Alphabet Breaks $100B Barrier, OpenAI's Rumored $1T IPO | Grant LaFontaine, Chris McGuire, Max Junestrand, Christina Cacioppo, Lin Qiao, Ilan Twig, Taranjeet Singh

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Today is Thursday, October 30, 2025. We are live from the TVVN Ultradome. The temple of technology. The fortune, the fortress of finance.

The capital of capital. Meta missed earnings yesterday due to a one time tax hit.

Yes, not that big of a deal honestly. Meta post record revenue but warns of expenses. This is from the Wall Street Journal. Meta reported record revenue in the third quarter. But the technology company warned of accelerating capital expenditures around artificial intelligence, sending its stock down 7% in after hours trading. If you're worried about expenses, you got to go to ramp.com Time is money save. Both easy use, corporate cards, bill payments, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place, baby. It's now a $1.7 trillion company. Not bad. But we are in the age of 3. 4, 5 trillion dollar companies now. It's crazy times.

There's a club above standout for me, reels at north of a $50 billion run rate.

Crazy. Which is more than all of TV combined, right? Something like that. It's close.

No, I think, I think television advertising.

Like linear TV advertising is in that range or it's like creeping up on it.

In 2024, television advertising spending in the US was expected to amount to approximately $60 billion.

I mean they're within striking distance. Let's hear it for the Meta team. Remarkable. So There was this one time tax charge of 15.9 billion. That crush net income. Spending on AI researchers has also been crazy recently. And CapEx is growing a ton. They're going to hit 72 billion. There's this year I'm good for my 72 billion over at Meta.

Not bad. The ad load just anecdotally is up tremendously. They're now doing four ads where they used to do one.

Yeah, I thought there were almost five. You can go in between stories and get five in a row or something.

Yeah. So in between two stories you can get up to five individual ads. So gotta pay for all that CapEx somehow.

Yeah, the core business rocks. We know this. 51.2 billion in revenue this quarter. They were up 26% year over year. And there's just so many dials that the Meta team can get slightly more dialed every quarter. You can get more users, more time on the platform from those users, more ads, more targeted ads. There's all these small tweaks that add up and wind up compounding. So my bigger question today is what happens to the advertising cash machine once you're two decades in? So Google went through this transition on October 2nd of 2015. And at the time I feel like most people thought it was crazy. They rebranded, they went from Google to being called Alphabet. And the idea was that they were going to have other business. A to Z. Yeah, yeah, we're going to have other, we're going to have other things. And you know, focus is usually pretty valuable. And at the time people were like, well you can't even keep Google Reader online. You can't even get a chat app up to date. You can't win in social networking. You had to shut down Google. So what are you thinking? You're going to go build a self driving car, an AI team or a new cloud platform? Like this is crazy. Just put the 10 blue links in the back. But looking back on it now, it feels like Alphabet totally deserves the broader name. The company is more than just Google search box, certainly more than 10 blue links. Google Cloud is material. DeepMind is material. Waymo is material. There's the business side, Google Apps for business. All of these are both key to the future value of Alphabet, but also key to just running the business today. The interplay between these divisions creates a ton of value. But more importantly, I don't think these businesses, at least most of them would exist if they hadn't grown up in a cash rich environment. Like it's just so hard to predict in 2009 how much capital is it going to take us to build a self driving car network that we'll be able to launch in San Francisco and barely be profitable and then we'll probably need another decade.

Strange comp here is YC I don't know, some years ago at this point was trying to understand what the factors that contributed to the breakout successes. And one factor was founders having wealthy parents. So the founders felt like they could take these really massive high risk swings because they weren't, they weren't going for a base hit. The founders like if I make like a few million dollars, if I make a few million dollars, it doesn't change my life. Right. Is, is well beyond that. I got to go big and so I got to go big. Willing to like look silly for a long period of time. Willing to, you know, just stumble around as long as it takes to hit it really big. And certainly a number of the things you just outlined wouldn't have been able to be, maybe would have died as traditional venture businesses.

Yeah, I mean this was what I was writing about with 1X, the robotics company. Extremely difficult to understand. Are we three years away from that business, really working financially are we 10 years away from the business, really working financially? There's a lot going on, but Google was able to just hold on to Waymo from 2009 to today, 16 years, and they're probably still losing money on it. I mean they're like unit economics are decent in one specific market. It's going to be a long time.

I would say definitely losing money on.

It, but they can actually do stuff. But every time they announce something, you know, they stream it. They got to get on restream one livestream, 30 plus destinations, multi stream and reach your audience wherever they are. You can sign in with Google since we're talking about Google. So I wanted to look at some parallels between what's going on with Google, who's been on a tear and now has this like all of a sudden, pretty diversified business. There's this meme here of the Ninja.

Turtles, where from the account alphabetting.

Yes. So the search giant, the cash machine of the ads business, is taking the other bets as their children and now as search becomes less relevant potentially in the age of AI. Well, what does Alphabet have? They have Google Cloud, they have Waymo, they have maps, Gmail, Chrome, DeepMind, Google AI. It's a stacked lineup. And so, yes, even if search does.

Get older, I love how YouTube isn't even deserving of its own Ninja Turtle.

And you'd think YouTube would be a huge one here. And that one seems. YouTube seems extremely resilient in the age of AI. It seems like the place. It's a social network, it's gonna stick around. And we really haven't seen any. I mean, we've seen the Sora stuff, but no one's. Everyone uses ChatGPT and says, oh, wow, yeah, this is definitely gonna replace some of my Google searching for sure. It's kind of searching Google for me and then giving me the results. No one's saying that about Sora. No one's saying, like, oh, I don't need to watch Doug demuro anymore or whatever.

Yeah. And I mean, I think one of the, you know, right now you're seeing more AI content on YouTube, but it's still created by independent channels. There's a world in the. You know, YouTube pays out a huge amount of its revenue today to the creators on the platform. There's a world in the future where YouTube just generates the video. The content itself through, you know, its various AI products, never actually has to pay out a creator.

Yeah.

Because it's just.

And that's actually better for YouTube in many ways. Yeah.

So certainly Content creators. Content creators today are worried about being disrupted by other people using AI to make content. Yeah, they're not thinking about the platforms themselves that know exactly what.

Yeah.

The kind of content that people like and would be able to over time produce it themselves.

Yeah, but aggregating that demand, aggregating attention. Yeah, yeah. The value is not aggregating the supply side, it's the demand side. This is the aggregation theory. And so if you want to, if you can aggregate a bunch of people that open apps and are in the market for video, you can serve them up, maybe Mr. Beast video or Doug Demuro video, or you can serve them up AI generated content and you still make money because you have aggregated that, that, that demand, not supply.

Doug Demiro would be a good guest. We are working on it. Great point.

Okay, now, three, two, one. Privy wallet infrastructure for every bank. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rail, securely spend a white label wallet, sign transactions and integrate on chain infrastructure all through one simple API. So the Google story is very interesting because really for the last decade, since 2015, when they rebranded as Alphabet, I feel like they were not getting a lot of credit. People were like, oh yeah, like goog. It's like the kind of the place where you sit on the, you rest and vest, you sit on the rooftop, you're not really doing anything. And then now everyone's waking up to this idea that it's like, whoa, they have like four monster businesses. And yeah, there's a ton of gravestones in the graveyard from various note taking apps and chat apps and Google readers over there. But overall they wound up building a very diverse, very valuable business where even if Waymo's not cash flowing a ton, is it worth $100 billion? Does that add to their $3 trillion market cap materially? Probably right.

Waymo also raised like a venture round not too long ago.

Yeah, I think it actually has like a public mark now, which is interesting. But my question is how do we take this and we bridge it to what's going on at Meta, formerly Facebook in October. I guess October is the month where you rebrand your company. Facebook did it. Google rebranded to Alphabet in October of 2015. Facebook rebranded to Meta in October of 2021. And people I think overly were overly narrow about framing that transition about specifically VR, specifically virtual reality, the Metaverse, everything that Mark Zuckerberg was investing in after the Oculus acquisition and the Meta horizon worlds and VR, obviously that was a piece of.

It's interesting that I feel like the name Meta has Aged pretty well.

I agree.

Even though it was ultimately somewhat like an embarrassing over investment at the time.

Totally.

So the name aged well. Even though the activities that were driving the name change did not.

Yes. And I think it was just, it was just important for Mark Zuckerberg to send the message that we're not any single app, we're not Facebook. Yeah, yeah. And we're not even just social networking. Like we could wind up with a hyperscaler cloud platform if there was like, you know, yes, you have aws, gcp, Azure and then you also have like meta cloud platform. People would be like, yeah, that makes sense. And that's a couple hundred billion dollar business. And they figured it out. Right. And so that rebranding it did definitely set them up for a new era, but also just the ability to place other bets like what Google did once they became Alphabet. But so it's interesting to see like how will you know, like what will those bets look like? Because AI is obviously just a sustaining innovation for meta. It's a similar thing to YouTube. Right. And machine learning has been generating value in ad targeting for over a decade.

Sustaining in many ways. But the, the potentially disruptive component is that people are using LLMs in social ways. And so as people spend more and more time talking to LLMs, that is time that they are not in meta platforms, products.

Yeah, maybe on the personal interaction side, like the really parasocial stuff.

That's what I'm saying, that's what I'm saying. But for the users, like, you know, there are users out there that used to spend five hours a day using meta products and now are spending.

I don't think any of those though. I mean you look at the overall usage numbers, yes, you're getting 30 minutes of ChatGPT, but you're not seeing a blink on. It's people are like they're doom scrolling Instagram and then they're also chatting with four zero. Right. They're doing both.

Yeah, maybe. But at the end of the day.

I mean, I agree like it could potentially be a headwind long term and that's obviously why I'm just saying like.

Mark certainly sees ramping attention and user minutes on OpenAI products and it's a concern, it's a risk not quite as material as for Google.

And so yeah, the question is like can meta, msl, TBD labs generate some sort of chatbot that's at, that's at 4.0 level, frontier level. Doesn't need to be super intelligence necessarily immediately, but just something to sort of stem that bleeding in the way that Gemini and AI search mode. AI mode in Google Search and the AI search overviews sort of stemmed of the bleeding from ok, well, do I need to just stop using Google Search for knowledge retrieval? If you're like, do I need to stop? Maybe you can pull some people there. But I mean meta does. Even though there's like all this chaos around who they're hiring and they're laying off their old team and they're building this new team, they're spending so much money, it's not like they're new to this. Like, Meta started using machine learning for ad targeting all the way back in 2013, two years before OpenAI was founded, four years before the Transformer paper. Like, this is not a new technology for Facebook. They've been using this in their core infrastructure for over a decade. But there's this question of what is Mark Zuckerberg's track record when building or buying successfully in new markets? That's where it gets really hard. Obviously Instagram, WhatsApp, great results, but certainly much harder in VR. And also whatever the next next thing is, it's much less clear.

He has a track record of being amazing at cloning incredible features and products and buying incredible features and products. There's no obvious track record of zero to one innovation.

And some of this stuff has just been blocked. I believe he wanted to buy Unity game engine and effectively get into the gaming world in one way or another. And of course some of those games would be instantiated in VR or instantiated in meta properties, but I believe that was blocked or that didn't get through ftc.

An environment that doesn't allow him to buy great companies is not a great.

It's his Kryptonite. He's nerfed.

He's definitely.

If he can't buy, he's nerfed.

He's one of the M and A goats.

He is one of the M and A goats.

His power level seems too high.

And it's way different than Google. And it's interesting because on the face of it, Google and Facebook have similar backstories, similar cultures, young founders who, who built up these tech companies only seven years, eight years apart from each other when they started. But Google had a very different culture. You know, it's a PhD research project, sort of an academic campus. When you're walking around, the mission is organizing the world's information. It's like very nerdy. And that obviously translates to, hey, how do we organize the world's information? Let's Create a mapping product. Google Maps. Okay, what do we do when we have all the maps? Let's try and drive around a car on it. And then they get self driving cars, right?

Yeah.

And it's like, it's a little bit harder to jump from. Like our mission is to bring people together. So we're generating AI or VR, which feels like the opposite direction. And so I don't know, it feels like there's always been a little bit more tension on the mission related to where the other bets go. Whereas the organize all the information. The organizing the world's information. Like you might say, how does a self driving car fit into that? But I can totally say here's exactly how it fits into it. I can't say that it's much harder.

What's Meta's mission? Monetize the world's attention?

No, bringing people together. And the thing is bringing people together.

To build the future of human connection and the technology that makes it possible.

Yeah. And so there's a lot of, there's a lot of products that feel like they might be.

I would love for Mark to just go super villain mode again at some point. It could make sense from a comm standpoint to lean in the opposite direction. Of course, right now that's not the strategy, but if he just said our mission is to monetize the world's attention, that would go pretty hard.

I think the stock pops 20%.

I think so too.

You want to build it back up, Monetize the world's attention.

Stock's down 10% today, but could be up 20 tomorrow. Updated, update. Update on Halloween.

Ooh, spooky.

Spooky, I like that. Spooky.

I like that. We're going into spooky earnings season. Before we move on, let me tell you about Cognition, the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. Yeah. And so overall, you know, it's easy to look back with 2020 hindsight on Google and be like, wow, it all made sense. They, they were these academics, they wanted to organize the world's information. They wound up building AI, they wound up building Waymo, They've been very successful there. Who knows what's going to happen with Meta. I do think that there is an open question about how does Meta square the grounding of the mission into whatever comes next? Because if there is a big business to be built in anti personal and truly like anti social networking, you kind of got to square that with the mission. Right. And so maybe you do need to Maybe you need to shift away to some sort of newer mission, something different. Or maybe you need to Apple.

Apple should probably update their mission to making phones that are performant but break easier.

Have you actually read Apple's mission ever? The Apple mission?

We gotta do a segment called Ranking Big Tech's mission statements.

We definitely do.

Apple's mission is to bring the best user experience to its customers through innovative hardware, software and services. Is that actually that's like the least inspiring mission statement they've gone.

So Apple strives to bring the best personal computing experience to student educators, creative professionals, consumers around the world. There was an older mission statement at some point post Jobs era. There was one that literally had TM for we make the iPad, which is the best like tablet computer. And it was just like a list of products that they had. It was like deeply.

Apple's mission is to create technology that empowers people and enriches their lives.

That's pretty good.

That's better than the AI overview of anyways. Yeah, I think the mission statement is probably underutilized as a mechanism to increase your stock price because authenticity is like a powerful thing.

Yeah, I mean overall I think there's a lot of questions about like, what is MSL building? What is TBD Labs? What is super intelligence? How does this all fit together? I don't think anyone doubts that Meta can benefit from just improved machine learning systems, improved AI features all over the ecosystem, all over the family of apps, all over the core apps. The question is, but again, are any of the, are any of the side projects going to become monsters? Because you're kind of in the side project era now that you're 20 years old.

Yeah, that's a good point. But yeah, you know, another shout out in. In the second quarter of 2022, REELS was at a $1 billion run rate and by the third quarter of 2022 at $3 billion run rate, second quarter of 23, 10 billion, and the third quarter of 2025, 50 billion. So the growth is absolutely incredible. And yeah, credit to Meta's entire team for just ridiculous execution.

Yeah, Google really crushed it. Google's parents says spending on AI development may reach 93 billion. They're higher than Meta's 72 Google parent companies. Google's parent company reported a 16% surge in third revenue with growth in its digital advertising and cloud computing units, helping to finance robust artificial intelligence spending. Sales reached a record 102.3 billion. Sundar was just like, is that good? I mean, he almost posted like that, like the Post is like, hey, we did our first hundred billion dollar quarter not.

And it's completely just posted Q3 earnings.

That's so, so massive. Shares rose 5% in after hours trading. I think it's up a little bit more now. Net income was 35 billion, a 33% increase from the same period a year ago. Like other large tech companies, Google is pouring tens of billions of dollars into AI development. I mean, what a remarkable result. You know, there was so much, so much FUD around.

Our friend Logan Kilpatrick of course works at Google, replies to Sundar and says Google is the most incredible business in the world.

He just said that.

He replied to Sundar and said that. I have to agree, I have to agree with Logan.

We are very proud to be sponsored with them by partnered with them. By the way, Google AI Studio. You can create an AI app, an AI powered app, faster than ever. You can get started. Gemini understands the capabilities you need and automatically wires up the right models and APIs for you. You can get started at AI Studio, build talk about a domain name.

And this is, I didn't ask Logan if this is cool, but if you run into any issues with Gemini, you can just DM Logan, help me your personal tech support and if you respond quickly DM me, then I'll DM him.

You're famously, you're famously a dot com respecter and a good domain respecter. Google has gotten to the level where they're buying whole TLDs. Are you familiar with this? Like docs new?

Oh yeah, yeah.

I believe they own Google. And so if you go to, I think if you go to com Google it resolves or something like that. I think they bought.google maybe I don't get that right. Www. I gotta look this up. But they've been on a tear. If you go to docs new, you just get a new Google Doc, which is cool. Anyway, let's move on to some timeline. Let's move on to some news. Tyler, what's new in your world?

I mean most of the big news I guess was the OpenAI IPO.

Yeah, $1 trillion. And that's from Reuters, correct?

Yes.

Do we know like, was that just leaked to them or can you just call them? Should we call Reuters? Hey, tvpn, we think it might be worth a trillion re t. Yeah, I.

Don'T know where this was originally reported.

But OpenAI laid the groundwork for Juggernaut IPO at up to a $1 trillion valuation. Three people familiar with the matter said so they Got some reporting. They got a scoop. The company has looked at raising 60 billion at the low end and likely more. They cautioned that talks are early and plans, including figures and timing, could change depending on business growth and market conditions. CFO Sarah Fryer, who's been on the show, has told some associates the company is aiming for a 2027 listing. Boo. Play the let's get it happening earlier. Some advisors predict it could come even Sooner around late 2026. I want this IPO to happen tomorrow. I think it'll be the most entertaining news item ever to actually get to dig into an S1 to actually look at the financials. Like there's been so many leaks, so many, so much speculation to actually get.

We can do our first 24 hour show.

We should, we should. I mean realistically, we should be there in New York City the day of talking to all these people, everyone involved as they go out.

Yeah, so it says they're gonna, they're planning to file in the back half of 2026.

Yeah. So it'll be a while. There's still a lot to do, a lot to build. I'm sure that they want visibility into what's the impact of SORA on the business? What's the impact?

