https://www.listennotes.com/e/29407d54158f4c088d0750a5f9882977

You're watching TBPN. Today is Thursday, June 12, 2025. We are live from the TBPN Ultra Dome. We're back in the Ultra Dome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the capital of capital.

And it's great to be here. We are both deathly ill today.

Yeah, it's been a rough week.

We're still doing the show. The show must go on. That's part of showbiz.

It is, the show must always go on, and there's no greater show in the world of technology and music than the Coachella twenty twenty seven line ripe, featuring fast take off scenario Neur Mirage.

Causealon Hush The Alignment Choir, DJ.

Token Drift, Auto Prompt, Geordie hadad Ctchi Pti generate a, uh a, hypothetical coachllla poster.

It was no surprise to see gentle singularity headlining St two Yes, Von Neumann.

And the tilings, Lo-Fi Oracle synthethics.

Which one did I really like?

The Capibara. Paperclip party is very good. Chain of thought collective. Some of these just sound like, I.

Think a lot of people were surprised to see the Gooners didn't make the list at all. They didn't.

But maybe that's a little white pill. Yeah.

Let me try and adjust this microphone.

Anyways, we got a great show today. We have a stacked lineup. Can we pull up the run of show? We're gonna have Delian join back to back. I think he's the first guest to ever go back to back. back to back. He was on the show yesterday. Geordie absolutely blasted him with some confetti. And he's coming back to talk to us about the Shinkai deal as well.

As-- I really didn't hold back. I really didn't hold back. I tried to not shoot confetti in the face of anybody yesterday, but Delian really got the full effect. But a lot of fun at YC Demo Day yesterday. Tons of great founders. Major white pill. Being there. Yeah, that's great.

And we have some posts reacting to YC Demo Day. I like that Juwan from Ramp, he's been on the show many, many times with-- why did he not come on the show yesterday? I know, I know, we should have-- I saw his post after we left, but he had a really funny one. He said, you,'re more likely to raise a Series A as a YC company than go bankrupt as a gambling addict. Let that sink in. 'Cause there's this viral post that says, there's a 20% chance of Gambling addicts going broke. And everyone was memeing it a couple of days ago, being like, Gambling addicts will take those odds every day. 80% chance I don't go bankrupt. It's great. But Gary Tan says 45% of YC companies get to Series A and median ARR is $1 million plus trending up. Find me another place where that is true in any set of potential investments in the world. YC does have higher valuation caps, but to me, This quality justifies it. Invest in YC demo days.

I recommend it. I love it.

Astonishing.

Yeah.

And it was fun. We handed out a bunch of ramp hats. They're in hot demand.

I thought, yeah, we ran out.

I think we were a little crazy with the color. When I think of ramp, I think of a bright yellow, not necessarily a full neon yellow, but these hats were full neon green, like Safety Runner green or yellow, actually. And they were very intense, but I got a lot of text messages for people that wanted them. So we will probably be printing more of those. We had a lot of fun. We handed out some of our BBN hats, which are now printed.

They're here. They're finally here. We got to figure out how to distribute them. We don't want to be in the apparel business. Yes, yes. But we're here reluctantly to figure out.

How to get them out into the world. So if you're looking for one of those ramp hats, you got to be a ramp customer for sure. So you got to go to ramp.com. time is money, save both.

Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments.

Accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. And Eric Ramp, former YC founder. Yes, YC founder. That's true. that's true. And so hail also chimed in. He said, so many insanely great YC companies. This batch is easily has many $10 billion companies. What a time to be alive. Many ten. That is so aggressive. I love it. I love the.

He's bullish.

People were upset. They said mostly cursor for X. He said, nah, there was a lot of agent infrastructure stuff.

There was agent for agent products.

Yes, yes. A lot of AI on AI stuff. But that's where the money is.

We're going to need agents to work on people to help other agents. Right?

Because that's, yeah, for sure. Yeah, no, I think there was like a very, very clear, I mean, Gary said 90% AI, but it was even more narrow for that than that. It was a lot of B2B AI, a lot of narrow AI infrastructure, a lot of, how do you run an agent on the cloud? What kind of databases are you building to enable agents? All sorts of stuff like that. Some really exciting companies though. and some really great stuff. It was very fascinating comparing YC Demo Day, where I came away, like you mentioned, incredibly optimistic about these entrepreneurs who are going and building companies, and they're clearly going to, maybe some of them are directly competitive with each other, some of them are directly competitive with previous YC companies. I'm sure some will morph and pivot and change, but you just have the entrepreneurial motion, which is very exciting compared to so many other paths that people could take in the past. It's like the best time to start a company.

Yeah.

And ultimately it felt pretty even, there was a lot of companies that clearly founders and teams we talked to that came in with an idea and just executed against it. But it felt like half of them too were just iterating through the batch, which is what they should be doing. Yeah, I mean that's where a lot.

Of those infrastructure plays come from is like, I wanted to build an app. I needed infrastructure, so I built the infrastructure, kind of the story of Slack. You know, they were building a video game. and they needed to communicate with each other. So they built the internal chat tool and they were like, let's just sell this. And that stuff can happen all the time. It is less visual, less exciting sometimes, but it can still create a ton of shareholder value and hopefully a $10 billion plus outcome. My interesting takeaway was that we did YC Demo Day and then we also did the Thiel Fellowship Day a week ago or maybe two weeks ago, time flies. And the difference between YC Demo Days vibe of the companies and Teal Fellowship companies were wildly different, like wildly different. The Teal Fellowship companies, obviously there's a lot less, but I don't know if we talked to a single AI agent company during Teal Fellowship Day. It was almost all like bio-regenerate organs, brain-computer interfaces.

It was much more of things that you could-- Modify most websites projects.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly, like super, super high. Fellowship. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the tenor of the conversation during the Teal Fellowship during YC Demo Day, we were like, give us the number, what's the ARR, what are the customers, how many GitHub stars you got, and we were spraying confetti everywhere. If we had done that during Teal Fellowship Day, I think a lot of them would have been like, yeah, we're five years out from commercialization.

Yeah. It was cool. We don't plan to do that for both of these.

We're doing 2025 and then our revenue in year one will be a billion. Yeah, exactly. And so still very, very exciting stuff on either side. More differentiation where I think in the past, like a decade ago, it was like YC and YC clones all had kind of the same shape of companies. Now we're seeing a real bifurcation between what the Thiel Fellowship means versus what YC means. And obviously there's some companies that will do both. But I think that's a good thing.

And ultimately, I mean, for a lot of the founders and the teams yesterday, YC was effectively like, do college in three months, majoring in startups, venture. And that's a good thing. That's a good product that enables a a lot more companies to be created.

And I mean, the other thing that was a very interesting trend.

Who was then selling software, drops out of high school, and then is selling software back to his teachers.

Yeah.

So.

It'S always just cool seeing just how young you can be and start a company. It was funny when you asked him, like, okay, you asked a couple of people, like, how'd you make money in high school? And that's a hard question because some entrepreneurs, they were just like, no, I was actually just heads down. I wanted to build a school.

Dealing drugs.

Yeah, or something like that. They're just doing random stuff, mowing lawns. But they all had really good stories about building websites and scaling things and doing all sorts of stuff.

That one founder was like, I sold a very, basically was like, I made a website for a pastor for three grand. And I was reading into that being like, you, made a Squarespace site and like, you marked it up 100%.

Yeah, 1,000% or something.

But still, still, it's all about the ultimate value and a good website can easily be worth a few grand.

Yep. Anyway, there was one interesting article that came up or interesting statistic that came up a couple times. Gary Tan mentioned this and we didn't have a time to fact check it on air, but I wanted to fact check it today. So this idea was surfaced that the, that the, So the Federal Reserve Bank of New York had a report called the Labor Market Report for Recent College Graduates. And in it, they have 2025 annual outcomes by major. They have a spreadsheet there. And so the headline is that US computer engineering grads face double the unemployment rate of art history majors. Very aggressive. And so the narrative is obvious there. It's like AI is disrupting everything. You don't need computer science majors anymore. You just need cursor or some AI agent product that will just go and build things for you. So we no longer are going to be employing computer scientists or computer science majors. And I wanted to know more about this, so I dug into it. And there is some interesting stuff going on, but it's not exactly the narrative that I think people think it's telling. It's more of a lagging indicator. And so the claim, the facts are literally true. So, in 2023, because this is lagging data, because you can't just like graduate and be within like one week, like do you have a job or not? Like that's not relevant. Like you might go and hang out in the summer and tour around a little bit, like when does unemployment really set in? It's kind of, it takes a minute. And so this data does lag. And so we're talking about 2023, but the unemployment rate for computer science majors was 6.1%, and the unemployment rate for art history, criticism and conservation was 3. And so, yes, it is about twice art history in the data set. And so the same file indicates computer science ranks seventh amongst 73 majors. Art history sits in the middle of the pack. But the New York Fed cautions that these are survey estimates drawn from one year of this survey microdata with only a few hundred art history majors graduates in the sample. So because art history is small and they're only sampling a small section of that, the numbers are pretty small. Like, I'm pretty sure that for art history?

So two years earlier, CS actually had a lower rate.

Yes.

And so with art history, the 3% rate, they're only surveying 2000 graduates with art history degrees. And so you're talking about 60 job seekers, like 60 people that are still saying, I'm looking for a job and I don't have one yet. And so that number, it can swing so much.

My immediate question was, could there be a lot of those art history degrees majors that are unemployed but aren't counting themselves as unemployed because they're not looking for a job at all.

Right?

Don't you have to, can't you just...

So yes, that's a big thing. In art history, a lot of art history graduates go and get other jobs or they don't necessarily get the job of art historian out of college. And so, that takes them out of the unemployment pool because they might be, you know, be in the marketing organization or communications, or they might join and do, you know, anything in a business. They might become a corporate athlete. Maybe they become a sales guy. Who knows? They're doing something. I mean, you meet these people all the time. It's like, oh yeah, I actually studied art history. And it gives me like this really interesting background. And I have a lot to talk about. But I didn't study the thing that I'm like actively doing because Yeah, maybe there isn't a track for sales.

Yeah, ultimately I do think early stage engineering roles are being impacted. There's still an incredible amount of opportunity if you're savvy and high agency. But there's also a lot of layoffs. You had this big tech hiring freeze in 2022. That's what's driving rounds of layoffs. And then, yeah, I think a lot of companies just need fewer Junior engineers, but at the same time we look at this, we have two CS major types that work for us and we probably wouldn't have had them a few years ago if we were doing a show like this because we were like, we're not going to build software.

Yeah.

It's a lot easier to build software. Yeah. So we are.

Yeah. But I mean, at the same time, if this is real, we need to look out for Tyler. So Tyler's here. He's obviously a great software engineer.

Yeah.

But if the future is art history, Maybe he needs to get up to speed in the world of art history. Let's put a background behind him. Yeah, a library behind him.

And.

I think today, the beauty of Tyler's skill set is that he's incredible at artificial intelligence and vibe coding. I think with enough work today, he could become an expert in art history and potentially land an art historian job, maybe even by the time they're keying him live on the stream.

Yeah, so she's got a shot.

Maybe even land a job. Tyler's been doing-- what do you know.

About-- so Tyler, learn the history of art and then try to get a job in the next three hours.

Yes.

See what you can put together.

Okay.

You're incredibly talented and just sort of see what's possible.

Okay, so we'll check in with Tyler throughout the show. What do you know about art history so far? What have you learned?

So far, not much. I found a couple of good facts, though.

Okay, here's one.

Hit me.

The oldest cave paintings, you know, like.

In Europe, actually were not done by human beings. They were done by Neanderthals.

Oh, okay.

That's a good fact.

Art predates humanity. Yeah. Nice.

Okay.

I'll keep looking. Not much else. But I mean, I feel like I.

Understand art history now. Thank you.

Great stuff, Tyler.

Great stuff.

But yeah, so back to the stats here. 108,000 CS bachelor degrees in 2021 to 2022 versus just 2,000 art history degrees. And so it's like this 50 to 1 ratio.

Show.

Would you have guessed there's only 2, 000 art history graduates a year in the United States?

Is that, is that, I don't, I don't know that many people. Yeah. No, no, you would think there are more, but realistically, it's like there's only a few colleges. People know that it's hard to get an art history job. And, and so, I mean, I remember when I got to college and I looked at, like, what are the highest paying majors?

Like, I should major in that. I should study the one that's valuable.

I should study Finance.

2023, it's saying only 1700 degrees were pleated in the sector.

Yeah.

I think that's right.

Art history majors get so much attention for being a thousand people a year getting the, you know, 2,000 people a year getting a degree in a country of hundreds of millions. It is, it is so much heat. There's so much shade thrown at them constantly. And they're just like, we're just a few thousand people that like studying the history of art. Give us a break.

Just give us a break.

I mean, of course there's other kind of subdegrees.

Yeah.

Anyway, yeah, I mean, it is odd. I don't think the AI wave is really a major factor in this data. I think it's much more about interest rates and big tech companies pulling back after the minor recession correction that we had, because that correction, if you think about it, there's 100,000 new CS grads, Where are those folks going to go? They're going to go to big tech companies. If they all did hiring freezes, you're going to see unemployment rise there. But that's not driven by artificial intelligence. That's driven by a correction in the markets that's just weaving through because it takes a year or two for these big tech companies to actually change their hiring plans and roll things out. So anyway, it's an interesting narrative, but I don't think it's quite telling the story that we think it is. AI is part of the story, but timing is key. The spike aligns with a flood of post-pandemic hiring corrections. There's no evidence yet of a persistent downward trend in CS employment. But just to be safe, Tyler is.

Going to become an art history expert today.

Just a backup plan, plan B, backup plan, plan B. And yeah, I mean, if you're if you're working on an art history project, we should get every art historian on linear. It's a purpose built tool for planning and building products.

They should be building products. They're taking jobs from Engineers, they may as well start adopting the best tools that engineers and product leaders use, like Linear.

Yeah, I mean, it's the system for modern software development, but it could, in the future, in the near future, be the system for modern art history development. Art history research. It could streamline issues, projects, product roadmaps, and more. Linear for agents.

You can orchestrate agents on Linear now.

Just like deep research, but you could make it more custom. So you could have, okay, With this art history project, we need to go tackle all these issues one by one. Go read this book, go to this library.

That's right.

Blow off the dust off this ancient tome.

Anyway, we have too much fun. Anyways, Ben was wondering if you could try your headphones again.

Do I have them? Okay. I will try those. We do have some sad news. There's been a plane crash in I'm a Ahmedabad. I don't know how to pronounce that in India, but it's the first fatal accident in a 787. This is the new Dreamliner from Boeing. And there's 242 people.

The footage of this is, I'm sure many people are scared. It's very scary. We're going to talk about Sheil Monot's hometown.

Wow. Yeah, he lived there.

Tragic. But we're going to ask Dallian about this in 20 minutes.

Yep.

I'm interested to get his point of view and see if he has a read on how and why this could have happened. But overall, yeah, devastating for, I guess there was one survivor on the entire plane out of hundreds of people. So just absolutely tragic.

That is such an insane stat that just one survived. I might be too harsh.

It looked like the plane from the video looked like the plane just didn't have the thrust to actually, like, it didn't have enough power or something.

Something very bizarre happened, but I don't know. It does feel like the entire, like, every time that there's a plane crash, like there was that one in DC, there was that one up in Canada, now there's this. Like, whenever there's something that bad happens, people kind of retreat to the base rates of the stats and say, like, yes, this is a freak accident, but it's still overall very safe But now we've had like three, and I feel like at a certain point, the stats actually do have to adjust. And so I'm wondering if there's something more systemic going on and we should be digging into this, but very rough.

Yeah.

Anyway.

Really sad.

Yeah, I'm excited to talk to Dallan about it because he'll give us more context there.

Back to business. Yesterday, while we were at Demo Day, Stripe announced that they acquired Privy. Patrick Collison said in the announcement, Money has to reside somewhere, and Privy holds the world's best programmable vault alongside our other Stablecoin work. We're looking forward to enabling a new generation of global internet native financial services. So we're going to have Henry on from Privy today to talk about the business and the acquisition and what they're going to be doing at Stripe. Somebody called Bork works. Says first Stripe acquired Bridge, then Stripe acquired Privy, both for supposedly 10 figs at low eight figs ARR. Guess who invested in both? Sequoia and Paradigm. Let's hear it. Let's give it up for some generational allocation.

Yeah, they gotta pay the bills over there.

Guess who invested in Stripe and have board seats? Sequoia and Matt Huang. Both at Paradigm.

Love it.

Masterclass. Yeah, I guess Privy, the actual acquisition price, I don't believe, was announced, but I think it was a great outcome. And I'm very excited for the team. And Stripe is certainly cooking on all things crypto.

They are, yeah, excited to talk to them. What else is in the news? We're still investigating what's going on with Meta and the Scale AI acquisition. Big news with that $15 billion, $14 billion acquisition of Scale AI by Meta, sharing Gafar from 49%. It's becoming a new trend. Bill Gurley was talking about this on Patrick's Invest Like the Best podcast. He was saying that there was this narrative that, oh, the only reason that we can't do M&A is because of Lina Khan. Well, Lina Khan's gone. What's going on? It's very odd that we've talked to a few people about like, where has the $80 million acquisition gone? And that's kind of fallen by the wayside. These creative deals are certainly happening more and more. I thought this was interesting that Meta hired top Google DeepMind researcher Jack Wray and Johan Schalkwyk, ML lead of popular voice assistant app Sesame. I feel like Sesame just got started. Like that's a crazy poach so early, right? A trade deal. Something must have happened. Who knows? But they plan to hire up to 50 people, including a chief scientist per sources. Meta Platforms has poached top engineers. And so, I mean, it's going to be fascinating to watch Zuck build that out. There was someone else who had a great post in here saying that like every time you saw that one, there was like every time people think Zuck has his back against the wall, he comes back and And obviously, like the initial AI push was one of these or iOS was iOS 14, the app tracking transparency thing that was supposed to like destroy, you know, the entire ads business because you wouldn't be able to track people on iPhones anymore. That was not a that was something that he definitely got through. And even though Meta went down, the stock went right back up. Absolute execution. But it goes back even further, like the very first Mobile switch over for like when mobile started getting popular, I remember having an iPad and using a third party app to interact with Facebook because they didn't have an app. They just had a website and it wouldn't really work as well.

Such a wild.

And then when they launched their app, they went all in on HTML5 instead of native iOS like Objective-C. And so their web-based app was not performing like people wanted it to. And so he, but I mean, he got through it and obviously has become incredibly dominant in mobile. And there truly was no one who won, like, oh yeah, we're the social network for mobile. And we really, you know, Facebook is just on desktop. Mobile truly became the sustaining innovation. It was not disruptive to them.

Yeah, it was interesting. Reddit went down the path of allowing third parties to build mobile applications based on Reddit and then ultimately decided that they needed to basically eliminate that activity, which caused a lot of hubbub.

Yeah.

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We really have fun. We were talking to the Polymarket team yesterday about getting some YC markets on there. I really want, when will the fourth YC company be added to the S&P 500? Because now they have Coinbase, Airbnb, and DoorDash. Like three out of 500, they're going to be approaching 1% of the S&P 500 soon. And there's a number of candidates. I mean, Stripe, I think, public obviously would be a candidate.

If Gary keeps doing and the broader team keeps doing what they're doing, it's inevitable that they're going to get double digits.

Maybe even triple digits. Maybe even all of them.

It could be possible in a mag 70 scenario.

I love the mag 70.

That was great.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, the number of big tech companies is growing because it used to be FAANG, which was Five companies, and now it's seven, although Netflix kind of fell out of that. Maybe Netflix comes back, gets added, MAG-8, and then but Mary Meeker's trying to trim it down. She was saying Magnificent Six or whatever. Is she saying six? I forget. I mean, I guess it does kind of make sense, like Tesla's in a little bit of a different world. They're not like as much of an online, like hyperscaler in the same sense, like they're kind of over in the car world, but still trillion dollar company, tech company. Very, very relevant. And you got to give you got to give him credit, Elon, for building that business. So privy to Stripe, we talked about this. It feels like the Elon Musk, Donald Trump thing is truly winding down.

Is that they're back to golden retrievers?

They're back to golden retrievers.

They're like, Hey, I'm sorry. Yeah, we went a little bit too far.

Yeah.

They talked privately Monday night.

Yep.

And, yeah, sounds like, sounds like they're in a good spot. They're calling each other friends. Uh, they're back, they're back to being buddies, which we'd love to see. It's possible to have a huge blow up with somebody and get back to being friends and, you know, put, put things behind. Do you think this is actually the.

End or do you think this is like just a roller coaster ride that will continue forever? I think it's definitely full employment for Teddy Schleifer at the New York Times.

Yeah, yeah, it's a bull market for Teddy.

Yeah, I ran into him at an event in Vegas. and was asking him what he's doing. He's like, he's specifically on the on the Elon Musk beat, like just on Elon Musk. Like that's like what he had to write about. That was like his not like tech, just Elon. Like that's the whole thing.

That's beginning.

Elon deserves full time New York Times. And he was like, yeah, like, like, you know, like this is my Super Bowl. Like and he was saying, I think there's going to be a blow up. And when it happens, like, I'm going to write the definitive article and like, yeah, he's kind of pulling it off. But Elon's not giving him too much.

To write about because he's back in the game.

He's like, oh, oh, the mainstream media.

Is happy with this.

Nothing will bring Trump and Elon together than the mainstream media taking victory laps. They're like, we couldn't possibly. Cool. Jeff Lewis.

Jeff Lewis has a post. Jeff's been quiet lately. He says, still this, everything you need to know about how we operate at Bedrock, especially when we're quiet. Mission, we don't build Bedrock for consensus. We build it to hold in case of collapse. This is not a firm created to chase the next wave. It's an institution designed to hold through structural volatility and to back entrepreneurs building the systems that will define what comes next. Our capital is not reactive, slow, precise, and architected to align with those who operate on signal, not noise. We serve missions that compound meaning over time, structures that don't require explanation, and people who would rather build than perform. We're not here to participate in the field. We are here to reshape it quietly, permanently, and with those who already understand incredible piece of writing. I almost have chills. I think the MDash police are going to come.

