Apple Goes Full Throttle on F1, Meme Stocks Make a Comeback, Amazon's New Wearable AI Device | Christina Cacioppo, Deena Shakir, Davide Asnaghi, Ylan Richard

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Today is Wednesday, July 23rd, 2025. We are live from the TVPN UltraDome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital.

El capital de capital.

El capital de capital. Thank you to Restream for powering this stream. We love Restream. Couldn't do the show without them.

Seriously.

Yeah, it's amazing. They're a new partner, if you haven't noticed already. They're in the intro. In the last 30 seconds.

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That little cinematic IMAX treatment. We're having a lot of fun with that.

We realized how dependent we are on them.

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We had a small error at one point and we could not run the show.

Yeah. Critical infrastructure.

But one out of a few hundred shows.

Yeah.

And it was fixed quickly.

So, you know who should get on Restream? Apple and F1. That's the story that we're talking about today. We've talked about this before, so F1, fantastic race series. We're big fans, but the actual streaming rights to the, to the races has been kind of hotly debated. There was an article in the Journal a while back that they were going to ESPN saying, hey, we want something like $80 million. And ESPN was like, I don't know if that's worth it. And we were going back.

They wanted something like $200.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, they wanted a lot. And so the stack of content to go through is growing. So we will be, we will be thinning out the textbook. We will be thinning out the guest lineup in the future. But for today, we're going through. Let's kick it off with Ben Thompson. He had some good analysis here and has some, some details from reporting in The Athletic, which is a New York Times property. Formula One is trending towards choosing Apple for for its United States broadcasting rights for 2026 onwards. The technology company's bid being in the $120 to $150 million range. Market clearing order inbound. It is a market clearing order. Probably will clear. ESPN has held the rights since 2018, but its current deal is up at the end of the year. The sports media giant's exclusivity negotiation period expired before February 2025, leading to interest from other broadcasters, including Netflix and TVPN. Yes, we would love—

we decided to sit it out.

ESPN has remained in the mix for US broadcasting rights, though its bid is lower.

Apparently ESPN's offer is in the $90 million per year range, which is still wild, uh, because this is the US broadcasting rights.

Yep.

And I believe in 2024 Formula 1 had around 1 million Total viewers, 1.2, 1.3 million race viewers on average per race. Yeah.

But Ben Thompson puts it in a different perspective. He says F1, on the other hand, has a meaningful audience versus MLS, which was averaging around 200,000 viewers per year on linear TV before the Apple deal. And that wasn't growing. So this is 6 times as big as MLS. Yeah. Again, I think there's more games than or more race, more games than races. So it's not exactly apple to apple, but every race but one has seen a year over year increase in viewership. So F1 is getting more popular. A lot of that's driven by Drive to Survive. And this is the crazy thing, given when races are televised, usually early Sunday morning, and the fact that they aren't promoted by ESPN in any meaningful sense. So it's not like you're getting the Pat McAfee Show talking about, oh, you got to tune in and there's a ton of coverage on ESPN throughout the week. They just kind of show up Sunday morning and people turn on the TV and they schedule it. And so you can— he says—

I always like the timing because any parents out there, you know, you're certainly not sleeping in on the weekends. Kids wake up.

Yeah.

And I find it's some nice background noise or viewing in those early hours for sure.

And so he says you can make the case that F1 makes its own audience, which by extension means they will be able to pull people to a streaming service. Basically F1 fans are strong enough that they'll go search it out. And when I, when I was really getting into F1 after getting into Drive to Survive, I was like, okay, I'm going to have to subscribe to F1, the app, and like jump through all these hoops on your phone. And it was, it's like as many hoops as UFC, but people still do it. Yeah. And there's still, there's still a big debate.

But anyway, and I think Netflix had done the analysis and realized that all of the potential viewers of F1 were basically already subscribed to Netflix. and so it was a more difficult kind of equation to make work than someone like an Apple TV potentially that could potentially drive new subscribers.

Someone called it a streaming backwater or something like that in here. We'll dig into it. But somebody had some not nice things to say about Apple TV, although I'm a subscriber and I think it's nice. So he says, what makes— this is Ben Thompson writing in Stratégie— what makes this all work is the fact that for F1 races. Uh, F1 races are at the bottom of the funnel in terms of fan engagement. F1, at least in the US, has by and large grown its audience via Netflix's Drive to Survive. Uh, Netflix pays F1 a pittance for rights, apparently single-digit millions for that. But it's okay for F1 because the way they ultimately make money is by converting Netflix viewers into race fans. So if you're F1, you see that as a marketing channel.

Yeah, and F1, uh, has sponsors at the, at this sort of league level and also the individual teams, all of those sponsors are getting more viewership and engagement through F1. So it's sort of added value to them and they don't have to pay. They're actually making money on— I mean, I wonder if the sponsors are consequential.

I wonder. I mean, of course the sponsorships are like such like 360 deals that it's like, you know, car livery and also a whole bunch of other, you know, advertising assets. But I wonder if they broke out Okay, how much lift, how much benefit, how many impressions are we getting from Drive to Survive? Would that be, when you total up all the value add to all the different advertisers from being in Drive to Survive and being seen by people on Netflix, how much would that be more than the couple million dollars that Netflix pays for the rights? It might be, it might be. Like there's a lot of people that see ads that are for specific F1 sponsors in Drive to Survive.

Yeah, we have seen Saudi Aramco like hundreds of times while watching Drive to Survive.

Exactly, yeah, it's like pretty valuable ad space. So interesting deal that kind of works both ways and everyone makes money. Anyway, making that model work, however, means actually monetizing the races, which means that it actually, it's actually quite logical to go with the company willing to pay $30 to $60 million more for those rights. You have to capture value somewhere in the funnel. Moreover, you could make the case that many F1 fans aren't necessarily ESPN subscribers. And this is, this is where it gets interesting because the cable bundle is shrinking and the F1 did this global fan survey. So it's their data. So Ben Thompson's kind of taking it with a grain of salt, but this is from the F1 global fan survey. They, they conducted a study every 4 years to track how fan engagement is evolving across the sport. They got 100,000 responses from self-identified, highly engaged fans in 186 countries. That's, that's basically all of them. The findings offer a detailed snapshot of the modern fan mindset and show that Formula One is increasingly attracting new, younger and more female audience with growth in markets such as the United States. Gen Z is helping shape the rhythm of modern, of the modern fandom engaging with the sport more frequently and on a deeper emotional level. Female fans now account for 3 in 4 new fans.

Interesting.

I would not have predicted that. That's very, very interesting.

Well, the drivers are often Chads.

That's what's driving it.

That, that could be part of, part of the factor.

Yeah. It's also interesting that there, there are no female drivers on the grid right now. There was Danica Patrick in the, in the NASCAR series for for a while, but somehow it's breaking through. Maybe it's through Drive to Survive being more accessible on Netflix, more storylines pulling people in, and they're just going down that funnel. I don't know.

Well, there's also the, the, the WAG industrial complex surrounding F1 that is aspirational lifestyle.

Maybe they should do a spinoff of Drive to Survive. Don't they do that with the NBA? Isn't there a show about like WAGs or something like that? Maybe that's kind of informally what the Housewives series is, right? Maybe they should do that. With the largest country share of respondents, fans in the US continue to stand out for their growth, youth, and digital fluency. They over-index on content engagement, sponsor responsiveness, and daily touchpoints, signaling a market where fandom is evolving rapidly and is commercially—

Saudi Aramco is like, why? We seem to be getting a lot of female— Zoomers.

Female Zoomers.

Zoomers.

Buying oil.

Following our content on Instagram. They seem to be really into this.

What's happening? Maybe. I don't know. So, so basically Ben Thompson's conclusion from this survey is what, what do you, what are you talking about when you're talking about a younger, more female-focused audience? Those don't sound like ESPN subscribers. Those actually sound like Apple TV subscribers or potential Apple TV subscribers. Certainly cord cutters, certainly people who are not going to buy a big cable package and get on ESPN2 and Red Zone and all of that stuff. Yeah, that's typically the Gen X male, the maybe older millennial male that probably dominates the ESPN audience. And so—

Yeah, that's really interesting. Apple kind of has an edge where they can build out a service for some of these more lifestyle-oriented sports, some of these alternative, you know, you could imagine them doing things in tennis over time because maybe that's a different audience than like the hardcore ESPN, Red Zone subscriber.

Yeah. Yeah. So he says, I could definitely envision a scenario where F1 not only doesn't suffer from being on a streaming service instead of ESPN, but it actually grows further. So this is an interesting bull case given Apple TV's lower price point relative to a standalone ESPN streaming service, much less a cable bundle. What is clear is that this deal certainly makes a lot of sense for Apple than the MLS deal did. If the company can capture all 1.3 million of those current viewers and they are incremental to current Apple TV subscribers, then the company company will break even on this deal. Those are very generous assumptions, of course, but not nearly as generous as whatever assumptions drove the company to spend double the money on a sport no one watches, which is MLS. So he's, uh, he's taking shots at MLS because there was an interesting quote in here from, from something else. What was this? Uh, it was from, uh, The Athletic again, talking about the North American Soccer League general managers. One common theme from general managers: the Apple deal, which is Apple's deal to to air MLS is proving to be too much of a barrier for new fans.

The way they want the content to be completely free.

New fans just don't want it on Apple, apparently, or the GMs don't want to be limited to the Apple audience. Apparently they want to be on ESPN or something.

Oh, okay.

Apparently. So the GMs say, hey, if we want this to grow, we're the general managers of a bunch of different MLS teams. If we want to grow soccer in America and grow MLS, Change the format, change the salary cap.

Why don't they just pivot to football or basketball or baseball?

Yeah, what's wrong with just throwing around a pigskin? Yeah, change the format. Just turn it into American football.

I have to say, football is one of the best things you can buy under $50.

Sure. Period. For sure.

That's non-food. I mean, I think the value you can get out of a pigskin is absolutely insane.

Hours of fun.

The return on— the return on pigskin.

Yeah, it's fantastic. He says, allow us to bring more attractive players. I didn't realize that MLS had a salary cap because I thought they were signing like massive deals with these like legacy famous players.

Who is the player that went to Galaxy?

Is that Messi or something?

Yeah.

Is that right? I don't know. Well, this is bad because I don't know anything about sports. Out of our territory. There was someone who went to Miami. There was someone who went to the LA Galaxy. I don't know. Anyway, this GM says—

Yeah. So, so Messi plays for Inter Miami.

Yeah. And it's a huge deal. It's like AI researcher money. Remember? That's what we were— how we were comping it. And the GM said, but they also have to end the deal with Apple. It's bad for the fans.

Beckham. David Beckham played in the MLS. And then you have Zlatan Ibrahimović as well. So they'll pull in some superstars. but usually towards the end of their runs.

So, so, so the GMs of the North American Soccer League MLS, they say, I think we have to be on more linear outlets. We have to be on ABC, NBC, Fox, or more regularly, more regularly, because I think a lot of people, a lot more people watched our games when we were in that space. I think Apple and the whole streaming thing is really innovative, innovative, but it's probably where things, uh, and it's probably where things will be going, But I don't think MLS is the leader of that. I don't think enough has been put behind the subscription model. You're in a different league when you're— you're a different league when you're a subscription-based league. I don't think the effort has been put in like it should be. It's like selling tickets. You need people out there selling. You can't just hope that people are going to sign up. And so, yeah, interesting. The risk for F1 is that the series, which has massive, massive growth, is going to constrict its— conscript itself to the streaming backwaters, says Ben Thompson, just so it can make a few more bucks in the meantime. So that's the risk is that F1 goes and, you know, gets stuck in subscription land and no one can just turn on the TV and see it. And the 1.3 million fans don't actually migrate over and they say, I'll just catch the highlights or I'll just watch Drive to Survive on Netflix instead of going setting up a new subscription. But if it's truly F1 truly does have a younger audience, does have a more female audience, they might be— that might be what gets them to turn on Apple TV streaming at least. Yeah.

Anyway, I still get so confused by all the different cable plans. I watch F1 on YouTube TV, which I guess is through ESPN. It's like, I guess that will go away and then I would have to subscribe to Apple so they would get a net new. I actually don't subscribe to Apple TV.

You don't?

I don't.

Okay.

Not, not for any reason. I just, I never want to, I never want to go through that. I never want to go through the— I just don't watch a lot of television.

Yeah.

And I don't want to go through the hassle of like signing up for a new service.

Yeah. I feel like recently I got a new iPhone and, um, it just like came with Apple TV Plus and I just like clicked the button and didn't unsubscribe. And then I've been on that for a while. But speaking of a new iPhone, we have a challenge for Tyler Cosgrove, the intern at TBP. And we will be giving him a second shot on goal, a second kick of the old field goal.

If you missed it, we bricked his iPhone. He had to upgrade to Liquid Glass. It's been on its last legs.

Mark Gurman has some interesting posts today. He said we won. He likes the new revision to Liquid Glass, the latest and greatest, which I think you can't get yet. Break it down.

No, so it's mostly because my storage is so low, so I can't— so you can't revert back.

Yeah, it's like—

but you also can't go forward.

I can't go forward because I would have to like delete basically everything on my phone, which I guess maybe I could basically clear it and then update and then get the stuff back. Okay, but it's I don't know if that would work.

Well, you're stuck in purgatory, an iPhone iOS purgatory, liquid glass, a liquid glass house. But today you have the chance to win a new iPhone if you can get on the leaderboard for Arc AGI V3. We gave Tyler the chance to prove his humanity and defeat the version 3 of Arc AGI. This is a benchmark for artificial intelligence systems. The whole design is that anyone should be able to do this. Any human should be able to achieve, to beat these puzzles. Tyler beat them, but we got some benchmark time. We gave him a time constraint. Mike Knupp, the co-founder of Zapier, who's also the co-founder of Arc AGI and behind the lab that's actually pioneering this benchmark, gave me some times. He said 15 minutes would be super hard. 20 minutes would be reasonable. 25 minutes would be Very doable. We set it as hard as possible, 15 minutes. Tyler came in around 25. So, but today redemption is on the line. You get a second shot on goal of winning that iPhone. So what did we say? So the new human benchmark, there's a leaderboard where you can go and do these tests as many times as you want. The first time you do it, it's hard 'cause you have to figure out how the games work. But then after that, it becomes kind of a speed run. But the leaderboard is based on efficiency. So how many, how few moves can you make? How few actions can you take to solve the puzzles? To be kind of in the top 15, top 20, you have to do it under 600 moves across all 3 games. And that's the challenge for today. There's no time limit. You can do this as many times as you want. You can reset, you can try and learn all the different patterns and all the different paths.

Um, we were worried about, um, so I think originally we were going to do like I had to be in the top 10.

Yeah.

But then I was a little worried about stream snipers coming in and, you know, viewers watching the stream coming in and just going crazy, going ham, and then I would be out of the top 10.

Yeah, exactly.

If I did well.

So, so try and beat it today. Give us, uh, give us the benchmark, uh, the, the, the baseline score of how many moves it takes you the first time you go through. And then try and do it again, try and become more efficient until you can hopefully cross the 600 move threshold and get on it. Get on, get on the leaderboard. That should be a lot of fun. All right. And what else is fun? Getting your business on ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Go to ramp.com to get started. Ramp. Ramp. In other news, meme stocks are completely back.

Let's give it up for meme stocks.

Give it up for meme stocks. Let's give it up for top signals, baby. We got a bunch of them. So the Wall Street Journal has an article about Kohl's, the discount retailer, and then Opendoor, the high-flying tech company that was co-founded by Keith Urban recently.

More low-flying.

Yes, but got out, I think, via a SPAC. Was— what was Opendoor's core business? Basically allowing folks to buy and sell, buying and selling homes. The stock's been up and down. There's been a lot of discussion over, can they take on Zillow?

Is this something Zillow can compete with? It's back at just under $11 a share. As of a month ago, it was trading at $0.50.

OK, so way down.

It's still down 79% since the IPO. But more recently, it's up 300% in the in the past month.

Wow.

And people seem to be rallying around. I saw people saying this is an $82 stock all day, all day. I don't know why. I don't know why that number in particular.

Not a lot of DCFs going on in the meme stock community.

Vibes-based analysis.

It's a proven strategy.

Yeah.

Memeing a stock.

It happens. And Krispy Kreme—

Is also in the conversation.

