13 VC Jobs & What the h*ll is going on?

Welcome back Chronicler!

This week, Washington proved it can yank access to a frontier AI model from commercial markets at any time and for any reason, and it did exactly that to Anthropic's Mythos 5 before partially relenting under industry pressure. The episode landed the same week China's Zhipu matched U.S. frontier performance on key benchmarks, and the combination reshapes how every VC-backed AI company should think about platform risk.

Plus: Cap Table Dilution and this week's best picks from The Stack.

As always, thank you for subscribing and engaging week-in week out. Still a work in progress, but I appreciate all 2,244 of you.

With Love,
Kev

THIS WEEK IN VC & TECH
What matters this week

LEAD STORY

White House AI Crackdown Opens Door for China to Close Gap

The Trump administration's two-week export control lockdown on Anthropic's Mythos 5 and Fable 5 models, triggered by a jailbreak report from Amazon, established a new and alarming precedent: the U.S. government can restrict commercial access to frontier AI models at will, with no legislative framework or clear criteria.

While Anthropic won partial relief on June 26 for roughly 100 approved companies, Fable 5 remains off the market entirely. The geopolitical consequence landed fast: China's Zhipu released GLM-5.2, and Marc Andreessen publicly declared it "the first Chinese AI model to match and often beat the American big lab public AI models."

For VCs, this episode rewrites the risk model for AI infrastructure investments, sovereign intervention is now a live variable, not a theoretical one, and portfolio companies built on top of restricted frontier models have a new category of regulatory fragility to price in.

"The U.S. government just proved it can pull the plug on frontier AI overnight, and China noticed immediately."

QUICK HITS

AI Model Access Controls  TechCrunch · June 26

The White House asked OpenAI to limit its new GPT-5.6 lineup to roughly 20 government-approved companies, citing the need to build a security testing framework before broad release. OpenAI complied while publicly warning that government gatekeeping of AI access "should not become the long-term default," a signal that the industry is bracing for this pattern to repeat.

South Korea $880B AI Infrastructure Plan  Bloomberg · June 29

South Korea's President unveiled an $880 billion national AI infrastructure plan anchored by Samsung and SK Hynix building four new memory fabs and an HBM packaging hub, plus $356 billion in AI data center capacity by 2035. The plan directly targets the global memory shortage bottlenecking AI buildout, and reinforces South Korea's position as an irreplaceable node in the global AI supply chain.

Humanoid Robotics Exit  TechCrunch · June 24

Agility Robotics, backed by DCVC, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Amazon, and NVIDIA, agreed to merge with Churchill Capital Corp XI in a deal valuing it at $2.5 billion pre-money. The deal would make Agility the only U.S.-listed pure-play humanoid robotics company with live commercial deployments, testing whether public markets are ready to price the physical AI wave that VCs have been betting on.

European VC Fund Close  tech.eu · June 24

Dutch software-focused firm Main Capital Partners closed its ninth flagship fund at 4 billion euros and a companion vehicle at 1.25 billion euros, more than doubling the size of its predecessor funds and pushing total AUM above 12 billion euros. The raise signals that LP appetite for buyout-style enterprise software investing in Europe remains robust even as early-stage venture fundraising tightens.

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MONEY IN MOTION
The largest deals that you should know about

Baseten, an AI inference platform most developers had never heard of outside engineering circles, just landed a $1.5 billion Series F at a $13 billion valuation. The deal signals that the picks-and-shovels layer of the AI stack is now attracting the kind of capital once reserved for the frontier model labs themselves.

VENTURE BITE: One Concept in One Minute
CAP TABLE DILUTION

"Dilution is not what you lose when a new investor comes in: it is what you agreed to give up when you set the terms of the previous round."

CONCEPT

Every time a startup issues new shares, existing shareholders own a smaller percentage of the company. This is dilution. It is not inherently bad (a smaller slice of a much bigger pie can be worth far more than a larger slice of a tiny one), but founders and early investors consistently underestimate how much dilution compounds across multiple rounds. The math is simple: if a company issues new shares equal to 20% of the post-round total, every existing shareholder is diluted by exactly 20% in relative terms, regardless of how much the valuation has grown.

WORKED EXAMPLE

Aiko, a seed investor, owns 10% of a startup after the seed round (500,000 shares out of 5,000,000 total).

Series A: company issues 1,000,000 new shares.

New total = 6,000,000. Aiko post-Series A = 500,000 / 6,000,000 = 8.33%

Series B: company issues 2,000,000 new shares.

New total = 8,000,000. Aiko post-Series B = 500,000 / 8,000,000 = 6.25%

Total relative dilution: (10% - 6.25%) / 10% = 37.5%. Aiko's percentage has been cut by more than a third despite never selling a single share.

Quiz (Difficulty: Very Easy)

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THIS WEEK’S STANDOUT

🕵️‍♂️  Standard Metrics AI Analyst

Standard Metrics shipped a major update to its portfolio-wide AI Analyst in June 2026, adding live web search and in-app charting so investors can go from a natural language question to a visual benchmark in seconds. The tool combines internal KPIs, qualitative notes, and co-investment data with real-time internet context, letting portfolio managers ask questions like "How does our Series B cohort's ARR growth compare to public SaaS comps?" without leaving the platform. For firms managing dozens of companies, this collapses the gap between raw portfolio data and LP-ready narrative.

💰 Fundraisly  Screens 300K+ investors, maps warm intro paths through your network, and books qualified meetings, giving VC associates a faster way to evaluate founder fundraising readiness and competitive investor dynamics.

🔍 DiligenceSquared  Uses AI voice agents to conduct customer reference interviews at roughly one-tenth the cost of traditional management consulting engagements, compressing commercial due diligence from weeks to days.

⚖️ PitchBook Valuation Estimates  The first daily ML-powered valuation model for 15,000+ VC-backed companies, updating marks between rounds so portfolio teams always have a current, defensible reference.

🧑‍💻 Harmonic Covers 35 million private companies and 195 million people, using job postings and LinkedIn signals to surface pre-announcement deals, with a natural language AI agent for open-ended sourcing queries.

FROM X
Our favorite post from this week

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THE BOARD
VC jobs, curated for you

Here's what you've been waiting for: exciting job opportunities! To maximize your chances, remember these key tips:

That’s it for today, hope you enjoyed this as much as I did curating it, see you next week!
-Kev