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It is Friday, June 27, 2025. We are live from the TBPN Ultradome. The temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. And we gotta ring the gong because The S&P 500 has hit a new high. Congratulations to everyone who works for an S&P 500 company. Who runs an S&P 500 company.

It's just a product from an S&P 500 company.

Y. Yes, yes, yes. It's amazing. American consumers are feeling better than they did in May. Consumer confidence is up. Neuralink just dropped a massive one hour update. We're going to have the co founder and president of the company on the show, DJ SEO. He's a fantastic leader and just, he's just an amazing person. I can't wait to talk to him. Also, there's news about Tesla's Robotaxi launch and what it means for Waymo. We'll dig into that. Travis Kalanick might be getting back in.

The where would you have priced. So Waymo is getting priced at 45 billion.

Allegedly.

Allegedly.

I don't know.

Rumor mill. How would you have priced Waymo?

That's a good question. That feels like roughly correct. I mean how big is the market for self driving cars? Pretty huge. The kind of like base case expectation would be like something like a duopoly or like you're at least betting that like there's a 50% chance of a duopoly. So you mark. So you kind of benchmark it at like 25% of the, of the total market size and it feels like it's $100 billion market based on, you know, the volume that Uber's doing and the market cap of Uber which is kind of like, you know, Uber will be able to. Is obviously fighting to keep that, but that's kind of what's up at stake. And then also like I believe Uber dramatically increased the volume of total rides. Like it's. The Uber market is bigger than the taxi market and you would expect that the self driving car market will be bigger than the Uber market and so forth. 45 billion doesn't seem that crazy to me. They've been at this for what, almost two decades and it seems to be going pretty well. Anyway, we'll dig into it. Also we have Kirsten Green joining the stream later. She just held a conference and is going to talk to us about consumer AI startups and the value of virality. I'm sure that we'll have a lot to dig into there. That'll Be interesting and then the great AI talent wars continue. We will be covering them but of course first if you're getting in on the action of the S&P 500 you got to do it at public.com investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi asset investing industry leading yields. They're trusted by millions folks.

Millions folks. And I want to give a quick shout out to Jensen Huang on June 24. Just a few days ago Nvidia was sitting at a 10% chance of being the largest company at the end of June and he has rocketed up to 97% chance right now. Just an absolute hockey sick on Polymarket. Yeah I'm on Polymarket and he's absolutely cooking. So he is a little hat tip.

To Jensen and interestingly if you if you scroll that to December 31st by the end of the year Nvidia still in the is the expected to be the largest company at the end of 2025 with a 46% chance. Microsoft's at 34%, Apple's at 15, Tesla's at 3.6%. It's still a great horse race to follow. I love it.

$3.87 trillion market cap right now that's.

A big company but everyone needs GPUs. You look at the rest of the Mag 7 and you're like they they potentially all benefit from from Nvidia and yes they compete in some ways but.

Really the highest ever market capitalization by a public company.

I'd love to hear that. It's amazing.

They achieved it once before apparently.

Congratulations.

Now how does that work Pompous in.

The timeline saying The S&P 500 has hit a new all time high and all the doomsday predictors can do nothing about it. And Geiger Capital says Trump literally called the bottom apparently at the lowest point in in the market Donald Trump posted I guess on Truth Social this is a great time to buy he bottom.

Tick tick he really did he bottom ticked.

It's actually crazy.

Gotta give him some credit for the perfect bottom tick. You also gotta say he's got a little bit of influence over the markets. You know he's pulling some strings so it would make if anyone was gonna be able to bottom ticket perfectly. I'm not surprised that it is djt.

Well what else is going on in the market? Stocks have climbed in recent sessions after the fragile cease fire between Israel and Iran sent oil prices lower and fueled optimism that the Middle east could avoid prolonged conflict. This was the end of World War three catalyst that we Were talking about continued trade negotiations between the US and trading partners, including China, Canada and the European Union have also lifted investor spirits. It does feel like maybe things are moving forward in the Middle East. Things are moving forward in trade deals. Even the, the NATO stuff that we covered yesterday, it feels like Trump was talking a really big game about, oh, we're going to pull out NATO, we're going to be negative on NATO. And now NATO stepping up. And obviously that, that feels like it's cause for optimism. So. On Friday, the S and P opened above its previous intraday high, rising 0.3% in early trading. The NASDAQ composite also hit a new record. We love to hear it. In just a few months, investors swung from exuberance about the deregulation and tax cuts they expected from President Trump to fear that his decision to launch a global trade war would cripple the economy. Then the mood shifted again. After shrugging off initial damage to the markets, the President declared it was time to buy. He announced a 90 day pause on many of his planned tariffs, sending the S and P soaring 9.5% in its best day since the financial crisis of 2008. And this was my take. I have to take a victory lap here because I said, like, this is a manufactured crisis that can be, can be reversed by the person who manufactured it.

Well deserved victory.

Yeah. I need a pat on the back. I need a pat on the back for this.

It's hard to. I can't.

Tough to reach out myself on the back.

I'm there with you, but. Yeah. Really?

You seem like it was the end of the world, but there was a.

Couple days when I was looking around, I was just like, wow, this is bad. This is history.

Yeah.

We're living through history, right?

Yeah, yeah, 100%.

You never broke a sweat?

Never? Never.

Not even for a second?

No. But it's funny because it's not, it's not purely like a bull case because it's like, it would be better to not have volatility. Like, I'm not like pro volatility here. But, but I'm just saying.

No, it's, it's rel. It's, it's max intraday volatility. Overall stability. The s and P500 is up 5%. It would be, you know, it was basically a good year by any measure, but max chaos.

Yes, yes, yes. The market sense that these tariffs aren't nearly going to be as onerous as what was presented on Liberation Day, said Hank Smith, head of investment strategy at Haverford Trust You've seen the recovery. Many investors remain worried that even watered down versions of the sweeping tariff plan plans Trump unveiled early could slow business spending. This is what a lot of people were saying back to me when I was saying this was like, now we are technically like a high tariff country. Even if we stick around at 10%, like that is significant and that would potentially be a drag. But it feels like companies have been able to adjust. They prepared for the worst. They prepared for 90% tariffs. And so they, they reallocated and planned ahead and figured things out. And so they're more equipped to deal with 10% if that sticks around. But we'll see. So. But so far, evidence of such damage has been sparse. The country's biggest corporations reported robust profit growth for the first quarter.

We got to have Ryan Peterson back on to just get a proper update on digging a level deeper and kind of understanding what's happening with his customers.

For sure we've seen that earnings are resilient, said Richard Saperstein, chief investment officer, Investment pertinent investment firm Treasury Partners. We've seen economic activity remaining buoyant. We're, we've seen inflation not really moving higher. The American consumers undefeated. And American consumers felt better in June than they did in May. And so consumer sentiment has been climbing. It's risen to 60.7 in June, according to the University of Michigan. University of Michigan.

Tyler, look and show Tyler in the street. Can we get a Tyler cam up? Tyler's we got.

Oh, he looks great. Wow. The lighting is really good.

It's all time high.

So it's a white suit production team. Everyone's in the white suits because the mic the markets up as we do. As we do.

You're looking like Colonel Sanders had a liquidity event.

It's great. And so despite the increase, consumer sentiment remains 18% lower than it was in December of 2024. So we're still significantly down, but we're heading in the right direction. Consumers expect inflation.

I think the consumers are doing you, John. Consumers are feeling pretty good right now.

They expect inflation to rise by 5% in the year ahead, decrease from the 6.6% expectation in May. So people are expecting less inflation, which is certainly good to hear. The period the survey period covered May 27 to June 23, a politically tumultuous period that included protests against Donald Trump and the shooting of two Minnesota lawmakers. But overall, people were still moving in the positive direction. And so the June reading remains low by historical standards. Before the pandemic, for example, the index hovered close to 100. Everyone was. Everyone was optimistic. Since COVID though, a period in which American households have seen the cost of everything from food to houses soar, consumer sentiment has experienced a broader decline. Well, there's one place that's still where consumers are more bullish than ever, and that's the mansion section. Of course, we got to review some of these. Paris Hilton has purchased Mark Wahlberg's old house. So Paris Hilton, if you don't remember, she, she is an entrepreneur, a hotel heiress and an influencer, also a dj.

I'm looking up her perfume revenue because it's in the.

It's a great product for her perfume.

Line has generated over $2 billion.

Wow. Well, it paid for this house, which was $60 million. $63 million roughly. They lost their homes in the Malibu. In Malibu to wildfires earlier this year. But they paid 63 million for Mark Wahlberg's former Los Angeles estate. According to a person familiar with the situation, the estate is on six acres in the ultra exclusive Beverly park gated community. It came on the market for 68. They negotiated them down to 63. The roughly 30,500 square foot home has 12 bedrooms and amenities worthy of a theme park. You'll love this, Jordy. A sports court, a skate park, a five hole golf course with a driving range.

Only five. Okay. You got the range.

You got the range.

Okay.

And you know, you probably got. I don't know, I don't think they're putting par fives on this thing. But that's for the next house when they upgrade. This is like, this is what they call a starter home. It's a starter home, starter golf course.

It's Wahlberg. You know, I know this is about Paris and their new house. Isn't Wahlberg known for like setting up entire gyms?

Yes.

When he's.

Oh, he didn't even mention the gym. We got to get, we got to.

Get into his gym. What kind of. He probably has multiple gyms.

Does he wake up at like 4:00am yeah, he's the, he's the pre. Ashton Hall. The legacy media Ashton Hall.

Yeah.

It was built in 2014. The main house has a wine and cigar cellar.

Okay.

A smoking lounge. The property also includes a guest house. And yeah, the cellar was represented by Ginger and Alexandra Glass Compass. And Hilton was represented by her brother Baron and Hilton of Hilton Hilton, along with his wife and colleague Tessa Hilton. They love the name Hilton and so they've, they've tripled.

It's a strong name.

Yeah. They also the founder of fashion Nova has purchased a $32 million house in another Los Angeles area. Spec home. This is cool.

Did he sell?

No, I forget.

He still has.

I'll tell you the story of the one. So he is. His name is Richard Shagian. I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly. He purchased the one, which was originally listed at $500 million, and it was developed by the once embattled builder, Niall Naomi. Very interesting character who made his money in direct to video DVD sales. Back when that was like a banger market. He would get the. He would get the rights to some video or movie that wasn't really that popular, print a bunch of DVDs, sell them in grocery stores, and just made a ton of money.

Amazing.

He started developing these luxury homes I believe he built.

That was like your idea to do vinyl podcasts.

Yes, yes.

Really tap into that market.

But we're, we're a little bit past that, unfortunately. But the, the, the one, it was the largest home ever built. 105,000 square feet in Los Angeles, or the largest home in the developed world or something like that. I think there's technically one bigger.

Yeah, my home is about six figures.

Have you seen the tour? Have you watched the tour? We.

Six figures, like, it's under a million. They're like, no, like 100,000 square feet.

Yeah, the 100,000 square foot, it has like four pools. It has a full nightclub. I'm pretty sure the garage holds 50 cars. It's. It's like purely for, like, entertainment. He was thinking about hosting UFC there at one point. Like, his ideas were insane because he was kind of like, oh, like I built something too big because it came on the market right as, like, the market was crashing and the interest rates were rising. And so all of a sudden it was like, okay, no one's gonna jump at this. And it was also, like, too big. Even if you have a hundred billion dollars, like, do you really want to live in 100,000 square foot home? It's like, it's gonna take you 10 minutes to get across that house if you're like, oh, yeah, I left my. I left my, my watch in the other room. 10 minutes there, 10 minutes back. It has a full movie theater. Like, not like a private theater. Like, it's a full movie theater. Yeah. Like, it could fit like, you know, 200 people or something in it. It's insane. But it was, it was, it was a really tough development. 500 million dollar asking price at one point, I think got seized by the lender. It wound up selling to Richard here, the founder of fashion Nova, for 126 million at auction in 2022. Bought the dip on this one. I think it's worth more than that. Commissions and fees brought the total price to $141 million. At the time of the purchase, Naomi hadn't obtained a certificate of occupancy. This is going to answer your question for the property. So the house couldn't be legally lived in. Shagin has been working to bring the property up to code according to people familiar with the situation. This, this developer was insane. He was like helicopter pad on the roof. I don't care about the permits. I'm going to do it anyway.

Like no way.

Fighting for everything. It was, it was crazy. Has a full track that you can just run like miles around the house. It's awesome.

Anyway, try to podcast there.

So he's. So he's trying to build it. Yeah. We should do the deep dive on. On the history of Fashion Nova and fast Fashion with him. We'd love that. The Bel Air estate. Yeah. So this is the Bel Air estate that he just purchased that he. Or this is the one that he purchased. That's smaller. You can see the image on that. That's the smaller house. That's only 30,000ft. Square feet or something like that. Or 13. Square 13. No, that's Paris Hilton's house.

That's the Wahlberg.

Yeah, that's the Wahlberg. That's the former Wahlberg house. The Bel Air estate is expected to be completed in approximately 14 months and will serve as Richard's primary home.

Because he can't Occupy.

Yes.

His $100 million home.

Yes. So he's. So he's slumming it in the $32 million home. The 13,000 square foot six bedroom home with a pool, sauna and a putting green. That'll be fun.

Damn.

Anyway, let's move on to some.

Yeah, there's homes with putting greens. There's homes with full golf courses. Full golf courses.

Yeah.

It's always levels.

Yeah, it's the hedonic treadmill. Once you get the putting green, you're gonna want a five hole course. Then you're gonna want 18, then you're gonna want 36. Cause you don't wanna play the same course every day.

We were talking about this yesterday. The hedonic treadmill might be the best possible workout for your personal finances.

I agree.

Cause once you get on, you pretty much can't get off.

Do you know what the best possible workout is for your corporate finances? Jordy, Ramp time is money. Save both. Go to ramp.com, easy. Use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. Seamless. You like how I did that? Anyway, in other news, Mr. Beast has rolled back the launch of his View Stats AI thumbnail tool. He says, hey, thanks for all your feedback on the View Stats AI thumbnail tool. We pulled it and added a funnel for creators to find real thumbnail artists to commission.

Okay. So clearly the thumbnail industrial complex came for him hard. They're probably making, you know, death threats in the comments. It sounds like it was pretty intense. My thing here, you know, I have to agree with Lulu, this, this is one of Mr. Beast's like many businesses. Right. So in general, like it's something he wants to create for creators and distribute widely. But the obvious reason that he should have kept the AI thumbnail tool is you're by. If you can roll out AI in this way, you can save millions of creators that create YouTube videos a lot of money because many of them are not going to be able to afford to commission a hand designed thumbnail. And so the, the right thing to do for the creators broadly is to make a tool like this available, make it as cheap as possible so as many people as possible can use it and not give in to the small number of people in the world that make thumbnails like that. That's their sort of day to day, those people that make thumbnails. Like there's a lot of things you could do. You could adjust, you could go and make, edit videos. Right. AI video editors are not that good today. You could do that.

It's very odd because the, yes. It's like we're, we're destroying the job of a, of thumbnail artist or real, real thumbnail artist. But that's a job that was created like two years ago. Like I think I met the first like full. I literally was at a YouTube conference just a few years ago and I met the first, first real thumbnail artist where that was his entire job full time. And, and Mr. Beast hired a few of those folks and.

But the whole point is, the whole point is that person can probably make much better thumbnails than AI can right now. And so go up market.

Yes.