With the ticker DNUT. OK. 40% in the past 5 days. So yeah, the market, a lot of opportunity out there, but the thing that's been interesting is that Buco Capital bloke had a post earlier this morning. He said, "Opendoor is down 10% after being down 10% yesterday. Krispy Kreme is up 37% after being up 27% yesterday." The meme market is brutal, lightning quick, and moving way too frantically between absolute— to ever have another GameStop. Yeah, basically. So yes, it's interesting, like this eagerness from retail, just investors broadly to find the next GameStop means that there's an incentive, like, you know, if you don't get in before something goes up 300%, in a week, there's almost this like, there's almost an incentive to just pick a new company that has that potential to do something.

I feel like Krispy Kreme in particular was part of the narrative that like GLP-1s would destroy that business because people's appetites would be suppressed and so junk food markets would sell off and junk food companies wouldn't do as well. But maybe the meme stock retail traders know something we don't. Anyway, let's go to the Wall Street Journal. Individual investors are once again loading up on a group of unloved stocks and taking to social media to defend them from haters and the short sellers. Meet the cast of the meme stock craze season 2. Let's go. A user named HotTicket9440 wrote on a subreddit forum Tuesday as shares of Kohl's, which is down 17% when I took this screenshot—

that's down 15% today—

the department store chain surged by nearly 40%. Max pain on the shorts. Buy every dip. Together we strong, said HotTicket9440. Open has GameStop vibes written all over it, Skip Tradeless wrote Tuesday on X of Opendoor Technologies, which is down 23%, 23% today, but it was up yesterday, I guess. Real estate platform. It's a real estate platform. And in all caps, we won't stop until $82. Which I don't know how that was picked, but we'll find out.

Nice, nice number.

Shares of Kohl's and Opendoor have rocketed highly higher recently. So have other oddball stocks, including QuantumScape, a maker of batteries for electric vehicles, and Rigetti Computing, a quantum computing firm that we talked to Martin Shkreli about. The, the, their recent rise and the cult followings they have inspired on social media are reminiscent of GameStop, AMC Entertainment, and the original meme stocks that caught fire in the aftermath of the pandemic when interest rates were near zero and the markets rallied was underway. What's interesting is like it was very clear to trace the origins of the meme stock craze. It was like you had social media had fully arrived, you had low interest rates, and then you had stimulus checks going out. And there was a whole cottage industry of influencers and YouTubers who basically they made content around when will the, when will the checks get delivered? When will the stimulus checks get delivered? How will you get, how can you get your stimulus check sooner? People were Googling for that, people were searching for that, and you would make a video explaining, okay, they're in the mail now. And people were just so interested to know when the money was coming and making sure that it would go to the right address and that they were set up to get it, because it's free money, you don't want to just lose out on it, right? Um, and so people made those videos, and then the natural evolution was, well, now that you have the money, what do you do with it? And then they were making financial recommendations, financial advice, right? And they made a ton of money and they got really, really big. And there were some of them that were making like 5 videos a day breaking down, you know, all every different what you should do in Tesla, what you should do in GameStop. And so like the precursor was very, was, it was a very clear trend. And also retail hadn't gotten burned in a while. I feel like it was just like, like all of the precursors were very clear. And now I don't, I'm having trouble constructing like the narrative around why this is happening again, other than maybe this is just like it's just going to be cyclical forever. But anyway, their recent rise and the cult followings they inspired on social media are reminiscent of GameStop, the original meme stocks. Younger individual investors congregated on online stock picking forums to share their triumphs and losses and found every— found a common enemy in the professional investors who were betting against their favorite stocks. Now, with stocks at records, the economy staying resilient and corporate earnings beating expectations— Netflix beat earnings, by the way— and we should expect that basically every tech company is going to beat earnings because the dollar is weak. And so, and so if you have a large portion of your business outside of the United States, you will see very strong earnings results this quarter.

Yeah. Well, one unfortunate thing for the meme stock movement is that Besant said this morning that Trump's not going to fire Powell. And so the— there's Jerome Powell, Powell, Fed chair in 2025. Is sitting at 18% now, dropped on that news. So what did it peak at? It peaked, it peaked at 20. It was at 24.

Never went above 50%.

Yeah, but it was at 24% and it had been rising kind of week over week.

I mean, that was a crazy—

dropped on that.

That was a crazy time when the Jerome Powell stuff— I didn't see that much real evidence. We talked to Joe Weisenthal at Bloomberg about this a little bit. But it was a full-court press by the financial media and the financial institutions to say, like, do not do this. I remember opening up the Wall Street Journal one day and like there were 5 different articles from, you know, news reports of big bank CEOs commenting on the record, hey, don't fire the Fed chair. Let's— there were op-eds saying about the value of Fed independence that we shouldn't lose this. And then when we talked to Joe, Weisenthal, he also said it is somewhat un-American to not have an independent Fed. But then, of course, there are people on the other side of the debate. But if Jerome Powell is staying around, what does that mean? Rates stay high, and so we should see less froth in meme stocks, in theory. I don't know exactly how it works through the system, but But, you know, like, I would imagine that it's harder to borrow on margin, harder to get more leverage. Like, all these different things are functions of interest rates being higher. So you see all these— these— quote, you see all these indicators where this is full-blown meme mania, said Brent Kochuba, founder of derivatives data firm SpotGamma. Opendoor, which traded under $1 as recently as last week, began to take off after social media users rallied around the company. Then hedge fund manager Eric Jackson said in a July 14th post on X that his firm, EMJ Capital, has taken a position in the stock. Opendoor notched 6 consecutive sessions of double-digit percentage gains following his endorsement, and the shares are up 439% in a month. And look at that stock chart. Look at that. It is a complete line just directly up.

Of course, Keith. Reboy was absolutely loving it.

Yep. You don't get 100 baggers without upset stomachs. This is Jackson, not Keith. But when you spot one early with almost no one else watching, that's when the magic happens.

And so this was a guy that was doing a little bit of general solicitation as well.

Oh, it's that guy.

Yes.

I didn't realize that. A 38-year-old educator in California says he began scooping up shares of Opendoor last month when it was trading under $1 a share. This is Melvin Barrientos. He says he sold all his shares and put options tied to Opendoor over the past week and pocketed a roughly $3,000 profit. Put options for the right to sell a stock at a set price. Barrientos says he is always on the hunt for beaten-down stocks and has traded meme stocks like AMC and Carvana before, often loading up on thousands of shares before selling them when they rally. He says he plans to sell more Opendoor puts if the shares continue tumbling. And shares of Opendoor fell 10% to $2.88 on Tuesday. It just happens by luck. Kohl's revenue is another example. The embattled—

what's your investment strategy?

It's just luck. Luck. Make your own luck. Well, I feel like there's some great wisdom out there about—

I wouldn't—

I wouldn't—

it doesn't feel like true mania. Since this guy's not saying, I just quit my job. Yeah, become a day trader.

Yep. I don't know. It's very, very interesting. So meme stock traders are often talking— are often target companies that are highly shorted, like Kohl's and GameStop before it, hoping to induce a so-called short squeeze. Short sellers bet against companies. If the stock starts rising instead, short sellers may need to buy their shares back to exit from the losing trade, a cycle that creates even more demand and can send shares soaring. The frenzy continued on Wednesday. Shares of GoPro soared 57%. Krispy Kreme, which you mentioned, jumped 20% despite no clear—

GoPro. I mean, I love when they just pick an awesome company like GoPro. GoPro is a sweet company making cool cameras for doing cool stuff.

Yeah.

How can you not love that?

Yeah, it is interesting because, yeah, AMC and GameStop were very much like nostalgia plays, whereas Opendoor doesn't really fit that template. Of— I feel like a lot of the GameStop supporters were also supportive of the idea of getting back to a world where you can go and buy a video game from a local store, and that just being like a fond childhood memory. I remember as a kid riding my bike to GameStop to pick up a new N64 game.

I love how there's somebody out there that's just like has that mentality of just buy the stocks of the companies you love. And they're like, well, I love Krispy Kreme, and I love GoPro because I love doing some cool stuff, filming it, and treating myself with some donuts. And they think they're a genius investor, not realizing that.

And I mean, every once in a while, things do get oversold. There's plenty of examples of companies that have been trading below cash for some reason. And it's a function of various lockups. And then the company kind of goes into wartime mode and rebuilds and does come out of it and builds back up. And that does happen, especially post— the end of ZIRP, post the SVB crisis, there were a lot of companies that were just truly oversold and they were able to come back, usually because they're founder-led and the founders stuck it out. So there's lots of options being traded on Opendoor, NVIDIA, Apple, and Opendoor has over 3 million option contracts that changed hands on Monday, almost as much as the S&P 500. Wow. With a market capitalization around $2 billion, Opendoor is a member of the Russell 2000 small cap index. Index. The fact that open— more open-door options traded Monday than contracts tied to Nvidia, the $4 trillion behemoth, was unusual. That's pretty much unheard of, Heisinger said, founder of options data platform Quantdata. And that trading increase obviously wasn't tied to fundamentals. It was a speculative squeeze. And so there's a very funny article in Bloomberg from Matt Levine. He's a fantastic columnist, a fantastic writer. This is taking it one step further. We're getting into meme stock treasuries at this point. Okay. So he says, well, the other day I wrote— and if you're not already subscribed to Matt Levine over at Bloomberg, you got to get on Money Stuff. It's a great newsletter that you can get in your email inbox if you subscribe to Bloomberg. Well, the other day I wrote that the crypto treasury strategy trade is very good, but, but saturated. The US stock market will pay $2 for $1 worth of Bitcoin. So lots of companies have acquired Bitcoin to make their stock go up, but the returns are diminishing. Companies have moved on to other cryptocurrencies, Ethereum, Tron, and Solana, and BNB, and Trump Coin, but they are running out of space. And he wrote, if you want to do this trade now, you might want to try something else. Maybe the stock market will pay $2 for $1 worth of blank, you think, where what goes in the blank is 1, big and attention-getting, 2, relatively liquid so you can buy it incrementally as money comes in and market to market as the price goes up. And 3, somewhat crypto adjacent in spirit, but 4, not a big obvious crypto token. And so what are—

what would the— what would be exciting? One-of-one Ferraris, class, you know, classic Ferrari Treasury. Ferrari Treasury. There's something there. Something there.

That sounds like something we would do as a joke.

Yeah.

And it will, will actually happen in the market in a few, in a few years. Maybe someone should buy that McLaren collection.

There we go.

That's a good treasury.

There we go.

You got an original F1.

Trying to think what else is— what else is big and attention-getting and relatively liquid.

I don't know. Well, his example is MicroStrategy. So he says, I feel like someone should try a MicroStrategy treasury strategy. Like you take over a small public company and you announce that you are raising $200 million to buy MicroStrategy stock. Maybe that would be worth $400 million. And he says, I'm an idiot, but there's one obvious answer and I'm ashamed that I missed it. Quantum Biopharma found it.

Wow.

A biopharmaceutical company dedicated to innovative therapies for neurodegenerative disorders today announced the purchase of 2,000 shares of GameStop to hold store value balance sheet as a strategic investment. This move aligns with Quantum Biopharma's ongoing commitment to combating market corruption and enhancing shareholder value through prudent financial strategies. That's where you see against manipulative trade practices. Well, whatever your plan is, you're going to need to design a graphic for it. You're going to need to get on figma.com. Think bigger, build faster. Figma designs helps design and development teams build great products together. Get started for free at figma.com. We have interesting—

yeah, they hold Bitcoin. They do on their balance sheet.

They do. I don't think that's because it wasn't— it was— it was more—

I think it was more like prudent treasury management.

Yep.

And wanting to be diversified. Dylan's been a big believer in crypto for a long time. Um, I actually— but the mark when the S-1 came out and people saw that, everybody was pretty excited.

I actually held Bitcoin on the balance sheet of my first company when Bitcoin was—

because you guys had to—

you were accepting it through Coinbase. We had an integration where you could pay, but it was complicated because customers would pay in Bitcoin and then if the price of Bitcoin went down, they would ask for a refund. And if the price Bitcoin, or if the price of Bitcoin went up, they would ask for a refund in the Bitcoin that they paid. If they— so there was effectively the use your refund policy as a hedge. And so if the price of Bitcoin went down, they could like sell the product and then buy more Bitcoin with it. It was just like very, very messy. But we wound up holding some Bitcoin on the balance sheet, but we eventually sold it way too early, obviously. And we also paid out a bonus to people. I think everyone, everyone that Christmas got 5 Bitcoin.

Wow.

Easy to think about now. It was like $5,000 back then. Brutal. Yeah. Yeah. Brutal. Anyway, let's tell you about Graphite.dev, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. I wish I had Graphite back in the day. You can go to Graphite.dev to get started.

I had Graphite back in the day.

Yeah. So Matt Levine goes on, 2,000 shares of GameStop is like $50,000, which isn't going to move the needle even on a $72 million public company. The stock was down this morning, but good effort.

Good effort.

So he says the simple way to think about exchange-traded funds is that an ETF—

that would be if they added $50,000 worth of GameStop to their balance sheet and then the stock mooned, that would be true mania in my book, right?

Oh, totally. Totally.

The day trader. The educator who's day trading options, quitting his job, and you gotta have adding, you know, $50,000 of GameStop triple your stock price. To me, that's—

$50K is so little. I mean, what, yeah, what is the, why did they do this? Like, what is the, is it just to get a press release? Just to get mentioned in Matt Levine's newsletter?

Well, John, it obviously aligns with Quantum BioPharma's ongoing commitment to combating market corruption and enhancing enhancing shareholder value through prudent financial strategy and advocacy against manipulative trading practices.

How does this combat market corruption?

They're making a statement, John.

They're making a statement, I suppose. Anyway, uh, there's no way— there's no better way to make a statement than getting on Vanta. Automate compliance, manage risk, improve trust continuously. Trust management platform.

Yeah, we're gonna be hitting the gong in just a little bit. Vanta raised raised some new money that was announced today. And we will have Christina on a little bit later to break it down.

Yeah. Well, this, this newsletter from Matt Levine is fantastic, but I'll let you go and subscribe and read it. We can move on to The Wall Street Journal talking about Amazon. Amazon has launched a new— or they bought an AI wearable that kind of flew under the radar.

B. Yeah. Had you ever, have you ever heard of this company?

I hadn't heard of it. I feel like I've heard of most of them, but only the ones that kind of went viral. So the Humane Pen, I followed the Rabbit R1, I followed the, uh, the Friend, I followed. And then obviously the Sam Altman, Johnny Ive project, IO, which we don't know what it is. Might be a wearable, might be a phone. I don't know. I feel like there's been a lot of conflicting reporting about what they're actually building, but there's a lot of stuff there and there's something coming. And then obviously we've talked to the founder of Whoop and other wearables. And I'm aware of Fitbit. That's kind of in the legacy space. Apple has the Apple Watch. Now Amazon has the BAi bracelet that listens to your conversations throughout the day and automatically adds action items from those chats to a to-do list.

So it might suggest it'll create a suggested to-do for you. On their website, it says go grocery shopping for the week as one. 2 is actually on their site says, send a Figma link of the work discussed to the team. And 3, establish a daily routine to take a, establish a routine to take a daily walk. And it gives you reflections and insights. And the example they give on the site is you're adapting your parenting approach during wife's absence by creating special moments around routine activities like swim class. Not a bad reminder if you're a parent. Turn that swim class into a special moment.

Do they have a Linear integration? The purpose-built tool for planning and building products. You can use the system for modern software development.

I would get a B-band to help you streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps.

That'd be great. They should go to linear.app. Anyway, it's funny. After a decade of Amazon saying Alexa isn't listening to your every word, the company is buying a bracelet that can listen to your every word. Uh-oh.

Let's go.

The tinfoil hat's on. Bees wearable transcribes all the conversations in your day, including when you talk to yourself. Then it uses artificial intelligence to turn that giant word soup into a searchable history, offering up key events and even to-do lists based on your chatter. So interesting. Obviously there's a big pushback on this from privacy perspective. Do you trust Amazon? I tend to trust Amazon on this stuff. The bigger question is like, If I see you wearing one, are you going to get the glass hole phenomenon? Do you remember that with the Google Glass thing? That's— we seem to have blown past that. So Google launched Google Glass back in 2012-ish, something like that. And it was just a— it was just a pair of glasses with the camera on it and you could take pictures. Very direct precursor to the Meta Ray-Bans, although it did have a heads-up display. It was very small in the corner. You could kind of look up and the basic use cases they were pitching were things like turn-by-turn directions. If you're on a bike, you don't need to pull out your phone, you can get Google Maps integrated. Google was working on this for a while. Then eventually it kind of got sunsetted. There's this famous picture of Marc Andreessen in the Google Glass and a lot of people were very excited about it. It seemed like the era of augmented reality was on the horizon. Didn't really pan out that way. They pivoted to B2B or enterprise, and the idea was like, okay, maybe if you're on a factory line, you could have instructions, work instructions pulled up there. That never really panned out either, and they kind of sunset it. And it kind of went the way of the Microsoft HoloLens, where there was some amazing R&D that was done, some amazing engineering, but they never crossed the chasm, never got past the early adopters. And so But during that time, it was one of the first major backlashes against like the Silicon Valley tech bro. So, uh, people were wearing these because they were— yeah, there's Marc Andreessen wearing the Google Glass, one of the prototypes.

