Logan Bartlett, Kian Sadeghi, Joshua Steinman, Sam Lessin and Seth Rosenberg Debate, Intel's New CEO

You're watching TVPN. It is Friday, March 14, 2025. We are live from the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. This show starts now. We got a great show for you guys, folks today. We have Logan Bartlett calling in. We have Keon from Nucleus calling in. He's announcing a new product, DNA sequencing. It's going to be very interesting. We got Josh Steinman, the legend, the man, the myth, the man who has every single. Morning. Good morning. We are going to win. We're going to find out if he's winning. And we have the great AI debate. We are putting two venture capitalists in a cage and some people are calling.

VC on VC violence. But we're going to try to keep it civil.

We'll try and keep it civil.

So Seth Rosenberg and Sam Lesson are going to be calling in. They've been going back and forth not only on the timeline, but on the 101. They've been billboarding at each other.

Billboarding at each other. Okay.

Sam Lesson and the slow team threw up a new billboard that say got an AI startup idea. Shoot at Seth Rosenberg. A message not slow. And this has just been on the, on the 101 as of yesterday. So lots of fun, Lots of fun. We're excited to have them on and.

But that starts in half an hour. For the next half hour, we're going through the news bringing you the top stories in technology and business and finance. Top story today, uh, intel has a new CEO. Pat Gelsinger. Absolute dog. One of the greatest to ever do it was at intel for a long time struggled, but absolute legend. And if you go back and listen to his tertechery interviews, you'll understand that he is someone to be absolutely respected. And even though obviously there were lots of problems with intel, the shift to mobile, the TSMC stuff, they losing their, their grip on the foundry model. Uh, still a fantastic CEO and someone who I just think should be respected in the technology industry forever. But today we're teaching you about the new CEO. A former board member has stepped in. His name's Lip Bhutan and he's returning to overhaul the chip maker.

And so, and to be clear, looking on public, the market likes this. They're up 18% in the past five days.

Wow.

After basically just kind of, I mean.

That'S given like the crazy sell off too.

Yeah. I mean part of it's potentially just the rebound from a pretty intense sell off. But this is now a lot of.

People were saying it was a mistake to not stick with Pat Gelsinger, but we'll see. Hopefully this works out. Let's break it down. The selection as the chip maker's new chief executive officer was cheered by analysts, bankers and shareholders. He brings two decades of semiconductor industry experience, relationships across the sector, a startup mindset. I want to know more about that because he is 65 years old at this point and has been on the board and in these really large companies. We'll see if he can go founder mode now. And he has an obsession with AI and basketball. He also comes with tricky Chinese business relationships, so that could get more complicated. Underscoring Silicon Valley's inability to sever itself from one of America's top adversaries. So even though people want to go all in on America, there's still lots of flow back and forth between the two most important economies in the world. How Tan, age 65, will use his assets to resurrect intel is on the minds of all industry watchers. Intel has gone from being one of Silicon Valley's biggest innovators to a relic struggling to compete with superstar Nvidia and others. In the age of AI, its stock lost 2/3 of its value in four short years as intel sat out the AI boom. This is of course, because Intel's known for making CPUs, not GPUs. Very important for, you know, the normal apps that you use every single day, but not the next generation of video games, 3D rendering, and AI.

One interesting point. Gelsinger was pushed out three months ago.

Yep.

So there had been a while intermediary CEO. That's, that's now.

But they think they're, they think they got their guy now. So shares were up more than 14% at market close. Sounds like they're doing up more since then. The new CEO will soon have to answer the most burning question about Intel's future. Whether he will break apart Intel's design and foundry businesses. I think Ben Thompson has been advocating for this. A lot of people have been talking about this. Basically, manufacturing chips is an enormous expense that intel can't currently sustain. This is what industry leaders and analysts say and former board members have called for a split up. And so Nvidia, of course, is a, is a fabless semiconductor company in the sense that they work with tsmc. TSMC does not do design. They only do the manufacturing, the fab. And so when that separation happened, it was very questionable because, you know, maybe you get some benefits to having everything being integrated all the way from, okay, you get an Intel Acceleron processor, it has a Brand, you know, your average customer might not know, but certainly some gamer who's building their own PC wants the intel brand. And that intel brand leads into design choices that they make to make the computer run faster and then they actually make it themselves. So that integration makes a lot of sense in many ways, but it kind of restrained them from having the flexibility to play in new areas as they came up.

Totally. And Nvidia has shown that they can just focus on this one aspect of the stack and still put up ridiculous margins.

Yeah. And that's because they, they, even though they don't own the manufacturing, they have, they have the software and the. And NV link and CUDA and this ecosystem where if you're a very, you know, heavily funded, large language model, foundation, model company, the best engineers in the world, they want to do foundational research, frontier research, and they don't want to learn a new language, they want to just write cuda. And CUDA is not perfect, but it's certainly the best in the ecosystem by most accounts, so. But a deal to sell all or part of intel to competitors seems to be off the table for the immediate future, according to bankers. A variety of early stage discussions with Broadcom, Qualcomm, Global Foundries and TSMC in recent months have failed to go everywhere, anywhere and so far seem unlikely. And this was the story that we covered earlier about the private jets of. I believe Broadcom, intel and Elon were all at Mar A Lago at the same time. So there might have been some deal.

Which I honestly think that was somebody trying to make a story out of everybody just being around Mar A Lago.

Yep.

At that point in time, because many of the most important people in all of the world and business, I mean.

They might have just been golfing.

Yeah.

They might have just said, hey, like this, this get together, we're not talking business.

Yeah.

We're talking par threes, par fours.

Let's be the first group to keep business off the course.

Yes, exactly. The company already hinted at a more likely outcome, bringing in outside financial backers, including customers who want a stake in the manufacturing business. Intel fortunes also rest in part with President Trump, who has signaled that he wants to unwind the Chips act signature legislation from former President Joe Biden to invest more than 50 billion in semiconductors. Intel would receive up to about 8 billion through the legislation, contingent on development of new factories, which have faced delays. And of course, TSMC is now building fabs in the US and the early reports that it was going better than people expected. There was a big question about, okay, it's not just you get some ASL ASML machines, you get some lithography machines and then you turn them on and boom, you're just printing chips. You need really, really talented individuals and most of those individuals live in Taiwan and they might not want to relocate very quickly or move over. But things have been looking good. But I'm sure we'll, we'll need to dig into it more.

You have to wonder how bad it would have to get sort of geopolitically for Ben Thompson to leave Taiwan. Because you can imagine him just, you know, yelling into his newsletter, I'm not leaving, I'm not leaving.

You have to drag me out of here.

And then we'll have to do a strike mission. Pull him out.

Yes, pull out.

One of the greatest writers.

He is one of the most valuable assets on that island. Right below tsmc.

Yeah, exactly.

Geopolitically, it's like we need, we need TSMC and Ben Thompson.

Ben.

And then who knows what happens? The rest, I'm sure there's a lot of other important stuff over there. Tan has likely no more than a year to turn the company around, said people close to the company. His decades of investing in startups and running companies. He founded a multinational venture firm and was CEO of a chip design company called Cadence Design Systems. He served there for 13 years. Good run provide indications of how Tan will tackle this task in the early days by cutting expenses, moving quickly, and trying to turn intel back into an engineering first company. In areas where we are behind the competition, we need to take calculated risks to disrupt and leapfrog, Tan said in a note to intel employees on Wednesday. And in areas where our progress has been slower than expected, we need to find new ways to pick up the pace. So this could be really interesting. I don't know if they're going to go on an acquisition spree, but you know, there is like a question about what does the next chip look like after the gpu. You know, Google's built the tpu, but then you also have startups like Fetch, Facebook is rumored. Facebook has one.

Not even rumored, confirmed.

Amazon has one. But there's also the question of, you know, these new transformer based AI inference focused chips like from Etched and there's a few others, Cerebrus, there's Grok, there's a few others. I forget, I forget the other startups, but a lot of people, they raised money very quickly. They got line time with tsmc, they became like great designers. But there was a Question about could these companies really go the distance or would they land with a company like intel ultimately and just provide a new product line that then intel could push? Either could be fantastic outcomes for everyone involved. So many take this culture reset to also mean significant cuts at intel, which has already shed about 15,000 jobs last year. Wow, that's like what, like a quarter docusign they lost? Yeah, something like that.

Almost to a T. To a T.

He is brave enough to adjust the workforce to the size needed for the business today. A former intel board member who has known tan since the 90s, Tan's first tour at intel as a board member from 2022 to 2024 ended in frustration, people say close to people close to him say. Although he cited time demands as reason for departing company, insiders believe Tan was fed up with the bloated workforce and direction under then CEO Pat Gelsinger. Tan's return then signals an inevitable change in strategy. His capabilities aside, intel remains far behind modern chip production, said Mark Rosenblatt. And Intel's balance sheet is not sufficient for the cost required to sustainably achieve it and scale the manufacturing needed to support it. Our team management Cadence was going through turmoil similar to Intel's when Tan took over in 2009. He was able to refocus the business, push its services to the cloud, and land new customers, including Apple. A company on the brink of delisting went on to return more than 3,000% in share price during Tan's tenure. Let's go. Size gone for that.

There we go.

Good stuff. Tan, in public talks, has described how he approached reshaping Cadence's culture to eliminate what he described as silos. I tried to change it into a one team culture. That approach harkens back to what he calls his first love, basketball. Born in Malaysia and raised in Singapore, Tan aspired to be a professional basketball player until his mother told him to get a real job. I love it, he said during a video interview during January. Well, I'm sure his mother's very happy now. Hopefully she's still alive, but.

Well, I'd like to, because there's no.

More real job than CEO of Intel.

Yeah, I'd like to see him go on a generational run at intel and then buy the NBA. You know, don't just buy, buy.

Don't just buy a team. Just don't go ballmer mode.

Yeah, Buy the league.

Yeah. By the league.

I'm a professional deal, you know, player now.

Yep, that makes sense. Tan has declared the arrival of generative AI as Bigger than the invention of the Web. He spent the past several years investing in AI startups across the globe. And let's go into the China connection and then we'll move on to the next story. Before he rose in the semiconductor industry, Tan was known as one of the first Silicon Valley venture capitalists to invest in Asia. I'm sure he did very well. Tan is founder and chairman of Walden International. A prolific investor in Chinese tech companies, he was a big champion of China's semiconductor sector in an era when US China relations were considerably, considerably rosier, including co investing with a China state owned asset manager.

Party around.

He was an early investor in smic, which is the semiconductor manufacturer international. I believe that's smic. And which the Commerce Department blacklisted for its alleged ties to the Chinese military. In 2020. Walden sold his last stake in 2021. And in 2023, the House Select Committee on Communist Party. We got a letter to him.

We got to get Steinman's view on.

Oh, this.

Yeah, on this whole era.

I'm sure he's gonna have a nuanced stake, folks.

Yeah, you can expect nuance.

Yeah, you can definitely, definitely expect.

Mr. Steinman.

Mr. Steinman. It's great Intel. As word of Tan's new role spread, one Chinese media outlet headlined the news. Intel hires the CEO with the best knowledge of China's chip industry. Interesting.

So, yeah, you missed the line here too. A subsequent report from the committee highlighted hundreds of millions of dollars of Walden investments that went to Chinese companies involved in military activities or human rights abuses.

Not good.

Kind of a weird. The market likes it weird. Pick in the context of this being one of our great American technology companies, but at the.

Keep your friends close, keep your enemies close.

Yeah. The steel man here is that, you know, he's not a Chinese national.

Exactly.

And you know, I would. Let's give him the benefit of the doubt that he is deeply loyal to the United States.

And we just, you know, I mean, yeah, there is a world where you invest in a Chinese semiconductor company. You see how fast they're moving. You take the threat realistically. You don't want to be Jack Ma. You would much rather be Jensen Huang.

Yep.

And not get thrown in jail when you throw on a leather jacket and become a superstar. Right. And so you come to, you know, you. You take over intel and you make it amazing, and you become a legendary American turnaround CEO. And that's just. That's just a fantastic outcome for everyone involved. Well, except for the ccp. But I'm happy with that. So I don't know. Yeah, we'll, we'll be tracking it here. We'll get them to call into the show.

We will chop it up. With us talking to a correspondent over at Truth Social, seeing what Trump has to say about, about this, you know.