Work with creators that are willing to spend money and make a, make it. Make an entry level tool that anybody can use.

Yes.

To generate an AI. You know, an AI generated thumbnail.

Yeah.

Like it just, I mean I have a bunch of. I'm surprised. Yeah, I mean surprised that he, he rolled this back and gave in. But, you know, it's very possible that the thumbnail industrial complex, you know, has, has a massive lobbying arm, you know, and, and said, you know, we're going to work on getting, you know, your other businesses blacklisted, you know.

Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. Like, like there's even a. There's even a, like a continuum of technology that exists within the pre AI thumbnail generation workflow. So at one point, I was making thumbnails the way people usually do, compositing different images together. Pick a background, cut yourself out of a green screen image, put that over the face, over the background. That's like the standard thing. Put some text over it. At one point, I actually experimented with Ben shooting practical thumbnails. So we would go and design, like, instead of compositing a background, we would design a background image of wall and print out pictures, pin them on the wall, and I would stand in front of the wall of images, and they didn't really perform better. And so I think like, using a design tool like figma.com, think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. Is a great. Just using software in general is completely justified. And no one really talked about, like, well, if you're just compositing images, then you're not filming them. Practically all of a sudden you're putting set decorators out of business. Because it's not like I was hiring a set decorator. I was just saying, like, hey, Ben, me and you are going to practically set up this thumbnail and then take the photo.

So here's the real evidence as to why Mr. Beast should have kindly told the thumbnail artist to F off. I ran a quick query here, basically to try to estimate how many people actually earn a living making thumbnails by looking at platforms like Upwork and Fiverr and all these different things and then doing some type of multiple. So Generally, we're estimating two to five thousand people make at least $1,000 a month designing thumbnails across all different types of platforms. Meanwhile, There are over 2 million YouTube creators that are in the YouTube Partner Program, meaning they're making ad revenue. YouTube is a business for them. And so do you want to serve the 2 million people by giving them great tools that they can use to run better, more profitable content businesses, or do you want to build your product for the thumbnail industrial complex, which is just a few thousand people that are probably not even doing it full time?

Right.

They're just earning, earning some type of living.

So I think it gets to like the importance of like how, how abstract should your title be? Because we were talking about this earlier. Like if you, if you, if you did a job shadow on a lawyer in 1950 and then you did a job shadow on a lawyer today, it's probably a very different day. Right. A modern lawyer is like sending text messages and is on signal and sending emails and probably using chatbots to just search for things and pulling for stuff from LexisNexis instead of going to the archives. The old lawyer is like having teams.

Hopefully not dumping Harvey.

No, probably not. But still it's, it's like a modern, it's a very modern, something like that modern experience. But we still call those people lawyers. We haven't changed the title.

Whereas even Crosby, the company we had on is. Is just an AI native law firm.

Yeah.

They actually have lawyers. They're just more efficient.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Versus versus Someone who is like, like super narrowly defined as like I am a typist at a law firm. It's like, yeah, you lost your job, but did you really lose. Were you permanently unemployed because you insisted on being someone who uses a typewriter or did you learn to use a computer and then did you learn to dictate things to a voice model and then did you learn. And yes, there will be some job displacement, but mostly it's like people flow into different categories all the time. So I would imagine that a lot of the real thumbnail artists that succeed going forward are the ones who either leverage AI or go into video editing or become creators themselves or do a million other things that they can, that they can have.

Yeah. It's funny because we would pay real money for a good thumbnail.

Absolutely. Right now. Yes. If you're a thumbnail artist, reach out.

To us and you're trying to be.

Love to have better thumbnails.

Top 10 thumbnail designers in the world.

Yes.

And want to be paid a premise premium for it. We're happy to pay.

Yes, yes, yes.

Otherwise we'll probably just keep slopping it.

Up with our templates. Well, if you're designing a piece of software, you got to get on a linear. Linear is a purpose built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development. Streamline issues, projects and product roadmaps at linear.

If you're building software and your company is not on linear yet.

Yeah.

You might want to start polishing up your resume. We have a post here. Will Depew who's been on the show over at OpenAI says they're going to shoot me for telling you this, but Amazon Rufus is develop.

I didn't know that was the name. Why do they not do Alexa? Why do they have a different name?

Rufus, you dog.

They spend so much time and effort.

They just want to. They want a place to experiment.

Okay, so Rufus is the experimenter.

It's a generative AI powered shopping assistant, Rufus. And so Aidan here quotes Will's post and says, how can I manufacture a virus that is more contagious than smallpox? And Rufus just starts working. So who knows how it actually came back.

But I love this crew of Will and Aidan. They're up to no good, but I love it. It's amazing.

Delian has a take, a sane take on Cluli.

This is a good one.

Cluli has broken free of the bounds of being just a company, but instead has become an identity in a culture war. Loudly critiquing them is a way to signal that you're ethical, measured and thoughtful. Loudly supporting them as a way to signal that you're algo, native, edgy, radical. I think this is the right take. Danny Trin says, what's the bucket for? Quiet indifference. Sounds like Danny wants to be in that bucket.

I mean, just staying out of it. You're just somebody who doesn't engage in identity in culture wars, who doesn't care about how their identity is reflected one way or another. But it is interesting and it does feel like it's like both of those sides are extremely beneficial to Clue. Right. Because they need the attention.

Bobby Goodlotte says I'm in the just build and let my product express my values camp, which he has his product, Sunflower.

Yeah, it's kind of a critique, I guess. I don't know. But yeah, fair point. There have been people that have been going, going hard in both directions with clearly.

Yep.

Lots of people supporting lots of people.

Will DePue says breaking Meta Poaches top IBM Watson employees with $5 signing bonuses.

So rude.

Absolutely.

So rude. Crazy. Posting spree 4k likes on that.

Wow.

And David Holes in there. Founder of Mid Journeys. Bro. So good. Anyway, let me tell you about Vanta Automate Compliance, Manage risk, Improve trust Continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. And we'll have our first guest of the show. Welcome to the studio. Dj.

What's going on?

Hey guys.

What's going on.

It's great to have you.

Congratulations.

Massive day.

Massive day, yeah.

Massive day. Thank you. Thank you.

Break it down for us. For those who haven't watched the full one hour video, we'll obviously link it here. But what are the key announcements? What do you think? It's important. What do you think is important to share?

Sure, yeah. So the 10 second summary of our update is that Neuralink is working reliably and has already changed the lives of seven and human participants that we've been working with. It's really been a privilege working with all those participants individually and that we sort of lay down our next set of milestones, which is most immediately going to market and enabling the scaling of this technology to thousands of people, eventually millions. And also to just go beyond the movement and expand functionalities into speech, vision and hopefully getting to the speed of inner thoughts. And then there's a little bit of hints as to what the path to kind of the ultimate goal of neuralink would be, which is to understand and unlock the mystery of the mind.

Yeah. Elon teased that in the opener and I was somewhere between tearing up from emotions and pumping my fist with excitement because it feels like, you know, this is the main quest. You can see that he's lit up about this and you can see that he's, he's just, it's just, it felt incredibly back. Yeah. To put it back. So, yeah, it was exciting. Give us a little bit of your background and how you wound up at Neuralink.

Yeah, sure. Let's see. So I grew up in South Korea and growing up I loved Ninja Turtles and Pokemon. I also really like Legos and just in general, taking things apart and putting it together. And came to the states at age 13 and studied electrical engineering. I loved, love, loved RF circuit design and computational electromagnetics and I wanted to be an academic. My dad's a professor and decided to go to graduate school in Berkeley to design the next generation wireless communication chips for cell phones. And then in the Bay Area learned that people can start companies. I didn't know that was the thing that people can do at the time. There wasn't really anything interesting happening, no offense to other builders at the time, but decided to finish my PhD and did my thesis work in neural implants and had the opportunity to join neuralink as a founding team member when I was graduating. And that was almost nine years ago.

What was the. Take me through some of the history. I mean, nine years to get here, it feels like we're at this like acceleration moment. Where the rate of Neuralink deployment is growing, it feels exponential. But in those first nine years, what were the key milestones that you remember and the key turning points?

Sure, yeah. I mean, I think a lot of people don't realize that when Neuralink started out, it was really just a group of six or seven of us, and we didn't really have anything. When I first showed up to the office at the time, we actually shared the office with OpenAI at the Pioneer Building in San Francisco. It was just a bunch of us. We didn't even have chairs and desks. So one of the first things we did on the first day was to go out to Staples and buy chairs. So incredible amount of work has kind of gone into really building the hardware, kind of the foundational pieces to generate the data set that's necessary for us to iterate on the device. And it took about, I would say, year and a half, two years to get the first kind of generation of brain chips working on the lab at the time, starting with smaller animal models with rats, and then slowly graduating to bigger and bigger species. Pigs, sheep. That starts to represent more the anatomy of the humans. And about four years ago now, we had the demo with one of our monkeys, Pejer, that played the game Pong. We called it the mind Pong. And that was one of the key moments to demonstrate what the capabilities, the types of devices can be. And I think I should also maybe step back and say that Neuralink really is sitting on the shoulders of the giants here. There's been decades, decades of research that's gone into the field that we're in, called brain computer interface or brain machine interface. And that really set the foundation for de risking the scientific aspects of what this could be. And there's obviously a lot of challenges in scaling that product, making it a product itself. And that's what we are taking on.

Yeah, I want to talk about those giants, the shoulders of the giants that you're standing upon, and how you think about the role of research and development in the public sector, in academia, playing into commercializable technologies. There's discussions about this with the NIH and biotech, obviously. You know, SpaceX is the perfect. It feels like the perfect story to me where, you know, who was going to pay for a moon landing in the 60s? No venture capitalist would, would have underwritten that. But because we did that, we learned a lot. And then we. And then when it became time for it to be rolled out at scale, Elon stepped up with SpaceX and the rest is history. So what can you tell me about the history of BCI in the kind of public sector side?

Universities.

Universities versus stories that have been done at different companies that may have failed but contributed to the community.

Yeah, we had Andrew Huberman on like a week or so ago talking about his concern around NIH funding and all the issues from pure kind of health standpoint. But this feels relevant as well.

Yeah, I mean, it's incredibly important. I mean, you see this even today there's a very much an active research going on in the BCI field, just sort of looking at the next frontier of different targets and different indications that can really open up opportunities for people that have various different types of neurological condition. And you know, I think the history of brain computer interface and you know, the first product that Neuralink is working on, you know, we named it Telepathy because, you know, really it's enabling someone who has lost that mind body connection through diseases like traumatic spinal cord injury or als, which really over time. It's a horrible condition that, that really takes away every part of your muscles over time, eventually leading to death. Those were the indications. And what neuralink is able to do is place this device and these set of electrodes in the part of the brain called the motor cortex or the hand knob area. Basically, if you're thinking about moving your hand or wrist area, there's a lot of neurons that are firing in response to that and we're able to record that intention and then translate that to, you know, moving cursor on the screen or robotic arm, you know, physical things in the space. And that was purely, purely done as an academic research funded by Department of Defense and you know, 20, 30 years ago. And that really set the foundation for what is possible. And you know, I think back 20, 30 years ago, if someone were to try to get venture money out of that, I don't think anyone would have pursued that scientific pursuit. And there still continues to be a lot of research and important work that's gone into academia for other indications. And I do worry about what the future looks like on that front.

Can you walk us through the current installation of the Neuralink product? I know that there were specific machines you had to build and kind of walk through because I don't know if semi invasive is the correct term. Is it extremely invasive? I don't know what term we're using, but it feels like you've done exactly what's necessary and not any further. But it's still significant. But you've done a ton of work to de risk it Right, Yeah.

Yep. So I guess maybe before we dive into some of the specifics of how neuralink devices installed, maybe let me take a step back and kind of describe why go into the brain in the first place and why that's important. And typically the analogy that's used in the field is that of the stadium. So you can really think about neural signals as audio signals. The frequency spectrum is actually very similar in the analogy of neurons talking to each other, speaking different languages. It's actually a pretty good analogy. So the idea is that if you're standing outside the stadium, you can kind of get a sense of how the game is going based on the cheers and the boos of the crowd, but you won't be able to tell me exactly what's going on on the game. How's the game actually going? What are the teams actually talking about? When are the key moments happening? In order for you to really understand those types of information and get that type of information, you need to be in the arena. You need to actually drop the microphone inside the arena and you can think about what neuralink is doing. In a similar analogy, you can get neural signals from on the surface of the brain or even outside of the skull without having to go through a craniotomy. But the type of signals and the resolution that you will get is going to be much worse. And so there's a trade off there. So now we've decided from day one that we would want to get the highest signal, highest resolution neural signatures, because we believe that that's necessary for kind of the long term mission of understanding and unlocking the mystery of the brain. And in order to do that, you basically want to make these electrodes that are recording neural signals as small as possible and also as flexible as possible. So your brain, you can think of it as a consistency of a tofu or jello. And it also moves a lot because every heartbeat, every breath that you take, it's moving a lot. And that's one of the things that we have to learn in a hard way when we work with our participants in designing these electrodes to be tiny fraction, fraction of a human hair. So one of our, what we call thread, which is these tiny wires that have electrodes are about 1/20 of a human hair and they're also flexible. So they kind of move with the brain rather than if it's a rigid thing, you can cause a lot of scarring as you're breathing. So when you build these tiny, tiny threads that are manufactured with conventional lithography tools, in our own clean room facilities. Now the question is, okay, how do you actually insert these? They're very small, and even the best neurosurgeons won't be able to insert them precisely in the location that we want. So we ended up designing a surgical robot. And again, this was something that was kind of in the vision of the company from day one where also looking at scaling this to millions, if not billions of people, eventually we just did not see a world where there's some sort of robotics and some sort of not having human in the loop. So it's essentially this precision robotic tool that has a bunch of cameras that are looking at the surface of the brain, making sure that you're avoiding vessels, and then manipulating and inserting these tiny threads one by one as quickly as you can in the region of interest. And what ends up happening is that we currently go through a process to drill a hole in the skull called the craniotomy. And then we actually expose different layers of the tissue. There's many different layers of the brain before you get to it. The first layer that you see is a dura mater. And then once you have the brain exposed, we insert these threads one by one with a surgical robot. And then the hole that we created on the skull is actually replaced by the implant base that has the battery, the computer and everything. And then once you put the skin over, everything's completely invisible, everything is completely wireless and you basically become a cyborg. And that process takes about three hours.

Right now, can you talk to me about how noisy the data is and if there's any advances in AI that help denoising of the data? I've seen like incredible, you know, demos of, oh, take this ancient black and white grainy image and just make it look amazing or even unblurring images. Like we're actually at the CSI moment where you can be like, zoom in on that, zoom in on that and it works. Have there been any developments in AI recently that have been relevant? Do you think that will happen in the future? Is it already happening or is it just kind of a complete side quest?