Looking sharp.

Yeah. And interestingly, kind of solves the problem of are these sunglasses or are these indoor glasses? Like, they're just— it's not glasses, so you could wear it indoor or outdoor. And I guess you could put sunglasses over the top of that, more or less, but never really got adoption. And there was, there was this, I think, like some sort of instance where a tech person was wearing them in a bar and someone came up to them and was like, I don't want you taking pictures of me. I don't want you recording me in public. Get that off of here. And it caused this kind of culture war issue. And the, and the, and the portmanteau that became popular was glasshole. As you can imagine what that means. And so people were very upset about this and like, I don't want you taking pictures. Now we're kind of blown past that where everyone has a phone on them that could be recording you and everyone's taking out their phone all the time, taking pictures. And there's just kind of, you know, Emily Sundberg was talking about in the Hamptons how there's so many TikTokers around taking video of everything. You can't even leave with another man's wife, as she put it. Right. And so The, uh, such a funny phenomenon. But, uh, but I mean, it was funny because she said that, and then a week later the Coldplay concert happened, and that one may go viral. And that's of course the product of technology. That's a product of the fact that everyone is filming. There is going to be someone filming every screen at every moment. And so at a concert, it wasn't like something happened and then the one person that has a camera needs to be like, oh, I should take a video of that and post it. It's like there were after a while, once it went viral, there were other camera angles that came out because other people were also filming at the same time. Now, not everyone was, but you put 100,000 people together, they're going to be filming everything at all, at all, at all, at all times, all the angles. Obviously very beneficial when something disastrous happens. You have a lot of, you have a lot of coverage to figure out what happened. But in other cases, it is somewhat of an invasion of privacy, all sorts of things. And so Long story short, we kind of blew past that. There hasn't been a pushback on the Meta Ray-Bans. People wear them and there hasn't been any—

Don't they have like a light?

They do. That lets you know if it's recording.

It's recording.

Yes.

I think it's good.

Yes. And so that was kind of where the technology resolution landed. Yeah. Now Meta Ray-Bans aren't the most popular product, but there's certainly plenty of people that daily drive them and they're not getting, you know, aggressively yelled at for being like, like Meta Ray-Ban holes or whatever. Like that meme is dead. And people just kind of assume that if I'm out in public, someone might take a picture of me with their phone or their Meta Ray-Bans. Like it's just something that happens now. And we've just been normalized to it.

Yeah, and anytime these wearable pendant bracelet things have popped up, people's immediate thought is, okay, so you're recording every conversation that you're having and that's being indexed. Maybe you're getting transcriptions. Is that suddenly if somebody sues you, can— do you have to provide that, you know, as part of a lawsuit? That you can imagine the kind of problems that that would cause. We should have— so Avi from Friend.com, he's starting— they're starting to ship their product on July 30th, so just a week from now. And I'm sure he has some way that he's addressing that, Yep. Bee is interesting. The company was started just under 3 years ago by some former Twitter employees, actually, back when it was called Twitter. So the CEO, Maria, and Twitter and Bee, both like flower-adjacent animals.

I'm seeing a trend here. I like this.

Yeah, I can see it.

So Maria de Lourdes Zolo said the company, which imagines a world where AI is truly personal, is joining Amazon in a LinkedIn post. An Amazon spokeswoman said that while the deal is signed, the agreement isn't yet closed. For Amazon, it's a small move in a potentially huge future market. I saw the bracelet.

Yeah, it was interesting. I think the pricing strategy here was smart. The device, they sold it for $49.99. So just clearly trying to sell these to as many people as possible. And then I'm sure there's a subscription component to it as well.

Yeah. There is something about the price point. And even though, even though when the iPhone was released, it was like $600, it was very expensive.

Oh, and they actually haven't shipped any product yet.

Oh, BE hasn't?

So they're shipping in— they were shipping in February.

Well, sorry, September. So when they ship, will they have to pay sales tax? What should they use for that?

Definitely. I would strongly recommend NumeralHQ.com sales tax.

They could put their sales tax on autopilot. They could spend less than 5 minutes per month on sales tax compliance. That would be amazing. Anyway, so they did send a demo to Joanna Stern at The Wall Street Journal. She was impressed with how useful the bracelet was, but she wasn't sold on the privacy tradeoffs. Rather than saving audio, Bee only keeps a transcription. But still, the creep factor is high, says the Journal. We have long had listening devices in our pockets, in our homes. For many, Amazon's Echo speaker was the first.

It is kind of funny. Somebody, you know, let's say somebody, a friend comes over your house and, you know, they've got their Bee bracelet on and then they take it off at some point sitting on a table and you're like, wait, there's, you know, let's say you're having a pool party.

Yep.

You're sitting at the table. We're sitting like this. So the person, the Bee owner is off doing something else, but they actually get like a a perfect transcription. Oh yeah, I actually get recommendations. Yeah, it's like, hey, so-and-so was just talking behind your back for about 30 minutes.

Yeah, the mangoes he brought to the pool party, totally rotten.

Totally rotten.

Wow. Really lacks attention to detail. Won't be invited to the next pool party.

Yeah. So your B is like, okay, so you really need to work on your mango selection going into the next party.

So your friends were really behind your back.

It's really a weak point for you.

Yeah. Yeah, that's good.

That could, that could be valuable.

I think people are going to have to fill out the apology form to all the schizophrenics out there who've been like, everything's listening to me because like, well, yes, in fact, everything is listening to you.

I think if Meta, if Meta could, if Meta could have bought a company like this and said, and said for $50 a month, we'll pay you $50 a month to listen to everything they say and give you better ad targeting, I bet Meta could make it back.

Yeah, I mean, I do think the price point is like super, super key to getting the install base down. John Carmack was talking about with VR, what was he saying, like 100 grams, $100 for a VR headset? That's when you're gonna get everyone to buy them, and then there's gonna be such a big install base that everyone will want to build on top of it. And that's when, you know, the— when the iPhone came out at $600, it was so expensive, it was such a luxury good. But everyone had a phone at that time. The phones were just heavily subsidized by the, by the phone plans, and the phone plans had started at like $10 a month, $30 a month, and kind of worked their way up to $100 a month. The phones were really only like a couple hundred dollars, so if you lost it, it wasn't that big of a deal. And like slowly it had worked its way up from the bottom. I mean, wireless phone, cell phones used to be a luxury. It took two decades probably from the '80s to go from the big DynaTac all the way down to the Motorola Razr V3, which was like pretty much, you know, affordable to many families. We'd give them to their high school kids, right?

Yeah.

And then so when the iPhone came out, there was already this install base of people who expected to be able to make phone calls, sell you over the cellular network, and then also text each other. And then the internet browsing was like kind of a nice-to-have extra feature. I remember someone had a really fancy— I think it was like a Nokia or something, or It was some sort of other phone that had a very primitive web browser on it about 2 years before. It was really expensive because you had to buy a data plan too, but I was like, oh man, the ability to access the internet everywhere, that's such a killer feature. And so I definitely could imagine a world where you have to get these products just so cheap that everyone's buying them, wearing them, they're just baked into everything, and then you can scale up to something that's more premium. Yeah.

Um, it just seems we're so far past the Siri, Alexa personal assistant, shopping assistant rivalry.

Yeah.

But it makes sense for Amazon to try to get back in the game.

Yeah. I wonder, do you think, uh, do you think OpenAI could, could kind of come out with an Alexa competitor that would do well?

I mean, they arguably already have, which is, it's just, I mean, ChatGPT. Yeah, I would say you use specifically, you use ChatGPT as like voice memos. Say like you kind of talk through what you're thinking, what you want to do, and then it condenses it nicely. It's not taking a bunch of actions yet. Like being like, hey, I want to make, I can see in the future where you're like, hey, I want to make a, I want to cook my wife a nice dinner. Like in this theme, can you put together an ingredient list? Order all the ingredients and have it home by 5 PM.

That's very, very GenTech. I just imagine, I talked to somebody who said that they often leave or their wife leaves ChatGPT open in the conversational mode when they're just hanging out. And then you can just like, it won't chime in unless you actually ask it a question and it will kind of know that, okay, now you're talking to me. But it doesn't have a specific wake word. So it's just like a third party in the conversation. Felt very sci-fi, very futuristic. I don't know. Anyway, so now Amazon is interested in a wearable device that's always listening, no wake word needed. So Amazon has reminded us for years that its voice-activated speakers only start listening when they hear the wake word, even if you didn't necessarily utter it.

But they would— if you've had an Alexa in your home ever, it certainly will wake up randomly, it'll hear something incorrectly and pop on all the time.

Yeah. And so very interesting to see what they're thinking about here. Bea is one of a growing pack of AI gadgets out there. Google has Pixel earbuds that put Gemini AI in your ear. Meta Ray-Bans, of course, we talked about. Samsung recently showed up, showed off Gemini-infused Galaxy devices. Apple has been slower on the uptake. But remember we were hearing that reporting from Mark Gurman that Amazon or Apple was working on like a robotic arm or something like that, something that like would sit on your table or something. I don't know. They had some sort of like robotics device like in the far roadmap.

Apple's always— I mean, I do believe that Apple works on a— what you see, even leaks from Apple is still like 5% of what they're actually working on under the surface. Meta had an announcement announcement today for a wearable device. So I'll read their post. They said, imagine controlling your devices with a subtle hand or finger gesture. Our cutting-edge research turns intent and muscle signals into seamless computer control. This breakthrough wrist technology is redefining how we interact with computers— intuitive, precise, and ready for the future. And, uh, they, um, I believe they released an entire study around this as well. We actually got a chance to take a demo of this. It was very cool earlier this year. I'm not sure how much we can actually say on it for now. But yeah, so they did an entire study as well around a generic non-invasive neuromotor interface for human-computer interaction. So it's basically, yeah, the team has it pulled up here. You can see like you can click by going like this. You can scroll in different ways. And when we used it, it was extremely, it was extremely intuitive. Like you needed to— it took about 30 seconds to figure out how it works.

The scrolling motion was particularly cool. That was something I hadn't experienced with the Apple Vision Pro.

And this is one of the ways in which Meta imagines integrating, making something like a pair of glasses as functional as a phone or computer.

Yeah. Um, this was an acquisition too. So Meta bought Control Labs to bring this wristband into the company. That was a deal reportedly between $500 million and $1 billion. It's been 6 years now, and now they're starting to test it even further. What's interesting is that the Apple Vision Pro was pretty good at hand detection, and I feel like this is maybe one of those like Elon versus Waymo debates about like, you can do it with a camera. Like, you can see that I'm doing this. You can see that I'm giving you a thumbs up. You— if you can see, the computer should be able to see with a camera. Yeah. And it's just a matter of getting the right training data, building the right model, and then rolling that out. So it should be doable from a, uh, from a pure software perspective. But it was nice when you put on glasses and you put the control wristband behind your— you didn't have to have it in view.

Yeah.

And so you could have your hand in your pocket and still be controlling. And that was a big part of the weight of the Apple Vision Pro was that it has cameras not just looking out this way, but also looking down to see your hands. So, but if your hands are behind your back, but it's such a weird niche use case, I feel like I could just get used to having my hands.

The other challenge is getting people to adopt. Effectively two new devices.

Yeah.

Is also, um, yeah, not necessarily easy.

Yeah. Putting on a wristband, I mean, if you put a watch on it, you put, you know, you make it part of the daily wear. The big question is like Apple's getting so strong with the Apple Watch, like the ecosystem feels like if it really starts clicking, the Apple Vision Pro can key off the watch and it just gets so much better if you have the watch on and you're like, Okay, well yeah, I'll get the watch then to throw that on. But obviously that's no substitute for a Patek Philippe or an Audemars Piguet. So you got to head over to Bezel. Your Bezel Concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. Go to getbezel.com. But I don't know, I don't know exactly how it will play out. It feels like You need maybe both. It'll— it's still like it adds cost. I, I feel like the— I'm still in the camp of make the headsets light and cheap and give people the, the ability to replace their TV, like, and then a few other things that they can do, but they have to replace entertainment.

Not a daily driver coming with you everywhere.

Yeah, there's so many people that build, you know, like, okay, I got 3 Apple Pro Displays or 3 Studio Displays. I mean, look right there, we got, we got 6 displays in the, in the production suite. Um, like in theory that could be replaced with VR headsets. Yeah. And you could have unlimited displays and reconfigure them as you need on the fly.

Yeah.

Uh, and for a lot of people, especially if you're traveling, college student, a smaller apartment, um, you know, instead of a big 60-inch TV and a bunch of monitors for your desk setup and this and that, you just have one headset. But It's got to be light. You got to be able to wear it for a really long time.

Yeah. Well, let's go and check in with Europe. We have a post here from Kai. He says, normalize sitting outside the cafe all day and not really doing anything. And Superstar Poster Jira Tickets says, impressive, very nice. Now let's see the GDP. Good to flag there's a real cost to sitting outside the cafe all day and not really doing anything. 7 days a week.

These guys look, these guys look very retired though.

Yeah. And I feel like let them sit outside the cafe in peace, but shouldn't be an invitation for you to do the same thing.

I don't know. I think you flip this around and you phrase it as you're holding court. People come to you, you set up, set up shop.

Holding court is underrated.

Holding court is extremely underrated. You got to just set up, you know, hey, you want to come pitch me your startup? I'll be at this cafe all day long.

Yeah, we have a, we have a friend of the show, media mogul who holds court at a, at a certain hotel in L.A. and he doesn't have to, doesn't really have to leave all day long.

Sure.

They just, you know, he's really a king there.

Yeah, that's great.

And they come to him. It's a fantastic way of doing business.

Yeah. Well, if you're struggling with a bunch of inbound emails to your support team, getfin.ai. The number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks.

World champion.

Number one in competitive bake-offs, number one ranking on G2. Did you see this video?

Yeah, pull up this video. So a company called Volonaut.

Volonaut.

Volonaut says, we are excited to share this raw flight footage, including takeoff and landing, all with real sound. No special effects, no CGI, no AI, pure engineering. Enjoy the future, a functional real-world speeder bike that so far only existed in sci-fi movies is finally here.

This seems extremely dangerous. Yeah, you just look at—

it's tough.

Yeah, it's like we wanted— yeah, we wanted flying cars, we got them, and now we're terrified of them. And I don't necessarily want to go for a ride on this. It seems really fun. It seems like in the same territory as like wingsuiting. Like, as a kid, I was like, I'm definitely going to become a pro wingsuiter. No doubt. Put me in. But then give me the Red Bull livery on my wingsuit. I'm 100% doing it. And then I looked at the actual stats of how dangerous wingsuiting is and was like, I will never be wingsuiting. I will be watching Red Bull videos of wingsuiting.

Yeah, leave it to the Red Bullers.

How do you even make this safe? This is—

they're calling it the air bike.

Yep. It's very cool that they built this. Very, very, very cool. I wonder, I wonder how it commercializes. I wonder like, where does this go? What use case is it?

I mean, it's also crazy on the, on the link. I have no idea who's building this on the LinkedIn. Yeah, it has one guy on it and Tomas Patan and it seems like— where is this?

Mm.

He's in Poland.

Okay.

He's apparently the only person working on this company.

Solo dev, solopreneur.

Okay. So he's also the founder of Jetson, which is the eVTOL company.

Okay. So he built this on the side.

Side project. Little, little side project. Built a speeder bike.

He's in Poland. I wonder if there's a defense tech application.

There's oft—

anytime you can put something in the air and make it move fast, there's usually I mean, if you're worried about, if you're worried about a minefield and you need to get from one place to another, maybe this is a good way to get around. And if you're really trained because you're in the military, you're not just some casual person going for a flight, like, could be safer than trying to walk through a minefield. Of course, like, you are a pretty big target up there. It looks like he's wearing some sort of—

yeah, I mean, the way to think about this is this is a— you could also imagine this as a drone, right? There doesn't need to be a human on it, so it's It's powered by jet propulsion. It's designed to carry one person at speeds up to 124 miles an hour.

