Logan Bartlett: tariffs will likely cause a recession, but VCs won't stop dancing yet

Logan Bartlett, a partner at Redpoint Ventures, argues the tariff shock is likely self-fulfilling. "If we have the perception of a slowdown, people are gonna stop spending, which will inherently lead to a slowdown," he says. Goldman had moved its recession probability to 45% by the time he spoke; Polymarket was showing 62%. Bartlett thinks a recession is probably where this ends up, though he's clear he'd prefer to be wrong.

VC behavior in the near term

Bartlett doesn't expect venture firms to change course quickly. He frames it as a pattern: after March 2020 and again after the ZIRP unwind, GPs and LPs alike learned that downturns are buying opportunities. March 2025 saw record retail buying, which suggests that lesson is now deeply embedded. His read is that it will take several quarters and at least a couple of fund cycles before anyone starts to capitulate, partly because LPs who exit blue-chip managers typically lose their allocation permanently, not just for one vintage.

The structural incentive runs deeper than sentiment. Most GPs and the LP teams who cover venture specifically are measured against their own asset class, not against lumber futures or public equities. That narrow mandate means the relative trade-off of "should we be in venture at all" only surfaces at the CIO level, and those decisions move slowly.

“I think we're gonna see this divergence of fluency of people's ability to use AI. It's gonna take a couple orders before anyone starts to capitulate that maybe this is the new normal. I think we've sort of seen that the messages from Besant versus Navarro versus Lutnick — there's not any consistency coming out from those different people. I'm not sure there's a clear strategy, and I would find all this stuff pretty intriguing, if not necessarily factually accurate.”

AI isn't insulated

Bartlett pushes back on the idea that AI and defense are clean havens. He says he heard directly from people close to large foundation model companies over the weekend, and there's real concern about supply chain exposure. Cooling infrastructure, specific server types, components tied to China, Taiwan, South Korea, and Mexico all feed into AI infrastructure in ways that aren't obvious from the outside. "It's gonna be hard to disassociate the aggregation that is what's being tariffed into AI," he says. The data center buildout is vulnerable too — electrical transformers, most of them manufactured overseas, are a meaningful input to new capacity.

Signal versus noise

Bartlett is skeptical of reading too much into any single voice in the current cacophony, whether Navarro, Bessent, Lutnick, or Elon. He notes that Kimball Musk tweeted against tariffs shortly before the conversation, which may or may not have been coordinated, and says treating public statements from insiders as trial balloons rather than factual disclosures is probably the right posture.

He does give Bill Ackman credit for breaking ranks explicitly. His broader frustration is with commentators who simply absorb whatever the current talking point is rather than owning a view.

The political opening

Bartlett sees a potential opportunity for Democrats to reposition as the pro-growth party, noting the contrast between Trump's current tariff posture and the traditional Republican free-trade orthodoxy of Milton Friedman and Ronald Reagan. He points to the timing of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's book Abundance as a sign that the intellectual groundwork exists. Whether a credible political figure emerges to carry it is a different question.

Shopify memo and the AI workflow shift

On the leaked Tobi Lütke memo, Bartlett reads it as both genuine operational direction and deliberate signaling. He says his own workflow has shifted significantly toward AI-native research over the past week, compressing work he estimates would previously have taken three weeks into four or five days. He expects a widening gap between workers who have made that transition and those who haven't, and thinks Shopify's public stance is smart for attracting candidates who want to be in that environment.

Bartlett sees the tariff chaos and the AI buildout as running on entirely different timescales and with largely separate logic — but he's not convinced they're decoupled. If consumer spending tightens, even a $20-a-month ChatGPT subscription becomes a line item people consider cutting.