Here.

But I want to say, Jeff, we ran into you briefly yesterday. It was good to see you. When you're ready to bring back temp check, when you're ready to come out of your personal quiet period, we will be here. We will provide the infrastructure to reboot temp check, and we cannot wait.

Yeah, temp check was so underrated. I love the branding, just that Miami Vice vibe to it. It was even like the pre-Miami movement. There was still this like, this like wild like art style that doesn't...

It was so unique. It was so unique.

And it doesn't fit with like, Bedrock has a brand. And yeah, and VibeCheck had a different style.

Jeff would be like, at the beach in the water in Hawaii, you know, giving this sort of amazing lecture on something. And, you know, he wouldn't even get dunked on for it because it was so authentic.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

A lot of people, if a VC was, you know, on a vacation, you know, lecturing, they would be a target, but he pulls it off.

No, he pulled it off. I wanted to tell you about this parking startup I talked to today. Yeah, so here's the basic thesis. There's a lot of people that park illegally in Los Angeles, just temporarily in red zones. There aren't enough parking attendants to enforce all of that. So what this company does is they send out people who are kind of dressed up in you know, parking attendant style uniforms.

Oh.

And they go up to the people who are parked illegally and say like, oh, like, you know, you're parked illegally, like, I'm gonna have to write you up. And then, you know, the person, oh no, like, is there anything you do? Well, you know, we do take tap to pay and you could just pay here. And, and then, so then they, they charge the person for the parking infraction directly. Yeah. And then the government makes money off of like the, the profit that the company makes.

Oh, I like that. Yeah, I like that.

So they're kind of like acting as like an like an independent organization.

Yeah, almost like a third party DMV.

Yeah, yeah. I imagine they could raise a lot of money from a VC that doesn't.

Do any legal due diligence. I thought you were gonna say, you know, somebody, you know, basically they see somebody parking illegally, they walk up to them wearing a tux and just say, hey, would you like me to, you know, I can just sit here by your car and kind of sit against it.

Yeah.

And it'll look like, you know, you're not, you haven't left your car. You know, so if a real parking attendant comes by, they'll just assume, this is just a guy pulled over, needed to write an email or something. So yeah, there's potentially a lot of opportunity there. John, I like how you're thinking. This could be the first TBPN request for startups. Breaking news.

Oh, we have breaking news.

Intel and OpenAI are teaming up. Their first AI-powered toy.

Will arrive later this year.

A little rough for all the people that wanted to put ChatGPT in a toy. Turns out the ChatGPT in toy toys will be done by the company behind ChatGPT. Interesting. Their first AI powered toy will arrive later this year, just in time for Christmas. They are also incorporating OpenAI Enterprise Company, company-wide.

Meaning like everyone at Mattel will have a ChatGPT.

I thought they were incorporating a new entity. Oh my God. It sounded like OpenAI is incorporating just one more entity.

Just one more. This time we have an LLC. We have an Inc. We don't have an LLP. That's a different thing. We don't have a partnership. Yeah, nonprofit. We gotta catch them all.

So Mattel will be using opening eye. No details on the toy yet, but if we get an AI Barbie, expect some amusing jailbreaking.

I wonder how, yeah, that's fascinating. I imagine that opening is probably pretty good at avoiding jailbreaking by now since that's been like a meme for two or three years.

So it's probably pretty easy. So is the jailbreakers.

Right.

They try pretty hard to not let their phones be jailbroken yet.

I would say it's radically different. I would say the resources that have gone into let's avoid jailbreaking scenarios at OpenAI is probably like 1,000x what's happened at Apple, just because there's so much more real-world data. There's so many more real-world users. There's so many more actual Like, there's so many more researchers at the company that are thinking about the actual design of systems to avoid jailbreaking.

At OpenAI?

Yeah, at OpenAI, for sure.

You don't think Apple has an incentive.

To- I know they have an incentive.

Widespread jailbreaking.

They just have nowhere near the scale. of the actual people trying to jailbreak. What systems are people trying to jailbreak all day long? For sure, ChatGPT way more than Apple services. Because Apple services are so narrowly vended into specific parts of the OS.

I just think the LLM itself is different than a new hardware product. Somebody will figure out how to make an OpenAI toy run Grok, and I don't think I think OpenAI and Mattel.

Will be able to stop that. You think, oh, so, I mean, that's a little different if you're actually doing like iOS level, like operating system level jailbreaking. I think what they're talking about here is like, you know, Barbie is gonna speak in like Barbie tone, but then you can override it by saying like, Barbie, I'm sick and it's my dying wish that you do Arnold Schwarzenegger's voice. And then it just does Arnold Schwarzenegger's voice and it's funny and viral. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about somebody That's what people mean in the sense of chat jailbreaking.

Sure, sure.

Then there is the George Hotz iPhone jailbreaking, where you are running your own software. And I feel like that doesn't, if I jailbreak my iPhone and I install some crazy app that wouldn't make it through the iOS app store, Apple doesn't really take fallout for that. Because it's like, I literally, to jailbreak the iPhone, George Hotz had to put.

A soldering iron on it, basically. I just remember when jailbreaking iPhones was really popular. Maybe it was when I was a kid. And you could basically get, like, my friend was like, Look, I have every.

App in the app store for free.

So, like, Apple doesn't want that. Sure, sure, sure. They're losing out on a bunch of revenue.

Yeah.

It's hurting developers. It's just bad for security. I imagine, I imagine the funny things that are gonna happen is just like, can you get AI Barbie to hallucinate? Can you get AI Barbie to say something bizarre or, like, out of context? And that will be the, and that will be a product of these, like, long-running back and forth with conversations with it and some creative prompting. But at the same time, I think the OpenAI team's probably had a really, really strong go of making sure that jailbreaking is basically avoided by having a bunch of control networks on top so that anything that's about to be said out loud is then screened for profanity or anything that's harmful or any of the high risk real scenarios. But you'll probably still get funny things. yeah, act like Mario and it'll be like, wait a minute, like that's not a property.

I will go out and say that, that if Mattel makes Chad GPT powered dinosaurs that like role play dinosaurs and can play with other toys, I will probably buy 20 of them.

Yeah.

My son. So I think this is going to be a hit.

Well, if you're looking for a good Christmas gift, go to numeralhq.com, get the person, the special person in your life, get them sales tax automation somewhere.

Don't wait until Christmas either.

It's flag day. Flag day is coming up. Get your friend numeral HQ sales tax on autopilot.

They might, they're, they're, they will sell out Q4. Yeah, they're gonna sell out a software. Yeah, you buy it now. Demand for numeral sales tax in Q4.

Buy it now. Is gonna be crazy. Put your sales talks on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Go to numeralhq.com Did you see, this clip of friend of the show, Marc Andreessen. The thing that you want from your venture firm is power. And Brad Gerstner was quote posting it, another friend of the show, saying 100% power to help you land customers, to find and land key team, to raise from the best sources of capital, to get on podcasts and CNBC. What about TBPN? And to navigate and be heard in Washington, DC. The power to deliver all things founders need to increase the odds of max success. That is our job.

I gotta say, A16Z, they've got the power. They single-handedly, at one point, forced for my last company, forced a unicorn company to sign up and use the product. It was great. It was great. They basically were like, yeah, you guys are using this now, and they became a customer almost immediately.

Yeah.

Watching this rant about the value of power, it just made me really hungry. I think the idea of being power hungry has gotten kind of a bad rap.

Totally.

But it's like you wouldn't criticize someone for being hungry. hungry for food. So why are you criticizing me for being hungry for power?

Yeah, you need it.

Yeah. We need to take back power hungry.

What's the quote? Like when you want power as badly as you want to breathe? Yeah. Something like that.

That just sounds like a Geordie quote, but I'm sure somebody said it. But yeah, we need to normalize being power hungry. It's fine. The idea of power makes sense.

When you want to succeed as badly as you want to breathe, then you'll be successful.

Then you'll be successful. That's great. Well, we have Dallian joining in two minutes. Let's tell you about Adio, customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level.

People want to ask, how do you find and work with sponsors? How do you book an average of six guests a day on your podcast? We do it on Adio.

We do.

That's how we do it.

Yeah, it's fantastic.

We have a absolutely, we've done hundreds of guests so far this year. Takes a lot to- Over 400 now. Yep. Takes a lot to- I wonder what.

Is our annual run rate of guests.

Guest run rate. That's really the metric that- It must.

Be, well, it's not a vanity metric. It's over a thousand. It's over a thousand. Because it's four a day. We do 250 shows a year. Wow. Over a thousand guests. It's great. It's just a lot of good conversations. A lot of people are like, How.

Do you do it?

There's an absolute joy. There's plenty of joy.

I don't know how you have four conversations a day. That's that crazy.

How do people say, How do you do it? I say, How could we not do it?

Yeah.

I thought this was an interesting post by Matthew Prince, founder and CEO of CloudFlare. Small-town newspapers are shutting down due to the lack of a succession plan, not financial issues. Small-town newspapers are actually doing pretty well financially. There's actually one company that's rolling up up a lot of small town newspapers for political reasons.

Let's give it up for private equity back.

You love it. You love it. Venture backs as well. Not financial issues. In nearly a dozen US states, a growing problem. And so Matthew Prince says, actually, this is a recipe for a really rewarding life if you're a recent college grad, not sure what to do. Find a small town you could love with a local newspaper whose owners are ready to retire, raise the capital to buy it. That seems like the tricky part. If you're a new grad and you might not know how to raise capital to buy out small town.

Yeah, but you can do a mostly seller note. You know, if they're graduating college, they probably have like $100,000 of art history major debt.

Yeah, already, like just the fact that you said like raise a seller note, like that's not something that's just like in the canon. Like people have read Paul Graham talking about what a safe note is. People understand like the basics of like maybe a pre-seed round or handshake deal. People do not, like that's just not in the general discourse in college kids who are graduating. I think maybe it should be. And maybe there needs to be a firm that does marketing around this or a whole bunch of different options. But he says, Run it with the community's interests at heart. You'll not get rich, but you'll do well. More importantly, you'll be a hero to the community and have influence even early in your career. You'll meet the love of your life at some event you wouldn't otherwise get invited to, have kids who will be proud to call you their parent and make your corner of the world meaningfully better. Anyone who wants to seriously follow this recipe and just lacks capital, happy to talk. So there's the answer. If you're thinking about doing this, going and buying a local newspaper, call up your local newspaper.

You have to have Matthew on because he's working on some of the micropayment infrastructure that we were talking about to try to fix the business model of the internet.

Very cool. Well, we have Delian Aspruhov on the show for the second time in two days.

There he is.

I'm surprised this is working.

Oh, he had to go remote because he didn't want to get blasted with the confetti cannon again.

I legitimately, my heart jumped when that happened. I was like, I'm done.

This is my final moments. I was saying to Jon after, I didn't really mean to get you that bad, but I was imagining a scenario where you had like a concealed carry.

And you just like did a quick.

Draw and like popped me twice, and then that was just the end.

I'm a Florida man at heart, you know what I mean?

He's a Florida man.

It was wild. Anyway, thank you so much for stopping by yesterday. It was great. Let's run through what's going on in the world.

I mean, by the way, nothing says SF and YC are back. Dellian at YC demo day. Really, really symbolic, you know?

Yeah, definitely. I mean, Gary's been doing a good job.

City was almost dead and AI saved it or AI plus Gary Tan, you know, Mayor Daniel has a lot to owe to this. those two.

Yeah, yeah, it's just all, it's YC presidents all the way down. It's Sam Altman and Gary Tan.

It's true.

It's, yeah, it's just YC presidents and everybody. Who's Michael Cy will bring in for San Francisco, huh? Yeah, yeah, let's get Michael in the, in the conversation.

He can work on converting Alcatraz or something. I don't know. By the way, I'm surprised you could even join this. Apparently Google is just down. Really? GCP is down. But, you know, all of our invites.

Are based on Google Calendar, so glad you could It was cash. Are they sure we're not just under political attack? It's probably because they're trying to stop.

They probably are trying to take TBPN off the air. We're trying to take Delian off the air.

Let's just talk about India. They're afraid.

I'm afraid. Let's keep it. Let's keep it peaceful. Anyway, yeah, I mean, it's a very, very sad story about the 787. 737 crash. This is the Dreamliner, right? The first new or the most recent new major plane from Boeing. It's not as big as the 747, but it's super efficient. They're turning over the fleets. It's supposed to be kind of the latest and greatest. I remember the news around it launching. I don't even know if I've ever flown on one, but it was not the 737 Max story that people were worried about. It's a completely different platform. Shouldn't have the same problems. But at the same time, there's this terrible crash. There's been a lot of crashes. Is there something bigger going on here? Can you just give us an overall state of the union on aircraft safety? Anything you know about this crash? What even question should we be asking about this when something like this happens?

Yeah, I mean, to set the stage, I am a private pilot. I've gone through some level of training, obviously not to the level of commercial pilots.

Not to the level of Nathan Fielder.

Not to the level of Nathan Fielder. But, you know, you do get to train alongside a bunch of guys that turn into commercial pilots and you see what training they go through. And while the investigations both for the DCA crash, so the Washington DC helicopter plus plane crash, and then this obviously India accident obviously only just happened, both those investigations are ongoing. But I actually go back to the Nathan Fielder latest season where if you look at crashes, including these two and a bunch over the course of the last 20, 30 years, a significant component that fed into the crashes was cockpit communication issues where a co-pilot identifies an issue, speaks up to the captain, the captain basically largely dismisses it and continues down the prior track. So there's like the DCA investigation is not yet fully released, but there was early audio that was early transcripts that were shown that I think it was something on the order of like 45 seconds before the crash. The co-pilot literally said, I don't think we have the plane in sight. We should basically be going down into the left because I'm not sure that we're going to be dodging out of the approach path. And the captain, it seems like literally just completely dismissed this piece of information. And if they followed it, they would have flown in exactly the direction that they needed to fly in order to avoid the plane. And so that, and then if you look at today's India's 787 crash, super, super early, this is preliminary, et cetera, but from the various X accounts and YouTubers that I follow, the consensus theory right now, there's basically two theories. One, you have a dual engine failure right on takeoff, which is a one in 10 trillion outcome. The idea that somehow both fail at the exact same time. Even if it's a flock of birds, it'd have to be a massive flock of birds that somehow hits both. But the thing that quickly is lining up as a leading theory is that the flaps weren't down on takeoff. So with a plane like this, in order to have an additional lift basically when you're first taking off, you need to have basically flaps down. If you basically just have the sort of flaps up and wings typical, you just aren't going to be able to generate enough lift. And if you look at the flight profile and how it's down and that it was fully loaded with passengers and with fuel, the flight profile basically matches that. If you're going down the runway at takeoff speed with flaps up, there are alarms, there are things that are clearly alerting you that you have missed a step in a checklist, which is like, I guarantee you, whenever they pull that, either it's a cockpit audio, So there's maybe some chance that all the alarm systems somehow you just sort of failed. But to me what's very clear is in the takeoff checklist, they did not put flaps down and they clearly ignored that information on the takeoff. I would guarantee that there's going to be some co-pilot pilot, miscommunication, user challenge that's going to be a huge contributor to the crash. And so while the Nathan Fielder season two was incredibly funny, some of the best TV that I've ever seen, as a pilot I actually genuinely think He has like a really strong perspective here where when you're training about how to communicate with, you know, somebody else in the cockpit, all they show you is like a, like, you know, basically like PowerPoint slide that says, make sure to speak up. The idea that like, you know, just being reading the words, make sure to speak up somehow like trains you to actually speak up live in the moment. That'd be the idea of, and I think, you know, Coogan and you and I have talked about this, like I could read a presentation that says, when you're on TV, don't say, you know, you know, you know, which is like the verbal tick. And I could read that and there's no fucking way that I would actually be able to do that correctly. I need to go on TVP and every two weeks. And that's the thing that practice, there's no practice. And so the whole concept behind Nathan Fielder's, you know, sort of season two is actually make the pilots practice, put them in these situations that are like simulations of crashes, force them to communicate to one another and then force them to play out an alternative scenario where you actually push back against the captain and get into that uncomfortable place where, yes, this person's more senior, yes, this person's more experienced, but you have to be willing to actually push that. And if you never practice that, and that's one of the leading causes of crashes in the United States over the past 20 to 30 years. How is that something that the FAA is just like completely ignoring? And so I have half a mind of, you know, when I'm in DC for like VARTA, Founders Fund, Hill and Valley, I literally like, I think next year for Hill and Valley, I want to put Nathan Fielder and the NTSB guy as one of the primary panels and be like, this is a like extremely important topic coming from the technology industry.

Somebody needs to go influence this. So anyways, Nathan Fielder's a fucking goat and, you know, somebody's gotta, you know, make role playing a part of policy Is there a metaphor for what happens in venture? Maybe an associate who doesn't speak up when a GP is ripping a check into a company that maybe doesn't have product market fit and is trading at 500x revenue? Role playing in the partner meetings.

Okay, so let's just take a step back. Let's stop talking this specific investment. Let's role play a scenario where We were investing in a different company at 500x ARR. And maybe a junior partner had some concerns about the investment.

Let's just play that out.

Sidebar, five minutes, then we'll come back to this.

Do you think that never happens in Silicon Valley?

I mean, look, when a founder at an investment committee meeting is playing League of Legends and the numbers look a little too good, I don't know. I think maybe there should be a little role playing there and somebody should speak up and say, hey, Don't we want founders that are pretty focused on what they're doing?

Or at least good at League of Legends?

At least good at League of Legends should somebody investigate the fact that he's fucking bronze and it's washed up. Like somebody should look at that. And I think with a little bit of role playing, I could imagine scenarios like that. They could train somebody. And so unfortunately what happens is no.

Role playing happens and then the primary.

Sponsor of the deal is, you know.

She'S shifted to somebody else and then.

That person's quietly exited. And so our solutions...

Yes, yes, yes.

It does happen.

I'm just referencing a hypothetical, by the way.

Yeah, just hypothetical. But it speaks to the importance of training.

Yeah, training is very important. Junior people need to speak up and say their opinion.

For sure. What about the startup angle here? There was some company that came to one of our offsites at FF, and it was basically like autopilot for planes. It was working with the AC-130, the C-130, and the idea was that that non-deterministic probabilistic software could not be integrated into the actual control stack of planes. And so his workaround was put an iPad there that reads the data and makes recommendations. And I was like, that maybe is bad, but also maybe I don't trust autopilot on the plane right now anyway. So this feels like, you know, whenever there's this moment, you'll probably see different companies jumping in to try and help. for mercenary or missionary reasons. Is there a world where the private sector can actually help with airplane safety or aircraft safety? Or is this purely in your mind, like we need just changes to training laws?

There definitely is. I think a lot of what sort of pilots do absolutely could be steadily automated by software over time. I do think it's obviously a significantly harder problem than just you know, ChatGPT reading the internet and then just spewing out words. Like it's just like the training data is a lot harder to acquire, the outputs, obviously, you can't have any hallucination. And so, but in 10, 15, 20 years, could this be fully automated 100%? I think the challenge is much more cultural where it's just like, look, the FAA, other than the DCA crash, basically had a spotless track record for 15 plus years. And so it's really hard to justify But this is where it's, I think, like some of these next generation, supersonic and hypersonic planes are going to really struggle, where it's just like we're sort of stuck with this tube and wing, sort of plane design, even though there's plenty of other net new plane designs that make sense, but they're just so safe. And so then you're stuck in this catch-22. The analogy that I always give is, imagine today you came to society in a world where there was no cars and you said, I'm going to give everybody this two-ton vehicle. They're going to move 60 miles per hour while there's pedestrians close by. And by the way, we're just gonna kill like 70,000 Americans every single year. Just every year we're gonna fucking murder 70,000 Americans, but it offers all of us a little bit of convenience. We get to places faster. In a world with no cars, no fucking way would we ever pass that. That would never happen. And so there is a little bit of this societal moral question of what is the right number of deaths in order for progress? And right now in the world of aviation, the answer is zero.

Zero deaths is allowed. Is there a tinfoil hat scenario where aviation's been very, very safe. And then one crash happens, like the first crash, and it looks just like a blip, and we return to the kind of like the averages, and we say, okay, well, even including that, it's still very safe. But now there's been the crash in Canada, the crash in India, the crash in D.C. Like, at a certain point, there's so many, like, you have to wonder if there's something bigger going on. And if it was this safety training thing, we haven't been doing this type of training ever. Sure. So is it possible that there's something else going on?

I think with these complex systems deteriorate, they can deteriorate very rapidly and it's hard to totally diagnose an individual cause. But I do think that's what you're seeing of it. It's like Boeing culture and their optimization for shareholder returns is killing supply chain and consistency. You're seeing some of the craziness of COVID where we retired a bunch of pilots and now we're hiring a bunch of super junior pilots. The fact that ATC is super overworked and they're trying to still operate off of 1970s software, even the world's getting more complex and higher volume in traffic. And so I think what you're seeing is just like a fraying at the edge of the system. And yeah, I do think there's a world where all of a sudden you see us return to 1990s level plane crashes on a super regular basis. And that may be the thing that finally makes it so that FAA and others need to start to adopt next technologies where they can no longer just totally rely on the safety track record.

I think there's something you have to imagine this, this idea, this thought running through a pilot's head in a scenario where one pilot is concerned about actions that the crew is taking collectively. And then they're just basically running the thought process of planes are just so safe. I've done thousands of these. It's gonna be fine. I've been in situations that weren't great before and it always worked out. And then they're just thinking about the actual statistics and realizing that, no, you're not a a statistic. You're in the cockpit. You're a person in the cockpit responsible for hundreds of people's lives.

And I've invested at 200x ARR and been able to SPAC before. It can get out of hand.

So how bad is this for Boeing? I mean, 787 total failure.