That's so fast.

And what makes it possible is they have the stabilization system, onboard flight computer, and anyways, I mean, this looks like a beautiful future. It's just like, how safe does it need to get until I'll be ripping one of these from Malibu into the into the studio every morning.

I don't even ride a motorcycle, so I don't know. I'm more likely to go to the moon, I think, than, than rip around on one of these. It seems like you have to be very doomer-pilled, John.

You don't think they can?

You don't think they can make it so, so safe that it's, that it's, you know, flyable by anyone, certifiable by anyone? It's just so easy to drive that, you know, there's no risk. Then yeah, maybe I'd give it a try. It looks very fun. It does look very fun.

Yeah, one, one solution is it becomes like fully autonomous and you don't have this sort of like human saying, I'm going to, I'm going to take this turn a little faster. Yeah, but still be cool that you could ride on it. That would take you around to places.

Then you're just back in eVTOL territory, right? I don't know. Yeah, I guess this is not eVTOL because it's not electric motors, jet propulsion.

But imagine when this thing gets to the point where you can just like fly it up a mountain.

That will be crazy.

You're going to be able to take these skiing.

Just everyone's waiting in line at Everest and you're just bombing up to the top.

Yeah. You just like take helicopters in the mountains.

Yeah. Again, it's like we kind of do have flying cars in the form of helicopters, right? Just like not, not evenly distributed. It's going to be fun when they start selling these things. They're going to get on Adio. Customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI-native CRM that builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level. Get started for free.

Yeah, I have a feeling you're not going to be able to just order one of these on the website anytime soon.

No, they're going to need a sales team for this. Let's check in with Tyler. How are you doing on the challenge?

Okay, so I played all 3 games.

Okay.

And then I don't know how the, like, scoring works. So I can look at each of the 3 games, there's like scorecards, and then there's recordings. I'm on site, so I can see the number of actions. If you add them up, I'm at, uh, 576.

Oh, you're pretty good.

Wow.

So that's under $600. Okay, but I'm not on the leaderboard. I don't know why.

Okay, maybe it needs some time to update.

That's the real challenge now.

Yeah, leaderboard.

So I'm not just trusting you.

Like, I won, but, but write it, write a SQL injection to have to reach out to Mike. Reach out to Mike. You might be getting a bug bounty too, and your iPhone.

Maybe, maybe. But congratulations, that sounds like good work. How far are you away from number 1?

I'm in 13th place, so I got 576. Okay, number 1 is at 511.

Do you think that's doable based on your—

yeah, definitely. I made a bunch of mistakes.

Okay, so maybe, maybe give it another run. I could probably go see if you go sub-500. That'll be good.

Bang, there you go.

So 500, you get upgraded to more storage.

I will reach out to Mike because I think there might be a bug here, and I don't want— I don't want the reason that you're not gonna win your iPhone to be a bug.

True, true, true.

I feel I went— yeah, it feels like you might have earned it.

Yeah, you also don't want bed bugs either. You want a new bed. You want to go to eightsleep.com. That's right, get a Pod 5. 35— 5-year warranty, 30-night risk-free trial, free returns, free shipping.

I am, uh, deathly ill. I'm trying to keep the energy up by Eight Sleep. Uh, let's hear for Jordy.

I think he's putting out a fantastic performance today.

Production team, I didn't know this was possible. My HRV last night was at 32, which, which I thought would imply death. But I'm here, I'm doing the show, and it's scary to imagine what my night would have looked like without my sleep.

Indeed.

I don't even want to imagine that world.

Indeed. Well, there's one founder I know who's sleeping a lot better, sleeping well. Samir from Vise. He— his company just hit $22 billion in platform assets. Do you know the story of this company?

All I know is they got marked up like back to back to back.

Yes.

Sort of 2021.

Yes. Yes.

It was a unicorn.

Yep. And then they were very young founders and there was all this like, oh, like they're overvalued. Like, you know, and the guys apparently just kept sticking with it and chopping wood. And I love to see this. This is amazing. So he says, one learning to share with all future entrepreneurs: great businesses take a long time to build. Ignore the noise and keep going. It sounds like that's exactly what he did. They grew 1,275% year over year. They're growing 40% quarter over quarter, a record number of new firms. So what this company does is, is, is software for fund administration for asset managers, I believe. And so their portfolio management, portfolio management, so they're onboarding more managers and bringing those assets on the, on the platform. I don't think it's fair to say like, oh, $22 billion is it revenue or they'd have some take rate. It's more like a GMV type of thing and they probably take a small, small fraction of all that. But still, like growth is growth and it seems like they're doing very well. So good to hear.

Cool to see. I think he's been a huge beneficiary of GenAI from what I can tell.

Interesting. Yeah.

Yeah, it is funny. I mean, looking at Lucid's been on an absolute tear this year. And hearing like how many years that were not super exciting, that you were just chopping wood, just trying to be better every single month. I had a buddy come to me last year and he was like, yeah, I think I want to create like a Zen competitor. Like, I think it'd be pretty simple to get it to like, you know, just like get it to like a $50 million run rate, you know, nice little lifestyle business. Thinking about your journey with Lucy being like, I don't know, I don't remember the exact numbers, but it just was the exact opposite of like a fast-growing, you know, for sure company at the beginning. You just had to like just, just compound, compound, compound. It took so long to really unlock the growth.

Yeah, no, it always grew and the growth rate was always decent, but it just took a decade to get any meat on the bones. Just like I always refer to that as like Once the company has enough revenue and profit to sustain the operations out of the fundraising to survive mode, and it's actually a player in the category, not just some wild bet, it takes a long time for the majority of companies. Some people, they're just built different. Maybe they're lucky. Maybe they made their own luck. They rip from day one, and we love to celebrate them here.

We do.

But yes, sometimes if you have something, you know, the die has been cast. Alea jacta est, the Mark Zuckerberg quote. You know, you release the arrow and it travels in whatever direction you released it for as long as possible. But hopefully that's at a compounding rate upwards for a long time. Anyway, if you're looking to compound, get on Public.com investing for those who take it seriously. Multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields, Trusted by millions. Public.com. Go check it out.

And Sonos has new news out of Sonos, out of Santa Barbara County, California.

Trade.

Tom Conrad has been asked to be the next CEO of Sonos. He's grateful for the perspectives and critiques that many of you have shared here these last 6 months while I was interim. So excited for the road ahead. So big pickup from Sonos. We've covered Sonos before. We've shared Yep. Frustration over the years with Sonos. But fundamentally, the products are incredible when they're working. And it feels like it was always a software problem, right? Not, not necessarily.

Maybe which firmware I'm still confused by because they haven't rolled back the app. And so I'm wondering what's going on because my Sonos app still takes a long time to open. Just opening it up is a full at least 90 seconds to just adjust the volume, which is crazy bad experience. And the crazy thing is that the same hardware with the same phone used to be 10 seconds. And so there's something that changed when they added some new functionality that really bogged down the network or the app or something. They got to roll it back. It's very clear what they, what they need to do. So hopefully you can do it. He's been, he's been interim CEO for 6 months. Hopefully he can turn things around. There's a lot that they need to do. It'll be interesting to see where Sonos goes.

Yeah, he's got experience. He was the executive vice president of product at Pandora for 10 years.

Yeah.

And then became the chief technology officer, then went over to Snapchat, was a VP of product there. Also had a brief stint at Quibi as the chief product officer. So excited to see what he does with Sonos and considering I have a bunch of Sonos in my house still.

Yeah. Do any Sonos speakers have microphones on them? Let's figure it out. Because yes, several Sonos speakers come equipped with built-in microphones. The Sonos One, Sonos Era, 100. And so you should be able to talk to them. They work with voice assistants like Alexa, Google Assistant, Sonos Voice Control. OpenAI's got to buy this company, right?

I could see it. That would be a wild deal because at $1.3 billion current market cap, it's affordable.

It's affordable. But then you just jump forward in the supply chain. You can start delivering all of these things and then you just have an Alexa competitor.

Distribution into millions of homes.

And also in through like the actual distribution like chains like Best Buy and stuff like that. Like maybe you want to start from scratch, maybe you want to greenfield it. I don't really know, but this feels like something that would be a no-brainer. Um, yeah.

So in 2024, Sonos shipped 5 million units, uh, globally.

Yeah.

So that was down from, uh, the year before, but still that's a lot of devices out in the world.

Yeah.

In a single year that, um, I could see it.

What about, uh, Perplexity? Aren't they at 18 billion? Perplexity by Sonos?

Well, they're working on a phone.

They're working on a lot of different phones.

Solana's working on a phone.

Lots of new phones coming.

Everybody's working on a phone.

But maybe the smart speaker market has languished enough that there's something interesting to be done there. I mean, just the voice transcription is so much better. We talked to the CEO of the Nothing phone, and he was saying that he's integrated Whisper and Gemini and kind of beefed up the voice assistant. But maybe people aren't willing to jump from the iPhone ecosystem But, you know, if you're like, oh, well, I could offset the lack of a great Siri with a great ChatGPT-enabled smart home device. Kind of interesting. I don't know. You put some AI researchers on the problem of getting the Sonos app to load in less than 90 seconds, and I think you might solve it. Tyler, you have an update for us? What's up?

Yeah, I'm on the leaderboard.

You're on the leaderboard. There we go. Let's go. Come over, ring the bell. I've gone for number 1.

Hit the gong. Hit the gong. You are the proud owner of a new iPhone.

There we go.

Incredible. Well deserved. Give it a better hit than that. Give it a better hit than that. I'm gonna kind of COVID the mic, but, um, bigger hit, bigger hit. Still fairly gentle, but it's great contact.

Great contact.

Nice work.

So what— yeah, yeah, give me the position. Uh, what ranking are you now? I want to see you go for 1.

Yeah, so I think I'm number 13 now. I think we can— 13, if you already showed it, but yeah.

Okay, yeah, can we pull up the screen?

What am I, 65 moves behind?

Okay, and what was it? What was the total number of moves that you did?

576.

576, not bad. You smoked 600. Yeah, there we go. Okay, and, and you got to get to 511 is the number 1, I believe. Okay, so, so you got to cut down a little bit, be a little bit more efficient, but I think you can do it.

Should be doable.

Very cool. Uh, and then After that, we gotta get you working on the agent side of that leaderboard. You've seen that? So on the other side—

I looked at it a little bit.

Yeah, on the other side, they actually have like a harness that you can use to get started and you can start trying to build your own AI agent that will go and try and solve it and rank on the leaderboard.

Interesting.

But you know, that's enough about leaderboards. Let's talk about billboards, out-of-home advertising made easy and measurable with adquick.com. Say goodbye to the headaches of out-of-home advertising. Only AdQuick combines technology, out-of-home expertise, and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe, folks.

Meanwhile, on the timeline, Ryan Peterson is throwing out some bait. He said rail is best used for freight while humans should fly through the sky at 500 miles per hour because they value their time. And he says, just discovered that saying bad things about rail travel is an evergreen way to engagement bait. Plan accordingly.

People love, love rail. But it is very true. America is very different than Europe. Like the Trans-Grand-Vitesse, the TGV that goes from Paris to London, that's, I think that's like the equivalent of like Boston to New York. Like Europe is just so much smaller than the, uh, than the western side of the United States that even with a high-speed rail system, getting from, uh, LA to Chicago is still hours and hours and hours, just so much longer than, than on a plane. And so we actually do have a pretty robust rail system, but we just choose to use it for freight and then we fly through the sky at 500 miles an hour.

Meanwhile, Meta is investing in their own AI chip, Olympus. Hmm. Zuck is really cornering a lot of these iconic Olympus-like words, right? He says, yeah, Meta recently updated its ASIC roadmap, adding a new project, Arc, a supplementary of its ASIC product line, which leverages TSMC's 2-nanometer technology and is targeted to enter mass production in the first half of 2027. We believe Meta plans to make adjustments to the design of Olympus to compete with Nvidia's Rubin GPUs, resulting in a delay from fourth quarter 2027 to, uh, first half of 2028. Arc will focus on post-training and inferencing purposes. The design service vendor selection will be complete in coming weeks, and we think MediaTek has a good chance of winning the product— the project, sorry.

Interesting. Uh, Semi Analysis says, don't worry, H100s, H200s won't be worthless anytime soon. It will still be a valuable baseline that impressive AI accelerator upstarts like MAtX, Edge AI, OpenAI Titan chip, Meta and Microsoft can use in their performance comparisons. This, of course, is when, when folks come out and say we, we're buying H100 equivalents. And, and so they share a picture of Jensen here, chief revenue destroyer. After Blackwell, you can give away a hopper because Blackwell will be so performant. So interesting to see where this goes. It feels like Nvidia is the one company in the Mag 7 that every other Mag 7 company is coming for and being like, I'm sick of paying them. Whereas all the other Mag 7s have kind of—

meanwhile, Elon's just saying, you want $100 billion, Jensen?

That's true. Yeah, he isn't, he isn't designing his own chip yet. Yeah, I wonder if that'll change.

But I do believe there was an xAI engineer yesterday that was saying that the keyword in some of the things that XAI was putting out, as they said, like H200 equivalent or something like that, or Blackwell equivalent GPUs. So could be, they're not necessarily fixed on it.

Yeah. And so, yeah, yeah. It's interesting because like Google and Amazon compete on like shopping searches and LinkedIn competes with, you know, Facebook in some ways, but basically every hyperscaler kind of has their own corner and their own monopoly built out like in search and social networking and in desktop or cloud or, or shopping. And then they all butt heads in little ways like Google going up against Tesla with Waymo and, and they kind of touch on each other's territory, but they don't often— it's very rare that all of them are going up against one, but it feels like that's the narrative around, around NVIDIA. Everyone's sick of, of paying the Nvidia tax, maybe. I don't exactly know, but it seems like if you're trying to cut them out, if you're going to TSMC and fabbing your own chips, like that is straight up cutting out Nvidia. And Google, it seems like, was successfully doing it with the TPU.

Yeah. Signal has a post here. He says, meanwhile, on the App Store, and there is a new king of the App Store free charts. It is TSMC. Dating advice, helping women date safe. Uh, from my understanding, they basically productize the groups on Facebook, the 'Are We Dating the Same Guy' groups. Um, and so this acts as a layer over a bunch of different dating apps where women can effectively review, add comments, leave Yelp-style reviews for the men that they are going on dates with. Um, and the founder, I think his name is Steve Cook. Um, uh, let's see here. Uh, Sean Cook. He was a director of product management at Salesforce for just under 4 years. So really Salesforce putting in the work at Salesforce. Uh, we love to see it. And I said earlier, this is just a massive moment for big tech PMs.

It is.

Never doubt them again. Never doubt them. A lot of people have been doubting the PMs that say, oh, you're just changing the color of this button.

The color of the button matters apparently, because you have to imagine that this, that this app category is highly competitive.

I don't know, maybe they're just the first one doing it, but there has to be multiple of these. So I was looking and—

Someone built something like this.

The third most popular app, I believe, is the same exact concept. Concept.

No way.

It's called T-Born.

Oh wow.

Dating advice. See the truth before you date. So they went with the same name. Okay, this is number 3. Um, huh. It has very few ratings, so I do wonder. So T-Dating Advice has 56,000 ratings, but the number 3 app is T-Born Dating Advice.

Yep.

Just so, so strange. Uh, it only has 60 reviews, but clearly climbing the charts.

Well, here's some dating advice. Book a Wander. Find your happy place.

Find your happy place.

Book a Wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, and 24/7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better.

That's right. And without further ado, I think we have our next guest. And I got to get this.

Welcome to the studio. How are you?

Massive day.

Massive day. Thank you so much for having me. We're getting a little bit of feedback on the audio. Can we turn up the levels a little bit? Can we— can you hear us okay?

I can hear you.

Okay. Yeah, it's just a little bit muffled. Are you on headphones? Maybe take those out and we'll see if the computer audio is any better.

Should be better.

It's better.

That's way better.

There we go. Welcome to the stream. No problem. Kick us off. Give us the news. What happened today?

We at Vanta announced we raised $150 million Series D. $4 billion pre, $4.15 post.

Fantastic. Congratulations.

Thank you.