Appointment, I'd be interested. I don't know, I'm, I'm, I've always been very, very optimistic about intel, very pro intel. And I used to have a riff about how, you know, I wish Elon had bought intel instead of Twitter because maybe semiconductors are more important. Now you talk to, you know, all sorts of folks and they'll tell you, well, like the free speech thing is really important and there are good, good, good reasons why it was important to, to, to, for the X deal to go through, but why not both?

Yeah. Anyway, I mean, it does say a lot that Elon seemingly looked at the opportunity, maybe didn't go for it.

I mean, it's a lot of work. He's got a lot of stuff going.

On, but it's very possible, he just didn't see. It's very possible that intel is valuable, but Elon didn't see sort of value for, for the sort of Elon ecosystem.

Totally. Well, if you're looking to go long intel, go short intel, whatever you're thinking, do it on public.com investing for those who take it seriously. They have multi asset investing, industry leading yields and they're trusted by millions of stocks.

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Research and then make a bet. Anyway, let's move on to the economy. Everyone is worried about a recession and the Wall Street Journal is breaking down.

Where you should be looking, not reacting at all to me, just, I love.

The hats, I love the hats.

I'm just gonna start not even making eye contact with you, just fully focused on the mic, the public hat.

That's great. The Wall Street Journal has an article here. Here's what to look for in terms of early signs of a recession. Tariffs, government layoffs, funding cuts, immigration restrictions, recession talks in the air. Any one of these things would at least temporarily exert some drag on the economy. Put them together and they have an everything everywhere, all at once dynamic that could hurt it badly. White House officials have cautioned that the economy might need, as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant put it, a detox period. At the same time, some of President Trump's promised challenges, such as less regulation and a big tax cut, are pleasing to many businesses and could stir them to invest and hire more. Very true. Major economic data hasn't fully yet begun to capture Trump's time in office. The Wall Street Journal is looking at a host of other factors to figure out whether the US Might skirt a recession or fall into one. Here are some areas to watch. There's the Small Business Uncertainty Index, which is at a high point and ticking upwards. But a lot of that happened kind of before the election. Mentions of soft landing in company conference calls or seems like it's very, very low, which means that people in business are maybe a little bit worried won't be a soft landing.

This terminology started being used very clearly. You can see it in this chart that we're looking at in 2022, where everybody was like, okay, things seem to be correcting. Can we, Is a soft landing possible? And objectively, at least, from a market standpoint, it happens. It happened. Yeah, but maybe we were.

So maybe you don't stop talking about it.

Maybe we land, we just sort of leveled out, right?

Yeah, yeah.

So I don't think that's necessarily the right data point, but the US Policy.

Uncertainty Index is at an all time high, and that makes sense. Everything feels very uncertain. But hopefully, you know, certainty around policy can happen very quickly. Like we can get certainty around these things. We saw that with the, with the Bitcoin Strategic Reserve. Like, it was very uncertain on Tuesday and then by Friday it was pretty certain. And so, you know, that's not that much turmoil in the market anyway. The Policy Uncertainty Index IS, based on US news articles, has soared. It recently hit its second highest level in data going back to 1985. The only time it was higher was in the early days of the COVID 19 pandemic. Even for businesses that are enthusiastic about the White House's deregulatory agenda, the whiplash of uncertainty could be causing problems, not knowing, for example, what products might be subject to tariffs and at what rate. We talked to Avi Sheffman yesterday. He said, I didn't want to make my product in China, I made it in Canada, and now I have a tariff on my product. And so that, that's a perfect example of uncertainty. You know, if you want to set up a new manufacturing plant, you might be in the wait and see mode right now. And that hurts investment, that hurts the economy, that slows things down. Right. And so consumer sentiment is dropping and the probability of delinquency is also on the rise. But this is a trend that's been going on for a few years now. Tiny bottles of liquor are flying off the US Store shelves, whiskey and tequila makers said sales are up for miniature 50 milliliter bottles, often called NIPs, as well as for 375 milliliter bottles, which are half the size of bottle.

So do they make historically a recession indicator?

Of course, because people stop going from, hey, we're throwing a party and we're getting a large bottle of alcohol to I need my alcohol, and I just need the cheapest thing possible because I'm living paycheck to paycheck. It's very sad. I would say stick to the 50 milliliter bottles of Dom Perignon if you can, if you're, if you're struggling. But yeah, it's, it's a tough, it's genuinely a tough recession indicator. And there's been a few others about what, what products have been slowing down in convenience stores. We looked at that in the Wall Street Journal earlier and, and it seems like people are buying less because, of course, even though inflation. We talked to delian about this. Truflation.com is showing that inflation is coming down. But again, inflation is a rate of change. And so we're not seeing deflation. So the prices are still high because once you go through a period of inflation, the prices are higher and they're not going back down. So the rate of inflation is declining, which is great, but that just means high prices forever, basically, unless they come down. That's the nature of these things. So people are starting to feel that and they're seeing that, hey, the economy and my salary is maybe not catching up with the higher prices. I'm going to buy less and then that slows down the economy. That's, that's certainly the.

Yeah. J.D. vance did an interview yesterday and he said, you know, a part of it's possible for the underlying sort of economy to be fine yet like this sort of fear and sentiment, you know, sort of takes over and people just start sort of anticipating a recession and then there ends up being like somewhat of a slowdown or like change in consumer behavior. Vance has taken a fairly hard line on this. He says yesterday, you can never predict the future. But I think the economy and the fundamental, the fundamentals of the economy are actually quite strong right now. Sort of his view, sort of his job. He's got to defend the policy coming out of the White House. But yeah, I mean, it's not that.

Unreasonable to think about the fundamentals. Like, if you think about previous recessions and depressions, they're built on, you know, massive bubbles popping, the dot com boom where so much money had poured into companies just making no money and then there had to be a retreat. Or you've built up this crazy house of cards on top of the real estate bubble and all of a sudden people have six homes in the desert that are just sitting empty. And. And right now you could point to a lot of things that feel frothy, but it's hard to say. Like the US economy is built on a house of cards right now. At least no one's concocted a strong thesis around that. So although there are nervousness and weakness, spots of weakness here and there, no one's really sounding alarm bells in the same way that Michael Burry did during the. During the housing crash.

Yeah, except random and on accounts.

Well, yeah. I mean, as you've said before, like, the most alpha you can possibly have is just tweeting top every single day.

Yeah.

And then eventually. Right.

Yeah.

And somebody. So I think Nikita tweeted top and like very much near the top. Right. Because like we're now, we're now off the highs and he looks like a genius, I guess.

I'm very excited to have Logan Bartlett on. In just three minutes. He's going to be walking us through a Red Point market update that they gave to their LPs. This will be interesting for March 2025.

Has he invested in any interesting like power law, fintech companies?

John, you know what, there's one that comes to mind.

Oh, which one is that?

I think the website. It's R A M P dot com.

That's a good domain.

Yeah, it's a good, great domain. And I think the company is pretty great too.

Yeah.

And what do they do at that. At that domain?

They're an all in one finance platform that saves companies time and money.

That's. Oh, I mean, that's great because time is money and you want to save both, right?

That's exactly right, John. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe. Maybe you could pull up some, some, some more info.

I mean, I'll just, I'll just pepper you with questions. They have corporate cards, right?

Yes.

Are they easy to use?

Absolutely.

Okay, what about bill payments?

They have that as well.

Accounting?

Yes.

Do they have a whole lot more?

They have a whole lot more.

Wow. And you're telling me it's all in one place?

It's all in one place.

Too good to be true.

But it's not.

It's not. It's not.

You can sign up and you can use it now.

And where would I go to do that?

Just go to ramp.com and tell them that the show formerly known as Technology Brothers.

Sent you.

Sent you.

Okay. And I think I'm getting it now. Really?

Cool.

Yeah, we should check this out.

But anyways, Logan actually invested in Ramp. I believe it was. We'll have to ask him. 20, 21. And he took a little victory lap when the new round got announced because they're back at a healthy multiple of where he invested at.

Yeah, I mean, in terms of like high status things in the Valley, it's really just, are you a ramp investor? And then above that, it's like, are you advertising Ramp? Yeah, that's the real. Like, maybe, maybe we can convince him to run some ramp ads soon because that would really like, broaden his appeal.

Yeah. His podcast right now is presented by his fund, Red Point.

Yeah.

But it made much better if it.

Was presented by Ramp. I think so.

That's right.

Let's try and get him to do some ad reads. Maybe we'll get him to do an ad read on, on this guest spot.

That's great. We should, we should have like a bucket poll for the, for the, for the guests.

I mean, we're having the Billboard guys come on to argue about AI. We got to do an ad quick ad in between that. Yeah, right in the most heated.

Right in the most heated moment.

If you're looking to get in a fight with another venture capitalist, go to ad quick.com, throw up a billboard on the 101, and you might just find yourself debating another VC on the TBPN show live. Anyway, how are we doing with Logan? Is he ready to come in? He is not ready to come in. Should we move on to some, to some bucket, pull some bangers, some random posts? Did you see this? This AI written email. I hear you're in New York. You have to check out Central park and catch a Broadway show. It's a blast. Ashley Meyer says, gee, I wonder if this vendor email was written by AI. Pretty ridiculous. It is. It is remarkable how, how low the bar is for some of these. It's maybe just like these funny.

New York is one of the. I mean, yeah. I mean, to me, AI should just focus on what actually matters and not focus on the sort of human connection piece. Because if you're sending like the whole point of this is to try to send a super high volume of outbound. That's sort of like superhuman level of outbound.

Yep.

And so every, you know, if, if one out of five messages, that's like using this sort of personalization feature is just like making somebody like not respect you?

Yep.

Like it's not, it's not great.

Yeah, it's kind of an unlimited downside situation, which I think is why a lot of, you know, Apple has been slow to adopt it and a lot of large organizations have been slow to adopt it. Figuring out the right level of like humans.

They've been that slow. Yeah, I mean, there's summarizer for imessage for you.

I, we. I want to talk to Bryce about that. Did you see he responded to my Apple Intelligence thing?

We got Logan Bartlett here.

What's up? How you doing?

Good. There he is.

Thanks for having me on.

It's great to have you. It's great to have you. How's the, how's the reception? Been to the market update? You getting any pushback or are, you know, VCs already sort of making threads based around your content and sort of making it their own?

Yeah, well, it's a, you know, we were done like a week or two ago with all the content and then obviously the market went crazy and we had to like redo, I don't know, 50% of the slides or something. So thankfully it didn't end up being too stale. We froze all the data on Monday and Tuesday, Wednesday it ended up actually being pretty tame in terms of the market trading. So I think people can rip off all the slides for their annual meetings that are coming up here in the next couple of weeks. We're happy to open source and take credit for it.

Give me the one liner. Is it so over? Are we so back? Are we poor? Are we rich? How are you feeling?

Private or public?

Let's start with public.

I don't know is not a great answer, but I would say it feels like we're in for a lot of bullshit that is flowing through the system and uncertainty just isn't a great thing for any business. And while it's not going to impact software companies or technology companies quite as much directly, like the end customers for a lot of these different businesses are going to be impacted in a meaningful way. And so until we get a little bit more clarity on to what end all of these things are being done and what sort of the end state is. I don't know how you price in anything going forward. And so now that obviously changes by the minute here. So it could be we're at some steady state here in the next couple days or hours or weeks or whatever it is, and this ends up all sort of feeling kind of stale. But right now I'm not, I'm not particularly optimistic about what's going on in the public markets. I heard some Morgan Stanley equity research person said that coming out of their conference, which is a week ago, they said it was the most negative sentiment that he had heard. I think with the exception of the onset of COVID in the last 10 years from people sort of like looking at the markets and I assume that's just a fact factor of uncertainty.

But yeah, yeah. Is there, do you think there's some sort of like Doge efficiency meme that's working its way through the market right now? Like I remember when Elon came into Twitter X, you know, laid off a ton of people, there was this big question about like, well, what other software companies could do something similar. But is that now that you're seeing it done at the federal level, are companies thinking like, hey, maybe we should pull back a little bit on the investing and scaling?

I think we've sort of seen it over the last couple years, or at least the last 18 months or so. If you go look, one of the slides that we put up in our deck was sort of the trade off that's occurred between growth and free cash flow. And to some extent that's the macro environment. But also I think it's just the knobs being pulled a little bit between layoffs and hiring freezes and all that. And so I think people have made the conscious decision that they can do more with, with less. And I think AI is only going to continue to pull that trend forward. Is it cutting to the bone like Doge maybe is doing or Twitter did? Probably, probably not. People aren't taking it to that extreme. But I do think people have really recognized that there's knobs that are a little bit more pullable than they would have appreciated otherwise. And I think, I mean if you look at the big software private equity folks, the Vistas and the Thoma Bravos of the world, like they've been doing this for the last 10, 15 years. I just think it wasn't something that people really tried to do in the public markets and now we're seeing that actually occur in a more meaningful way.

