The howls will begin the minute the FTC’s lawsuit against Amazon hits the clerk’s desk. “The FTC hates business!” “Lina Khan is a communist!” “This government is controlled by the far left!”
Of course that’s what most in the business community will say. It would be novel if they didn’t.
But they’re wrong.
I’m an early stage venture capitalist. My fund, Tusk Venture Partners, invests in seed and Series A startups, typically in highly regulated industries – think companies like FanDuel, Coinbase, and Lemonade, Ro, Bird, Wheel, Alma, Circle, Sunday and so on.
What you don’t see on that list is anything that could attempt to compete with Amazon or Meta or Apple or Microsoft or Google. Why? Because there is no way to compete if the incumbents’ dominance over their respective markets is allowed to grow, completely unchecked.
When we invest, we’re ultimately solving for the company’s exit. Typically, that comes from an IPO or an acquisition. While IPOs generate most of the attention, acquisitions are more common. When we think through our possible exit, the first question is “Would x (the larger competitor) be more likely to buy this company or build their own version?” The second question is, “Can x squash our startup before they even get off the ground?”
Whenever we look at a startup that would directly compete with a company like Amazon, the answer to the second question is always, “yes, definitely.” And we don’t invest.
I don’t have any animus towards Amazon. I order stuff from them all the time. I probably buy 75 books each year on Kindle even though I own an independent bookstore in Manhattan. I think Amazon is a great company. But I also think that allowing them to continue to dominate the entire retail market unimpeded is a death knell for the economy in 10 to 20 years.
Ultimately, every company, now matter how insurgent they once were, grows stagnant. They become a bureaucracy beset by internal politics and a CYA mentality. That’s why the behemoths of my childhood, companies like IBM and GE, are a second thought today. Luckily, as these earlier giants started to falter, companies like Apple and Microsoft took off, and companies like Google, Amazon and Meta came along.
The results have been staggering. Apple has increased its US employees by 1,500% since 1998. Between 2001 and 2018, Alphabet (Google’s parent company) grew its job count 347 times over.
But would Google, for example, have gotten as far had the Department of Justice not pursued antitrust litigation against Microsoft in the late 1990s? Unlikely. Microsoft’s overwhelmingly dominant market power and position would have allowed them to force computer manufacturers to use Internet Explorer instead of Google.
The same problem holds true today. Amazon, great as they are, will ultimately falter. They’re subject to gravity just like everyone else. And then either one of two things will have happened: it will have been feasible to invest in potential competitors to Amazon, dozens will have emerged, a few will succeed and they’re ready to replace Amazon as a major employer. Or, Amazon continued to amass so much power by controlling pricing, controlling the entire marketplace, that investors like me never felt comfortable backing a competitor and when Amazon lags, no one can fill the void.
That’s where the FTC comes in. Their job isn’t to wag their finger at big businesses and tell them that making money is evil (We already have AOC and Bernie Sanders for that). Their job is, yes, to protect current businesses who are forced to both advertise on Amazon and to accept far worse placement in each product search because they can’t afford not to be on the platform. But it’s also to look ten, twenty years into the future and see which industries may not have the openings for incredible new companies to emerge simply because the incumbents are too big to ever challenge.
When the case goes to court, Amazon will argue that none of their practices violate existing regulations. If they manage to make that case successfully, good for them. But as an early stage investor, I need to at least see that the government recognizes that new market entrants can’t compete if the existing giants are allowed to deploy whatever competitive practices they want. If there’s no rule of law, there’s no future market worth betting on.
Whether or not FTC succeeds in court, the lawsuit’s very filing shows that the agency at least recognizes that what’s good for tech giants and their current investors is not necessarily what’s good for tech startups and the economy’s long-term needs. That’s exactly the kind of regulation – and regulators – we both want and need.
Bradley Tusk is an early-stage venture capitalist.
FILE PHOTO: Ariel Cohen during a panel at DLD Munich Conference 2020, Europe’s big innovation conference, Alte Kongresshalle, Munich.
Picture Alliance for DLD | Hubert Burda Media | AP
Navan, a developer of corporate travel and expense software, expects its market cap to be as high as $6.5 billion in its IPO, according to an updated regulatory filing on Friday.
The company said it anticipates selling shares at $24 to $26 each. Its valuation in that range would be about $3 billion less than where private investors valued Navan in 2022, when the company announced a $300 million funding round.
CoreWeave, Circle and Figma have led a resurgence in tech IPOs in 2025 after a drought that lasted about three years. Navan filed its original prospectus on Sept. 19, with plans to trade on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “NAVN.”
Last week, the U.S. government entered a shutdown that has substantially reduced operations inside of agencies including the SEC. In August, the agency said its electronic filing system, EDGAR, “is operated pursuant to a contract and thus will remain fully functional as long as funding for the contractor remains available through permitted means.”