Been waiting to do that. Appreciate it. Such a massive milestone. Can you catch us up to speed on, you know, I think people know your story by now, but can you catch us up to speed on just like the last couple of years getting to this point?

It was an overnight success, correct?

Definitely. Yeah, definitely. Haven't been working on this for like 8 to 10 years. Totally. But who's counting? Okay, so we started most known for like automating SOC 2, also putting up billboards on the 101. So we still do both of those things, but we also help our customers like build out their security programs, improve them in a bunch of different ways, and then take all that hard work and use it to build trust with their customers through audits, through trust reports, through security questionnaires, all sorts sorts of things like that.

Is, is the characterization of Vanta as like a point solution company, at least when you started the company, correct? Is point solution a pejorative?

Yes, it is.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Break, break that down. Why is it— is it all because of Parker Conrad, who's a friend who, uh, who's coined the, the compound startup and you have to do everything at once? Um, what, what are the trade-offs of being point solution early on? And then how do you think about adding things on? Because there's probably some trade-off of you build, trying too much territory, trying to capture too much territory, you can't hold on to it.

But at the same time, yeah, there's an easy argument if Christina had started and said, we're a platform.

That might have been rough.

At the beginning, could have been a much, could have still been successful, but maybe a much smaller company.

Yeah. So walk me through that journey.

Yeah, for sure. So we started, I mean, our word was wedge.

Okay, wedge.

The nicer word. Yeah, right. Like it sounds better than point solution, which sounds kind of like trivial.

Wedges have points on them, right?

Totally.

They come to a point.

You need a pointy wedge.

Yes, yes, yes.

But we started with SOC 2 for startups. And because they're like, you might remember this, but like 2017, like no startup got SOC 2. Now you get it when you're like 2 founders, which is a little wild. But they were like so valuable then we figured if we can do that, customers will let us do a lot and give us a lot of access and we can help them with a lot of things. And then we can use our pointy wedge to expand into like a platform over time. And I'm like joking, but like that was a seed pitch. I posted one of the slides from it today. It was like truly the 2018 pitch. And so it's kind of cool to be here, you know, a little bit later.

And were you getting, were you getting pushback on like market size at that point? Were people saying like, you're going to need an act 2 basically?

Oh, totally.

People weren't even like, you need an act 2. It's like, you need a new idea. Like, you just pitched me on sock doing all the startups and no startups get socked.

Well, so what were you, what were you What were you seeing then that other people were missing? Because it seems so obvious in hindsight that young startups would need SOC 2 and a variety of other things in order to sell into enterprise and do other things that they want to do. But like, what were you seeing then that now looks obvious in hindsight?

I think it was this, like, if you could make it easier, like less time, not necessarily less money, less time for a startup to get a SOC 2, they would 100% do one. The problem was you really had to give your CTO up for a year who would go talk to a bunch of accountants and then become very sad. And so like, no one would do that. But if they didn't have to do that, everyone would go sign up and press the like fast SOC 2 button.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I don't think it's an obvious idea at all. Like when you, when you start a company, most people go, I need a laptop.

No, no, I'm saying it was, it was non-obvious. That's what made it a great opportunity.

Totally.

But it was clearly obvious to Christina and the team.

What do you think of the— it feels like you're one of the success stories of selling to other startups early on. And there's been this criticism people have bubbled up of it's this kind of circular economy that happens in the startup world. We've seen a lot of people break out of it. What's the secret to breaking out of it? Is that still a good wedge? Is that still a good go-to-market? And just kind of what are your thoughts on that idea of, being a startup that sells to startups?

Yeah, well, first, I appreciate the use of the word wedge. I still actually think it is like a good idea. There's like definitely some like circular Ouroboros thing in part because like especially early stages, everyone cares about growth. They don't care about your costs. And so there's like can be some amount of trading that happens. We tried not to do that. And I think actually the couple of times when I did that, it just blew up later. Like it was a bad idea. But I think with that, you like hopefully have startups that are growing, like you have the cursors in your user base, you have the ramps, you have the who members. And then those customers like push you upmarket whether you're ready or not. And if you can hang on to them, you can like start serving bigger customers, but kind of you need that growth out of the startup base too.

Yeah. On, on that note of like, like people care more about growth than costs, like Were people ignoring margins early on?

Oh yeah, for sure.

Were you paying attention to margins early on though? No, not at all.

Okay.

No.

What are those? Never heard of them.

Software.

Yeah. Yeah.

Non-AI software.

Then talk to me about, we were just talking to another entrepreneur who has kind of a wedge type of product and is expanding and there's this trade-off between take what you have into new places, either upmarket or international, versus add new products, new SKUs? And that's kind of an age-old question. How have you worked through it through the past couple of years? And do you have any like, like frameworks for thinking through those types of processes?

Yeah. So I think that what we— I mean, you do both, right? Both is sometimes hard to do at the same time. And so what we did was like, take the same thing if the go-to-market's working and do it in Europe, do it in Australia, do it in Asia. And at the same time, start to build the muscle to build multiple products because it is hard. Everyone talks about it's hard and I remember being like, kind of why? And I don't know, I've lived through it. It's hard. I don't have a great answer. It's just like the organization gets optimized around doing the thing you're doing and you have customers and you have revenue and it all reinforces itself. And so when you want to go take a group of people and do something that has no customers and no revenue, you kind of can, but it's just weird.

It is hard.

Are you big on— is it Gresham's Law, the idea that you like ship your org chart? Have you noticed that? Yes. No, no. Gresham's Law is bad money drives out good. I don't know the one I'm talking about. It's a different law, but it's this idea that you ship your org chart. So if you have an org chart that's it's heavily international, you're just gonna wind up selling internationally. Do you think about it from that perspective? It's Conway's Law. Conway's Law, Conway's Law.

Yes.

Have you been through the wringer of Conway's Law? Have you learned how to fight it? Have you learned how to deal with it?

Oh, totally. I think I've learned you can't fight it, and so you just have to change your org chart sometimes.

Okay, yeah.

Right, 'cause you're gonna ship whatever your org chart is, so try to make your org chart the thing you actually wanna ship. Does that make sense?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I've noticed that. What's the, what's like the, the correct way to keep morale high while basically doing a reorg and telling someone like, hey, you're going to be working on something different, but you're talented and we like this, but it's just like, it makes more sense for the business to do this here over here.

Like, I mean, beyond all the like, be honest, like actually say, or like make sure you believe you're saying those things when you're saying them. I think we went through a phase where I went through a phase where like, you tried to like, we reorged kind of a lot and it was because you like always did feel like you had a better structure. And it's like that, that was too much. Also, like, it doesn't matter. Let it, like, the org chart hang out for 6 or 9 months. Don't change it every quarter. You're just going to drive people crazy. Sounds really obvious when I say it, but yeah, of course.

Yeah.

What, what, what are some, like, any new technology, like, technology trends that, that you're seeing across the customer base in terms of, like, challenges and ways that you guys are reacting? I can imagine I mean, social engineering, like, you know, hacks and challenges must be skyrocketing. But what are you guys seeing broadly?

That's a good one, especially with like AI and deepfakes and, you know, the like text message gift card scams, but like ratcheted to 100, like really good versions of those. Yeah. I think the other thing we see, especially for European customers, is they just get a ton of pressure from European enterprises on AI. Some of it's on AI in general, some of it's on the American model providers, especially the ones you might guess.

Right.

And there's just like all this kind of default skepticism in Europe that then if European startups—

And that's around like data, data usage and—

Yeah, exactly.

And just like, I don't trust OpenAI and so don't send any, like, I don't even want to use something, use a tool that uses OpenAI.

Yeah.

Like a CTO or CIO saying that basically.

Right.

Yeah, that makes sense. Do you think— I want to know the thoughts on just general competition when you're selling a wedge product from bigger companies that might want to add this on as a feature. We've been talking to a bunch of founders about how to deal with competition from bigger companies. What have you been through? How'd you get through it? And then I want to talk about how that landscape is changing.

Yeah. So we've been slightly different. It's like we never really had competition from big companies because people didn't build what we built. Built before. They built vertical task trackers, but no automation. What we had was in the COVID boom, lots of folks decided to start Vanta knockoffs. And so we had like a round of that and kind of went through the gauntlet that, you know, like gone through that whole roller coaster and now we're on the other side of it, but sort of different.

How did that manifest? Was that like pricing pressure or just like, like having the market slice up differently? Needing to reprioritize or kind of double down on kind of territory that you kind of claimed and felt you were confident on and then had to retrench a little bit?

Some of all of it. I mean, I think in the early days we were kind of probably in retrospect, like too pleased with ourselves. Sorry for like coming up with this category and this product.

Sure.

And like the honest answer is like no customer care. I mean, they care, you know, or like they're very supportive, but like they just want the best product for them. And that might be the first one.

Yeah, they're not like, oh, you created the category. Great. Then I won't, I won't look at my other options.

Exactly.

Like, no, said no one ever.

Yeah.

Right. And so I think it pushed us to be like, okay, we did whatever we did years ago. Cool. What have we done lately for customers? Like, what have we done today? What have we shipped? You know, this week, this quarter, this month, this day. So is it that piece, which I think we got a lot stronger. Because of that. And then pricing pressure for sure. Because in our space, because it's sales all the way through, like there's no self-serve trial. The dominant strategy for a competitor is to like copy the demo, do the same demo, and then say, hey prospect, these products are the same. You're right. You just saw the same thing, but like we're 30% cheaper. So like, why would you go with Vanta? And like, we kind of learned what to do with that.

Why did you go international so early? Was it to defend against other people being like, I'm going to build the Vanta for XYZ country, but it sounds like it was more customer-driven.

Yeah, it was about like 20% of our customer base, I think at the time was outside the US. And we hadn't done anything for that. It's just like, you know, founders in London, you know, watch TVPN. Like, it's not like it's just because they're in London doesn't mean they like don't listen to American podcasts.

Well, and they're selling to American companies.

Sure.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

What, what's up with all the colors? I feel like Vanta Black is the darkest black you can possibly buy. It's like patented paint, but then we're not named after that.

Okay.

Yeah.

Oh yeah.

Trademark color.

Yeah. Take me through that.

So yeah, not, not touching that. But we kind of coined purple in the early days. And so we have— we've become the Purple Llama Company.

Purple Llamas. Where'd the llama come from? Because, yeah, I mean, yeah.

And by the way, by the way, we called every llama owner in L.A. We were trying to get llamas here in the studio to join us. We have it. We have a third mic, but it ended up being— it ended up being a massive challenge. And we were worried about— we didn't have a carve-out in the lease that said we could bring llamas in our studio. So it ended up being— but, but I think you guys should I would actually, it would be great to get some live llamas.

Popular with the kids at the petting zoo.

Yeah.

Yeah.

We tried it in downtown San Francisco. Downtown San Francisco, also not the most llama-friendly place.

It's hard. They're tough to get.

You can't even bring llamas wherever you want in this country anymore.

Yeah.

What is it coming to?

It's a disaster. On the kind of the AI, like on the AI story, there's like, this question of that I've been, I've been noodling on with a lot of founders about like, is AI a reason to launch a new product that the customer feels? So an agent, a prompt box that they interact with versus just, hey, behind the scenes, we're going to use a ton of AI. You're not even going to know. It doesn't really matter. But the product's just going to get better, more efficient. Maybe our margins go up. Maybe we are delivering things that we want to deliver you faster, more reliably, more accurately. All these different things. Is there one area that's more exciting? I know you're probably doing both, but how do you think about—

Yeah, I mean, I've seen it. I've seen a trend of companies that are basically clones of existing companies that were traditionally seen as SaaS platforms. And they come out and they're basically like, we're this, but it's an agent. And then if you look and try to understand the product, it ends up looking exactly like SaaS with maybe a slightly different workflow. But I don't know how much more valuable it is to customers or if it's actually a better experience.

Yeah.

Oh, totally. There's like, it's an agent, but actually it's a forward deployed engineer, but actually it's like a founder pressing on the button, you know, and like, I did that.

It's a CRUD app. Totally.

It's a CRUD app with like the founder, like pressing buttons at 11 PM at night. Um, so like definitely that, and it'll get better over time. To the first question, like we do a bit of both. It's actually more AI in the background just doing stuff. And then sometimes when we're going to start like surfacing it more and we might call that, you know, oh, that's an agent or the agent did that. And like, yes, it is AI, but it's really just getting rid of workflows behind the scenes that no one really wanted to do or needs to do.

Yeah, yeah. I've been personally experiencing it in Gmail where it was very easy for them clearly to like add an extra panel with like, now you can chat with your email inbox. But for me, the search still doesn't work. And so I much would— I would much rather that just every email that comes in gets condensed down, summarized, and then when I go to search, it really knows what I'm looking for and it just gives me a better product behind the scenes. But that's probably like a harder technical challenge, or maybe just— it's just less experimental. So people are kind of debating. What about in terms of like internal productivity? We were talking to a friend earlier that said that he's seeing there are examples of 10x engineers going to 100x engineers because of tools like Cursor and Windsurf and Devin, Cognition, all that, all the different tools that improve developer productivity. But he was actually more excited about designers becoming 1x engineers. And I thought that was a very interesting take. And if you kind of do like a divide by zero, maybe it's an infinity game. I don't know. But he was saying that like that has been more exciting to him. And I don't know, like what are you seeing internally?

So some of that also PMs with like a V0 Replit lovable, like, right? Because you like have this idea for a thing and then you can make a version of it and then go stick it in front of 5 customers and like it just— and you can do that in 15 minutes, like actually. You know, it was before you'd have to like write the spec or draw the picture, then get the designer to make the mocks and then animate the Figma and you know, whatever. Like that loop went from like ideally 2 days to 15 minutes and that matters so much for like just testing new stuff.

Yeah. Yeah. What about just this idea of like generally AI being like a reinvigorating force for founders who are in your position where like the business has worked, the business like is big basically. And like you have—

Yeah, the valuation post-product market fit. Yeah, the, the, the, the like Series B, C, D just shows like a clear story of just execution. But then what John's getting at, and we've had Owen over at Intercom from the show who actually left his company, came back, and then was like fully ready to just like restart the company almost because there was so much net new opportunity.

Even Ben Thompson was saying like he was kind of getting bored of writing about tech, and then AI happened and he's like, I can't wait to write the articles anymore. But what's your experience been?

Like basically that, that there's all these like magical product experiences that we've thought about, but just couldn't build until now. My favorite like clear Vanta example was in 2017 when it wasn't clear if anyone wanted a SOC 2. It was clear people answered security questionnaires, like those long spreadsheets of questions. And so we wanted to automate those and tried and like weren't good enough ML engineers and libraries weren't good enough that that we didn't and went down the SOC 2 path. Anyway, it's kind of working. But like now Vanta has really good questionnaire automation. We thought of this building this in 2017. We just like couldn't until now. And that is like very fun.

Yeah.

Where next? You guys have just been chopping wood seemingly, like just executing day over day. But where are you going from here?

Hardware.

Hardware. AI pendant. From Vanta. It captures every— if you say a single word, if you say a single non-compliant word, it just knows.

No way to say trust to like a constantly listening AI pendant.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Yeah. But what's next?

You know, keep building stuff, cool stuff for our customers. We have a bunch of security products that are launching that I'm very excited about. So you like get customers in on the wedge, you know, but then over time after they get their SOC 2, they start growing, they start needing more things. They start thinking about building out different parts of their security program. So a couple big launches there coming and a couple more things that we have in store.

Last question from my side, we'll let you go. Has the rise of defense tech, American dynamism, ITAR compliance been like a— like, how have you been like playing in that space?

Oh, it's good. Yeah, yeah. We're actually— we're working with the government.

Yeah.

So this administration is trying to make it easier for everyone to procure software. There's like a FedRAMP, there's a new FedRAMP 20X pilot we're in and we're doing that for two reasons. One, so our customers can sell to the government and have a path there that is not, you know, years and consultants and like literally thousands of pages of long-form text law, like can do a lot there. And then also helping the government go procure software. And so we are just like doing a ton there.

Yeah, yeah, it's funny. The— it feels like it's incredibly cumbersome to the defense tech founders that have to get ITAR compliance, but then they kind of wear it as a badge of honor.

I've been—

yeah, yeah, I have to use Teams, you know, because my work's so important. I'm like, yeah, yeah, like, I— your work is important, but now it's become this badge of honor. But it's great, you know, they need to stay compliant. Anyway, thank you so much for hopping on.

Congratulations.

Congratulations.