For you as a multi stage investor, what advice are you giving to the sort of average series A founder? In many ways we could have massive gdp, could go negative. But if you're a high growth software company that's just sort of hitting your stride, you can still thrive. How are you kind of advising your portfolio companies around sort of downstream capital? Because as Redpoint, you guys are also a fund that can participate in some of these later stage rounds as well.

Yeah, I would say that at least the last, I mean the last five years has sort of felt like. So I've been doing this now for been or 12 years in the last four or five have felt like twice as long as the first half of my career just in terms of all the changes that have occurred. That said, it does seem pretty uncorrelated what's going on at a high level macro with the early stage funding environment. I think to some extent what happened after 2000 was the sophisticated LPs really pulled out of the funds that they felt had gotten too bloated or too big. And that's happened this cycle as well. I think if you talk to smart endowments or pension plans or stuff, they've definitely as fund sizes have gotten to three, four, five, six billion dollars. Those people have raised eyebrows and maybe voted with their feet to either scale down or walk away from those funds. But there's a lot of other money that has willingly and excitedly run into those big fundraises. And so I think you're seeing sovereign wealth and Middle east people come into those funds and give them what, 2, 3, 4, $500 million. And so it ends up being a rounding error if a smart pension walks away or endowment walks away. So the way that impacts the startups, I think it's just at a very micro level. Continue to execute and the funding will be there. At least that's the way it seemed over the last couple years. And I guess it's true until it isn't. But all this stuff sort of feels outside of the control of the individual founders. And so I would encourage people not to worry too, too much about it.

Yeah. Related to that, I remember when the market crashed kind of around. I don't even know what we have the term for interest rate. Like post Zerp era. I think post zirp, you were talking to maybe it was Emil, Michael or someone. But about this idea of like there's a lot of dry powder and there was a lot of optimism from entrepreneurs being like, well the VCs have the money, they're going to have to give it to us anyway. And you were kind of explaining to folks, well, like the dry powder isn't necessarily sitting in their bank account. Like they have to make capital calls, the LPs might put pressure on them, like funds might get downsized. But it feels like maybe now the dry powder narrative was real and now like all the VCs figured out how to start deploying again and Deployment rates are up. But how do you tell the story of the post ZIRP era to where we are now in terms of just the pace of capital deployment?

Yeah, it's a great question. I would say I've been surprised at how consistent people have been able to fundraise and I think there was really a triaging or kind of a hollowing out of the middle that occurred. Or maybe the Tier B, if you will, a tier 2 funds where you saw a handful of those folks blow up or really struggle with their fundraisers in some way. But the names that everyone thinks about or knows, I think there was a concentration and consolidation of capital that came in. And then you couple that with some of our friends with seemingly endless amounts of oil money coming into the sector as well, and it just, it just sort of feels like we're in this new normal state where there's a lot of capital going around and I don't know exactly what's going to cause that to change. It feels like there wasn't a ton of reckoning for sins that were made in 2020 and 2021. It feels like people were able to get a mulligan and say, hey, you know what? Yeah, we got a little crazy, but now we've really doubled down and focused on what it is that we do seem, at least on the LP side, seem to be largely forgiving or if they're not forgiving, there's someone waiting to take their place.

Exactly.

In one of these name brand funds.

I mean, it feels like, yeah, there's gyrations and oscillations in the American early stage technology market, but where are you going to go if you don't invest in American technology?

It's sort of like we all read the same book. So you look at the founders today and like everyone's read Innovator's Dilemma or everyone's read like, like read the case study of blockbuster Netflix. And so we're dealing with a far more sophisticated entrepreneur that's executing or CEO that's executing on AI right now. And I think similarly, all the LPs studied what happened after 2000, 2001, that was actually a great time to lean into the asset class. And so now we're at this prisoner's dilemma where it would be theoretically a great time for everyone to lean in if other people backed out, because then prices would depress. But everyone's staying in and so it's actually leading to prices staying elevated, which has been interesting. I mean, I think in the last couple weeks it Feels like I've heard the meme or the refrain that it's like so 2021 or it's got 2021 vibes all over again. This was pre the last seven days and so I'm not exactly sure how that's going to play out, but that's definitely been the sentiment in the private markets from the VCs that I'm talking to is just sort of like, gosh, this feels like we're running this back and doing it all over again.

Yeah, I've had this feeling multiple times this year where a portfolio company is just raising like a big up round and depending on the lead, I'm just thinking like, wow, I really wish I could sell into this round. Like even though I'm a believer in the company, it's just like, you know, getting so far over and the narrative is always there. Right. Like I'm thinking of like one company in particular that will go unnamed. Like really, really strong narrative, really strong traction is just like setting prices at a point that, you know, basically pricing in the next, you know, potentially decade of growth. And if that's the case, as an investor, you ideally would want to get out and then just invest, you know, rotate into another illiquid because you're done.

You got your growth.

Do you guys?

Yeah, it's such a feature and a bug of the private markets that you're not like beholden to the mania and you sort of get to play a long game in anything you're doing that. When I talk to my private or my public market friends, like they're envious that, you know, you can take a morning off and not have your entire world implode versus the public markets. Like stuff can hit the fan and your entire day could totally change at a moment's notice. The flip side of that is you're really in for a long period of time and you don't get to say, well, I'll take a few chips off now because I think probabilistically there's a better opportunity that could come down. And it feels like this is a good risk adjusted return. That doesn't really. That's not as accepted in the private markets. I think increasingly though, we're finding some of the financial products for that. And I've seen more people or at least more opportunities to take a little liquidity. I'm not sure it's totally socially acceptable, at least for the institutional funds to do it. I think it's far easier if you're an angel. People are a little bit More understanding of that.

But it does feel like it comes down to volume, right. If I put 25k into a company and it does well and I want to sell the position, it's very different than you with we have a $400 million position here and we're rotating out, it's like there's probably not the demand, just one. I don't know if you feel even free to speculate on this, but something I've been confused by was the figure round getting priced around $40 billion. What in your mind do you think is the play there? Brett's last company spacked, you could imagine figure. I think a pure play humanoid stock would do well, at least a little bit, a little while in the public markets. But what do you think is some of these later stage companies that are still a ways out from like true commercial adoption. But you know, especially now with companies like Core Weave, you know, the Core Weave ipo, it seems unclear now if they're going to get out. But like, what's your read? Are any of these companies going to get out in the next year? Other than some of the bigger names like, like Chime?

I've heard so a few different things there, I guess I've heard. I don't know if you guys have heard different things with Core Weave in the last little bit, but it seems like there's a few people that are still kind of all systems go on IPO and are going to plow ahead. And Core Weave certainly doesn't ask my opinion, but if I were counseling them, it feels like just get out there. And I think having some AI story with, with probably a bunch of institutional managers that want exposure to some derivative direct trend of AI, I would say it's probably as good a time as any, especially when some of these bigger contracts are coming up in 2017, 2018. Get out. When you have a little bit of certainty of those cash flows coming from the Nvidias and the Microsofts and the OpenAI's of the world, I would encourage them to go on the figure things specifically.

So.

So I looked at Brett's business Vettery, which predates the last one I actually really enjoy. I haven't talked to him in, I don't know, eight years or something, but I really enjoyed that interaction. Now that was like a job marketplace or something. So very different than now he sort of become this like hard tech founder, which is interesting from a job marketplace thing. The thing that I don't totally understand about Figure in that round itself, and this is a common Phenomenon at the, not the end but at the peak of a lot of cycles is you end up with a lot of these SPVs getting formed in a meaningful way. And you end up with managers trying to get right bigger checks for rounds than their funds can actually hold. And so it's hard to know exactly what the incentives at play for some of those names. I don't even, I wasn't familiar with the names that they're talking about in leading those rounds. But it certainly seems from a fun size standpoint that those people probably can't step up and write those checks themselves. And so then you wonder what are the incentives at play for whoever is writing those checks? What are they thinking about and what is the executive team? What is their incentive to raise at this price?

All these things.

I looked at it as if you were going to price it at 10 and say this is a pre IPO round. We are going to basically we're planning to SPAC the company in the next year. We think it's going to pop. That type of round makes sense. But if you know you're pricing it at four times that roughly, it just feels like how do you actually get out of this? Who's going to get out of this position? Do the employees actually benefit? But that's just, you know, one example.

Skill issue SPAC at 80.

Why not?

Why not?

I do think there's this retail demand for, I mean if I were open a AI I would try to get out sooner rather than later. Right. Because I think there's this demand both from institutional and retail to have exposure to some of these things. And if you look, I mean palantirs where they're trading and obviously there's a bunch of different considerations around that business. But like I, I think that if you went out and floated just a small percentage of your, you know, your overall business, I think that there could be a lot of nice liquidity to fund a lot of the capex and, and you would trade at a really healthy premium. So it'll be interesting to see who of the big model companies actually tries to get out first.

Speaking of going public, do you want your private market investor competitors to go public? The general catalyst, you're like, yeah, I want you to go from.

I want to be able to see your fund returns. Yeah, disclosures are going to be.

It's an interesting thing. So our structure is not one that we can or ever will try to have the ambitions of doing that. I saw when people, there's certainly funds that act or either call themselves have leaders that are more akin to a CEO than they are investment partner or something like that. I think from a financial engineering standpoint and institutionalization of the asset class, I'm excited to see people try these things. The cynical side of it, when I compare a venture firm to a private equity firm and think about the incentives at play. So if you're a private equity firm, if you're Apollo or Blackstone or blackrock or whoever it is, right, you're this big entity, the people within your firm can't really leave and compete with you because there's so much institutional infrastructure around. One, the quantum of dollars that you actually need. But then two, the relationships with the debt providers, the ability to process the deals, the ability to get access through the bankers. You can't just go hang a shingle or go join another competitor to compete with Blackstone or Apollo or whatever it is, right? In venture, it's so beholden, I think at least to individuals. And individuals can walk out the door and they can go raise 100, 200, 300, $400 million and effectively compete with you in some way, shape or form. And so there was an information report, I don't know if it's true or not. Talk about GC moving from more carry to bonuses and I don't know if it's true. Information tends to do a pretty good job reporting I think. And that was reported alongside some people leaving the organization. And you just wonder as the incentive structures start to change and you start to be more institutional, how do you retain the quality of people? So at an intellectual level, I'm very interested to see how this plays out and I respect anyone that's innovating in some way, way on, on a structure that has been stuck in some version for a long, long time. I, I'm very curious about the practical implications of how it's going to work with like retaining individual talent and all that stuff.

Yeah, that's been, that's been my big question. If, if you're somebody that you know, wants to get into venture and you believe in your picking ability and you think you can be one of the greats, wouldn't you want to get the sort of maximum benefit of that by getting carry and being a part of a partnership versus you know, oh, I got, you know, I invested in the next slack and I got a one time little bonus.

Yeah, exactly.

Who knows how it'll work.

But I can imagine, especially since the next option, if you can't compete, then it's fine. You're kind of Locked in Goldman bankers or Morgan Stanley bankers or Apollo mds or whatever. It's hard for them to get the scale to go out and really compete. And sometimes they do and sometimes they don't. But that RSU structure, bonus structure kind of works. When you can't really walk out the door and hang a shingle and compete venture, you kind of can. And so I think it's, if you're good, you can go raise. We see a lot of these solo capitalists or whatever, like small 3, 4, $500 million funds out there. And so I think, I don't know, retaining talent is going to be an interesting thing to see.

Have you, like, last question on this point. Have you seen solo, the sort of solo GPS overpaying to win deals? Because like, that's something like, you know, sometimes you see these sort of obvious power law companies, like the Andurils of the world with Elad Gil sort of like, you know, leading rounds. And that, that makes, that makes sense. I think there's sort of consensus now that Anduril is going to be a really massive company. But when you see a solo GP come in and write $100 million plus check, does that ever, you know, you know, what's your, what's your read on that? Because from my perspective, sometimes those marks don't even feel real. When, when you're, you know, there's something to be said of like, okay, red point, like underwrote this and like, you know, they're like an organization and a firm. And it's not just like, you know, one or two major, you know, so how do you, how do you look at those rounds? And I'm sure oftentimes you're, you're competing to win those rounds.