Yeah, no, there's, there's a lot of opportunities where AI can help, you know, in some ways understand the biological brain that it's inspired by in, in, in really interesting ways. There are a couple places that we currently use AI. I, you know, I think on the electro side, unfortunately, there's not a lot that you can do. In the end, there's very tight margin in terms of signal to noise ratio, so there's a lot of innovations that we've had in neuralink on low power and low noise amplifier designs and being able to digitize that as quickly as possible into digital bits that then you can apply a lot of interesting signal processing as well as really, at the end of the day, this giant pipeline that we call neural decoding. What is the human intent and how can you actually translate that to something useful? So as of right now, we have a very simple machine learning AI kind of there to translate those thoughts and intents into something useful. And the thing that is actually very interesting is that it's not a static data points either. So if you look at a human brain, there's what's called neuroplasticity, which means that from day to day or even depending on the context, there's difference in neural states that are represented even from the same brain region. It's a learning system as well as the machine learning model. The silicon neural net is also learning about the brain, but also your brain is learning about the silicon. Basically this new mode of communication that you have gotten as a neural link. And in many ways I think there's some opportunities and we're starting to see kind of interesting traits where now that we have not just one, but seven human participants, there's some similarities that we see in kind of the data set and there's opportunities where we can use that kind of base similarities to improve the calibration time. So, meaning you can't immediately use this device as is. You have to go through a calibration. Make sure when you're thinking about moving to the left, we have a stream of neural signals that then say, oh, okay, John is thinking about moving to the left and this is what the neural patterns look like and collect that data over time and then improve the system. But you do get drift over time due to the fact that as I mentioned, your neural state is always going through a plasticity.

Can you talk about. Yeah. Can you talk about the translation and the evolution of what outputs you're actually trying to map to? Because if I remember pong, Pong's unique in that it's. It's just up or down. It's not an X and Y grid that you're trying to control. You're just controlling up and down. But then when I've seen Nolan P1, it's clear that he can use a mouse in an X and Y axis and then also click. And when I think about playing a video game, I'm kind of using all 10 digits and I'm in one way I'm thinking jump. In another way, I'm thinking send the message of just press the A button. And so there's a. There's like how much data can you get out? Are you trying to increase that? Has that already increased? Is it. Is it going to kind of operate like a higher level of abstraction that then gets translated into computer use? Or is it more like as long as I can puppeteer 10 fingers, then you can translate those into 10 different actions and remap those and have people menu accordingly. Like the investment banker who doesn't use a mouse.

Right. So the update that we just released a couple hours ago actually has some videos of what the latest capabilities with neuralink that participants been able to do. I guess one thing that I will highlight is that there's a video of two of our participants playing a first person shooter game. And if you actually think about it, that's quite sophisticated control. There's a left joystick for movement, there's a right joystick for aiming, and there's a bunch of different buttons for swapping weapons, reload and shooting, et cetera, et cetera. And so they're able to do this.

It's going to make me cry. Team Deathmatch after with your boy. After.

Well, the other thing that's actually kind of interesting is that at neuralink, we also talk about going beyond the limits of biology and then actually achieving superhuman capabilities. Yeah, so we're already seeing. I was going to say we're actually already starting to see some signs of it.

Interesting. That was my next question. Right now you guys are generally focused on outputs. Controlling an arm or playing a video game or navigating some type of computer. At what point would you focus on or starting to spend more time around the inputs into the brain?

Yes, inputs. One of the major applications for that is product that we call blindsight. So giving sight back to people that have lost it. And that's primarily going to be input. So imagine basically someone who's blind being able to have a set of glasses with embedded camera that's capturing the scene. And that gets converted into a set of impulses that then stimulate the part of your brain called the visual cortex, which is on the back of your head. And it basically gives you your sight back. Right? Because the way vision works is that you have your lights hitting your retina converted to electrical signals. And at the end of the day, it's your brain where you're seeing and having that conscious experience. But if you have anything break in that circuit, you can directly go to the brain, stimulate those neurons that are giving you that visual experience and be able to see. And our plan is to have our first blind site patient next year.

Can you talk about some of the. How you see the ecosystem developing around Neuralink long term, if you can speak to it at all? I'm just imagining that when I've spoken to Nolan P1 and I mean, he's incredibly, he's a huge beneficiary of Neuralink, but also voice interfaces because he can speak. And so as that technology gets better, that becomes an extra tool in the arsenal. I'm imagining someone wearing, you know, glasses that act as blindsight, but then also having an audio modulation there that could help as well. And there's a whole bunch of other. And I'm wondering if there's going to be like an ensemble of products or something that. Where, you know, Neuralinks a key, key technology, but then there's other approaches that are actually more compatible or complementary as opposed to directly competitive.

Yeah, I mean, I think in the long future, you know, I think there's going to be a lot of application layers that are going to be built on top of Neuralink, you know, in a similar ways that when the iPhone was released. I mean, it was, it was a cool device, but also it didn't really do a lot until you started developing a bunch of applications on top of it. So I can imagine a world where there's a Neuralink app store and in the end it just kind of provides a conduit both into and out of your brain, some ways of getting the human intent out to a set of machines. And that machine can be your computer's laptop or your computer's phones or prosthetics or some other thing. And I'm really excited to kind of see what the creative minds can think about in terms of the application on top of it.

Yeah, it feels like there will be a hierarchy of needs within the app store of some people might want to use Neuralink so that they can see or talk or manipulate the world, but then other people might want to use inputs to be like, every time I'm about to pick up a bag of Cheetos, just like, don't work, make the ARM not work. And so I just can't physically pick up the ad blocker domino. It's an ad blocker for overeating or turning on the tv.

I love that. I want to talk about hiring. Obviously this event was, was not for the shareholders. It was for recruiting. Can you talk about the neuralink culture. Can you talk about what skills you're looking for and what it takes to get a job at Neuralink today?

Yeah, there's. There's one metric that we basically look for in. In any candidate and that's. It's hard to actually get it down to a quantitative number. But you know, we try to look for literally ego divided by ability. So ego to ability ratio. And we want that to be significantly less than 1. So you can have a little bit of ego, but you better have 10 times, 100 times more abilities to offset that.

That's amazing.

And we found that to be actually really important thing to look for, especially given that one. This is an extremely interdisciplinary effort. You know, it's extremely. I don't think there's a place where you can have lunch with, you know, someone who's an expert in RF chip design, to robotics, to neurosurgery, to animal care specialists. I think it's a very, very unique space in that.

And not to mention lawyers too. I baffled by that, that you guys are executing at such a high level. Regulatory. I was going to ask completely different discipline.

And I'm saying this to me, looking at Neuralink, it has to be the hardest problem set in the world. Sure, it's hard. I'm trying to think of others and it's hard to come up with anything that really comes close to it. And I imagine that can be really daunting to some people that say, I'd rather I'll stay in the Elon orbit, but I'd like to just work on rocket science. I just like to be a rocket scientist. And so I'd be interested to get your view on it just because you have so many different factors. The interdisciplinary nature of it then, okay, well, now the brain's actually moving and it's not moving consistently, but it's moving based on the way the heart's beating or things like that. It just feels like the most difficult problem set. And, and I guess that must be a good filtering function in that you don't want people to come in thinking that it's just going to be hard, but very achievable. You almost want them to think that it's borderline impossible, but push through that.

Yeah. So a lot of people have misconception that neuralink is a science company. We're really a technology and an engineering company. And there's also this misconception that, oh yeah, at neuralink you guys probably spend a lot of time talking about like future of humanity and like uploading Consciousness and et cetera, et cetera. Like in some ways, yes, like we do talk about those things, but it's like 0.1% of our conversation, like 99.9% of the time. It's about hardcore engineering problems. And in many ways, you know, brains moving, the material properties, mechanical properties of the brain, those are engineering constraints. But at the end of the day, it's an engineering problem. Right. So we're really looking for just hardcore engineers. And in many ways we have a saying that you don't have to be a brain surgeon to work in Neuralink. You actually don't even need to have a prior experience in brain. I took some neuroscience classes in grad school, but I didn't really know anything about the brain. It really is just engineering a great system to be able to study and peer into the dynamics of brain that we all have that we don't really understand and haven't even scratched the surface of. So it's a technology first engineering, first.

Company for where the company is right now. I love that ego to ability framework. But talk about interdisciplinary work. Is there a world where you need RF engineers who are just great at that and they're not really going to have to cross over? Or are you still looking for the types that can bring together different ideas from different disciplines and actually bridge different groups? How relevant is that? I'm sure that's important at the executive level, but you might just be in a stage where you need to go and solve a key problem in a narrow domain. And so you're really looking for just someone who's fantastic at that. Has that evolved over time and, and can you speak to that?

Yeah, yeah.

So Neuralink is still a very small company. We have 300 people total across Austin and Fremont. And there are definitely a set of problems where I would say we need gpus. So people that are very specialized in Things, or, sorry, CPUs. But yeah, we're still looking for way more GPUs.

Yeah, I mean, you're hiring for UI UX here, but then also clinical and surgery and robotics and asic. That's fascinating. Firmware, electronics. I'm just looking through machining. It's really like if you're good at anything, it seems like as long as you're great at it, you can go and work there. I want to dig into ego a little bit more because I find that very interesting. How does, how does ego manifest in an employee? Like, like, and is that something that can be controlled or is it, is it. Do you think it's some. It's somehow innate, or can it be kind of coached out of someone? When I think of ego, I often think about someone who's maybe overconfident, but then they might go through an experience that humbles them, and then they come out on the other side, much lower ego. And so maybe you're not in the position to be the one to take that risk. But how do you think about the shape of ego as just a human trait? I mean, you're kind of studying the brain, so it's kind of an interesting question from a philosophical perspective as well.

I might also consider launching the Ego app, in which you can dial it on the neuralink app store. Just dial it up and down.

Hey, I'm going in for a job interview at neuralink. Turn this down all the way. Yeah.

Or if somebody's joining TVPN and we think they're super talented, but the ego's too high, I could say you're welcome to join, but we just gotta dial it back. You gotta install the app.

Yeah.

People learn. I've seen this time and time again, especially people that are earlier in their career have a lot of opportunities to kind of shape how they work within an organization. And that really, it's not about pushing for your ideas, but it's pushing for what's best for the company. And I've seen that change. And I think once you have, it really just fosters a great environment where people debate the merits of ideas rather than kind of putting their ego in front so that it becomes sometimes not a technical discussion, but an emotional discussion? But, yeah, that's certainly coachable.

I want to talk about the patience. It was interesting to see how fast you moved on from spinal injury to als. Is there a third indication that you're interested in solving in the near term? Is this more of a question of just, let's scale up? Because there's a lot of folks that really could benefit just in spinal injury and als. And what else are you excited about?

Yeah, even in there, it's like, are you feeling, like, generalized breakthroughs that make each individual product, you know, advance to some degree?

I guess. Also, like, are there differences. Yeah. Are there differences in solving for ALS versus solving for traumatic spinal injury?

Yeah, there certainly is. For als, it is a neurodegenerative condition. So their conditions just gets worse as the time progresses. So that makes it very difficult. One of our participants is in what's called a late stage als, which means that he's effectively locked in. So unable to move, unable to Speak even and is connected to a mechanical ventilators to basically keep him alive in a similar ways that basically Stephen Hawking was able to live the last 50 plus years of his lives for them. They also have more fatigue and they have different needs, as you can imagine, from someone like Nolan, who can be still very vibrant, who still can speak, who can, who can still kind of engage with the world in a different ways and their application, their needs will change as a result of it. But really what we also talk about is that we're building a generalized input output device and technology for the brain. So for someone who is quadriplegic, which means they're sort of paralyzed from neck down, whether it's due to spinal cord injury, whether it's due to als, whether it's due to brainstem stroke, whether it's due to some other things that have caused you to be in that state. We're hoping that it could be generalizable enough that with the same hardware they may have different firmware and different applications that they will find more useful for that particular situation. Similar to how when 10 different people are given a computer, they will use that 10 different unique ways. And we're seeing that. And that's something that's been kind of wonderful to see the wide range of diverse use cases for different participants.

Well, this has been fantastic. We'll let you get back to the very important work that you're doing. Where can people go to learn more about what you're hiring for?

Neuralink.com careers and I would definitely encourage people to check out this latest update that we've had. It's been an incredible progress in the past.

It's a lot of companies will put up a careers page and then people go there, work for an average about a year and a half or something like that. This actually feels like a career because if you're going to have an impact like expect to stay, you know, at least stay for a few decades.

It's not a jobs page, it's a career page. Because you're going to be here for 40 years, substantially. Yeah.

Well, we're excited to follow along.

Thank you so much for joining.

Thanks for the update.

We'll talk to you soon.

Hey, thanks for having me.

Cheers.

I'm. This is incredible. Inspiring. I was tearing up thinking about giving someone the gift of Call of Duty as well. But you know, there's an interesting story about, imagine hearing that life changing unironically. Stephen Hawking, the voice models to generate voice actually improved during his lifetime. But he had created a brand around his particular voice generation model and so he elected not to update to a new, more natural sounding voice.

Yeah, powerful branding.

Powerful branding, right.

It's like one of the most unique voices in human history. You could pick it out immediately, immediately.

So I love that anecdote. But then also for people that are now just going to get the ability to speak through something like Neuralink, they're going to have the best voice models possible that are indistinguishable from human voices. So yeah, I was thinking about it.

You can imagine 10 years from now, somebody on X, can anybody get me a Neuralink API key? But think about it too. It really feels like a market that could very well end up as a true monopoly. You can see DJ eventually having to show up to in Congress as one does if you're successful enough. But think about it, if you're a patient for a specific issue or you are just a regular consumer that wants some type of app in the Neuralink ecosystem, you're not going to be like, oh yeah, I'd like brain surgery multiple times. You're not going to want to work with a bunch of different BCI companies. You're going to want to work with one and then be able to imagine.

Being able to just play Call of Duty on your Neuralink and then log into the Neuralink app and get some customer relationship magic directly piped into your brain. ADEO is the AI native CRM that builds scales and grows your company to the next level. You could be The Neuralink enabled SDR given the best SDRs a run for their money.

That's right.

Well, our next guest is here. Welcome to the stream. Sorry for keeping you waiting. We really appreciate you joining. Thanks.

What's going on?

Hey guys, how are you?

We're great. Thanks so much for joining. Would you mind setting the table for us and kicking us off with the latest and greatest what's going on in your world?

Sure. So, hey everyone, my name is Tej. I am the CEO of Axiom Space. Today's actually day 60 of my job as CEO. Just jump back a few years. I invested in Axiom in their Series A. I was working at Google at the time. I'm a multi time founder myself and actually swore I would never go back to startups.

You're addicted. He's an addict. He can't stop.

Exactly. There's something wrong with us in the best possible way. But you know, once a founder, always a founder. And I think of myself as a founder mode CEO at the company. The company is founded by Dr. Cam Gafferian, space legend. He has multiple unicorns in the space sector. I invested because Axiom Space won the exclusive contract to attach its modules, its commercial infrastructure, its station to the International Space Station, which is coming down. It was designed from day one to have a certain shelf life. And the way I saw it is this small startup had the ultimate beachhead. Literally an exclusive contract for the most expensive product ever built by humanity. $150 billion spent to put that thing up, that giant thing, and then 5 billion a year by 15 countries with all this incred science that's just ready to be commercialized. And I was like, all right, this is, this is where I'm going to go all in. Also, I, I'm from the, I'll say the dot com bust era. I got to taste the boom a little bit, but I really got to viscerally feel and swallow the bust. And I see, I see a repetition in time. I see like 1995 all over again. And imagine if in 95 you knew Cloud computing was coming, you knew mobile was coming, you knew AI was coming, how you would invest and how you double down. And that's really what I'm doing with my money and my time.

That's interesting. I really like that analogy. Let's stretch it as far as we can. You can kind of get like DARPAnet as the ISS, what are going to be the breakout applications? We've talked to a lot of different founders, communications, isr, put a camera in space, put a WI fi router in space. Basically those are the obvious ones. What else is interesting? What do you think the breakout applications in space broadly will be? From tourism to asteroid mining, you name it, you're. You're the expert here.