I'd say It's— I love, I love just the steady march building momentum. And I'm sure you'll be back. If history repeats, you'll be back on here very soon with, with the next one.

Knock on all the things. Thanks so much for having me.

Fantastic.

We'll talk soon. Talk soon.

Up next, we have Deena Shakir from Lux Capital. I will take the intro. Jordy. and I will welcome Deena Shakir to the TVPN UltraDome when she's ready to hop on the stream. And in the meantime, I can give you some news, check in with Tyler. How's Tyler doing over there?

All right. I'm up to 10th place, 10th place, 550. So I dropped, I think, 26 moves.

I still, I mean, are there obvious low-hanging fruit for you at this point?

It's just a grind.

Just a grind.

Just grind. I'm just, I think I gotta just basically lock down my moves.

Okay.

And then just try to optimize one by one.

You need maybe like a screen recorder or something so you can watch some game tape.

Yeah, yeah.

I think you hit the tapes.

We need, we need a coach. Yeah, yeah. Who else could, who else could help? You need like a world champion, like speedrunner or something like that.

Anyway, we have Deena in the Restream waiting room.

We have Deena in the Restream waiting room. Welcome to the stream, Deena. How are you doing?

Hello. Hello, guys.

Thanks so much for joining. Deena Shakir, sorry for the delay. Why don't you kick us off with an introduction on yourself? And I'd love to know kind of how you fit into the Lux Capital structure ecosystem, what you're focused on, and kind of, and then we can go into a bunch of questions from there.

Awesome. Well, I'm Deena. I am a partner at Lux Capital. We're a multi-stage venture firm. We love turning science fiction into fact. I know you've had Josh on here before and heard all about that. We do everything from pre-seed to pre-IPO. Truly multistage. And I have a particular propensity for healthcare, which I know we're gonna be talking about today, but we are all very much generalists.

Okay. Let's just— we'll get into the other question later. I already have completely new questions. Delian Asparouhov over at Founders Fund, buddy of ours, was saying that the seed ecosystem has just kind of been eroded by founders just skipping rounds. And it feels like that's a lot of kind of a— it's in large part because these like AI companies were able to justify, yeah, I need $1 billion to train a foundation model. And so even if you're not training a foundation model, the multi-stage firms are like, yeah, we can do a $100 million seed round, no problem. Like you have a good pedigree, maybe there'll be an acquihire or something. Where is the pre-seed market? Where is the seed market? Still interesting, or do you disagree with that entire take and you think it's never been better?

You know, I think it's a tale of two worlds. And honestly, the nomenclature for rounds doesn't really mean much these days anyway. On the one hand, the advent of AI has made it more cost effective than ever to start a company. And you are no longer judged in terms of growth by how many people you're hiring or how much money you've raised, but actually how much how far you can get with the least amount possible. And that is only going to continue to happen as we see the advent of sort of AI software tooling and all of that. On the other hand, to your point, if you are raising for a company that is infrastructure intensive, that requires high amounts of compute where you're building your own models, and let's be honest, how many of those do we need? Those types of companies can and will raise $100 million+ seed rounds. So, you know, I think yes is the answer. It's never been better. But also you will very much see a tale of two worlds. And, you know, on our end, we're funding, you know, tiny seed rounds and very large seed rounds. It really depends on the company and what's needed.

Okay. Related to that, give me your take on this post from Caitlin Bolnick. You must be one of four things to raise right now: an AI high flyer, a seed company with the promise of being an AI high-flying company, extra points if you're young, an American dynamism reindustrialization company, or biology enabled by AI? What do you think?

Caitlin always has the great hot takes. I think that's accurate, although honestly it's not the best time for companies that are raising in the biotech space. So I'm not even sure that I would necessarily include that in the list. But yeah, definitely every company right now needs to have an answer to what their AI play is for sure. That being said, if you're seeing Groundhog Day of pitches that are, you know, AI notetaker, AI agent, like, yes, we all use these companies and they're wonderful tools. But what we look for is sort of the operating system, right? The actual picks and shovels, the really generational companies and where the innovation is not just the act of using AI, but something that's actually defensible and transformative.

Yeah.

Elad Gil had a post yesterday. He said AI markets crystallize for a subset of AI markets. It is suddenly clear who the finalists or winners will be. And so he breaks down a few categories, LLMs, code, legal, medical scribing, customer service, and search and IR. How are you thinking about AI markets within healthcare? There's obviously a bunch of different subcategories, but at the same time, some of the biggest headline fundraisers have been around these sort of medical scribe products, or at least products with that kind of the core wedge.

Yeah, you know, I, I, we've actually invested with Elad in a company in the health AI space, which I'll chat a bit about, called BlueNote. But, um, yes, AI scribes, I think, were the lowest-hanging fruit in healthcare. The, you know, one of the biggest pain points was with, you know, documentation and note-taking for physicians. Um, these companies were not immediately up and to the right. Many of them have been around for quite some time. Um, but of course, the advent of LLMs and, and really the, the openness to adoption, which has always been the biggest sticky point in healthcare, has made them particularly effective now. But there's still so much latency in healthcare. We are still talking about AI in the context of fax machines. So there's a lot of opportunity outside of that. And I get excited about, you know, the clinical research side of things, the opportunity in clinical trials. You know, if you're talking outside of patient care, we're in a company called Trial Library, which is is, you know, using AI and technology to rapidly accelerate getting patients into trials for life-saving therapies. And frankly, this is where pharma companies are willing to spend a lot of money to find those hard-to-reach patients. Companies like Bluenote, which we invested in with Elad, for example, are using generative AI to help get drugs to market. So to help with regulatory and medical writing, etc., there's a massive opportunity outside of Scribe. And although scribes are very interesting, it is increasingly a very crowded market. Last count, I think it was over 100. And there's probably—

So many.

Wow.

Have you seen anyone?

I'm sure more are being formed.

As we speak?

As we speak. People are reading the TechCrunch headlines and they're saying, hey, maybe I should create.

It seems like Stripe Atlas has gone down under all the pressure. Yeah.

Just kidding. On the note, though, on the last company, Amina, I think one question that's come up on the show is, what will it take to actually reduce the cost to create and bring a new drug to market? And discovering the drug itself is one thing, but then is there any hope of reducing the cost of the next stages in terms of outside of the paperwork and things like that? But it seems like if you have this huge kind of variable cost of trials. Is there any sort of hope of bringing that down over time?

Yeah, for sure. I mean, the sort of drug discovery piece of it was really, you know, V1 of AI in this field. And we've invested in companies in that space. And there are new companies that are forming in that space. But outside of that, there's a lot, as you pointed out, clinical trials, right? Big area. There's, you know, there have been lots of companies trying to apply technology there, yet still a massive pain point, particularly if you think about where the bulk of the spend is in pharma and specialty drugs. These are tens of billions of dollars of market opportunity here to help get these drugs to market faster. And in order to do so, it often requires finding really difficult-to-reach patients. There's only so much right now that AI can do. To make that happen. So it requires really unique business models. And the company I mentioned, Trial Library, is a great example of a company that is using technology, but ultimately to find and match humans with one another. And those humans are patients, and those humans are providers.

Okay, I want to go Shark Tank mode for a second. I got a pitch for a hypothetical company. I'm not actually building this, but, uh, today, uh, there was a piece in the Wall Street Journal about Amazon buying a bracelet for $50 a pop, you get a transcription of everything you say.

Amazon bought the company.

They bought the company.

You just buy a bracelet.

They bought the company. Have any of the AI scribes in healthcare done something like, hey, the doctor wears a bracelet and then the scribe is, you know, there's a hardware play or there's a wearable play. Have you seen anything like that? Is there an opportunity?

I don't know if I've seen a bracelet per se. There are over 100, so I wouldn't be surprised. I wouldn't be surprised if one of them involves a bracelet, but yes, I have seen hardware plays. This sort of idea of ambient note-taking. I've seen that in the form of cameras that are sort of adding on the computer vision element. I've seen that, of course, in terms of different types of tabletop devices. There is an extra added concern with healthcare, which is the elephant in the room, and that is around PHI and privacy. And oftentimes that's over-engineering it. Really what you need is to understand what's happening in that encounter with the patient. And as it turns out, you don't necessarily need a ring, a bracelet, a camera hanging over you. Oftentimes audio, and in many cases, just AI-enhancing text inputs is all you need to get to the outcome that's desired.

And for that reason, you're out.

How are you approaching this brain-computer interfaces as a category? Yeah, there's been Neuralink, Neuralink, Nudge announced a new round yesterday. But how are you thinking about the category broadly? Feels like something that right now it seems like a very small group of exceptionally connected and talented teams are sucking up the vast majority of capital, which I guess happens in every market, but maybe more pronounced in the BCI space. But do you expect that to be a category where a few years from now there's hundreds of players are more concentrated until people can really kind of de-risk.

Remember we talked to a Thiel Fellowship company that was doing that kind of the other side of the barbell there. But yeah.

Yeah. I mean, as I think as a trend at Lux, we were investing in the space before it was obvious. We were early and proud investors in Control Labs, which you may be familiar with, which was acquired by Hack. Yeah. Reardon, the founder, is actually now a venture partner at Lux, and it's fun to jam with him on these topics all the time. My father happens to be a neuropsychiatrist, so I have a particular interest in this space. He was really big on TMS, and I think that there's still so much opportunity there. We are actively looking and spending time with a lot of these companies. To your question, I don't know if there's going to be 100 of them in the future. These are still very capital-intensive. There's still a lot of science that does need to happen. We're seeing companies at the earliest stages through our Lux Labs initiative, researchers who are rapidly accelerating on the kind of innovation side and ultimately to get to commercialization. That piece of it is the piece that I think still remains to be proven, but we are excited about what's to come.

In healthcare broadly, I'm sure there's tons of opportunities for startups to build new companies that are kind of built on the back of the AI trend. Are there any places where you think that AI in a narrow sense would be a sustaining innovation for the existing large players? I'm thinking of like in the enterprise, it feels like, you know, Google might be facing disruption in search to some degree, but like the Gemini API seems to be doing really, really well. And like they were set up well to serve, you know, a frontier class model as an API. And so they're leveraging that and they will continue and Azure has seen a similar thing with Microsoft. They've been beneficiaries, and in many ways, it's been a sustaining innovation for them in terms of cloud. But what is the shape of the big players in healthcare? Where are they going to just completely win, so you probably want to stay away from it as startup folk?

I love this question. I don't know if you guys know this, but I actually got my start in healthcare at Google, helping to build what eventually became Google Health.

Health.

Back then, one of the first products that I got to work on was this knowledge graph for health, which was, you know, taking symptoms and conditions, mapping them together. So, if you search for itchy eyes, you'd have this graph pop up that explains to you, you might have conjunctivitis. Very novel at the time. We launched Google's first HIPAA-compliant product. It ultimately led me to venture because it became abundantly clear to me that the real innovation in these really intractable industries was actually coming from early-stage startups. This was before the advent of LLMs and all of that. I ultimately think that these big tech players are obviously going to be key distribution partners. Google is still the digital front door for a lot of healthcare. Increasingly, OpenAI and others are becoming that, but it is still where so many healthcare encounters begin before a patient even knows that they're a patient. That being said, do I think that the, you know, the top innovative companies in the healthcare space are going to emerge from these big the big tech companies? Unlikely. But I think that they will thrive and exist in partnership with them. And the hyperscalers, when it comes to AI, are always going to play critical roles.

Yeah. What role are the big tech equivalents in healthcare playing? Is it the big insurance networks, big hospital networks? I mean, we've heard General Catalyst is buying a hospital. I don't fully understand the thesis there. Haven't fully dug in. But what are the bigger players doing that might, where they might just be default beneficiaries of new tech trends?

Yeah. I mean, I've actually spent a lot of time speaking with the leaders of some of these companies. Obviously, they're critical, important partners to our companies. And they are rapidly looking at solutions in AI. So they used to be bottlenecks. These are the distribution partners. Selling into health systems has always been a slog. Ask anyone who's done it, they've got the gray hairs to prove it. I was in a board meeting recently, actually, with a major executive from one of the biggest national payers out there, who blew my mind talking about how they were thinking about adopting clinical AI. We're talking actual bots that are engaging with patients in a way that was far more ambitious than even some of the most, you know, out-there VCs that I had seen. If they're doing it that fast, like, we need to get on this quickly. It is clear that, you know, in healthcare, you want to meet patients where they are, and this is where patients are. They're using these tools constantly. Providers as well. There's a new generation of providers who expect more digitally. And as you can imagine, and you see this in pretty much every major earnings call from these payers, this is no longer just a nice to have. It's a mandate.

Yeah.

What about robotics in surgery rooms. We've seen Stryker. Yeah. I mean, Neuralink specifically is— has talked about building basically their own system in order to do these surgeries. That's like a very— yeah, no, they built it. They're using it very kind of like narrow use case for something that they're doing. But how far out do you think we are from robots conducting kind of routine surgeries, let's say you, you need to get an organ removed or something like that. Is that something that you'd bet on a human still doing 10 years, 15 years, 20 years from now? Or are we gonna be at a point where a human is sort of kind of observing a robot, you know, working, but not necessarily like doing the actions themselves?

I mean, it's already happening. So we're not talking about 10 years from now, it's already happening across the board. And robotic surgery is an area that we've invested quite a bit in. You may have heard of a company called Auris, which was acquired by Johnson Johnson, in which we were lead investors. It's happening in other procedures, in ultrasound, in IVF. We have a company that's on the software side, but enabling computer vision through IVF. If you've ever had— I don't know if any of you have had surgery, but many procedures that used to be highly invasive are now done laparoscopically through robotic surgery. So it's one of the areas in healthcare actually that has has seen the most adoption, and it's still human-assisted in many cases. A lot of that ultimately comes down to patient preference as well as liability, but I would not be surprised if we increasingly move more and more to a world with robots at the forefront of surgery.

What was your take on Fiji Simo's post kind of outlining therapy potentially as one vector that OpenAI's ChatGPT core product could be impactful. That feels like an example.

Health was the other big category that she laid out as well.

Yeah, it feels like meeting customers where they are. And yet all of a sudden we're talking about, you know, a research nonprofit is now competing in the healthcare space. It feels like it's definitely like an unexpected turn of events if you were looking at OpenAI as a health investment. A decade ago.

Yeah, totally. Well, Fiji's amazing. She's become a friend and we actually met in the context of healthcare. So I know it's an area she's deeply passionate about. It's not surprising. It is wild, but it's not surprising. Again, meeting patients where they are, and particularly for, um, you know, a chatbot that does tend to err toward, you know, sycophancy, that's constantly telling you, great idea, let's elaborate on that more, etc. Like ChatGPT, in an era with an epidemic of loneliness, can become a very close friend. It can in many cases diagnose. And, you know, there have been some really interesting studies published in JAMA actually looking at the empathy factor comparing AI to humans. And sometimes the AI actually does score better. Now, do I believe that therapists will be replaced by AI in the near future? No. But the fact of the matter is people are already using it. The numbers are staggering. They're using it for this case now. And so I think what we need to think about is What are the guardrails? How do we ensure that, you know, you don't end up with the types of situations that have made headlines, you know, whether it's suicides and so on? And how do you ensure that this is done responsibly? And I'm excited that someone like Fiji is at the forefront of that because I believe that they are really thinking about not only the ethics, but the responsibility of having human lives in their hands.

Yeah, it feels like something that's going to be like back and forth in the news cycle constantly, but ultimately you know, top of mind and they have all the capabilities and teams in place to, to, you know, execute effectively in that category. But it's going to be, it's going to be a lot of PR back and forth, I'm sure. Yeah. Anything else?

No, this is great.

This is great. Thanks so much for hopping on.

Awesome. Great to chat with you guys. Take care.

Have a good one.

Talk to you soon. Let's go to this post. From Nick Carter. Do you hear this? Do you see this?

No.

You're going to— they're going to own you. Oh wait, no, you're millennial too. He says millennials will be slash are the peak IQ generation. Zoomers are iPad kids, lobotomized. Gen Alpha will be largely incapable of learning anything due to AI. Tyler, what do you think?

Well, Tyler, you're Gen Z, right? You're not—

yeah, I'm definitely—

do you think you're an iPad kid? Do you think you're lobotomized?

I think that's a little bit younger.

Okay.

But I think that's probably true.

Like, how do you avoid this?

Replace iPad with TikTok.

Sure.

Like, if you talk to the average, like, I mean, like, I don't want to, you know, you don't want to throw your whole generation under the bus. I think there's a big power law.

