Newcomer Polls 25 Top VCs Managing $100 Billion on AI Bubble Fears

Twenty-five venture capitalists whose firms collectively manage more than $100 billion in assets have given Newcomer their unfiltered, anonymous read on the state of the startup economy — and the result is a new quarterly product aimed at tracking how Silicon Valley sentiment shifts over time.

Newcomer, the tech news outlet run by Eric Newcomer, launched the VC Sentiment Report as a paying-subscriber publication on a dedicated website. The first edition combines quantitative survey answers with 344 individual quotes collected from live video interviews lasting 30 to 45 minutes each.

The respondent pool is deliberately elite. Newcomer says it selected "the VCs we respect the most — investors who aren't afraid to say what they think (anonymously)." The group includes multiple current and former Midis List members — Midas List members, rather — well-respected emerging managers, and other top general partners. Their identities will stay confidential so they can speak freely, and Newcomer plans to interview the same group for the next three quarters.

That fixed panel is the point. Because the respondents repeat each quarter, the report is designed to measure both current sentiment and, over time, how it trends — a longitudinal index rather than a one-off snapshot.

The questionnaire runs 24 questions long and covers the most contested issues in venture right now. The topics include the odds of a bubble-bursting moment, which seed-to-Series-B company could become the next "generational startup," which early- and late-stage rounds were most competitive over the past three months, and the accelerating trend of dual-valuation funding rounds.

It also gets personal. Participants were asked what they would do with shares in OpenAI, Anthropic, and Stripe; to name the most overpriced and most underpriced startups that raised money in the last 12 months; and to estimate what percentage of startups backed by top VCs are meaningfully misrepresenting their financials to investors.

Sector-level questions track quarter-over-quarter changes in appetite for defense tech, AI applications, AI infrastructure, AI labs and foundation models, fintech, and healthtech, alongside overall capital deployment aggressiveness.

The tone of the answers, previewed in quotes Newcomer published, is blunt. On foundation model companies, one investor dismissed the current wave of architecture claims: "They are all small variants on the transformer. They're not reinventions. I would be very interested if I saw something that is a new architecture."

Another flagged the price of entry into top AI labs in terms that leave little room for misinterpretation: "There's no entry price of, like, 100M-post. You're looking at entry prices in the billions. It's just nuts. It's nutty. And so if you're going to do those deals, you better be right."

A third drew an uncomfortable parallel between today's model vendors and a famous consumer-internet casualty: "I compare them in some way to social gaming companies. Zynga was only as good as the next FarmVille. The same goes for these model vendors. They're only as good as their next model."

The report also probes risk directly. One question asks respondents to put odds on AI-related valuations — public and private — falling 25% or more within 12 months. Others ask which multi-stage private markets firm investors would most want to back based on the last 12 months of investments, and which venture fund started in the last five years they would choose to invest in.

Beyond market structure, the survey crosses into career advice — what profession a new college graduate should enter today — and editorial scouting, asking participants what story Newcomer should be chasing right now.

Access requires a paying Newcomer subscription, with the report hosted at reports.newcomer.co. Newcomer says the team — Eric, Adanma, Riley, Madeline and Jonathan — wants reader feedback as it develops the project "into a long-term resource."

If the panel holds together across quarters, the report's real value will arrive later: a running, on-the-record-off-the-record measure of when the investors deploying $100 billion start to change their minds.