Yeah, it's. So I guess I've seen less of that phenomenon than probably 2021. And I would have to rack my brain a little bit to think about like the big institution or institutional. Institutional solo capitalists are. I think those terms are directly at odds with one another. But the big solo capitalists that can write those checks, I mean, can obviously do that. And he's the one that certainly comes to mind. I would say, honestly, there's been some firms that have continued to scale where I've probably seen that more than any individual kind of solo capitalists out there. And I think there was this thing where in 2020, 21, it felt like we rotated to the brand where we lived in this world where everyone was, was just a zoom screen away. And so, you know, Marc Andreessen and douglione and Keith Raboy and whoever was, was. Could be in the room as quickly as I could be in the room, because time and space weren't really constraints at all. And so in that world, I think there was a big gravitation to the big institutional funds because it was like, oh my gosh, I'm going to get Marc Andreessen involved. And that's amazing, right? It feels like we've rotated a little bit more back to like, who is my individual board member who is going to be on the ground with me day to day. Like I'm going to solve. Solve for that person rather than the sole, like just the brain past a certain point, right? Like, obviously you must be this call to ride the ride with some, some things. And so you got to have enough credible brand as an institution. But then it comes down to the individual a little bit more. And so I would say I've probably seen more than the solo capitalist thing. I've probably seen more of, hey, this fund has a bunch of money and you might not be getting their number one person. It could be their, you know, whatever, their. Their reliever out of the bullpen that in to do the round. And those are the ones that they're like, really juicing the price a little bit on these things because they want the asset in that way. So I think that's something that I've seen more and more of of late.

I want to go back to the innovator's dilemma, and I heard you on a podcast maybe two years ago, right when the ChatGPT moment was happening, debating, is AI a sustaining innovation or disruptive innovation? How do you sit with it now? How are you seeing it get adopted in the public markets and what narratives are taking hold there?

I still feel like there's an analogy that was made to me about Google and it was talking about the Americans in World War II, that we got every opportunity to ultimately do the right thing and come into the war and help determine the outcome. I think that was the analogy I had heard about Google with AI that like, they have all the things to their advantage, be it the distribution of Google SEO, be it YouTube content, be it what, whatever it is like the talent, the team, the dollars, all of that stuff, to like, figure this out. Ultimately, we'll see if that actually proves to be the case. But I do think that that is largely true of a lot of. A lot of the incumbents in different sectors. And, and so the analogy that I think I used back then, I think is still True is like if you go back and look at the Salesforce and mobile, that was still Salesforce. It was just like a mobile app of Salesforce. And if you go look and kind of go down the line, like how did Netflix or Facebook. There wasn't like a mobile Netflix. I mean, I guess you could say TikTok is mobile Netflix in some ways, but there wasn't a pure play mobile Netflix like a Quibi that came out and was actually disruptive in some ways. And there wasn't Facebook. Maybe Instagram was the one that kind of hopped on being that. But still it was like, like it wasn't totally net new surface areas that ended up manifesting themselves around that stuff. Or at least it wasn't immediately in the fullness of time. Maybe it could have been if Instagram had stayed independent or what TikTok's been able to do. I think that seems to be the case here today, where we're going to see these things that are new and novel within AI. And I draw Akin to the Ubers or the WhatsApps or whatever it is, where these businesses that couldn't have been possible without AI are going to form a lot of independent equity value, but a lot of it's going to be captured by incumbents in some ways. And I think in mobile, Apple and Google probably captured the lion's share of equity value that was created by the mobile iPhone or whatever. Those were the ones that really, through the App Store and the actual phones, they captured a lot of it. And I think in large part, maybe with the exception of OpenAI, the vast majority of the equity value will probably end up accumulating to the Facebooks and the Microsofts and the, the Googles and I guess OpenAI as well. But I still think we'll end up with hundreds of billions of dollars of equity value created for the derivative companies, akin to the ubers and the WhatsApps and whoever else.

Yeah, I had this take I was noodling on yesterday about it feels like Apple's missing the AI moment, but does it matter? Because Microsoft missed mobile and they still made it work. How do you feel things are going with Apple Intelligence? Obviously that Jon Gruber article kind of shook everyone to their core. Do you think they're in trouble or is it overhyped or where's the narrative sitting with you these days?

So the Gruber thing, I mean, obviously Gruber's like the goat of Apple coverage. And so you gotta take everything he says almost like biblically. In some ways. That's the Canonical gospel of, of Apple takes.

But.

I have always hated Siri. I have always hated it. And then the Apple intelligence thing and the summarizations on the text, I mean I love that only as a meme. Like I enjoy screenshotting it and sending it back to my friends. That's the best use case of Apple Intelligence I've seen. And so when making fun of your product is like the best instantiation of your product, it's probably not, you know, you're not on a good trajectory there culturally. It just feels, and this is, this is probably more, you know, John Gruber or Ben Thompson than what I profess to know about, but it just feels antithetical to Apple's culture to execute on AI in the way that I think you need to. They are very like measure 35 times and cut once and let's do this all secretively and let's try to control the ecosystem and keep everything insular in some ways. And that is just so antithetical to AI. And AI is about proliferation and getting it out there and getting the data and taking the feedback loops and moving fast and trying new things and iterating and like I just think that's directly at odds with who they are. And so I don't know how you change that. I guess to your question, does it actually matter?

I don't know.

They have such lock in. Right. Is Apple, what is Apple's market cap today? I mean, is it like a trillion, trillion dollar business? Sorry, $3 trillion business. Yeah, 3.2 trillion. It's like I think they're probably going to mess this up and I'm not sure it's going to matter for them as a business. And I think the sooner they realize that, that they won't be able to execute on it. The sooner we get these things in our product as a, you know, as a partnership, rather.

Yeah, just open up the APIs and let the, let the ecosystem flourish and you know, let me change out the button for a different series.

Well, the other.

Lose that. But it's fine. I still buy the phones.

The other thing that nobody really talks about anymore because it just hasn't been possible is M and A. Yeah. Apple has so much cash if there are breakout, you know, consumer like products that make sense as part of the Apple ecosystem. There's a, there's a world in which they could actually just buy those companies.

And everyone quotes the 60 billion on their balance sheet or something. But Apple has returned over a trillion dollars of cash over the last like 14 years. Like it is a cash generating machine at a scale.

I don't think we ever seen their acquisitions. I think that's probably a better use of capital than what they bought to date. They've not been the best suppliers. You know, it's crazy though. I mean they were. Siri was acquired for them like I don't know, 13 years ago or something. 14, like they were early on all of this stuff. And so clearly there's some like broken execution elements at least within how they've gone about it to date, which might not matter in the grand scheme of things.

It's a deterministic culture, not a probabilistic culture. And so it's misaligned with AI.

I like that. That is very Ben Thompson or Ben Evans of you.

I'm trying to be. Be more pithy.

Yeah, I like it, I like it.

We got really no time left, but I wanted to give you an opportunity to talk about ramp you when, when they announced the new fundraise, you, you kind of like were poking a little bit of fun at yourself because you, you did, you basically you got found.

The local top but not the global top.

Well, and I think you invested a couple times during.

I did, yeah.

We invested a billion and then like three and a half and then or whatever. Eight, two or something. Yeah, it was a long run from there. Funny enough, that round that we ended up investing in at whatever 8 billion or 8 and a half or whatever it was, what's a couple hundred million among friends. But that was like December 21st when we were talking about it. And then the round ultimately closed in January or February or something. And so it was really last boat off the island in terms of internally the zero interest rate kind of mindset. And the thing that I've learned, and this wasn't. This has been the last five years for me basically since I. So I joined Redpoint in, in December of 19, officially started in March of 20. And what, what, what I've realized is like price very rarely within some zone has, has mattered. And when I find myself iterating a little too much on, on like, oh, I'll do it at this price versus that price, it probably says something about what I think the ultimate outcome for the business can be and when, when it's been the investments that have worked the best are the ones in which I'm like, I don't know exactly how this is going to play out or where the ceiling is on how this company can execute, but I just need to be in business with these people and let's, let's just see where it goes from there. And obviously that's easier when you're talking hundreds of millions than it is low single digits, which is easier than high speed single digits, which is easier than double digit billion dollars. But like that mindset is one that I've internalized where it ultimately says something about the quality of the company. If you really think too, too hard about the difference between this price or that price. And so the funny thing about the Ramp investment was the entire time for the last three years, I was like telling our team internally, I don't know when this is going to stop growing or what the ceiling for this can be. And at some point we're going to get to the other side of what that round was a couple of years ago. And so that was the first public validation that it really felt like we had crossed that chasm a little bit. I think probably nine months ago, a year ago, it sort of felt like an inevitability that we weren't going to get stuck at some maximum that was beyond that. But yeah, I mean the team just continues to execute at a level that I've never really seen before. And I know you guys know them well and so it's been a fun one for me to be a part of and kind of work alongside side.

Well, this conversation has been presented by Ramp. Like every conversation.

Go to ramp.com to sign up corporate cards.

All my conversations quite literally are presented by Ramp. I think my ability to do this job at this point is presented by Ramp in some capacity. So you guys have quite literally the ad play for it, but I, yeah, they keep me in business as well.

That's amazing. Thank you so much for coming on. When's your next. Are you going to do is this report. I feel like I see him twice.

A year or is it once a year is usually. I mean this, this one I think took a lot out of our team internally. There was a lot of late nights and weekends on this one. So I think we're going to give our folks a little bit of time, a little bit of respit before we run it back. But who knows? I mean the market keeps up, we get more tariffs, we, we get things a little crazy. Maybe we'll need to come out of the woodwork and you know, when the theme music plays, you got to immerse for sure.

Last, last question for you. We have Sam Lesson and Seth. Seth Rosenberg from Greylock coming on and slow. Coming on to debate AI in about an hour. Who's who do you think's gonna win?

Let me give you guys a little bit of advice. As someone that has moderated a debate with Sam lesson before, let me give you guys a little bit of. I would, I would encourage.

If you.

If you have mute buttons on microphones, I would encourage you to jump in and try to steer the conversation. Don't be a passive participant.

I remember this one.

People tend to be really mean to you when you do that. And you let him.

Let.

Let the filibustering go on between him and let's say, I don't know, Zach Weinberg, theoretically. So I would encourage you guys to be active participants in that conversation.

We're excited. We got our boxing gloves. We're gonna throw them on. We're gonna get the mix.

Hey, guys, keep up the great. I'm a huge fan of what you guys are doing. I appreciate. Anytime you want me, I'm here.

Thanks.

Welcome.

Yeah.

All right, guys. See you.

Bye.

Yeah, Good fun.

Did you.

Yeah, we got to get the. Get the mute button ready.

Have you seen that? What he's referring to with Zach Weinberg, they were debating crypto. It was Sam lesson versus Zach Weinberg. And Sam was making the case that, like, every real assets should be on chain and your mortgage should be on chain. And like, this is the future. Everything will be crypto. And Zach is just like, okay, like, walk me through that at an extreme level of detail. Like, how does this work legally? How does. How do the taxes on the land work? Like, all these things. And they just went at it. And Sam was just going super, super hard, talking, talking, talking. And then he kept being like, I gotta go. Cause it's kid bedtime. Like, I really. I really gotta go. But then he wouldn't let Zach get the last word, so that he'd be like, he'd want to like drop another filibuster on him. Like, really frustrating for everyone. And I guess people gave Logan some. Some negative feedback because he wasn't. He wasn't aggressive on the moderation enough. But I thought it was a great. I found it very, very entertaining to watch. So I had a good time anyway. Should we do some good time? Some posts, some ads? All of the above over the next few minutes before Kian joins us from Nucleus.

Yes.

The shot. The chaser from Xor Swap. The shot. Claude Thinking and Zero1Pro have replaced all university instructors for me. I can no longer watch any pre recorded videos. And then the chaser is. I bombed my second linear algebra midterm.

Ouch.

Two days later, that's so funny.

And word grammar. Friend of the show says math is best learned from textbooks and practice problems, not from Claude, but also not from lectures. So, yeah, just hit the books.

Yeah, I remember. I mean, this is train up to Silicon Valley from Pasadena. Took me like 12 hours, but I had a textbook on natural language processing, like the precursor to LLMs. This is back in like 2012, 2013. And I just sat there and just read this whole textbook and taught me a lot. I really enjoyed it. Very interesting textbook.

Textbooks are underrated when it gets to getting potentially goaded when learning is the vibe.

Yeah, textbooks are goaded.

No, I think the good thing for Sean is that the models are going to get better. And the good thing about the real world is nobody really cares if you're using an LLM for specific answers, as long as you can do a little bit of thinking yourself. Yeah.