Yeah, I saw another post that, that was. I don't think it's in the, in our stack but it was something to the effect of like, you know how depending on where meta's market cap is at the time of the OpenAI IPO will be like potentially like, like it will be an interesting comp because you're going to be able to look at a business that's like very, you know, at scale, like profitable, still growing very quickly versus OpenAI which we know will be losing tens of billions of dollars at the time of the ipo. And of course we'll have an amazing growth story and a bunch of narrative and things like that, but we'll still be. The comps are going to be absolutely wild if it's landing in that one to one plus trillion dollar range.

Yeah. Let's go to some timeline. Suspended cap says makes no sense what the f meta is spending all this money on. You've spe 70 billion on reality labs to make the Ray Ban vision. Are you serious? And people are critical of Apple and their hardware efforts. Give me a break. And investor Nick says investors need to punish Zuck like they did in 2022. And suspended cap says he won't blink this time. This is too big. He's effed. I don't know, he does have one of the biggest cash machines in the entire world. In the entire history of business, there's a lot of cash. And it's worth remembering the debate between Eric Schmidt and Peter Thiel, where Peter Thiel sat down with Eric Schmidt, I believe, at a Wired conference, maybe it was Forbes. And they debated what big tech companies should do with all the cash they're generating. Before we continue, before I finish this thought, let me tell you about figma.com Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design development teams build great products together, get started for free.

I can't believe you interrupted your own thought.

And so I was listening to Sharp China with Bill Bishop last night, and his dog came in and he mentioned the farmer's dog, which is like the brand of dog food that he feeds the dog. And he was like, this isn't like TVPN. We are doing 25 ads in the middle of the show. And I was like, you are doing ads Anyway, Yeah, the question was like, Google has all this money. Why do they have this growing cash pile? Why can't they find something to do with it? And it's interesting looking back on it and now, because Google did wind up giving a lot of cash back, they weren't able to find a place to. They truly had too much cash to do. They invested so much in Waymo and so much in DeepMind and so much in Google Cloud and a ton of other projects. And at the same time, they still had money left over. And so they were still doing, I think, stock buybacks and dividends throughout that whole process. And so it was like Thiel was kind of proven right that Google was sort of out of ideas or the big tech companies or the technology industry broadly, was really out of ideas. Then, of course, AI comes now we're sort of vindicated. Hey, there is this new thing we can invest. Let's draw down on the cash flow. People are skeptical about it, but at least it's happening. But the question is, what is Zuck thinking? Because he's definitely in the mode of like, I got this cash machine. Let me invest my cash flow in new data centers, in new AI training companies.

I think investors are right to. To look at this and say, like, meta platforms is one of the greatest businesses of all time and you have. And the CEO is a little crazy. Like, he's a bit of a wild card. Like, he has, like, obviously has an incredible.

Of the big tech companies.

No, I disagree. I think if you look at, I think if you look at Sundar I think if you look at Satya, I think if you look at the guys.

That are running Bezos, I'm thinking Bezos because they had a cash machine with Amazon. What did he do? He didn't return a dime of capital and had had gross net profits of like zero for a decade.

Yeah, but while he was building aws. Yeah. And the last time that, that Mark invested this heavily in something, it did not deliver roi.

Sure.

And so I think people are just a little bit scared. That's why the stock's more volatile. That's why it traded down.

This is, this is.

Google is up. Google's up 10%. Microsoft traded down briefly after, after earnings. But, but ultimately, I think you have to, if you're, if you're investing in this company, you have to be, you have, you have the, the, the, the sort of protection, knowing that this is fundamentally just a fantastic business. And you can, you can pause, you know, they can sort of pause this like crazy spending at any point. But again, Metacan. Yeah, but Meta, they're doing a bond offering that got announced this morning for $25 billion. And that's after they did another deal with Blue Owl for something like $30 billion a couple weeks ago. And so Zuck is levering up. He's going all in. And investors need to be tolerant of that risk. And there's plenty of people that are going to say, well, it's fine. I'd rather own Alphabet, I'd rather own Microsoft, et cetera.

Buco Capital bloke is also. Seems like he's on your side here. He says excited to buy meta in the 500s. The stock, of course, is trading in the 600s.

So he's currently at $666 a share.

Is that a good thing? Is that a good omen? Is that a good symbolism?

It's a devilish omen.

It's rough. And Buco Capital says the only challenge will be having the cour to do it when it gets there. And he shares a pretty good visualization from Gemini of what's happening right now. Mark Zuckerberg is in some sort of convertible driving off a cliff, wearing a VR headset with piles of capacity.

Wall street in the back, flying out.

The back of the car.

To be honest, I think this makes him look really sick.

It does. And this is exactly what I want out of a big tech CEO. I want risk. I want Risk. And I don't know, I feel like you're making a ton of good points that I agree with this year.

I'm not saying, to be clear that I'm not riding with Zuck. I will always ride with Zuck. I'm just saying I understand why people are like, you know what? I'm gonna. I'm not. I can't really stomach, you know, a drawdown. Some people are gonna just rotate into the other hyperscalers.

I'm just trying. Yeah. Tyler, what do you think?

I mean, people were calling for Sundar to be basically fired for like a long time. I know, like, until like basically this year. Yeah. So I feel like you're. You're exaggerating how much, like, Google has been like this, like, winner the whole time.

No, no, no, no. I completely agree. This was my point about when they, when they rebranded to Alphabet, like, everyone was like, you're not going to cure cancer and create self driving cars and also build AGI and build a cloud platform.

People were still saying, Sundar, like, should not be for 10 years.

For 10 years. Yeah. People were saying, like, it's not really working. And now finally people are like, okay, it actually worked. You have a diversified business. Congratulations.

Okay. Okay. Breaking news.

Yes.

This is gonna rock your world.

No way.

Taylor Sheridan and Peter Berg team on Paramount and Activision's Call of Duty movie.

Let's go.

Let's go. Hit the gong for that. The creators that made Yellowstone Hell or High Water and Lone Survivor and Sicario.

I'm so excited for the Call of Duty movie. You know, they should also make a Vanta movie. Automate compliance, manage risk, prove TR continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation. That's incredible. Wait, so we need to get someone on the show who understands media because this all seems like it's happening very, very quickly.

We understand Neo Factual media, New media, corporate media, legacy, New legacy media. No, I don't understand Neo Trad media.

The Neo conglomerate is entirely new to me. I don't understand what Ellison's doing. I don't understand what Taylor Sheridan is doing. In reaction to it. It seems like this is a reaction. Basically, Taylor Sheridan left Ellison's new empire, left Paramount and said, hey, I'm out and I'm going over to NBC Universal. I'm riding with the comcasters. And now he's saying, I'm making Call of Duty movie. Is this all tied to his head or is it something else?

I don't know. I'm sure this was in the works.

For a while, potentially. Was it? I don't know. There have been Like a flurry of Taylor Sheridan, like little leaks and news items. Because it seems like he's in a negotiation with. With David Ellison over. I mean, he was until he laughed, but he's still with Paramount at least for, you know, a couple more months, maybe a couple more years. He still has projects in flight. You can't just, like, you know, completely dip on your production company. But we really should get someone on the show to figure that out. Let's go to more haters, More, you know, posters on the timeline from J. Bultard. This AI stuff is so dumb. Zuck is repeating the 2020, 22 sinking of a great money machine in Meta with wasteful spend. The Metaverse sucked. And AI is nearly as dumb with all this capex as investors. Tell him they're sick of it.

Yeah, and part of. Part of. Part of. Part of the. The. The. I think part of the blowback here is that the first AI product that Meta announced from their new team was Meta Vibes.

Incredible moment.

And I know you've been putting in hours and hours a day on the Meta Vibes app, but that didn't send a strong. That does not inspire confidence. Right. Because it was. If they had launched Sora, people would have been saying, like, wow, they're absolutely cooking.

And I think there's two audiences that the Meta Vibes app didn't hit with. One was, okay, the extremely online technical Teapot, whatever you want to call them. Those folks are like, well, this looks like white labeled mid journey, because it kind of is. And the app just doesn't feel, like, super polished or, like, crazy. Oh, wow. I've never seen these UI paradigms. So there's that and then there's the teapot critique of, like, infinite jest and slop and all this stuff. So, like, they weren't hitting with, like, the insiders, but then simultaneously, it's not like you walk down the street and you were like, oh, wow. Like, this is actually breaking through with just, like, everyday random people in the way that Threads has. And so, I don't know, maybe in a year we'll be like, oh, wow. They actually figured it out. They funneled a ton of people to Meta Vibes and it's as successful as Threads. That would be impressive. It seems like a tall order.

Yeah, it won't be.

It won't be.

But the thing about Sora, that stood out, and even though I'm not bullish on Sora as a media consumption platform, it had this innovative super viral feature that was fresh and new and so I think if Meta had launched that everyone have been like, oh, yeah, like you spend the money.

Yeah. But when at least you're on the frontier of the slop, like you have the purest slop.

Yeah. And it, you know, Sora benefits Instagram, weirdly because people are creating more content over there and it's driving engagement. But.

And also just. But it did not inspire the idea of cameos and putting those things together and the way it was, like all the little details. Yeah. It was like, okay, this is unique. And like there's clearly a ton like this. It doesn't feel.

Cameos suing OpenAI. Like cameo that. The celebrity video. Ah, that makes sense.

Yeah.

By a celebrity video platform suing OpenAI over the feature, which.

I don't know, like feature or just the name.

The naming. The naming. The naming of the feature, which feels like. Feels like a stretch to me.

Yeah.

I don't know.

The other thing.

Yeah. The problem with brand names is if you create a name that is too descriptive of what you do, you can't trademark it. So if we were to call this like the news show, we couldn't have any intellectual property around that.

Did you see this? Engineer said a couple days ago, just submitted my resignation from Meta. Some might say that one year at the company is not that long, but I survived like three rounds of layoffs, so I think it's fair play. For what it's worth, my team is great and it was an overall positive experience, but there are other better places to build AGI, which hopefully won't be used for Stepmom chatbots and Infinite slot machines.

Wow.

Scathing.

I wonder what the play is. Do you think that's like grow your account so you can be a founder, launch something. The whole, I don't know, the slop, it doesn't seem. I don't know, it's tricky.

Yeah. So Zuck is certainly, I don't think, going to take his foot off the gas yet. No, we'll have to get the vibes. We'll have to get about 10 times.

There's new Reality Labs hardware shipping every year. There was massive pushback and the stock sold off by like 50%. It was like really, really rough for a while.

Didn't it trade down to something like.

Yeah, like $300 a share or something?

No, I think it was, I mean.

So, yeah, look at the five year chart. At the bottom of 2022, it was $90 a share.

That's what I'm saying.

Rough. And it was up at 300. So it traded from almost 400 to 90, which is down 70%. That is an insane drawdown. And then it just built right back up and it was bigger than ever. And so I don't know, I feel like people might be filling out apology forms for him at some point. Even though it looks rough right now, just something's going to wind up clicking and also the core business is just going to keep ripping. So you just get so many more shots on goal. It's just an endless stream of shots on goal when you have a cash machine like the family of apps.

Yeah. Also the stock's up 20% in the last six months. Even factoring in this 10% drawdown.

I don't know. I think investing in AI is not the craziest thing you could do in 2025 as a hyperscaler CEO. Anyway, Polymarket has some OpenAI IPO market up already, so no IPO by December 31, 2026 is already at 55%. We will certainly be tracking this. But if they do get out the the market is pricing right now between 1 and 1.25 trillion in market cap, but 6% chance that it's up at 1.5 trillion, which would be crazy to go out at. Not technically the biggest IPO of all time. I believe that belongs to Saudi Aramco. So oil is still dominant relative to AI, but still would be one of the Most insane tech IPOs in history, obviously. Quickly before we move on. Graphite.dev code review for the Age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster.

Did you want to watch this video? Toby yesterday responded.

Wait, Ludke.

Yeah Toby. We covered his post where he said having some AI follow you into your Zoom meetings or Google Meet for taking notes is the digital equivalent of showing up to a meeting with your fly down. I said I never let them in. I just let them sit there in the waiting room. Oh I forgot. Sorry. He responded and said I'm actually very pro meeting recording and AI summarization but I'm not okay with bots joining as fake humans to accomplish this. It's a meeting between you and me, not you and me and some startup's viral growth strategy. Granola is great. Gemini does this well in Google Meet. Hypernote is great and fully local but use them with consent. My tweet is about how ridiculous and self important it looks when you show up to a meeting with random bots as entourage.

Yeah, I think I do remember seeing there's a viral screenshot of Somebody who showed up. Is this the screenshot where somebody brought, like, five bots? Which is hilarious. Entourage is actually kind of sick. Yeah. Wait, Tyler, this would be a good hack project, like viral Entourage on your calendar that when you join a meeting, it just joins with, like, 25 other people. And it's just like, it just takes your name and just automatically does, like, your chief of staff, your head of security, your PR person, your secretary, your driver, your dietitian, your. And it just joins every meeting with 20 different bots and just makes you look super important online. Maybe that'll happen. We should move on to this.

Watch video.

Jensen Wong, CEO of India.

Jensen, right. I was gonna go. I was gonna go for that. The guy from. From Snowflake. Oh, okay.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, let's watch. The Jensen video is only 7 seconds. So look at this. He's having beers with some absolute dogs. He's hanging out with the CEO of Samsung, the CEO of Hyundai, hanging out in South Korea, just having some beers. Crushing some beers with the boys. This is how you do it. People will call it a top signal.

I mean, this is going to go so hard in a top signal vibe reel that we will definitely create when the time is right.

But, I mean, there have been crazier top signals. And when Nvidia was at, like, half the market cap it is at now, Jensen was signing autographs.

People were like, signing a woman's shoe.

Might have done that too, I don't know. But it was a crazy moment. And everyone was like, this has got to be it. So I think Jensen is just consistently putting out crazy clips that read as top signals to confuse the market. Keep you guessing.

That's right. That's right. He said, doubt me again.

He also says that Korea has the best fried chicken in the world. Taking shots at Colonel Sanders. Rough out here for America. I don't know why Korea has the world's best fried chicken, but Korea has.

The world's best fried chicken.

Let's go. The best fried chicken in America is Korean.

Whoa.

I have had Korean fried chicken. It is delicious. Something about the sauce is really, really good. Also, Jensen Wong in South Korea says, are there any Nvidia investors here? The audience cheers. And he says, that's why Korea is rich, baby. Let's play this one. Play it loud. Do we get it? Nvidia investors. That's why Korea's so rich. He's got bits. Do I have any messages? He's got.

He's feeling good right now. I mean, on your 5 trillion day. I mean, I mean, come on, let him, Let him have a little fun. Let him have a little fun. Straight after GTC.

It's so wild that they hit 5 trillion yesterday, particularly because they don't report earnings for another like two weeks. So like, basically every other big tech company is on like the October 28th, October 29th cycle. So as of tonight, after Amazon and Apple report earnings, we have the book closed mostly on all the Mag 7 except for Nvidia, but Nvidia is still in the news. And so Alphabet got crammed to the business section. Microsoft got crammed down to the business section. Meta made it to the front page of the Journal because they sold off. But Nvidia got the full chart of their progress. They got the Glazonator 3000A1 from the Wall Street Journal because they just hit 5 trillion. And they have this interesting chart of how many days it took Nvidia to create a trillion dollars in market cap. The first trillion took them 6,138 days. The second trillion, they did it in 180 days. The third trillion in 66 days. Then the fourth trillion was in 273 days, and then the fifth trillion in 78 days. So from 6,000 days, took him 20 years to make that first trillion. They say that the first trillion is the hardest.

They do say that.

But then the next one comes in just 66 days or 78 days, which is remarkable. So he's on a tear. And congratulations to Jensen Huang and all the folks over at Nvidia for powering this AI revolution.

Absolutely crushing. Pull up this video of the Snowflake CRO doing a little street interview.

Excuse me, sir. How old were you when you became a millionaire? This guy.

Yes, sir.

I've just been getting your Instagram feed.

How old were you when you became a millionaire?

Oh, boy.

Four years ago.

Okay, pause.

Yeah, wait, so who is this guy again? He's the, he's the CRO of Snowflake, which, like, Snowflake's been like a hundred billion dollar company for a while, right? Snowflake Market cap. I thought it went out like years ago. I mean, maybe he wasn't liquid. It's $91 billion market cap company. And it's down too.

Like, okay, so. So there's. This was the line that people were most confused about because I don't, I don't want to. I don't want to, like, try to guess this guy's age too, too, you know, I won't be. I don't pretend to know exactly, but I assume he's in his 40s, maybe his 50s. He was at VMware for 10 years as the vice president of US enterprise sales and then the Senior vice president, General Manager of Americas. And he was also the president of Broadcom from November of 2023 till now.

Yeah, it seems like an absolute dog.

And became the CRO at Snowflake this year. But still, everyone, I think, is shocked of, like, how he didn't possibly pull together a million dollars by somewhere.

25 years in enterprise technology. That's what it says. 25 years. What is he spending his money on? He must be just, like, obsessed with buying, depreciating cars.

That could be it.

Maybe he gets a new Bentley Continental GT every year like clockwork. Maybe he's the one that's buying all the Lamborghini.

Maybe he's buying multiple. Maybe he doesn't like to drive the same car twice.

Yeah, that must be it.

Maybe he gets a fresh car.

That must be it.

I don't like to drive cars with more than 20 miles on the odometer.

Yeah.

So I'm just gonna cycle it out. I'll take the lot.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Every 20 miles?

Yeah. They say once you drive it off the lot, you lose half the value. Well, it's the price I'm willing to pay.

Yep.

Because I gotta keep my net worth under.

I gotta keep it in six figures to inspire. Clearly, it worked. It clearly inspired him to grind harder. He's a CRO at SN Snowflake.

It's incredible. No, this must be. This must be some sort of. He misspoke, because that.

Okay, let's. Let's play the. Play the rest of it.

This does not make sense.

What are you doing?

Tech CRO for Snowflake.

Did you guys just go public?

We went public five years ago during COVID Couldn't ring the bell. So this is our. Do you recommend entrepreneurs take their company public? Because there's a risk there as well. When you bring in all that capital.

You bring in voting shares. What do you think about going public as opposed to such a funny question? I promise, we got 17 million followers. This is the best marketing he can do.

All right.

Just keep it rolling. Hey, we're keeping this rolling, man. Sir, real quick. Can I finish real quick with you real quick for one minute?

We'll do 30 seconds.

30 seconds is cool.

All right.

What do you think?

He does not do 30 seconds. He definitely does another, like, five minutes based on the edit. Cash flow is everything until profitability comes, then you get S P500 and you get a whole different kind of return. What does that mean Too? Do I not understand that?

What did you guys do in revenue this last year?

So we're gonna exit the this year probably just over about four and a half billion. Let's go. Disclosure. That's disclosure that he's not supposed to make. Keep track of us.