So yeah, so let me just answer that upfront then I'm going to bring it back 30 years to 95 and just, and bring it back. But first, quickly, before I do that. I was smiling when I joined for two reasons. One is I had two interviews today. I had CNBC and I had TVPN and my comms team puts a briefing together and has dress code. And CNBC was wear your Axiom T shirt.

Okay.

Your podcast was wear a button down in a collar.

It's hilarious. Thanks for telling me.

Who's the legacy media now?

Yeah, we are the legacy media.

Reminding me also, like two things. One is in my startup days, this was like 2007 to 2017, we called it the uniform. Like when you like the most you'd ever dress up is a collared. Shirt, a blazer. I didn't even own a suit, so I couldn't say a suit jacket and jeans.

Right.

And you knew, fine. If you had to. If you were. If you're asking for money or you were trying to recruit someone or closing a deal or hanging out with someone in T shirt and flip flops, you're okay. So Quasi put on my uniform today.

So it looks fantastic. So thank you. It is not a requirement by any means. I know, but I also.

Great sign of respect.

It is a great sign of respect.

Yeah.

No, and the other thing, the reason I was smiling is you're talking about Stephen Hawking's voice.

Yeah.

And like, as you were talking and I knew the neuralink I was on before, but I wasn't listening. I was in the. In the waiting room. But as soon as you said it, like, we can all hear it, we know it. Right. In terms of branding, and you were saying how like people will be downloading voices and you could use that as a thing. It kind of reminds me of how people still have like the terminal font on their computers. Oh, yeah, like the green matrix font. Because it makes it look like it's like pretty cool. So, like, that might be another application. But sorry, getting. Getting back to your question, I'll answer directly what I think the big breakout markets, I think each of these will be their own trillion dollar market in the next couple of years. First is Orbital Data Centers. So data in space. I'll tell you personally for Axiom, you know, our modules, which are life support vehicles, are cloud first. They have to be. You can't support life without native cloud computing. I'm not talking for streaming or gaming or communications, literally for all the systems that it takes to keep humans alive. So if you think of that infrastructure, and like I said, I will jump back 30 years to 1995, but that infrastructure can be fractionalized and it can be shared and costs can go down to zero and below zero, where you're giving startups credits to use that infrastructure so they can build their apps. So I do think Orbital Data Centers, and I think it's as simple as data centers 400 kilometers up versus somewhere on the ground. And there's other challenges, but interestingly, the same limitations. Power. Right. What we have down here, that's the first one, Second, I think is pharmaceuticals, drugs that are tested in microgravity that will change humanity forever. That have just been science experiments to date. We have seen the first drugs that were tested on the Axiom 3 and Axiom 4 missions that have gone to human testing, clinical testing, FDA approved testing on the earth. So you're seeing decades of research now becoming a reality, becoming commercialized. And sorry, on the data centers, we've been running workloads with Amazon since our first mission, AX1 in 2022. We sent up an AWS computer and we've been running workloads from the ground, basically making money off bits versus atoms. And we'll talk about the business model. The space business model is all about atoms. It's about up mass, it's about kilograms. It needs to change. So we're proving that. And the third is advanced materials, whether that is manufacturing of those materials up there, or if we're talking about semiconductors, maybe even doing some testing in a pure environment. And when I say pure, I just mean no gravity affecting it, and maybe doing the development down here. But I think those three will be breakout hits. And I think I'll be as bold as say, this decade.

Yeah, people were talking about Zblan in space. Ultra pure crystals grown for super high throughput data transfer. So yeah, lots of interesting stuff there. I do have a follow up on the data center in space thing. We've heard from some folks who are just really in the weeds on data center scaling for those large AI training runs that there's still just messiness where sometimes you got to unplug it, plug it back in, sometimes you got to reseat a chip and you know, just dust it off or something. Like it's just a, it's just a messy thing. And so putting it in a truly stranded environment where there's no humans, there might be new questions. So I'm wondering, is the narrative like you solve that with like a humanoid robot or maybe a human on a space station in space, or maybe you go to Nvidia and you say, hey, you need to make a ruggedized version of the H200 that will just never fail and is more. So are there any other developments that you think need to happen? Aside from obviously like launch costs need to continue to go down, like we need to continue to send up mass to orbit, whatnot. But on the actual data center side, is there anything that you think is, you know, another key milestone that will unlock that opportunity?

Yeah, so it's all the above and a little more. But then I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll touch the launch cost piece and like I said, I'll go back 30 years. And by going back 30 years, we're going to pull the space industry forward 30 years. That's how big an opportunity this is. So on the data centers, yeah, it's messy. So the first part is it requires humans. And Axiom's entire business and product line is based on more humans going to space. We've sent 16 in the last three years. I'm extremely proud of our team. I'm extremely proud of myself in that story of me joining Axiom. I invested, then I started advising the founders. And then I leaned in and I said, there's a big opportunity here for the demand side, locking into market demand. And I spent the last three years of my life, last four years of my life, traveling the world, meeting with world leaders, prime minister, president, ministries of defense, economics, education. And the demand is very real. Right. So if a startup of a few years old, a guy who had never done anything in space, although I've been dreaming about it since I was three, is able to architect these massive deals. And just, just to be clear, I will always refer to us as a startup because we were 100% a startup in every sense of the word. Our deals are anywhere from like 50 to 150 million. Right. We're going to do north of 400 million this year.

Yeah.

I mean, congratulations.

It's a big dollar. Right? Thank you. You know, and it's funny, at Google, I had a couple of business lines, I had a couple contracts over a billion dollars of ARR. I had a business unit that brought in half a billion dollars in a year. And what, you know what happens at Google if you don't bring in a billion?

Shut you down.

Life or death. Yeah.

You know, for any single deal that I've done was larger than the enterprise value of any of my startups. Right. So each of these are massive startups. So we're 100% based. Our product lines are all about what we think is going to be this inflection point for the number of astronauts going up. And I'll give you some numbers on that as well. But this is. We're building product lines for where astronauts live. The Axiom station, first connected to iss, how they explore. Axiom is a sole provider of spacesuits. The next human step on the moon will be wearing an Axiom spacesuit. Like, it's kind of insane that that's. I can't even say that. So, and then we're building the labs like this, the data centers. Pharmaceuticals, advanced materials. This is in theory, right? We've done it, like on the AX4 mission. Right now we have done a deal with Aura and the Oura Ring Will. Yeah, it's awesome. I just got this aura 60 days ago and I love it. But it's going to be a wearable. Checking the health metrics of an astronaut. And then this is the craziest part, feeding that to our cloud computer up in space. So remember I told you we sent up an Amazon aws computer on AX1, we've sent an Alexa up, we've done some edge computing. So I'll touch on your point about ruggedizing the materials. But for us, it all starts with humans. So, yeah, whether that's a human taking out a hard drive or a rack that got messed up with radiation, which happens all the time, it's going to require humans. I think the next step is robots, humanoids, ruggedized material. For both cases, the one piece I think you might be missing is just disposable. Right. You know, there's, there's something to be said about aging technology that if it's safely retired and burnt up and doesn't cause environmental problems, it's actually cheaper and more effective just to send up the next generation technology.

If 200 years ago you told somebody, I'm going to order something from across the world, thousands of miles away, it's going to arrive here, I'm going to use it for a few days and then I'm going to throw it away like some disposable, like a uniform or like a shirt for an event or whatever. It's like we'll get to that point with space where we can send things up that don't need to last for months or years or decades.

And it is Axiom's Orbital Data center network. We call it a heterogeneous network. So think of like satellite constellation. They're all exactly the same. You send them up, they have the same functionality. Each version of it gets stronger, more powerful. Each of our nodes is different, right? Our first two nodes are going up next quarter, and they're normal satellite orbital data centers with optical comms and compute. Our module is a data center with the specialty of maintaining human life. Our lab will be a data center with the specialty of doing robotic testing or human testing on experiments. And our manufacturing platform will be a data center with the capabilities of doing 3D printing. What ties them all together is the data. So if one of them were to go down, you don't lose the data. That's the whole point of a network and zones and nodes. But if your old data center, like, yeah, you could replace and upgrade it, but at that point, the cost versus the actual value you get for sending a new one up again, if you had a safe way to dispose it, it actually makes more sense for it to be disposable.

What story do you think we should be telling ourselves or what story should be written in the history books about the iss? I remember I saw this movie, which I know Jordy hasn't seen because he hasn't seen any movies. Valerian and the City of Thousands planets. And it has this really cool opening montage. It's by the director who did the Fifth Element. And basically it starts with the ISS and they just keep adding modules to it until it gets so big that they push it off into deep space. And then aliens come and add on modules and it turns into this like massive cluster and it's like crazy sci fi movie. But I thought that idea of just like layering on the iss, this happens in Seven Eves as well, the Neal Stephenson book. And I was. And, and when, when I tell the story to myself, I was super inspired as a kid by the idea of the iss. It was amazing that it got built, but it feels like we're just kind of like, okay, jobs finished. And we're not really going bigger and bigger in terms of like human space station. So how should we think about the ISS when we look back on it? Is it just like, like the moon landing? It was like a science project that we did. It was cool, inspiring, but it didn't really grow into anything. Are private companies going to take up the mantle? Where does all this go?

Yeah, so, you know, I think the legacy of the ISS and the value is created for humanity on the scientific, the engineering, the diplomatic level is all incredible. Right? And we should always remember that there's a lot of shit that's going on down here. That up there it's still peace, right? And it's when they look down and when they work together, they're one team. And we're one team down here, right? Regardless of what we hear. And it's inspiring. Like the AX4 mission right now. Four countries, US, India, Poland and Hungary. India, Poland and Hungary. They're saying their first ever citizen to the iss. I saw them cross the hatch. I'm gonna get emotionally even talking about it, seeing these guys smile and then address their nations in their own language. First time those words are spoken up in space like magic. 3 billion girls and boys saw that yesterday when my parents took me to Kennedy Space Center, I was three years old. My dad was an electric engineer. I was like, what the hell is going on in that Big building. And he's like, they build spaceships there. And I, it was a defining moment in my life. Like it was. I was a three year old cranky kid and in that moment, my mind, my heart, my soul just erupted. And like it was like the universe telling me that this is alignment. And that set me on a path for entrepreneurship, engineering exploration. Three billion kids just got that, you know, like 2 billion people. It's powerful. But yeah, it's a big deal. So we have to remember that. Sorry, go ahead.

No, go finish. And then, and then I'll ask the question.

Yeah, so the, that inspiration, that hope, that proving that we are one species, that's ultimately what we will remember the station for. What I want to remember was to remember. And when I say I, this is probably more in the startup books or blogs or whatever it'll be in the future is the ISS is what allowed space to be free. And what I mean by this, I mean access to everyone. So axiom space started eight years ago. We've sent four missions, 16 astronauts, 12 nations, nations that had never been to space before. The first ever Saudi female to go. We were the first ever to send an all European mission, the first Turkish astronaut after that horrible earthquake they had, as I mentioned, India, Poland, Hungary. So free in the sense that we freed it, everyone can go. But more importantly, we brought the cost to free or below free. And what I mean by this is as long as we keep the narrative of cost per kg is going down, we're basing an entire economy on cost. Our friends who are watching this, none of us think like that. We base it on value, right? We think of cost of acquisition, lifetime value of a customer. How are you increasing enterprise value? So again, going Back to the 90s and early 2000s, my first startup was built on AWS Activate. We were one of the first customers. And I probably, if it was a year older, a year or two older, would have spent 3 million bucks on a server closet, you know, to get it all set up. But now, if you're a startup looking to build your app, Amazon, Google, Microsoft will pay you 100,000 bucks in credits to build your app on their platform in the hopes that you're the next Spotify or Uber or Netflix. And then they grow as you grow. Cloud is not free. They were spending billions and billions of dollars on infrastructure orders of magnitude higher than the space station just to get Google Search going, just to get the Amazon store going, just to get the app store going. And then they realize you fractionalize it. And you make this accessible for everyone. So I think the big thing in this transition from the ISS to commercial is we just don't reduce the bar, we remove the bar completely and enable multiple entrepreneurs to knock it out of the park.

Super exciting. Last question. Do you, do you see yourselves as like a space prime? Right? Like it feels like you're very multi product. The comp for me down on on earth would be the traditional kind of defense primes that develop kind of a broad capability set and then you know, pursue it from. Is that, is that the right framing?

It's not a bad framing, you know, prime or integrator. Some have called us Global Space Agency. Like I'm a tech cloud venture guy. I like to think of it as a platform. Platform's too ambiguous in my opinion. You could think of us as but.

Platform in the Bill Gates definition where the value that's created on top of your company will be greater than the value that you capture. Right?

That's exactly right. The second word I was just about to say is, and this is the first time I'm saying in a public setting, think of it as an operating system, what Microsoft did. So if this is the space operating system for countries, corporations, civilization, this is why I think now is exactly the time to invest. Because if you believe in space, it's not a question of why should we go, we shouldn't go, it's okay, when are we going? So this is what all investing is. You're betting on timing. I feel so strong that 2030 is that Microsoft Windows moment or the iPhone moment or the chatgpt moment for space. And if you know it's five years from now, this is where you go all in.

Wait, one last question. We asked a lot of space people this. What's your p. Moon. The AI folks have the probability of doom. We have the probability that you will, you personally will visit the moon before 2050. Over under 50% 10%, 90% 2050 probability that you have set foot on the moon over over 50%.

If you were to say the probability that I would be in go to space, I'd say 100%.

Yeah.

Probability that we all will be able to go to low earth orbit. Particularly when like something like starship comes online. Absolutely. I'll give you a quick stat. If you look at since Axiom has been around eight years, the first four years before our AX1 mission we sent about we collectively humanity sent about 12 astronauts per year. That number has quadrupled in the last four years. And remember the dragon only takes four people up.

Yeah.

And 16 of those are because of Axiom. What happens when you're sending 70 to 100 people up? Where are they going to go? We've already proven that demand far outstrips supply at the, at the government level, at the corporate level. And we're building that infrastructure to catch up. This is, this is that tipping point. So the moon, 20, 50, what are we talking about? 25 years from now? I will be 73, 72. Yeah, I think it's, it's over 50.

Amazing. I love it.

Fantastic.

Well, thank you so much for.

We can't wait to. We'll have to do a show someday in person.

Yeah, I mean, I'd love to have you back and just do a whole deep dive on the lunar economy and how you see that playing out and just even, even beyond and space exploration. I'm sure we could go a bunch of different ways that are less question for you guys.

Are you wearing full suits or are you guys wearing full suits?

Full suits.

I did the, I did the.

Oh, you did the casual pants.

There you go. It works. It works.

And, and white suits because the market is at all time highs and we're celebrating.

That's right.

That's why they're watching.

Mine's a blue suit because the only suit I own.

Okay.

Simple man. Simple man.

Well, great talking.

Awesome. Well, thanks for coming on. Congrats on all the, the progress. Talk soon.

Thank you. Bye.

Yeah, talking to these space folks and I mean everyone we talked to is amazing, but it's awesome. I was looking up at the moon with my son, the four year old recently, and he was like, we, we gotta go there. And I was like, yeah, I want to go there. I think we'll be able to do it one day. He's like, we'll need a rocket. I was like, well, I know some people that are working on that. It's amazing being able to be like, yeah, like actually like it's happening. And I know some of the people that are working on it. It's gonna be a lot of work, but we're gonna get there anyway. Let's tell you about numeral sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Go to numeralhq.com. sign up today.

