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Over 300 organizations rely on The Information for exclusive insights into public and private companies, including in-depth analysis of the ways in which tech moves markets. Click here to contact our corporate and enterprise team to learn more. Welcome back! Startup land has two distinct storylines these days. There are the pre-AI companies struggling to grow their business or raise their next round, and the AI-native companies built entirely around artificial intelligence. The latter group is in the center of a boom, and some have skyrocketing revenue or possess talent that’s worth billions of dollars to bigger firms. Venture capitalists who have invested in both types of companies want to support the AI firms using assets or key individuals from the pre-AI firms, with the assets often consisting of enterprise tools or apps. This dynamic can be seen at Andreessen Horowitz. The firm invested in a slew of enterprise startups started before the AI boom, such as cybersecurity firm Resourcely, and has also backed young AI firms such as Thinking Machines Lab and Anysphere, whose Cursor coding app is powered by large language models. According to a memo Resourcely CEO Travis McPeak sent to his investors earlier this summer, he had been considering shutting down due to limited traction, dwindling resources and months of unsuccessful efforts to sell the company, which had raised $8 million from Andreessen Horowitz and other firms. Then Andreessen Horowitz general partner Martin Casado came to the rescue by introducing McPeak to Anysphere CEO Michael Truell. After Anysphere leaders met and interviewed McPeak, the AI startup made an offer structured in a way that has become more common in the past year: McPeak would join Anysphere as a security lead, and Anysphere would give Resourcely shareholders $1 million worth of shares. In an e-mail to advisers and investors in Resourcely, McPeak said Cursor’s share payment is “mostly benefiting our largest investors,” while common shareholders, including employees, are unlikely to get a return from the arrangement. He said Resourcely would still try to find a buyer in the coming months, or shut down and return remaining funds. McPeak apologized for losing investors’ money, and that he had made a mistake by reacting to AI advances too late. That said, if Anysphere does well, the shares that he and his shareholders have could more than make up for the $7 million loss by investors. At the time of the deal, Anysphere’s private valuation was $9 billion, but it might reach twice that figure if the company were to raise funds today. But the Resourcely arrangement appears to be a smaller, less triumphant version of the much bigger, not-quite-acquisition deals Meta Platforms, Google and Amazon have struck with startups to hire their CEOs and other talent, sometimes for billions of dollars. Some of these startups had been struggling on their own. Some companies see former founders as especially valuable talent. Rippling, for example, says it has hired more than 150 former founders. But what’s new is that venture capitalists are quietly moving talent between portfolio companies as the gap widens between AI and pre-AI companies. That’s especially true as VC firms like Andreesssen Horowitz manage bigger pools of money, making it more important to turn losses into wins when they can. Other venture investors even seem to be making bets in anticipation of acquisitions involving their portfolio companies. Thrive Capital, a large backer of OpenAI, last year invested in Jony Ive’s Io Products, which was developing a personal AI device with the help of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. The writing was always on the wall that the two firms were likely to join forces, and that’s exactly what happened earlier this summer. Anthropic is having a good week. In addition to hiring back two leaders of Claude Code—which competes with Cursor—just two weeks after they joined Cursor owner Anysphere, the company is fielding interest from venture capitalists for a potential multibillion-dollar financing at a valuation of more than $100 billion, thanks to recent financial performance improvements. In fact, we’re hearing some investors are floating valuations up to $150 billion. It isn’t clear where the valuation will land once Anthropic decides to raise funding.—Sri Muppidi | 
