By Louis Lehot, Partner, Foley & Lardner LLP. Garage to global, since Y2K.

Friends,

Nvidia spent Monday turning the AI buildout into an asset class, raising half a trillion dollars of firepower with six of the largest investors on earth. Delaware ordered a $2.35 billion buyer back to the table, the firm put five more deals on the sheet, and several of our own closings sit quietly until after Labor Day. Monday night, the YC founders take over our San Francisco office. Here is the week.

In the Courts

◊ Delaware ordered a buyer back to the table. The Chancery Court ruled last Friday that Verisk could not terminate its $2.35 billion acquisition of AccuLynx just because the outside date passed, holding the termination invalid because Verisk’s own willful conduct caused the failure of the closing condition, and awarding damages on top. Verisk said Monday it may appeal. My LinkedIn note this week covered the drafting lessons: a termination right is not a self-executing escape hatch, and your conduct has to preserve it. The full opinion is here.

◊ Paramount sits quietly until Wednesday, when the court holds the first case management conference on the road to the March 2027 trial.

Recent Deals

◊ Foley advised Spinnaker Resorts in its acquisition by Travel + Leisure Co. Spinnaker develops, markets, and manages eleven vacation ownership resorts across four destinations, and the announcement came Tuesday. Consumer and leisure deals are getting done alongside the AI headlines.

◊ Foley represented TensorWave in its binding customer lease with Fermi for a turnkey data center in Texas. TensorWave is an AI cloud provider built for high-performance workloads, and the lease covers a facility at the Project Matador campus in Carson County. Last week this newsletter covered the fight over where datacenters get built. This is what the buildout looks like when the papers get signed.

◊ Foley represented Origin Ventures and Venture53 as investors in ClearJet’s $25 million growth round. ClearJet builds parcel logistics infrastructure for brands, e-commerce shippers, and 3PLs. Logistics software keeps getting funded because it works.

◊ Also on the sheet recently: Foley represented M2S Group, a Wynnchurch Capital portfolio company, in its Iconex business’s acquisition of Heartland Label Printers, and served as lenders’ counsel in the $382 million financing for Sabanci Renewables’ two Texas solar projects.

◊ And September is loading. Several client deals, signed and closed this summer, stay under wraps until after Labor Day by design, so the announcements land when everyone is back at their desks. Watch this space.

The Tape, Briefly

Monday opened as warned, with oil up on fresh doubts about a Middle East deal, but the damage stayed contained. Then July inflation came in at 0.1 percent for the month and 3.4 percent for the year, right on estimates, producer prices came in flat on Thursday, and the S&P 500 touched a record while the Russell 2000 closed the week at an all-time high. Markets now put better-than-even odds on the Fed holding steady on September 16. The soft spot was the consumer: July retail sales fell 0.6 percent against expectations of a small gain. Three things matter here for dealmakers:

◊ Nvidia turned the AI buildout into an asset class. On Monday it announced infrastructure financing platforms with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs, and KKR, built to mobilize more than $500 billion of third-party capital for AI compute. The buildout is no longer funded only by hyperscaler cash flow. It is being packaged for institutional money, which means project finance, structured credit, and power and real estate work landing inside what used to be a chip story. TensorWave’s lease above is one small example of the paper this creates. Nvidia reports on August 26, and that is the next referendum.

◊ The financing thaw is broadening. Small caps at records and rate increases off the table is what relief looks like for the half of the M&A market that has been waiting on expensive money. If you are a seller who shelved a process this spring, the fall is setting up better than the spring did.

◊ And next month belongs to Apple. Bloomberg reports the September event will carry eight products, led by the company’s first foldable iPhone, the most anticipated Apple launch in years. When Apple opens a new hardware category, the supply chain, accessory, and app economies move with it, and those are deal pipelines too.

From My Desk

◊ The desk was quiet this week while the phone was not. If you missed them earlier this month: The Chief Everything Officer, on the lonely work of running an emerging growth company, Beyond the Headlines on Q2 venture, on why record totals do not mean easier fundraising, and my video on the journey from the early days to the global Silicon Valley. Notes ran on LinkedIn all week: Monday’s Verisk breakdown, one on the 43 Chinese entities added to the UFLPA list, one on US-China AI and tech policy, and a word to a group of young professionals just starting out.

◊ A Founder’s Guide to the Secondary Market in 2026. New this week on the Substack. Carta’s latest twelve-month tally shows secondary sales of $61.1 billion outrunning IPO proceeds of $58.8 billion, which makes secondaries the new exit for many companies. Liquidity is here, but it is selective and complex, and the guide walks founders and boards through eight takeaways, from the ROFRs and preference stacks that quietly kill deals to the QSBS and holding-period math that costs more than any discount. Liquidity strategy is a board-level decision, not a last-minute move. The one-page version:

A Founder’s Guide to the Secondary Market in 2026

New in the GC Seat

General counsel moves across the innovation economy, starting close to home. If you or a friend just took the seat, reply and we will note it here.