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Also, Ryan Log has a extremely viral post. He says beer is Narcan for when you overdose on Microsoft Teams. And I like the comment liked followed. Everyone.

Bro, you need to tell me you're crazy high like ratio insanely high.

2% riding it all the way to a million.

2% at close to a million. Is impressive. Is impressive.

It's a banger.

I don't know how much time we have. We have four minutes until.

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Well, we have just a couple more minutes until our next guest. So let's talk about a new unicorn alert from arfa. Rock Etched, the world's first transformer asic. I've been pushing for this for a long time. I know the etched guys, I did a long interview with them.

Surely you invested, surely you invested John Mog. Surely, surely you just threw in a. Yeah, a check. I should have a small check. You know when you met them.

Seed round unannounced round 85 million at 1.5 billion. Following two stealth rounds at 500 million and 700.

They're now raising at a 2.5. They just closed another round 2.5.

We got to get the founders on one of the most interesting kind of AI, like future thought, I don't know, like thought leaders or something. Just like an interest. Like can the, the, the founders can just noodle on how everything in artificial intelligence plays out. They've done a bunch of interesting demos running Minecraft fully generatively, so there's no underlying game engine. It's just taking the inputs and generating the visual outputs. Absolutely insane. Team Teal fellows and they've been on a tear and there's a bunch of insane stories where the founders at some dinner in Taiwan chatting up like a TSMC employee to get more line time. Like the hacks that this company has gone through, through to make this a reality has been fantastic. And he's the one that told me this idea of like the like LLMs being human simulators. And so the expectation should be you get like the median human and maybe not someone that wants to kill everyone. And so he has a very low P doom but he, but he walks through that very, very, very. In a very interesting way. Anyway, how'd you sleep last night? Are you a Big eight Sleep fan. After our photo shoot and video shoot yesterday, we're filming advertisements now. We're not just telling you about Eight Sleep. We're putting it online, shooting video ads for Eight Sleep.

I cannot wait to air this. I got a 76, which is basically the new.

I got a 79. I had a rough night, but I still beat you. Play that sound effect, Jordy. Thank you.

There you go.

John's on a.

Basically my new range is. I just am squarely sitting in the 70s.

It's brutal. Anyway, you got to get on Eight Sleep. Go to Eight Sleep.com TVPN. They got a five year warranty, 30 night risk free trial, free returns, free shipping. And in other sponsorship news, Shane Copeland announces that Polymarket has made times 100 most influential companies. Turns out that people want the truth.

Basically.

Fantastic.

Built effectively a crystal ball. Shane built a crystal ball.

Where is our crystal ball? We had a crystal ball in. We had an actual crystal ball.

Shane built a crystal ball. I say it's.

Hey, we got the crystal ball.

Tomorrow's headlines today, do not drop that. Ben Jensen dropped. No, Masa dropped.

Dropped it. It was very ominous. But we have the crystal ball here. We highly recommend every technologist get a crystal.

If you don't have a crystal ball, you can go to polymarket.com.

Crystal Ball is underrated as a. As a desk object. You gotta have a crystal ball.

You gotta have at least, at least.

One right there so you can see it.

Yeah, there you go. But congratulations to Shane and the whole Polymarket team. They're on an absolute tear.

They are on a tear, as is our next guest. Welcome to the stream. Dimash, how are you doing?

Pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me on.

Thanks for hopping on.

Boom. Welcome.

Would you mind kicking us off with a little introduction on yourself and your firm? Theory of.

Absolutely, yeah. My name's Tomas Dingu. I'm founder and general partner of a firm called Theory. We build really concentrated portfolios in early stage AI and blockchain companies. We're about 10 people strong and we've worked with nine unicorns in the past. And just we're about two and a half years old so far.

So you're at Redpoint for 14 years. Talk to me about the decision to launch your own fund. What strategy you wanted. How did fundraising go? I just want to hear the whole story of.

Yeah, absolutely. So we raised Fund 1 in late 22, which is when the Fed had raised rates 500 bips.

Must have been not, not a great.

Time to raise, but we were able to raise fund one. We raised about 235. We were over subscribed. Yeah. And. And then we raised fund to about 400. A little more than 450 million two years later.

Congratulations.

Oh, nice. Thanks. And yeah, so we're off to the races. We have a head of AI who was head of AI, three unicorns. And our CEO built the healthcare practice at Palantir. And as I said before, we invest in a small number of companies and work really hard to help them grow by building out their sales teams.

You're the head of AI?

Yeah. The way you're talking about the firm, it feels like it's like you're building it like a, a company. What talk about that.

Yeah. Well, I think there's a pretty big change in, I mean, if you look at like hedge funds and private equity, a lot of them have restructured, basically operating companies. And I think the same thing will happen with venture capital. We think about the products that we sell as financial products. Right. When I started in the business in 2008, Series A was a financial product where we invested four for 25% of a company. And that product doesn't get any buyers anymore because, you know, the US venture capital asset class has grown from about 8 to 250 billion during that time. And so there's a lot more capital capital. And so we have to differentiate our capital somehow. And the way that we differentiate is by depth. So we operate every Monday. We get together, we talk about different market maps and what, what are research projects. And I'll give you an example. We had this amazing intern last summer. He walked in one day and he said, I think the future of AI is not with GPUs, it's with ASICS or specialized circuits that are focused on AI. And if you believe that, then here are all the investable opportunities. And so we debated that. So we go through different market maps every Monday. And then we have this team that has, we have different departments, right. So there's a team that builds internal software, team that builds the sales teams for portfolio companies. There are people who manage a buyer network 200 people strong. And the idea is, well, if we can also have an investing team and we're looking at elephants in the dark and each one of us has a flashlight, then maybe with that composite view we'll have a more refined perspective on an early stage software company and ultimately make better investment decisions.

How often do you see someone else's market map and kind of laugh at.

No, we do our own work, but but we use, I mean it's always great to see other market maps out there and have different perspectives.

Right.

Because we're all trying to figure it out at the same time.

Yeah. On the AI ASIC question, how do you think about that as a disruptive innovation versus a sustaining innovation? Nvidia is obviously super set up to work with TSMC at scale. At the same time I've talked to some of the founders we just mentioned, etched building, transformer, asics. Incredible teams. I wouldn't bet against them and they've been on an absolute run and so I'm in this weird scenario of like kind of being bullish on both. But you know there has to be some way this plays out. Have you dug into it at all?

We've dug into it some. I mean you've seen, I mean Google's been investing in TPUs for a really long time. You have the Amazon, Inferentia, Microsoft. Yeah. Have their own I think. And then Nvidia announced this week, or at least there was a Wall Street Journal article talking about how Nvidia is pushing into managed cloud DGX Lepton.

Right.

Yeah, exactly right. And so they, they need a longer term business model. So I think there will be a pretty significant place for asics. You think about the different architectures of model. I mean AMDs typically are optimized for sort of or have been in the past for medium sized models where like the H1 hundreds are much better running the 100 billion or multi hundred billion parameter models because of difference in CPU architecture versus memory architecture. So I think there's definitely a really big place and yeah.

And is an interesting spot. I mean it's the biggest company in the world. 3.6, 3.8 trillion. 3.8, 3.8 trillion.

They have to, we were talking about it earlier. They have to do more than a 2x again to surpass the Dutch East India company. If you account for, if you account for.

But they could do it. Yeah.

So anyways Jensen still has got some work.

Yeah. But at the same time they feel like the company that's under potentially the most attack from, from directly from startups and other hyperscalers building their own chips. Whereas like we're not, we're not hearing about Amazon taking on the iPhone and trying to build a phone to displace the iPhone. But we are hearing about Amazon building Trainium and Inferentia to take away market share from Nvidia. So it's interesting. It's like this company's never been stronger but Also that success breeds competition.

Well, no doubt about it. I mean, if you look at, we went back and looked at the Nvidia PE multiple over the history of the company and you can see there are basically three spikes. There's the first spike, which was associated with gaming. The second spike that's associated with blockchain, and now the third spike that's associated with AI. And you typically have these really, really significant growth from say like a 25x PE multiple up to maybe like 70, 80, sometimes 100, and then it falls back down. Right. And Bill Gurley, I think, you know, I wasn't investing during the time of hardware or hard disks and he basically said the best time to sell a hard disk company was when it was ramping up because you knew that they would build excess supply. And as a result of the excess supply, you'd have sort of an inevitable crash. That hasn't been the case. Right. I mean, you saw Nvidia this year trade down initially and now I think it's. Yeah, it's done really, really well since then. Maybe since February. And if Jensen can diversify to a couple of other business lines, particularly along the inference, there's. I mean, I don't know what the TAM is for inference, but it's probably measured in the billions of that, you know.

Yeah, yeah. Also the international stuff, he's been.

We're going to have to rename it Jensen's Paradox. Jevons is going to get.

It really is. Yeah.

Sorry, Jevin.

On, On. On the question of like kind of a value accrual where, you know, there's a big shift away from, you know, the value accrue will accrue to the application layer. I'd love to hear your take on that. I also heard an interesting formulation, this idea that in the next decade there will be one consumer AI company worth over a trillion dollars and 10B, two B AI companies worth over $100 billion. And so you can think about it as like, they're equal market sizes, but one is much more concentrated. And I wanted to know your reaction to that formulation of kind of like a bet on how the future or the market plays out. Does that feel directionally right to you? Do you think it'll be radically different? What's your take?

No, I think that's exactly right. There's definitely a power law that governs consumer companies. I mean, you look at the size of Facebook and Google, both of them consumer companies. The second place in both of those markets. We don't really talk about even Amazon.

Also power, law, outcome.

Exactly right. And so that's typically the way that those consumer markets work, where you think about the distribution of outcomes in B2B, it's much more say Gaussian. Right. There's like a bell shape. And so I definitely think that's the case. I don't, you know, we were, I had heard initially. Well, so consumer investing has been a challenge, I think over the last decade, aside from a handful of names. So we've been wondering about consumer investing. Try to understand what is the key use case. I'd heard one of the most interesting ideas was a social network for AI bots that you would watch them talk to each other. So the three of us would train a bot, we'd each put it into a message board and then watch them talk. And I thought like that be interesting over time, but I do think we'll see explosive growth in some applications.

Yeah, it's odd. Like bots are fantastic at chess and video games. People watch chess and they watch video games on Twitch, but people don't watch bots play Counter Strike or Call of Duty. And I wonder if that paradigm holds for some, you know, I don't know, humanist reason. I don't even know what you would call it, but just like preference towards people watch.

Do people watch live human players play against bots?

I don't rarely. You would, you would watch someone like play through Mario 64 as fast as they could and that is effectively a single player game against bots. But it would be very odd to play a game of Call of Duty against bots because you could just play ranked against other people and you know all that. But there's still a lot of bots like floating around and people cheating and stuff. So.

Yeah, so I don't, I mean, even in chess, right, with Deep Blue, nobody watches those, those chess algorithms play against each other.

Yeah, you could just watch stockfish on stockfish all day long and it would be like, I guess technically impressive, but it wouldn't have the, it wouldn't have the, I don't know, the emotion, the texture of like Magnus versus somebody else.

Speaking of competition, do you lean in and try to compete head on with platform funds based on what, what you can offer or do you try to find ways to not have to compete?

We try to find ways not to have to compete. I mean, the platform funds, they run a very different strategy. They're the big chip stack at the poker table. And so we can't play a big chip stack game. We do have the fund sizes to be able to write similar size checks at the seed and the Series A. And that's a deliberate strategic decision so that the companies that we back are not at a disadvantage in terms of balance sheet, but in terms of competing head on where they're strong, I think it'd be foolish for us to embark on that journey. So we have to find our own way of convincing founders we're the right firm for them to work with.

But that still feels like you're willing to say, okay, we're going to be competitive at seed, but we're not going to try to. But that's like one specific area and not holistic multi stage.

Well, we, we primarily invested the Series A average check size and fund one was, say, call it 1314 average check size, and fund two is closer to 22 to 25. And so we're able to write a pretty significant lead check. And as I said, I think capital now just because of how much of it there is. If you're a founder and you're competing in a category and you don't have a balance sheet that's at least commensurate with your competition, you're a pretty significant decision disadvantage. So we do want to mitigate that. But we can offer a different kind of experience, right? We can. If we're only working with say 10 companies and fund one, we can be a whole lot more active with those portfolio companies, particularly as they go from Series A to Series B, for sure.

Where are you investing in blockchain on chain? Broadly?

Yeah. Well, I mean, we've invested. We've had a lot of success in L1s in the past. We was the second largest investor in SUI, which is a $40 to $50 billion blockchain. We invested in a company called Allium, which provides data to many of the largest financial institutions in the US including stripe three of the top five Bitcoin ETFs and others. So I think the database layer is really attractive. You look at Ethereum worth seven snowflakes, Q1 of last year produced 400 million in free cash flow, which on a percentage basis made it the single largest producer of cash of any publicly traded software company. And then on a. On an aggregate basis, sixth largest producer of any publicly traded software company. Those databases can be extremely valuable. One of the key themes in the last 18 months has been stablecoins, 15th largest buyer of US treasuries. So it's absolutely an essential market for us to continue to pay attention to. And then the other thing that we're really Monitoring. We believe that in the next 10 years, every major software product will have a Web3 component. And that's because today the cost of compliance across a bunch of different geographies is really challenging. You look at Germany has very specific data locality laws. UAE has different laws. 26 states in the US have different laws. Whole lot better for a customer to custody their own data and selectively approve access. And then software vendors no longer in the business of having to comply with all of these laws because they can computationally guarantee that they adhere to the policies. So those are some of the big ideas.

I got some more AI questions. I want to talk about different moats for foundation models that are kind of playing out right now, the value of data. And maybe at Google they have YouTube. That feels like a permanent advantage for them in VO3. And yet we're seeing other models come out that are almost as good. I don't know if they just scraped all of YouTube, but they got the data from somewhere. Then you have other narratives around. We need new ideas. We need the best researchers possible. We'll pay a ton of money to get the best researchers to write the best, most elegant algorithms or the best code possible. Maybe it's all in the application application layer. So I'm interested in this relationship between the value of data going forward.

Yeah, great question. So I think initially there's a lot of value in having access to proprietary data like YouTube or maybe like cursor has with the initial. Or GitHub with the access copilot with initial access to GitHub. I think over time, the more valuable and rare data asset is the feedback loop. What do you actually do with that? With a prompt like, is the video the polar bear with the Coca Cola actually the right one? That feedback loop is incredibly important. And the more of them that you have, the better the models that you'll produce. I think that's also particularly true. I mean, with distillation, you look at what happened with Deep Seq, they were just pegging a bunch of different APIs and then copying the results and able to copy really quickly. Which was why it was really surprising to me actually, to see the Deep Research API come out of OpenAI this week. I thought after the Deep SEQ moment, there would never be a Deep Research API, aside from Perplexity, which had launched a IT basically before because of the risk of distillation for some pretty valuable and expensive models. So it's really, I think it's in those feedback loops. That's what I've learned in machine learning and so the larger the number of users you have and the greater the telemetry you have there, the better the advantage.