Yeah.

And you'll see it like grow more and more with Gen Alpha.

What separates the high-performing Zoomers from the lobotomized, brain-rotted ones?

I mean, I think it's— you can probably just like if you need like one thing, it's just like, do they use TikTok daily? That's like you probably get like 90% of the—

Yeah, I wonder, is it a screen time thing? You have to cut it off early?

I don't think it's necessarily screen time because you see a lot of kids who just like, if you're like reading like LessWrong or something, if you ever talk to someone who like obviously like read a lot of like online blogs like that, they're like super cracked. So it's not necessarily screen time.

Sure.

One thing is I feel like maybe the kids that have it the worst are like 10 years old right now, where I feel like parents today, there's a general awareness that having your kid glued to an iPad is not great. If you see— I'll be at a restaurant and I'll see a kid just like drooling over their iPad for 2 and a half hours, not engaging with the parents or whoever they're with. I think that's like fairly frowned upon now. Like, I got an iPad for my 3-year-old, but he's only used it on flights. Yeah, like, he really just doesn't— he only thinks of it as a flight device. And that's purely because I don't want other people to be angry if he's going to, you know, cry for 4 hours.

Tyler's over there being like, I'm not addicted to Apple products, but I'll do anything for an iPhone. Which one is it, Tyler?

Yeah, which one is it? Gotta pick.

Any more progress?

I'm still working through. I'm going like very slowly.

Okay. So yeah, because there's no time. So you're just really—

I can't see my score like until the very end.

Okay.

So I think I'm doing better, but it's very slow.

And are you like actively on a run in ArcGIV3 right now? How do you— what do you mean? Like, do you kick off a new, new test or can you optimize each one individually?

Like, I think you can do each game. Individually, and then you can't do a specific level, like you have to do the whole thing, you know, 1 through 8.

Okay, okay, got it. Yeah, interesting. I need— I still need to do all 3 because I've only done the first one. I actually haven't beaten it.

Did you time yourself?

Well, no, because I did it in parts, right? I did like a couple minutes before the stream, and then I did 5 minutes on the stream, and then, you know, I think— I think I know enough at least to be like— to probably have an edge, so it wouldn't be apples to apples. But maybe I got to check the number of moves. That's the move. Okay. Well, we have our next guest here in the studio. Let's bring them in. Good soundboard, Jordy.

What's going on?

Welcome to the stream. How you doing?

Welcome.

Hey.

Awesome to meet you.

Oh, thank you.

Great to have you.

I thought I was worried we had some audio issues. Turns out we don't. Can you give us an introduction? What are you building?

Of course. I am building data computers. Alongside with my co-founder Lenny, and we use AI to automate the production of printed circuit boards. We design them and manufacture them.

Wow, very cool. What's the state of the art right now? Like, who are your competitors?

So there's a bunch of companies that really like try to build circuit boards. Circuit boards are at the heart of every single electronic product that you have. You name it, like aerospace, robotics, medical devices. These are all industries that traditionally would take months to come up with designs and like volume manufacturing of these boards. And so our goal is to help them and like scale up to production right away. Our competitors are folks like Altium, Cadence, but also like current manufacturers that are like building circuit boards right now.

And what's the latest news? Do you have anything?

I'm very proud to announce that we raised a Series A by Andreessen Horowitz.

There we go. Fantastic. When did you start the company? I don't know if I think I missed it.

Exactly a year ago. Like, we hit the 1-year anniversary 3 days ago.

Am I looking at a virtual background or is this actually your office?

No, this is the Brooklyn Navy Yard. We build circuit boards in Brooklyn, New York.

Cool. What is the core value proposition? Speed? Speed, quality, time? How do you think about like, what are your customers asking for right now?

So the real like thing that was very interesting to me is that we have fewer and fewer people that can build circuit boards at the highest like level of complexity. And these people are working at insanely good companies like Tesla, SpaceX, Apple, Meta, and they're very, very hard for other hardware companies to kind of like take away. And I used to be at one of these companies. I used to work at Apple. I used to work on custom silicon. So our goal is basically to democratize the way that we currently build circuit boards and allow from startups to large enterprises to take advantage of a very high-end type of workflow. And the only way we could think about how to do it is to teach large language models to actually generate schematics. And so the advantage and the difference is that we use code. To build our circuit boards, which is something that usually like is not done this way. Circuit boards are very visual. Like you can think about them almost as like Figma. While we, what we do is like more like web design, like CSS and code that then gets rendered into like an actual circuit board. It's called artwork.

Can you, can, is it like okay to take a circuit board schematic from an existing product? I remember we had this founder on, I think it was the Matic robot. And he had— was that right? We had some founder on who had printed on their circuit board like, "Hi Amazon," because they knew that Amazon was going to take it apart and like try and understand how they were doing what there was. I might be messing up the company names, but it seems like there's some proprietary information in the— like, yes, there's amazing data and amazing engineers at these big companies. They're making these circuit boards. Boards, but they're probably not okay with you just taking that as training data, or maybe it's legal. I don't know. What's the deal there?

You're absolutely right. I think that Matic is a fantastic company. They and Whoop both print on their circuit boards like dumbbell copies.

That's the one. Yeah. Whoop.

That's right. Fantastic detail. I really love it.

Yeah.

Yeah. You can make that— you can make that a feature.

Yeah.

We'll do it for every one of our circuit boards. Data is actually the most important part of this. So there is no easily available data for this kind of problem, whereas on code you can basically take GitHub and start training your models on very high-end data that you can use. Part of what we are doing at Diode is we're rebuilding the dataset from the ground up. And so there is a lot of data annotation, data cleaning, generating new types of data that we can use to improve the models. And we are about to announce like next week a partnership with like a very large like software open source project. And our goal is basically to contribute back to the community, generate this data that we're going to use to train like better models without going and like touching on proprietary data. Like we own our own designs. And so while we assign the IP of the boards that we design for our customers to them, we usually retain the rights to the individual components that we generate. And those are like a competitive advantage for us. We are basically building an internal data structure.

Yeah.

Why, why do you even need, uh, real data? I feel like you could generate all of this in simulation. Like I, when I hear people talk about bio and saying, oh, we don't have a simulated cell, I'm like, okay, well that makes sense. Like humans are really complicated. Biology is really complex, but like we created circuit boards in the first place. We should be able to simulate those. Like why can't you just simulate all possible circuit boards and then do some sort of search through that? Why do you need hard data?

You're absolutely right. We actually do do that. Like, we have reinforcement learning algorithms. There's two types of simulation that you can do. One is like an electrical simulation, which you can absolutely, like, get right. It's called SPICE. But then, like, the second-order effects of, like, physics are quite complicated to model. And so there's a really, like, there's a good saying around, like, very talented electrical engineers, which is that you never trust sim. Like, you basically, like, you can try simulating it, but then manufacturing something and making sure it works is the ultimate simulation test. The boards may be manufactured in a different way, the board house may not respect your specifications. And so we 100% do simulation, that's how we bootstrap the process. You couldn't build the library of data that we've built just by hand, it's physically impossible. So we use simulation to bootstrap, but then the ability to manufacture the boards is really what creates differentiation and like brings home the fact that these like circuits are actually working.

So what are you guys actually doing on the manufacturing side? Are you going to be scaling manufacturing? Are you just making prototypes for customers and then they take those elsewhere to scale?

Excellent question. So our offer to the world is come to us, bring us what you want to design, we'll design it for you, optimize it for manufacturing, and then scale it with you. Today, we have only small batch assembly in-house. Like, we actually have an electric lab right here that we use to assemble, like, circuit boards like these. And then we partner with manufacturing houses for, like, the largest higher volume production. But the, like, eventual future is we are going to vertically integrate this manufacturing. And, like, this is what we want to offer to companies. If you look at the current offer for printed circuit boards in the US, it's very, very hard to manufacture them like within the nation. It's usually like anytime you want to scale, you need to go to China. And we think that the way to solve that is basically by making all of our design look the same from a manufacturability standpoint so we can generate volume and bring it to all of our clients at the same time. We also do things like automatically matching the parts and the ordering, which is something that normally it's done manually and it's incredibly like long and annoying to do. And so to like keep a very complicated process short, we make ordering PCBs from the US as easy as ordering them from China. Not quite as inexpensive yet, but we are going to go there.

Where do you think you'll set up your actual manufacturing hub? You said you're in the Brooklyn Navy Yard right now. Do you think you'll go elsewhere or do you want to keep it in the, in the great state of New York?

So I'm a big believer in like decentralized approaches for prototype level. So we're actually opening an assembly shop in San Francisco for our clients there, and we're thinking about one in Austin where we have like some clients that I absolutely love alongside the one in New York. And I think that long term for scaling production, the best strategy will be to co-locate the warehouses for the components and the assembly. So we are probably going to open a larger facility in either Arizona or Ohio, most likely.

Awesome.

Last question for me. IMO gold medal. What was your reaction to the news and is, is solving IMO-level math useful to you? Do you think there will be transfer learning from that model into the circuit board design domain? Or are we in the era of spiky intelligence where until you RL on that particular problem, you're not getting generalizable results?

I think even if we were in the era of like spiky intelligence on like RL on a specific problem, like circuit boards are an absolutely like good way of doing this. Like conceptually, a circuit board is orders of magnitude simpler than silicon design. Before building circuit boards for a living, I used to do custom silicon designs, and those have been represented as code for years. This is 100% an RL-approachable problem. I do think that the IMU news is fantastic. Clearly, there are incredible returns if you do train on a very specific set of data. I think that the biggest moat will be in the data. What we consider to be our competitive advantage is not really training new foundation models. We actually rely on foundation model improvements in the wild. And our entire model is based upon feeding those models with better and better data and being able to fine-tune and reinforcement learning train very specific parts. One of them is the model that spots mistakes. That's how you tell a good generated design versus a bad generated design. And you can ground the model in reality and physics.

That makes no sense. Thank you so much for stopping by. We will talk to you soon. Congratulations on the raise. Congratulations on crossing the one year.

Milestone. Fantastic. Getting an A done as well. Great stuff.

Thank you so much. Enjoy.

Talk to you soon.

Bye.

Cheers.

And up next we have Elan, who, uh, I met and Deleon was mentioning, uh, was building a company in France. Now he's building a company in America. We're going to dig into the differences between the two countries, figure out which country is the best, get to the bottom of it. Hey, how you doing?

What's going on?

Hey, I'm good.

I'm good.

And you guys?

I'm good.

Great.

We met at Miami Tech Week a few years ago, correct?

Yes. Yes, that's right. And I remember you telling me quite specifically you didn't see yourself starting a venture business, but a venture-backed business. But you said media was something you were very interested in. So it looks like it turned out quite well.

Here we are.

Here we are.

Here we are. But yes, give me, give me the background on your journey. We'll get to the current company, but I want to talk more about But building a company outside of America, Delian gave us a little bit of the background, but I wanted to just hear that journey and kind of tangle with it for a little bit.

Yeah. So I started a company called Kala with two co-founders, probably a bit more than 8 years ago. The vision and the mission was to basically make real food more affordable by using robotics and AI to automate the back kitchen operations. And if you look at the typical P&L of a restaurant, It's like 30% food cost, 30% people cost, and 30% overhead, real estate, rent, electricity, those sorts of things. And like the 10% EBITDA margin, if you are performing well, a lot of restaurants actually end up losing money. So that was the vision. We said, okay, we can actually build machines and robotic systems to bring down operating costs, to bring down the required footprint of a restaurant to run, which means we bring down overhead as well. And hopefully we can reinvest part of those gains into better quality ingredients to make the product more affordable and higher value. And then we can also make the restaurant itself more profitable, thus more scalable. So that was the vision. We basically ran the company for 8 years. I did a bunch, like an ungodly amount of mistakes along the way. But in the end, managed to have 5 very, very, very profitable restaurants. Basically, give you a few numbers, but like 60% retention, customers coming more than once a week, 95% customer satisfaction. Can give you the profitability numbers, but much higher than what any other restaurant has achieved in the world thus far. And so the thinking from there was, okay, we have those great first results with the free restaurants. Let's start scaling. We had raised €10 million up to that point from VCs and we got hung on a very structural problem of Europe, which is there is a big financing gap when you get to the Series A/Series B moment. Where basically there's just a gigantic cliff of funding there. And so basically we did not understand that when we created the business and structured the business. And so we basically were starting to assemble the plane, get ready to take off, and then we hit the wall straight on. And we just hadn't built— we should have built a much smaller plane or whatever, a delta plane or something that's more lean than what we had prepared to do because we had the a much more ambitious vision than what was achievable in Europe. And the thing that's quite specific and that Deleon was referencing a few days ago on the show was restructuring the business to go from those handful of restaurants that were very profitable and a very high HQ cost, trying to restructure that to get to a profitable breakeven point at the business level was basically on paper possible. We could have cut down costs enough to make a the business profitable. But just pure French regulation prevented us from doing that. Just the severance cost, they can put it quite well, purely the severance liability was higher than the cash on hand we had at the time. And we had quite a lot of cash and still it was a lot of money that we had to pay in severance and plus other liabilities around that. And so in the end, we basically tried to talk to the regulators, to the government, to any structure that was around us. To try and find a workaround. But in the end, we couldn't really go beyond what the laws and rules allowed. And so ultimately, we had to shut down the business around a bit more than 2 months ago, which was quite a shame. I was very, very angry throughout the whole process, which obviously pented up in the past few weeks. And when I met Deena a few, actually a few days after the decision from the court came down, I was still kind of on the fence about what I wanted to do next. I was still thinking, should I—

Well, one—

—be very angry about this?

Yeah, one thing I would just highlight, that the idea of using robotics to deliver better, cheaper food was not novel. What was novel was actually getting it to work, right? Like, so many people have tried to do this in the United States. This is a graveyard. Yeah, it's an absolute graveyard of companies with super talented founders and teams that that for some reason or another couldn't, like, you know, it's hard enough.

Dave Friedberg started one, Eatsa. Yeah, and it's hard enough.

It's interesting, was the other way around, like they automated the front of house, not the back of house. That's true. But a lot of businesses, like I could kind of give you 20, 30 different businesses that have tried. And I think up to that point, we are the only business that had, and technically Sweetgreen does as well, but had kind of proven let's say, incrementally positive return on investment on the whole investment of a restaurant. Meaning if you actually invest the money it takes to build the machine and put it in the restaurant, you actually end up with a higher ROI on the whole investment than if you are just launching with a normal team. I think Sweetgreen is the only restaurant that had this apart from us. And for them, it's not very clear exactly how they achieved that in terms of how transparent they are with the numbers. But yeah, other than that, I don't think anyone had even made had even actually paid back a single installation of a robotic system in a restaurant. And so yeah, we are very proud of that result that we got a few years ago. And then we managed to launch more stores, get more revenue, get stores doing very high EBITDA margin. But yeah, in the end, couldn't really get there with Calla. And I think in the end, the biggest mistakes we made was definitely starting the business in Europe, in France specifically. There's just the market and let's say the whole ecosystem is just not made for ambitious plays. And like, if you want to build something ambitious, you can't really do it there.

Yeah. Do you think that the restrictions and the regulation that you ran into, are those broadly popular or are they kind of like legacy rules that if you put them up to a purely democratic vote, most people would say that doesn't make any sense? Because there's a lot of like, like, you know, legislative and regulatory cruft in America that isn't popular. but hangs around and people just kind of deal with it. But, but what is like the mood in France around this? Like, it's, it sounded like there wasn't very much like public outcry, but it feels like a situation where kind of everyone loses because the customers were enjoying the food, the employees were enjoying their jobs, you were enjoying building this company, and now they all go, just go away.

Yeah. So I don't— so this regulation specifically, I don't think it's known enough. Like, company going bankrupt is not something that makes national news. So it's not something that people have top of mind. But I think overall people would probably support it because what the regulation actually says is just that when an employee, when a company goes bankrupt, the employee gets pretty high severance, meaning they don't have to find a job straight away, or if they can't, they can take a few months to find it and it's fine. So I think with the very socialist mental model that most French people have, I think this would probably be popular. But on top of the severance itself, the state puts in place a lot of other protections, even beyond what the severance cost is. Like, you basically get your full salary for a year if your company goes bankrupt, paid by the state. Paid by the state. So there's, I mean, partially by the company, but the state puts a bit more on. And so there's a bunch of those rules that I think people would probably be in favor of if they thought about it, but it's just not something that's top of mind for anyone.

