ATHENS — TechCrunch hosted a StrictlyVC event in Athens as part of the Panathenea festival, where venture capitalists discussed startup investing trends, AI-native founders, and market concentration. Niko Bonatsos, managing partner at Verdict Capital, joined Andreas Stavropoulos of Threshold Ventures and Ben Blume of Atomico in the discussion.

Bonatsos described a sharply bifurcated investment environment, saying, "If you’re an AI-native founder or a company in the American dynamism space right now, you can live life in the fast lane. If you’re not in one of those two buckets, it’s really tough. In 17 years in Silicon Valley, I’ve never seen more groupthink." He noted that "three quarters of all venture capital raised over the last year went into five companies." He added, "Today, if you’re a 40-year-old tenured professor at Stanford not building something in AI, no one wants to meet you." Bonatsos also recalled his arrival as a Stanford graduate student in 2009, saying, "The iPhone was two years old, the App Store was one year old, and there were days when there were more VCs on campus than students."

Stavropoulos drew parallels between current market dynamics and past tech inflection points. "I remember how exciting the Google IPO was, and how it ushered in a reopening of a market that had been very pessimistic about tech in the early 2000s — how it was an enabling event that brought in a whole new generation of entrepreneurs. The same thing is happening now. With every subsequent wave of paradigm shifts, the scale changes by orders of magnitude, and that’s to be expected," he said. He also suggested that in times of disruption, "lack of experience" can be an advantage, as "experience can actually steer you the wrong way."

Blume stressed that age alone is not the key indicator of founder potential. "If you try to generalize just from age, I think you miss what you’re actually looking for: an extremely high level of intensity, the ability to move ahead of the pace the market is moving, and the mental dexterity to adapt in a landscape that’s changing constantly. If you have those things, it’s more important than the age on the passport," he said. He also noted that SpaceX’s impending public offering represents a rare opportunity, calling it "such a one-of-one company. For a long time, space has been a government and public sector domain. To give investors real financial access to it — I think that’s going to capture a widespread imagination."

Niko Bonatsos connected the role of immigrant founders to potential developments around Cursor, noting Musk’s option to acquire the company for $60 billion. "If Elon feels like he’s [having] a good moment, maybe Cursor [which Musk revealed recently that he has the option to acquire for $60 billion] will have some good news too. But more broadly, for the next next generation of companies, as Andreas mentioned, they could be going after much larger markets, and immigrant founders, as we know, they’re the ones who dream really big, they have nothing to lose, and they can go the distance, and Elon Musk is an immigrant founder himself," he said.