You have some good equity in the company.

We're doing okay.

We're doing okay. As somebody who's an executive at a.

Billion dollar company by the way I watch you all the time. Congratulations on all your success company.

The best financial advice you can give to the younger generation. Best money advice you can give to this guy. This guy should be giving financial.

He's like step one can save your way to being financially secure in the future. You've got to build up wealth. Don't worry about W2s. W2 is not.

Sorry.

W2 maybe 30 years to build up million dollar savings.

This is crazy.

It's tough to predict my friend.

In this world. This is actually hilarious.

12 to 18 months.

That's all you got? Yeah.

Okay. Give me the next 12 months. What's the number one thing people need.

To be adopting in their business right now? They're going to be using. He's still going. 30 seconds. 30 seconds. Accelerate revenue. It's all about moving fast.

Do you think if business owners aren't leveraging AI they're going to get left behind?

Absolutely.

Why?

It's like the Internet. If you're not on the Internet wave you're dead.

It's going to replace Uber drivers.

Potentially could self driving. It's going to change the world. So funny.

Wild. Wild interview.

Yeah. So they had to file an emergency 8K disavowing unauthorized statements. The projection exceeded the official guidance by $100 million. So they said that they were projecting 4.4 billion. He rounded up to 4.5 and that's a no.

No.

So he got himself in trouble. Stay safe out there.

I just don't understand how he has on his LinkedIn. He has President at Broadcom full time since November of 2023. He's not listed on the Broadcom website.

I don't know. But it is one of the funniest.

Maybe he's kind of like Soham Perique style Moonlighting over there.

Yeah. Who knows? We have the founder CEO of whatnot coming in the studio today. Is that correct?

In about 20 minutes.

About 20 minutes. We have Grant. We're very excited. People have been debating whatnot because it sort of came out of nowhere, as this daca Corn e Commerce company. Chris pike, former guest on the show, is taking shots on the timeline, putting the timeline in turmoil, calling it unregulated gambling. Well, we're going to get to the bottom of it. Is it gambling? Is it not? He says he feels like someone needs to write a deep dive on this. But we will dig in. I'm not exactly sure, but we'll try and understand the business, how they make money, how it all works.

Buying groceries, gambling. Sometimes you go buy a watermelon, you're like, I don't know.

That's actually.

It looks pretty good.

You can't crack it open.

But if I once I cut it open, once I get home and cut it open, it might not be the best watermelon, but it looked good. You're trying to knock on it, you know, you're trying to feel out kind of the vibes of the watermelon.

I do that with pumpkins right now around Halloween.

That's right.

Halloween's coming out. People are gambling on pumpkins. It's gonna be rotten inside. You gotta play the game, play the game on the field.

Dhruv over on X released a video. I guess he says Amazon will sue me for leaking this. He says, worth it. New.

This is so funny. Putting the tiny Amazon package in the missile launcher. That and I love how it just demolishes the door. It just completely destroys the door. Like the door just gets like broken into a million pieces.

And this is innovative because everyone's experiences, right? Even though Amazon gets it right to your front door, it can still be kind of mildly annoying to have to go out and carry boxes in first world problem. But this solves that totally. Yes, you need to replace the door once a day.

So people were taking shots at doordash with a new doordash robot. Will it get it to your door? Well, here's your answer. Maybe it needs a missile launcher on it. I also love that this video, it looks like it's in part a real video. Like those first frames with the human hand that looks like they actually built the missile and then they switch over to just a 3D render. And so there's like maybe no AI here, but still some CGI. It's very, very hilarious. So funny.

Should we move into some of the more Neo reactions?

Of course, yeah. But first, let me tell you about Julius. What analysis do you want to run? Chat with your data. Get expert level insights in seconds. Julius. AI. Yes, me. After loading the dishwasher, instead of paying a robot $20,000 to do it for me. And it's Trump holding a ton of cash. Very, very funny. Also, people are planning to, to drip them out with gold chains or silver chains. And I think a fade on here too. That's very funny. I mean underrated. The idea that if you get the 1x robot, I wonder how much you'll actually be able to dress it because at a certain point you can't put a body kit, a crazy body kit on a Tesla because you'll just block the cameras and eventually you won't have self driving. And I wonder.

Chrome hearts all over my knee.

Yeah, you're going to. I think that, but I think it's gonna trip and it's gonna be under.

No, no, no. One T shirt.

One T shirt. I don't know. You get a baggy T shirt if.

It can't handle one. One baggy tee if it can't handle.

It's just you're gonna have to pay for two Chrome Hearts T shirts because you have to send one to the tele operator because the tele operator doesn't feel the exact weight of the Chrome hearts T shirt.

You need to make immediately make an account dripped out Neos. And it's just a daily feed of.

The vibes around this company are just great. It's such a moonshot and it's like, it's so capital intensive. It's so difficult. But I think everyone's having fun with it. MKBHD actually dropped a whole video.

Rob, we gotta pull up this video. Rob Froude, he says 20K to simulate the experience of a roommate with a ketamine problem.

It's ridiculous.

This is what we were saying, we were saying on the show yesterday. It's like, hey, Neo, clean up all those wine glasses.

And it's just like, yeah, just smashing everything. I mean it's gonna be crazy.

Neo, get ready to be good at cleaning up glass.

For sure.

That is, that's really the final challenge for humanoids. Yeah, cleaning up glass. One of the greatest challenges for humans. Yeah, cleaning up glass.

Oh yeah. It's a mess.

Like it's an adventure.

It's a mess.

It's a high stakes game.

I mean the, the like some of the anecdotes from this robot are gonna be hilarious. There's going to be wild stuff. Well, if you're looking for a robot to generate some media for you, head over to Fall, the generative media platform for developers. The world's best generative image, video and audio models all in one place. Develop and fine tune models with serverless GPUs and on demand clusters.

Another post here with Neo got the Glock out. Now tell me where the seed phrase is. Got to make sure that the. Just another reason why they put the experts locally.

You definitely have to arm them. This is important.

Yeah. Should humanoids be able to open carry.

There's a whole corridor crew video about this that went super viral. Boss Town Dynamics, they made a whole series out of it, all cgi. But they took renders of real Boston Dynamics robots and put them in like shooting ranges. And this whole environment, they tell this whole story and he just goes viral constant, constantly. And people think it's real even though it's CGI.

What were you saying about MKBHD?

Oh, MKBHD put out a video about Neo1x and he's beating the drum of like, this is teleoperation, it doesn't count. And he's like, he's going pretty hard on them. He gives us some caveats and he says, hey, I wish, I hope this does work out. But some other people were kind of levying the critique on him that he's not in the arena, not trying to build things. But I mean, at the same time, we talked about this yesterday. I think MQBHD really has seen a number of these concerns. Yeah.

And he's been burned on.

He's been burned on a couple things.

You know, multi hundred dollar devices that should be a lot easier to deliver, a great customer experience. And so I think it's fair for him to be concerned about a $20,000 product that would probably like. I, I'm. Every day I'm more bullish on One X. Yeah. I think, I think they're. They have a great understanding of the Internet.

Yeah.

They're folk. They've been focused on like a specific use case, the home for a while. They're focused on teleoperation, which is the right thing to be focused on.

Yeah.

Because even if it only is good at teleoperation forever, that still could be valuable.

I'm bullish as a futurist.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Not as a consumer.

Well, yeah. And I think that everybody should be going into this with the understanding that you are going to be participating in trying to pull the future.

I agree.

Forward.

I agree. Yeah, yeah. It seems like. I don't know if they're calling it a beta, but it feels like you should go into it assuming it's a beta. What are you laughing at? Didn't you have a joke? Did you ever post your joke? Joke? At least tell your joke on the, on the stream if you didn't post.

I'll tell my joke.

Tell your joke.

A woman shoots her 1x Neo then holds him underwater for five minutes. Next she hangs him right after they enjoy a lovely dinner. How can this be?

What was John posted about that before the woman?

John? John Palmer. This was inspired by John. John Palmer's post last week of like the AI agent being like, this is not my son.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. A father and son create an AI agent company that gets to $20 million. They go to San Francisco.

Yeah. With a father and son build an AI agent. The father tweets that they have 10 million ARR. And the son is rushed to San Francisco to pitch the seed round. At the pitch, the VC looks at the boy and says, I can't fund this boy. He is my son. And so the answer of course to my riddle, a woman shoots her 1x Neo then holds him underwater for five minutes. Next she hangs him right after they enjoy a lovely dinner. The answer to the riddle is of.

Course turbo Puffer search every byte. No serverless vector in full text search built from first principles on object storage. Fast 10x cheaper, extremely scalable.

Major cliffhanger. No, she killed the robot but is hanging out with the operator.

Okay, okay. At first my read on it, I mean my read on it was just like it's ridiculous. And it's a play on that whole riddle that confuses LLMs generally. I mean there's some very funny examples of those. It's the strawberry thing all over again. It's just very easy to confuse these things.

Pecooper over on X went incredibly viral. 25,000 likes and a half a million views. Saying my Neo robot after I learned the third world or piloting them is mad. Chill.

It's not going to be a third.

Worlder, remember, it's going to be an American tele operated robot.

What is this? Will Menitis post. He posted this Neo robot in this, like in this image. And I understand it's photoshopped in there, but I don't understand why it went so viral. People really like it. What is this a reference to?

It's some. I mean if you scroll down Brandon Jacoby's post, you think it's this, you think it's that.

They don't know, but it's such a real image.

Have you seen the original image? Yeah. Was it like a frat of Racka?

What is the.

Yeah, no, it's like a guy who's standing there and he like, he just like. I don't know how to describe it. He like looks all run down and everyone's like looking at him funny.

Okay.

I think the. It's kind of just like the Ghibli thing where it's like, oh, that's an image I recognize.

Okay. Yeah. For some reason I don't understand this image. I just don't look at that many photos of people drinking on porches. I suppose. But you know, to each their own, I guess.

Dev had an absolute banger. Wait till you find that MF20K clanker in your kitchen acting too friendly. And I guess you followed him after this post and he says, damn, after so long.

Oh, that's funny. I got caught following him. But I did like this post and I was like, I gotta follow this. There's a Dev. I don't know. Wait, after so long? You're not that big of a an account. I feel like I'm not that behind. I don't know. I'm glad I found your account though, Dev. You're very entertaining.

You guys found each other. It's very sweet.

Oh, Jordy, already following. Okay, it's me, you, David Holt for the followers. I know. And Jaya Seed. Very funny. I like that Dev replied to the post banger. Just giving yourself a pat on the back is fantastic.

Okay, Eric Katana has a less not so PC post in here. Is it gay to have sex with a female robot tele operated by a man, Elon Musk? Elon came in with a crying emoji.

I don't know.

We'll leave that to the philosophers. I suppose we'll need a whole new branch of philosophy.

Erica Tanner replied and said, elon, what. What did you mean by this? Which is Optimus's new hand upgrade includes 22 degrees of freedom. What does it mean anyways?

Did this. Did this tane post get deleted? I don't know where this one went. I don't know.

Let's move over to some bub talk. We have a post here from USV with a clip from the legend Fred Wilson.

While we pull that up, let me tell you a profound get your brand mentioned in ChatGPT reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. Let's play the clip from Fred Wilson.

So the thing about bubbles is that.

There'S just two things I think that people need to remember about bubbles. First of all, bubbles provide the financing for new revolutions, like that book you described. I love revolutions and they provide it at inflated valuations. So People can look at what OpenAI.

And entropy are doing.

They're raising money at astronomical valuations and then throwing all of that money building.

We gotta get Fred Wells, right? What a legend.

We can say they're overdoing it. You know this reminds us of the telecom overbuild of the late 90s, whatever. But the net result it will be, there will be advances that would not have been possible without that investment mania. So that's one thing to remember about bubbles. The second thing to remember about bubbles is after the crash there's, there's a renewal and so if you can just ride out the crash and then stick with it, things will be even better afterwards.

So the thing about Bubbles is that.

There'S just two things I think that basically just survive.

Survive. Get in the winners riding the winners.

Invest in the companies that are durable and generation multi, generational. Skip the others skill issue, skill at all.

Just don't make mistakes, still make mistakes. Use Google AI Studio the fastest way from prompt to production with Gemini create an AI powered app faster than ever. That's the second time I did that. Sometimes we scare around.

Dean Ball says my sense is that selling Blackwell chips to China would quite possibly be the most unpopular tech policy move of the Trump admin, especially on Capitol Hill. It's plausible that the long term, really even near term result will be much more compute regulation.

I like this guy. Dean Ball. Tyler, do you know Ball?

I think you've already made this joke.

But have you gone down the Ball rabbit hole? Have you read any of those?

I've read some of his longer posts.

He's coming on the show tomorrow.

Pretty spooky day to come on the show.

Yeah, it is.

That'll be an interesting, very fun interview.

Yeah, I feel like the. Wait, didn't Trump went to China just yet yesterday, right? Or where did he actually meet Xi Jinping? I don't remember.

He's not going to China.

No, no, no, but he, but he met with Xi Jinping and immediately led up South Korea. Oh, South Korea, okay. Oh, Jensen's there too. That's fine. I have no idea anymore. I feel like if you were anti selling GPUs to China on the basis of AI doom, you have to update towards. It's actually kind of chill to sell them to China, right? Like debate this with me. Okay, so if you're a doomer, the reason, one of the reasons people said let's not sell GPUs to China was if they get GPUs they will get super intelligence. They will steamroll us. They will be all powerful and super Intelligence will be communist, it will be state capitalist, it will be not loving free speech. It'll be all the things that are un American and we don't like. Then the last couple years have happened and played out and it feels like the fast takeoff scenario feels less likely. And so that should update you to be a little bit less worried about it now. Less worried about selling to China because it's not nuclear weapons, it's not the Manhattan Project, it's nuclear slop. It's slop. It's erotica. But it's also great knowledge retrieval. Really cool image generation, really cool audio generation, summaries. It is definitely a great productivity tool. But it's not going to be okay. They have it. They got the GPUs, they got a GPT5 level model. And now America just loses, like. And China is just dominant, right?

Yeah.

I mean, I think, you know, the Leopold take is that it's still like, I don't think in his scenario, like, the labs have even been nationalized yet. And he's like, I don't think the capabilities right now merit the nationalization. But I think a lot of people still think that, like, it's like, you know, two more years, then we'll be at a point where, like, it would make sense for there to be, like, major geopolitical conflict just over the AI question. So I don't think it's like, the people who were super, like, bullish on that idea, I think are still. I don't think they've been fully, like, disproven yet.

Yeah, I don't know. It seems like we'll have to talk to more people about, like, how that's shaping up. Because there's also the weird dynamic of, like, even if we wanted to sell Blackwell to China, would they even buy it? Because they seem very interested in their own supply chain.

I think they can do both. You know, they can buy Blackwells today and they can still. I don't know.

I mean, the more you buy, the less incentive you have to build locally. Like, that's just true. Like, we buy solar panels here. There are no good solar panel companies. I don't know. There aren't. They're probably. Yeah, but they're like, America has been like, yeah, we're buying them so cheaply. Like, how do you get a company off the ground in a market that's just getting destroyed? We ran this example with GoPro. America had a company there and got steamrolled. And so it's like you need to be over investing like crazy and America just doesn't have the appetite for that.

Yeah, and I'm just saying China has more of an appetite to have an entire industry backstopped and money losing for a sustained period of time.

Yeah.

Couple more posts before we bring in Grant Zero Hash. We talked about this briefly yesterday. MasterCard is set to acquire crypto startup Zero Hash for nearly 2 billion. Imran Khan over at alliance says Zero Hash powers most crypto to fiat on off ramps holding money transmitter licenses and MSB licenses across the US. Most on ramps you use today likely run through zero hashtag. This is a pretty big deal. So MasterCard getting into the game. In other news, Kimball Musk says Please vote your Tesla stock. There is no one remotely close to my brother and no CEO on earth that would accept this package. It is a massive win for you as a shareholder every way you look at it. Elon says thanks bro. These are the original technology brothers.

What is oh you true. What does he mean by no CEO on earth that would accept this package?

I can give some more context. So Gavin Baker says my firm, Atreides Management will be voting in favor of Elon's performance based compensation package. I would prefer that every company I invest in have a comparable plan.

Sure.

I believe shareholders should generally support thoughtfully structured performance based CEO compensation packages because they incentivize CEOs to create transformational growth and value. The basic logic of these plans is The CEO gets 10% of the incremental value creation if they 10x the stock with a 2x hurdle. So shareholders get a 900% stock increase and the CEO gets an incremental 10%. The first Tesla plan incented Elon to 10x the value of Tesla. He achieved all the milestones and may never be paid for this. The Axon plan incented Rick smith to greater than 5x the value of Axon. He did. And when milestones aren't met such as Farfetch, then the CEOs don't receive the payouts. The new Tesla plan is arguably better than the first as it also includes financial and technological milestones in addition to market cap based incentives. And again, so Atreides is riding with the brothers.

Yes, but what do you think Kimball means by saying no CEO on earth would accept this package? I understand that. I completely agree with the first part. There is no one remotely close to Elon for Tesla. I'm totally in on that. I'm in on the idea of incentive packages. I like.

It's just that the targets are so aggressive that most CEOs don't think they would achieve them.

Yeah, they'd be like, no, pay me.

How about I, yeah, how about I get compound at 10% a year? How about I do this or that?

Like if I go to the CEO of Target or something and say like okay, you won't make a dime unless you 10x the stock, they're going to be like, what are you talking about? No way. Yeah, that makes sense.

Sense.

Thank you. Well, let me tell you about linear. LINEAR is a purpose built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects and product roadmaps and start building. Let's go to Cheng Liu. Have you heard this Scott Forstall Stans? There's a lot of Scott Forstall Stans out there. He was the senior vice President iPhone software. Thirteen years ago he was apparently fired from Apple after the disastrous launch of Apple Maps. What mapping app do you use on your phone?

I am an Apple Maps guy.

Me too. I use Apple Map.

I pretty much always have been because I used to be. I switched to Apple Maps but only like a year ago. Yeah, but then I was on Google.

I was on Waze. And Waze was incredible because you'd find all these like secret behind the scenes Waze. And then I think a lot of of local neighborhoods basically said like hey, we, we actually live on a, on a nice quiet street. We don't want Waze funneling a thousand cars through our neighborhood during rush hour. So can you route around us? And it kind of put everyone back on the normal routes.

And I just always like that you could see the maps on your home screen without unlocking your phone. And that was enough for me.

I agree, I agree.

I stuck with it. Even though sometimes it would take you on a little bit of a goose chase. Yeah, well, Waze, but I also Waze. I was never a fan of the goose chase. I'm like, I don't, I don't want to.