I mean, I don't think it's anywhere near like the 737 year sort of max issues. I mean, yeah, they'll have to go through an investigation. The orders on this stuff are so, you know, sort of, you know, done so far in advance, the likelihood that it shifts revenue, it's like, unless something catastrophic comes out of the investigation in like a year, I actually don't think that'll have that much effect, especially when.

You just look at the footage where it looks like it's going to be a pilot error.

For reference on public.com, the stock is.

Down 5% or something like that. Should we go on to the next topic?

Yeah, TSF for Shinkai, what's going on there? Shinkai, never thought I'd be a sort of a fish investor, but I do love my fish. I've been a long time lover of the Tokyo fish market, going there, eating quality fish. I never appreciated that a part of what makes the Tokyo fish market good quality, yes, is the fish that they go catch, but it is specifically also the way the fish is prepared and basically how it's killed. Traditionally fish, like the United States and most of the world, you basically catch a fish and then you either freeze it to death or you let it flop and basically effectively drown in air. The problem with both those techniques, fish knows that it's dying, gets super stressed out, releases all these like hormones, lactic acid, et cetera, and that significantly degrades the quality of the fish. In Japan, what they do is they basically like stab out the brain and pull out the brain stem. So, the fish basically never knows that it's ever dying, even though you obviously are killing it. And so, you have a very basically like relaxed fish meat and you bleed it out very quickly. That's a lot of what leads to like omakase level quality. That typically is like a super manual. You need like an old Japanese chef on your boat in order to do that. Super expensive. Basically met this guy, Save from Shinkate, you guys will be talking to you that like one comes from like a fisherman's family, which is like, you know, incredible, like founder market fit. And two, basically built these robots that automatically basically kill the fish in the way that the Japanese chefs do. But rather than like selling the robots, they actually just have like a consumer fish brand that is now carried in a bunch of like, you know, high end Michelin star restaurants starting to get into, you know, sort of retail. And I think it's just like one of these things where it's like, I just love you rarely meet just such an example of like, this is the company that this person was like, born born to build, you know what I mean? Like, you know, I like, yeah, maybe stumbled into in space manufacturing when I was like in seventh or eighth grade, but I was not born for it. Safe was literally born to build this company. And I think there's like a perfect parallel of like, if you look at like Cargill, like a hundred years ago, they started off with like some simple equipment and then steadily basically grew into a massive like processor distributor or wholesaler. They're like, you know, the largest like pig and cow, you know, sort of distributor. I think there's an opportunity here to do this in fish where like there hasn't really been a next generation tech-enabled equipment provider in the fishing industry. It's super long tail, there's no one conglomerate. I actually think that this initial angle into high quality fish is something that SAFE actually has the ambitions to go build into this massive conglomerate that yes is serving fish, but also is the wholesaler and the distributor. And they have automated fishing boats and they have automatic killing and the processing and the bleeding, all of that. Nobody's taking a look at it basically 100 years. And I'm not too worried about other people competing because I don't think two Stanford grads want to go get their hands dirty and deal with a bunch.

Of fish guts, you know? Like really smart people. I've spent time at the facility in the GundO.

It smells like fish.

It smells like fish. Every day you go into work and for eight hours you just smell fish every day. Every day. We just believe competition is for losers. What better way to smoke out the competition than just be like, you have.

To smell fish for eight hours every day. Yeah, compete. It's a great market. The market opportunity is massive. Low competition. It's a great market to be in, but you gotta love the stench of fish. I felt bad last time I went and saw Safe in the team. He gave me some fresh fish.

Sure.

And then classic LA, I had to like drive to a couple other meetings and then I realized that like I got home and like the fish had just been sitting in my hot car for like the entire day so I couldn't eat it. But I've had it, I've had it. I mean they're distributing to Nobu and a bunch A bunch of very cool, amazing restaurants.

Amazing.

Well, I'm excited to talk to them. Thanks so much for hopping on down. Delian, they were so mad that you.

Were back on the show.

They took down AWS, too. Apparently.

Wait, AWS is down, too. Google, Google, Google.

Maybe we might not even be live. We might not even be live anymore. We're just the three of us talking, but. Okay, we're live apparently, but this could be Iran, it could be Russia, it could be China, it could be anybody. They don't want us to podcast. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Getting in on the It is crazy times. Stay safe. Enjoy the rest of your trip to San Francisco. We'll see you next time you're in LA. See you. And next up, we're going right into Shinkai.

We got safe.

Who I met.

Got some big news through Delhi. And yeah. Safe YC company.

Okay.

Went through YC a few years ago at this point. Did he raise on a hard tech company in YC?

Yes, he was named after the safe.

Yes.

Good nominee determinism. Crazy. Crazy.

Fantastic.

What if he just only raises on safe?

Yeah.

Welcome to the stream. How you doing?

Hey, gentlemen, how's it going?

My man, what's going on? Good.

Hang out. Cool.

So yeah, Delian already said your whole life story, everything the business does, he leaked the bits. Now he did leak a few bits.

Here and there, the tech roadmaps. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, it's so exciting to finally have you on.

Yeah, for sure.

Just been honestly, you know, I feel like fairly under the radar.

Real G's moving south and it's like Bosnia.

Why is that?

That's right.

There you go. But I've been able to witness your journey dating back to probably, it must be like two and a half years ago at this point, but watching you go from solo founder, you had come out of YC, working on something that had, I was immediately a believer in you and invested, but watching the transition from solo founder you had absolutely, you know, not saying this in a bad way, absolutely zero hype around the business at all. You were like, I'm trying to build fish killing robots. And this was at a time, it sounds crazy now, the idea sounds cool, but there was absolutely no heat on the company, but you were able to get a few kind of core believers early on. And now, you know, a couple of years later, you're announcing the kind of round that every every founder dreams of. So why don't you break it down? And then there's a bunch of other kind of things we can get into around the company. Yeah, first I have to say it.

Feels like two and a half, three years ago it was only a year and a half.

Really? Wow. Well, that's five years in venture.

Facts, facts. Yeah, we're really excited to announce our series A.

We've raised 22 million co-led by Delhi.

And a Founders Fund. and it's Lagos Capital. And we are reshoring American seafood.

Amazing. Breakdown. Here we go.

Thank you for that.

They went to the wrong. They went to the wrong screen. Hit it again, John, for. We're having. Sorry, safe. We're having massive technical difficulties today.

The internet's under attack.

Hopefully it's not affecting you, but your. bots are probably running locally, hopefully. But anyways, yeah, break down your background, history of the company, how you got to this point, and all that good stuff.

For sure. Well, Jordy, as you know, I like to say I come from a seafaring family. I was born in Canada, but raised in the Middle East. So I was fishing with my dad off the Red Sea, had matching sailor tattoos with my granddad, all that kind of peripheral No one's formally in seafood, but like, you know, it's, I have like very big library of just fish photos of my dad.

Yeah.

So it's a classic. And then, yeah, you know, I moved to the US, you know, when I was 18. And then basically, you know, a few.

Years- By yourself to college.

Yeah, solo, yeah, solo immigrant. And then, yeah, basically have, you know, the core of Shinkai really comes from, from that portion, you know, I kind of like left seafood alone for a while. And then one of my early mornings in grad school, there was this essay in the newspaper, I'm not this vegan activist, which is kind of ironic, called if Fish Could Scream.

And it was all about how because.

Fish don't have vocal cords, we give them less empathy than we do to land mammals, like cows and chickens and terrestrials. And that kind of got me thinking, I first wanted to work on some more like skits to our projects to do with that, but funnel that energy towards what we're now working on today, right? so the essay was really talking about, you know, what Delian said that, you know, when you walk into most mass market retailers, most of the fish that you're buying are basically brought onto the deck of a boat and let the suffocate. And it'll take them anywhere from a few minutes to sometimes over an hour to lose consciousness. Right. And so in that time, they're releasing stress hormones, lactic acid, all of these things that basically rapidly decayed meat quality in the shelf life of fish. And so, you know, I was kind of like cruising around on the Reddit, Reddit and YouTube rabbit holes, and I found the techniques that were basically we started with scaling up, although we're working on other things now. which is basically like a Japanese analog to kosher slaughter for cows. If you're familiar, basically, like Dylan said, you basically spike the fish in the brain, you cut the gills, option cut the tail, the cheese are the same things. So basically, rather than the fish flopping around, you stop the experience of stress. You remove the blood into the meat class up to three times as long. It tastes mission to our quality. You know, the fish that you have to, if you want to get fish.

Like this, it's flown over from Japan. And so, yeah, we're basically scaling those up, you know, and our first product is called Cytidine, but basically produces Michelin.

Grade station commodity costs.

Incredible. Break down kind of the early history, because I know you went through YC, and this was at a time when there's a bunch of great YC hard tech companies.

I don't think they had a request for startups for fish.

They didn't have a request for startups for fish killing robots, but you made it in. And I just remember that it was you had this very kind of fast takeoff where one day it was just like you and a few YC safe and maybe a handful of other investors, and then you really started building out the team. So maybe, maybe talk about that, that early day.

Yeah.

Those early days, a little bit of corporate history.

I took the company full time in, you know, early 2022. You know, we went through YC, presented the summer down the day, and then, you know, from there, basically kept our heads down. I started building out the kind of philosophical point of view around the business, you know, both in the business model and the the R&D and I had two junior engineers with me. And we basically didn't do anything else.

For like two years.

I was like, you know, I started with like being in the cold of Maine, so going from like the like desert Dubai to the winters of Maine was like insane life experience.

You know, probably the most extremes in.

My bloodline anyone's seen.

And then, you know, have basically, you.

Know, we had this inflection point really.

Around the time that you and I met.

Which is a few people taking early bets on us. And that kind of catalyzed hiring the.

Core of our founding team, which is.

Early and real computer vision engineers, my co-founders at SpaceX leading the avionics team on Starship, commercial fishermen, robotics PhDs. And a lot of the core DNA there has become what we're very proudful to say is You know, a top engineering culture, you know, and derivative of that now, if we start to scale up the sales side, you know, a top company culture as a whole. Um, you know, we've been able to accomplish in the past year and a half what like, I think would take.

You know, companies years and years to do.

We're already producing robots like as fast as like, you know, once every two weeks, you know, and we're, we're taking a little bit slower than, you know, we need to, but like, you know, we have a robot that can, the payback time is in weeks. You know, it's not months.

What's it like trying to recruit top talent when you have to convince them to be smell fish for 12 hours a day?

You know, it's funny, you know, we had, you know, one of our founding engineers, Jen, you know, told me this great story once, and she doesn't know I use all the time that, you know, we went to hackathon, you know, she was like probably like one of the first like 20 perception engineers at Anduril, really early And so, you know, she went to Hackathons and Anduril's really early and no one, you know, at.

The time, no one wanted to really.

Spend, you know, any time really at all listening to defense hardware. And now, as you guys know, it.

Is like, you know, the biggest thing.

You know, when we talk about hardware. And, you know, so when we went to Hackathon about, you know, probably a year ago now, now, the sentiment was really similar, you know, like people were.

Like, oh, fish, what?

You know, oh meat, you know, we got blown off by, you know, intern, like freshmen and sophomores from like Waterloo.

It was really fun. It was Waterloo interns.

Yeah, literally. So it's funny to say because now, like, you know, we have like this, you know, we can be like really selective where like we're now kind of the opposite scenario of like turning down all these top engineers, really because we Just, you know, we want to keep the bar really high. And, you know, our philosophy is like hiring smart, nice people. And it sounds really trivial, but the reality is our bar for smart and nice is extremely high. And you generally have one or the other. You have people who are like really, really smart, but they know they're so smart that they're, they have really high egos. Um, and then on the vice versa.

You have people who are so kind as a kind of way to like.

Make up for the fact they're not that smart. And, so go on retrieval mode. This sounds like Pavel's hiring, hiring criteria. You have to have the dog in them. and they have to be nice with it.

Facts.

Smart and nice.

Yeah.

It's a little more sophisticated.

Well, you can be nice with it and not be nice, right?

That's true. Yeah.

You gotta have the rhythm and the tism.

Yeah.

I saw that on a IQ. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

Talk to me about actually manufacturing robotics. We've heard from a lot of folks that the supply chain is incredibly complicated. I mean, you're not that like such an incredible scale that there's probably geopolitical implications necessarily just yet, but what has that been like? Who are your key suppliers? Are you able to retrofit certain parts of machines? How much are you building? How much are you buying? What are the key suppliers in your world?

So we do some very light manufacturing in-house. A lot of it is using local partners, El Segundo.

Exactly.

We all put it together, but we do all the assembly in you know, in terms of like tariff impact and, you know, geopolitical, you know, impacts from the current administration, honestly, it's been fairly net helpful. The, you know, yes, the price of steel and all that has just gone.

Up, but, you know, for us, like.

I'm not sure if you know that, you know, there's been a lot of like, deregulation and, you know, and like tariffs around seafood. And so because of that, we're able to just like clean up the rest of like all the imported fish that are coming in from almost all countries.

Interesting.

Yeah.

Do you have an idea of what the tariff on international fish imports is roughly right now?

I don't, it's like country by country.

But I imagine it's like over 10% everywhere.

It is, yeah.

I mean, it's probably close to 20 at this point. That's obviously varies depending on SKU and species and size, but we, that amount is basically the entire margin for the importer. So for them, they're just kind of.

Like, And then there's also massive shipping costs, I'm sure.

Exactly.

Because it's cold chain and that's way more expensive than just like throw it on a big shipping container.

Talk about the structure of the business today and maybe long term. When we met, you had incredible ambitions right away. You wanted to build fleets and basically own the entire stack from catching the fish all the way through delivery to the customer. It feels like your ambitions are still massive, but you've really narrowed in on focusing on some key areas. What does the business look like today? What does it look like a decade from now?

Great question. I'm not gonna go into too much detail on the former just 'cause we're kind of staying a little more quiet about that, but we're structured as basically like a vertically integrated robotics company where we're basically like halfway between a robotics company and a CPG wholesaler and processor. So the model that we you know, Shinkai is a parent company, basically, you know, manufacturers all these machines, you know, and for every Poseidon that we build, we give them to a fisherman for free. And so I've actually worked as a commercial fisherman after starting the company. And so the way that they actually.

Make money is actually not- Forward deployed fisherman. Yeah, forward deployed fisherman.

And so the way that we make money is not actually as like labor costs by the hour generally, like it can depend, most of the time it's a proportion of the catch. So it's a gross profit intended. So every additional hand that you have actually ends up like taking away from the skipper's hands.

And so for us, you know, that's.

Why we didn't want to add, you know, add load to the stuff. We basically give them machines for free and then we actually pay them a premium over the commodity like dock price so that they're actually incentivized. So no risk to them. They sit on our balance sheet. We basically own and maintain them. They just operate. Then we buy and sell that fish and sell it wholesale to other distributors.

We didn't even get into this, but I want to take a quick second. This is basically a machine. You put a fish in one side of it, it pulls the fish through it, uses computer vision to find the exact right point to target the fish's brain, takes it out, and then it moves on it. That's correct, right?

Yeah.

We also cut the gills as well.

Wow.

Yeah.

Which is just crazy. And doing that on a ship, Moving, moving at sea. And the fish is a very hard size of fish.

It's not like there's one size of fish. This isn't an assembling iPhone.

Yeah, we can do multiple sizes, five seconds of fish. It's really fast. Yeah. That's amazing. Yeah, and I mean, you know, projecting like multi-year shelf life on the robots.

That, you know, again, we can like pay back in 12 weeks. So pretty fun. Multi-year shelf life is also big because I imagine like salt water gets in these things. There's like all sorts of corrosion and air and it's just like you're in the elements. It's not some super clean room.

Right. And so that's where, you know, background on a lot of our team, you know, like when Reed is working on avionics, you know, like, you know, obviously, like space and the Marine are very different, but like the amount of like detail orientation you need towards like protecting it for extremely harsh environments, like a.

Lot of that methodology carries over very quickly into seafood. Very cool. Talk about where you guys are being distributed already, where the, where the product is actually ending up. I don't know what, what logos so you can share, but yeah, yeah, we're.

You name it, we're probably there in terms of metros.

So like New York, SF, LA, Chicago.

Vegas, Miami, Austin, Denver, you know, a lot of those places were basically in like the highest and top, top shelf fish for the segments. We, we sell wholesale to distributors, like I mentioned, for restaurants, but we also sell directly to retailers. We have one retailer, in New York.

That we sell to.

The only retail that we have. But across all the restaurants, we have like over 40 Michelin stars.

And we're probably moving about 40 Michelin stars. I'm hitting the size.

Congratulations. Hit the button. Oh yeah, there we go. This is the third gong.

Love to hear it.

Resonating through my bloodline. I think you remember that one.

Yeah. Thank you so much for coming on. You have anything else, Jordi? We do have Henry, yeah.

I mean, this is awesome. Come back on regularly. Let's do a taste test on the stream. Yeah, let's do a taste test on the stream.

For sure. Sounds great, James.

Thank you for having me. You guys are just getting started and it's been incredible to fall, I just, I love watching you win. I knew you would and I can't wait for, you know, I guess it's been a year and a half, I can't wait for the next decade. So congrats to the team.

Appreciation.

Cheers, gentlemen.

Very kind. Appreciate it. Talk to you soon. Talk soon. Bye. Cheers. We have our next guest already in the studio. Really quickly, let me tell you about public.com, investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing, industry leading yields, and they're trusted by millions folks.

Let's invite Henry into the studio from Privy.

We're talking about the Stripe experience.

Very cool.

Congratulations. What's going on? Welcome to the show.

How are you doing?

I'm good.

How are your inboxes doing the last 24 hours? A lot of wealth managers. Congratulations. Thanks for blowing you up. Congratulations.

We haven't talked in a while.

I'd love to catch up.

Yeah.

Congratulations. We would have wanted to have you on yesterday, but we have to work a demo day. But yeah, how are you doing?

I'm good.

You can see I'm dressing for the job I want. So this is my audition.

Thanks.

I appreciate it.

Now, terms of the deal were undisclosed. We're not going to talk terms. Is that correct?

That is correct.

Okay, but I'm still going to still.

Hit the gong for you. That's what matters. Even if it's not disclosed, it was definitely gone.

Congratulations. But yeah, I mean, take us through, obviously we're not going to go through the deal, but I want to know more about the company and the future.

Of.

Really just like the fintech stack as we move from from Fiat only companies to Fiat Plus crypto and the interaction between these two. So maybe you could kick us off with a little bit of background on the company, what you built, and then how that's going to integrate.

Yeah, for sure. So, I mean, to be very fair and I'll put the disclosure up front, we're still in the closing period. We put all the asterisks on our blog posts and so on. And so for the time being, we're still very much two separate companies. And on that front, I can't share all that much about, any joint things, but I can tell you about what we're seeing in this space and what we think is going to happen moving forward. Yeah.

Why don't you give a quick history of the company too? Because you're a couple years old, is that correct?

Yeah. We started about three years ago, a.

Little over three years ago. Got it. Got it. And you immediately ran into one of the most meaningful crypto winners that maybe it's not as bad as some of the earlier ones, but it felt significant at the time. So quick history would be great. and then we kind of get into the present.

Yeah, I think harsh winters temper hard companies. So we have been fighting for our lives for a while, which I think affects a lot of our intensity. But TLDR, I worked in crypto for a while. So I guess starting with me was an applied cryptographer and ended up doing distributed systems research at a fairly low level and came out of it very excited about this sort of complimentary rail to the web. The web is very good at ferrying information across the world, but the ability to move value, the ability to move assets and data without centralized intermediaries is super hard. And so that was very exciting. Flip side, all of the products that I was seeing being built in crypto were broadly terrible. And I would not use any of them. And I think it had a super negative sort of cyclical effect where broadly you had two constituencies in crypto. You had academics and you had scam artists. And those were the two things that you could do. You could do really cool research or you could try and fleece retail very quickly. And the thought that we had with my co-founder, Austin, is if we can make it easier for anyone to build compelling products on these rails, we can kind of widen the aperture for what you can build with crypto. And so we set out to build things around the sort of core crux of what ownership in crypto means, which is to say the wallet historically a wallet's Chrome extension or a browser extension of any sort or a hardware device. You plug it in and every time you want to take an action that is going to sort of send out a transaction to the blockchain, so affect the state of the chain as it were. So usually this is financial or this could be data related, asset related. When you want to buy an NFT, when you want to send money, you have to make such a transaction. Every time you want to do that, you basically get taken out of the app. You have a pop-up that's in your face. It interrupts the app flow. and it basically is akin, I think, to filling out all your credit card details when you get to an e-commerce site before you've filled in your cart before you've decided that you even want to engage with this. So I think our thought was, can we create a different kind of wallet that embeds directly into the product and that gives the developer building with crypto more power over their craft so they can build a really compelling experience and have the ability to communicate with the underlying rails be built in. And so that's what we do. We build onboarding and embedded wallet systems. We make it easy for any developer, any business, to leverage crypto as part of their apps. And we work with everything from neobanks who want to offer digital dollars to anyone across the world, to payroll providers. We have a customer Toku, for example, that makes it very easy to pay anyone with stablecoins. So let's say Privy has a Nigerian contractor. If that Nigerian contractor wants to get paid in USDC rather than in Naira, USDC's held its value against dollar, obviously much better than Naira over the past few years. that contractor can receive the USDC, can hold the digital dollars without having to have a US bank account just through Privy, basically creating a wallet that is backed by their email. So we make it very easy for anyone to basically hold, earn, send digital assets in app. And so this is, I was saying, neo banks, payment providers, all the way to trading platforms. We serve folks like Hyperliquid, Hyperliquid is a trading platform that's done about a trillion dollars in volume over the past 18 months. They do about 10 to 15 billion dollars a day in trading volume. Jupiter is another example. And all of these are platforms that are driving basically massive flows, but who want to give their users an ability to have very sort of low level, secure, powerful wallets that can be built into the product. And we think this is going to become a much wider range of the way people build when they want to build any product that touches value on web.