Have you talked to any other founders in France who went through something similar or had cautionary tales to share? Because it feels like if this was widespread, we'd be hearing about it a lot and people would be starting to lobby or anything, or maybe just everyone leaves. I don't know.

I think one of the reasons why it was so hard for us specifically is that the— so first, we had our business and so the HQ cost component is kind of harder to scale down than a typical software business. I think that's probably one reason why it was hard. And also, I think a lot of businesses that fail, especially startups in France, just fail because they can't really find product-market fit and they can't even get commercial traction. And so in the end, you don't really mind the company going bankrupt because you just didn't have something that was worth working for versus for us, I think it's a bit different because we actually had a product that worked and the economics were there. We just couldn't keep on scaling and we should have understood that maybe 2 or 3 years earlier and been a lot more conservative on the structuring of the business.

What's the strategy for the new company? How do you leverage what works and avoid what doesn't?

Yeah, so I think so. The first one, key lesson is definitely being a lot more lean on the HQ costs. I think one thing that I learned is that even though I think this business can be scaled, built with venture capital, I think you have to build a strategy around your financing that's both VC, but also private equity that does retail and restaurants more naturally. You have to be able to tailor your business toward those guys because at some point you're going to need them. And so that means, look, lower HQ cost, more lean HQ operations, that means other structuring elements you have to do differently. So that's definitely one big learning. The second one is also in terms of, let's say, structuring of the operations. We had built restaurants that were too small. And so even though they are very profitable, they didn't bring in as much EBITDA as we could have if we had stores that were doing like, let's say, $3 million revenue per store. We'd have been bringing a lot more EBITDA per store than the revenue we had in our stores. So that's another key learning. And the tech itself also, we are changing a bit the product. We are not taking any of the previous IP or tech that Kala developed. We are rebuilding everything from scratch. But we know overall we have rough good ideas of what are the prototypes we made, what worked, what didn't work. And so we're also approaching the tech a bit differently than what we did with Kala. And thus we're also approaching the product differently. We're not going to be serving the same food. Makes sense. Jordy, anything else?

So what's the timeline for the new company and what kind of key markets are you looking at?

Yeah. So when I spoke with Dalian a month and a half ago, I was not really decided on it yet. So barely basically incorporating the business now. Already have basically, I talked to a bunch of Kala shareholders that when I announced that we had to shut down the business in India and we are forced by the state to shut down, it's not even like we decided to do it. Talked to a bunch of them that basically said, whatever you guys do again, if it's the same business, we want to back you again. So I'm right now just thinking about how I want to think about financing and the first few months. It's very high level at the moment, not really into any details. So that's the first step in the next few months. The higher level roadmap is to launch the first store in New York middle of next year, midpoint of next year exactly. When is going to depend a bit on a few element around funding and also timeline on regulation. But yeah, the first restaurant in New York, and then launch a few restaurants there, and then pretty highly considering franchising as kind of a path to scale a lot more aggressively and a lot more efficiently, capital efficiently than we did with Callao, where we own every single restaurant.

Yeah, I think most people don't understand just how, if you have a hit restaurant concepts and you can scale with franchises, not only can franchisees change their lives through that opportunity, but you can have what ends up looking like software or better than software margins in that super lean HQ and just printing cash off the top line.

And imagine if the restaurant itself doesn't do 10% EBITDA, but multiple kind of X around above that, the amount of money you get out of the top line of the restaurant is just so much higher that let's say you are a typical restaurant does 10% EBITDA margin. As a franchisor, you're going to take 5%. That's not a lot of value you're taking for you basically not doing everything, but creating the whole value in the end. If you have a restaurant that does a lot more than that, you can get a much bigger chunk of the top line of that restaurant. And thus the gains into by not operating is also much better.

Very cool. Cool. Well, excited for You to come to the US and build here. I'll hit you up when something happens.

You're gonna come to the restaurant. Amazing. Yeah, we'd love to try it. Awesome. Thanks so much. Thanks for answering. Bye. Bye.

Great stuff. Tyler, any more progress?

How you doing?

I made it to 5th place. 5th place? Yeah. Wow. My moves are 525.

525. You're, you're hot. You might be number 1 by the end of the day.

Yeah, but it's pretty marginal. Like, it's hard now.

It's gonna be hard from here on out to squeeze out the last little bit of performance. It's all good job.

It's all your mindset, Tyler. Yeah.

Did Tyler win the iPhone?

He did, he did, he did.

I had a consolation prize ready. Oh, I did a Rubik's Cube. Oh, we got a Rubik's Cube now? Uh, that's too easy for Tyler. That's a, that's a 3x3.

I got the 9x9.

Tyler can do the 9x9. That's it. You, you say that you can do the 9x9, but that thing has not been solved yet.

Done by tomorrow.

Yeah, I think that's tomorrow.

You should do it live. Give me like 20 minutes.

Tomorrow. Do it tomorrow on the stream. Okay.

Should I fully scramble it?

Yeah, scramble it. Scramble it.

It looks pretty scrambled to me. It looks like the last, like the hardest part is ahead of you. No, the hardest part is almost done. Okay.

Okay. Nice little timeline. Yeah. Uh, Brian Johnson says Blueprint has been a pain in his butt. It's kept me from not focusing on the single thing I'm consumed with. How does the human race survive the rise of superintelligence? Every minute spent dealing with problems like why a supplier shipped us something out of spec is a minute not spent figuring out how to make Don't Die the fastest growing ideology in history, increasing our odds of survival and thriving. At the same time, Blueprint produces products my body and mind that bring my body and mind great joy. I rely upon them for my well-being. I trust it. So do tens of thousands of happy customers. After years of consuming, I am at a molecular level blueprint.

How big do you think the business is? Tens of thousands of customers? What do you think LTV is?

I had thought or heard that it was at like $100 million run rate.

That feels about right. I feel like if you go into the Blueprint ecosystem, you go pretty hard.

Yeah, you could end up consuming 6 products a day.

Yeah, because you skew for everything. And you go, it's not just like one. Protein bar and that's it. It's like they has a whole variety of things to purchase.

So supplement companies continue to be undefeated in terms of monetizing health audiences.

Yeah, especially if you have a big audience like he does.

Yeah. He says Blueprint is the best longevity stack in the world. That's not an exaggeration. That's meticulously designed based on scientific evidence, third-party tested, comprehensive, easy to consume, delicious, and priced to be accessible. And anyways, he'd go on to say that he's been basically attacked by people saying that he's grifting, that he, you know, is the whole kind of blueprint. Don't Die ideology is meant to sell supplements.

Netflix did a documentary. Wow. That's really, really big.

But the news here is that he's hiring. He's hiring a CEO and a CTO who can lead the business day to day while he focuses on Don't Die. Yeah. Interesting opportunity here. There's a bunch of different product lines. They have Nourish, Biomarkers, Quantified, and I guess clinics are coming soon. I don't know that any exist yet, but they're raising money, too. They need some hardcore builders. I think this would be a great SPAC candidate, John. It's real revenue, charismatic founder. Take it public. Brian, just, just do it.

Buy some meme stock for your treasury.

Keep some GameStop and the corporate treasury.

Diversified memes. Yeah, yeah. Some Fart Coin in there in the, in the corporate treasury. That's the move. I can see what a run he is. Such a master of earned media. It's so crazy. He's— this is basically what, like a hiring post? He's saying like, I'm hiring 2 people. Yeah. Amazing essay, super viral. And then also a Business Insider piece that he gets coverage from and can screenshot. The master. What a beast. Sick.

How does he, how does he do it?

Putting up massive numbers. His portfolio company just exited today and he got paid. Water's on me next time, folks, because he received a distribution.

Better than nothing. $2. Not a zero. Not a zero.

What happened? It's so interesting that it wouldn't be a zero, but it also wouldn't be like —like a real number. It's like the smallest amount. That happens.

The money has to go somewhere. I guess. I guess. Michael Kratzios has a video today. To win the AI race and ensure global technological dominance, we need more power. So we have— Michael will be coming on the show tomorrow, correct?

Yeah. Yeah. And a lot of news here. I'm sure we'll be digesting it. The All In podcast is also having a crossover event with Hill and Valley. With a bunch of hitters breaking this down. There's a bunch of absolute dogs.

I don't know if there's been more absolute dogs under one roof in Washington in, in maybe since Helen Valley.

It's pretty, it's pretty wild. The actual action plan is really, really like huge. The, the basic summary is that they're shift— they're trying to shift, or they're shifting with this document in AI policy at the federal level from safety-first posture. We're worried about paper clipping. We're worried about, you know, like the doomer scenario. Should we, you know, have an FDA for— that was one of something that was thrown around on podcasts a while ago. Should these models need to be approved by the federal government before they go into general release? Now there's a shift in posture to a growth and geopolitics politics posture, basically. So, uh, the immediate practical effect is the publication of priorities. Real-world impact will depend on how quickly the 90-plus follow-on actions, especially deregulation, fast-track permitting, new export packages, and procurement rules move from paper to binding regulations, guidance, and contracts over the next few months. So there's a bunch of stuff in here. It's going to touch the OMB, NIST, all the cabinet agencies, Commerce, Energy, Labor Departments, Treasury, Department of Energy, basically Census, like, treat AI skill programs as tax-free educational assistance. There's a whole bunch of different ideas in here.

They're bringing that golden retriever mode ideology to AI.

There's going to be the creation of the Department of Defense AI and Autonomous Systems Virtual Proving Ground. I was talking I was talking to somebody yesterday about how big is AI on the battlefield, how big of an issue is having frontier AI in a military context. And it's very unclear if you can just, you know, hey, invade Taiwan, don't make mistakes, like one-shotting these problems that we don't think were there. But even if you just think about if you're going up against an adversary and they have Microsoft Excel and you don't, Well, their logistics are going to be smoother. And so even just having AI tools and systems in all the different little places within your military force, that could be advantageous. Even if we're not talking about the Terminator killer robot scenario, like the humanoids, all of that stuff feels a little bit further out, but just using AI to make standard processes a little bit more efficient seems, seems like an important advantage to have in a conflict. They're also expanding the National AI Research Resource Pilot and the creation of financial instruments, spot and forward markets to give startups on-demand access to GPU capacity. NSF, Department of Energy, secure compute environments and National Secure Data Service Portal for controlled access. So there's some open source and research efforts. There's a ton of stuff in here. I'm sure it'll all be—

Yeah, the open source stuff was was exciting to see.

Yeah, we'll see how Mark Zuckerberg fits into that because if he stays with the new super— the superintelligence team is stacked, but there was always a question about like, how long will Llama stay open source? China seems to be beating us up on open source. We saw Qwen doing really well, Deepseek doing really well. And so if there's going to be an open source champion in America, it feels like that could come from Meta. And so it'll be interesting to see how badly he wants it, how badly he wants to stay there and how valuable that is to stay in the open source, at the frontier of the open source. Speaking of that, there was an interesting debate back and forth. I forget who said this. Oh, François Chollet said, please note, we are not able to produce the 41.8% result from Arc AGI-1. That's the first Arc AGI test. Claimed by the latest Quen 3 release, neither on the public eval set nor on the semi-private set. These numbers, the numbers we're seeing are in line with other recent base models. In general, only rely on scores verified by the Arc Prize Foundation on the semi-private set. That way you can trust that the methodology was consistent and fair across all models verified. But then one of the team members, I think, says, hey, we use the JSON format for convenient parsing. I'll DM you for reproduction. Sounds good. Waiting for you to DM them. So we will have more news on whether or not Quen 3 really did jump forward in Arc AGI. But again, you know, the, the, the goal should be 100%, yeah, um, on Arc AGI since these are, um, these are tests that, you know, everyone from an intern to a, you know, I don't know, 10-year-old can do. I don't know how low it goes. I don't know if a 5-year-old can do it. I got to I got to put it to the test. We got to have the kids try. Definitely.

Anyway, Martin Shkreli has a good post here responding to Caitlin Rellis. She says you must be one of 4 things to raise right now: AI high flyer, seed co with the promise of being an AI high-flying company, American dynamism/reindustrialization company. And Martin says, how about just growing revenue and profits really fast? That is a fantastic strategy.

The Lindy way. But then if you're growing profits really fast, you might not need to raise. You might not be able to justify a big raise potentially. Just raise it 500x revenue, I guess. Yeah. 10,000x EBITDA or something. Um, anyway, in other news, um, people are still memeing about the, uh, nuclear reactor breach, uh, by hackers via Microsoft SharePoint.

Yeah, I was interested in the timeline there. I was I was getting into that story yesterday. The vulnerability was discovered in May at a hacking competition that Microsoft put on. They then patched it later, which didn't work, and then the major hacks happened over the weekend just a few days ago. And so the timeline there is kind of weird. Like, did they not— and people were pushing back and saying, like, very unlikely that there was A serious breach? Well, no, more so unlikely that super critical documents were shared in those systems. But still, any of any and all information related to the US nuclear weapons agency and just program broadly should be pretty secure. So yeah, anyways, I'm sure we'll learn more about the kind of timeline that led to that over time. And Some final words of advice from Sahil. Buy a.com domain. Go into debt if you have to. I saw somebody quoted this and said, I actually did do this. I went into debt. The guy who got the domain Contra.com, which is a nice— Did it work out? Yeah, he raised a lot of money. Oh, that's great. It's a great domain, great name. We got our domain from Snagged.com. Yeah, Rob, we check it out. Industry-leading domain services. He helped us get TVPN.com in 30 minutes. Wow. Was one of the fastest negotiations of all time. It's pretty awesome. And we are very grateful. It's also cool. He started Ro— Ro— like a pharmaceutical company. Yeah. Row.co. So he's been in the domain game for a while, but— oh yeah, fire domain. And last, I got to do one more. One more. Do it. From Will Brown. ChatGPT should have a big green switch that says SICO mode. SICO mode. Like, it's like a fancy mode. Yeah, SICO mode. If you want to just turn it on and just get gassed up by the model, you should be able to really turn it up.

Stay safe out there. Stay safe. Don't get lost in the sauce. Don't get lost in the sauce.

And one more final post. Okay. CEO Brew Markets is highlighting the CEO of Nvidia. Jensen has a legendary LinkedIn profile. He was at Denny's for 5 years, 1978 to '83. He was a dishwasher, busboy, and a waiter. So just working his way up the org chart. If he had stayed there, he probably would have become CEO, but he went and a decade later founded NVIDIA and has been running it for 32 years and 7 months. So what a run.

Biggest company in the world.

I think we lowkey got to put him in the truth zone because he worked at AMD.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, that's— wait, that's the post.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry, I didn't highlight. Leaving out the years that he worked at AMD and LSI is a great example of how a lionizing narrative works. Creates the impression of superhuman genius, which confers a valuable aura that material impact on morale, negotiations, etc. Similar to Singapore was a fishing village.

So I actually don't know that much about the rumor that Singapore was a fishing village. I guess it wasn't. I don't know the story of Singapore. Singapore Deep Dive incoming. Sounds interesting. But yeah, worked at AMD and LSI Logic and then started Nvidia. So, but he took those off the LinkedIn because he's like, ah, I got it. Why should I promote my competitors? You know, smart man. I'm not competing with Denny's. Apparently the first Denny's that he worked at or something has a plaque on the wall like Nvidia CEO worked here. Very cool. And he still does Denny's stunts. He did one with the Acquired guys. He came by and like, I think he delivered them Denny's or something like that when they were doing some event at Nvidia.

At this point, he should just buy Denny's. It's $237 million. It's trading at $270 million market cap. It's that cheap? Wow.

I didn't realize it was pure play. Like, it's also a I guess it's getting meme-stalked.

It's up 16% in the past 5 days. Not financial advice. Not financial advice. Jensen should really pick it up quick before it runs too hard. Yeah.

I mean, he's in the interest of keeping it alive because if it just goes away and no one remembers—

He could turn every Denny's into a showroom for his latest chips. You know, just carve out a booth.

I feel like I read some article about Denny's or some sort some sort of restaurant chain using AI to help the servers or something. Everyone has an AI play. Restaurant, restaurant solutions or something. They own IHOP, I believe, something like that.

Yeah, headquartered in Pasadena. Very American episode today, John. You could not put that football down the whole time.

It's fun. It's nice to just have like a little fidget. It's the original fidget spinner.

Something about John with a football.

It's great. It works. It's great. Yeah, I tried to keep it like below the desk during the interview so I could be a little more serious, but you know, I think eventually we're going to be tossing the pigskin while talking to some founders about their raise.

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