Good Morning! Apple is developing a screenless health and fitness tracker to take on Whoop, with Google-owned Fitbit launching its own competitor earlier this year. Peloton launched three new treadmills, including its cheapest one yet that folds.

The PE exit drought is pushing junior partners to leave big firms and launch their own. A rocket-supply crunch is forcing a scramble across the space industry as companies hunt for new ways to get satellites deployed. And Royal Caribbean is nearing a $3 billion deal to take a 50% equity stake in Sandals Resorts.

Plus: Wall Street is growing skeptical of the data center boom, venture capital's role in a major Ponzi scheme, and why you're probably not tough enough to earn huge returns.

Today's newsletter is brought to you by F2, the agentic operating system for private markets. Deal teams on F2 reach conviction in hours instead of weeks. See for yourself and book a demo.

SQUEEZ OF THE DAY

a16z Is Starting a School

Most VC firms in Silicon Valley are competing to meet the next Mark Zuckerberg before the Series A. But Andreessen Horowitz, the venture giant behind Airbnb, Coinbase, OpenAI, Stripe, Anduril and Databricks, is spending tens of millions of dollars to try to meet him before freshman orientation.

Yesterday, a16z announced the Horowitz Andreessen Academy, a San Francisco-based college alternative for recent high school graduates and students who've done up to two years at an elite university.

The founding class of ~50 students arrives in fall 2027 for a tuition-free, one-year program with no traditional grades, tests, or homework. Instead, students will spend most of their time building products and working alongside an absolutely insane group of founding partners: OpenAI, Anthropic, Nvidia, Stripe, Palantir, Anduril, Coinbase, Replit, Google and Meta.

They'll provide everything from mentors and compute to co-ops and recruiting, with Sam Altman listed among the instructors and ~200 speakers on deck.

Students will also get more than $50,000 in compute credits and a $5,000 research and travel budget. The curriculum is absolutely wild and ranges from AI research to "The Geometry of Luck" and even finding love (which might be needed in San Francisco).

While Peter Thiel has run a similar fellowship for years, a16z's is unique because it combines the school, employers, mentors, and venture capital under one network.

The Academy is a separate for-profit entity that has raised $42 million, including $35 million from a16z, with angels like Tobi Lütke, Garry Tan and Adam D'Angelo. It's unaccredited, so no degree and no transferable credits, and a two-year program planned for 2028 will charge tuition comparable to an elite private university. So a16z is basically investing in a startup whose product is, at least partially, future startup founders.

Academy CEO Gagan Biyani (co-founder of Udemy) says the firm hopes to invest in companies started by students, and dozens of companies including Databricks have signed on to interview or consider graduates.

Takeaway: Most venture firms compete to win the deal, but a16z is trying to build the pipeline that produces the deal. If VC is about getting access to exceptional founders earlier than everyone else, it's hard to get much earlier than senior year of high school. And if you’re a student at Horowitz Andreessen Academy, you never know what professor might walk through that door.

PRESENTED BY F2

From Data Room to Term Sheet in Hours

Thoroughly screening a deal used to consume days of an analyst’s time. On F2, the same workflow can be done in an afternoon, with the sensitivities and downside cases still run on every deal:

• Data room triage: hundreds of files classified and indexed in the first hour

• Financial spreading: normalized into your chart of accounts in hours

• Screening memo: drafted in firm standards while diligence is still underway

Analysts on F2 screen deals quicker and know sooner which ones are worth pursuing.

Built to power the next $30 trillion in private markets.

Book a Demo.

HEADLINES

Top Reads

• Apple is developing new fitness tracker aimed at rivaling Whoop (BB)

• Peloton is back with a 'cheaper' folding treadmill (The Verge)

• Royal Caribbean nears a $3 billion deal to take a 50% equity stake in Sandals (CNBC)

• Knock-on effects of exit drought reshape private equity (WSJ)

• A rocket supply crunch is making it harder to hitch a ride to space (WSJ)

• Private equity firms hold assets longer in high-interest-rate era (BB)

• Data center companies delay IPOs amid growing public opposition (NYT)

• Venture capital's role in a major Ponzi scheme (Axios)

• Top Swiss Goldman banker laments lack of private equity deals (BB)

• The office bust is shifting from empty towers to investor losses (BB)

• Carlyle Group's Syniverse taps Jefferies for debt overhaul (BB)

• Bulls and doomers are both right on AI, says Ray Dalio — it's 'miraculous' for productivity but a 'devastating' bubble creating huge wealth inequality (Fortune)

• Hedge funds pull back from favorite trade as bond gaps vanish (BB)

• Barclays hires Morgan Stanley executive for Asia private bank (BB)

• Software firms discount AI to keep customers from Anthropic, OpenAI (The Information)

• New data centers worth $68 billion disrupted in US, data show (BB)

• On targets high-teens growth through 2029, plans first buyback (BB)

CAPITAL PULSE

Markets Rundown

Market Update

• The Nasdaq hit a record high while the S&P 500 was little changed; the 10-year Treasury yield held near 4.95%.

• WTI crude extended its decline to near $95 on reports Saudi Arabia is moving added supply through the Strait of Hormuz.

• Asian and European equities advanced overnight; the U.S. dollar strengthened against most major currencies.

Economic Data

• ADP showed private employers added an average of 20,000 jobs per week for the four weeks ending September 5, up from 16,750.