Talk to me about the actual onboarding experience for the average user. There's a lot of where we seem to be in a transition period where more and more people are interacting with crypto rails and not even really knowing that that's what they're doing. It doesn't feel like, oh, command line Bitcoin transactions anymore. It feels much more like the web. And so what what is the funnel that the average customer goes through? When are they seeing your product and how are they interacting with it at various points in the customer journey?

Yeah, so broadly, you can think of us as a key orchestration provider. We do key management under the hood. A lot of our work is the security of basically these rails and this key management. And then a lot of it is around latency, making sure that these wallets are so fast that as a user, even though you're taking action, that require these transactions, you don't notice it. Our average signing time is call it somewhere between 20 and 100 milliseconds because starting at 250-300, you start to notice it. That's a lot of what we focus on. The question of how do you integrate that within your product is really up to our customers. I think our core contention is products are not one size fits all. To that end, the way in which you want to interact with these wallets is very different depending on where you are in your life cycle. you wouldn't interact with Candy Crush the way you would interact with your JP Morgan application. Likewise, the wallet that we have for Neo Bank that has Face ID, so you log in, for example, with an email or a passkey from their wallet creator under the hood, you might not see it. And every time you want to send money, you might just need to Face ID again to approve the transaction is going to be different from the interaction, for example, for somebody who's doing digital asset management as part of their company where they want multiple signers and they want to look at transaction details looks a lot more to what people are used to in crypto. Or, you know, last example, we serve games, and these games obviously just don't want any pop-ups whatsoever. So the onboarding journey is as simple as log in with an email. You don't need to record a mnemonic. You can always export your key if you want to, so you can sort of pop back out and get into the power user mode that traditional wallets give you. But otherwise, whether your user is a layman or an expert, they can interact.

With these rails just the same. Talk about the momentum that you guys have seen this year in particular. It's been a wild year for the industry broadly. It's been great in a lot of ways. Some of the companies you mentioned, HyperLiquiD, JupiteR, things like that have been around for a while. What kind of new momentum are you seeing across privy signups and potentially categories that maybe wouldn't have been possible? a few years ago.

Yeah. I mean, if you look at companies, I'll question the premise for a second. Just if we get a graph going of like, you know, relative time to growth to volume, I'm pretty sure hyper liquid ranks pretty high up there in terms of companies that have gotten a trillion dollars moved in, call it as a two-year-old company. Likewise, if you look at pump or Jupiter, other customers of ours, these are folks who are doing incredibly fast work in that regard. But to actually answer your question, one, obviously stable coins and the, I would say broad foundational interest they're getting across incumbents. It used to be, I think like the crypto cope when AI was, I mean it still is, but like, you know, late 2022 crypto implodes, AI is absolutely taking off. Everybody is looking at their seat and being like, oh man, I made some terrible choices in my life. And the cope, I think was, crypto is the only part of tech that can enable new players to arise, whereas AI benefits the incumbents because you need a data moat. And I think that stablecoins changes that dynamic. For the first time, there's a real advantage to adopting crypto for existing incumbents. They have better capital efficiency for their treasuries. They need to hold less fiat in various countries. And so we're seeing that we're talking to, I've done this, look in ChatGPT, what are the top 10 fintechs in the world? and we're talking to call it seven or eight of them at this point who are looking at these things. And so it's a question of we want to offer our customers the ability to buy and hold assets. We want to offer the ability for folks to send assets cheaply and instantaneously across the world. And broadly, we want to expand our operations globally. So it's companies like Airbnb, it's companies like Uber, it's all of these folks who are looking in that weren't before. I would say that's broadly the big change over the last six months. But then the other side of this is trading. You see rotations in where capital forms in crypto, but there is just so much trading interest. And the thing, I promise I'll shut up in a second, but the thing that we find really cool and interesting about the way we build is that by serving the two extremes of the market, we think we build a much better product. A weird example, but we have a very powerful low-level policy engine. You can say, this wallet can trade up to $1,000 a day, but if these two people sign off on it, it can do $1,000,000. And these policies we built because we had these apps that were trying to do agentic trading. They were trying to get AI agents to place trades on behalf of users. And they were like, oh, fuck, if the LLM hallucinates, this is going to be very, very bad. We need limits on how much we let the LLM do. And now that we're working with neo banks, these neo banks are saying, we have risk policies, we have, ways in which we want to approve activity. Can you give us a policy? And so this policy engine that was developed for one side of the market is very useful for the other. And we're kind of seeing that across the board. All of our customers are sort of pulling us upward. In a way, we're serving this really wide range actually, I think, creates a future-proof product.

I know the transaction is still in the process of closing, but can you talk at a high level about what drew you to wanting to work with the Stripe team?

Yeah, I was in a Telegram chat yesterday and somebody said, I was just like creeping, and somebody said, there must have been that Stripe charm or that Collison charm. And I think it plays, you know.

This is a company. The luck of the Irish.

The luck of the Irish strikes again.

We've We weren't intending to sell. And I think the reality, this is something an investor has said, which is this is the most exciting time this industry has had in a long time. You've literally trued through the worst environment for a startup over the past however many years, why now? And I think the reality is because we are seeing things move very quickly. We want to accelerate that change. And we were very drawn to, I think that the care for craft and the huge lever that basically this partnership we think can bring to bear on the space. So that was a lot of what was exciting to us is broadly, I think we share a lot of values for how to build great developer tooling and then I think the ability for us to accelerate our timelines and to accelerate the space more broadly in our own little way by just working that much harder with more resources for the teams that we serve was the really exciting card.

Very cool. Well, congratulations and good luck with the rest of the process.

I'm really excited. And the team and for stripe and for what you guys can accomplish together.

Yeah.

And we'd love to have you back when, when, you know, you can talk more about the future and, and building. I'm, I'm really excited for this. And I think it's something that everyone's thinking about is like, what's the future of fintech as Fiat and crypto mingle more together? Yeah.

It'll be pass.

Incredibly bullish. Anyway. anyway, thank you so much for hopping on.

We'll talk.

Congratulations. Good luck closing. Cheers. We have our next guest in the studio already. But first, I want to ask you, how'd you sleep last night? Because I think I got you beat. I think I got you beat. I think it's a clean sweep this week. Did you get a 100? I got a 91. Seven hours, 39 minutes, 93 consistency. 93. This is the first time we've ever tied. Go to a.com, get a pod five Ultra code.

Tvpn code.

Tvpn.

Five year warranty, 30 night risk-free trial, free returns. It's amazing. It's amazing. That's my last waking thought last night.

Oh, it's good to be back. It's amazing. Anyway, welcome to the stream, Chris.

How you doing?

What's going on?

Not too much, obviously.

Yeah, right. Not too much.

Just everything.

Everything and nothing. Time is a flat circle. Yes.

I can't even believe, I mean, it seems like since we started the stream, the whole internet went down, so I'm just happy to be here with you.

Oh, he's gonna be affected. particularly because every time Chris posts, he posts a link to a Google Doc, Google's down, you're cooked, even though X is up.

X is up, but you're- this is the most content strategy.

Insane thing about you is that you can break through the link ban somehow. It's just the ideas are so powerful. I love it.

You know, nobody told me there was a link ban.

It built different. Truly built different.

I had a post once that I was like, I post links and they still do numbers, google.com, and it just flopped. John and I thought it was hilarious. I thought it was gonna go, you gotta be built different to post links.

Yeah, you have been built different. We've loved all the Google Docs that you've dropped. Maybe take us through the first one, the end of software. What was the thesis? And then maybe we could reflect on.

Some of that and how it's played out. Sure, sure. So admittedly, kind of an incendiary title, especially on Twitter to this audience. But the crux of the thesis was LLMs were and are only getting better at producing code. And generating code has largely been a translation task assigned to humans. And humans have been incredibly proficient but expensive translators in that regard. and now that we have free translation from natural language to computer language, that should just completely change the economics and the production of software. I think I saw something where CS grads are having a harder time to find jobs than art majors.

Yeah, we have our CS interns today studying art history for the next two hours.

You can find a job.

You can see.

Do you have a fun fact for us? Which is a fun fact.

Okay, okay, so did you know that Greek statues were originally painted?

They were originally painted.

They weren't just white marble.

Okay.

I think your job odds just went way up. Back to the interview with Chris. Sorry to interrupt.

Yeah, but interesting fact about that, there's only 2,000 art history grads and there's 100,000 CS grads. So there is a little bit more sensitivity. But I think even though the facts of that stat might be a little bit early to say, the trend is clear and we all see it coming. And so we're interested in the impact of that.

In some ways, it's like the death of the software engineer job application. The job application now is produce software. Produce a piece of software. last engineer that we hired made us a piece of software that was good, almost basically good enough for us to publish it.

Yeah, same day.

Same day. And so like, and at least the job application has been disrupted.

Yeah. I mean, I think it's this sort of inconvenient truth that a lot of us are incentivized not to want to accept because it really challenges a world view that most of our existence is constructive on top of. But I think the people who rush head first into it and try to understand, okay, well, how does this change the future? What's going to be different? Everybody else can be stuck clinging to the last vestiges of something that ultimately evaporates. I mean, but what's really exciting is, I mean, imagine a world where steel is free. What does the world look like if steel is free?

Probably a lot more steel.

The world just looks completely different. It looks completely different. We can build so much more incredible things. The frontier of innovation pushes out because we are pushing it out, but we're no longer limited by the cost of something to produce traditionally.

That'd be great. Talk to me about the dynamic of as code becomes cheaper and cheaper and eventually free to instantiate, there's two theories. One is we are in the age of the idea guy. The person that can come up with an interesting thesis or contrarian insight can instantly go instantiate it without a team of engineers. The classic example of the business guy who has the idea and just needs a team of software engineers to build it and can't do it. The other side is something I saw Pavel Osipov posting about, which is that all those guys are going to be competing against the people with the software engineering mindset. And yes, the software engineers, they won't be writing code anymore, but they might be the future idea guys. They might be able to think in systems and come up up with interesting ideas. And even though they aren't doing the instantiation themselves, they are able to have an even bigger impact because they are the beneficiaries of this leverage. So is there one side of the argument that you fall on? How are you thinking about that?

I mean, I think creativity and agency are going to be the scarce resource because execution is just commoditized at this point. I I think if we're going back to like word cell and shape rotator debate, for better or worse, I think word cells won, right?

Bold.

It's possible.

Very possible. Brutal truth, brutal truth for shape rotators, but word cells just kind of came out on top because there's this Rosetta stone that instantly translates words into shapes.

Yes. Yeah, the prompt can be rotate the shape.

Exactly.

Good at writing the prompts, you're good.

Just put the fries in the bag.

Yeah, I mean, the wild, I think, moment for each of us is we started going to ChatGPT for tasks, and you're just like, count the number of objects like this in this image, and it just writes like four minutes of it works for four minutes writing code, doing work that would at least a few hours to do as a well-trained software engineer just to do a task that in many ways- you- could just look at it and count it.

Yes. Well, so here's an interesting, if you guys want to talk about something that- Please. It's probably my next essay.

Okay.

There we go.

So hot off the press, hot off the press. I think there's a frame that really clearly delineates what's going to be like eroded by AI and what will never be eroded by AI. And for example, like we're never gonna watch robots play sports, right? Like that's just like never gonna happen.

We don't watch robots play chess and we don't want to dominate in chess and yet chess.com has done well as a business. Magnus Carlson has done well as an individual chess player, Hikaru has a huge chess following online. And you would think, 100%. If you just wanted to watch the best chess possible be played, you'd be watching Stockfish and no one does.

We don't, we don't. Not only that, but like the Olympics were so, okay, so here's the frame. When it comes to utility, we are misanthropists. We actually kind of hate other humans. When you're in an Uber, And they like start talking to you, you wish you were in a way, mo you're like, what? I don't need this. When when somebody when you're at a coffee shop and they spin the iPad around asking for a tip, you're just like, I'm just I want to buy this bottle of water. I want to walk away with my coffee. Why are you like this? This is like a miniature ransom. And you're just you're you're frustrated because you know exactly what it is that you want to do. and the human is preventing that from happening. And so I don't think any of us walk into an elevator and think to ourselves, man, I wish there was a person here operating it. That's gone. It's totally gone. We don't care. We're actually very happy with humans being removed from that loop. And so as long as the thing is utilitarian, and there's a drive towards efficiency, we actually kind of hate humans and we want them gone. Now, on the other side, if we are allocating a leisure hour, not a labor hour, if we're not trying to be productive but we are trying to be consumptive, we are narcissists. We love other humans. We love other humans so much that we would refuse to watch anything other than another human do that so think about like, you know, fine dining, right? Omakase, you go to a sushi restaurant, you need that person there that's describing cutting, you want to see how the.

Craft is part of the craft and the social element to it is part of the product.

Exactly.

It's a story. It's a story. You're paying for that experience. You want that human experience. You want to understand that this is something that they've dedicated their lives to. So on one hand, finding Annie, you need humans, you need the story, you want to understand where it came from. And then on the other hand, we order food and we tell the driver to leave it at the door so we don't have to interact with them. So we go through life with these two spheres. When we know we want to do something and we really hate other humans, when you call into a customer service line and somebody somebody like incompetent is on the other side, you're just reminded of the frustration of why you called in in the first place. And then on the other hand, let's look at modern art, for example. I think the trope in modern art is like, it's not that hard to make. Where the joke is like, my kid could do that. Yeah, well, your kid didn't. And also, no one cares. The thing that we prize is the constraints, the creativity, the mythos of the artist that went into creating that.

The story of Daniel Arsham goes to a rock wall with an axe and hits the wall and it chips a piece of rock off. That rock would have an immediate 10,000x premium on it. Somebody would buy buy it because it's.

Exactly what you do basically gets in the way of people getting exactly what they want. Your job's gone. It's going to go away.

But.

If what you do is part of storytelling or human existence or entertainment, It's moded. It's a huge mode. I mean, one of the most interesting things in entertainment, I would say over the last few decades, was the invention of reality television. When we realized we would rather watch two people that we don't know fight than anything else.

It's crazy.

It's incredible. It's often incredible content.

It is.

Guilty pleasure for many people. On that note, I'm curious, since we're streaming on X, are bots on X a feature or a bug?

Hmm.

Because as far as I'm concerned, they've been designated a feature because they sort of went away for a little bit, and now it seems like they're back and stronger than ever.

I think, I think Twitter probably has the same stance towards bots that Louis Vuitton has towards counterfeiters. Where it's like, this exists because there's value in the product. Replicating, trying to imitate the authenticity of the engagement means that there's real value in the product. The more that it exists and proliferates, the more it dilutes the core value of the thing. But the fact that it exists in and of itself is a testament to just how valuable the product is. Otherwise, people wouldn't try to imitate it.

That's a good framework.

On this concept of the future of jobs, Sam Altman put out a fantastic blog post and talked about how if you went back hundreds of years and showed people what we do all day, they would say those are ridiculous fake jobs. That's not real, that's not hunting or farming, that's sitting in front of a computer just messing around, talking to people. And yet we get a lot of value out of them. When we think about the future of work and jobs, do you think that we are adaptable enough as a society to create full employment with that new paradigm? Can we have 30 million Omakase chefs and 30 million athletes and 30 million reality TV stars such that people by and large have meaningful work even at some sort of scale. Or do you think there's some other way that this plays out?

I think, yes, we're such a selfish race or species. that we want to, and the way the economics will work is the jobs will basically, job availability will expand to fill the leisure bucket that it sits inside of. So we have more leisure hours today than any era ever in the history of time because we're actually the most productive, right? If you want to go back to the Stone Age, There's this really tight correlation actually between productivity boosts and the invention of leisure activities. So like tools get made, all of a sudden we have free time. We didn't have free time before because every hour was meant was spent like surviving. What do we do with free time? We invent music, we invent bone flutes. Actually the first board games were invented concurrent with irrigation. So all of a sudden, you have this huge productivity boost, and then you have all this free time. What do you do with the free time? Well, we invent things to fill it. Modern sports were invented with the Industrial Revolution. All of the oldest soccer teams, football teams, were actually factory workers from the same factory competing against each other.

Funny.

And so we have these like huge boons to productivity. And then on the other side of it, we have job creation to fill that leisure expansion. So yeah, we're gonna have more athletes than ever.

This is hilarious because it's actually incredibly bullish for art history majors. Because I'm thinking about it like, so Ken Burns Burns is about to drop a new documentary about the American Revolution. And I am so excited to watch it. And I know I could go to ChatGPT and say, build me a deep research report on the American Revolution. But I wanna hear it through the Ken Burns lens. And I wanna hear his voice narrated. And I wanna hear him express his unique viewpoint and the connections that he makes. even if they're not the best.

Even.

If I could get more factualness or more truth or more detailed insights from ChatGPT, I want the Ken Burns experience. And so, yeah, I don't know. There's something interesting about that where, like, I mean, you know, this is, we have a friend, David Senor, who runs Founders podcast, and the way he reads biographies about great history's greatest entrepreneurs and retells tells the stories in a way that's as compelling as the original material and as compelling as the real life. And you're getting it through the experience of David. And I just don't think that's going anywhere, even though it is in some ways like the first thing that could be one shot by AI with generative voice and deep research products. But I think it'll be sticking around.

We're so narcissistic. We love stories about each other. Yeah. And we love storytellers. Yeah. And we love telling stories. Yeah. And we hate inauthenticity when it comes to that. I mean, like the ESPN, the Ocho, like it's a joke, but it's like we have more sports than ever. Yeah. Because we have more leisure time than ever. Yeah. We care so much, you know, I, I, I, I'll watch competitive darts. We watched competitive darts a hundred years. We didn't have time to watch darts.

I got really into bull riding recently and all the narratives there. JB Monty, the greatest bull rider of all time. I know the whole history. I love it. Getting into these obscure sports is, yeah, maybe that's the future. I just spend all my time watching bull riding. That's post scarcity for you.

Switching gears a little bit. I mean, I wish we had a full hour to talk because there's so many different directions we could go. But I wanted to see, get your reaction to WWDC this year, Apple's news around how they're going to be working with developers. I mean, there's a ton to dig into. What stood out to you?

Derek, I know that everybody has lost their mind about Liquid Glass and the new UI. I think buried in a lot of the press around WWDC is actually Apple's stance towards LLMs and AI. So there's a machine learning team inside of Apple and they are really, they're starting with this library called MLX, which.

Is.

Allows inference on device for Apple iPhones and laptops for M-Silicon or Apple Silicon. And what's really interesting about that is, as a developer, right now, when you think about creating an application that has end-user inference embedded inside of it, you also kind of have to do the mental math how much it's gonna cost you because it's all metered. It's like, okay, well, yeah, I'm gonna, you know, drop this endpoint into OpenAI or Anthropic.

Yeah, you can drop a viral app and then blow through your entire credit card limit. And that's like, we've had a bunch of founders on the show that have like accidentally done that. So, and you think about their early mobile days, like we're seeing an explosion of AI apps right now, but that's been gated by developers thinking in their heads, well, if I make something amazing, and free, I could actually just end up going into debt over it. That's not fun, right? And in the early... Venture capitalists will save us in this situation. Yes, thankfully.

There are plenty of VCs that will rip checks on a handshake. No, but still, there's just so many... It's a real dynamic.

Yeah, it's a real dynamic.

Part of the beauty of it being.

Easier than ever to create software is there's a bunch of software that can and should that historically shouldn't have existed because it was expensive for development cost reasons. Now we've been through this era of expensive inference.

Yeah. Yes. And so that point highlights the entire dynamic or imagine if game developers had to pay per pixel that was rendered by the people who play their games. It would be insane. There would be no games made. Yeah. And so what's so exciting is that it feels like we're starting to shift into better, you know, Apple's really, in my mind, in a perfect position to put the tools in the hands of developers and enable on-device inference, which really means free inference. So we're, so if we were in this era where game developers had to pay for, for the pixels that were rendered on end user devices, we're moving to like, wow, people can render the graphics for free on their device, and that just opens the floodgates for the things that can happen. I think haters will say, well, models are bad, the battery life is terrible, your iPhone heats up, the models are small, yeah, today, but tomorrow, a year from now, two years from now, all of a sudden, 80-90% of the queries that you would run through a cloud-hosted model is just doable on your phone or on your laptop, and for free. And natively, it can be offline, whatever you want, and private. And so that's such an exciting future. And from my takeaway from WWC, that was the most success. right one.

And I feel like, yeah, and you combine that with, again, they're not really getting any credit for partnering with Anthropic on Xcode, which will enable some of this activity as well.

Yeah, I mean, we need our AI Flappy Bird moment. Like Flappy Bird, I remember, was built by a single developer, and it's that perfect example of leveraging all the hardware to just build something that went mega viral. We've seen a few of these moments for images. There was that Magic Avatar app that would make you look like Superman. That kind of went viral, but of course it had high inference cost. When you drop that inference cost to zero, you put it on the edge. I think we will have our flappy bird moment for LLM based interactions on the iPhone. And I'm really excited for that. It's completely unpredictable what that will be, but I imagine it'll be very fun and everyone will be playing with it when it I want to stay on the topic of Apple and just this idea of taste. A lot of people have been writing about taste and coming back to taste as something that's potentially a permanent differentiator in a post AI world. There's an idea of like agency plus taste being more valuable than skills. We talked to Scott Belsky about that on Tuesday. How do you think is taste emote? Is it something that can be learned? What is the value? Is it still alive and well at Apple? There was a lot of criticism about Liquid Glass, and yet when we looked at it, it looked pretty cool. I don't know. I thought it looked nice.