You're anti goose chase.

Like in the Waze context.

I love a ways goose chase.

I don't want to go on a street race through a bunch of 25 mile an hour.

No, the best is when you're on Waze. No, I agree with you. But the best is when you're using Waze and it's like hey, you're on the freeway but why don't you get off and get back on the freeway seven times over the next six miles so you can save 45 seconds it's like Waze, I don't want to do that. At one point.

Waze, they really should have a slide, like an aggress, like an aggression slider.

They basically do. So if you go into the Waze settings, there's one where it's like, okay, avoid toll roads. It's like, I understand that. It's like if I'm driving across the town and I don't want to pay five bucks, I want to save money. Yeah, avoid toll roads. Then one was like, avoid freeways. And I don't know, I guess it's like maybe if you get motion sick or something, you don't want to be in freeways. Whatever.

I met someone recently that doesn't drive. They didn't grow up in la, they moved here and they just avoid all freeways. So they only take street laws.

I mean the self driving cars often avoid freeways because higher speed accidents are more risky. But so for a while, I don't know if this was actually in ways, but there was a moment where you could go in and check, I want to avoid toll roads. Two was I want to avoid freeways. And three was I want to avoid dirt road. Which was hilarious because I can just imagine driving through Los Angeles and all of a sudden it's like, yeah, if you cut across this person's front lawn, you can save 30 seconds. Front lawn. I don't know. Hot take is that Scott Forstall. Apple Maps was this kind of disastrous launch where it really didn't work anywhere near Google Maps. But eventually they turned it around and Apple Maps became a really great product for the iPhone. And Cheng Lu says, as someone with a bit of insider info, sorry for baiting, I can tell you that the current trajectory for Apple would likely have been better off if he ended up CEO. Look up his background and interests, I'll forever be a forestall simp. The guy can code and coded the right things and so it's very, very interesting.

I wonder what he thinks about iOS 17.

Yeah, I mean you can run this counterfactual and say, okay, if you put the software guy in charge, maybe the software is better. But what does that mean for the hardware, the supply chain, the trade war? Would Scott Forstall have been able to get through the crazy trade war?

I mean, Tim Cook could have been a goated coo, right hand to Scott.

That's true, that's true.

Maybe you wouldn't have. Maybe iOS 17 wouldn't be such a, a dumpster fire.

I don't think it's that bad? Actually.

I get multiple times a day a reminder of how bad I think it will.

I think you'll get used to it over the next six months.

I've gotten used to it, but I still can appreciate how bad it is. But we have Mark Gurman's coming on the show next week and I'm excited to talk with him about it.

Well, we have our first in person guest of the day. While he hops on the show. Let me tell you about Numero HQ. Sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than 5 minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Thank you so much for hopping on the show. Great to meet you.

Likewise. Good to meet you.

Thank you.

Can you fellow LA technology brother.

Yeah, not many of us.

Yes, not many here. I'm going to have you. Why don't you introduce yourself and kind of describe the shape of the business today and then I'd love to go back and kind of, kind of hear the whole entrepreneurial journey.

Sure.

So I'm Grant LaFontaine, co founder, CEO of a platform called WhatNot. WhatNot's a live stream shopping platform online marketplace. The best way to think about it is we sort of enable anyone to create like a digital brick and mortar store. So as opposed to interesting, any seller can come on, they can then sell through live video, which means you sort of like this, you can stand up, you can be in your store, you can walk around your store, sell goods, sell anything. And so we have people on the platform selling comics to paintings to plants to women's fashion, everything in between. And it just ends up being, you know, incredibly good way to build a business. Very similar to like a brick and mortar retail shop online.

It's so interesting that digital commerce has just doesn't look like, yes, there's items on the storefront that you can buy. But imagine if stores had no employees in them and you couldn't like in real time, quickly ask, yeah, ask a human like, hey, like, you know, what size do you recommend here? Or do you have this, do you have this in another, you know, all these different things that ultimately drive like higher purchase volume in a retail setting that we just generally don't have online but do exist on Whatnot.

Yeah. What was the. Take me back to the start of the company. What were the, what was the competitive landscape like at the time? What was the, was this something that was like working internationally and you were like oh, of course, of course.

That was the whole, that was the whole thing. It was like everyone was like looking at China and You look at how some of China's retail giants got started. It was like, selling fruit and vegetables.

Yeah.

Like in live. And something that Americans just don't understand at all. You know, buying, like, bananas through, like, basically a farmer who's just like, yeah, check out these bananas.

I actually imagine you buying bananas.

I would. I would do that in Malibu. But anyways. But yeah, walk us through kind of like what was the early days of discovering kind of the opportunity.

Yes. So one of the funny things with us is so the live shopping market niche is, like, monstrous. You know, like nearly a trillion dollars.

And it's been big for a long time.

So I think it took off in like, a little after 2015 or so, and it was just like, ramped to a crazy.

And when did you get started? What year?

So we started whatnot in 2020.

Okay. Okay. So there was like, some. There were examples out there, like, this can work.

Although we had no idea. Yeah, we literally had no idea. So when we started whatnot, it was me and my co founder, Logan, and we were working at some bigger tech companies. We'd both started businesses before. We're like, we like to build.

Yeah.

Like, that's sort of the thing we enjoy to do.

Yeah.

And we're like, we don't like what we're doing now. Let's go build something new. And we were both really into buying and reselling things online. Collectibles. So, you know, at one point we were selling sneakers and, you know, in that whole world. And I. My first business was when I was seven and I started selling Pokemon cards online.

There we go. There we go. I love it. I was selling DJ equipment. He was selling people.

At the last YC batch, we were asking every founder that we interviewed, like, how they started their first. What their first business was. And a lot was like, somewhat collectible.

He's like, running Fortnite servers. Collectibles. Like, there's something about out. I don't know. I. I have kids. I don't know if you have kids. I want to get my kids to, like, do business online asap.

Well, yeah. And people that don't. People that are like, I want to start a business, but I don't have an idea. It's like business is just making something for one price.

Yes.

Or buying something for one price and selling it for a higher price. Like, that is just business. So just sneakers or sneakers or collectibles, Pokemon cards, whatever. Just very simple.

So. So I feel like a lot of the. A lot of the media platforms, they'll Start with just like the idea of like I want to share photos online, Instagram, or I want to have a place to host video online, YouTube. And then over time the commerce aspect comes in and becomes more feature rich. Whether it's, you know, tagged products with affiliate codes or sponsored content or an ad network. Like how mature was your thinking when you went to write like the first, first pitch deck or the first. Did you go through yc? We went through yc, yeah. So the YC application, like did you.

Apply with this idea or did you guys like take a little bit of a.

So I'd say we had like a quasi pivot.

Sure.

Which was so early on, the thesis was there's something around collectibles and social commerce because a lot of why you collect is not necessarily for the object but to sort of hang out and talk to people about your interests. And so our initial pitch was basically a social commerce like marketplace for Funko Pops, which are like little vinyl dolls. And that was it. That's what's in the YC application. And we didn't have any idea we were going to do video. It sort of looked like a standard marketplace with a follow button and a cool handful of features.

So was it creator led in the sense that I as the collector come and share pictures and inventory and details about particular products that I have in stock?

Yeah, it would basically be that. So you like, you'd have a profile, you could follow it, you could post your stuff, there's DMs, got it, chat with people.

Yeah.

And how many investors. Obviously you managed to pull it around together, but how many investors passed because they were like, sorry, I'm not backing your niche toy marketplace.

Yeah.

I mean it's funny now because the amount of money we've raised is like ungodly, godly large, you know, but not.

Even, not even large numbers.

Not even, not relative to the valuation. I mean you've raised like just under a billion dollars. You're sitting at 11 billion. It seems like also the stakes right.

Now for, for raising an ungodly amount of money are like, if you, if your business doesn't work, does everyone in the whole world lose their job? And as long as you're not there, like have fun or people are like.

I have to get carb stars on my projects, I'll take 2 billion.

But yeah. So when did the video aspect come in? What were the thinking? And how did you think about the first design and then start iterating?

Yeah. So I'd say like, I'm a purist when it comes to building product, which is like, you stay close to your customers, you talk to your customers and you figure out the problems they have. And so as we were building our Funko Pop marketplace, we just knew everyone on the platform, we knew all the sellers, we were friends with them, and we could see them hacking sort of social media video in interesting ways. In particular, trying to run like auctions in live video.

Oh, so they'd be going live on Twitch or other platforms and then selling on whatnot.

Yeah. So the actual real initial example was we were following. I was following a seller on Instagram and I tapped into their Instagram Live and they were trying to hold auctions in the comments. And the latency on Instagram live video, at least at that time was like 30 plus seconds. So they basically have like put up the item, run a clock, and then once the clock stopped, they'd start taking the bids and the comments. And I invited my co founder and we got into a bidding war and it was just like really fun. We're like, huh, why is no one.

Built but sort of broken?

Yeah, like what? Why has no one built mobile video auctions? Just sort of felt obvious.

Yeah.

And then people don't realize unless you've bid on an online auction, you have no idea how thrilling it is. So I've bought cars on Bring a Trailer and once you start bidding, it is just. There's nothing more entertaining on the entire planet.

The more I get to know you, the more you're like, actually, gamification really works on me.

It does work on me. No, it's incredibly fun. And that's even in the context of Bring a Trailer, which anybody that's used Bring a Trailer maybe goes on the site all the time, but they're like, this is so underdeveloped in comparison to every other application that I use. And so even just the dynamic of bidding against someone else and looking at their bidding history and seeing, okay, like this guy just bids a lot, he doesn't actually buy cars. Okay, this guy's bought like six cars in the last six months. Like, I've got a real, real competition here, so. But I still. Yeah, it's still the percentage of people that have actually like done like bought things online via auction, I think is relatively, it must be relatively low still.

Yeah. And so, yeah, we basically.

How quickly did you ship the, your version of the live auction product after that, that four weeks. Okay. Yeah, correct.

They were good APIs around that time because I remember wasn't Clubhouse doing live audio and they were partnered with some new company that was able to kind of do it like turnkey.

Yeah. It was this company, Agora. I think that's what Clubhouse was using. We actually didn't. Again, we made a bunch of mistakes. We didn't know anything about China, we didn't know anything about the low latency live video APIs, so actually stood up our own like low latency live video surfing infrastructure. If we hadn't, we probably would have built it in a week.

Yeah.

And it was not very good, but.

Like good enough to get good enough.

And the product was so clearly had product market fit. I'm not entertaining, as you guys can tell. And I did the first live stream because we gotta like make sure it works. And I sold $5,000 worth of Funko Pops in two hours.

Wow.

And so you're like, like unentertaining human being sells that much. We basically dropped everything the next day. And we're like, we don't know what this is, but this is really fun. This is it. Drop everything. We're all in.

Yep.

Okay.

Yeah. And $5,000 doesn't sound like a huge amount of money, but when you look at that in the context of an individual seller that probably has decent margins on that $5,000, and then they start realizing, I can do this every single day. And this quickly just becomes like a real page business out of like could be out of nothing.

So from there, help me understand the growth mechanism. Is it people screenshotting and sharing to other platforms? Are you running ads? Is there a referral program? Is there SEO? Like what's the flywheel? Because it's.

Well and part of it. Because I imagine like the people that are obsessively buying like Funko Pops are like pretty like they know where they're being sold. Right. Like these people, like, it's not like GT3 RSS.

Like people know, I'm gonna go find that on. Bring a trailer.

Yeah. Or there a handful of other platforms. Yeah. It's like people that are obsessive about a category are going to know all the surface area where selling is happening and just go to where the inventory is.

Yeah. Is that roughly.

Yeah, that's roughly correct for. For, you know, for almost the first three or four years of the business, we basically just focused on collectibles and enthusiast categories, which we sort of broaden out maybe like. Like if you're into cars and things like that. And it was fundamentally because these categories, people like to talk about what they're buying, where they're buying it and so we lean for the first four years, we basically just grew through referrals and word of mouth.

Was it pretty similar?

And what was it like with the investors once. Once the product was clearly working because I remember there were so many VC think pieces on live shopping and how it had broken out in China. And I imagine when they met you, they were like Lisan al Gaib. I finally found. I finally. But there was also. There was also like in the early days, like I remember there. I won't. There was like, there was like Pop Shop was also very hot. I think they raised around from like benchmark around the same time as you guys. So it seemed like very competitive at the time.

Also Amazon owns Twitch. They have selling infrastructure. Like there were lots of reasons why someone else might do this. The classic, like, what if Google builds it? What if Twitch does it? What if someone else does it?

Yeah, I'd say probably, at least for the. Even the first couple of years after we did live, we weren't like particularly hot.

Yeah.

A lot of people like looked at the side that we started in, which was all collectibles, and then sort of compared it to Asia and they're like, is that really the same? So like a lot of it was people holding, you know, doing auctions and they're not showing their face on camera. They're just show like the Funko Pop.

Okay.

And a lot of the other companies.

That'S like, they'll put the product out and wait till it sells and then put a new one up there.

Yeah, they'll like talk to you and you'll just like look at the product and you can.

And meanwhile in China, if people haven't seen these videos, it'll be like they'll. They'll show like it's. They'll just take a product, hold it up, move on. Take a product, hold up, move on. Right.

Yeah, we have those.

We have those.

People know it's crazy that that works at all. Like, that feels like such a worse experience than just an E commerce app with like a bunch of dropdowns and filters.

I don't know. Something about seeing a product in real life. I think it inspires some element of trust even than just seeing a digital photo or render.

Yeah. I think what we see is that people start to build relationships and trust the seller. So as opposed to in the previous E commerce world is where is it coming from? Who you don't know. People come to whatnot because they build a relationship with a seller. It's sort of like, like I Don't know, a local shop where you go and meet someone, talk to them. And so it just builds a lot more trust in the system.

So in that sort of, like, it seems like there were a few years where, like, you weren't as hot as, like, maybe you should have been. Was that driven by just not fully monetizing as well as you wanted, or like, choppy growth? Were you cyclical at all? Was it like the interest rate, like, crisis and SVB collapsing that like, put a damper on the hype? Or was it all pretty smooth?

Yeah, because I, because my, my memory of the whatnot hype cycle was like, okay, wow, this company has like a massive valuation, but I've never used it. And I think that's what a lot of people, like, recognize. Like, people are like, something can't possibly be real unless I'm using it every day. But you guys had this insane valuation and then every once in a while you're not. You don't go on a lot of podcasts, at least I haven't heard you on one before, but you just pop up with a massive up round and then just pop up with another massive up round. And so I guess what we're trying to get at, I think, is has the growth been relatively consistent and smooth, or has it been unlocking new categories, unlocking new use cases that have just really continued to drive the business in general?

It's been pretty smooth. We had one slow patch probably coming out of COVID where growth during COVID if you were like a consumer entertainment company, was just no one had anything to do. And so I think we were sort of lazy in our growth motion because it just basically we didn't have to worry about growth.

It just sort of like, boom is happening to you.

And then we had to get a little bit more deliberate. But I don't think we've ever grown under, like, you know, top line sales. I mean, revenue's probably never grown under 90% a year in the entire history of the business.

That's amazing.

And so it's been pretty good. And when people, like, there's moments in times where people get excited. So for a long time we're like, oh, this is niche. It's collectibles. And then we got fashion going and working. And then people are like, oh, that's exciting.

That's a big caveat.

And is fashion driven mostly by reselling existing inventory or are you partnered with specific brands or fast fashion companies? The shape of the market?

Yeah, I mean, it's pretty diverse. So there's some brand selling now. There's brick and mortar jewelry shops selling. I would say the dominant sort of theme in fashion is probably like old season inventory or overstock. So people, the reason it's really great is it's great for whoever owns that inventory because they can collect higher margin by selling it on whatnot. And if you're a part of that's.

The individual brand, a lot of times.

It'S somebody businesses think like T.J. maxx style stuff.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So people getting access to TJ Maxx Max style inventory and it's multi brand. It'll be like Lululemon but from last year.

And so you're going to buy 60% less or something.

Yeah, 60% less. And the deals are incredibly good.

Yeah, yeah. So people are kind of building their own business on whatnot from, from scratch, but then scaling to a point where they kind of have an operational relationship with different brands and they have a whole kind of strategy and probably pretty stable earnings. As a creator.

What's the competitive of landscape been like over the last couple years? Because I know it's been widely reported that TikTok's been willing to just burn billions of dollars trying to get shopping working on their platform. You have. There was another one, I can't even remember the name that popped up with crazy incentives that was like, I don't think it was live but what's the one that Flip. Flip. So Flip popped up and they were like free money. Money as a service we're just gonna get. And that was like. I remember people were like people would send me a text and it's like I just sent you $200 on flip. And so I'm like, this can't go. That's not gonna last that long. And so you've had a number of people kind of like, you know, trying to at least like enter this like overall kind of like entertainment meets commerce market. But how have you got it sounds like it's just been continuing to execute against your roadmap.

Yeah, we're pretty like as you said, we. I sort of dunk on much podcasts, you know, maybe we'll pop up every once in a while with a fundraise. We just try and stay really heads down and just deliver. Our thesis has always been it's going to be a competitive market and so how you're going to distinguish yourself is consistent delivery and then you know, continuing to add value to customers every day. And you know, our beliefs always been there's room for a purpose built Platform here, like say TikTok, amazing product. But people are going there to like watch videos, not necessarily shop. And I think that pattern is really hard. So we've always believed there's opportunity for a player who's purpose built to be world class at shopping and sort of, you know, shopping meets entertainment. And I think over the past six years we've sort of largely proven that out.

Is there a Mr. Beast of whatnot? True Power Law creator that's just, just a whole order of magnitude above everyone else in terms of seriousness and operational excellence, size of team, like that type of thing.

There are a few people who are like, I think whatnot's very similar to other entertainment platforms. So I spent like six years at YouTube. You know, it is Power Law oriented. And so the handful of people who are in the tippity top tier, you're looking at operations with like 100 plus employees at this point. So pretty big.

That's pretty remarkable. Yeah. Why do people say whatnot is gambling? It feels like collecting things that just like, I mean, obviously there's a little bit of risk. You buy GT3Rs and you find out that it is a broken.

Yeah.

And I think to be more specific, people are saying, like, certain sellers on whatnot are focused on mystery boxes. Hard, you know, mystery box. Right.

Like the power packs from Gamestop and.

Yeah. So you would have to like also say that. Yeah.

Do you have like policies around it? Do you have a personal stance? Like, how does that.

Yeah, because gamification too is like, that is something that sellers want. They make it easier for me to provide an entertaining shopping experience.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So first off, there's no gambling allowed.