Cerebras, which makes artificial intelligence chips, withdrew its registration for an IPO days after the shutdown began.
Navan CEO Ariel Cohen and technology chief Ilan Twig started the company under the name TripActions in 2015. It’s based in Palo Alto, California, and had around 3,400 employees at the end of July.
For the July quarter, Navan recorded a $38.6 million net loss on $172 million in revenue, which was up about 29% year over year. Competitors include Expensify, Oracle and SAP. Expensify stock closed at $1.64on Friday, down from its $27 IPO price in 2021.
Navan ranked 39th on CNBC’s 2025 Disruptor 50 list, after also appearing in 2024.
Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, speaking with CNBC’s Jim Cramer during a CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer event at the New York Stock Exchange on Oct. 7th, 2025.
Kevin Stankiewicz | CNBC
Shares of Amazon, Nvidia and Tesla each dropped around 5% on Friday, as tech’s megacaps lost $770 billion in market cap, following President Donald Trump’s threats for increased tariffs on Chinese goods.
With tech’s trillion-dollar companies occupying an increasingly large slice of the U.S. market, their declines send the Nasdaq down 3.6% and the S&P 500 down 2.7%. For both indexes, it was the worst day since April, when Trump said he would slap “reciprocal” duties on U.S. trading partners.
After market close on Friday, Trump declared in a social media post that the U.S. would impose a 100% tariff on China and on Nov. 1 it would apply export controls “on any and all critical software.”
Amazon, Nvidia and Tesla all slipped about 2% in extended trading following the post.
The president’s latest threats are disrupting, at least briefly, what had been a sustained rally in tech, built on hundreds of billions of dollars in planned spending on artificial intelligence infrastructure.
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In late September, Nvidia, which makes graphics processing units for training AI models, became the first company to reach a market cap of $4.5 trillion. Nvidia alone saw its market capitalization decline by nearly $229 billion on Friday.
OpenAI counts on Nvidia’s GPUs from a series of cloud suppliers, including Microsoft. OpenAI is only seeing rising demand.
In September it introduced the Sora 2 video creation app, and this week the company said the ChatGPT assistant now boasts over 800 million weekly users. But Microsoft must buy infrastructure to operate its cloud data centers. Microsoft’s market cap dropped by $85 billion on Friday.
The sell-off wiped out Amazon’s gains for the year. That stock is now down 2% so far in 2025. It competes with Microsoft to rent out GPUs from its cloud data centers, but it doesn’t have major business with OpenAI. The online retailer is now worth $121 billion less than it was on Thursday.
“There continues to be a lot of noise about the impact that tariffs will have on retail prices and consumption,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told analysts in July. “Much of it thus far has been wrong and misreported. As we said before, it’s impossible to know what will happen.”
Tesla, which introduced lower-priced vehicles on Tuesday, saw its market capitalization sink by $71 billion.
The automaker reports third-quarter results on Oct. 22, with Microsoft earnings scheduled for the following week. Nvidia reports in November.
Google parent Alphabet and Facebook owner Meta fell 2% and almost 4%, respectively.
Govini, a defense tech software startup taking on the likes of Palantir, has blown past $100 million in annual recurring revenue, the company announced Friday.
“We’re growing faster than 100% in a three-year CAGR, and I expect that next year we’ll continue to do the same,” CEO Tara Murphy Dougherty told CNBC’s Morgan Brennan in an interview. With how “big this market is, we can keep growing for a long, long time, and that’s really exciting.”
CAGR stands for compound annual growth rate, a measurement of the rate of return.
The Arlington, Virginia-based company also announced a $150 million growth investment from Bain Capital. It plans to use the money to expand its team and product offering to satisfy growing security demands.
In recent years, venture capitalists have poured more money into defense tech startups like Govini to satisfy heightened national security concerns and modernize the military as global conflict ensues.
The group, which includes unicorns like Palmer Luckey’s Anduril, Shield AI and artificial intelligence beneficiary Palantir, is taking on legacy giants such as Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, that have long leaned on contracts from the Pentagon.
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Dougherty, who previously worked at Palantir, said she hopes the company can seize a “vertical slice” of the defense technology space.
The 14-year-old Govini has already secured a string of big wins in recent years, including an over $900-million U.S. government contract and deals with the Department of War.
Govini is known for its flagship AI software Ark, which it says can help modernize the military’s defense tech supply chain by better managing product lifecycles as military needs grow more sophisticated.
“If the United States can get this acquisition system right, it can actually be a decisive advantage for us,” Dougherty said.
Looking ahead, Dougherty told CNBC that she anticipates some setbacks from the government shutdown.
Navy customers could be particularly hard hit, and that could put the U.S. at a major disadvantage.
While the U.S. is maintaining its AI dominance, China is outpacing its shipbuilding capacity and that needs to be taken “very seriously,” she added.