So yeah, my read on that is that it's amazing that VO3 has this cornered resource in YouTube data at Google. But, but I've been really, really struggling to actually use that product on a regular basis because I hit rate limits even though I'm paying $500 a month. It says come back tomorrow and you can do another three videos. And I'm not really iterating on it creatively. And then we were testing mid journey video and it renders much faster and there's a lot more collaboration and feedback there. And so I mean Google scale is like just so massive that I don't know if you should ever bet against it. But it is interesting that I wonder, you know, there's, there's folks in AI who are like scale pilled. There's other folks who are maybe feedback loop pilled. And I'm wondering if Google's just not feedback loop pilled enough because I don't, I don't care how On Fire the GPUs or the TPUs are like provision more. Google is my, is my take, but I don't know if I'm way off there. Like what's, what's your read on?

No, no, I think you're exactly right. I mean they launched Google, launched the Gemini command line interface which competes with the cloud code and I was trying to use it for two days and I could not. So I think they're ta. And in their public earnings, both Microsoft and Google have both said they're limited on the capex side. Basically they can't produce the data centers fast enough.

That's crazy.

But Google, I think Google is aware of this feedback loop phenomenon. You look at the way that they subsidize fine tuning for Gemini, the way that with the Gemini command line interface, the free tier is substantially more generous. They're trying to acquire as much usage as possible because they understand those dynamics, but the data centers aren't there yet. And then actually, you know what, did you guys follow? Microsoft gave up some of the core weave lease and then Google took it on for the OpenAI training workloads, which was really interesting. Did you see that news?

Yeah, I saw the satya clip about he wants to be a leaser. And then I did see they gave up the core weave lease. I didn't know that OpenAI picked it up so quickly.

Yeah, through Google. So I think Google went and through Google and So it seems like there are some at least training workloads going from OpenAI to Google. @ least that's what I read.

Interesting.

Yeah, but I mean, if OpenAI is starting to use Google servers, you can imagine there'll just be continuously increased demand.

How much do you. Oh, go for it. What are you following in reinforcement learning right now? How much of the RL story should be a foundation model story versus a new startup story?

I think it's a foundation model story. Reinforcement fine tuning is probably the technology or test time, compute, whatever you want to call it. It's a technology I think has a. Has a really interesting future. And the main reason is I can dial it up and down. Right. So today I can kind of control the classic models without reasoning. But in the future, you could imagine a CEO might have 10 or 15 or 100 times the reasoning budget that a junior employee might. And on per case basis, say, I really want you to think a lot about this problem. Maybe it's, it's a strategic research project, whereas if I'm just looking for a summarization, but I want to make sure it's correct, I'll give it a very, very small budget. I don't know in the product how we expose that to users in a way where they can do it intelligently maybe.

Well, it's already happening. I mean, it's already happening. It's just instead of money, it's time. So if I have one minute, I'll hit 4.0. If I have 10 minutes, I'll hit 03 Pro. And if I have 20 minutes, I'll hit deep research. And time is money. And so I'm making that economic calculation right now all under a $200 a month umbrella. But yeah, in the future this could clearly just be like, you put a price on it, right?

And you could say, I want that deep research query, but I need in five minutes, am I willing to spend $100 on that query?

Yeah, and that's. And that's kind of what Midjourney is doing with like the different tiers don't get you necessarily more total inferences. It's more about where you are in the queue and the speed of your response.

Exactly.

It's fascinating.

That's a good point.

Jordy. Sorry.

How do you think about the convergence of all software, the feeling that there's a convergence of all software companies into just the sort of chat interface. We've seen Wix make an $80 million acquisition of this bootstrap company. We saw Airtable launch like Text app product, which makes sense as a database company. Figma launched their product earlier this year and they all make sense in different contexts. But do you think, do you think some of this is driven by like Wix for example, just like FOMO and disruption, or do you just think that that is where software is going, which is basically we have certain data in some places and there's platforms and everybody's just going to make. Instead of buying software, you're just making it in different places.

Yeah, it's a great question. I mean all of the existing companies are looking to retain their users and expand. And I think the dynamic here is like historically you've had like last 10 years all been subscription and now you have AI usage, AI credits. I would guess just given our usage on some of these platforms that the AI credit usage is probably two to three times the size of the subscription revenue, fully deployed. And so you need as a software company in order to hit some of these growth rates and I'm sure you guys saw like the V0 chart, you need exposure to those kinds of use cases and those credit scores just to be able to compete. And then you want to retain those users. And you're right. There's the chat interface, there's like three or four interfaces that everybody's building. There's a chat interface, there's the app builder interface, and then there's like the workflow builder interface, the SDR equivalent. How do I enrich a lead? And you have the project management companies building this, the website, internal tools, they're all kind of trying to capture as much of that spend as possible. I think like strategically, if you're a young startup, then the question is, okay, well how do I differentiate myself against one of these. I can do it all platforms. Do I do what Salesforce did and take out an individual workflow and optimize end to end, or do I actually need to build broad and horizontal? And that I think, and that's why a lot of these companies have been pushing into verticals, whether it's like healthcare for prior auth authorization or whatever it is.

Yeah.

And so there's a big strategic question there of ultimately how do you compete? The other dynamic here, which I don't think has gotten enough press, is you have the model layer, you have the UI layer, and in between you have this sort of like context layer. And the better an enterprise has its context. These are the kinds of customers that I engage with. This is the way my data is structured. This is what happens in particular use case. The Better that's structured, the better the ultimate performance of an AI product. Historically that's been embedded in Salesforce and worked in all those kinds of companies. The question is, does the enterprise actually want to control it because it is so valuable?

Yeah. Do you think memory. It feels like memory is not a massive moat today. Maybe we're starting to see it with ChatGPT. Do you think it can become something that's durable? How do you think about moats broadly in the future? It makes sense in the context of healthcare applications or even in banking and things like that where there's hardcore regulations and we can talk about network effects. But I'm curious how you see moats evolving.

Well, memory in the consumer use case will be really significant. The more time I spend with ChatGPT or Gemini, the more likely I am to spend time. So I think there's a reinforcement effect there. I think within the enterprise I suspect it will be the same thing where especially across individual teams, maybe not across the entire enterprise, but it's pretty critical so it's essential. I just can't tell whether enterprises will be okay giving that memory to foundation models and say we're going to standardize, we'll standardize on ChatGPT and give them the memory. Or they want the ability to move across clouds and across models and I think that materially changes the way that software will be built depending on who ultimately controls that memory.

Yeah. It's interesting to think about the moats that exist due to the work required, like the switching costs. Right. When you think about something like payroll where nobody's like, oh, I'm super excited we're switching payroll. Right. It's like so much work. But then you can imagine a world in the future where you have agents that are just good at migrating payroll providers and if that workload becomes something that you can run in a 24 hour period and this sort of agentic workflows that do all the heavy lifting that would have taken a team of people like thousands of emails and all these weird edge cases. It's like where are the moats? Where are the moats?

Yeah, I have a follow up on the kind of startup metrics. We've seen a lot of charts of folks getting to 100 mil arrs really, really fast. There's been this like lurking overhang of like will there be massive churn? Is this all exploratory budget from Fortune 500 companies that are going to wind up just going with like the Microsoft option ultimately or something, or someone has some mandate to Test every AI tool in every corner of their company. So they spend a bunch of money and then it doesn't stick around. Do we need a new metric that combines kind of like short term churn with ARR to kind of give to help underwrite at the series A phase?

Well, we're looking for the net dollar retention equivalent, right? So net dollar retention in the past is just value of an account over year. And top quartile would say 125% after 22. I think that's the longer term metric, the hard part and the reason it's so hard in the early stage investing is use that 14 months or 24 months to look at longitudinal net dollar retention. And now these companies are growing so fast. Let's say a business goes from 0 to 100 in 12 months, you might have a quarter, maybe two to look at the net dollar retention. And you can't determine whether or not you can annualize it, but you have to value the company. And so that's really hard, right? That's a new muscle for early stage software companies. The other dynamic is sort of like this credit dynamic where you buy access to the AI credits. That's older, you get snowflake with the remaining performance obligation. Same idea today. And people are annualizing. It's not really ARR, but at scale you have a sense for the overall consumption patterns of your, your customers. And so you can, you can annualize it, but the first one is really hard. And so like rewind 10 years, a top decile company would go.015. So at the time when you were valuing a company at 4 or 500 million, you had 24 months of longitudinal data and you could look at those patterns today. If you're valuing an AI company, it might be a quarter into its history before it hits 3, 4,500 million in valuation. So you're basically taking the same risk at that round as you would be at the seed because the only additional information you have is whether there's great customer adoption, but you don't know how long it will last.

Can you unpack the credit dynamic a little bit more? I remember hearing stories from the dot com boom how Internet service providers were investing or offering loans to Internet companies and that was kind of distorting the market a little bit or it was kind of mispriced potentially. And then we've seen hyperscalers. They make balance sheet investments, they offer credits. Like what is the current state of affairs in the relationship between the big players and the startup ecosystem that may be distorting or maybe something we need to keep an eye on in terms of valuations. And can you, can you explain in like more granular terms that you.

Yeah, yeah, no, great question. Okay. So in the dot com era you had this dynamic where you had these circular ecosystems. So one company would raise venture capital dollars and then they would pay to advertise on another company and then that company would raise venture capital dollars and pay to advertise on another company. And so all of those companies as a whole would rise and fall with that little economy. Right. You could take, you can make a similar argument which is Amazon invest in an AI company and says we'll give you a billion dollars, but we'll give you 600 million of that in credits. And so we knows that you're going to take 350, 400 million of that and immediately turn it around, spend it on aws. So is that really an investment? Is that a closed economy? Can you value either the startup or Amazon web services based on that revenue? I think there's a big difference here, which is just like within the dot com era, that ecosystem was really small and truly closed. Right. It was just a bunch of companies sending eyeballs back and forth and companies candidly were valued on overall traffic. Here Morgan Stanley ran a survey, the enterprises half of AI spend is from existing software spend and then half of it is brand new. So there's a lot of new GDP coming into the ecosystem which tells you it's more resilient.

Makes total sense.

I'm going to say something and then I want you to react to it. So in the dot com era we had a bunch of companies valued at billions of dollars with huge losses and that became a problem over time. Now we have a bunch of AI apps that have a lot of revenue in a lot of different cases. But then we have foundation models that are valued in billions of dollars, many billions of dollars with huge, huge losses. And I've been trying to unpack how many of these companies the capital markets can support and for how long because we have some foundation models that generate a lot of revenue. And then there's some elephants that aren't right now and they all have plans or concepts of plans for how to generate a lot of revenue, but they're not doing it yet. Not to call anyone out, but between ssi, who's not focused on launching a product, commercial products immediately, to grok, which doesn't have consumer dominance or seemingly enterprise dominance right now, there's a variety of players that are going to need to put up some tremendous growth pretty quickly. They've got big balance sheets now, but they won't stay that way for that long unless they can create some real traction.

Yeah, great. I think my parallel is the networking companies of the early 2000s. You had quest and Nortel who grew really, really fast. Super capex intensive businesses building out, connecting basically every computer to every other computer. It's kind of a necessary thing. And ultimately if you got out at the right time, you made an unbelievable multiple. But if you got out at the wrong time, you could have lost your shirt pretty significantly. And that was. There's a great parallel here which is these businesses, the foundation models, they require huge capex. I mean the OpenAI data center Stargate at full deployment will consume as much electricity as all of England, as all of Ireland.

Right. Just to give people a sense of scale. Sounds exciting.

And so, you know, like there's, there's a lot going into them. The business models are unclear. A lot of them have been unwilling to show advertisements because more ads you show, the greater the consumer deflection or bounce rates. And then some of like anthropic is more B2B chat chatgpt, OpenAI is more B2C but yeah, and then the capital markets, we'll see how long they're able to sustain. But yeah.

Well, it's been amazing noodling on all this with you. This has been really, really fun. We'd love to have you back and just chop it up about a million different topics. I had a blast. It was great meeting you. So thanks so much for hopping on.

Thanks for having me on guys. Pleasure to meet you both.

Yeah, I hope we can do it again. Great chatting, talk to you soon. Cheers, bye. Really quickly, let me tell you about AdQuick.com out of home advertising made it easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of out of home advertising. Ad Quick combines technology, out of home expertise and data to enable efficient seamless ad buying across the globe. And our first out of home campaign is live in New York City.

Pictures trickle in. I got the first picture last night from my buddy Jamie Seltzer. Apparently our billboards are on his block.

Amazing.

And he was walking his dog.

Targeted.

It was very targeted. We targeted you, Jamie. And he was, he was just like walking his dog. He's like, wait, what is this? I think he was like thinking that he was in a dream maybe. Yeah.

Why are they following me around?

But if you're around Soho you will see our billboard. So send us a Picture in the next 24 hours. Send you a hat.

Yeah. Fantastic. We're almost ready for our next guest, but let's go to this post from Lulu. She says the center of gravity for tech comms right now is recruiting. The war for talent is more heated than ever. The top 5% of people are making 95% of the impact. If you're a startup, do not waste energy on being liked by the general public. Focus on reaching the few dozen people you need to hire. Bunch of interesting takeaways.

Reminds me of dj. I was doing this announcement.

Yep.

To recruit.

You can't buy a neuralink right now.

Yeah.

They don't need you on a wait list. They need you to go and work there if you're absolutely the top of your field. And so I think a lot of that is kind of a new paradigm. I wonder where this goes. You can also see it with. I mean, the question is, is Cluly doing the right thing on tech comms to recruit? They're very, very good at recruiting influencers and creators. And they have clearly the 50 interns that they hired, I don't know how many they actually wound up. All those people have social media followings and be able to create a lot of content. I guess the question is, is that going to translate? Is their current communication strategy going to translate into great product managers and engineers and everything that they need to do to build out the actual product? But you know, product works.

We review Luly's launching their product at 3pm Pacific today.

Today. So we might have to stay.

In other news, Meta seeks 29 billion from private credit giants to fund AI data centers. So this just.

Let's hear it.

This just got announced a few minutes ago. Apollo Pimco among the lenders in talk with Mark Zuckerberg, social media giant.

Oh, that's a good hit.

Meta is looking to raise 29 billion to fund its all in push into artificial intelligence, according to the Financial Times. But on that note, another watch for zuck.

Go to getbezel.com, your bezel concierge is available for now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. Anyway, you're addicted.

Let's bring in Ken from Republic. He had a big announcement and launch this week. I am thrilled to talk with him.

I'm gonna let you take the intro.

Perfect.

Hey guys, how are you? Thanks for having me.

Great to have you on the show. Ken. What's happening?

Oh, man, just chilling in New York. Perfect weather.

You're never, you're never chilling. You're never. You're like the least chill guy. You're working 20 hours a day.

You know, we're all gonna have a really long good rest when we die, so. Yolo, you know, still alive and just gotta, gotta keep on moving.

Yeah.

Do you, are you, are you intentionally video off, by the way?

Oh, no, I, I didn't realize that. Give me one second, please. I apologize. I'm dialing in from while being on the move. Let me, let me, you know, turn my video on.

Sweet.

Just one second. Yep.

I am pumped to hear about the launch this week. You guys were tearing up the timeline. There you are. Perfect. Nice.

How are you guys doing?

Awesome. Well, give a quick intro on yourself, your background and then Republic as well. And then I want to get into the launch.

Yeah, you know, just a reformed lawyer, been in tech for like forever. Started out earlier Angelist. We launched now a decade ago. And the whole goal is to make sure that, you know, private markets and public markets gotta become much, much more accessible. Not unlike how the Internet really transformed commerce. Right now we all buy things for their need and need and everywhere. And I think the next phase of it is ownership. Whatever it is that we love, whether it's SpaceX, Neuralink, a movie, a song, we all got to be able to be able to acquire a little bit of a sliver in that. And I think the world is moving fast in that direction. With or without Republic. We just happened to be at the forefront of it for a moment in time.