◊ Bay Area tech: Apple hired its next general counsel from Meta’s legal chair, and Asana named Katie Colendich its general counsel in San Francisco.

◊ California life sciences: CytomX Therapeutics in South San Francisco appointed Alejandra Carvajal as chief legal officer, arriving from Mersana Therapeutics, and aTyr Pharma in San Diego also named a new legal chief this month.

◊ Energy: Chevron named Scott Keller general counsel as of July 1, on a path to the chief legal officer seat in 2027 as Hew Pate winds down seventeen years in the role.

◊ And elsewhere: Sanofi promoted Jamie Haney to general counsel effective September 1, and Berkshire Hathaway named Michael O’Sullivan its first in-house general counsel.

◊ One seat we are filling ourselves: we are hiring. The Foley growth team is adding lawyers. If you or someone excellent you know wants to build with us, the posting is here.

Legal Tech, Briefly

◊ ILTACON lands in Nashville next weekend, August 23 to 27, and this year the big legal technology conference is an AI conference. Litera relaunched in July around a unified legal AI platform and its Lito agent, Thomson Reuters rebuilt CoCounsel to reason from Westlaw, Practical Law, and a firm’s own knowledge, and one session title says it plainly: Platform Wars, or which AI tools lawyers really want. The point solutions are consolidating into platforms, and every legal team is about to be asked to choose one. If you are working through the buy-or-build question for your legal function, I am having that conversation weekly and am glad to compare notes.

◊ One tool worth a mention is not legal-specific at all: Perplexity. Many of the lawyers I know have quietly added it to their daily research, because an answer engine that shows its sources fits the way lawyers already work. The legal platforms are consolidating above, and the general tools keep getting better underneath them. Both trends are worth watching from Nashville.

On the Calendar

The fall season opened at Silverado this past weekend with the Battle of the Bay and the Silverado Golf Initiative. Two photos from the weekend:

Dong-su Kim, CEO of LG Technology Ventures

Here is where you will find us from here, running straight through LA Tech Week, and a direct message gets you details on any of it.

This month

◊ Final call: YC Founders Summer Mixer. Monday, August 17, Foley SF office. Current YC founders and alumni, drinks and founder-to-founder conversation, hosted with Open Future Forum. If you are a YC founder and do not have your invitation yet, message me this weekend.

◊ CFOs on the Bay: Yacht Social. Thursday, August 21, San Francisco Bay. Four hours, forty people, one boat, hosted with Open Future Forum. Details in Christina Bui’s post.

◊ TDK Ventures 100X. August 25 and 26, San Francisco. Proud sponsor of TDK Ventures’ annual deep-tech gathering.

◊ How Women Lead. Thursday, August 27, Foley Silicon Valley office, Palo Alto. An 80-person reception and panel discussion. Details here: https://www.howwomenlead.com/events-1/pivots-power-seats-a-womens-executive-panel-on-career-transitions-board-readiness

September

◊ GC Lunch Series · September 11 · Palo Alto. The next installment of our general counsel lunch series about leadership in the GC’s office, compensation and the market for GCs. Details in my post.

◊ Women’s Leadership Meeting · September 17 · Foley SF office. A 75-person gathering of women leaders in tech and law.

October · Tech Week season

◊ SF Tech Week: Sidebar Summit · week of October 5. Panelist session and reception with Sidebar.

◊ Capital Markets Event · October 6 · Foley SF office, an in-office IPO panel and reception with Open Future Forum, details in my post.

◊ AI Strategy at Microsoft: CFO Forum · October 7, details in Murray Newlands’ post.

◊ Founders n Funders · October 8, a reverse VC pitch and reception.

◊ CTA Advanced Manufacturing Event · October 13 · Foley SF office, hosting thirty Canadian startups and investors with the Canadian Consulate.

◊ LP/GP Event with Jersey Finance · October 14 · Foley SF office.

◊ LA Tech Week: Sidebar Summit · week of October 12.

◊ AI/Tech Investing Forum · October 20

◊ Family Office & Private Wealth Management Forum West · October 21–23, both Opal Group events.

◊ One Way Ventures Summit · October 28, where we are a proud sponsor.

The full fall list, with descriptions, is in last week’s edition.

Closing Argument

One more picture before the sign-off, from the lobby of the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. I wrote on LinkedIn this week that everyone building here stands on the shoulders of giants, and the wall makes the point better than I can: the neighborhood, labeled, from Hewlett Packard and NASA Ames to Anthropic and OpenAI. The names change. The valley keeps building.

The Computer Museum in Mountain View, California

◊ The Verisk lesson travels. Rights on paper are kept or lost in behavior, so act from day one like the record will be read aloud in Wilmington.

◊ If you shelved a sale or a raise this spring, the fall is setting up better: financing is thawing, the window is broad, and September gets busy fast. Use the quiet weeks of August to finish the preparation, because the prepared companies move first.

◊ If you want to be in the rooms, Monday is the founders’ night and Thursday is the finance leaders’ boat. My inbox is open, and making the right introductions is still the best part of this job.

— Louis