Right out.

Like it's illegal and whatnot.

Okay.

You know, our trip trust and safety and customer experience team is probably our biggest team at the whole company. So we do take this stuff like very seriously.

Let's hear it for no gambling. We love that.

Let's hear it for trust and safety. Let's hear it.

Trust and safety team. They work really hard. We know it's a serious expense. Very good.

But yeah, so none of that's loud. I think people open packs of cards. It's fun. I opened packs of cards when I was a kid. I sold Pokemon cards when I was a kid. And so we try and give sellers the flexibility to run their business in the right way. We'll make them sure it's safe for customers and nothing illegal is allowed to stop.

Yeah. And so there is an element of randomness if you're selling just like I used to buy the booster packs of Magic, the gathering cards as a kid. And sometimes you get something that's a foil or something. But that's very different than putting money into the whatnot platform. Participating in some sort of ecosystem, then pulling out dollars directly. That's what gave gambling would be.

Right?

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

Thank you. What categories are you guys working towards that you're kind of most excited about? You said you unlock fashion, so the.

One, the future category I'm most excited about, it's still early innings is food and drink.

It feels like really hard to sell online.

Well, so it would be in a static world, but in a video based world where you can like. So like the. There's a farm outside of San Diego who sells organic citrus.

The bananas. Yeah, back to the bananas.

Back to bananas.

And so I'll order from them and the next day at my doorstep will be like organic tangerines and things like that. And so I'm really into. I'm a foodie and I think everyone increasingly is more conscious around what they eat, where they get their stuff from. And so I think being able to eventually, you know, get fresh meat from a farmer, get fresh fish from a lobsterman from Maine, There's a bunch of stuff we're gonna have to figure out logistics wise and all sorts of seafood is crazy. But wouldn't you rather like see it get caught and then at your doorstep the next day?

Yeah. With Starlink, the fisherman's gonna be out there and be like, all right, I'm just pulling up a crate of crab.

Who wants it?

Who wants it?

That's wild.

And then he pulls it up and there you go.

Go.

Yeah, that's. I can see that. I can also there's so many other categories of like collecting. I don't know if these are popular yet, but eventually I could imagine like a wine collector is going on there. And wine is something that you want if you're buying it. Like, unless you're like just an insane expert, you probably want somebody. Like part of going to a wine shop is being able to talk to the, you know, associate there and they can talk through like the origin and the winery and what made a certain case of wine, like special things like that. So wine makes sense. I think other categories of like collectible alcohol, like, you know, whiskeys and things like that. What about cars?

Cars would love dreaming of the day to do cars. I've wanted to do cars for a long time. We'll eventually get to it. The truth is we're growing so fast and so we're having to like, like make sure the core user experience is really good before we get outside of ourselves.

How rigid are you? Because Twitch just has just chatting or IRL for like it's a catch all. If you're not playing Fortnite or Minecraft, they have a catch all and then people kind of go and innovate in that category. Is it just like I will get deplatformed if I try and sell my car and whatnot or is it just like you're not ready to say like. Like it's actually a good experience but it is possible to do.

Cars are tough too because I mean think of, you know, you can buy a new car, it could be a lemon. You can buy, you know, an existent, you know, a used car and you know, even after, you know, on bring a trailer, there's like, you buy it and then you can get ppi, you win the auction, then you're getting the, the, the PPI done and then at that point you can back out. You don't get your like, I guess like feedback but at least there's like some protections there. So when you up the, when you up the price like you know, a thousand X it just gets.

So theoretically today, if you adhere to our platform policies, you'd be able to do it.

You could.

Theoretically it's, it would be almost impossible.

Sure.

Because you'd have to be able to pay for it with your credit card. You'd have to be able to, you know, like ship it in two days.

It's like I will be driving someone's.

Like challenge accept accepted.

Cannonball.

Across the country we have sold some cars on whatnot. Those have been more for collectible cars for specific events. So like the creator of Spawn sold like the Spawn Mobile and so we, we just did some custom stuff there. But it, but in practice, if we saw people starting to sell cars, they'd likely butt up against some of the just general policies we have today. And so we, we'd have to go and make the platform suitable for it.

How's it like is the majority of the team in la so we're all.

Over the place now.

So the true Covid company.

Yeah, we're true. Even before like we started a handful of months before COVID and our initial team, there's. Our designer was in Italy, two engineers in Brazil and me and Logan in L. A and so we've always sort of been distributed. I'm an introvert.

Did you go to YC up in the bay.

We did go to YC Bay and then we couldn't raise money and so we moved to Phoenix.

No way.

Yeah, because we had like no money and we just ran it. Ran the company from our garage in.

Phoenix and then I would off air. I would love to see who pass. I mean, even to a lot of people's credit. I mean, I saw Shiel from BTV posted yesterday. Like, if I got pitched whatnot and they were selling like dolls, I would have almost certainly passed.

Yeah, look, you would have. The only way you would have ever invested in whatnot in the early days was if you knew me or Logan deeply and had worked with us. Because that's the only thing that would have given you confidence. We always had the confidence because we, you know, we thought we were capable of doing a lot per period of time, but we're not. I didn't know that many people. I hate networking and you're coming here with like a funko pop thing. Like so, like, I totally do. I harbor like a little bit of.

Like you're getting the last laugh.

But I still think it's early, so I don't even worry about it. I just sort of like blinders on. We got to deliver. But yeah, unless you knew us, you would have sort of been a fool to invest.

How did the Logan Paul investment come around then?

I think we got introduced to him through Andreessen. So Andreessen did our Series A and then helped get us connected and he was really into Pokemon cards at that point, point in time. And so it was sort of like a natural fit. He's been on the platform a handful of times and so it was a good add on investor.

Yeah, I was reviewing his post talking about the investment and I was like, that makes so much sense because he's been so immersed with even early stage. Like vine was so primordial in terms of like what TikTok became. He's been so early to all these platforms. Makes sense that he could see the vision better than a lot of other people.

How international is the business today?

I think we're in nine countries now, so I think we got into international maybe about two and a half years ago. It's a really big focus for us. The international business is doing very well and I think you'll see us continue to expand this year.

Going on the offensive. Are we going to China? We're taking the fight with them. We're going to TikTok's front door. Bank dance. You're on notice.

We'll go anywhere where we think we can add customer value.

Yeah, that makes sense.

How crazy has the lebooboo side of the business been? We covered it.

What is the.

So I think we literally, by the time we did a deep dive on it, I think we may have top ticked that trend. Maybe they're still growing as fast as they were, but I mean, it pretty.

Much came out of nowhere and then was doing hundreds of millions of dollars in sales on whatnot. It still is, I think.

Wow.

Annually.

Yeah. Annual. Annual.

Like if you were to annual, you're like, no. Daily.

No, it's pretty big. You know, I think it's just like fun. You know, you sort of get a box and you see which one you get and it's kind of quirky and weird. So it like lends itself to making content and so it sort of takes off.

What's the relationship like with the company behind Living Booboo in that case? Because I can imagine that they want to capture some of the value created by the gamification and they have the ability to sell directly and they might even have the ability to auction things off. Like they want efficient pricing. And so how does the relationship work between you and the originator of the collectible?

I think it just depends. There are some collectibles companies we work with directly. I think we're working with Marvel and we've done a bunch of stuff in the toys and comic space. We haven't specifically worked with Labubu. Honestly, I think Labubu stuff took off to such large degree. Even though, like, again, I don't know, catching up.

Holy.

So no matter what, they were going to sell a gajillion boo boos. And so I think they were just trying to make sure manufacturing hits and the product is still good. So that makes sense.

What. Before you jump off, what. What does the next like couple years look like?

I think it's a lot of the same stuff. 1 just continue to make the buyer experience better, the seller experience better. You're going to see us get into more categories, more countries, and then make sure we build the product for more and more types of sellers. So more investments in brands is definitely in the corner cards. Very specifically, yeah.

Where does AI play a role? Do you need like a traditional machine learning system for recommendation algorithms or is there a role for generative AI in this business? Or is it more just like you're using tab completion models to write speed up the developer productivity of the company?

I think everyone's. There's the obvious spots where, yes, everyone uses cursor and whether you're an engineer or not, you can prototype and build stuff faster. I think we're seeing obvious applications in CX and Trust and Safety. Really good at detecting context in core ranking systems. I haven't seen anything yet that's much better than the state of the art machine learning models. So I'd say we're at least in core ranking systems, probably not a lot of LLMs. We're starting to use it more, more for like content understanding. So it's very good. You can take a live stream and like tell me everything about this live stream to feed into the ML models. So I think for us we're just trying to be world class at using LLMs to solve our customer problems. So we're making deep investments but it's, you know, wherever we can solve a problem.

Where does the community stand on AI generally? Are they like anti AI because it needs to be like a, you know, old fashioned collectible or, or do they see it as an opportunity, there will be new IP that comes from some kid prompting a model and then create some collectible phenomenon?

Yeah, I mean I think people still want to interact with people at the core. So in some ways whatnot, sort of anti AI in that it's like about the human experience. So I think anything that undermines the human experience will always have a little bit of a knee jerk negative reaction. And so for us again I think customers don't care if you're intact, they care if you're using AI, but everyday customer uses whatnot, doesn't care. So it's more behind the scenes stuff where we can make their lives easier. So you're a seller. Can we tell you what are the five major things happening with your business or generate tips for you or make it so you can list products really fast. We get all the context from them. I think that's sort of where we're at.

Is there a cohort of folks, folks that just, I mean like there are obviously tons of people that just watch Doug Demuro videos because they're interested in cars and they never buy a car on cars and bids or they never even buy a new car because they're just happy with their car, but they like him and they like him talking about cars. And are there users on whatnot who don't really buy stuff but watch a lot and just see it as like some sort of meditative, you know, content parasocial maybe Parasocial but also maybe just like it's kind of like background TV and they're Just like enjoying learning about different products and understanding the market.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah.

So on like any given day, the vast majority of people who are watching do not purchase anything. And the Average person watches 80 minutes.

80 minutes.

80 minutes a day.

80 minutes a day. That's so much.

Hit the gong. That's crazy. Well, thank you so much for coming on.

Thanks for having me. Really appreciate it.

Really great to meet. Always welcome when you have news. Anytime you want to pop your head up and announce a new.

Yeah, all right.

Thank you. Hanging.

Hang out. 80 minutes a day. Wow, that is a lot of minutes.

I need more minutes in the day.

Yeah. Sorry. Sam Altman, good luck with your 30 minutes a day of ChatGPT usage. Whatnot's got 80. Get those numbers up. Time to get those numbers up. If you're. If you're building anything except whatnot, apparently.

Tyler, can you find out the day that we did our Pop Mart deep dive?

Yes, I need to know that. I also need to tell you about Fin AI, the number one AI agent for customer service. Number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake offs. Number one ranking on G2. Oh, there was this funny, funny thing. So there's Profound and like GEO is actually in the timeline and of course we are partnered with Profound and so, you know, there's the conflict of interest here. You gotta get through it with a kid gloves. But the founder of Amplitude YC Company, Spencer Skates, he posted Too many VCs are funding AI companies that should be features. 12 plus startups have raised 72.8 million in the last few months for AI visibility. Basically SEO for LLMs. What profound does. We built it in three weeks with three people and shipped it for free. And he's going back and forth with David Burton who says, I personally demoed 12 SEO for LLM products. Wait, an 11 out of 12 sucked. Did you see this first?

Don't we have to talk about James's reply?

Oh, yes.

That was almost ratioed, Spencer. James replied, lack of focus kills. And he just shared Amplitudes.

I'm not a fan of that. I think it's not Golden Retriever coded.

It was pretty hardcore.

It's a little too hardcore for me. I think you got to put on the kid clubs when you're dealing with somebody who's standing down.

But to me, one thing that stood out about Spencer's original post, Spencer's wife, by the way, did the series A of whatnot.

No way.

Yeah.

Wow.

Incredible investment and skates. Oh, cool friend. Very cool. But they said 12 startups has raised 72 million in the last. That just doesn't feel like that much for a category that could be drive like billions and billions.

Yeah, we've talked to a bunch of these different companies. It feels like a lot for one sort of like thing all at once. It is interesting because.

It feels like.

A ton compared to how many weapons companies are being funded when two thirds.

Of that is profound.

Two thirds of the dollars. Yeah, but not of the number of startups.

Sure.

And so it is just interesting that it feels like a niche.

Yeah, but, but, but yeah, for, for all of venture, if something's a good opportunity, expect like at least 10 funded companies.

I mean I would expect that there are at least 12 new like CRM companies out there. Of course we are partnered with adeo Customer Relationship Magic, the AI native CRM that builds scales and grows your company to the next level. And so but it was just funny because David Burton is like putting all of these AEO companies in the truth zone. But Ahmed Omar says which one works? And he said profound, but I didn't buy because pricey and still too black box for me. But he was, you know, very interested that he.

Yeah, and this is, this is effectively why. This is why I. Yeah, I were. One of the reasons I invested and profound myself was Kareem over at Ramp was just like this is what works for us. That was enough of a. Of a cosign for me. Tyler, did you find out when we covered Popmart? Yes, it was August 29th.

Is that it's.

Oh my God.

Wait, did we perfectly top ticket August 29th?

Really not perfectly, but August it. It actually peaked on August 26. And so this is a good learning. If we ever start talking about something cool. Toys.

It's not cool anymore.

Collectible toys. Just know that we are probably top ticking it. If we're talking about some trend in technology. We're probably like 12 months. 12 months at least before the top for sure.

We have our next guest in the restream waiting room first. How'd you sleep last night, Jordy? How'd you sleep on your head?

My handicap.

Head over to eight sleep. Doc.

I think I got a decent.

Get a pod five. I did not do too well. I got six hours of sleep. I got a 79. I think you might have beat me today.

See the fact that you can get six hours and put up a 79 when I got seven hours and 10 minutes and put up an 81, it's like I'm gonna have Mateo reset.

I think It's a skill issue. You're just not focusing on sleep. So you're like waking up in the middle of the night and stuff. It's not good. Should we bring in our next guest?

Let's do it. I'm excited to talk to Chris.

I'm gonna let you take the intro.

Chris, welcome to the show.

Hey, guys, thanks for having me.

It's great to have you. I will give some quick background. Chris, you were the senior Advisor to the U.S. department of State office of the Special Envoy for Critical and emerging technology from 2023 to 2025. You're a foreign affairs officer for the U.S. department of State, the Bureau of Arms Control Verification and compliance from 2015 to 2023. And in 2024, you were the Deputy Senior Director for Technology and National Security on the National Security Council at the White House. And there's a bunch of other stuff that seems equally significant and important, but we can get into it. It's great, great to have you on the show. I'm sure it's been a busy, busy, busy year for you, but why don't you give a quick introduction on your background and anything I may have missed.

Thanks a lot, guys, and really appreciate you having me. Yeah. So I, as a longtime civil servant in the government and the State Department, I was detailed the Biden White house House from 2021-24. From 22 to 24, I was on the National Security Council. And I broadly had the Chinese technology portfolio the whole time and oversaw at the end of all of our, the Biden administration's critical and emerging technology related work from the White House that I went back, served in the Trump administration for a good chunk of time this year and recently left government. So really appreciate you guys having me, especially on today where obviously we had a big, a bunch of big developments kind of overnight with the president meeting with Xi and the kind of trade deal of which technology is obviously a very major portion.

Okay, so before we get into what's happened in the last 24 hours in the last week, can you give kind of your view on this year and how a lot of these different, how the trade war has been kind of evolving in your view?

Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, I think the administration has very much kind of gone back and forth on where they are in China policy. I think that you obviously have had enormous threats of tariffs and moves to kind of really kind of separate the US And Chinese economies on pretty fundamental levels. On the other hand, I think you haven't actually seen a lot of Implementation there, there's a continued desire to talk with the Chinese. And when it comes to some of the technology protection measures, where I think the Biden administration was more focused, it's been a little bit more stop and go. I think that generally since the first Trump administration, there has been a big pivot in Washington to move towards away from the policies of China of let's deepen integration in order to get them to change and towards a more competitive stance. I think first Trump administration really kind of initiated that. It was very much built on by the Biden administration, particularly in the semiconductors and AI spaces, where I think there was a pretty very conscious decision, I know there's a very conscious decision to really separate those supply chains and saying in those areas, we have to maintain as large of a lead as possible. It doesn't mean in every single one, but in the especially critical ones like advanced chips and AI. And then the Trump administration then I think took this and initially escalated with enormous tariff threats on China. China across the entire economy. The Chinese, I think, have very much taken to heart the lessons from the first Trump administration that what you have to do is punch back and punch back hard. And that has resulted, I think, in a little bit more of a detente, actually, than we've seen over the previous few years where I think the United States has been able to kind of slowly ratchet things up. The Trump administration has ratcheted things up a lot, so did the Chinese. And I think both sides have now kind of pulled it down a little bit.

It does feel like the renegotiation of US China relationship starts in 2016 with the new Trump administration. Hundred Year Marathon by Michael Pillsbury is an important point. That book, it seemed like it sort of went viral on Capitol Hill. There's also the rejection of American tech companies. But what else do you think kind of led us? What was like the inciting event, if there was one in this beginning, to discuss a renegotiation in US China policy? Is it Xi Jinping becoming effectively a dictator for life that kind of changing the perception of like, okay, well, they're not even going. They're not even trying to go for democracy. What other kind of like moments in history do you think of as the defining moments in the renegotiation of U.S. china relations?

Yeah, I think that's right. I think that China has kind of fundamentally. Well, China has fundamentally changed under Xi. I think there's some realization here that some of the promises of China political change in China and market based change are not going to happen. There have been very much market based changes in some senses. Right. They actually are much more deeply integrated into the economy. But it hasn't changed the fundamentals. You know, integration with the Chinese state and their companies. And from that flows kind of national security considerations. And I think, you know, Xi has obviously taken this in a, in a, in a much more authoritarian direction. And one can argue whether or not that was there all along. And actually, you know, maybe, maybe it was something that people missed in the 2000s. But, but I think very much in the mid 2015s, like you said, around 2015, 2016, people were starting to realize that we have to change course and particularly I think in 2017, 2018. And look, the initial Trump campaign I think really did change the narrative on China. I think that's pretty indisputable on certain things. I think we were starting to see a little bit of a changing narrative towards the end of the Obama administration. The last week of the Obama administration, they put out a big report, the President's Council on President Council on Science Technology put out a big report on the importance of maintaining a domestic semiconductor industry, which was the first time they'd really talked about that. And then obviously with the CHIPS act in the coming years, that became the major focus. But I think you have to give the first Trump administration credit for really changing the policy. And the Biden administration very much continued that. I think the approach was maybe not to have a massive confrontational policy across the economy, but to say in the areas that we care the most about, we are going to take pretty actions that four or six years ago would have been unprecedented to separate ourselves. And we are in a very different place because of that. I think we'll see kind of where we go going forward. It's a little bit of a, the last, like couple weeks have introduced some, some more complicating dynamics, I think.