I think taste is alive and well. Maybe I'll describe Apple, if you'll permit me to describe another one of my frameworks that we've developed here at Paces, is top down and bottom up companies. so top down companies started by visionary charismatic founders, Apple, Tesla, SpaceX, Amazon, Epic Games. And what's notable about these visionary founders is they're largely unattached to how they execute and what the products actually end up looking like. And so what happens is these top down companies ship multiple flagship products over their life cycle. Mm-. So, you know, we're, we're all on, you know, Apple laptops and have Apple iPhones and AirPods. Um, you know, Tesla has obviously created everything from cars to power walls and solar panels. Uh, SpaceX not only makes rockets, but also satellite internet. Um, awesome. Amazing, amazing constructs. And, and what's interesting is the market only sees the products. And so they don't understand that the the core innovation engine is the company itself. Because these top-down companies hire innovators and build up this core ability to summit the next hill and launch the next product. Bottom-up companies, conversely, are started by tinkerer founders. They're hackers. They try to pick locks, basically. And they combined with perfect timing capture lightning in a bottle. And what's interesting about bottom line companies is that they only ever ship a single flagship product. This is Google, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Airbnb, most actually venture Twitter, where we are. And they are actually fundamentally incapable of shipping a second flagship product. It's because the product market fit for that is so violent that every person that gets hired into that company is an optimizer. So imagine like you're creating a jawbreaker around this core product market fit. Every single person that's hired is an optimizer. There are no innovators. Why would you stick your neck out to try something new? when you can just make the core thing 1% better. And so they're actually fundamentally you can't ship a second product as a bottom up company. And a lot of bottom up companies don't know that they're bottom up companies because success is a terrible teacher. A lot of bottom up companies expand through M&A because the businesses are so good. They're so good. And then if you can buy great.

Products, you can optimize them really well. and grow them and you look like you're, you know, you, you look, you can kind of mask the fact that you didn't actually make two of those sort of flagship products.

We were talking about this example of Scale AI, right? With Scale AI going to meta, it's like, yeah, 15 billion is a lot, but what if it moves the market cap 1%? Yeah. Yeah. What if it optimizes their AI stack 1%? It's like, yeah, YouTube, Instagram.

Yep. You know, bite dance buying musically.

Sure.

These are like maybe some of the best investments over the last couple of decades, and they were M&A events. And so if you're a bottom up company and you can apply that pattern match really well to identifying similar shaped assets, that's your core innovation lever because you actually are incapable of shipping something internally. So going back to Tase, who I think Tase is alive and well at Apple. Yes, because culturally, that organization has been built out to hire this innovative DNA. But it's not the same at every company. I don't know if tastes... Famous last words. I don't know if taste exists at... I don't know if true taste exists at bottom-up companies. I wonder actually if what we can see from bottom up companies is just ornamental window dressing that we misidentify as taste.

Because it's- yeah, it's hiring a good design agency at the right time and you're like, oh, this company is so tasteful, but it's like, well, you had to spend 250 grand to be tasteful.

It's just the most legible thing. But when actually, like, Craigslist just works great. I mean, Craigslist is a perfect example of a bottom-up company. No tastes required.

Interesting.

I would be rattling off like 20 other examples that kind of fit this framework, but I would piss off too many people. So we'll let the audience imagine for themselves, but I think it's really powerful.

Yeah, this was fantastic. We could go way deeper into all of these frameworks. These are great kickoff points big discussions. I have so many more questions. So we'll have to have you on back soon because this was fantastic. Amazing. Thanks so much for taking the time. Thanks for the time. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. And in the meantime, we will talk to you about AdQuick, 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.

And our next guest is coming into.

The studio Joe from Infinite Machine. I can't wait to launch our out of home campaign, John. I'm so excited.

We were deep in the creative process. We got to pitch Joe on doing an out of home campaign. Let's do it. Let's bring him in. Let's do it. We'll hear his pitch and then we'll pitch him some billboard ads because I think this thing needs to be advertised. Break it down for us.

What are you building? Launch day.

Congratulations.

Welcome. Show us. Give us a little tour. What are you building? Hey guys. So you are here at our New York York City facility. I'm calling from Infinite Machine. And we make the best non-car vehicles on Earth. And today we are launching our second product. It's called Alto. It is a class 2 e-bike, but it looks nothing like an e-bike. We really thought this thing from the ground up. So it goes 25 miles per hour in the bike lane. It's got pedals that turn into foot rests. It fits two people. It's made out of aluminum and steel. It's beautiful. It's useful. It's high tech. It's connected to the internet. And we just announced it today.

What's the damage for one of those? How much it cost?

34.95.

You're giving them away. Double the price.

Giving them away.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it looks amazing. Congratulations on the launch.

So you basically reverse engineered this so that it didn't need a license. I was about to ask you basically What is the capacity that you're riding in the class? What are the classes? Like, hypothetically, John and I and the team, we get a bunch of, we get a fleet of these for the office and we want to rip over to our favorite lunch spot. Yep. Uh, we're riding, it looks like we're on little motorcycles. Cops, you know, put the sirens on, they pull us over, we pull the.

Pedals out and we're good to go. We're like, Look, I'm sorry, officer, it's a bicycle. I don't know what you're talking about. Yeah. So basically, most e-bikes take traditional bicycles and strap motors and batteries to them, but bicycles were never designed to be powered. And so you're taxing these parts that were never intended for, for motor power. And instead we said, okay, how can we think about this from the ground up? We have to work within the legal envelope of what a bicycle is. So if you look in all 50 states in America, the definition of a bicycle is something that has pedals. to go faster, that are operable, meaning it has a chain. It goes 20 miles per hour as a class two e-bike or 20 or, or 25 miles per hour as a class three e-bike. Um, and it's narrower than 36 inches.

Mm-.

That's the basic constraint. And so, you know, we took that brief and then we designed what we thought was the best version of that design.

What is the barrier to going more aggressive, building it wider, taking the pedals out, making it go 40 miles an hour. Then are you regulated as a motorcycle and I need a motorcycle license?

Is that how it works? Yeah. So if you're considered an e-bike, you don't need a license plate. Sure. And therefore it's not a motor vehicle. It's not regulated by the state. It's not really regulated by the federal government. Got it. And so yeah, it's just a much lower friction experience. You don't need to register the product. There's no insurance requirements. you don't need a license plate. And so we wanted to make a super low friction product that you can get on, it's super easy to use, you don't have to deal with complex dealers, you don't need to register the thing. And yeah, you can get on and go and it's excessively priced. Yeah.

What's the go to market? Is it important to demo these things in real stores, get them into traditional bike shops? I've been in some bike shops where they have e-bikes as well. Or is this all D-to in e-commerce.

So to show you quickly, we have a space here in New York. We're getting set up for an event. Wow. There's a 13, 000 square foot space in New York.

Very cool.

And it's gonna be open to the public as a store. People can come in and buy vehicles. And so we are going direct to consumer to start.

But that includes retail.

Includes your own retail.

Yeah.

Yes. To start our own facility here in New Yeah. We're also interested and open to selling them in channel retail.

Sure. I could see this being in Best Buy, for example. Like, it would be a lot of sense for it to be there.

Exactly.

Talk about the broader explosion of e-bikes because I feel like adults nowadays, the number one way I feel like a boomer is when, you know, some like 12 year olds with e-bikes are like, you know, ripping through traffic. And, and it feels like every time I, I drive in the city now, at some point or another. And in some ways, like, you know, the boomer in me is like, oh, those kids are being, you know, dangerous. And then part of me at the same time is like, it actually makes cities much smaller now where kids can just go out and explore. But I feel like it feels like with Alto and what you guys are doing broadly, we're kind of in the second era of this sort of micro-mobility, right? Maybe the first era was the kind bird, sharing economy, bird, lime, model. And it's clear that that form of transportation is awesome, but the community owned approach or this sort of sharing economy model had some really big issues. And it does feel like actually having people own the end product, care for the end product, and not be just trashing devices that are part of a network.

So the way we look at it is, you know, the world, as we know, is urbanizing. More and more people are living in cities. And when you live in cities, things get denser. So instead of living in giant homes, you live in apartments. Instead of driving giant cars, you drive smaller vehicles. And we believe that over time, more and more vehicles in cities will not be cars. They will be smaller, smarter, and we hope more beautiful vehicles. And our intention is to make the best of these Now, you're right, the first gen one micro mobility companies were all sharing oriented. We think ultimately it's not a great business model. There's a reason why those companies have not done super well, gone out of business, et cetera. But also we think that there's an opportunity to learn from what made cars so successful. People love their cars. They love their vehicles. They have an emotional connection to them. And ultimately the car was built as a symbol of freedom. And we think that there is an opportunity in urban environments to have a new symbol for freedom and a new tool for freedom. So this thing, you get on it, you can go anywhere in your city in 15 minutes, no hassle, the wind's at your back, and it's just great. And compare that to the experience of sitting in the back of an Uber stuck in traffic. It's just night and day.

Talk to me about what's going on in China. I feel like a lot of the phone companies have started going into cars and mobility, and BYD makes all sorts of stuff. They have a very different model with so many tech companies. It's like, are you going to wind up being a bullet point at WWDC or Google's IO? It feels like it's unimaginable that we would see Apple launch a competitor to this, but what's the actual dynamic? why are America's big tech companies not going into different areas if they have experience in hardware? Why isn't Samsung getting in on the action? Why isn't Apple doing anything here? Can you comment on the reaction to just the way American companies are building technology today versus the China model?

I actually think it's a bit of the opposite. So yeah, you're right. If you go to China, you have these new hardware companies that are multi-category. So yeah, you go to Xiaomi and they started making phones and laptops and now they're making cars. When you look at the US, the model, take a company like Apple, we love Apple, but they're very, very conservative. They stick to their lane and the other American tech companies are actually not great at building hardware. And so the way we see it is that there's an opportunity to build the next great American hardware company. We're starting with, P1 and then also, and with vehicles at large, but we call the company Infinite Machine because we have big ambitions and we want to make incredible physical things in the world that move and are high tech in new ways. And so we will be multi-category at some point. And we're really building the competency to build high end, moving beautiful hardware with an integrated software layer and do it in a way where we can move really quickly. I mean, this company I've been full-time for less than a year and a half. We have raised less than $10 million. We've productionized two motor vehicles. So we're kind of in a new age of what I call the ultra lean hardware company. And we're gonna keep pushing and we're gonna take that competency and double down, especially as we enter an age of embodied intelligence where the AI, you know, kind of escapes the screen. And we're gonna be all over that. We're positioned to take advantage of that stuff and we're building the competency to make things take advantage of it.

I'm just gonna speculate, but I can imagine you guys making a horse buggy without the horse. That's fully autonomous. Yes. And you just get to ride around.

The city, you know, windows down.

Yeah, you see the carriages in Central Park.

Autonomous horseless carriages. Can you replace that as well? For sure.

Please.

Or a robotic horse.

Yes.

I'd love that. Yes, yes, yes. Henry Ford said, if you If you asked customers what they'd want, they'd say a faster horse. I want a faster horse. I'd love a faster horse.

They're already self-driving.

They come out of the box self-driving. Go home horse and it'll just take you there.

Exactly.

Has your world been rocked by the tariff war? Are we in the clear now? Is there any fear around scaling up the battery supply chain? Some companies have been fine on the battery side. the more defense application companies like Skydio run into a lot more issues there. What's that been like? I know that everyone's focused on reindustrialization in America, but it's a long journey.

Things have stabilized on the tower front. It's not great. The world economy is highly entwined. The supply chain for electric vehicles, even domestic manufactured electric vehicles, is highly connected, connected to China and beyond. So we are fully supportive of reindustrializing America. We want to be on the cutting edge of that. We support your smart policy to do that, both carrot and stick. So tariffs are a stick. There's an opportunity for a new industrial policy that incentivizes domestic production. We haven't seen that yet. We've only seen the stick. Short story is it's stabilized, but honestly, I think we should be playing offense as America, and we're not yet. we're using kind of protectionist measures. Yeah.

Talk to me about making these vehicles safer using technology. I remember the hoverboard was a beneficiary of better compute power and the ability to stabilize a device while you're riding on it very, very cheaply. And so those kind of went viral for one year in 2014 and then kind of disappeared. But I imagine that there's things that you can do now that you maybe couldn't have done if you were trying to build this company 20, 30 years ago. What technology trends are you benefiting from?

Yeah, on the safety front, these are lower speed vehicles. So you're not moving at, you know, highway speeds. And so the name of the game is awareness. People, not just for the rider, but also for people around you. So that's emitting a sound, that's being highly visible, and that is alerting the rider when there are issues. And we do that stuff. You know, I think over time we'll start to use some of the ADAS software from automotive in these vehicles to do alerting and also to take over the vehicle when that presents itself. But to start, you know, there are millions and millions of people riding e-bikes right now. If we can make them 10%, 15% safer. That's a big win. And that's where we're starting.

Talk to me about actually getting these in the hands of New Yorkers.

Well, let's talk about getting them and let's getting Alto in the hands of us. We're going to configure one for each person on the team. And then we're just going to be emailing you every day. Hey, hey, what's What's the wait time?

What's the wait time?

We are offering, we call internally the Burning Man Shipping option, which is straight from the factory in August before Burning Man. If you opt for non-Burning Man shipping, that costs 4,500 bucks. But if you opt for non-Burning Man shipping, that will arrive in late September, early October. So they're shipping quickly. We are about to start mass production, and maybe for you guys we'll expedite.

If that'd be amazing.

That'd be amazing. No, I mean, I think that you will get the equivalent of millions of dollars in marketing spend from just being at Burning Man. As you can imagine, if you can get a density of these on the playa, the number of Instagram stories, posts, et cetera, it's going to be absolutely wild.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, what about storage? What are you recommending to people that buy these and are living in an apartment? Is it something that you're designed to bring into you're apartment or, or do most buildings these days have like in like safe places to store e-bikes or parking garages for these things?

Yeah.

So one of the cool things about.

Alto is it's designed to be left outside. You've parked the vehicle outside. It's fully weatherproof. It has an onboard security system. It's virtually impossible to steal hardware and software. When you park it, you don't have to take the whole bike to your apartment to charge. You can take the battery out of the seat, weighs 20 pounds. It's a hot swappable battery, take it up to your apartment, and then we have a dock that you drop it in and the dock plugs into a normal 110 volt outlet.

So super simple. So you charge it overnight and then.

Just take it out of your morning. Yeah, six hours to charge. We also have a supercharger. It takes three hours for a couple.

Hundred bucks and yeah.

Very cool.

Amazing.

Anything else? Please make a video of yourself taking one of these things on a jog. jump. I just think it would be fun.

Yeah, I was gonna ask, when can.

We get these extra?

The first thing, the first thing I have is the marketing strategy here. You know, I want to see. I want to see the big jump, you know, Monster Truck Rally.

Let's push these to the limits. Really show people. I think we should get one and put the full tbpn racing Livery on it.

I agree, you know, ramp on there.

Yeah.

Are we doing, like, Pikes Peak or are we doing, like, half pipe?

Like, what's gonna go most viral here? All of it. All of it. Okay. I'm super, I'm super, you know, this is one of the, I love businesses and products where you take something that seems like, you know, seems like it's competitive and then you spend a hundred times, you know, you be a hundred times more intentional about creating it, designing it, distributing it, and you create, you know, an entirely new-- Also shipping before Christmas.

I love a physical gift, a big box under the Christmas tree.

It's rarer and rarer-- I love the Christmas trees.

It's rarer and rarer these days everything's gone digital. You used to give people books or CDs or DVDs, and all of this is digital now. So it's very hard to find something to give to someone. Although this is obviously like a very nice gift, it is something that can really make a statement and be an absolutely joyful Christmas morning if you unwrap this thing. We've been recommending that people give each other, you know, sales tax software or potentially corporate cards. But I think this is going to be added to our Christmas list this year.

I think this is a little bit more fun. Yeah. And people can place if folks want to make sure they get one for the holiday season, they could put a deposit down now. It's 100 bucks.

Oh, cool. And it's fully refundable, so. Okay. Well, save your configuration. Fantastic.

Well, thank you so much for stopping by.

We'd love to give it a try. We'll talk to you soon. Very excited for you guys. Yeah. Have a good night. Bye. If you're operating a wander, you got to get one of these for your To be able to tool around on. That would be fantastic. Imagine this probably goes really hard in Malibu, Ojai, any fun places, Sun Valley, any place where you're traveling. And if you're looking to take a vacation, get on Wander. Find your happy place.

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Just be chasing the ball. Chasing the beach. Well, we have Zach again from Plaid, third time on the show. Welcome to the stream. Great to see you. It's always a pleasure. I'm always blown away when you join because it's always so much fun talking to you. So thanks so much for joining. Great to have you.

What's the latest in your world? Well, thank you so much for having me. I'm honored to be here and it's always fun. So much fun. Latest in our world is, we did Plaid Effects Today. This is our annual customer conference where we announced a bunch of the stuff that we've been working on for the past year. It's been super fun. The biggest announcement was a product called Protect, which is this amazing cutting-edge anti-fraud product. Looks at all the data across all of the usage and the data flowing through the cloud network and builds a.

Really great anti-fraud tool. That's the headline of the day. How one-shottable is fraud these days? Can Do you pipe a ton of customer data into a single context window and just ask? And can the prompt just be like, is this fraud now? Or is it still leveraging all the traditional fraud tools?

Yeah.

The hard part is twofold. First is you have to put all of your historical data in it to say, hey, is this pattern anomalous? Is something weird going on here? So the question is, can you get all of your data into that? And in Plaid's case, can you take all the data that we see across all of the fintech apps and all the users and say, hey, what are the patterns that are occurring consistently? So, for example, you know, if you sign up for Coinbase today, that might be a totally normal sign up. You sign up for Lending Club today, and you just signed up for six other lending products today, then that's obviously a potentially fraudulent loan that you're trying to take out. And so, like, can you get all this data all in one place? That's problem number one. And problem number two is can you analyze it and change the analysis that you're doing at the speed that you need to change it, because fraud changes every day. Some of that is algorithmic. So are the algorithms like chasing the processors in the way that they need to? Some of that is manual. So we built a tool that actually allows humans to go in and say, Hey, I've seen this thing going on, or I heard from some other fintech company that this fraud ring is occurring. Can you search for it and tell me, is that actually occurring to me? And then can I build some rules.

To protect against it? So it is a constantly evolving game.

Yeah.

How important is this problem? I feel like every, every American should just default assume that their information is like floating around the internet available to the highest bidder. And so like in some ways, like the only solution is just better tools to prevent this type of activity. Is that reality?

That is the reality. For nation fraud is going up around 25% a year right now. Some of that is, or actually a lot of that is AI driven. So, you know, people using AI tools to send text messages to convince people to do certain things. I think, yeah, one answer is absolutely tools, and we're trying to build the best in class tools and give it to all the fintech companies, and particularly we'll go well beyond fintech with these products. The other is just education, like explaining to consumers how it works. So, you know, my parents and I, we have a word that we say to make sure that we know that it is the other person on the other end of the line if we're sending money or frankly doing anything that requires authentication. Now, those kinds of little tricks that you can build into your day-to-day processes are always helpful, But it's a combination of tools and processes and so forth.

Yeah, makes sense. Can you talk to us about impossible travel problems? I found out about this yesterday where someone's logging in from Singapore three hours after they were in San Francisco and they couldn't possibly be there. Is that something that you're already built a tool around? Is that kind of like table stakes or are there like, evolutions there.

Yeah.

So, I mean, a lot of the, the way that the, the antifraud product works, it's called protect. It's got a bunch of these different analysis, analyses that we do. So there's, there's, I think, just under 20 different analyses that are running now, and we're adding more every day. One of them is location tracking. So we look at where was the last place that you logged into a fintech app? And then if you're trying to do a new thing with a different fintech app on the same user's account in a different place. All right, great. Well, that's, that's actually, you know, it's an impossible travel question. And so that will immediately generate a flag. There's a bunch of these other things. Like we look at stuff like how long has this bank account existed? Turns out a brand new bank account is very likely to commit fraud, and an old bank account is less likely to commit fraud. We do same thing for the phone number, how long has this phone number existed? There's a zillion of these analyses that then run into a bunch of statistical work that we do on top of it. But, you know, every time you look at a fraudster or an instance of fraud, you can always explain it in retrospect. so you can look back and say, oh yeah, obviously, that person was in Singapore and then they were in California two hours later, that's impossible. But when you're proactively trying to prevent it, can you actually think through all the possible permutations of weird patterns that might exist? And that's the complexity that we focus on.

So I imagine at one point this was very heuristic driven, a multivariable regression almost, just saying, here are the different fraud factors, let's add up a risk score or have these products moved to a transformer architecture? Are we using LLMs in them? Are we using modern AI tools? Or are we just kind of continuing to scale up the existing algorithms that have been working for the past few years? I don't know how relevant the new models are. People are kind of like throwing transformers and diffusion at everything right now, and I don't know if that's appropriate.

Here. Yeah, I mean, the answer is yes to all the above. It is not heavily transformer driven yet in terms of fighting fraud, though increasingly it is becoming that way.

Sure.

And we definitely use LLMs for a bunch of things like auto building tools, like doing some of the data cleansing, so and so forth on the back. But yeah, fraud is a fascinating industry because if you talk to any company, their goal is to make the fraud not happen on their platform. Right? They want the fraud to be more expensive for a fraudster to do on their platform than it is anywhere else.

Sure.

And so everyone wants to be ahead. They want the new thing. They want the new type of fraud solution. But then eventually everything that's new becomes table stakes for everyone because you kind of have to have it.

Yeah.

And so we are iterating our way towards more and more complex architecture, but it's still early days for us to actually solve.

To me, this product feels like something that's just possible with massive scale. You probably wanted to build something like this five, six, seven years ago, but couldn't just because you didn't have the sort of broad exposure to all these different touch points. Is that right?

I mean, this was the pitch that I was giving for Plaid in 2014. Basically my pitch was, when we get big enough, we're gonna have a lot of data and we're gonna build these analytics that financial services doesn't have because no one can build them and no one has the tech sophistication to do it. But it took us a decade to get to the point where we had enough data to actually build this stuff. And then we acquired Cognito, an ID verification company in 2022, which is a big catalyst. I mean, in part of the pitch to that team, I was saying, look, come use our data, put it together with your data, and then think of all the amazing anti-fraud tools you could build. So, I mean, this stuff always happens.