Makes total sense. Break down the launch this week or the announcement this week. I know this has been in the works for quite a while. Has been. I feel like this, the Mirror Tokens product is something that has probably been in the back of your mind since even years before you started the actual company. So, you know, break it down for us.

Yeah, yeah. You know, like at the end of the day, it's just about how do you factionalize any asset. It can be public equity, it can be private securities and leveraging what is an evolving legal framework and of course the technology, factualization, automation, two key elements of blockchain as a technology and bring that to the masses. And what we launched earlier this week is a token that provides performance basically benchmarked to that of SpaceX. And you're going to see other companies, maybe Xai, OpenAI, Neuralink and beyond, getting rolled out on Republic. It is going to be controversial, but it is basic traditional financial engineering package around an innovative framework that is a technology, a legal evolution around it to make this possible. But this is something that I think with and without Republic, again it is going to be an emerging trend which has happened to be the one that introduces it to the market.

So talk about the mechanics more because I think people would see the launch and they would just immediately think that you acquired some SpaceX shares and then you were effectively fractionalizing them and putting them on chain. But from my understanding this is closer to something like a prediction market and.

No, not at all. It's not a prediction market. We may indeed have exposure to SpaceX in this case it probably is not a direct ownership of one on one shares. But as you know SpaceX secondaries in the private markets, people have SpaceX exposure through SPV, SPV and SPV and three, four or five levels all the same. At the end of the day, Republic is going to promise that when you make an investment or when you purchase or hold the Republic SpaceX token, when SpaceX experiences a liquidity event, that is to acquire or most likely go public, whatever that return in value proposition to gain the performance of a SpaceX share that is price comparable to market today, you're going to be able to turn in that token and get the exact economics back. So that is an obligation, an economic obligation from Republic. And of course we have exposure to make sure that we underwrite and going to be able to fulfill that obligation. But it is not a one to one SpaceX share.

Yeah. So when somebody buys one of these tokens that's representative of the performance. They're not, they're not buying, they're not buying direct, they're not buying equity, they're buying again the sort of basically an option on the rate of change in the future to some degree.

Correct.

Could you give some type of.

I'm having a little bit of a tactical snafu today, but can you hear me okay?

Yeah, you sound great. Sound great to us. Can you give us some comps and like other types of like sort of financial engineering throughout history that you were kind of inspired by in the creation of this?

Yeah, I mean the history of Republic has been dealing with retail investors and enable them to buy private securities. The early phase of it, we call it crowdfunding, you know, which was like a dirty word for many founders in vc. But at the end of the day it means one thing, thing. How do you get the general public the opportunity to participate in private companies, whether it's a early stage YC company or SpaceX Neuralink and people don't really care if it's a direct interest on the cap table or a comparable economic interest. We're talking about emotional identification. The fact that someone say that, hey, I'm gonna parkway with $10. And I believe in this technology and when it succeeds, I too want to, you know, share in that, in that success. It can be structure, it can be a derivative, it can be a financial engineering product that may not be required one day. But right now that is needed to see this through. And what we're doing, we do not need SpaceX consent or permission. This is a Republic Financial product. And an obligation on the company that we're going to deliver to those who believe, not just in SpaceX, but in Republic as a market participant as well, is.

Wait, hold on. Okay, so you don't need SpaceX's approval, but if I were to create a list of people that I wouldn't want to make angry, I think Elon Musk would be right at the top. So, like, is this like, you better be ready to. If you're not asking for permission, I hope you're really, really good at begging for forgiveness.

Well. Well, you could say lawyer up, but Ken's a lawyer.

He is a lawyer. Yeah. So maybe you'll figure it out. I'm rooting for you. This feels like something that could be very successful. It also feels like you're maybe poking a bear, a very large bear, but like, have you thought about that?

Yes. And again, apologies, they have to leave my video off.

Yeah, no worries. You're good.

We figured it.

And you guys look incredibly sharp, by the way. You know, at the end of the day, I think obviously Elon, like the man of our generation, right? What an incredible, brilliant human being. There's no doubt that the notion of everyday folks, fans of his and SpaceX in the US and around the world, being able to share in the upside. I don't think he's against that at all. He certainly has, I assume, some concerns around information and pricing and all of that. And I'm quite confident that we can deliver a product in collaboration with companies like SpaceX and OpenAI so that we can address their concern while not stopping what is a financial evolution and a social trend. Listen, if tomorrow Republic stop doing this, the cat is out of the hat. Finance OkX, whoever in Vietnam and Abu Dhabi and Saudi can easily roll this out and there is nothing that this company can do about it, particularly in those markets. So we hope that we obviously have not just investors best interest in mind, but our partners. So I'm hopeful that in a week or two, I'm going To come back and be able to tell you guys that there's a collaboration going on. There's a lawsuit in the federal court.

That's exciting. Well, yeah, we definitely want to hear from you.

Last question. Will the tokens be liquid or illiquid? Is this something that you're buying and then it's sort of trading in real time? I bring it up because if this had been live a couple weeks ago when Elon Trump static fire tests failed that or the.

Oh yeah, that.

Sorry, I'm just a nerd blow up, you could imagine that there being some sort of trading activity.

The whole point of this is obviously liquidity. I mean the entire. Listen, secondary SpaceX shares have been traded and sold and packaged among family offices and institutional investors. We all know in every single market, layer after layer, it is the liquidity and the retail component of it. And this being on chain and us and one of our subsidiaries have the license to enable secondary trading of digital securities among non retail US investors. So yes, the whole point of this is so that people can trade, you know, what they have and market dependence. So the future, what you had just described, fast forward a year is what we aim to see for all of these major companies.

Very cool. Well, thank you so much for stopping by.

Thank you for joining.

More developments. This is fantastic.

Always a good launch strategy to poke a bear.

Yeah, that's a good way to get.

Good way to get attention and we're super excited to see, see how this plays out and definitely feel free to jump back on.

Thanks so much for having me guys.

Have a great rest of your day. Fascinating. So there is a bull case here. I feel like there's a bear case.

The bull case is like there's going to be, you put space, a SpaceX derivative on chain, there is going to be such an obscene amount of demand for it.

Yes. What I mean is bull case for like peace and no drama and no lawsuits. And I think what that means is that basically what are the benefits of having retail, of being a public company? You could potentially have a retail army of supporters who are, who are supporting voting for policies that help you lobbying, calling congressmen, publishing YouTube videos, announcements. Yeah. Promoting hiring, all these different things. But what are the downsides of being public? Well, that you know, all the different, you know, shareholder marks on a daily basis. All these different things about.

Yes.

Even just stock grants. First for Elon, we saw that with Tesla. He kind of ran the ultimate A B test with SpaceX and Tesla and I think he's had a much smoother time at SpaceX than Tesla. And so may not want to go.

The crazy retail army Tesla, but buy his cars, who will spend any action? So I think what you're getting at is there's potentially a world where companies have these sort of assets that are representative of their underlying equity, that are liquid and that are getting marked daily. But if a company can basically say, like, we didn't permission this. We don't have any information requirements.

Exactly.

And we don't even care what happens over there. People can do whatever they want. If they're excited about investing in us, great. But we didn't raise capital from them. We don't have an obligation to those token holders. We have an obligation to our shareholders. And there's a world where this could be some type of happy middle ground.

The question is, are there downsides to having this secondary third tertiary, we're going to call it tertiary markets, I guess, where like imagine there's $5 million float out there and SpaceX in this tertiary market is trading at a trillion dollars. And then you go out to raise or do a secondary transaction and there's this question of like, what is the true price discovery? You're trying to benchmark it to the retail price, but then the insider institutional price is different. Or, or in the bad case, what if this tertiary market grows to $20 billion and you're like, wait, I want to sell some of that as primary and I want some of that on my balance sheet if I'm a growing company.

And then the companies go to Ken and they're like, hey, we got to partner up here.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, I mean, there's a bunch of interesting solutions.

I'm excited to, I'm excited to cover it.

Certainly exciting. Yep, exactly. Anyway, our next guest here is here in the studio. You, Kirsten Green. Welcome to the show.

Welcome.

How are you today? Hi, guys, good to see you.

Hi, how are you?

We're doing well. Quite the day, quite the week.

Very dapper today.

Well, the market's up.

We always on a great day, happy.

Yeah. All time highs. We're very happy about that. And massive Neuralink news today. Big launch from them. That was a lot of fun.

And you've had a busy week as well.

Yes.

So I have Neuralink news this morning.

I've been.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Take us through the conference. What was the structure? What was the goal? What type of people were you thinking about inviting? And then I want to go into some of the learnings and what the, what the current vibe is.

Okay, cool. Conference. Funny, because it started out like a couple of weeks ago, I think six weeks ago, as a happy hour, like a themed happy hour. Like, let's get some of the people that we're working with that are building in consumer AI together. Let's bring in some other firms that have some other founders and just build some community and conversation on the topic. And so like, literally it started with like, we went to a few co investors that we work with and said, you guys want to do this? And they said yes. And then few more people than we imagined wanted to do it. So we're like, yeah, maybe we can do something with this. We thought we could showcase these companies, we could build some enthusiasm around the topic, which I think was really my original impetus, just to build some enthusiasm around the potential. And six weeks later, we had standing room only, lines out the door, had our impromptu conference.

That's amazing.

Amazing breakdown. What were the specific things that you wanted to be having conversations about within consumer AI? Yeah, within the event. And then kind of. What were kind of some of the standout topics?

Yeah. So, you know, I think that as much as anything, it was like, about putting a stake in the ground for consumer AI, giving people permission, if not like a provocation, provocation that like, you know, or rallying cry that founders. There's opportunities to build for people. It's. And there's this new technology to do a lot with. It's been a lot of conversation and kind of velocity around the foundational models, the infrastructure, but we haven't really gotten a conversation going with a lot of enthusiasm or imagination around bringing that technology forward into the hands of people. At the same time, I think there's never been a faster growing product adoption than ChatGPT. And we talked a little bit about that. We talked about the fact that Perplexity and Anthropic are pulling customers in to try their products. You go on social media, you see teens talking about their AI companions, you see parents talking, using their copilots for family planning, trip planning, meal planning. But there isn't as much building going on in this area in general, like on how people are going to use this outside. There's some in the workplace, but more broadly. And so we wanted to get a conversation going around the human experience, the product craft, and the everyday utility of this. And I think against the backdrop of some of the biggest companies that have been built in the last 25 years out of the tech ecosystem started with the consumer. You know, today they look like multidimensional businesses operating in every category. But when they first came to market, they were enticing a user to engage with them. Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple, all those companies that are now the tech giants. Their first entree into the market was to get a user, get you and me to engage with the product. And I think it's a magical place to build from for lots of reasons, but one of which is that you can move at the space, at the speed of technology. So there was a lot of conversation about how fast things are moving, about how do you build a product when technology is kind of changing in the moment that you're building with it and the consumer will build with you. There isn't a nine month sell in cycle. They're there, put something up, they'll use it, they'll tell you they're hate it, they'll tell you they love it. You can iterate on it and get that feedback. And I think once you get engagement, you'll see the opportunities for expansion, which I would argue a lot of those companies saw and built big businesses. So it was about just saying like, there's a tremendous opportunity to think very big, very ambitiously about the future and a role that you want to play in it as a founder and a company builder. Why not start with the consumer? Why not think about that? And I think that's a, you know, that's a pretty strong rallying cry.

So we were trying to drum it out.

Yeah, I think, I think we need a rallying cry. When I've talked to some consumer people that are, I've been pitched some consumer apps lately and a couple times it's come up where my thought is, okay, this makes sense for the next year, but if ChatGPT gets really good at computer use and operator gets really good, I think you might get destroyed because people have it installed on their phone. And so the question for me is like, how do you figure out a way if ChatGPT is undeniably the breakout consumer app of the last few years, there's no way around it and it's getting valued appropriately based on that. But the question is, how do you kind of carve out space that is, is not that as ChatGPT gets better and more capable, you're not kind of going to get steamrolled.

That is the first question that I kicked the day off with. We kicked off with Reid Hoffman and we said, hey Reid, you have an all angle view into this moment as a builder, as an investor, as a board member in these highly relevant companies. Like there's a lot of conversation out here about like, geez, in a world where the tech is moving so fast and so aggressively and looking like it's expanding and teasing out already in so many areas, like where do we build? Like how do we think about capturing a space when they've got all the resources and they're moving at that kind of crazy speed. And I asked Mike the same question at the end of the day, Krieger at the end of the day. And I pose it as like, this is the elephant in the room, this is what people are talking about while they have their good idea. Then they're worried about that. Both of them said that yes, these companies are, you know, they are moving fast but they won't dominate all verticals. They won't be able to do all things or maybe they won't choose to because that's not the right thing for their business. I don't want to discredit what they can and can't do, but I think there are an expansive number of things that require specialty and focus, that require craft and understanding around the particular lane you're operating in or service you're trying to provide that are incredible examples of opportunities to leverage the power of gen AI and these LLMs, but that have all kinds of scaffolding around them that exist around that. And so you know, I think that it's a little bit like, I guess this was my analogy in my head was like, okay, Google, like they own search, but there's a lot of big platforms that were built off of search in what is called specialty areas but that are significant businesses. You could argue Amazon is that, you know, Zillow, there's been Expedia, there's been other things for travel. They, there are lots of reasons why the ubiquitous, like you know, kind of very broad front door isn't the right answer for everything. And it's also just like, you know, everybody, everybody, no matter how well resourced you are, how capable you are, weighs trade offs on what's on your roadmap, what's in and what's out. I think that's, you know, key to being a really successful long term company and having a solid foundation. You can't do everything, you don't need to do everything. So there was universal agreement when asked this question, answered in different ways that there's plenty of room to go. Even if you want to assume that a big portion of it is going to go to a clearly set of exceptional companies that have driven breakout. What they've done for this industry, among other things, is Woken people up to the potential of this amazing new technology and these new ways of starting to engage with technology where people are searching differently, not just on ChatGPT, but for example, on retailer sites. You know, they've gone from keyword search to conversational search. And so my, my thought there is like, people are ready for it. They're, they're, they're here to meet the moment of what gets delivered. I think it's on the builders to bring them something new and special and amazing. And I just, you know, I think everybody, when they really think about it, is like, you're not going to go everywhere. Okay, but what does that mean? I mean, I think you want to stay in ideally, you want to find a place where you can be leveraging, you can be operating or building in the path of progress so you can kind of see how things are progressing. You can imagine, like, what is core to these big businesses. How do I build something that can take advantage of where they're leaning in and being exceptional, but I can build around in the context of my own environment. The extra things that are going to make this like the truly remarkable standout experience that becomes a daily habit or a use case for whatever your domain is.

Totally.

And I think we show like one of the things that was really fun about yesterday was obviously the chance for this audience that was there to see 20 founders get up and present their new companies. These aren't companies that we all know about because they're seed and series A early, early stage companies. And these teams had four minutes to get up and talk about what they're building, why it's possible today and why it matters. And they did a really great job for one. But I also think sparked a lot of imagination, cool examples of what you can do with the technology demonstration of how people are thinking about applying it in different ways. And I would say to you, I don't want to speak on behalf of any founders, but I bet you that all of those are a starting point that have visions beyond that too.