Yeah, one of those was the rare earth elements debate. Has America been blindsided by the importance there? Were we miscalibrated on exactly how much leverage they had, like how much that poker chip is worth on the poker table of this trade deal.

Yeah. Because there was a point where people are like, wow, they're already using that play, right?

Yeah. Taking away the passports of the researchers and then also just banning exports, really crippling our ability to build with those rare earth elements. But is that something that we've known about for the last 10 years or has this been a surprise? Or is this like, or is that just like one of the many chips that we expected to be played the whole time.

Yeah. I mean, people in Washington clearly knew that the Chinese had dominance of Rares. You'd have to kind of be under a rock to not know it. But I think you're totally right that, that no one really did anything about it. And, and part of that is that, look, it's hard. It's so hard to get things done in Washington. Yeah, that's about right. It's, It's. It's hard to get things done. And it's hard to get things done that are like, you know, you'd need a lot of investment and a lot of coordination and like, you know, massive resourcing and coordination is exactly the thing that's. That's really difficult to get things done in Washington.

It took a chamas back to really make a move. Right. Empty materials.

Oh, he did. Yeah, he did do that. Spac. That's crazy.

Yeah. I mean, that's like. I think that's the biggest success out of. Out of all of them.

Totally.

Yeah. And I think, look, Washington is actually. Can be good at responding very quickly in a crisis. Right. Like Operation Warp Speed was very effective, for instance. But obviously it took until there was a pandemic for us to do something like that. So I'm hopeful that now people will take this very seriously. I wouldn't be surprised if we start to see legislation on Capitol Hill to actually resource this, because even though the administration. I think the administration is focused on it now and takes it very seriously, there are also. We really need to get money.

Right.

And exactly how. Where that, you know, how that money manifests, whether it's, you know, equity investments or loans or some kind of, you know, other Defense Production act authorities or something else. Like there's. There's going to have to be some government dollars here, which certainly can be stretched a long way. But we're, but we're going to have to do that. I think just to your original question, though, the thing that's surprising, I think people were very surprised that they played this card as expansively as they play it right now. Right. And go ahead.

Yeah, no, continue. And then. And then I want to get into kind of the last 24 hours.

Yeah. The surprise on the. Playing the card early.

Yeah. Look, the fact is this move was way disproportionate to anything that we had done effectively. It was saying, you know, there was this. Affiliates ruled the United States put in place, which basically fixes a big loophole in export controls. Like the way the.

That.

The way that Export controls work is every single company has to actually be listed on the control list to be to be controlled. And if the subsidiary isn't listed, then you can export to them. That's not the way that sanctions work. The way the sanctions work is if the company is listed, then every company they own is sanctioned. And you better not work with sanctioned companies because otherwise you're violating sanctions for various arcane, you know, reasons that have.

To do with nothing own goal there.

Exactly, exactly. So we basically put in place there was a regulation that said, hey, we're going to fix this really obvious loophole that is being blatantly exploited. That also is just very logical. And the Chinese response to that was to go way over the top and say we're going to cut you off from all the rare earths and threaten your entire economy. They didn't think that was proportionate. I think what they were trying to do was send a signal that we won't tolerate any additional export controls on any entities in China and we want any additional restrictions on our access to technology. We're going to go over the top. It was really risky for the Chinese because the US does have big leverage over the Chinese too. Right. There's two things that they're extremely dependent on for us that we could cut them off from. The first is the US dollar. Their financial system is still very reliant on the dollar. Obviously you're trying to extricate that. That would have enormous implications. But they're reliant.

What would that look.

And the second is semi condition.

What would that look like?

Like sanctions on banks or something like that. Like, I think it's something the Chinese fear quite a bit. Now to be clear. I'm not advocating for that and that would be a really significant move, but just it's something that would be a, it's a lever that we have. The second is semiconductors. Right. They, they're not good at, you know, they have limited 7 nanometer. Can't do anything beyond that. And they're very, all their whole industries are very reliant on chips made with US tooling and so on.

Okay. So I want to get way, way more into chips. But, but to kind of ground the next part of the conversation like catch us up to speed on the, on what, what you kind of. What your takeaways were and what we know out of the meeting in South Korea.

Yeah, so I think basically the, the deal was sort of a freeze for. Freeze. They agreed to freeze implementation of their massive escalation rule. We agreed to freeze, escalate. We agreed to freeze our affiliates.

Rule, rule.

So I think you think of it as largely it locks in the status quo for the duration of the deal. There was various other things that it resolves that are recently created issues. The Chinese agreed to buy soybeans. We resolve rare earth access, etc. It did. It did not. You know, we avoided some of the worst case outcomes. There was no agreement to send, you know, our votes to advance chips to China. There was no, we didn't accept like a Trojan horse package to like, hey, we're going to build a bunch of Catl and BYD factories in the United States, which would have been very bad for us battery and auto industry in the longer term. But I think China really does feel emboldened right now because they kind of punched us in the face. The rarest rule and what happened was we both de escalated a little bit. We'll see what happens going forward. But the status quo to a degree benefits China. They're trying to buy time, they're trying to circumvent our controls. And if we're not willing to kind of continue to, to engage in this, in this kind of technology protection effort, then every day the Chinese get a little better at working around our controls.

So what, what can you say about. Or what do you, what's your read on the actual dynamic between Xi and Trump? Like, I feel like these two guys have been in the game for a long time. I have to imagine. My, my part of me wants to believe that they enjoy the, this like, you know, deadly dance that they play with each other, but maybe that maybe they're just like deeply frustrated Putin and.

Xi Jinping kind of being like, yeah, we might live forever. Yeah. You think you're going to make it to 160, bro? He's like, yeah, totally. I got some scientists that are cooking up crazy stuff. I love that. This is like hot mic. Who knows if it's real? Might be a psyop. But I like to imagine that they're just browning down. Who knows? Yeah. What do you think?

I will say that was not the first time I've heard leaders of countries speak to the desire to live to 150. Here's some interesting things. You work at the White House and I have heard that before.

Not from them, but I'm picking up what you're putting down. That's great.

Yeah.

But no, I mean, look, I think that Trump's obviously coming at this from this deal making perspective. That's not surprising. And obviously there is political dynamics Here on top both, because I think there's threats to the Chinese kind of both pose threats to hollowing out industry, but also are kind of doing acute things to cause pain to some of Trump's political base. Like, I think that the soybean person and things like that are doing that. Yeah, exactly. On the other side, I think that Xi is very much seeing himself as managing the relationship for the long term. I mean, what hovers obviously over all of this is Taiwan as well, and the desire to kind of slowly move the United States away from Taiwan, which is ultimately his long term historical perspective and goal. So in some ways they're coming at this from a little bit opposite. I think Xi is from the much, much longer term angle and Trump from a shorter term angle. But I don't think they necessarily have hugely different perceptions of the broader dynamics at play here.

Okay, so on the chip front.

Okay. Yes. So we got the rollback. Yeah. Let's move on to chip.

Sorry. So I don't even know, maybe it was two, three, four weeks ago at this point, but somewhere in the last month or so they were basically like, we don't want any of your chips at all. And I didn't really know how much to read into that at the time.

People, it seemed like the team wants Nvidia chips, but the CCP said so.

If you're an AI, you gotta justify.

Why you'd want Nvidia chips over Huawei chips. We're working hard. Let's support America's. Yeah.

So Xi wants to build up real national champions that can get to the cutting edge or leading edge. And at the same time, the AI industry wants to be able to make as much progress as they possibly can. And what was your read when that news broke? And then how much do you think they're still kind of gunning for Blackwell grade chips?

Yeah. So number one, I think they are. The Chinese will take all of the US Chips that they can get in a vacuum.

Vacuum.

Like, I think that there's some negotiating ploys here and I think they were holding the H20s kind of hostage because they wanted to turn the tables on us and get us to give them Blackwells, which obviously didn't happen. There is a possibility that there's the information filtering up to Xi is saying, actually we can do this ourselves. You shouldn't take these.

And that would be like Huawei being like, like, no, give us. Just keep the money coming back to us so that we're close and we'll be a lot closer in a few years, if we can take those dollars, reinvest them, et cetera.

That's right. But the problem is there's just no way that China can meet their domestic demand with Chinese chips alone. I mean, if we can have all sorts of debates about Chinese production numbers, and I'm happy to engage in those, but fundamentally, the United States cannot meet demand for our own AI ecosystem with all the semiconductor production in the world and all the best companies. So it's obviously impossible that China, who has a much more nascent ecosystem, is heavily restricted on tooling. And I think all the estimates of their 7 nanometer production capacity, not to mention obviously they don't have any 5, 4, 3, 2 production capacity, is somewhere in the realm of 125 5th to 1/100 of the United States. There's just no way that they can fill their domestic demand with Chinese chips. So any effort to say we're going to not take any US chips is going to inherently hobble their AI industry. I mean, I guess at some point, if you're very close, the marginal value of that would be such that you're willing to take it. But I think just given the dynamics we're broadly seeing with US AI companies, I'd be very surprised if they were actually, when the cards were down, were going to reject Nvidia chips.

Is Jensen being in South Korea at the same time just a coincidence, or did he. Do you think he sort of planned around that?

Do you think anything with Jensen's a coincidence these days? No, I don't think so.

I mean, he's basically.

He's the CEO of the biggest company in the world. Like, he should be there regardless. Yeah, yeah.

He's running a. He's basically. Nvidia is basically a country. I mean, both are true. Market cap is like, you know, bigger than.

Their market cap is equivalent to twice Canada's gdp, something like that.

It's greater than Germany's gdp.

Remarkable. Not that you can really compare those. It's kind of apples to oranges.

You wrote a piece that you published last night around why Chinese car investments are a national security risk. Would love for you to kind of like give us a preview on that for front.

Yeah, I mean, the point we were making, there was a lot of rumors in advance of the summit that another thing that the Chinese were dangling, which did not come to fruition, was saying, hey, appealing to the dealmaker element of Trump and saying, hey, we'll give you a bunch of investment in the US in exchange for whatever as part of the deal. But that's kind of very obviously is a Trojan horse. There's. We very much restrict Chinese investment in critical industries in the US via the CFIUS process right now. And obviously, particularly given the rare earth controls, you would think that that would. I think it has shown that we really can't be dependent on China for critical supply chains. So if we were to have BYD factories, like I was saying before, like BYD factories or CATL factories in the U.S. that is just as bad as relying on Chinese graphite for batteries. Right.

So when you, when you say Chinese investment in the US you mean them setting up local factories, which is different from making equity. Yeah, yeah. Because China wants us to make as many equity investments in their companies as possible. Because that gives, I mean, think about. DJI is a good example. There was American venture capitalists that were in dji. They have huge returns just like sitting there. They now have an incentive to say, hey, we shouldn't, we shouldn't ban dji. Like, it's not a problem that China can fly millions of drones over all of our cities. Just worry about something else. We saw this with ByteDance too.

Yeah, no, that's right. And there's a whole separate conversation on outbound investment and what we should think about with US investors investing in China and then with inbound investment, the question is, what are the risks that Chinese. And not passive investment, that's very different. But active investment and particularly setting up large facilities in key supply chains, what are the risks here? And the trend we've seen over the course of multiple administrations has been to take those threats much more seriously. So I think that's a positive thing. I think that the other thing the administration is going to have to really think about is first of all, what are the investments we need to make in those supply chains if we're not going to accept that and we're going to diversify not just from like Chinese batteries, but also like all the way down the Chinese battery supply chain. What does that mean? But also we have to think about kind of what are the sectors, where is. Where we got to the car was what happened with cars. And we talked about in the piece, what are the sectors where just having large scale deployment of kind of connected Chinese products in that area poses a risk. And I think there was a recognition in the Biden administration that actually electric vehicles in general have, you know, if 20%, 30% of the cars on the road were Chinese and could theoretically be like, you know, switched to Beijing. Yeah. I mean, they could cripple Our transportation infrastructure overnight. Right. That is something that wasn't a, that was unacceptable. So we've effectively banned Chinese cars but did it before there was big market penetration. So I think we have to kind of think about what are the other like. I think there needs to be some pretty hard conversations on robotics.

Yeah. So what do you think about Unitree just selling humanoids on Walmart.com we were thinking about buying one here because I've been very vocal over the last year, as long as we've been doing the show that I think it's super disappointing that we let GoPro should have been the dominant American drone company. And there's a longer list of companies that could have made great products in that space. Maybe people would have to pay slightly more. But we just let DJI flood and from what we know, DJI was just willing to lose money for a very, very, very, very long period of time in order to just take market share. And so when I think about humanoids and I'm not going to put a Unitree robot in my home, but if they're the cheapest and if they're kind of the leading edge right now there's a scenario where we just let them flood the United States we with humanoid robots and maybe they're adding value at home or in factories in different settings. But then it's just obviously like you just watch any sci fi movie and you can understand like the potential like national security risk of allowing robots that can be teleoperated to, you know, just proliferate all over the country. And so it just feels like hopefully that comes up at some point in some of these discussions of just hey, maybe we make the call to not allow this to happen like it did with drones.

Yeah. I think we just have to have kind of class based regulations on these things that says anything that fits these parameters. A robot in your home that's capable, that has equipment and audio. Yeah. And can, has mapping technology and maybe has some kind of appendage. I don't know. You could figure out a way to do it like just, just cannot be sold in the United States if it involves, if it's from a Chinese company or Chinese, Russian, North Korean. Right. Like the broader set of actors. The only category of, of items that we've done that for as a class is vehicles. But I think that needs to be, you know, we need to think about, we have the tools to do it and we need to think about what are the areas where that pose kind of similar risks.

And you're worried that we'll wait until there's a robot uprising to, to do something like this. I mean, you said earlier, like the US is really good at reacting in a crisis. And I just hope at some point, if I'm China and you're letting me sell humanoid robots into your country at scale and you're a political adversary, I'm laughing at you. It just seems totally unserious.

Yeah, I think it is easier to do these types of things before there are huge market impacts. So part of the reason that the cars move was doable was because first of all, industry was very supportive. We had Detroit banging down the door, being like, we're going to get killed by the Chinese in the same way they are with tariffs. But second of all, the market penetration of all the Chinese car companies was very close to zero still, partly because we had such significant tariffs, although those were going to become muted in effect. So if you have an area where it's still pretty nascent, it's doable and humanoids are perfect.

Like the second once you have a million Americans that have spent 20 grand on a humanoid and they're like, I'm not. That's right, like, I want to buy the next version. I like this one. You know, it's not like we've now seen the Chinese can build hit consumer products. There was a long time where people didn't believe that was true. But clearly with TikTok and DJI, like it's no longer a debate.

And DJI is a great example because you know, it's a much more complicated to do this for UAVs right now because DJI is everywhere. Also all sorts of like state and local and municipal governments, even the federal government still uses DJI drones. They're just, they have such dominance that like even if we did do it, we would have to do some kind of mitigation steps even to implement it. If we did it today, which maybe we should, but it just is massively complicated. Whereas if you do it decently, it's just you could just kind of cut off the appendage.

Yeah. Anybody that disagrees about the national security risk here and the potential downsides, like you can't believe that like if you believe that Israel was able to run like a decade long operation to get pagers like sold into the right group of people that they could then carry out this, you know, coordinated action and then you think it's safe to just like let robots from an adversarial nation flood our country? Like, I don't know what to do. I think you're just, you're lost blissfully.

And they won't let us develop the domestic robot industry unless we do something like that too. Right. Like they will consistently undercut us and we'll never, our companies will never get mature enough where they'll be able to benefit from the economies of scale where they can even remotely compete with the Chinese. Instead, they're going to be 100% off.

We were having this debate before you. Not debate really, but before you got on. It's like, like I believe that China can simultaneously buy as many leading edge chips, Blackwells, whatever, whatever will give them and simultaneously provide the long term capital to allow their own industry to catch up on whatever timescale it needs to catch up on. Like what is the tolerance level for.

Is there basically, is it possible for us to run the Chinese playbook against them? We subsidize Blackwells, flood their markets with Blackwells and then, then they can't go down the learning curve with SMIC and SME and Huawei. And then at the last second when they're super dependent, we pull it back when we need to. Right before, I guess, ASI hits or something like that. That's the basic thesis debate.

I mean, I think two things with that. One is that history would show that's never something that the Chinese are going to accept. Right. They've never been okay being reliant on any Western technology of any significance. They also. So we've been very clear about our intention to keep this dominant. Now I think you can't put that toothpaste back in the tube. They're going to go. We saw they were going all out in indigenization back in 2020. It's even more the case now. Their constraints are not desire or cash. They are actual access to equipment and tools. And we're lucky that the SME and not just lithography machines, but also etching deposition machines, like anything, all the kind of related advanced equipment is among the most complicated technology in the world.

But we can assume that they're actively. That they have thousands or tens of thousands of people that are tasked globally with just collecting as much information as they possibly can to reproduce it locally.

Yeah. The only reason this works with chips is because this is the most complicated equipment with the most complicated supply chains on earth. Right. Like an UV lithography machine is literally the most complicated machine ever, ever made by man. So therefore it's possible the Chinese can actually indigenize every single thing on earth except this. Like that is a Logically consistent outcome. The other thing I would just say with respect to your thesis is if that was the play, the more effective way to do that would be to cut them off from everything completely. But then tell them you can have it via US Cloud because then you can cut it off at any moment's notice. You could debate if that's a good idea or not because. But like chips are going to be a lagging effect, right? It's going to be two to three years until all the GPUs kind of go bust or get depreciated or you need to architecture.

It's interesting.

What is the most current debate on the ground in Washington around like Blackwell specifically.