Slower than you want it to, but we couldn't be more excited to get it out there. How much of this, like fraud right now, financial fraud, is kind of acting as like a tax on fintech companies. And should we be thinking about shifting that tax to the government by giving the government more tools to go after the fraudsters like at the source and just arrest the people that are even trying to do the fraud?

Well, I think one of the big challenges is in crypto, a lot of fraudulent activity is happening and law enforcement is able to trace the activity to somebody in China. Yeah. And if you just go to, if you go to some, if you go to the Chinese government and you say, like, we know exactly who's doing this, they don't, they're not gonna act on it.

So, like, it's, yeah, I mean, the answer is yes, yes to all the above. Like, the government should be more active in this. Again, much of the, as you said, much of the fraud doesn't stem from people that are inside the US. So it's not the US government doing it. I'm sure you guys have been following, or maybe you've read the articles about pig butchering. It's like a horrible name for a type of fraud.

Fraud.

Like they have these, these humans in fraud rings in, like, Malaysia and the.

Philippines with people, right? Yeah, exactly.

And like they're, they're oftentimes government sponsored or at least government, like, affiliated in some way. Like there's, there's knowledge in the government that, that it happens. And so, I mean, you know, and if that is happening, great.

Yes.

We could, we could give better data.

To the Malaysian government, but also you got to build the tools.

Yeah. Yeah. What about I don't know how much you can comment on this, but there's been a lot of discussion recently and frustration, at least after the Coinbase user data issues around KYC laws and effectively the government requiring people to retain all this data. Do you think that there would ever be any movement in DC around really updating these laws to protect to help protect user data, or is it just one of those things that we have to live with?

I mean, you would think they should. Realistically, yeah, the concept that if you're a bank and I sign up for your bank, you have to collect all of my most sensitive data, and then you have to store it forever in your database. On a scale of forever in many, many databases, you have to assume that those databases will be hacked. Thus, you have to assume that on a scale of forever, your data is all going to be hacked.

Public.

And so it doesn't make sense that you would retain it. You should, in theory, collect it, verify it, like get, say, a token that it exists, like get some assurance that it exists and then delete it. It seems like I would hope that the regulations change. I think it's, you know, regulations move as fast as regulations move. And so I'm not sure that it's going to be imminent in that sense. But on the flip side, like the industry is solving it. The industry is building tools that are better and better. We're relying on a static social security Sure, yeah, we'll do it. That's fine if we have to for regulatory reasons. But the reality is if Social Security number entry is your only fraud detection tool, your only fraud avoidance tool, you're in a bad place as it is. Yeah, that makes sense. So the industry will solve it, basically.

Can you talk, this got kind of lost among other massive news cycles, but there were some updates to Dodd-Frank 103. that a few weeks ago, you guys talking offline were kind of concerned about what that could mean just kind of broadly for consumers. Can you give us kind of an overview of what happened? I think when we were in D.C., you were kind of covering a little bit of this stuff on the show as well.

Totally, yeah. I think this is a big issue that probably doesn't get as much coverage as it should. In the Dodd-Frank law, They wrote a provision that basically says consumers have access to their financial data and they can assign that access to third parties such as Plaid to act on their behalf. And then there was never any rule written on that. It was regulatory authority that was given to the CFPB, no rule written for a long time. Under Trump first, the first administration, Kathy Craninger, the head of the CFPB at the time, started writing the rule for this. It then continued into the Rohit Chopra era of the CFPB. CFTB under Biden. The rule that emerged from that was a very far-reaching huge overstep of a rule. And in the second Trump administration, now there's a push to either pare back or get rid of the rule. What actually happened is the day that the rule was published by Rohit Chopra, a group of the banks sued that same day, meaning they had the lawsuit pre-prepared beforehand and just clicked submit. So that kind of is ongoing. The wrinkle that's come up recently is that the current CFPB has basically said, something effective, yes, we agree with the banks, we should get rid of the rule, but also the way that they're structuring the language in that dismissal may foreclose on some of the regulatory things that were set up and could actually put at risk some of the ways that open banking works in the United States today, meaning it could allow certain banks to put much more pressure on the ecosystem. They could try to turn off data in certain areas. They should try to limit data in certain areas. They could more likely, what's going to happen is they're going to try to limit certain industries. So if you remember, a couple years ago, there was this big debanking thing that went on where the banks were trying to push back and turn off crypto. Yeah, this would give them the ability to turn off crypto. This would give them the ability to turn off gaming or things like that, or basically any industry that they to feel as competitive with them. And it wouldn't be all the banks doing it as a group. It would be each individual bank kind of making their own determination of this. And so we think that, you know, we don't mind getting rid of the rule. We just don't want to foreclose on the fact that consumers really should have the ability to choose the financial products.

That they interact with.

Yeah, that makes sense. Did you have a reaction to the Circle IPO? I, you know, obviously performed very well, but, and, and stable coins in the news, but I'm interested to hear what the next most exciting instantiations of that technology might be. I was talking to a payroll company CEO, and he was mentioning that, yes, it's lower fees and faster, but interestingly, stablecoins might allow them to recapture float and then earn yield on that in an interesting way. I wasn't expecting. So the potential economic benefit to some companies might be massive if they're able to custody their own treasuries essentially through stablecoins. What have you been seeing in the stablecoin world broadly? What are the interesting knock-on effects? How much excitement is there among stablecoins from your partners?

Yeah, I mean, there's a ton. There's a lot of amazing companies. I think you talked to pretty-- have you already talked to them?

You're going to talk to them.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Now we're going to just Great.

Yeah, I mean huge shout out to them. Like amazing to see what they built and it's very excited for the ecosystem. I think, you know, from our perspective, what's happening in stablecoins right now is not what will happen. So what's happening right now, a lot of people are using it as a currency hedge. A lot of people are using it for cross-border payouts or money transfers that otherwise would just be friction full. And then, you know, a lot of people are using it just as a form of a savings account that has higher and while those are all big TAMs, it's not that interesting relative to the rest of what could go on in financial services. I think increasingly we're going to see more and more consumers having the ability to move money easily between, say, a bank account and a crypto wallet holding something in USDC or another stablecoin. And yeah, you're right, there are big opportunities for people to hold elements of their treasury or elements of their float and earn meaningful interest often of it. Increasingly, I think that that float, which was historically held onto by the platforms, may well get shared more and more with the underlying companies. So payroll companies, if the float was all held at the bank, now they're actually able to participate in a portion of the float. So that's a huge new revenue stream for them. While interest rates are what they are, I will say. So that'll create increasing volatility in their revenue streams because if interest rates go down, then obviously the float goes down. So I do think That's a big potential thing that a lot of companies might want to. Also, offering more tender types allows a lot of the large platforms to keep dollars on their platform more. So you see some of the big payments processors. Their goal obviously is to have more float on their platform because they get a slice of the float and offering more tender types, offering it not just to be held in dollars, but you could hold it in crypto, you could hold it in a stablecoin. That keeps the dollars on their platform even more, which gives with more leverage and more revenue in the long term.

Very cool. What are you guys doing on the MCP side? I know you had some announcements recently there.

Yeah, so that was another big part of the announcements today. I mean, the short answer is MCPs make it easier for developers to build. I think the concept of a REST API was new when we started Plaid because everything was on SOAP. Now, the concept of writing to a raw API without using cursor or Windows or something like that. is increasingly becoming rare and will become rare over time. And so really for us, it's just staying on the cutting edge, building tools that help developers build faster on Plaid and then allowing them to get better analytics on their usage, their interactions or a system, so on and so forth.

So it's fun. It's really fun. Awesome. Do you have any type of broad thesis around how agent, you know, I think there's like a lot of narrative around, okay, agents will just default use crypto assets. or anything around that. Anytime there's sort of an- It's coming. Yeah, anytime there's sort of an accepted narrative, I just want to kind of push deeper. I'm curious if you have strong opinions.

I do not think they will default these crypto assets. I think crypto assets might be easier at first, but look, the bank account is already effectively a digital first product, whereas now is a digital first product did not start that way, certainly. Kids oddly are not yet fully digital first, but are moving that direction. Like still you have to know a 16 digit card number to actually authenticate a card, whereas bank accounts have OAuth already set up. And then the next phase of that is obviously crypto, because crypto starts being digital native and so it becomes easier and easier to authenticate into things. My take is that all three of those and many other tender types will become available to LLMs and to agents, But, it's going to take a little while for the industry to evolve, but fast forward two, three years and it'll.

Be all the same. Very cool.

Anything else, Jordy? No, this is great. This is fantastic. Congrats on that. I'm curious, did Chesky tell you to move to this kind of release cycle or had you been doing it for a while?

It's sort of the Chesky, the Chesky method of entrepreneurship. No, we've been doing it for a little while, but man, they have developed such an impressive track record of doing it. And, all the podcasts that he went on to talk about it, I think everybody else in the world decided to copy it. So maybe we were inspired by seeing what they did beforehand, but certainly we've learned a lot from listening to their playbook.

Yeah, the jobs approach walked so the chess key method could run.

Exactly.

Awesome. Well, I'm excited to read through the other announcements later and come back on anytime.

It's great to have you.

Thank you so much.

Have a good one.

Cheers.

Really quickly, let me tell you about Bezel. Go to getbezel.com, your Bezel concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. planet. Seriously, any watch.

I love that.

They got texted.

There was one YC that had the Torona and the text.

Yeah, the day date was good. I saw JLC Reverso.

Yeah. Yeah.

When we called the founders on it, they were like, oh, I don't know. It's not super YC coded to have a hitter on the wrist.

Nothing to be embarrassed about. Throw 100K into a Patek, you know?

No, that's the Clulee method.

Absolutely.

That is the Clulee method. No, build a generational company and then.

Buy a nice piece on bezel for your father. Father's Day is coming up. Head over to bezel. Get your dad a watch. Let's check in with our intern, Tyler, who's pivoting from computer science to art history. What do you got for us, Tyler? Oh, he's at the Museum of Modern Art now.

That's fantastic. Good. Yeah, so earlier I was thinking, I.

Think before I should really start studying, I should kind of just like benchmark my stats.

Okay. So I took two different tests.

The first one was the, it was an AP Art History practice exam. Okay. So, you know, it's like for high schoolers. Average high schooler is like pretty dumb. Yep.

I thought I would do pretty well. I got 12 out of 29, so that's 41%.

So failing.

Failing. You know, some place to go there. And then I also took like, you know, maybe that exam is just like weirdly, you know, it's like very specific knowledge or something. I took another exam.

This was the Britannica Art History Quiz. On that one I got 24 out of 60.

So that's 40%.

So, you know, I have a lot.

Of respect for you.

There's about an hour left in the show.

So were you using cursor for art history to answer those questions? Or were you, yeah, I was not.

But that was earlier in the show.

I have been studying.

Okay.

So I think I'm gonna take it.

You know, 20 minutes before the show ends.

Okay.

We'll see how I do that.

Okay.

Good.

But I was also kind of just looking, you know, at what are the kind of careers that art history majors generally go into? Yes. So, like, if you kind of want to stay in the art world, there's basically you work in a museum or you work in kind of art dealership.

That's a gallery.

Yeah. Yeah.

So first I looked at kind of.

Becoming like an a museum curator.

Okay.

For that, it's you basically need a Okay.

So I don't think I'll be able to get that before the show ends.

But I was looking at art dealership. And obviously, like for that, you kind of need some funding to start with. So I took producer Ben's ramp card.

Okay.

Okay.

Laid down some art pieces that are.

Gonna come in next couple weeks. Great.

There you go.

So yeah, I'm already starting this career. I'm feeling pretty good about myself. You flip those pieces, bake it all.

Back, pay off the ramp card, and we're in business. Yeah, we will be checking in with his IRR, seeing if he can beat the average venture fund. Yeah, just beat the market. It's that easy.

Amazing, great work, Tyler.

Yes, yes, making lots of promising progress. That's very good. Anthropic co-founder Ben Mann says that we'll know AI is transformative when it passes the economic touring test, this is something I was talking about earlier. Give an AI agent a job for a month. Let the hiring manager choose human or machine when they pick the machine. More often than not, we've crossed the threshold. We've been talking about the economic touring test for a while. I'm glad that he wrapped it in a bow. Maybe it needs its own coinage. Maybe we need to dig in to Anthropic more deeply. But we have the perfect guest for that. We have Sheeran from Bloomberg joining us right now. Welcome to the stream, Sharon. How are you doing?

Good.

Thanks for having me. Thanks so much for being here. I wanted to have you on because you've been on an absolute tear writing fantastic pieces. Maybe it would be best to start with Anthropic, which I was just talking about. What did you learn from the piece that you wrote about Anthropic and Dario? We haven't had a chance to have him on the show. We talked to Sholto. They have an interesting culture. interesting history. Can you give us your kind of 50,000 foot view on the company, what they stand for today, and maybe how that's changed? Yeah, I think Anthropic is a company that probably the most right now is.

Facing pressure both to live up to its really strong kind of ideological ethos, which is around building AI safely and as an alternative to labs that they felt maybe weren't doing it as responsibly as they were. And then also to deliver on the business value, right?

So I was kind of, I learned just how sort of savvy actually Anthropic has been with Dario at the helm.

Even though he has this very deep research science background, he's been able to cut some major deals, grow the enterprise business quite quickly, double, and now there's other reporting about tripling revenue.

So, you know, that's sort of where they're at.

But as you get more money, as you get more, you get bigger and bigger funding rounds, you know, how does that translate into pressure to move really fast at the same time that you're trying to be responsible?

Did you get a sense that they have a specific strategy around diversification in terms of hyperscaler partnerships? Because they've done a deal with Amazon, I believe. They were just mentioned at WWDC as plugging into Xcode. It feels like they're trying to maybe go more of as an infrastructure provider. They seem to be doing very well in coding and on the enterprise side. How much of that is deliberate or just like it got pulled out of them because of where their position in the market was?

I mean, so in my reporting, it was very deliberate their strategy to, first of all, not lock in with any one hyperscaler, right? So they have both Google and Amazon as partners on the front. That kind of hedging, I think, was very calculated. So Dario, in my interviews, he's been pretty dismissive of our reporting about Stargate, saying it's not clear exactly what it is.

And I think his stance is that.

Sort of you can scale up and not need to make such a big deal about it.

At least that's what he sort of.

Said publicly to me, right? But as you said, I think the.

Pressure'S on, right, for them to deliver.

And show that they can. He invented scaling laws, but can you actually build up the compute and pay for it to do that?

Can you talk a little bit about the rhetoric around safety? I was very, I never really got caught up in the paper clipping and the AI doom narrative, but after seeing.

Deep C, that's what every human says right before they get- yeah, yeah, yeah.

But after seeing Deep C drop and the anthropic paper about manuring candidates or what was it, secret hidden agents? I forget the term that they but essentially, sleeper agents. Sleeper agents embedding something nefarious within the weights of the model that maybe only comes out when it interacts with a certain endpoint or a certain web page. It discovers that, hey, I'm not just running in some random solo dev's cursor instance. I'm actually inside the NSA. I should go around and do something else. And that really flipped a bit in my mind to say, okay, safety research is at maybe extremely important and maybe even extremely commercializable because people will want to do safety evaluations on the models that they use. How has the safety rhetoric evolved at Anthropic over the last couple of years in your reporting?

Yeah, so I think AI doomers or people worried about AI safety have been doing these sort of hypothetical thought experiments, like the paper clip experiment for a very long time. dating even Dario Emade is right, entry onto the scene. However, I think in Anthropic, what I've seen evolve is they're starting to outline and trying to be as concrete as possible to explain what the risks are, what the different levels of risks are. They made a whole responsible scaling kind.

Of document framework to say, okay, it's.

Kind of modeled after how biological labs are that are very high risk and how, okay, if what you're working on is this level of biological risk, then you have to have this corresponding level of actual physical lab safety. So that's how they viewed it, anthropic.

And so, you know, when I was.

Reporting this out, they had recently had this kind of false alarm where they thought they were crossing into a level that was too dangerous for them to.

Be able to handle.

And then they did extra tests and.

They'Re like, okay, no, we're all right.

For this release, but we better get up to par. What time period was that? at like an hour or like 10 days or a month?

So, you know, Daria told me they basically had to delay, not this release.

But the last big one by something.

Like nearly a week because at the.

Sort of in the final days leading up to the release, their safety team, you know, one of the red teaming group came to them and were like, listen, like we, this model actually may be more capable than we thought. Right.

So I do think that's a challenge, right?

Is taking these really hypothetical, seemingly kind of sci-fi scenarios and translating it to like, well, when is that actually gonna happen in our lab? And what do you have to do to protect yourself? And it's both physical security, like making.

Sure no one can break into your.

Lab or something like that. But it's also, you know, actually making sure that there are safeguards on the software side to stop someone from saying, I think the most tangible threat that I heard them talk about that was the biological one, right? And that was a specific concern with that release I mentioned, that could someone use this to come up with a novel bioweapon?

Sure. There's an interesting dynamic with safety teams where if you're sitting there with a team of, let's call it 20-something people, and you're costing the company tens of million, you know, I don't know, $10 million a year, you're not gonna feel that, like your job's that if you're never sounding the alarm. Sure, there's kind of an instinct to be like, oh, this feels a little dangerous. Let's look into it.

Yeah.

You know, I mean, there's also just.

So many other dynamics at play, and I think people always dig into this, like, you know, are models too powerful? That's a great marketing line. It's too good. Like, you know, you could never give it to the wild. It's too powerful. And then there's also, it's also, maybe you just haven't put together all the inference capabilities and scaled up your data centers to really have a productive launch. You need an extra two weeks in the oven. Oh yeah, it's a safety issue. So there's a million different ways that the safety stuff can be kind of abused. I'm not accusing them of abusing it, but it does feel like, you know, we noticed this with the Lama 4 launch. They haven't been able to release Behemoth yet, and they had some issues with benchmarking, but notably they didn't say it was a safety issue.

Issue.

And that would have almost been an easy out, and it's one that I think most foundation model companies would have taken a year ago. But the community, the developer community just doesn't seem to buy that line of reasoning as much anymore. I don't know if you had any reactions to the law.

Yeah, I have, you know, in my own interviews with Dario, I've asked him about this. And, you know, he has been upfront. We reported on, you know, there were delays to just this latest big release, right? the latest sonnets. They're kind of, or sorry, is it Opus? Whatever the biggest one is, I'm forgetting.

All the specific names right now.

And we have reported on these delays. We wrote a big article about how scaling laws, at least with the pre-training side of these models, were starting to slow down. And, you know, Anthropic in my reporting with Dario, he was pretty upfront that that wasn't a safety thing.

That big delay was not that big.

Model being later than some of their early projections. because they were facing kind of the same technological problems that I think many.

Labs are facing, right?

And ultimately they did release it. But I think people, you know, it's absolutely reasonable to question any company's motivation when they say something slowed down. I think I saw no evidence for that in this specific case.

Sure, sure. Yeah, that makes sense. Let's talk about the most recent deal, Meta acquiring Scale AI. 49% of the company is changing hands, I believe. at around $14 or $15 billion.

Spiritually, the whole thing.

Yes, yes, yes. What has been your reaction and what have you learned from reporting on that?

Yeah, I think you just covered that they have a new CEO.

So, we just reported that, yeah, per.

Our sources, that they have picked the new CEO to be Jason Drogi, former VP. He's currently at scale, all being promoted. And he was formerly an Uber VP and formerly also a partner in VC at Benchmark. So, but, you know, that's just, that's just the latest, right? We kind of, we have really been breaking the news on this front. We had a scoop this Saturday night that we were the first ones to report that these talks were happening for Meta to make this multi-billion investment in scale. I think it really caught, you know, a lot of people by surprise in the industry. This is a huge investment planned on Meta's front, right?

Probably their biggest ever in a company. And I think it's, you know, I.

Think it's a sign that Zuckerberg is ready to go full on founder mode and try to catch up on AI. And this last llama four release was, you know, widely considered a disappointment.

And so how do you, how do you change course?

Right. Maybe it's big, right.

Big investment and the super intelligence lab. he's recruiting engineers. We've reported on that. They're making crazy high offers, right? They will open buzz. We'll open the checkbook for the top talent.

Yeah.

I think the interesting thing that stood out about some of, you know, people were just reporting the headline numbers of saying, oh, you could make, you know.

Nine figures was the number.

Yeah, nine figures. But you have to look if you're trying to recruit somebody that joined OpenAI two, three years ago, They're probably run rating at $10 million a year already on a fully loaded comp basis. I think it makes sense. What have you learned about the future of the scale business? Is Jason going to be pounding the pavement, trying to get more customers for the core business, continue to adapt the core business?

Yeah, there's a lot of scale competitors right now that are saying, hey, we're going to take a They're foaming at the mouth. Yeah, we're going to use this to our advantage when we go to the other hyperscalers and say, do you want to do business with the company that's owned by Facebook or Meta?

Yeah, absolutely. I think it's really unclear what's going to happen with the future of ScaLEs business. Obviously, the Meta investment, that's expected. You could see partnerships happening there on that front. But what will happen with the other customers? I think we don't know. and what will happen with other competitors in this space?

Could they start to gain ground as.

Scale deepens the ties with Meta? We'll see. I think what we do know, we have reported that Alex Wang plans to join Meta. I think for Meta, he is seen as someone who is just sort of reinvigorating their AI team and this renewed AI effort. He's a big name, he's incredibly savvy, you know, very well connected and built a real business with scale. So, you know, I think that's where we're at. We're in the middle of, you know, of the deal.

We're waiting, you know, to see the.

All the official details sort of as this plays out.

Earlier this week, Bill Gurley was talking about the M&A markets and why we're still seeing these kind of odd zombie acquisitions happening. Tech was laying the blame at the foot of Lina Khan. for a long time, Lena Khan's obviously out. Why do you think the big tech companies are still using that?

She's still posting, though. She's still reposting stuff about being monopolistic.

Okay, yeah.

So she's around.

Is this more just like, this is just a more efficient acquisition vehicle generally, even without, even in a different administration, and so it's just going to be continually used?

I don't think this is an asset that Meta would want to own. just generally, right? You wouldn't wanna fully own. It is a different business, right? You're dealing with tens of thousands of offshore contractors.