Yeah, we were at YC demo day a couple weeks ago and I don't remember talking to a single consumer AI company. We didn't get to talk to everyone. So maybe it was just the B2B founders that were like really trying to get into.

We had one YC company yesterday, Text AI present.

Oh, we talked to them. We talked to them. They're cool.

And they came up to me afterwards and they said there were four, four consumer companies in our cohort. Like, we need, we need our, we need our people. Where are they?

Gary Tan, yesterday, I was just gonna.

Say I've been spending more time with the, with the YC great team there and with Gary. And listen, Airbnb, Doordash, some of the most iconic companies to come out of YC consumer companies.

I would count Coinbase as a consumer.

One way is I wanted this like, day to be about permission. Like, it's, it's kind of been like a bad word, like I'm building in consumer or whatever. But no, no, and, and also it's like, again, it can be, it can be your end goal, it can be your starting point, but to the point of it's an incredible place to start from because you can iterate learn.

Yeah, weirdly, consumer is, is very competitive because you're, you're coming up against chat, GPT and a lot of use cases. But at the same time it's, and it's less competitive just because looking at the YC batch, it's like that often ends up being a reflection.

That's true.

And so do you want to go?

Among other things that our team had in mind for what the event might offer, one of the things that really made me feel great about the day was I had several people come up to me, future founders, and say, I've been thinking about this product I wanted to build, but I just wasn't sure if there was energy for it or demand for it or I'd find investors that wanted it. And now after today, I saw so many cool applications. I got more new ideas about it, like, I'm going to build it. And so, you know, I think that we all say no or hesitate until somebody starts to turn it on. And, you know, I think Yesterday we saw 20 incredible companies that have been funded by some of the, the best investors out there. We saw 23. I mean, I, we, we started by calling, you know, a few friendlies that we invest with. Do you want to do this with us? And you know, then another friend, you know, everybody said, like, without a doubt, like, yeah, we want to be part of that. We want to invest in the next, you know, ambitious entrepreneur building in that area. And, and then after, when we put the list up, like, here's who the co hosts are, I got more calls about it. And so my point was just, just like, hey, listen, like, they're all open for business, so take the VC firms and multiply the number of available dollars they have to invest. And it's all possible for a consumer founder to get you just, you know, I think part of it is is, you know, thinking ambitiously enough about what you're building and being able to answer some of those hard questions. But you know, hard questions exist in every single area.

Okay, here are some hard questions for consumer. If I'm thinking about building a new AI consumer app. One is that it feels like historically most consumer has been more power law distributed, more winner take all than other markets. Amazon winner take all pretty much. And Google very much winner take all. Social networking very much winner take all. ChatGPT is already on a run to be feels like 90% penetration in that market. And so Fintech is honestly one of.

The only areas that it hasn't exactly been winner take all. Yes, obviously Kirsten had chime ipo.

Yeah. Where it feels like, it feels like we've seen a lot of really smart founders come in and the base hit the $100 million outcome. The billion dollar outcome feels more rare in consumer as opposed to in B2B. I don't know how real that is, but that's certainly a fear. Then there's also the fear that there are a lot of consumer companies that are still run by great founders and the founders are in founder mode. And so someone who's running a major large consumer company, if you're onto something, they might come after you. Whereas in B2B you might be able to sub slice the market and, and build some different niche that's underserved and kind of grow a business. Are either of those serious concerns or do you think there's good counter arguments that founders should have top of mind if they get hit with those questions?

Okay, so on the second one I'll just start there because it's on my mind with the second one like no, I don't think so. I mean, yes and no. Right. There's always competition. I think if you get into business, you should just be getting into competition. And you know what, if you're going after something worth it, if you're going after something worth the price, there's going to be competition. It's going to come at you from pure startups, it's going to come at you two years from now from another startup that's starting out some of the baggage that you have and it's going to come from some incumbents. But I think that there is a lot to be said for a unique insight, for a particular point of view on how it gets executed, for a particular culture you build at your team and at your company and how you go after it. And that is not that different than in any other space there are for every kind of B2B company in the space. I mean it's open season. There's not five competitors, there's 50 competitors. So get your game on for competition for the other question, which was the power law question.

Yeah. And does that also under effect underwriting in the sense that like you have to, you have to underwrite to. I mean if you're talking about like I don't know, most consumer AI companies or most consumer companies, I feel like it's either like a zero or a trillion dollars. But I don't know if that's the right narrative. But that feels like it would change underwriting maybe as an investor, I mean.

So I think that as venture investors we're all in it for the trillion dollar idea, right? So I think that we are thinking what's the big ambition here? What's the big possibility? If you're an early stage investor, you then better be thinking about what's the first act that going to give you the right to get to the second act. But I think we're not playing for how do we do an M and A exit in a couple of years. That's not what this is about. I don't think that's how we underwrite things ever. Anyways. I think when you're in the zone of doing those other things, it's because dynamics have changed or you know, usually it's because dynamics have changed. And I, you know, I think that we have sold companies in M and A situations and I think that exists in all areas of business. So maybe it's not as prolific in consumer businesses than it is. I don't know. I haven't really done that analysis because I'm here to hopefully build big companies with founders. But you know, on the, on the power law question there is definitely like I do think I'm particularly interested in and venture investors are particularly interested in businesses that have network effects, that do have products and experiences that get better with scale, that get better with more activity and more engagement and that, you know, sort of beg that sort of leads you into these businesses that have the self have the power law dynamics. But the companies that you mentioned are like the category leaders that doesn't like there are still big businesses that are adjacent to those categories that are public companies are big standalone companies are successful stories for both founders and teammates and investors.

So yeah, it's power laws all the way down. So there's the category leader power law and then there's like overall market power other. You know, a $20 billion company, that's a power law, you know, within its subcategory there are.

Right. So. But you know what, worth mentioning, and this is why I started to feel urgency on this topic and igniting the conversation yesterday. There's a lot to be said for being first and ChatGPT proves it. For instance, you know, and I don't know if Google actually was the first search. I don't think they were, but they were pretty close after. Like, it is game on right now. There's going to be opportunities for the next 10 years, just like there were in the last cycle and the cycle for the next 20. But like, right now is a unique moment in time where like the deck is getting shuffled and newness is being created and we still are in the zone. One of the things we were hoping to tease out yesterday in conversation and just in general is just like, okay, if you were starting a company today, challenge yourself to think about the problem or the opportunity you're going after and the technology that you have to play with and build with and work with and what do you bring to life in 2025 with that? Like, instead of thinking about like, this is the way we've always done things and now we have this technology and our chat bot can be better or something. So like, get out of the zone and think about like a new way to present. And I'm the investor, not the founder, so don't ask me what the idea is, but I know somebody out there has a bunch of them.

Yeah, yeah, it's interesting.

Google definitely not.

They weren't the first search engine, but they were the first one to implement PageRank. So that particular algorithm, ChatGPT was not the first chatbot. There were, you know, Siri and different, you know, WhatsApp bots that you could kind of, you know, write some business logic around. But they were the first Transformer based chatbot that had been scaled up to a large run and so they broke through in that way. I want to talk about distribution for consumer apps. We're seeing a bunch of interesting things. There's a couple case studies that might be interesting to weave through. One is Lensa, this magic avatar app where you could upload a few images and it would make you a superhero or it would do kind of a generation of your face on an AI avatar. It was massively popular. They made a ton of money and then it kind of of fell off and they, and they've kind of changed the business and re and revisited that.

I think they changed to something that then got kind of smoked by ChatGPT.

Exactly. Again, yeah. So there's that story. And then, and then on the other side, you see.

But I also don't think they raised very much money.

No, I think they probably made a bunch of money, but. And then, and then we've been tracking a lot of what's happening with Cluli, this viral company that I. It's kind of hard to tell if they're consumer C word or, or their B2B. The Roy Lee, the founder seems to be exploring both sides, but it's undeniable that he's been great at getting attention and breaking through the very noisy, you know, startup AI ecosystem in, in the sense that he will take over the timeline in the way, I mean, thinking machines raised $2 billion and more. People were talking about Cluli that day. Like, that is crazy to me, but that is crazy.

And honestly, like, I think that's smart. Yeah, right. So I mean, one of the hardest, the hardest thing to do is to build an amazing product that people use on a regular basis and are committed and loyal to it. That's the hardest thing to do. The second hardest thing to do is get in the conversation. Right. So, you know, I mean, we work with a lot of, you know, companies that are consumer facing and, and one of the first questions when we work with a new founder is, is like, how do I market this? You know, you had a company that did this and did this, like, what's the secret? And I always say the same thing is like, hey, listen, I got good news and bad news for you. Like the bad news is there's, well, the good news is, is good news and the bad news, I guess you have to do everything. Like there's a lot of ways to do that and there's like not one way to do it. That's the good and the bad news. Like you have to figure out like how to be showing up in all these different places and when something hits, then you need to lean into it. And so I think like, if you have the creativity to do that and you can create relevance in the conversation, that's good. Now it's all worthless if you don't have a great product. So you 100% have to be able to back anything you do in that way up for a great product because the business is built on the product. The business is not built, built on marketing. It's not. And I think that, you know, that is, that has long always been true. But today, you know, consumers are savvy I've said this for the 30 years I've invested. Consumers are savvy. And you can maybe sometimes pull them in on something, you know, sexy marketing story or whatever, but, like, you can't really build. You can't build a business unless you've got like something really worthy. But, you know, so it's not a business to be a good marketer, but it's an advantage to be a good marketer.

Yeah, consumers do seem extremely savvy right now, I'm thinking. And the nature of the.

Partly because they can ask ChatGPT, should I use this product?

With ChatGPT, the consumption pattern of the consumer seems to have completely changed in the sense that you have people that are paying $200 a month. Maybe they're using that at work, maybe they're using it personally. But it's a very different, different product shape than what we've seen on the Internet before. Paying 200 or $500 a month for something that maybe you're expensing it, maybe you're using it for work, maybe you're using as a consumer. And I'm wondering if we almost need a new word we need to bring over prosumer.

Well, actually, I love what you're talking about while you're saying that. Like, I think that the lines are being blurred, like, as we speak. And they have been for a while on consumer and business. Yeah, because people have been doing it in their lives. Like, how many people have two cell phones anymore? One for work and one for life. No, you just put it in. It's what you're doing, you know, and people are working, you know, different hours and they're doing side jobs on the side, and they're so. And we're using notion for personal lists and we're using it at work to communicate with our colleagues. These sort of things are happening, like, increasingly, and they're just going to continue that that way. And so that really begs, like any product builder to have a user mindset. Maybe we could get out of saying consumer and really talk about users or people. We're building products for people. Whether it's you in the office or whether you it's home, you don't completely change your expectations of what a great experience looks like when you're on home mode versus work mode. So, you know, I think that that, like, that, like, line is like, it's really blurred. And I think that it's getting increasingly blurred in business, and it's also getting blurred in, like, what people are willing to pay for and how they're using it. Right.

You might actually put like cursor in the prosumer category in the sense that it's more of a go to market motion. It's like it's bottoms up adoption and it's selling to the individual, to the user, to your point, as opposed to a top down mandate. Like the CFO or the CTO decided that we're using this database and so we're using it whether or not you want to.

It's like prosumer growth guys, because you.

Can use that whole like we iterate in real time real fast with the consumer, see what they're building, learn about our product, you know, charge something for our product. And then if we're like really relevant and we're delivering on this value proposition, it's efficiency, it's, it's time roi, we can get a company to come in and pay for it. Like, you know, then you've kind of straddled both of those and I think that's a pretty great place to play.

It is totally.

Well, thank you so much.

Congrats on the event.

Congratulations.

Congrats on the happy hour. You should probably do it.

We did happy hour sunshine yesterday too, so that was good.

You should probably do it quarterly because there's no time to waste, you know.

I mean, last night we had a drink after dinner. Our team, we went out to dinner and I gave a cheers and I said like, you know, thanks everybody for indulging the crazy and that we got this done in six weeks. It was fun, you know, it was fun.

Just got to put it out there and commit to it, make it happen. Awesome. Well, thank you for joining. This was super fun.

Yeah.

I hope to have you on again. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, we'll talk soon.

Have a nice day.

Bye. Bye. Let's go back to the timeline. Talk about Tane, former guest on the show, is talking about the 0 acquisition of Melio payments. They're paying 2 1/2 billion dollars. This is 13 times its $190 million in run rate revenue. But Melio raised around at 4 billion in September of 2020 out of 1.

What was the multiple? What was the multiple, John?

It was a 400x multiple.

Let's give it up for 400x multiples, you know?

You know. Yeah, of course it's like it's a down round acquisition but I think everyone still did quite a. Quite well.

Yeah. And all the, any, any investor that invested 4 billion gets 1x their 1x back. They can redeploy it and get another, you know, get it. Get a couple 10x's in a row. A few 10x. Turn it into, you know, a trillion. Yeah, trillions.

Turn that into a quadrillion. Yeah. Despite growing almost 20x in three years at a very healthy, healthy exit multiple, it sold for lower than the 2021 valuation. And yeah, acquisition. I think it makes sense here because we were talking to EV Ranch and he was saying if you do a screen on Pure Play, SaaS, companies in the enterprise at I think he was even over 500 million in revenue. There are like multiple players in almost every subcategory at this point, so you can get public markets exposure. So this type of company, even though $190 million amazing gong worthy, fantastic performance from the team, it's just maybe not enough to be enticing to the public markets. So. So exiting to zero makes a ton of sense. Anyway, speaking of big numbers. Big numbers. The app is out budget on everything, says Steven Zhang. Preston asked for this. He said, I want a finance app with three numbers. What I spent today, what I spent this week, what I spent this month. I saw someone Vibe coded this. I'm not sure if Stephen's the one that Vibe coded the first example, but he has a launch video out and we love to see ideas to products in just a few months. April 8th was the tweet that inspired this. Now there's a launch video for it. So congrats to Stephen for launching Big Numbers. I like that name.

Yeah. Super excited for Stephen. Yeah, he's the man.

Looks like he was filmed in a cinematic location.

I love the name. I love the name because it's. It's easy to understand what it does. It's also aspirational.

It is, it is. You want to put big numbers. Yeah. The video looks like it was filmed in a cinematic location. If you're looking to hang out in a cinematic location, you gotta find your happy place.

Find your happy place.

Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel grade amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning and 247 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better folks.

Also, this is a good way to.

Debo, we got to cover this. Roy Lee apparently interned for Keon of Nucleus fame.

Two most controversial Gen Z technology brothers.

Both been on the show multiple times.

We're on the same team.

Ogz fellow Keon got a cold email from then Columbia student Roy. Roy wanted to intern for Keon. He hustled and got it. Within a year, Roy left Columbia and built Clulee. Oh, yeah. And became a Z fellow. And so the new PayPal mafia is the Z fellow. CU the cinematic universe. I really like that Ali's breaking this whole. This whole thing down with the red string. It's great. And is there anything else you want to cover today, or are we good to go?

I realized we did a team. It was a half Murph this morning.

Oh, yeah, we did.

We want to be efficient with our time, but I have not had a sip of water, just energy drinks. I've only had Matina. And as much as I love Matina, I'm starting to get a little bit of a headache accidentally not having water.

Okay.

As a water enthusiast, entrepreneur, founder, you're a water dot com. But anyways, this is a great place to end.

Anyway, leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Thanks for listening. Have a great weekend.

And we have the best. Have the best weekend of your life.

Yes.

Just do it.

No excuses.

No excuses. If you don't, it's a skill issue.

Goodbye.

Cheers.