The “last chosen in the gym” kids get ready for the Super Bowl

The Super Bowl will be held in Silicon Valley on Sunday, and the Patriots-Seahawks game at Levi’s Stadium will be loaded with tech money. YouTube CEO Neil Mohan is expected to be in attendance. Tim Cook is also from Apple. (He’s been a Super Bowl fixture since Apple Music began sponsoring the halftime show several years ago.)

Longtime VC Venky Ganesan of Menlo Ventures gave the New York Times a quote on the whole thing, saying that the Bay Area’s Super Bowl is “tech billionaires picked last in line at the gym, paying $50,000 to pretend to be friends with the people picked first.” “And for your information, I was also selected last in gym class,” Ganesan added.

Ganesan could probably buy a $50,000 ticket if he needed one. Menlo put his best foot forward at Anthropic, setting up a $100 million fund with the AI ​​company in the summer of 2024 to invest in other AI startups. The company has also joined several funding rounds for Anthropic itself, both through its flagship fund and several special purpose vehicles. (Anthropic is expected to close a $20 billion financing round next week at a post-cash valuation of $350 billion.)

Tickets are expensive across the board, averaging about $7,000 according to the Times (with some last-minute seats still available on StubHub for roughly $3,600, according to a quick look at the ticketing site). Only a quarter of it goes to the general public; The rest is distributed to NFL teams. Of all ticket buyers, the largest group (27%) comes from Washington state for the Seahawks, who have won just one Super Bowl in franchise history compared to the Patriots’ six titles, all with Tom Brady at quarterback.

Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, Amazon, and Meta are vying for competing announcements about whose AI is best for customers, so perhaps their respective CEOs will make an appearance as well. Other than Amazon’s Andy Jassy, ​​who reportedly splits his time between Seattle and Santa Monica, they all have homes within an hour or so of Sunday’s game.

This is only the third time the Bay Area has hosted the Super Bowl. The first time was in 1985 at Stanford Stadium, Stanford University’s original football stadium, where the 49ers beat the Dolphins. The second match took place 10 years ago at Levi’s Stadium, when the Broncos defeated the Panthers.