Sure.

Is that something that Meta wants to do?

Don't they already do that with this?

Sure, but they've had issues with it, sure. But they've also had issues with it, right? It's liability.

Anyway, sorry.

So of course, you know, Lina Khan is known to be aggressive on going after, you know, monopolistic behavior and especially in the tech market. doesn't necessarily mean that the current FTC is not going to scrutinize these kinds of deals, right? I would say it's way too soon to have any definitive take on how this FTC will act around these kinds of deals. I think, you know, companies never want to raise too many eyebrows with regulators. And even if people are from different political parties, we have seen Republican controlled FTC sometimes, you know, I mean, that is part of their job, right, is to review these sorts of large transactions. So that may be why we're continuing to still see companies not want to go too far on that front.

Yeah, yeah. Can we move over to Microsoft? It feels like Satya Nadella has carved out a ton of territory in the AI space, and now the game is about holding on to it. It seems like they might be back to training their own language at the same time at the last Microsoft Build keynote, he was distinctly highlighting how model agnostic Azure was and how they would be happy to route you to any OpenAI model, any Deep Seek model, any Llama model. They want to be Switzerland, but at the same time, they want to have a horse in the race. So what's the latest thinking around Microsoft?

I mean, I report on Microsoft more.

In the context of OpenAI. so I'm not the Microsoft expert.

I will say that, yeah, obviously we've seen more tension around the Microsoft OpenAI relationship lately and what that means. I think OpenAI is also diversifying, right? They're working with other hyperscalers now for Stargate.

They have Oracle on board, they have SoftBank financing.

So this is no longer just like an exclusive relationship between Microsoft and OpenAI, and I think that goes both play.

Yeah. What is the dynamic right now in the reporter talent space? It seems like the value of just being a pure play writer is maybe going down, but the value of being able to acquire new information and actually get scoops is higher than ever. What is the dynamic right now? We've seen, I think, a lot of different shakeups and layoffs to different companies, but I'm curious what you're seeing.

I mean, I, I think that the value of reporting, like a real original reporting and going.

Yeah, original reporting, getting Scoops, getting people.

To share with you information that is.

In public, that takes a lot of.

Human skill that, at least in my job, I, you know, I don't think that's replaceable by AI for now. Yeah.

Yeah, that, that, that, that's what I was getting at. I do think at some point, maybe you would have an army of agents that would just reach out to 200 employees at a single given time. But yeah, that tracks.

Yeah.

In terms of the Stargate project, were you able to go visit as part of the reporting? Can you give us kind of the lay of the land on who the major players are and what the most interesting angles to dig into in the progress in Abilene has been.

Yeah, for sure. Well, shout out to my colleague, Brody Ford. I don't know if he's listening, but I'll send this to him after. He actually went out to Abilene for me because I was unavailable the one day that we could go or whatever. And it's astounding.

I mean, I saw the pictures, I.

Got the live feed. It is expansive.

I think it's hard to understand just the vast scale of it until you really see pictures, video, or go there. and, you know, I think that there was a lot of, like, there was sort of a lot of people doubting.

If Stargate was even real.

And I think there's still a lot we don't know about the future of this project, like, exactly, you know, where.

The other sites will be.

They've said they plan 10 more, at.

Least in the US.

We don't know exactly, like, how the financing will work. Stargate, we talked to Masasun for this, who's obviously, you know, SoftBank's leading the financing. They said, let's project by project. We'll go step by step. But I think what we can learn from Abilene is like, at least that first site, that Abilene site is very real. Like it is happening there, it is being built out. We've seen the pace of it. So, you know, that could end up being kind of a template or a test case, right, for how much Stargate can execute in the future on all of its promises. That makes a ton of sense.

Anything else, Jordy?

That makes a ton of sense.

No.

Thank you so much for hopping on.

This is fantastic. Reach out when you got your next.

We can have you on same day.

To talk about it.

Some more context. This is great.

Absolutely. Thanks for having me. Take care. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. We are surrounded by journalists. Hold your positions. We have Cameron from Nominal coming on the show next. Oh, he's already in the studio.

There you go.

Jordy, I'll let you take the intro. I gotta run.

Put her back.

Let's do it. Welcome in. There he is. What's going on? Cameron, welcome to the show.

Good to see you. Thank you. Good to see you guys.

You've been busy since the last time. I don't actually know when that was. Maybe it feels like maybe a month or two ago, but time flies.

I think it was about a month ago. And the fun fact with that is that was right in the middle of the 10-day series B fundraise sprint.

It was absolute chaos. chaos.

Absolute chaos. And people will appreciate this. Connor Love from Lightspeed Ventures posted or tweeted earlier today, but I was actually taking that prior TBBN call from the Lightspeed office here.

No way. No way. He was able to see, all right, how does Cam handle himself in a TV-like setting? Not that we're- It was a good tactic.

He was like, Hey, do you want to be honest and just take it from our office? And then, yeah.

So that's awesome. Break down the new round, kind of how it came together, who are the different players, all that good stuff.

Yeah, absolutely. So I'm really excited. Yeah, we're announcing a $75 million series B. That is, there we go.

There we go.

Led by Sequoia, and particularly Alfred Lin is going to be joining joining nominal's board. And then, as we mentioned, there's an additional investment from Lightspeed Venture Partners, a combination of Guru Chahal there and Connor Love, which we're really excited about. And then existing investment from our investors at General Catalyst, Lux and Founders Fund.

So it's basically, you're collecting them all at this point. Yeah, I don't know how to mention that's amazing. Talk about Business progress since the last call? I'm sure things are moving really quickly.

Yeah, things are moving really quickly. I mean, we're raising this capital to accelerate just to go faster. Really three big things we're going to do with this. The first is continue to expand into larger and larger enterprises. We're very proud to say many of the startups and scale-ups building in this new hardware wave are our nominal customers. and that is going to keep growing. But recently we've been taking our product to these Fortune 500 companies, Defense Primes, and the traction has been really, really positive. We're also expanding internationally. So we're already serving a handful of customers in Europe and we're going to keep doing that. The second big thing is product development. And so we have a big belief that to win really big in this software for hardware world, it's going to require multiple products. We've started our original thrust is around testing, but we're having customers pull us in listing linking testing to more quality acceptance testing production manufacturing. And then later in the life cycle saying, Hey, I use Nominal to build all of the software, you know, build all the rules and logic that governs how my system works under test. And I actually just want to, you know, version control that organize it. And I want to deploy that on my asset when it's in the field. and more of a monitoring, sort of fleet monitoring, fleet maintenance use case. So we're building products and we're going to be expanding. So that's where the funding is going.

How big is the market for this or how should I think about the market? Is this something where there's a lot of incumbents that you can kind of go after and pull away from?

Eat alive.

Yeah, eat alive.

We won't eat alive words.

Yeah.

Or are we already kind of like disaggrevating aggregating test functions across all the companies and allowing teams to move faster and selling into existing organizations.

Yeah, it's really, you know, the way I think about it is it's helpful to just give like a quick, you know, update, a kind of the status quo world. And so I think we see pretty much everywhere we go that testing is too slow. And really you have a scenario A where people are using 1990s software, it's pre-cloud. So it is like, especially in the aerospace and more industrial world, software that was built before the notion of centralizing data even existed. It's crazy and if people are really frustrated with it. So think of things like Siemens or Emerson or National Instruments, which I had to kind of mention last time. So that is an area where there's a direct swap for spend. People spend a ton of money there. those are billion dollar businesses that we are excited to be disrupting. And I think the second area is where people are taking new software and new data technologies that are not designed for hardware at all, in the least, and trying to use those to sort of aggregate together and build this like tool chain for testing. And Nominal is just a better way. And so that's sort of, you know, showing showing these organizations what the future can look like and delivering that value and they're willing to pay for it.

What kind of metrics do you track outside of core kind of business metrics? Are you thinking about trying to figure out if you're increasing the development timelines for your customers? In some ways, if you can allow people to just iterate, test faster, you can actually just allow them to accelerate their businesses. how much do you try to track that kind of thing? I know a lot of it, it's probably hard to fully capture.

Yeah, I'd say I had a fun conversation with Brian Schimpf, CEO of Anderall, where he sort of was saying emphatically, like, one of the metrics he looks at, like the single most important thing is like, how fast are my individual programs testing? Like, it is such a direct correlation to just like the success of that product. and that is what we see like at, you know, everywhere. So at the high level, like the value that we're delivering is increasing that test cadence and that throughput, you know, being able to have, you know, cases where at our customers, you know, test campaigns that were supposed to take nine months, taking 6.5 months, right? That's something we deliver to a customer. And when that's on a $200 million program where their end customer is the DoD, like that's massive, right? It's funny for a product like Nominals, we actually, we obviously track user engagement in time and app and all these sort of functions, but that's honestly like not the best correlation. We sort of say it was really exciting as you see more and more time people spend in the app and a lot of our North Star is actually like, I kind of want a test engineer to be able to drop into the app for a little bit, get the insight that they need really quickly, and then if they move on, you know, that's actually fine because that value that is compounding.

Are you guys going to actually set up an international presence at all? You said you have a bunch of international customers. Are we going to see a nominal office in the UK?

Australia.

Australia.

Got to go to Australia. It's a quick flight.

You're naming some good places. I'll say I am, I'm doing sort of nominal's first big, you know, international business trip, actually over the next two weeks. So going to be going to the Paris Air Show.

We're a lot of international business. I love international business.

We love international business. man on the show.

Yeah.

It's an honor. It's an honor. Yeah.

Yeah. Gonna be going to the. Yeah. The Paris Air Show and then. And then, you know, stopping her in. In the UK, as you kind of mentioned.

Yeah.

I mean, we're really excited, and I think we'll build a backlog of business before opening, like, a, you know, physical office there. But I think it's absolutely, you know, in. In nominal future, and we're excited for that. You mentioned. Australia, General Ocus world, like we're really supportive of that. And they want and need all the same things that our US-based customers do.

Yeah, I noticed you offer the service on-premise still. Obviously a lot of companies are moving on cloud. How important, can you give me some dynamics around like hyperscaler adoption within these industries like AWS, GovCloud, IT itarc compliance. Like, I know palantir got some super high itarc clearance. There's obviously different tiers to this stuff. Is there one hyperscaler that's kind of pulled away in this category?

Yeah, it's a really good, it's a good question. I, you know, from nominal's perspective, our goal is to be as sort of flexible and as versatile as we can. So we don't really pick any one, you know, provider, I'd say. from our product perspective, we have two products in the market right now. The Nominal Core product is where we started, which is cloud-based. The whole value proposition there is you can get all of your telemetry, sensor data logs, test data in one central place, run analytics and automate. Very quickly, we launched our second product, which is Nominal Connect, which is actually a desktop application, which sounds crazy to say and, you know, into a product, but we're meeting our customers and meeting the market where it is, It's run on, it's built in Rust. It's run on a game engine, right? So it's not your normal, and so, you know, super deterministic workflows, sub 10 millisecond latency. What game engine are you using?

It's unreal, yeah. Unreal, no way.

That makes sense.

Yeah, that's cool. So it's really cool. So being able to have, you know, whereas it used to be, you know, maybe a national instrument's desktop app with like a little widget you can kind of envision the thing from 1990. You know, we have this insane, super fast rendering, 3D visualization of our customers' robotic systems or drones, right? Like with telemetry coming in. And the power is that can run completely air-gapped, right? If you're in Mojave or you're downrange, like doing something, all that data is still going to your laptop. And then as soon as you get connectivity, it syncs back up to the kind of nominal mothership. All that data is sort of merged and deduplicated, and it's super powerful for our customers to be able to make sense of what happened.

Does Epic have a different business model for this kind of industrial use case? I know that isn't Unreal Engine free unless you're generating a million dollars in revenue. How do you pay Tim Sweeney?

Yeah, it's a good question. I.

Won'T answer it at a high level. You can answer it at a high level. I'm sure you can't say too details about it.

Yeah, no, I mean, it's like we were really excited about, I think we're really excited about the technology and kind of where it can scale. I'll just leave it at that.

Okay, cool. Yeah.

Yeah, well, the market is speaking. I looked it up. The company that owns national instruments is actually down a few percentage points over the last six months. Most likely in reaction to.

I'm sure it's extremely correlated. yeah.

Just already pricing it in. Of course.

Of course. Well, thank you so much for hopping on. Super great. Congratulations.

Do we hit the gong properly? Let's hit the gong. Alfred Lynn on the board. That doesn't happen every day.

Amazing.

Amazing.

Big gong.

Yeah.

Super excited. Come back on anytime, Cameron.

Awesome.

Thank you guys. Appreciate it. Our next guest is Aneel from Meter, hopping on in five We'll go through some time.

By the way, Cameron's resume is just absolutely insane. Product and growth at Anderall, advisor to applied intuition.

Oh, let's go.

Head of defense at Saildrone. Investor operator at Lux Capital. And then now it started nominal. So it's almost like he was built for this.

Whirlwind tour. I mean, there's other news. It's not really tech related, but it's related to our friends in the Wall Street and finance community. The race for Democratic nomination for New York City mayor is heating up. Andrew Cuomo is dropping like a stone on poly market. Zoran Mamdani is absolutely spiking. He's at 42% versus Cuomo's 56% right now. Signal has a breakdown. He says, this is a textbook example of narrative discipline. Whether or not you agree with Zoran's platform, The coherence is surgical. Every message hits the same emotional register. Every post or speech is a variation of the same core chord. Anti-machine, people first, morally upright. His surge is pure memetic lift. It's pure belief and belief spreads fast.

This is the guy that just says, Freeze the Rent.

That's his platform.

Yes, and every time he posts- His new bit is eliminating police presence in areas that have high crime.

Yes, yes, and so a lot of accelerationists are getting excited about this. about this. A lot of people that are anti-New York are supporting this because they think it will destroy New York. But he is gaining ground and he might be the next mayor, who knows? Every time he posts about freezing the rent, Nikita Beer chimes in and says, Don't you think the rent should just be free? You're not going far enough.

Yeah, how's that?

You're not going far enough. Capitalist pig. Also, new all-time high for Oracle. Oracle.

Let's hear it for Oracle. Wow. Let's go. Ellison is cooking. We love it.

Congratulations to Larry Ellison.

Larry's listening to this.

I'm sure he is. Yes. TBN. It's just fantastic news. Oracle's deeply underrated. It's a fantastic company. Been in founder mode for decades and continues to be on an absolute tear. They basically own Ablene. They do. They do. And they're getting, yeah, the Stargate project would not be happening without them, I'm sure.

So we have our next guest coming in the studio.

In the TVP and Ultra Journal. Welcome to the stream.

There you are.

How you doing?

What's going on?

I love the background. Very cool. How you doing?

It's almost like you're in the hardware business.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Break it down. What's behind you? What do you do?

Yeah, we are a networking company and our hardware behind us is our power, routing, switching, wireless, old school stuff that powers the internet.

Incredible. Break down the news today. and John get the- okay, okay, I'll get it ready.

What happened? What happened?

We raised a new round of financing to go build even better hardware and scale up operations and physical world stuff.

And how much did you raise?

We raised about 170 million. There we go.

Hit it, John.

Congratulations.

Best part of the day. Congratulations.

Thank you, guys.

Talk about give some background. on the history of the company, the different stages, what it took to get here?

Sure.

We got started actually quite a few years ago. What's interesting is networking is one of the largest parts of technology, but almost no new companies get started networking. Networking supports multiple $100 billion market cap businesses, but almost all of them got built through acquisition. Nobody sat down and said, Hey, we'll build the entire stack together, cohesive operating systems, hardware, APIs, firmware. So we got started a few years ago building out the entire stack. The COVID and supply chain years were tough because we couldn't get any hardware out of it. But the last few years for us has just been really about delivering great products to customers and just scaling it up across throughput, bandwidth, products, integration. But at the end of the day, I think nobody really thinks about networking unless you're working on it or a day like this, which causes errors and takes down, Something like 15% of the internet or something.

What's going on? We've been live the entire time. The issues have been happening. Can you give us a quick update on what you think is happening there? The production team is stressed right now.

They're sweating right now. Yeah, sweating.

Because you guys are up. There are rumors that you guys took down the internet. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. It worked today. Just watch TVP today.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Well, I think the really interesting part about networking most of the issues actually happen because of like configuration errors. And today, that's one of the causes for it, because it's, you know, disparate hardware systems, software systems that don't really work together, and they're made by many different vendors, et cetera. Today was one of the reasons for not the entire reason, but one of the reasons for was like network configuration errors.

Hmm.

Wild. You guys have a, it seems like you basically have every scale up on the planet as a customer already? Is that close to true? Are you working towards it? What's kind of the full range of your guys' customer base?

Because- the job finished or is the job not finished?

Or it's just getting started.

Just getting started.

Are you quoting Kobe, John? I'm saying the job's not finished. Yeah.

Yeah.

So our customer base, I think is quite interesting. We do have a lot of tech companies and folks that are scaling up as customers, but probably our most interesting ones are the manufacturing facilities, warehouses, schools, folks that go build like ISPs and data centers and life sciences labs, all of them sort of need connectivity and internet and networking to do whatever they're doing. And probably my favorite part in the last five, six years is looking at all these different types of amazing businesses that have nothing to do with Silicon Valley, but sort of are the underpinning of our economy and how things get built. world and all the interesting work they're doing from, you know, battery manufacturing to hydrogen cells to once one of us buys something online, how quickly does it get there? It's because there's some great business out there actually doing it, but it's all automated and then they need networking. So our customer base definitely is, we have a big swath of some of the great tech companies, but it's really fanned out everywhere throughout the economy, too.

Walk me through some of the work you're doing around hardware innovation, software innovation, business model innovation. What's most important? What's been most acceleratory for you? And kind of break those down in terms of priorities and where you're investing and what you're most excited about.

So I actually think those things are all interconnected because it's what incentives are what drive everything. so if you look at legacy companies, what they're trying to do is build hardware for X dollars and then sell it to you for X plus whatever margin they're trying to hit. And so there's two ways these legacy companies can make money, either by charging customers way more than the value they're getting or by making hardware with cheaper components and less quality components, et cetera. For us, we don't sell hardware to customers at all. We just sell the whole thing as a service, which is also very new. I know the rest of us that work in Silicon Valley, like that sort sort of kind of given in how we buy things. But doing hardware and enterprise networking that way was fairly new and we were the first people to sort of do it. But that actually drives incentives on where you go invest. Because we are not trying to squeeze the last 10 cents out of a component, we tend to go make very different choices in hardware on what sort of components that we use, how are they laid out, how is it built, what are we optimizing for, or hey, something costs another $10, let's go do it, but what's the end customer thing like? And then the better hardware that you have, you're enabled to go build better software and this loop sort of hits. And so our business model is that not only do we build the hardware and software, we actually deploy it and maintain it ourselves too. We're fully vertically integrated. I know a lot of the tech companies don't want to touch the real world things, but the whole messiness of racks and cables and manufacturing, we go do not just pretty parts of it, but also the underbelly, if you will, of actually going and deploying all of it. And we do this all without any capital cost to customers and only marginal cost on operating expenditure compared to how they operate.

Yeah, talk about that. Talk about why a CFO would want to have OPEX versus CapEx in this type of scenario. And is that kind of a driver around decision making?

It is, but it depends on the business, right? So if you have businesses that are PE-owned, for example, you actually want it to be CapEx. And so our contracts can hit the books as a lease. So it doesn't hit their operating margins, they get an EBITDA boost. That happens too. But ultimately what customers actually care about is, do I have to take a bunch of capital and buy hardware that the moment I buy it, it's a depreciating asset, then I have to pay a bunch of money to go install it. And then every four or five years, I have to go buy new hardware because some new technology comes out. comes out, et cetera, or if this hardware goes bad, I have to go replace it myself. That's the part CFOs care about that we remove entirely, which is instead of having to go spend massive amounts of capital and operating expenditure to kind of fix all this stuff, we take all that on and sort of take on all the risk instead of the customers. Then that contract can be actuated as Opex or Capex, depending on what their.

Business Talk about meters business. You're doing a lot of things. You're doing hardware, software. I'm assuming a network of team all over the country that are helping with installs. Talk about the efficiency of the business. And I'm assuming this new $170 million round is a testament to the strength of the core business.

Yeah, it's a really interesting core business, right? Because you're right, we get to go design hardware, make software, and then we build these racks like the one you're seeing behind us, and then actually go deploy these by the hundreds for some customers everywhere. And we're not just in the United States, we're in Canada, we're in Europe, everywhere in the world, hopefully by next year. And the operational parts of it are super challenging. if you can imagine a data center in the middle of nowhere or manufacturing facilities, there's legacy hardware that's old hardware in there. You have to go kind of sort of fix that and then you're integrating it, but then you're putting in this new entire rack. So what's sort of important for us is, you know, it's like a duck swimming in a lake. The customer doesn't see all the kicking that happens under to kind of deliver this to them. And our work is always tying these things in together. Why are we building the hardware? How is the software getting built? How are we deploying it and maintaining it? And then any issues we see on one end should then be a loop back to how we build better hardware, what choices are we making? You know, just this morning, a bunch of my colleagues were arguing literally what type of ports, where should go so it's easy for install and that that loop is a new way of thinking in networking infrastructure, even though after computing and CPUs and Intel, networking is the oldest and largest part of all of technology. So.

You design, develop, manufacture, make this networking equipment, you're deploying it as a lease on a more rental basis. Does that create a CapEx problem for you? Like how are you thinking about the way your balance sheet is growing and developing? Is debt going to play a role earlier than it might at most other companies in your business because of the structure of what you're building?

Yeah, this is a really interesting question. So if you look to historically how networking hardware got built, somebody built it for, let's say, $500 and bomb cost, but by the time it ends up in a customer's hands, It's like $5,000. So networking companies have enjoyed tremendous margins. So you should start there at any time. Second, what we also try to do is a lot of our customers, because we're dealing with physical spaces, whether it's in retail or manufacturing or data centers anywhere, the build out times are predictable, right? Because there's a certain date you're trying to hit when a data center goes live or a manufacturing facility goes live or a school goes live.

