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🍋 Show Me the DPI

🍋 Show Me the DPI

Plus: David protein bars valued at $2.25 billion, Uber laid off 3,300 people, and Tim Cook will be paid $47 million for exec chair role.

Short Squeez
September 03, 2026

Together With

“Over the long run, the crowd is always wrong." — Seth Klarman

Good Morning! The University of Virginia had a record year thanks to being an early investor in Situational Awareness, gaining 27% over the year ending June 30th (pre-July rout). Medici Brands, maker of the David protein bars, raised $250 million at a $2.25 billion valuation, triple its valuation from last year. And Waymo hired Goldman to raise nearly $3 billion in debt from PIMCO, Blackstone, and Sixth Street.

Uber is laying off 10% of its staff, or about 3,300 people. Private equity is eyeing Venezuelan oil as Trump's deal opens a new frontier. And Tim Cook received a $47 million package for his new role as Apple's executive chair.

Plus: It's a great time to be rich in NYC, the US Open is turning into a party and influencer frenzy including cannabis on demand, and 5 signs getting back with your ex could actually work this time.

October 5: Wharton Online’s 8-Week Private Equity Certificate Program begins on October 5th. Save your seat before enrollment closes.

SQUEEZ OF THE DAY

Show Me the DPI

Venture has spent three years in a liquidity drought, with 2022-vintage funds sitting on paper gains and no way to realize them. Only 17% of that vintage had distributed a single dollar to LPs as of Q1 this year, per Carta.

Then there's Factorial Funds, which has crossed $1 billion in realized profits and sent $965 million back to its LPs.

The firm was launched five years ago by Sol Bier, a former Cruise engineer who left after GM acquired and eventually folded the self-driving startup.

Rather than raise a traditional fund, Bier raised large deal-by-deal SPVs and later aggregated them into Factorial Fund I, totaling $135 million in contributions. That pool has generated 7.1x DPI. Gross value across all investments, realized and paper, now exceeds $5 billion.

Factorial had 2 home run bets, putting ~$80 million across separate deals in SpaceX and xAI while both were private. SpaceX acquired xAI in February, the combined company went public in June in the largest IPO ever, and most of Factorial's proceeds are SpaceX shares recently released from lockup. It still holds restricted stock it can't touch yet.

And there may a third home run bet. Anthropic is Factorial's largest position, entered at the 2023 Series C below a $5 billion valuation. Anthropic raised in May at $965 billion and is expected to go public this fall. The rest of the portfolio includes Anduril, Perplexity, ElevenLabs, and Fractile.

Factorial has raised $750 million and deployed ~$500 million, including a second traditional fund anchored by Hyundai and Kia. The plan from here is to stay concentrated in AI and infrastructure.

Takeaway: LPs stopped caring about paper marks a while ago. What they want is DPI, and Factorial is the clearest evidence that the IPO window reopening actually delivers it. But the gains are concentrated among the small group of managers who got into a handful of generational companies early enough for it to matter. If you owned SpaceX, the IPO market reopening feels incredible. But if your 2022 fund owns 25 SaaS startups still waiting for Series C valuations to recover, not much has changed.

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HEADLINES

Markets Rundown

Market Update

Stocks rebounded, led by small-caps, as the rally in oil and yields showed signs of losing momentum.
The 10-year Treasury yield eased slightly after hitting 4.8% yesterday, its highest level since 2023.
Dell shares surged 15% on strong quarterly results, a further sign of robust AI-related spending.

Economic Data

August ADP private payrolls came in at 38,000, slightly below expectations.
September rate-hike odds have risen to roughly 67%, up from about 35% before Warsh's hawkish remarks.
Friday's employment report and next week's inflation data are seen as key inputs for the September 16-17 Fed meeting.

Movers & Shakers

(+) Dell Technologies ($DELL) +16% after the computer hardware maker’s Q2 adjusted EPS of $7.04 crushed the $4.91 estimate.
(+) Reddit ($RDDT) +9% because Baird maintained its Neutral rating on the social platform ahead of upcoming renewals for key licensing deals.
(–) MongoDB ($MDB) -14% after a 12% rise in AI and infrastructure operating expenses overshadowed the strong quarter.

Prediction Markets

The consensus is that oil prices will wane through the end of the year (mid-$70s).
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Private Dealmaking

Tripo AI, a generative 3D company, raised $446 million
TabaPay, a provider of money-movement services to fintechs and lenders, raised $155 million
Felix Pago, a money-transfer startup, raised $87 million
Physical Superintelligence, a developer of physical AI labs, raised $58 million
Typewriter Therapeutics, a developer of re-dosable genetic medicines, raised $56 million
AIR, an inline firewall for agents, raised $50 million

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

BOOK OF THE DAY

Blockers

Description:
Michael Lewis takes readers inside the early days of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) through the experiences of federal employees who found themselves targeted as obstacles to the new administration’s agenda. Rather than focusing primarily on political leaders, Lewis follows the public servants who had spent years protecting sensitive government systems, enforcing rules, advancing scientific research, and managing critical public programs. Their resistance, and the consequences they faced, becomes a larger story about institutional knowledge, public service, power, and what happens when experienced people inside government are suddenly treated as expendable. Written with Lewis’s characteristic narrative style, Blockers turns a complicated confrontation over government into a human story about courage, bureaucracy, and the value of expertise.

Book Length: 256 pages
Release Date: October 6, 2026

Ideal For:
Executives, leaders, investors, entrepreneurs, policy-minded readers, and anyone interested in government, organizational power, institutional risk, leadership, or the collision between technology and traditional institutions.

When institutions are dismantled, the people who understand how they work may be the last line of defense.

DAILY VISUAL

The Data Center Boom Continues

Source: Axios

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DAILY ACUMEN

Shifting Baseline

Each generation of fishermen inherits an ocean already depleted by the generation before, and each one calls that depleted state normal, because it is the only ocean they ever knew. The baseline for what counts as abundant quietly resets downward every generation, and nobody experiences the reset as a loss, because nobody remembers what was actually lost.

Markets do the same thing. A decade of unusually low volatility gets internalized as the normal state, and participants build assumptions and leverage around that new normal without registering that the baseline itself had drifted. When the older, wilder version of normal eventually returns, it arrives labeled a crisis rather than a reversion.

The correction is deliberately checking your assumed baseline against a much longer history than your own personal experience covers. What feels normal is often just the specific slice of time you happened to enter the game.

ENLIGHTENMENT

Short Squeez Picks

Executives don’t need more willpower
10 of the best health and fitness trackers
How to understand and manage workplace emotions
5 signs getting back with your ex could work this time
Is your organizational culture too nice?

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