And you should be able to generate something. I mean, all the textbooks at this point have been scraped into these LLMs. You should be able to get the LLM to essentially just reproduce exactly the text that's in the textbook. Now, maybe that's IP infringement, but you can certainly get the facts. The question is, were you just sitting there chatting and making it feel like you were learning? It seems like you didn't. You didn't actually get all the information into your brain.

Yeah.

But good luck on your next midterm. Let's go to Paki McCormick. He says today much of the global GDP is not computer. Soon, everything is computer. This is the opportunity. Funny, because there's. It's true. But I was thinking about the everything's computer. Everything is computer thing. And I think it. I like the phrase more as a possessive than a contraction. So the actual quote is a contraction. He was saying everything is a computer, basically, and then he dropped the A and it was everything, everything's computer. Everything's a computer. But I prefer the everything's computer as like, what is the computer of everything? It's like this, like, you know, hive mind.

AI.

Like, yes. What we're building is everything's computer. It belongs to everything. And that just tells you, like this. This very weird, futuristic, networked, mega computer that controls everything. It sounds even more sci fi at that point. Let's stay with Paki.

Yeah, I mean, like one more thing on this. I think this is the opportunity and why so many people that were traditionally software investors are excited about investing in hard tech or the real world as a category. When you look at some of these, some of the biggest recent outcomes the sort of flock safeties, the anderals or these companies that have are software is critical to the business, yet there's a major sort of real world component.

Yeah.

And you know, I think that's just going to come continue to be where some of the bigger outcomes are.

Yeah. Thiel had a good riff on this where he was like, I keep investing in companies that aren't the Internet and then they make money from the Internet like SpaceX. It's like a launch business. But Starlink is an Internet company and it's just like I keep going. It's like he's co founder of OpenAI, eventually invested in the business. It's a consumer Internet company now and maybe that's where the value is. And so there's all these weird things where you just keep coming back to the Internet is this ultra powerful force and the more you align yourself with it, so your capitalism and the economy just kind of naturally pulls every company towards that. And flock safety is like, yeah, we're a camera manufacturer but without the Internet, our company would be worth way less.

We originally wanted to be a newspaper and everybody said, hey, technology, hey, why.

Don'T you put this on the Internet? That's really the way to get ahead.

Head.

Should we stay on pack? He goes his breakdown. What a week for the optimists.

Devastating week for the pessimists.

Devastating. He breaks it down in his fantastic newsletter. He says, solar and wind pass coal in the United States. That's a big milestone. The United States continues to mog all in liquid natural gas exports. NASA launches a mission to study the sun. I like that. That's interesting. I don't know what they're trying to get out of that. I want to know more about what the goal of studying the sun is. They're like, they come back and they're just like, it's Bryce.

So basically, you know how people started.

Going well over there?

Oh, yeah, Huberman, the whole Austin crowd.

Sure, sure.

I don't think Huberman has recorded.

It was like the meme was like, wake up, get some sunlight. It's like, get outside, get some sunlight. People like circadian rhythm stuff.

The sort of start of community in Austin. Started staring at the sun directly.

Yep.

Sort of maybe getting some benefit from that. NASA's basically saying, you know, we see some opportunity here. They haven't gone blind quite yet. We should maybe check it out ourselves.

We should check it out ourselves. Yeah. Gavin Newsom launched a podcast and Packy says, hear us out.

Yeah. So this was cool. Lulu's analysis of this was fantastic. Which Gavin Newsom. The Gavin. My read on Gavin Newsom is he'd maybe start a podcast and he would just have people that agreed with him on. He's taking the opposite of inviting basically his political enemies on the show. And it's very humanizing. You know, he's. He's got. He's always been an incredible. A much better public speaker than he has been. You know, operator, I would say. Sure. Like, he's good with his words.

Yeah.

And I think the strategy is really smart. And I think, you know, you're. You were, you know, when we started this show, you. You probably said multiple times on the show, like, the person that does the most hours podcasting will win the election.

It's all about attention. Attention is all you need.

Gavin heard you say that. Probably he got the memo.

The podcast election.

No, but I think it's always smart. You know, the joke is like, the world doesn't need more podcasts, but there still is white space.

Exactly.

Ways to come in and get an ad.

And no one was doing this, which is an actual elected official divide. Talking across the aisle to some of the characters who have been labeled extreme. I mean, Steve Bannon is a very controversial issue, Very controversial figure. Not normally platformed by even centrist media, mainstream media. But he. I think Bannon did a. Did an interview with the New York Times. The New York Times also had Marc Andreessen, who they've written very negatively about in the past. And they also had on Courtesy Arvin, who in the past has been extremely controversial and someone that was not platformed by the mainstream media. But something is certainly changing.

Well, John, do you know what happened around five years ago?

What?

California Governor Gavin Newsom was photographed wearing a Rolex Kermit. Wow. Which you can get on.

On bezel shop. Over 23,500 luxury watches fully authenticated in house by Bezel's team of experts. Go to getbezel.com shop around and find your next hitter.

Apparently, Newsom is. Is a Panerai guy.

Oh, really?

But every now and then he'll step out. I think he's. He's got a lot of attention. Right. People kind of judge a lot of his fashion decisions. He had these. It's very sad time. But he had this sort of like, custom. All this custom gear for the fire where he'd like pop up and be on.

Yeah.

On camera. Like, really like you. You got that like. Like specifically stitched to kind of like larp. As like a firefighter.

Is sometimes it works. Sometimes he's taking risks, you know, Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

Yeah.

Anyway, we got Keon from Nucleus coming on the show soon. Let's check in with producer Ben and see if he's on. I think we got a couple more minutes. Let's move on to another post. Project Europe is a joke, says Arnie Ramesh. It's not the Thiel Fellowship for Europe if they take 6.6% equity for 200k. Surprised so many European founders are on board. Maybe for visibility. $10 million fund size, LOL and average US seed round. Make it non dilutive, then I'm all for it.

And Kari Saarinen, very European mindset to just be like. Just give away money. Yeah, just give away money.

They get non dilutive. I mean, the Thiel Fellowship is non dilutive because it's a nonprofit, but at the same time.

Sure, but it's. But they're trying to.

Asking for a handout.

Yeah, they're trying to stimulate for profit. The founding of for profit companies.

It's fine to just do it as a seed fund. It's fine. I don't know. I haven't dug into it too much. But let's read this critique from Kari Saarinen.

This is the founder of Linear.

Okay.

I set up a linear account for us to do some project management stuff yet, but we'll see if we get you on there. Okay, but I'll read through it. So Carrie or Curry says, I think your critique is overly harsh and frankly reflects the kind of attitude that holds Europe back. Initiatives tend to get criticized unless they meet some impossible standard or align with absolute ideals set by someone. Is this the best deal globally? No, but by European standards, it's probably average. I see seed rounds at 20% for one to one and a half million, led by reputable VCs. Personally, I'd rather raise less with simpler terms and go through these seed rounds. But everyone is their own economic actor and can decide which deals to take or pass on. Someone has to provide the capital and there isn't the teals to provide the capital in Europe. You're also overlooking history in a lot of contexts. You're comparing something just starting now to YC, which began 20 years ago. YC's original deal was 6% for 20K and it stayed that way for a long time. None of the perks you mentioned even existed back then. What you got was PG's chili once a week and some advice. Priceless chili. When I went through YC in 2012, the deal was 7% for 125k. The whole premise of YC and whether the economics made sense was simply about whether it could make your company at least 7% more successful. If Project Europe can do the same, then it's worth considering. So very interesting. I'm in favor of Project Europe. We've also been working on our own Project Europe. Yeah, Internally at the show, which is going to Europe.

Going to Europe.

Three months south of France, wine tour, doing. Doing the podcast, spending lots of time on boats, doing the podcast from the continent. You know, making Europe great again, one show at a time.

Seven, spend 6, 6.6% of your time in Europe. That's the real Project Europe. Anyway, we got Keon in the waiting room. Let's bring him in. How you doing? Welcome to the temple of technology.

What up?

What's up, man?

Hooligans. The mods of pods. I'm ready, John. I'm ready for you right now.

Let's go, let's go. It's great to talk to you. Great to see you. I don't think I've seen you in person since Miami, but give me the breakdown. Tell the fans who you are and what Nucleus is and then what you announced today.

Yeah. So my name is Keon, founder, CEO of a company called Nucleus Genomics. We're the world's most advanced DNA health test, single swap, single test. You can screen for over a thousand conditions. And today, oh, my God, it's chaos in the headquarters in the best way.

Okay.

We have launched genetic matchmaking. Okay? So now you can family plan far more effectively. You can make sure every single couple in this country has healthy children. It is absolutely amazing. It's already blowing up on Twitter. John, have you seen the video?

I have not seen the video.

Esque video. Can you pull the video up right now? Can you pull the video up right now?

I will. I will share with Ben and hopefully we can.

We can pull it up and watch it. Have you been. Are you in a relationship? Have you been testing this yourself? Have you been getting on that?

Are you dog fooding this?

Dog fooding this?

I am dog foodie this. Real time.

Let's go.

It's funny because we were thinking about, like, should we block same sex couples or not? You know, because we figured that in the future you should be able to independent of sex, you know, be able to have, you know, children. For now, it is sex block, so it has to be male to female. Sorry about a lot of tech bros out there. I know that might be hard for Some of you guys. But when you find the one, when you find the special someone one, you can do Nucleus and it is going to be amazing.

What is the actual flow for Nucleus? Is it a cheek swab? I mail it in, break it, swab.

Yep.

You get to get a DNA kit that looks like this. You open it up inside, there's a cheek swab. You take the cheek swab, you go sticking to two, non invasive. You can do it at home, no doctor's office involved. Goes to a laboratory, laboratory processes DNA. Out comes a raw DNA file which then we run through all our analysis, which is honestly like a. Like this is. People do not appreciate how much of a feat of science, engineering this is. There's a couple people I have to thank here. First and foremost, Gregor Mendel, late 19th century.

Let's go.

Thank you for playing with those P's.

He did not know when he played.

This piece, you know, you know, you know, he. He had like an extraordinary statistical intuition, you know, he had no idea what DNA was. He was completely abstracted. There was no molecular basis. Just playing with the piece went all the way to the, you know, Hershey Chase experiment. Shot to that experiment, Watson, quick identifying the structure of DNA. Of course, the Human Genome Project, right? A massive government project. Billions of dollars in investment, thousands of scientists. This product is now live in anyone's hands.

It's a short line from Gregor Mendel in 1866 to nucleus being promoted at the Jake Paul fight. So it is a very short line. If you can see it now, we'd be great.

Ben, you're live streaming right now. Let's see if this video works.

Yeah, yeah, we got the video here.

This is a day I've been looking for, forward to for four and a half years. But really, today's product announcement is the culmination of decades of scientific, medical and genomic progress spanning thousands of scientists and billions of dollars in investment. Hence, today I'm so excited to show you the next chapter of preventative health. Family planning through genetic matching. Imagine knowing every possible outcome for you and your. Your partner's future children, starting with their hereditary risks. Through Nucleus, you have the power to end preventable disease in your future family long before you even decide to have children. To show you how easy this is, I'm going to sync my results with my good friend Molly o'.

Shea.

Let's go.

Hey, Molly, what's up?

Perfect timing.

I just opened up my nucleus to see my results.

I've got to say, the UI looks really good. Good.

Oh, that's so nice.

You know, we really spend as much time as possible to build beautiful products. And by the way, aren't you one of the first people who did Nucleus? I mean, do you think maybe we're going to be a genetic match?

Definitely.

Let's find out.

Seeing if you're a genetic match is almost as easy as seen if you're a match on a dating app. I'm going to show you exactly how. Here are my Nucleus family results, which just came out. I haven't synced with Molly yet, so you can actually see. My kids may be at risk for cystic fibrosis, but the only way to find if Molly and I are actually going to pass down this risk to our kids is by syncing our results. Let me show you how this works. Just click add Partner and confirm that your partner's done. Nucleus Molly has. Of course. So I click yes. We're about to find out if we're a match. Molly, are you ready?

Yep.

Let's see.

Oh, my God.

We're a match.

This is amazing. Molly, are you still there?

Shocking.

Have to break up.