So there is the question of whether or not we should ship them. But actually the more pertinent question is there's a piece of legislation called the GAIN AI act that's moving on the Hill that actually the Senate passed as part of the NDAA the must pass annual defense bill and is being debated with the House right now and it's sponsored by Senator Banks and basically it says he's a Republican from Indiana. And basically it says, look, we're not going to weigh in on the question of whether or not we should ship chips to China. That's a separate question. But regardless of where you are on that, that American companies should get priority access before Chinese companies. And it basically requires before shipping any chips to China that are controlled and authorized, it requires American buyers to get right of first refusal, which I think is a, from my perspective is a pretty logical approach. Whether or not you support or oppose AI chip exports to China, saying that America should have them first is logical. It also does one other thing. The most recent text which exempts trusted U.S. exports to trusted U.S. persons to anywhere other than China from license requirements. The reason this is important is actually there's a lot of pending deals in the Middle east right now from U.S. data centers that are trying to make billions of dollars of deals in the Middle east those are subject to license requirements. There is a lot of negotiations on whether or not those can go and they've been held up for a long time. But this would say as long as the government certifies them as a trusted US person and they're subject to a couple standard restrictions like they keep 50% of their computing power in the US then they can go without US government approval. So really basically trying to prioritize US customers in any decisions vis a vis Chinese companies and also US companies vis a vis any decisions on the international AI Bill out.

Do you think Jensen will be happy with that?

Nvidia has been pretty public of their opposition to the bill. But look, my response is that just.

They just want the flexibility to do deals effectively because it's not exactly a secret that Nvidia, they have a Shanghai office and R and D center like they're trying to. I've joked that Jensen is the juggler, just sort of like juggling a bunch of different national interests always. And I guess that's his duty to the shareholders. But what is their specific. Do you know what their specific opposition is?

I think any regulation is generally opposed and I think that there's. They're concerned it would kind of hamstring their operations or result in kind of bureaucratic complexities that actually would prohibit them from selling anything to China, even if it kind of was prohibited. I guess I think that this is a good faith effort to work to develop a system that would allow that, if that's the administration's policy position to do so. I think my response would generally be like if the question is really is there a supply shortage of GPUs or not. Right. Because if there is, I think it's pretty clear with Blackwell that there's more demand than there is supply, then I think that US Companies probably. It's not surprising to say that the US Government for the US Government to say that US companies should get priority over these, over foreign companies for these chips. If there's not, then the bill in theory would have no impact on their ability to sell them to others. Now certainly I think there's tweaks to the language and things that people would be. I know that Senator Banks and his staff are happy to work with industry on. But that's the intent here. I'd hope that we could come to a resolution there.

Makes sense. Really enjoyed this conversation. Come on again soon we'll reach out. I'm sure there'll be much more to talk about in the near future.

This is fantastic. Thank you so much, Chris.

Thanks guys. Appreciate you having me. Look forward to talking more in the future.

Cheers.

See you later. Bye. Let me tell you about public.com investing for those that take it seriously. They got multi asset investing. They got industry leading yields. They are trusted by millions, folks. And our next guest is already in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring in Max June from Legora into the TVP Ultradome.

Boom.

Max, how are you doing?

Welcome.

Welcome to the show.

I'm great.

Good to see you. How are you?

Congratulations on all the progress Introduce yourself the company and then give us the news.

Of course. I'm Max Dunastrand, CEO, co founder of Ligora. We're an AI powered workspace for lawyers. We just closed our series C. Founded the business back in spring 2023.

How much did you raise? John's ready. John's ready.

150 million on a one.

Even.

I got all of these pictures back from the gym this morning from Stockholm. They had bought this huge inflatable unicorn. Maybe we can send you something. It literally takes up half the office.

Amazing.

Added it to the calendar so you can, you can book it.

Are. Are you a YC company?

Yeah, we were in YC winter 2024.

Winter 2024.

Wow. Yeah.

Winter 24.

That's insane.

18 months.

Months.

This must be one of the fastest growing YC companies of all time.

That's I think so actually crazy to seriously.

That's impressive.

So the VCs, they'd said we need 10% max. And you're like, best I can do is 8.3. Yeah.

I'll tell you actually this one was easier to negotiate than the first one I did with Benchmark. When I did the one with Benchmark, we sat down, we took an Excel, Chatham put in some numbers and I went, there's no way, dude. And he goes, I've never done a deal where I didn't get 20%. And then we started going down on the like point decimals and I think we landed on something like 18.51%. It was extremely.

You got it. Back off just a little tiny bit.

It was good. He broke his rule for you. You. So okay.

So how. How are you?

We.

We've talked to a bunch of.

Yeah. Let me give some context here because good friend of mine is a lawyer and, and the firm he's at, he's. He's on there like tech kind of advisory. I don't know, whatever, whatever, you know, big law. And he's been evaluating products and about a year ago he like was not impressed at all. And when I saw him, I saw him last week and he was telling me that he now is seeing AI tools do. He called it like $100,000 worth of diligence in 10 minutes. And he was like huge wake up call. He was thinking about. He didn't even think his firm would be able to evolve to that. Even though he, even though. And this is a big, you know, big firm. But he, he was like, clients are going to realize like what's the game has changed like very quickly and not every law firm is going to be, is going to react quickly enough. And so yeah, kind of want to get, yeah, wanted to get the update on like just how much has changed kind of over the last year because there's product innovation that's happening and then there's just like the models are getting better and they're both feeding into each other.

Well, I kind of view it like this. Here's the model capabilities, here's the product capabilities, and here's the people capabilities in terms of using those products and getting the most out of it. So there's a huge sort of gap still to be filled in terms of what people are using the products for. I mean, back in 2024 when we were part of YC, Liguora was a glorified GPT wrapper with sort of good rag, good citations, solved compliancy and data issues. But now I think your friend is right. The products have moved from being a conversational simple AI into something that solves much more sophisticated tasks. And it looks very differently across transactional work or in litigation or in, in house work. If you take due diligence as an example, I mean, it's effectively the exercise of looking through a large number of documents and understanding why what is within those documents. And I think LLMs were better at reading than writing initially, which is quite an important distinction. So we came at this whole problem very much from the review angle. I think some companies, I mean, look, we were not the only ones who realized that legal and LLM was going to be a nice marriage. They came at it from the thing like research angle or drafting angle, which was much, much harder to build a good company on in the early days. And I think now what's happening is, I mean, I don't know how many apps you use on your phone. I use maybe five. And what's happening is the lawyers don't want to learn 20 different point solutions. We're bringing everything into one suite. And then with things like mcp, we can actually also allow the really sophisticated law firms to bring in corpus of their own bespoke tools and capabilities, which I think gives a much richer environment.

I have a very painful lesson around diligence, which is why I care. I'm very excited about this technology. I worked on a deal last year before we started the show, and we were in diligence on this company and there was a single document that killed the deal and the lawyers had already racked up like $100,000 bill before we, before we, before we found it. And it ultimately meant that, you know, all the parties walked away, but we were still sitting there with like this massive bill. And it was just like unbelievably painful because it wasn't even complicated, it was just the business was incredibly old. And there was just this one deal that they had done like a decade ago that meant that it was just like kind of dead in the water.

Yeah, I mean, I mean, what's, what the tech allows is that you can also do a DD on the sell side before you even put the documents into the data room. And you say, hey, let's go open it up to the other side.

Right?

Like it's, it's, it's funny that it's called a data room, right, because it used to be a physical data room with a bunch of boxes.

You would go into that room, you.

Would open it up, you would start reading all the documents. Then we got control F and you could start control F ing for different change of control clauses. And then came the early versions of the sort of AI systems where actually the seed for what became Leguara was founded back with the early BERT models, if you, if you remember those. And you have to fine tune the system to find specific provisions. And now what's cool is you basically just ask the query in natural language and the system understands it. So you can even go in there and say, on a scale of 1 to 10, how much of a smoking gun is this document? And the AI will just respond and provide its reasoning. So I think in the comment that you made, will some law firms disappear? Absolutely. I think law firms will go through a huge wave of consolidation, frankly, because they've never had tech and sort of real scalability as a weapon. And I mean, you have the big four in auditing. And tech has been very good for auditing. It's very good with numbers, very good in finance. Tech has never been good at language until large language models. And so now I think you'll see increasingly firms leverage these things to not only sort of out deliver their competitors, but also to out price them some.

Is the solution for law firms, you think, transitioning to kind of value based pricing flat? More like project fees. Because if you compare this to the creative world, the best logo designer in the world is not going to charge an hourly rate because they might be able to make that logo in 30 minutes. You can't charge a $100,000 hourly rate, but companies will pay $100,000 for a great logo. So is that, which is correct?

I think that's correct. For a lot of work. I don't think it's correct for all the work. So I'll give you an example. When we negotiated this term sheet, we were working with Goodwin and our partner Craig there. And when I need his expertise to help me negotiate the term sheet, he's worth a lot more than his hourly rate, which is, I mean arguably already high, but it's worth a lot more than that in that specific case. But when his team is reviewing simple documents, maybe that's not worth as much if AI can do that. So I almost view it as if AI can do a specific piece of task, it will do it. The only question is like, when does that get transacted? And I think you'll see value based pricing in taking a portion of the deals. The best law firm in the world arguably is Wachtel and they don't do hourly rates at all. They just say this is the price to win and you pay them and they get a portion of that. But I'm also actually seeing another way where really big companies, like the big tech companies are going to law firms and saying, hey, we're going to pay you $200 million over the next two years and we want you to do all of this work. Can you do it? And the law firm is then forced to say, are we going to turn down $200 million or are we going to figure out a way to do that? And of course then tech will be part of that answer.

So I actually, yeah, it's about creating the right incentive to adopt the tech versus like currently some firms are going to resist it. And being like, I actually like doing diligence the old fashioned way where we could get three people to spend, you know, all these hours. This was super fun. I'm super excited for you guys. I have a feeling we'll have you on a lot more in the near future.

Just remarkable, remarkable progress, which we wish.

We had more, wish we had more time.

But I love to see a YC company winning and I rarely see one winning this hard. This is incredible.

This hard. This is especially. I gotta give a shout out like we.

Since we started in Europe, we just launched in the US back in March. So since then we've killed the team to almost 50 people. And it's like the growth that's coming in the US is frankly what we're doing.

Congratulations. Thank you so much, guys. Thank you so much. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one.

Cheers.

Bye.

Before we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about adquick.com, out of home advertising made easy and measurable. 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. Our next guest is Christina from Vanta. She's been on the show multiple times.

She's back.

She's back. We're getting an update. How are you, Christina? Great to see you. Thank you for supporting us for this entire year. It's been fantastic. You've been on a tear. What's new in your world?

Well, I got a hat in the mail from you all and it's great.

Favorite.

Well, you should have gotten a jacket. You should have gotten a jacket too. But the team may have sniped it. Oh, the jacket never showed up.

Jacket never showed up. But look really into the hat. So thanks for that.

I'm glad.

I'm glad things are going well. So little bit lot of AI going on with everybody as you're probably talking about getting excited for Vanticon, the security and compliance event of the season, and just did some surveying of security folks about how they're feeling about AI.

Yeah.

We were talking to the CEO of CrowdStrike yesterday. Very interesting nuance. Some. There's basically like AI generated viruses now where the actual code that hacks the system is generated on the fly by a generative AI model and can do reasoning. Yeah.

So your malware, it's gonna be great.

I'm sure.

Can think like a human being.

I'm in danger. I'm in danger is what I feel like. But how are people feeling? What are you learning from the customer base, from the folks that you're talking to on the ground?

Yeah. So we talking to folks on the ground. And then we also surveyed thousands of security leaders around the world and the results actually super, super encouraging on the AI front. And then I actually even guessed. So we found like four in five security leaders are using or plan to use AI agents to prevent against those sort of attacks.

Sure.

So the solution to the attack, to the AI agent attacks is. Is good guys.

In fact, more AI.

Yeah, of course.

Yeah. Long tokens.

Yeah.

So there's that piece. And then we found like kind of a similar percentage, but 70% of folks are letting those agents give input on security strategy.

Yeah.

And it's like giving it to a person who's considering it, etc. We're in like default, let the agent talk to your folks and influence them versus, like default skepticism. And again, this is among Security folks. So I was actually pretty impressed with this.

Do you have a sense of how token intensive some of these processes are? Because I imagine that one of the things you could do is just the benefit of AI is that it doesn't mind working 247 for months on end. So you could just say, actually go through every single line of my code base one by one and then just see, does this seem like there could be a vulnerability here? And just generate tons and tons of ideas and. And then we'll have a human filter through what it thinks could be vulnerabilities. Yeah.

So, okay, I saw your interview with Alex America yesterday, and I think we're, like, seeing something similar where it's just, like, paralyzing.

Sure.

And we were like, oh, okay, go off, run, take all the tokens, like, see what you come back with. And maybe it's something. And then I just did two things at once and maybe it's nothing. And then I'm like, I kind of just did the one thing and I have to move to the next task, but I'm in the spot. I am. And so we are seeing a ton of. Of parallelization at work here.

Yes.

Yeah. What else is empowering people on the AI side in security compliance? I can imagine that when we're talking about the technology, we talk about, oh, the future of the agents, we'll just be able to do it. But then when we talk to people on the ground, they're like, I'm just using ChatGPT to do my homework or I'm using it to get educated. And I feel like, like there's a whole world where we go and we rebuild the compliance training processes in an AI native way.

In a not awful way.

Yeah, a lot of times it's pretty awful. I've been through a few of those where you're clicking a button and watching a video and you need to move the mouse. Is there progress there? How fast is that rolling out? What does the future of compliance training look like, you think?

Yeah.

Okay.

Well, compliance training in particular, I think a ton. And to your point, like, adaptive and compelling and not the, like, like watch a video that feels, you know, at best stuck in the 90s. There's probably worse things you could say about it.

Right.

This work. Yeah. We see folks doing like, the phishing email was like, always the classic thing, but now it is just, they're, they're really good because it's also like, oh, let me scan your email inbox and be like, what do you actually reply to? Not just Like I'll send you the I don't know, TVPN newsletter and like try to. Or fake that and try to get you to click on it. Like it's, it's super personalized so there's some cool there. To your other question, my model of this kind of an overall but I definitely see it in security and compliance. To steal from Tyler Cowan is like Centaurs. And so it's like AI plus person and we're at that stage. Right. And we'll be at that and maybe, you know, AI will take it all the way like the way it did with Chess.

Yeah.

But even with Chess there was like a multi decade, you know, AI plus stage and I. We're seeing a lot of that with our customers.

Yeah, that's fantastic.

What we were asking the CrowdStrike founder about like, like basically was he surprised that we haven't seen like a gen AI induced like high profile security incident yet? I don't know if I'm like a solar wind. I'm sure. Yeah. When you. Yeah. What's your, you know, how concerned are you about, about that? Sort of like, like even the AWS industry shaking.

That was not a generative AI driven problem. It was just DNS configuration on a database.

Okay. So actually like building off of that I think, I don't know, probably pretty soon. But I don't think it'll be some like crazy complicated attack. Like a kind of, you know, it'll be like, oh, you left your database. It's unlocked. It's like the classic Equifax thing, you know, and it's like maybe AI spotted that.

Sure.

But like you kind of did the equivalent of like, well, you left your front door unlocked.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So just another, another lesson. Just like go back to the basics drill the basics. Human in the loop. There's definitely. The Centaur error is going to be here for a long time. I believe. I completely agree with you.

Last question. Wish we had more time today. Like how are you? How are you and your team thinking about headcount planning over the next, over the next two years?

Oh yeah, that's a great question. Question.

It's like all I'm doing right now in like an AI sense in a business.

Yeah. Well just not even in an AI sense but just like it's a new, it's a new world. It's a new world. We see, we see public company CEOs doing layoffs and saying we're doing these layoffs because of AI and maybe some of it's because of AI, but, you know, others. It's just, it's a really good.

He's not going to really grow headcount. He thinks he can massively grow revenue without actually scaling up the talent pool that much.

Government contracts are amazing. The way we're thinking about it is AI won't take your job, but someone using AI might back to the center thing. And so have a bunch of stuff. And that's our framing. Inside folks work at Fanta, whatever. And we have a bunch of stuff both to encourage and teach and be. And then this will be a core expectation of your job. And so like that kind of model going forward and filtering on it and hiring and, you know, so you're telling.

The team, like, you should have three, three, at least three bots join every hangout that you do that are all summarizing. All summarizing the meeting notes and competing to summarize the meeting notes the best.

I saw this too. I. Yeah, I don't know. I learned I'm a note taker and like, notes make me pay attention. So I like can't use those meeting recorders because then I stop paying attention and I'm just like. I know that not everybody is like this, but. Yeah, yeah, no, yeah.

A lot of it depends on like the actual use case. If you're in some sort of meeting where you need a full transcript, that's probably different. But you know, certain types of meetings, it's going to make more sense.

Vanta should make like a really menacing agent that joins and is like watching out.

Make sure there's no funny business going on.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Say some words. It'll like, pop up at you.

Yeah.

Well, thank you so much for taking the time to join the show today. We will talk to you soon.

Great to catch up.

Have a great rest of your day.

Thanks for having me.

Bye.

Talk soon.

See ya.

Before our next guest hops on, let me tell you about Bezel. Your Bezel concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch.

Okay, quick fire drill for the team. Is Alon from Navon in the waiting room yet?

Ben, we have.

Because I know we have a couple.

More but fireworks AI in the restream waiting room right now.

Okay, but team, think about ordering here because Elon, we have a special.

We have a special situation because Navon is going public today and the IPO's timing might be.

Yeah, I just want to be cognizant of his timing.

Okay, so we will have the production team working on.

But let's bring in Lynn.

Let's bring in Lynn from Fireworks AI into the TV panel. Welcome to the show, Lynn. How are you doing?

Hi, thanks for having me.

Thanks for taking the time. Big day. Would love to get your introduction to the company, how you're framing your business relative to everything else that's going on in AI at such an exciting time and then we'd love to go into the news.

Yeah, definitely. So Fireworks, we are a AI inference platform with application specific inference inference. Here's how we think about inference differently that we do not think about inference as we buy in compliances at home. For example, we buy refrigerator, use that for 10 years and then upgrade to the next one. We believe model should be continuously becoming smarter and smarter and learning and adapt into the application. Every single application developer, they should have their own model. They shouldn't use off the shelf any model other people use and become a model API wrapper instead Model should be part of their product design. And the model is like we raise child. It will continue to learn and be smarter and be more specialized in solving particular problem really really well. So that's kind of inference platform we provide with smarter model, faster model and much more cost efficient model for every single application.

So I mean you're competing with. Am I crazy? Are you competing with AWS Azure? Like these are the biggest hyperscalers, they are somewhat model agnostic but serve up inferences APIs.

Lyn's competing with everyone.

Is this the craziest?

He's coming for everybody.

But I mean take me a click deeper on the actual strategy. Is it just that there's so much demand that you can go and satisfy the extra demand or do you think you're building something that will just be completely differentiated from the hyperscalers forever?

Right. So currently we are running very high traffic. We are processing more than 180 requests per second. That is an order of magnitude of. It's same in the ballpark of Google search traffic volume. We process more than 10 trillion tokens per day based on Google's earning cost. That's similar to their that is actually the same as their token processed from Gemini.

