Three San Francisco VC firms booked private advance screenings of Christopher Nolan's "The Odyssey" — locking up auditoriums while public tickets disappeared and resale prices hit hundreds of dollars.

Bain Capital Ventures reserved a full auditorium at the AMC Metreon a year before Christopher Nolan's "The Odyssey" opened — long enough to curate a guest list of startup founders and accumulate hundreds of names on the waitlist from those who didn't make the cut, according to The SF Standard's "The Waggle" column, published Friday. Public tickets at the Metreon, one of roughly two dozen U.S. theaters equipped for 70mm IMAX, had been on sale for that same year; as of this week, eBay resellers were listing seats for hundreds of dollars.

Fifty Years, the SF-based venture firm, secured a follow-on showing at the same venue Wednesday — booked just two months ago after employees complained they couldn't get public tickets. Attendees reportedly dressed as Greek gods and sirens. Partner Seth Bannon arrived in a chiton and dispensed with the obligatory founder-lesson framing. "I could give some high-minded speech about how we chose to screen this movie because there's so many lessons it holds about entrepreneurship," he told the audience, per The Standard, "but to be totally honest with you, we just wanted to see this movie." Founders Fund confirmed a separate invite-only showing Friday at Alamo Drafthouse; CMO Mike Solana told The Standard that private screenings of "sci-fi films or tech-related films" have become a standing firm tradition.

The same column named Ivan Zhao, 40, co-founder and CEO of Notion, the best-dressed man at Sun Valley's annual tech gathering — a distinction that earned him coverage in The New York Times and Town and Country. The financial context: Notion was valued at $11 billion in a January 2026 secondary transaction in which GIC, Sequoia Capital, and Index Ventures purchased $270 million in employee-held shares, per Business Times Singapore and Notion's own announcement. No primary capital has entered the company since a $275 million Series C in October 2021.