Okay, well, we'll come back to Molly later, but let's talk about what just happened on the back end. Nucleus scanned our combined genomes for nearly a thousand conditions that we could have unknowingly passed down to our children. From here, Molly and I can dive deeper into the specifics of our results. In reality, nine out of ten parents have a genetic risk that they could pass down to their children. And one in 25 people have a genetic marker for cystic fibrosis. So what would happen if Molly had a genetic marker for cystic fibrosis? We have good news. We've been hard at work for something that we think will fundamentally change family planning forever. We can't share too much yet, but imagine if you could learn not just about the diseases you could pass passed on to your children, but also where they're going to look and act more like mom or dad.

More on that soon.

At Nucleus, we believe that anyone, anywhere should have the choice to access genetic insights to make more informed decisions about their health.

Okay, so the big question. Do we have him back? Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, you there? I think we got to unmute him. Let's see. We're juggling things. Can we hear you? Keon?

I can hear you. Can you hear me?

Yep.

The big question.

First thing. How was that video? Huh? Goes hard, right?

Yeah. Very clear. Very clear. I really liked how efficiently everything's communicated. The transitions are cool, but it's not all style. There's substance there. Very well executed. Good job.

When the big question, John and I are both married, but if somebody, if one of our listeners is dating, you know, somebody, when's the right time, the right time to say, all right, pull out like, let me see your cheek. We got to do a quick swab.

We got to do a swab.

Look, look, look, look. There's. There's many ways in doing this, right? If you're dating someone already, it's okay. You know, you do nucleus. You see if you have a genetic risk or not. If you're, if you both have a genetic issue, the same thing, you can do ivf, there's other reproductive options. You're going to be good. You know, the risk exists so you can prevent the risk. Risk. The whole point of genetics, right? But also there's a world where, listen, maybe you're a tech route, they listen to this podcast. You don't have the special someone yet. No worries. You sit down, you say, you know, you know, what college you go to, you know, they tell you whatever you say, okay, nice. You know, what do you do? You know? And then you say, have you done a Nucleus test?

There you go, there you go.

I mean, you got to break it to them. You got to say, listen, you got to make sure the genes are aligned because why would you get into this business in the first place, right? You'd want to get deeper into it if the genetics are not matched, right? I mean, you don't want to be carried the same thing.

You see people throwing up their Nucleus results like on dating apps, like, just look, just look at these.

That's the future maybe. What do you think?

I mean, I think, I think we believe in kind of individual liberty. I think genetics should be integrated with dating apps. And if someone, you know, ops in and should say, hey, I don't be match with someone that's also care for a rare genetic marker is actually done in different communities. The Ashkenazi Jewish community, they do this all the time. Actually don't match people who are the same Rare genetic marker. So 100%. I think you should indicate dating apps do mass preconception testing. DNA is becoming, as you guys know, cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. One of the greatest decrease in costs ever. Combining that with AI is going to be magic. Mass integration with different dating apps. I think you're able to save a lot of babies lives.

What about flipping it around? Obviously the genetic markers for diseases are very, you know, you want to avoid those, but, you know, I already have kids. But I could imagine that my son, when he goes to have his own child, my future grandchildren, might want to optimize for a grandchild who's, you know, going to be a future bodybuilder, let's say. And we want to make sure that, you know, they're just matched up so they can go to the Arnold, the most proud grandpa ever, and just absolutely look diced, you know, massive. Put on 300 pounds of pure muscle. And he wants to make sure that his wife is setting their kids up for success. Will Nucleus help with that?

Great question. So first things first, I'll say is, John, he has a good father, because you're like, seven foot tall. The genes are good. The genes are good. He already has already inherently. He's good.

Yes, yes.

But, you know, it's funny you actually asked this, because at the end of the video there, I, you know, I left a little teaser in there about something that's coming out. Let's just say, you know, there's something about, you know, maybe, you know, you don't want to just simulate people's disease risk, but also maybe you want to simulate what your baby's going to look to act like. And, you know, when you start thinking about whole genome sequencing, you can start maybe thinking about, can you actually simulate procreation? Oh, wink, wink, nudge, nudge. And let's just say, you know, John, we're shipping. We're shipping like crazy. It's like. It's like hysteria in the Nucleus headquarters we're building at the Frontier Genetics. You know, I hear, like, sirens going off, gongs being hit. It's completely chaos in here.

Yeah. So, so, so, so, so it feels like, you know, I think that the consensus now is that 23 and me walk. So you guys could take us to the moon. Like, what? Like, how far can you. How far can you take this? Right? Because, like, the first step is, like, giving people the data, and then you're. Then you're trying to, like, influence. Influence outcomes. Like, how. How much does this sort of Nucleus platform expand? What is the, like, $10 trillion vision for the business? Because I know you're that ambitious.

Yeah. So, you know, it's like Blockbuster versus Netflix. It's like, you know, BlackBerry, iPhone. That's the moment that's happening in genomics right now. And the beauty of the genome, what everyone's starting to appreciate is that the basically marvel of engineering and science that it is, because if you think about it, when you actually read someone's entire genome, it's not just disease risk assessments that you can actually think about. It starts to become about family planning, about procreation simulation, about what drugs actually work best for you, what supplements work best, best for you. And even about the long, different traits that you can analyze from, from IQ all the way to muscle strength. You start realizing that the integration of the genome simply has not happened yet in society, Right. If you take a poll of, you know, 300 million Americans and look at how many have been sequenced, right? Basically none of them have. And you talk about one of the greatest innovations ever, which is the decrease in causes, sequential genome. By far the single highest density, highest consequential piece of health information that exists, because it's literally your DNA. It's the entire thing. And it's not integrated in medicine, in lifestyle, or in dating. I mean, the opportunity is massive. And this test today costs $400. I'll make a prediction right here on Technology Brothers within five years. This test. Couple dollars.

Couple dollars. I said couple dollars.

You heard it. You're amazing. Amazing.

Congratulations. Where can people get it?

So. So last question is, are we going to have a way to test if somebody's nice with it or got that dog in them or is cracked? Because you seem like you're definitely nice with it. You definitely have that dog in you and you seem cracked.

Interesting. So we have found consistently, okay, that founders who do nucleus tend to be very high in their schizophrenic disposition. Okay. So personally, I'm in the 99 percentile.

I'm rocking it.

Maybe. I'm seeing. I'm telling you right now, that's how it is. I swear, you look at Alexis. Shouts my man Alexis, one of our lead investors, super high schizophrenic. A lot of other founders I know, super high schizophrenics. That's public, by the way. That's public, by the way. Public. I would never just expose. Shout out to Alexis there. And so if you want, you gotta look to see what schizophrenic. In fact, one interesting study showed that they ran these different models across every single phenotype, and they compared across different careers. By far the highest predictive one was actually schizophrenia. But it was for artists, which is very similar to entrepreneurs, though. So, you know, that's something to do if you're low adhd, super low ADHD associated with doctors and lawyers. So, you know, there's something there. You know, you got that dog in you. Maybe it's in your DNA.

I love it.

I love.

Amazing.

Well, where can people go get it? Where can people order a tank?

Mynucleus.com Mynucleus.com family if you're a couple, you want to have healthy children, that's where you should go. Follow me on Twitter. Yeah.

You're amazing. You're amazing. This was fun. I've actually never. We've never talked, and I'd love to have you back on whenever there's.

Whenever there's genome news, just bio correspondence.

Join this exact link. Like, don't even, you know. Yeah, yeah.

Hey, there's news. You tell us. Yeah. Amazing, man. Well, congratulations on the launch. We'll talk to you soon.

Talk soon.

Have a great day.

Thanks, guys. Bye.

Have a good weekend, too.

Amazing.

I think genetics might explain why a single inorganic blueberry would kill you on the spot. And yet I could eat a credit card with a fork and knife and just be unaffected. So I think we got Josh diamond coming in.

Speaking of microplastic haters.

Yo, yo.

How you doing? How are you doing?

Good, good.

Welcome to the show. We got Josh Steinman in the building in the temple of technology. Give us an update. Is it a good morning, and are we going to win?

All signs point to yes.

Oh, fantastic. Fantastic. How's it going?

It's good, it's good. How are you guys?

We're good.

You want to know, you want a little show lore? I definitely put one of your initial good morning, we are going to win podcast posts. Into the. Into the stacks. Early days. And then I put another one in about a week later, and John was like, wait, you put this back in? I'm like, yeah, we're still.

Yeah, we're still winning. It's still a good learning to remember. So we've done those tweets, like, three times already.

And I've. And I've talked about it on the show before. I think there's this, you know, founders will say something once and feel like they've said it, and you're not realizing that, you know, a lot of the long. The return is in the sort of long tail of just drilling this idea. And I really feel like it's become movement.

The David Senra thing. You're not advertising to a standing army. You're advertising to a marching parade.

Yeah, yeah.

It's interesting because, you know, part of it is self talk. Right. And this goes into, like, the deep, like, how do we program ourselves?

Yeah.

Like human as computer. Scott Adams talks about this, the moist robot hypothesis, but other people as well. And like, his. His school of persuasion is the same school that Bill Clinton and Tony Robbins come from. Like, Norman Vincent Peale. Like, there's a lineage here. So it's like, how do we talk to ourselves as people? How do we talk to ourselves as agents? Free agents, like, in the world. So part of it is just like, I'm telling myself every day, like, you have to wake up and you have to, like, want it every day. And then the other part is just like, obviously, you know, with the, with. With the public Persona that I have, you know, having come from, you know, both the military, but then also politics. Like, man, it was dark for a while, you know, like super dark. And I just wanted something where I just could say to myself every day, like, look, things can turn around, and I actually think they're going to. And certainly they have. But, like, every day, just wake up and be willing to just, like, offer yourself up to the universe. Like, yeah, it's going to happen. Like, we're going to win. Like, you're never more than one. One day away from, like, catastrophic success.

Going back.

Catastrophic success. I like that term.

Going back to your. Your dark days. Do you feel like you got a lot, like, were people turning down meetings with your company early on just because of your sort of political leanings to.

Do some backstory on the company? Can you break down.

Yeah.

What you're building, who you are, career highlights? I mean, yeah, I'm sure a lot of people know, but give us the basics.

Yeah. So I started off my career in, like, this weird corner of operational counterterrorism in the US Military that sort of branched into high technology and high technology strategy again when I was still in uniform and got a lot of exposure to just how much, you know, the world is a very interconnected place, and there are things that we can do in the digital world that absolutely affect the physical world. People talk about stuxnet, they talk about, you know, these. These attacks that have happened against oil facilities. So I get out of the military, I go to Silicon Valley, and then two years later, just like a strange series of coincidences, I get asked to come back to Washington and essentially be like, the most senior cybersecurity person in the US Government.

Government.

Not like, I'm going to reset your password, but, like, I'm going to remake our entire practice of running cyber operations for, like, the DOD and the intelligence community and homeland security and all that stuff. So I did that job for four years and then afterwards pulled together two buddies of mine, including Brandon park, who helped stand up Amazon's global, what we call operational Technology ot cybersecurity security program at Amazon. And then Felix Plushinski, who I'd recruited to come join me in the admin, who was a hedge fund trader. And we started looking at this problem. It's a huge problem. You know, we've digitized the industrial world, and yet there's. It has created these huge vulnerabilities that have been exploited, and some of that stuff makes its way out into the public. So, yeah, we just wanted to start a company to. To solve that.

What percentage actually gets public versus is sort of known among the industry, but not necessarily in headlines.

Yeah.

Are there foreign agents operating on American soil? Because I. I hear some people say the number zero, but I think you had a different point, right?

It's a different meme of mine. Yeah, no, there's absolutely foreign. Foreign sabotage teams operating on U.S. soil.

100%.

My actual number is somewhere around 100 teams. My guess is that. And the question is, like, you could break that down into, you know, what types anyway. Yeah, most of it doesn't get public. And, you know, sitting in that chair for four years, I had to get the classified reports every day of like, oh, this thing happened, that thing happened. And it just. It didn't drive me nuts, but it was like, man, it makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up.

Are there any cybersecurity stories in history that are public now that you like to point to as like, that could have been prevented? That's the one we're learning from. And here's how my company would prevent that, essentially, or here's how I would have stopped that.

Yeah, too easy. So I think two, three years ago, someone, I don't know who, I don't know who literally destroyed the Iranian steel industry in, like, one day.

Really?

There's video out. Yeah, there's video out there. Like, they literally took over, you know, the refineries and just started pouring liquid metal all over the floor on a bunch of these. Bunch of these facilities. Yeah, there's a bunch of incidents like that that have happened.

So walk me through how you would prevent that. I mean, I imagine what you're describing is like, remote takeover of a machine that is connected to the Internet or maybe air gapped and they didn't have the right security there. How do you actually step in and prevent that for. For our stealing industry, air gapping?