Wow.

So we process a large volume of data and that just means open model has the future and there are so many startups and enterprise they are reinvent the new user experience and they want to have full control of the model as their IP and have the model co develop, co evolve, co adapt into their product and we see that as a future and that's how we differentiate from product Focus point of view. And we do not provide this inference one size fits all. We provide inference one size fits one specific tailored towards application.

Are you GPU rich? Are you GPU poor? Is this part of your Strategy to have GPUs available when your companies need them? Is that a differentiator?

Yeah. I would like to say we design our product for GPU poor because interestingly we are at the beginning of S curve of huge AI native product expulsion. But product market fit today doesn't mean a viable business in the sense that many of the. We work with so many companies, they just couldn't scale to millions of developers or billions of consumers. They're going to scale into bankruptcy. Fundamental AI infrastructure is so expensive, even if they build the best product has so much value, they just couldn't make a viable business.

Scaling into bankruptcy is an iconic line.

It's a great line.

I'm not going to name. There's one company that really comes to mind, I won't name them. Give us the news, Give us the.

News from today on the fundraising side.

And get that gong ready again.

What happened? Congratulations.

We raised our CoC.

Yes, give us some more details. Who came in, how much, what is the valuation? What else are you sharing about the round?

Yeah, we raised 250 million CO led by Lightspeed and Index.

Boom.

Love it.

With fantastic participation fund Eventec and Sequoia.

Amazing. You can just call it a quarter billion. Now you're getting the really big number range. So.

Right.

It brought us about our valuation to $4 billion.

4 billion.

So really excited for all the customers, partners and investors.

And quickly, how old is the company?

We're three years old.

Wow, that is impressive. Congratulations. Well, thank you for everything that you're doing to power the AI revolution, helping.

People avoid scaling into bankruptcy.

That would be the company model. It's honestly one of the greatest lines.

We're going to be using that line quite a lot, so thank you for that and it's great to meet you. Congrats to the whole team.

Congratulations. Thank you so much.

Have a good day.

Cheers.

Before our next guest hops on, let me tell you about Wander. Find your happy place. Book a wander with inspiring views hotel, great amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning and 247 concierge service. It's a vacation home by better. Our next guest is from Navon. We have Alon Twigg, the CTO and co founder.

There he is.

Welcome to the show.

Get that gong.

Congratulations. Let's ring the gong.

Preemptively preemptive hit.

Okay, now we can.

I love it.

Now we can have a conversation.

Champagne.

Cheers. Cheers.

We have.

We have Happy Dad.

Nobody's joined. Nobody's joined. Drinking champagne ever on this show.

Despite joining. Drinking champagne. I'm gonna have a happy dad from the Nelk boys.

A really long day. So that's my last thing before the big party starts, so.

Well, well, congratulations.

Amazing. And you're live. Live from the nasdaq. How's. How's the day? How's the day been? And, yeah, maybe kind of back up a little bit and actually introduce yourself. I think people can probably tell what you're up to, but.

Yeah, sure.

So my name is. My name is Elan Twig. I clearly like Champagnes. I'm the CTO&CO. Founder. Co founder of Navan. Navan is a travel and expense management company. We started there more than a decade ago.

Wow.

Today we IPO'd. Super pumped.

Congratulations.

It was a beautiful day. Yes, exactly. My entire family. By the way, I think I broke the record of the number of family members that joined me to the service.

Amazing. It's so funny, because you're gonna make.

Me shed a tear.

Yeah. The last time we were at an ipo, it was for Klarna Sebastian, who's a friend of the show. And he. For him, it was. It was just like another day. He was like, oh, yeah. I didn't even bring my family. I just kind of stopped by ipo, the company come back. But so every founder, every.

Wait. How many family members, by the way.

Like, processes these things differently. It's always interesting to hear how people treat it.

How many roughly? Like 30. 30.

So no, it was just for my family, it was 17.

17.

17.

17 family members at the IPL.

Yeah.

Congratulations.

Really amazing milestones.

And the way.

If I may say one last thing about the guests. So my parents were here? Both of them?

Sure.

My dad turns 90 in two weeks.

Wow.

And he was here with me on the. Yeah. On the stage. He was, like, happy.

That's amazing.

I think most of my excitement was watching them totally being so excited.

Yeah.

Not understanding anything because they don't really speak English, but they kind of got the gist of what's happening, and it was super exciting.

Yeah.

That's incredible. What. Take us back through. I mean, I'm sure when you. When you looking back into, like, the depths of COVID which probably it feels a long time ago, but was traveling, you were in a business that. That was. I mean, I just imagine you aged more rapidly than maybe Brian Johnson would Like during that period. Walk us through kind of some of the key moments getting to this point.

Yeah.

Maybe I should first tell you that before COVID I had black hair.

Oh, wow.

Well, it looks good on you. Looks good on you. You look more like a serious executive now.

Yeah, Yeah.

I can fool people around you that I'm serious. Yes.

No.

You know, you run a company that the business model is we make money when people use the platform. There was no monthly fees. There was no way you don't pay.

No long lock in. No enterprise contract.

No enterprise contract.

So.

And why? Because both my co founder, Ariel Cohen and I, we had this philosophy that if the company generates money on usage, then the company will always be focused on making sure that people would want to use the product because it's a great experience. And it worked well for us for the first five years. And then when Covid hit, no one was traveling and no one was using our platform. Not because it was an inferior product. It was because there was a virus and no one could travel. And so we found ourselves with the best product out there with zero usage and zero revenue. And it took six weeks from, like, I don't remember the number, maybe 100 million to zero. Six weeks. So then what? Yeah, it was a very interesting point in time, but I can tell you that, you know, five years later, here I am with a glass of champagne. My parents were here. We were celebrating the IPO with a company that has way more products, a much more resilient business model, and trust me, this time, it's pandemic proof. So we are not going to go to zero. We'll go down, but not to zero if it happens again. So we learn. That's why we have gray hair, battle scars. And, yeah, it was definitely a challenging time, but I think that judging by results, I think that it was managed well. Obviously, the entire company, the entire management team, the board, we were all united around the decisions, and here we are, super happy.

How are you? We were talking to Brian Chesky at Airbnb last week, and he was sort of mapping out his vision for the future of travel. This idea that as we become more online, we also maybe want to become more offline as well, and maybe we're traveling more as well as spending more time just online. How do you. How do you. And how do you internally in the company think about the future of just business travel, pleasure travel, just like the overall travel market?

Right. So first I should tell you, you know, I'm the cto and I love technology. I mean, this is my thing. I really, really love technology. When ChatGPT came out, the first thing that I did, I bought like a $30,000 worth of a GPU. That's what I did. And I built a PC. My co founder thought that he should fire me. It's like you have a PC under your desk. I said, yeah, and I paid for it. Don't worry about it. I paid for it. And then I started deploying LLMs on top of it, uncensored LLMs. I dove deep into that, and I really wanted to know the nature of these creatures, how they behave. Because if I were to deploy anything to production based on these creatures, I call them, I need to know who they are, how they behave. Will they lie, for example, do they know what a lie is? Will they use it? No, they lie.

Yeah.

But for the observations, they will also lie for other reasons, intentionally. Like they would not want to lose, for example, and they would lie in order not to lose. Lots of discoveries, but ultimately it led us to, once we really understand the technology, how to deploy this thing to production and let it run completely unsupervised and do stuff for us. And I think the important thing is completely unsupervised. The first thing that we've done is we deployed Ava. Ava is our virtual travel agent, and she communicates with travelers as things happen when they need to book something or there's disruptions and they need to push their travel by one day, cancel this leg, argue about the reason, refund, et cetera, et cetera. And she would do all of these things for them. And it is all based on an internal framework that we built. We call it Navan Cognition. I really like the name cognition. I didn't invent it. It was a professor from Colombia that we work with. And why cognition? Because it turns LLMs into a highly functioning cognitive system. So Ava today is completely unsupervised. She manages thousands of of chats every day with a very, very high customer satisfaction that matches the humans level. And she offsets more than 50% of the incoming chats. She does not deflect. She solves. So I think our approach to travel is we look for ways to leverage technology to make travel easier so that people can focus on being there rather than getting there there. Getting there is just a noise that you have to. It's, you know, it's a penalty that.

You have to pay.

But the focus for corporate travel is to be there and to be fully there. And there's people outside trying to make me laugh from Outside. And I'm a little bit.

Well, I'll tell you, I just have one suggestion. I think if you make an agent, one of your, you know, your baby creature, and call it Twiggy. Please. Please. Oh, that's a good nickname. Microsoft has Clippy.

Yeah.

Navon needs Twiggy. You already went through one. You went through a rebrand. You were Trip Actions. Now you're Navon. I want you to rename Ava to Twiggy.

I think it's.

I love it. I'll do my best here. I'm gonna drink for that, really.

Cheers.

Cheers.

Thank you so much for coming on the show on such a big day. Congratulations.

Such a monumental moment.

And. And please extend our congratulations to the entire family. All 17.

All 17. And the whole team. It's a beautiful moment and just an ipo.

Hope you have a great rest of the day, great rest of your week.

Thank you so much.

We'll talk to you soon.

I'm going to party tonight. Thank you so much.

Thank you.

See you guys.

Bye.

Bye.

Love your podcast. Love you.

What a. What a legend.

What a legend.

What a legend. That's one of the most legendary. That was tough to follow. We have Taryn Jeet coming in next from Memo.

I think that's how I pronounce it. Mem0. He's in the restream waiting room. How are you doing? Great to see you. Thank you so much for hopping.

Really, really tough one to follow.

Yeah, the last guest IPO'd.

He was champagne, he was drinking, raised a Billy. It's a crazy one. I'm excited for this.

But thank you so much for hopping on the show. We're very excited to.

Yeah. Thank you for having me. Great to be here.

Of course. Talk to me about the business, introduce yourself in the business, and then I want to go really deep into how memory will actually transfer and what the equilibrium of the market will be. But we can go into all the technical or, like, market structure stuff after we kind of get the general news where the business is the shape of what you're building.

Thank you. So I am Taranjit. I'm the co founder and CEO of MEM0. MEM0 is building memory for AI agents. Right now, everybody is trying to create an AI app. AI agent. But there is a fundamental issue. All the apps are done because they are stateless. They don't evolve with you. As humans evolve, we are trying to fix that. So far, we are the most dominant player in the market with 41,000 GitHub stars, 14 million downloads and we recently announced 2024 million funding led by Basis Tech Ventures with Kindred, P50 and IC and GitHub.

Total agent domination.

So I mean, I gotta just jump straight into the actual market dynamic because I have to imagine that right now OpenAI is saying, you're gonna log in with OpenAI and we're gonna store the memory because we want you locked to us as much as possible. And for everything else, if we, we want to build it within the app, we want to, you know, do we want one click checkout in the app? And if, and if we are going to send you out, you're going to OAuth with ChatGPT and so are you the Android to ChatGPT's iPhone or is there a way that you can play together? Is there a data privacy thing where I can go to Sam Altman and say, hey, look, I know I'm daily driving the ChatGPT app, but you got to let me take my data with me, my personalization data with me, because I want to go out into the open, open LLM ecosystem and interact with things all over the place.

Yeah, I think that's a very good question. And there are two ways to look at it. First, it's good that big labs are adding memory in their consumer offering. They're actually educating the market that memory is needed. And they also realized that as models commoditize, memory is the next mode. And it's a matter of time that memory becomes available as an API. But you know, developers who are building all sorts of cool AI apps are using multiple LLMs. So in that scenario, because memory is not just read only, it's also write, you would want to decouple it from LLMs out there. So that's like take one. Now. The fundamental thing for why this is happening is we are going through a technological shift. So far we have been interacting with click, swipe and scroll all, but for the first time, we and everyone on this planet is getting the ability to talk to software. You can chat with it, you can say a few words, it will say back to you. So you as human, I as human. We are accumulating rich personal context. Now. Right now it's a handful of AI agents that we use on a day to day basis and we use like chat, GPT, Claude and you know, other apps out there. But five years down the line it's going to be a lot of apps in a life. And imagine if I as a user or you as a user, have to explain every app who you are that's going to be frustrating for you. So in that scenario, we strongly envision and we strongly will make this plaid for AI kind of functionality out there within you as a user are empowered to carry, to own and carry your AI memories across any app or device that you introduce.

Okay, so if you're the plaid for memory and in the future I am using, I mean, this is a real story. Like I use Gemini all the time for VO3. I also, if I'm interacting with a YouTube video, I'll always go to Gemini for that. Gemini is faster in a bunch of different places. But I use the voice mode on ChatGPT. I also use Claude every once in a while. Like I have little memories all over, over the place. And if I'm in the plaid analogy, that's similar to having a Chase account over here, Morgan Stanley account over here, an E Trade account over there, a B of A account, a credit card, all these things. And I want to bring those together. Is that something that you imagine I'll be able to do when someone comes out with a completely new product that they want to customize? I could go over, we were talking to Adobe or something and then I could say, yeah, I'm going to off with Memoir and then I'm going to allow you to access my memories or my memory in all of the other apps and port all of that in. Is that something that they would let you do?

See, that's the future that we feel is highly possible. I mean like big labs won't let you do because for memory is one of the modes. Right? Yeah, but if you consider from other side of users and like, you know, the world is not going to be just one app. The world is going to be multiple apps. Right. It's like OpenAI will be there, Claude is there.

Right.

In that scenario once. So right now it's like a technological shift. So you and I can relate, but not everyone on the planet.

Right.

But soon they will relate. And because of this new interface of voice, like, I will feel like, why do I have to tell this software again and again? Why is this software so dumb in that scenario, I think like users should be empowered to own and carry their memories. So far it has not been the case because it's just been like clicks, data, you know, your session history. But now you are sharing a lot of personal rich context. You should own it. You should be saying that, okay, I give my healthcare memories to this app, I give my financial memory to this app, and they are in sync. I think that's a future that benefits everyone. At least everyone on the planet.

Yeah.

Is cold email underrated?

I actually changed my life because of cold emails. Like, I wrote like 200 cold emails to almost everyone in Silicon Valley back in 2023. I still write like a lot in this round. Also, I still wrote like cold emails to angel investors. I think it's the most valuable asset for everyone out there. You should be writing more code emails. Everyone should be writing more cold emails.

I love it. Handwritten or AI generated? What's your take?

No, I. I still write like everything personally. I just take AI help to fix, you know, some grammar or some structural issues, but should be personally written.

Yeah, the AI cold email. Hey, saw you're in New York. Hope you like. I bet you like Central Park.

Yeah. Do you like Starbucks?

Anyways, congratulations on the fundraise. It's great to meet you and hopefully get to use MEM0 out there in the wild very soon.

Yeah, thank you for having me.

Fantastic. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one.

I have the perfect post to end the show on.

Please hit us. Hit me.

That is that. Tyler's app is broken.

Oh, taking shots. He's doing his best. Did you want to do the virality equals taste one?

No, I want to do. Maytob says I keep getting ads for cocaine on Facebook.

Oh, yes.

Just using linktree as a cloaking page. Kind of surprised this works. And to that I would say, how do you think? Who's going to pay for the Capex? Right?

Oh, okay, I see you're bringing it back to where we started the show with meta earnings. If you see this, you gotta assume whoever's running that ad advertising cocaine, they gotta pay a pretty penny. They gotta pay in their Facebook ads manager.

This is so funny. There's a reply here from this guy, Zach. What data does Meta have on you? And Metab says, I was in LA for a day.

I guess this was a thing. This was a thing on Facebook of people advertising drugs. And it is a game of whack a mole back and forth, trying to catch people because the lingo will change. And the way people are kind of dog whistling to each other that they have something illegal that they're selling. It's a huge game of cat and mouse that the meta team is kind of constantly working on. And you see those same kind of like breathless, panicked news articles about, like, is Facebook like a hotbed for, I guess, cocaine in this case or, you know, something else and, you know, variety of different adult content or whatever. And it's always this, like, dance of, like, how much do they. How much are they gonna invest in trust and safety? How many people are gonna be in the loop? How much AI are they gonna throw at it? How are they gonna have false positives? Cause what if you're just posting a meme about Tony. Not Tony Soprano.

Tony Montana.

Tony Montana, Yeah. Our favorite song that we used in our launch video. If we post that, there's obviously a reference to illicit substances in there. Do you want that to be flagged? No, obviously not. And so it's a constant dance. But very funny that someone actually slipped this through the Facebook's ad review team. I have a funny story about the Facebook ad review team. There was a time when you could straight up, like, there were companies that would basically go and find the individual ad manager who would approve, who would have admin access to the Facebook side of the ad manager. And the company would go and put up an ad and try and get it approved. And it would get shut down. And the ad would be like, harvard scientists created this. This limitless pill that's used by Johnny Depp. It was always Johnny Depp, but it was always Harvard scientists. And it would be a picture of Johnny Depp looking great. And then Harvard scientists, and it would link you to some scammy website that would sell you basically some fake nootropic or fake supplement. And these ads were against terms of service. It's straight up snake oil. It's not even. There's no thesis of, oh, is actually good for you. It's just completely fake. But they realized that it would convert and it would be very high margin. And so what they would do is they would go to the Facebook ad manager people and they would try and bribe them and say, hey, if you go in and you approve my ad, I'll put $100 million of ad spend behind it and generate $200 million in revenue. And if I can get that ad approved, if you, as just the individual ad manager can go and tweak the back end. And so. So there's like a constant war even inside the organization to make sure that nothing illicit is out.

I heard something interesting recently that there's a health influencer and people make AI videos of them just promoting random supplements on YouTube. So they'll make an AI video, they'll post the video, and in the description, they'll put links out to products.

Okay, okay.

And YouTube does not. It will not systematically identify the content themselves. It's just they say, they, we support AI video.

Sure.

And so this influencer is paying another AI service to consistently monitor videos and then report them automatically.

Yep.

But they have to spend $10,000 a month. It's 10 grand a month on this service because. Because it's super intensive from a. And this influencer needs to. So you could imagine somebody's.

I know exactly what you're talking about. Yeah. It's a constant war. It's a constant war.

The solution to bad AI is good AI Agents with guns. I guess.

Give your Neo robot a Glock. It needs to happen. Anyway, thank you so much for tuning in today. Thank you for listening to the show. Show. We will see you tomorrow. It's Halloween. We have a special show for you. Please tune in. Leave us. 5 stars on Spotify and Apple podcasts.

Tomorrow is going to be one for the books. Spooky.

Spooky.

It could be silly.

Have a good one.

And I can't wait.

Goodbye.

Have a great evening.