• The unemployment rate held at 4.1%, with 7.3 million job openings above the 7.0 million unemployed.

• Continued employment and wage growth should keep supporting household income and spending.

Bond Yields

• Bond yields paused after their recent decline alongside falling oil prices.

• Market-implied 10-year inflation expectations in TIPS fell 5 to 10 basis points over the past week.

• Easing inflation expectations suggest the Fed's rate hike is reinforcing its inflation-fighting credibility.

Movers & Shakers

• (+) On Holding ($ONON) +8% after the Swiss sportswear brand unveiled a $1 billion share buyback at its Investor Day.

• (+) GameStop ($GME) +6% because CEO Ryan Cohen bought another $26.4 million of company stock in the open market.

• (–) Royal Caribbean ($RCL) -6% after the cruise line is nearing a $3 billion deal to take a 50% equity stake in Sandals.

Prediction Markets

• Following another doomsday cry, will regulations alter the timeline for Anthropic’s IPO?

• Trade on real-world events with Kalshi. Use code OWS to get a $10 bonus when you trade $10.

Private Dealmaking

• Cyera, a data security company, raised $400 million

• Heidi, an Australian medical scribe and care platform, raised $340 million

• Verda, a Helsinki-based AI neocloud, raised $189 million

• Kairos Power, a nuclear reactor startup, raised around $100 million

• Kanin Energy, a Canadian startup that converts industrial heat into on-site electricity, raised $60 million

• Archy, a provider of practice-management software to dental offices, raised $50 million

For more PE, VC & M&A deals, subscribe to our Buysiders newsletter.

BOOK OF THE DAY

A Brief History of Intelligence

Description:
Max S. Bennett explores the evolution of intelligence from the earliest forms of life to modern artificial intelligence. Rather than treating the human brain as a single technological achievement, Bennett identifies five major evolutionary breakthroughs that progressively enabled increasingly sophisticated forms of intelligence: steering, learning, simulating, mentalizing, and language. He then connects each breakthrough to developments in AI, asking what today's machines can already replicate and what remains uniquely difficult about human intelligence. Drawing on neuroscience, evolutionary biology, psychology, and computer science, Bennett presents a compelling framework for understanding both where intelligence came from and where AI may be heading. The result is a fascinating bridge between the history of the brain and the future of intelligent machines.

Book Length: 432 pages
Release Date: October 7, 2025

Ideal For:
AI professionals, technology investors, entrepreneurs, neuroscientists, and anyone interested in artificial intelligence, evolutionary biology, human cognition, and the future of intelligent machines.

“To understand where AI is going, first understand the evolutionary breakthroughs that made human intelligence possible.”

DAILY VISUAL

The Rising Price Tag of Romance

PRESENTED BY PETRARCH

There is a Bidding War for Spirit’s Data

Spirit Airlines stopped flying in May, but they are still hitting news cycles for the value of their operational data. Google bid $10 million for the airline’s internal files, and a startup, Micro1, put in a higher, post-auction bid at $12.5 million. A judge will decide both the buyer and what the buyer in the near future.

The coveted prize is their ordinary record of running a business: years of emails, spreadsheets, and operating files that don’t ever appear on the balance sheet. Almost no company can sell that, because raw files are full of names, addresses, faces, and logos that expose the people in them and the business that made them.

Credit and PE firms are enlisting Petrarch as their partner in distressed assets. They strip out everything traceable and leave the operational knowledge behind, so records that were a liability walk out the door as an asset that pays.

Book some time with them this week to learn more.

DAILY ACUMEN

Nobel Curse

In 1973, Fischer Black and Myron Scholes published a formula for pricing options that had eluded economists for decades. Robert Merton extended it further the same year. Together the three of them solved a problem that made modern derivatives markets possible, and their work became so foundational that it is simply called the Black-Scholes formula today.

In 1997, Scholes and Merton traveled to Stockholm to accept the Nobel Prize in Economics for the discovery, Black having died two years earlier and made ineligible by the rule against posthumous awards. It was, by any measure, the summit of a career in economics.

Less than a year later, the hedge fund both men had joined as partners, Long-Term Capital Management, blew up so violently it required a Federal Reserve-organized rescue to stop it from taking the global financial system down with it. The same minds that had solved how markets should behave under their assumptions were undone by exactly how badly markets can behave outside them.

ENLIGHTENMENT

Short Squeez Picks

• The word that turns dreaming into doing

• The stomach it actually takes to earn market-beating returns

• Your smartwatch is lying to you about calories burned

• Why September feels like a second January

• Why the 8-hour workday doesn't actually work

MEME-A-PALOOZA

Memes of the Day

📣 Partner With Us: Get in front of an audience of over 1 million finance professionals, business leaders, and policy influencers. Submit a partnership inquiry.

📊 Wall Street Comp & Culture Data: Get the most detailed comp, carry, and culture insights across 1000+ Wall Street firms. Explore the data.

📈 Grow With Us: Work directly with the Overheard on Wall Street team to scale your finance brand. Schedule your free consult.

🧢 Wall Street Shop: Explore our collection of finance-themed apparel and merchandise. Visit the shop.

📬 Deals Newsletter – Buysiders: A curated roundup of major M&A, private equity, and VC activity. Plus access to private deal flow. Subscribe here.