I mean, a lot of people will say that stuff because they've heard it on, like, TV or whatever.

That's me. That's me.

Yeah, exactly. But these operations take Days, weeks, months, sometimes years, to sort of like get into a network and then find your way to the systems that you want to take over. And the whole point is like, every step of the way of those types of operations leaves breadcrumbs. And so currently the way in which people try and protect these networks is by looking at only one area of technology inside the four walls, the facility. And that's like the networking equipment. So what we do is we look at everything. And so by looking at everything, you just have a bigger picture and you can assemble a narrative. You can try and understand when malicious things are happening at that super high level. Because you're seeing what's going on with the engineering workstations. You're seeing, we are seeing what happens, happens with the network. We're seeing what's being done on the applications, we're seeing what's happening, you know, the firewalls.

Yeah.

So we just take it all in and you know, it's not, it's not, it's not new to like, oh, do something with a much bigger data set. That's really what we're doing here.

Can you break down some of the difference between espionage projects and sabotage projects? Are there any differences? Are there any risks, you know, state actors that are prioritizing one over the other right now?

Yeah, this is like the thing that most people don't understand. They'll say like, oh, you know, things that are happening right now, it's just espionage. The thing is like in the course of an operation, like you do the espionage first, it allows you to map the network, map the systems. And then sometimes people will like, just leave a little, leave a little something.

There in case they want to do sabotage later.

Want?

Yep, pop it.

Okay, so like there's like lots of espionage happening on critical networks. Like, gee, what's that preparation for?

Sure, that makes sense.

What, what's been your read on our response to Deep Seek broadly? Do you think that US companies have been taking it seriously enough? There's this, you know, general lens from some, some, some of the tech community that says it's, you know, it's open source. You know, it's not sort of the, the same type of risk as TikTok. What's your read on it?

Yeah, look, a major frustration that I have is that we get a bunch of these cutting edge companies and then, you know, almost certainly you have foreign, foreign actors, not just the Chinese, like many other foreign actors that come in. I mean, you can read the papers that came out of like the Twitter buyout transition to X. And they basically are like, yeah, we had foreign, foreign intel services, foreign governments, like operating inside, you know, X, formerly known as Twitter. I think that's happening at a bunch of our companies. I think it's a huge problem, huge counterintelligence problem. Because the question is like, what are they manipulating? Like, are they putting backdoors in there? Are they, they changing content? Are they changing. You don't know. And a lot of the companies, many of which my friends have worked at, they don't even have a way to think about this. And also, obviously, like, it's not politically correct to talk about, hey, maybe we shouldn't hire that foreign national that went to the like, you know, military college of their respective nation and whose uncle is like the deputy chief of their entire service.

Yeah. So speaking the new CEO of Intel that got announced today, you know, we covered this earlier on the show. You may not have seen it has invested over the last, you know, 20 years, hundreds of millions of dollars into, you know, Chinese tech companies. Do you foresee any sort of like pushback into bringing somebody like that on to run? You know, he's not a Chinese national.

But born in Malaysia, grew up in Singapore, but invested in the Chinese semiconductor company, exited the position in 2022, I believe, and now running Intel.

Look, you know, I don't know the situation specifically. Obviously Chinese companies are legally required to be dual use. Like they architected their entire economy to serve the Chinese Communist Party. It just means that I'm super wary whenever you see folks that have been allowed to make profit out of that system. I don't know his scenario specifically running Intel. I certainly hope that, you know, I certainly hope that everything's on the up and up. I have no reason to think that it's not. But whenever I look at, you know, those types of interactions, interactions between what I think the United States and Western allies would call the free market and the Chinese Communist Party. I'm just super wary as a whole.

Staying on the topic of China. Do you think we've learned at all from the sort of dgi, just sort of blitzing and taking the entire US drone market? Do you think there's a real risk that they're able to run that same playbook back with unitree in the sort of humanoid space, or are we going to be smart enough to not let them put a robot in every American's home?

They are absolutely taking that. They're absolutely taking that playbook and trying to replicate it as broadly as possible. For years I've Been telling screaming, anyone that'll listen on X or wherever else, like, we should ban DJI from doing business in the United States. Full stop. Full stop. Everyone's like, oh, all the alternatives are like more expensive or this, that and the other. Well, yeah, supply and demand will allow the market to correct over time, but it's a huge problem. Like, they exactly know, by the way, if you don't think that senior CCP intel officials have the ability to just walk into DJI headquarters and be like, give me everything you know about the topography of the United States, like you're smoking crack. They probably have access to it right now. So every time these things fly, anything that gets transmitted into the cloud, whose cloud is it? Where's that cloud located? You know, what access do you know the Chinese intel services have to it, military have to it? Like, yeah, all that stuff's like in the wild.

What about personal cybersecurity? What do you recommend to the average listener just to kind of beef up your own opsets?

Yeah, it's tough. So for normal folks, I just say use the big cloud, use the big providers. That's like the Googles, the Microsoft's, etc. Enable two factor authentication. I think probably the biggest thing that I don't hear a lot is whenever you get a message like an email saying like, hey, your bank says this or that, delete the email and then go straight to log into the the service.

Sure, sure, sure.

And that's like the mind space that you want to be in because like these guys are social engineers. They know the language to get you to click the link and that's what they're trying to do. They're going to put malicious software onto your laptop, on your phone, whatever.

Tons of phishing attacks at X right now, and those are getting more and more convincing. You've seen some people leak it out, usually just for Meme Coins launches basically. But. But yeah, you can imagine being much worse.

Famed investor Kleiner Perkins launched a Meme Coin. I want to. There's a couple topics I want to get through. One, you know, I'm sure you can only make sort of general predictions here, but do you think this whole TikTok thing gets resolved in the next month? You know, there's sort of, there was an initial date for early April that it was supposed to, you know, sort of change hands, but you just, we haven't been seeing that much new news about it at this point.

There's plenty of people that want to buy it. You know, Oracle, Microsoft, Alexis Ohanian, like There's so many different capital groups, like, chomping at the bit to, you know, be the, be the buy side on this deal. It's just a question of can you twist their arm enough to get the sale done? I think. But what do you think, Josh?

Yeah, they absolutely want to retain control of the algorithm because that's like the prize is the ability to like, inject ideas into the youth of the United States or elsewhere in the world. And so I think that's going to be, I hope that's a major sticking point with the way in which it resolves out. At the same time, you have to remember that this deal has the attention of the President of the United States, who is at the same time negotiating with his counterparty, Xi Jinping over a trade relationship that there are trillions of dollars in the offing around it. And so I learned this over four years of working for him. You just have to trust the boss. He's playing a game that very few humans have ever been able to play, which is the most high risk, the most impactful game of one nation in the world. Look, I hope he's able to negotiate it in a way in which preserves cognitive sovereignty. There's a lot going on and I'm sort of taking my foot off the gas on it.

Yeah, it's not a focus. Let's kind of pivot to a topic that's definitely, I'm sure, top of mind for you guys. Re industrialization. The vibes are good. The work is maybe starting. It feels like it's starting. It's certainly ongoing. Job's not finished. Are we doing enough? It seems like there's a sort of top. There obviously is a top down directive to invest in America, but there's been on the topic of China, China will give companies very, very low or zero interest rate loans to do development. We're not, not quite there yet.

I think Deep Seek's taking one of those.

Yeah, yeah.

Deep Seek turned down all their venture capital interest and said, yeah, we're just going to take a 0% loan from the bank of China. I love it.

So, yeah, like, it doesn't. It's almost like it's not an impossible task, but it's a very difficult one. Are we doing enough? Do we need to do more? What's your take?

Yeah, so in my four years at the White House, I ended up taking over this port. Not or not even taking over, but owning this portfolio of like technology supply chains. And it's, it's hard. You know, the Chinese are Literally, just like you guys have said, they're out there giving these 0% loans to these companies to try and build what they call national champions. And so, and so how do we compete? I think the answer is just the market, you know, and I don't mean that in a sort of like lame kind of way, like, oh, the free market will take care of it. But like there is an incredible amount of dynamism in the American system and in the American markets. So like the Chinese can certainly go out and try and drive attention or monopoly towards their chosen, you know, national champions. But we've got a bunch of people that want to make a ton of money here in the United States, a bunch of people from around the world that come here because they want to make a ton of money here in the United States. I think that presents us with different advantages. And so I think that, you know, when it comes to financing, there are lots of tools in the toolbox. There's the Defense Production act, there's, you know, DoD procurement, there's a whole bunch of things. I do know that the team right now is thinking about all of them. Again, having sat in the seat, you know, I'm not going to take shots at anyone, not that I have any shots at take just that like, I'm confident that they're thinking about it. I'm confident that they know, you know, what's available. And I think we're seeing great stuff already.

What do you think about the debate between supply side and demand side stimulus in these projects like the Chips act, obviously $50 billion, I think 8 billion was going to go to intel, provided some milestones. But Ben Thompson has been advocating for flipping that around and instead just saying, hey, let's have the US Government say we're buying chips that are made in America. If you show up with chips that are made in America, we are the buyer and then maybe someone else will buy them, maybe Google will buy them, maybe Apple will buy them, but you can guarantee that there's demand. But we don't care about what's happening on the supply side as long as it's happening in America. Do you like that change? Do you like that V2 thinking?

Yeah, I love it. I love it. I think, you know, right now I've heard a lot of strange things about how Chips act has played out. I haven't followed it as closely as if I was, you know, some analyst covering this stuff for the banks. But I mean it was one of the approaches that we pushed was this like, look, you just have to have it made in America. That's it. Show again, show up and we'll buy.

Yep.

That's one of the things on the table. And I hope they do it.

That's cool.

What, what's just pivoting back. I don't know if you're in California right now or up at the northern office, but how do we solve the wildfire crisis in California? It's this sort of very complicated issue. You've worked in government. You're very in tune with what's happening in hard tech. It feels like there's a public role to play. There's a private markets role role to play. There's obviously the whole insurance side, but you're sticking it out here in California. I hope so. What, what do you, what's your position on, you know, what we need to do as a state?

I mean, we got to let the forestry guys, like, actually operate. You know, it's insane to hear them talk about, like, what was going on in Altadena where, like years it took them to file these crazy applications with like 15 different state boards letting them do controlled burns and brush clearing. And they get said no to. Like, we just got to let these guys do their job. Like, forestry management is a solved problem. Right? Let these guys get out there. The Europeans laugh at us. The president talks about this all the time, but it is literally true. They don't have these types of catastrophic forest fires because they have good forestry management. There's an amazing account, man M A N M made films on Twitter. You've seen this guy.

He did.

He did a film. He took a red camera and he became one of these. What are the fire? The smoke jumpers.

Oh, wow.

Smokejumper. And he did this amazing film. Follow him on X. But he talks about it. It's like, look, yeah, these places are prone to fire, but if you look, let the forestry management folks do their job. Like, you know, you can manage it. And the same thing with the water stuff. Like the solutions are known. Like there's weird blockages in the way in which water comes into California. And the president's trying to deal with some of that stuff. Stuff like the state of California. Like, people know what the answer is. They're just not being allowed to do it because crazy, weird bureaucracies.

That's right. The movie was called Hot Shot. I remember seeing a trailer for this and being blown away by the visuals. I need to watch this movie. This looks fantastic. Available on Amazon Prime, Apple, Google Play. Go check it out, folks. Anything else?

I Think that's all I got.

Thanks for stopping by.

I'd love to. You know, we'd love to have you on when, you know there's, there's a bunch of these topics.

Cyber security correspondent.

You're. You're our new cyber cybersecurity correspondent or brother, depending on.

Or just. Morning Pump up speed speech. Yeah, just hop on, just tell us good morning. We're going to win. Then you can hop off, get to the rest of your day.

We've been starting the show with. By singing a little bit. So if you ever want to like, you know, create like an anthem or anything.

We need good mantras. We need good mantras. We have a few. Temple of technology, Fortress of Finance, capital of capital. But good morning. We're going to win works too.

See you guys.

Thanks for coming on.

Thanks for coming on. It's great.

Cool.

We have five minutes until.

Let's hit a couple posts.

Let's hit a couple posts. What do we have in the queue? We want.

So this is a crazy story from this account. Rob.

Rob Wiblin.

So he says this is a tiny niche story, but it may actually be the most catastrophic thing to happen globally yesterday. Bold start. Bold start. I'm not going to go out on that with him.

We'll be the judge of that.