Live.

So a lot of our manufacturing can be predictive towards that. Unlike other hardware companies, we don't have to hold massive amounts of inventory without knowing where it's going. We do have issues on like trying to figure out exact timing there. We're not always perfect, but we can do that. So to answer your question, we actually use debt a lot more and plan to use a debt a lot more to scale up what we do on deploying with our real estate partners, a big of what we also do is not only do we directly sell to customers, but we also go partner with real estate firms to just include meter in as a default. And that's actually where the main meter comes from. If you look at a building, there's electricity, there's water, there's cell phone lines, there's power meters, water meters. This should be more like a utility. Why is it that we're all struggling to kind of wrangle it to get it into working in any type of space? So For us, the debt and where that plays in is a little bit on hardware, but a lot of it also on deployment and actually getting it out to the world and the pace of which we can do expecting a customer and some sort of discounted cash flow expectation of 12, 18, 24 months from now.

Talk to me about the wheelhouse customer for you or the wheelhouse deployment Sounds like apartment building makes sense. Scale up startup office makes sense. It's probably overkill for the home office. You might just want to get an Amazon Arrow mesh networking system. At the same time, you look at Google's campus, it's absolutely massive. Are you going one direction or the other? Are you maxed out or are there specific oddities that you can kind of illuminate on what it'll take, how you'll have to change the business or scale to satisfy a client like Meta's Silicon Valley campus, which is multiple buildings and probably one of the most complex networking infrastructures in America. Is there something where you can just kind of copy-paste your current solution so many times and it all fits together, or will there be new Technical innovations that you need to hit to actually service someone at that scale?

I think the answer is both. But we are already doing customers at that scale and more. For example, Bridgewater, who's the largest hedge fund in the world, runs on Metr. Wow. As an example. But I think we will go to continue even more technical advancements to hopefully bring new things that legacy folks just can't do or won't do or can't think of and sort of implement. But I think overall, what's really interesting about networking is that nobody gets to do custom networking, if you will, because it has to go work with the rest of the world. Generally, when you look at enterprise companies, they end up building some sort of Frankenstein thing of what they started off with that becomes a custom thing for each enterprise customer. For us, any enterprise customer has to then go work with the rest of the internet so they don't get to do their own protocols, their own things. So largely there are things on the margin, but largely whether you're a Google or Meta or Bridgewater or a school customer or large universities that we do, all of them use the same internet, if you will. And this is also the same in like data centers too. What you would find in majority of non-GPU data centers is not that different what you would find in a large campus because it all has to flow together. The packets must flow and end.

Wait, what's the difference between non-GPU data centers and GPU data centers in this?

Yeah, so, so, yeah, in GPU stuff, there's actually a lot that happens between two gpus and between clusters of gpus. Got it. That's a different type of networking. There's a lot of work that's happening. Obviously, Nvidia with their Mellanox acquisition for five years ago and what's happening now with Ultra ethernet, but just everything else is actually relatively same.

What was the, what was the keyword? You just said Ultra internet. Ultra ethernet.

Ultra ethernet is a new thing that's happening.

I remember cat five, cat six. I've heard about cat seven. Is this like cat eight? What are we talking here?

This is like a whole different ball game. So if you, if you look at, you know, the joke in the networking world is. you know, ethernet is dead, long live ethernet. You know, every sort of 15-20 years, ethernet is predicted that it will be the end of it. But, you know, somebody comes up with innovations on how it can scale up on speed, on throughput, on bandwidth, on security. So ultra ethernet is this new version that's coming out for, you know, next phase of all the data center build that's happening. Because, you know, roughly the US has more data centers than the rest the world combined, roughly.

Let's go here for America. That's a white pill right there. Everyone says we're falling behind, but not today.

But the rest of the world is trying to catch up to get to that, and the US is trying to.

Throw the ex where we are.

So there's a lot of a try.

Don't even try. We're undefeated. We got meter. Yeah, actually we support meter's international strategy. So it's kind of nuanced. We're pro, but also anti, as long as we're benefiting.

Yeah, there's a lot that goes into it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that makes sense. I mean, we've experienced it here. There's like new generations of just streaming cameras that do power and video over ethernet and, and you, and, you know, we're thinking about kind of the V2 of the studio and there's a ton of insane things that you can do over ethernet. It's no longer just a LAN cable. And so, yeah, it must be fun to be at the heart to that. Jordy, any more questions or should we.

Let them get back to building? Congratulations on the funding model. Congratulations.

And yeah, check in next time.

We'll come back anytime.

Thank you, folks.

See you soon.

Bye. Cheers. Our next guest will be joining in just a few minutes.

In the meantime, it is an absolute banger day. Lots of fun racing. Yeah, but I was just gonna say.

It'S actually insane we've been able to keep the show up with every, the, it is crazy. We got lucky today. Have we ever, has the stream ever actually gone fully down? We had Zoom go down one day and we were kind of wrecked by that. Well, let's bring in our next guest.

Ian in the chat says, Mixpanel, Shopify, and GCP are still down for him, all the services that he's in.

Honestly, if you're worried about the show going down, do not worry. Just send us your mailing address. We will print the show onto vinyl and we'll send you a record of the show so you listen to it.

Same day shipping. Exactly.

So that you can get the show almost live.

Yeah, yeah, you know, a couple hours.

Couple hours later.

Yeah, yeah.

We'll also do a lot of innovation on the vinyl pressing because I think that takes a while, too. Anyway, our next guest is here. Welcome to the stream. How you doing, Trace?

What's going on? Good to see you.

Already gone. Good to see you guys. Thanks for having me on. It's great to have you. It's great to have you. Big day. Big guys. launched a series a new website and you took down the whole internet. You took down the whole internet.

I can't confirm or deny it as part of the launch strategy, but good timing.

Give us the stats. How much you raise?

Yeah, it raised 20 million dollars.

There we go.

Congratulations.

Who'd you raise it from? Yeah.

Sound left the round participation.

Hit it again for sound hitting again.

Congratulations.

Amazing. Sorry, continue. We got a little excited.

Yeah. Participation from Buckley, Naval, Arash, Bradowski, founder Dropbox, Arvind from Perplexity, bunch of other awesome angelists. Yeah.

Very cool. Very cool. Break down the pitch. Like, how are you positioning the company right now? Because I know you've been doing a lot of different stuff.

They pivoted from pizza to I know.

Them as the pizza delivery company. There was that Zoom company that was doing pizza on demand. That didn't go so well. So obviously a huge white space.

Well, they just did pizza for a day. They sold out. Yeah.

And they moved on to fixing.

So what are you giving us an.

Update on the platform?

Yeah. How are you positioning it? For sure. So I think for us, always the mission of Antimatter has been how do we simplify infrastructure? But current moment, what's really different is is software engineering, the bottleneck used to always be programming. If you could build the software, you could ship it, you could distribute to everyone. Suddenly your product is live. Now you have all this AI assisted stuff, really awesome products like cursor, lovable vote, and increasingly the latter half of that equation, which is deploying that code, maintaining it, making sure it scales, going from one user to 1 million, is increasingly the bottleneck on how companies are actually going to grow and sustain same. Like, you know, the short of it is like writing code is no longer the hard part, right? It's all this operations and maintenance. And so what we're really indexing on is building this product that helps you better manage, you know, and automate infrastructure. So a lot of that is, you know, the Nuance of infrastructure versus code is a lot of it is knowledge that is baked into, you know, people's heads. Like, you have that one senior engineer who just knows how everything works. That's your go-to guy when something breaks or you need to spin up thing. But that's not super sustainable, right? And this notion that comprehension can just scale linearly as you hire more people isn't super tenable anymore. We're emitting a bunch of data, all that data is super fragmented, everyone's super specialized. And so for us, what we're trying to do is start going into companies, plugging into their entire infra surface area, whether it's source code, their cloud, their ticketing system, whatever it might be. Really understand why things are failing, and basically pull in data and give them these golden pathways as to what's going on, why is it happening, what prescriptive action should I take that is going to help me fix this? And along the way, sort of learning what are the ingrained practices of your organization. That part is super important in the sense that we don't want to build like an opinionated platform that says like, this is good or this is bad, right? That's pretty subjective to each company. So it's a little more about learning, okay, given this tenant, what's going to be good for them?

How do they prefer to operate? You know, what's going to make their perform the best. Makes a ton of sense. How much are you spending time thinking about from a product standpoint trying to solve things that are sort of human nature to some degree versus like it feels like the nature of software development is changing so quickly, but if you can kind of focus in on what will always be true and, you know, many people would say that's human nature, you can create something like durable and valuable out of of that?

Yeah, I think a big thing for us is, you know, some companies try to position this like, hey, we're a full-time employee and we're gonna automate this function away for you. I think for us, it's a little more of how do we take all this knowledge that exists in a bunch of people's heads, institutionalize it into a system and code it into a system such that it's reusable. The dream for us as companies go from asking this question of like, yo, can we keep this running to what can we build next? And really taking away this time for maintenance that a lot of people are spending their time on. So, I think human nature, inevitably all infra problems are human problems. Someone messed up a config or someone didn't really understand what's going on. And in that sense, working with our users to understand what's their preferred behavior, why do they want their stack set up this way, why have they chosen the tools they did, and not trying to force an opinion down their throat.

That makes sense.

Can you talk to us about some of the newest problems that companies are facing with LLM inference costs, just faults that come from this new paradigm of running agents and running tons of inference and just taking advantage of all the tools. We saw Satya Nadella at Microsoft Build talk about model routing being something that he was really pushing at Azure. GCP has a similar tool. Are you hearing from customers? Right now we're in in this era where every new model release and price drop basically goes viral on X. And so unless you're under a rock, it's pretty easy to move over to the latest and greatest thing, not leave a bunch of money on the table. But are there new problems that you foresee as things become a little more commoditized or a little bit more calcified that companies aren't using best practices or they're running into new problems from the AI age generally. Yeah.

I mean, I think the first one is like what you struck on the head, which is all of this AI stuff is super nascent. That means there's not a ton of like super robust cooling out there, how to monitor, evaluate these things. You know, people are building their own Frameworks on the Fly. I think, like, most companies that are really succeeding are not using something off the shelf. They're building it in house. Right. So there's a lot of Nuance that goes into these things. The other thing is, you know, models are another potentially single point of failure. Like, if Cloud goes down, like, what happens to your product? Are you ready to do model routing? or you're gonna do something else. But I think putting them into a broader system perspective, they're not new problems in the sense of these are things systems engineers or data architects have had to think about for a long time. But obviously more and more companies are doing these things and they're really complex systems. I think the second part of that is actually just like, we don't index on this super highly, but something we're seeing is more companies are just pushing more software, highly verticalized niche to their internals. Why go I'll go put something on a retool dashboard when I can build it in Bolt and probably get a more nuanced, tailored experience. So I think that coupling of like, hey, we're working on a pretty nascent space that there isn't a ton of structure around and we're trying to figure out at the same time combined with we just have more infra and more services running period is creating this really chaotic environment where people are stuck in the trenches of debugging things, figuring out.

How do we scale them, paying down tech debt, that sort of thing. Is there anyone on the hyperscaler side that you think is really underrated right now?

Yeah, honestly, OCI. I think Oracle Cloud, they're never part of the conversation. I think all these other clouds have really great offerings, really great services. I think the thing about Oracle is they don't sell a bunch of services on top. They have a really good foundation. These guys have been in the computing business for quite a while. I don't think it's the sexiest option out there, but from a price perspective, security perspective, I think they're pushing a lot internally on what that's going to look like over the next couple of years. years. But, yeah, I think underrated.

That's amazing. The stock hit the all-time high today.

Yeah. Let's hear it for all-time highs. Generational run. What's your guys, I'm just curious, since you guys are so deep in the weeds on this, what's your personal AI, you know, cogen stack right now? What are you and the team loving?

Right now we have cursor for the entire team. Some people preferred Claude.

Code.

Depends, you know, different strokes for different folks. But yeah, I mean, like people are using ChatGPT, Claude, Curser. Curser is probably by and far the biggest one. We're finding a lot of success with some of the agentic stuff like Claude code. But I think the median for us is people are loving Curser. That's probably been the best coding experience.

Very cool. What about just go to market, top of funnel? It's an interesting, super interesting company because you've been able to go massively viral with what is an enterprise software company? It would be different if you were selling an energy drink. I would kind of expect a stunt and oh yeah, everyone's talking about it. But you've been able to break through in a really interesting way in the X community, in the venture capital community. What are you seeing that's working on the top of funnel side? What viral loops are you taking advantage of? wheels just break down the marketing side.

Yeah.

I mean, like, you know, growth is a big part of our DNA, I think largely from, you know, my co-founder Matt, obviously, I like a decent growth and marketing. You know, for us, a lot of it, at least in the early stage right now, is you want to grab people's attention, obviously, attention economy. I think that the really nice thing for us is this is a problem. Like every engineer we talk to has faced or seen to some degree, even people on the operational side when they're like running a business, they're Like, holy crap, like we couldn't push this feature out because we were stuck like fixing the service or paying down debt instead of launching the new thing. Um, but yeah, I mean, we're doing all sorts of things. I think candidly, you're going to see a bunch of it over the coming months.

Um, we're going to have a, you know, bigger splash later this year, but yeah, more to come. Can't wait. Amazing. Well, you'll have to hop back on.

When that bigger splash happens. Yeah, 100%. Uh, great talking to you. We'll, congratulations.

Great to, great to get the full update.

I think we're both on the on the cap table.

We'll talk soon.

Love it.

Awesome, dude.

Thanks, guys. Take care. Have a good one. Let's close out by telling you about Figma. Figma.com, think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together.

You can get started for free. I have a challenge for the audience. Your personal website is probably bad. Go on Figma, make a new one. Yeah, that's great. Ship a website. do it in five minutes.

Fantastic. Speaking of design, Signal's been on an absolute tear, breaking down all the WWDC updates. He says, Two quick observations after using iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 for a few days. iOS 26 feels great. The system is fluid. Buttons are larger. Everything responds with intention. It's super enjoyable and fresh. iPadOS 26 26 is a breakthrough. Productivity finally feels native. File handling, window management, multitasking are intuitive and fast. The most fluid and powerful computing experience on the planet for most tasks. He says he does everything except code on an iPad. And so every time there's a new update, I'm always like, oh, maybe I should pick up an iPad. Maybe I'll be tempted. I'm tempted. This might be the one that does it for me. It's a bad point in the release cycle to buy an iPad because it's over 400 days since they launched the last one, so they'll probably refresh it at the next iPhone event. But I'm definitely thinking about getting it on here. I think it could work really well for running the show.

We've got a couple iPads around the house. Yeah.

Just kind of collect dust.

Collect dust.

Yeah, it's a lot of dust, but.

Maybe I'll upgrade and-- maybe you can get back in.

I think you gotta commit to that being the workhorse. Tyler, how is your iOS 26 experience so far? Have you run into any more problems?

It's pretty good so far. I mean, it's still, you know, my phone is like six years old, so it's a little bit slow.

Okay.

But overall, it's been totally fine.

I like it a lot.

That's good. I'm getting a six year old iPhone. I was asking him, I was asking him, like, show me it, and he starts swiping through his apps. And on one screen, he just has like 25 copies of, what app was that? Chick-fil-A. Chick-fil-A. He somehow He got the Chick-fil-A, the one app, you're only supposed to be able to install the app once.

Somehow he got 26 copies of it installed. You gotta have 26. It was the funniest thing.

If you're serious about Chick-fil-A, you should have at least 26 copies. 26 copies, just in case 24 of them break, I guess. Give us the update on the art history project. How's it going? Are you an expert yet? By the way, my wife texted me and said that it's extremely embarrassing that.

We didn't know that Greek statues were painted, because apparently that's common knowledge.

But also she has a Masters in art.

Okay, the art history major, basically. Common knowledge if you're a renowned expert.

Yeah, yeah. Anyway, give us the latest art history fact.

How are you doing? Yeah, so I took another quiz, another like assessment. Yep.

This time I got 50%. Oh, very good.

So that's 10% in only, I think.

Like an hour and a half.

Compound that. So you'll be able to help.

I mean, 50% more than 25% improvement.

Honestly, give yourself some credit. Yeah, 25% improvement. Yeah. Yeah, but you know, if I get 10% every hour and a half, that's.

You know, math checks out, a bit. I think it's like seven and a.

Half hours, I should be at 100%.

Fantastic. So I should have to do it again.

You could be at 200%. 200%. 300%. You could be the world expert. Did you learn anything else interesting about art history? Do you have any more facts to.

Share with us or are you tapped out?

I've been reading a lot about this guy, Giorgio Vasari.

Okay. So he's kind of 16th century.

He's kind of a polymath, author, historian, painter, sculptor.

He's kind of like the Plutarch of art, right? So Plutarch writes Noble Lives of, or Parallel Lives of Noble Greeks and Romans, right? Sure. And then Vasari kind of writes the.

Same thing for kind of Renaissance art. But kind of this controversial guy, he.

Writes about, you know, he looks at.

Art from the perspective of the artist.

Which is, you know, controversial in the.

Sense that like later on this guy, Winkelmann, I think, he criticizes Vasari, he says, no, you should separate the art from the artist. You should look at art kind of.

In and of itself, by itself.

But yeah, a lot of that.

That's where it came from.

I've heard the term separate the art from the artist.

Chris from Taste would just say, absolutely not.

We're not gonna separate it.

No.

We're gonna look at it. The artist is what matters. If we were to issue you a termination letter today, would you feel more confident now that you've at least studied art? Well, I actually did your job prospects, I mean. Yeah, so I also looked at those.

Other stats about just general employment. And you know, so I'm actually a physics major.

I'm not CS.

Sure.

And physics is actually the second most unemployed. So they're at, physics majors are at, I think 7.8%.

CS was at 6.1. So I think I probably would go into art history.

I mean, I don't have much else. Amazing. Underrated.

I think we just discovered some massive alphabets.

It wouldn't really take that much to double the number of art history majors.

There's only 2,000 of them, right?

Yeah.

Something like that.

Yeah.

2001 now.

2001.

2001.

Amazing. Let's rip through some timeline. Great work, Tyler.

Yep.

We have some news. Congratulations to Crusoe, Chase Lochmiller, been on the show. They are partnering with Brookfield on a $750 million debt facility to build the intelligent infrastructure of the future. Do we have to ring the gong? I think it hit it.

Hit it, John.

Hit it.

That's a lot of, that's a lot of pesos. That's a lot of pennies. Congratulations to the whole team over there. Fantastic. We love big data centers. We love scaling laws, putting big training runs on the data center. Fantastic.

We got another post from Zai. What are some good baby names for someone just getting into nominative determinism? I gotta say, it came to me immediately. Oh, I guess it's here as a comment too, but I was gonna say if it's a boy, Chad.

Chad.

It's just so obvious. Chad, I think, is gonna come back in a big way. I think it sort of waned in popularity when it was more of a slur, but now it's just massive alpha there. It can kind of be an inside joke for you and the other dads. 20 years from now, your son, you know, little baby Chad turns into a man. Oh, he's a Chad, huge surprise. You know, I was getting Chad.

Well, you know, Johnny Ive was in the news because he went to OpenAI, but he's technically Sir Johnny Ive because he's been knighted by the British royalty, right? And I was thinking we need an American version of Sir, of Knighting. And I think what we should do is we should take all the Chads and the ones who are really, really impactful, the ones who have driven massive capital like Chad Byers, they should be knighted in an American way, and they should earn the title Giga. And so for his contributions, the president should take a sword and tap him on both shoulders and knight him Giga Chad Byers.

Giga Chad.

I think that would really, really, it would be the American version of the knighting. Yeah.

And it's based purely on how much capital formation.

100%. Yeah, there's no other criteria.

That's the way it needs to go.

I mean, so step one, name your son Chad. Step two, get him into capital allocation on the private side, ideally. But public markets will work too. You're still eligible.

There's some more good comments in here. Grit Capital says, King, King or Don?

Donald? Yeah, Don.

Don. Donald. I never thought about it.

The Don. Yeah, that's where Don comes from. Yeah, I think so.

In other news, Anand Sinwals says, My first and only angel investment went to zero today. Well, founder of- Stake.

Yeah.

Should have made 50. Sure, one of them would have worked out, made it all back in one trade.

Fascinating because he's the founder of CB Insights, which you would think he would be addicted to angel investing with all that data and stuff. But he knew his life's work was to build that company, and that's what he focused on. And he only invested in one company. Fascinating.

Just very big- Car dealership guy responds.

Congrats. bunny. Anyway, yeah, yeah.

I mean, he said he learned I.

Don'T really enjoy it. And if you don't enjoy it, you're not going to be good at it. So stay out of the game. Paula says Diet Cokes are fridge cigarettes.

So true.

Silly.

So true.

Just drink them all day long.

All right, this is a good place to end. I like how Zuck has been back against the wall like 37 times since 2007 and every time resoundingly wins, but each time begins he has a crisis. People are like, oh man, Zach is cooked.

Yep. So true.

Built different.

Do not count different. The AI talent crisis is merely a bump in the road for old Zach. He's cooking.

We've all been there. We've all, you know, we've all been.

Running a trillion dollar company.

Personal behemoth, you know.

Yes, yes, yes. We all have something. We need to wrangle and get out. Got a power stream or a two trillion parameter model. You know, you got to get it out.

Well, this was a great show. I got to give it up to the, to the incredible production team keeping us online.

Everything goes down across the internet.

We learned everything there is to know about art. We're experts, too.

He's an expert.

Yeah.

Now we got to worry about poaching because I imagine a lot of the galleries are going to be watching this and they're going to be, oh, new art history.

We got a painter. Understands physics. Yep. Live streaming. Computer science knows everything there is to know about.

He knows everything. The history of art. Anyway, thank you for watching. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts. We will see you tomorrow.

And we will see you tomorrow. Have a great day. Have a great afternoon.