We will desperately need politicians. Okay, so the headline here is that this media company, New Scientist has used the freedom of information laws to obtain the chat GPT records of Peter Kyle, the UK's technology secretary and what is believed to be a first world, first use of such legislation.

Interesting.

So Rob here says we will desperately need politicians to be able to use AI advisors to keep up with the intense pace of events that recursively self improving AI agents will bring AI advice, will improve in scale proportionately to the social impact AI is having given giving governments some shot at keeping up. But if any conversation with AI can be extracted using freedom of information laws, while advice from humans given verbally cannot, politicians and civil servants will be hugely biased towards worse and slower human advice and analysis. They'll fear looking stupid for asking clarifying question or outrage if the AI advises some UNPC course of action. Just as we need humans in government to be able to have some private conversations, we need humans to be able to get AI advice without journalists being able to publish the transcript. These conversations must, must urgently be carved out of FOI legislation. So anyways, interesting, interesting point. Yeah, you know, you want. Politicians have a lot of pressure. They have hard jobs. You want them to be able to like you Know, have their, their little friend companion. Like maybe they're using Avis. It's like sometimes it might just say, you got this.

Yeah.

You know, but other times they might ask, you know, hey, hey, you need.

To brush up on your linear algebra.

Yeah. Like what, what is when. What's this maximum speed limit?

Yes. It's like he didn't know. He didn't know. He should have known that. I wonder, I mean there are ways to use LLMs in, in more secure and less FOIA able ways. I mean certainly you can run your own Llama or deepseek instance on a computer. George Hotz has a project, tinybox. But I mean even if you just have a new generation Mac, it's now big enough that you can run and powerful enough and the models have been condensed enough that you can run them locally. That obviously makes it harder for them to be seized without your permission. Also you could see an LLM or an AI service, you know, basically built on top of something like Signal where there's end to end encryption where you know, if you're using an unencrypted network, the government can go and ask the tech company to. They have the keys so they can unlock the servers and pass over the records. But that's not the way it works. Works on Signal and other end to end encrypted communication apps. So you could imagine a world that, where someone is vending an LLM through an end to end encrypted service, not saving the records and offering a different service. Feels like a niche but potentially important use case. But it'll be interesting to see where it goes. I mean this is actually maybe the bull case for Apple because Apple's whole thing has been end to end encryption everywhere, including the, the Messages app. If I'm talking to you on, on imessage, Apple cannot see those. And even if the FBI shows up and says we have a warrant, unlock Jordy, John and Jordy's latest memes, we want to read them. They've been posting bangers back and forth. We want to access them. Apple doesn't have the keys. And Apple, if they're running the LLM locally on your device, it's locked behind your password.

If a, if a government employee has a government phone, shouldn't if the government be able to like do that itself?

Yep. Yeah. Yeah. I mean if you have, if you have the passcode to get into the phone, you have full access. So it needs to be on a, on a personal device that can't be monitored in order to Truly. But then of course, the flip side is that then, you know, bad actors can use the encrypted. And this has been the privacy debate forever.

Yeah, yeah. And OpenAI has historically just been very careful around anything. Anything political. They don't want to be positioned as, you know, OpenAI influence this election or things like that. But these are some of the big problems that they're gonna have to.

Let's go to Blake Robbins. He has some random thoughts. We love these posts from Blake. He says there might be an entirely new generation that now thinks of Nokia as a Drake song. That's funny. Two sort of insane how much mobile games like Candy Crush, Leverage, Leverage, Haptics. So as you're using the game, it's vibrating kind of an underrated way to increase engagement and I guess decrease regretted user seconds or just keep people addicted. And then number three, whoever runs stakes clipping, strategy slash network is on a different level playing 4D chess. I'm sure you've seen those stake ads all over.

Yeah. So the thing that that's been relevant to X is they've taken over or they're partnering with these accounts that post these viral videos. Viral videos and. Or just posts, images, things like that. And if you look at the bottom, it'll say like, this post is presented by Stake.

So it's like very kind of just a tiny logo.

You're getting Stake. Not in full ad. It's just stake logo.

And every time one of those goes viral, there's a community note. This is against the terms of service. You can't promote this. This is undisclosed ad. But this still goes viral. Still gets a ton of impressions. Impressions.

Yeah.

I had a fourth random and it's funny.

Well, so he's bringing up Steak. Steak has like this massive partnership with Drake and.

Oh, yeah, they do. They keep doing, like, stunts.

Steak and Drake.

Steak and Drake.

It's Drake. No, but I mean, the. The very. The funny thing is in this one post, you have him calling out that a whole new generation doesn't realize Nokia is a Drake song, which implies that. And Drake partnering with Steak means that Drake is just marketing, you know, basically gambling products to the youth. And he should clean it up. Should look in the mirror, clean it up.

Well, I have a fourth random thought here. You should get Nate sleep nights that fuel your best days. Turn any bed into the ultimate sleeping experience. Go to 8sleep.comtbpn and get $350 off the pod.

I slept very well last night, which I'm glad. I got a 98 because this debate is about to be tense.

It's gonna be difficult. It all could come crashing down. I got a 94. You beat me.

Good night. I slept a lot for you.

9. 9 hours, 21 minutes. How is that even possible? That's a long time.

I mean, you.

I put up some crazy numbers.

You put up some crazy numbers and.

But you got to be well rested for these debates. They're hot, they're aggressive.

I wouldn't be surprised if. So Lesson is not in the waiting room yet. Seth is. But I wouldn't be surprised if Sam was just taking a power nap on his.

I wouldn't be surprised. Yeah.

You know, to just sort of get really into that sort of.

Should we bring in Seth, do some pre game strategy? I want to hear his strategy. I want to hear how he's thinking about going toe to toe. Bring them in. Into the temple of technology, the fortress of finance. Hey, good to see you guys. Welcome to the stream.

How you doing?

Oh, you got the custom background with the billboard there.

Yes.

I'm starting with a little psychological warfare. Okay. That's my strategy. Just get them a little uncomfortable.

Yeah. What does it say? It says, lesson South. Shoot. Lesson A message, not Seth Greenberg. Yeah, it's very AI generated.

It says, got a weird meme coin. Shoot. Lesson A message not.

So it's cut off.

It's cut off over here. But yeah. Give us the breakdown. How did we wind up here?

So about a year ago, or maybe six months ago, Lesson and I had a public debate about is the AI opportunity for startups or incumbents.

Yep.

And it got heated. And so, yeah, we've kind of just been going back and forth and then. And then he actually took out a physical billboard on the one on one, like with all, like amongst all these, like, advertisements for AI companies that says AI is not your moat, like love slow kind of thing.

Yep.

And then I just kind of tweeted back at him saying, I'm gonna, like, take out a billboard on the other side.

Okay.

And then.

Yeah, so then he. Lesson threw up a new ad yesterday that says, got an AI startup idea. Shoot. Seth Rosenberg. A message not slow. So this is basically the Drake and Kendrick of allocators, the Tupac Biggie of this era. Exactly. No, but it's great to have you on. Sam's a fierce debater. We were talking with Logan Bartlett earlier. He's moderated a debate before, so we're going to try to keep it going, to try to keep it very, very tight.

Keep it. Because he's Known to filibuster a little bit when you get him.

That's right.

Yeah.

So you got.

You guys got to help me just cut Sam off.

Okay?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, I mean, he might not even show up. And then you win by default.

Yeah, exactly.

Forfeit.

Yeah.

What? Yeah, why don't, like, since we have some time, give some background on yourself yourself? Some background for the. For the listeners.

Sure.

Well, so Sam actually hired me at Facebook in 2013. So we've gone way back.

Crazy.

Yeah, exactly. So I was like this young analyst at Goldman Sachs, like spending 100 hours a week in spreadsheets, and then Sam invited me to this backroom dinner in New York talking about the future of the world. And this is back when Facebook had a little less baggage. It was still like a startup energy, like, future of the world, giving individuals a voice like Arab Spring, all of that. And I was just super inspired by it. And so it was like a four hour dinner conversation. I'm like, Sam, like, I definitely, like, that was the first time I met him, but, you know, he's quirky and futuristic, and so I'm like, I need to do this. So I spent like any spare time I had learning how to code and just like getting up to speed on tech world. And then I've just been in that world ever since.

How long were you at Facebook?

Yeah, I was there for about four years.

Years.

I led this separation of messenger into its own app, and then David Marcus came on to lead it and Stan came on and built kind of an empire around it. And then I was running post Project.

Titan, because it wasn't Titan. Like the whole project to put everything together and then you kind of.

That was after I left. That was after I left. This was the opposite of that.

This was the separation.

Yeah, this was back when it was like Facebook chat.

That's the game at a hyperscaler. You just break it apart, put it back together. Full employment for PM in the Valley.

Yeah, exactly.

So I was there for phase one.

Okay, and then you went straight to Greylock or what was your next move? No, no.

So I was running the product for the developer platform at Facebook, which was like AI bots, Messenger bots. It's like the hottest thing in Silicon Valley for like four months before everyone realized it didn't work because we were seven years away from LLMs actually, you know, being released.

Yeah, lots of business logic, lots of if then statement.

Exactly.

Dressed up with a nice UI every once in a while.

All right, we got your former. Your former boss or at least a guy that hired you is in the waiting room now so we can bring.

Him in and bring them into the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. And if they, if they get out of hand, I'm gonna be ringing this gong, telling you hurry it up, finish what you're saying. No filibustering on this debate.

You know, Sam, you almost forfeited by being late.

I was in the waiting room. I'm sitting there. I wore my Team Canada, Canadian Team Canada like Arc teres for you, Seth.

Yeah, thank you, I appreciate that.

I support your 51st state.

Yeah.

Hey, I'm American now. I kind of support it too, honestly.

There you go.

That's great. Well, welcome to the stream. Welcome to the debate. Should we do some opening arguments? Lay down the general. What is the actual point that we're debating here? Sustaining versus disruptive innovation for artificial intelligence. Is that kind of where you guys are differing most?

I think the debate is that Sam has too much disposable income to waste on billboards.

Oh, okay. Yeah. So Sam, what's the ROI been so far? Are you.

I don't know. Seth, how many AI pitches have you gotten from my billboard?

Actually, honestly, like the, the, the inbox is full.

There you go. You're welcome. You're welcome. I see no debate here. I'm very happy to send Seth all the AI pitches and life is good.

And to be clear, this, this debate is presented by Ad quick, the number one way to buy billboards on the 101.

Yes, yes. If you're trying to duke it out with a rival, get on Ad Quick, get a billboard.

It's underrated to take, you know, debates from the timeline to the 101.

Yes.

Just you know, air it all, air it all out, out. But yeah, so, so Sam, you know, we had, we had lesson on the show I think last Friday, broadly, you know, talking about opportunities in AI and the whole kind of full spectrum. Maybe. Yeah, I mean I, I don't even know necessarily where to start. You guys were the ones that.

Well okay, here's what I'll, I'll put. Seth and I have been debating this for years. Let me, let me try to tee it up which is I, for several years so like try to be self consistent, have been very pro that AI is going to make the big, big, big platforms a shit ton of money and it's going to be really good for small businesses. But it is a terrible place to hunt for startups. Right. It's a great way to lose A lot of money on startups. Now my refinement of that which, which I will give as a refinement from my like original is I do really believe in what I'll call AI cherry on top business, which is businesses that are good, that there's a sweetener because of the efficiency of the AI. But broadly speaking, when people come in and pitch AI, my answer is pass, please go call Seth. Seth's answer I think is please call me.

Okay, Seth, what are you going to say?

So I think that tees it up well. So I'll give you two examples of where I think massive new businesses can be built that are, let's say AI native.

Native.

I think one is like networks and marketplaces based on new democratization of being able to create new types of content. So like the analogy on the phone is you now have a camera in everyone's pocket. The first wave of apps was like camera filter apps and then Instagram.

No, the first wave fart apps.

Fart apps and like drinking a beer, drinking fair. But like the first camera apps were like, you know, just like little fun tools you could do with the camera. But then the real mobile first business were things like Instagram and Snap, right. Which basically created networks around democratization of creation of new content. And I think if you think about AI, like what new types of content can now be created by everyone? There's a few examples. One are games, like what's the next Roblox? Two is music. You know, is Suno going to have like a consumption experience so going to be a new type of network there. Three is software. Right. Just generally I don't know if, if there's enough out there to build like a, you know, web app store around productivity or vertical SaaS or whatever. But there's basically democratization of new content type. And I think you create a marketplace around that, I think you could build a big business.

So I mean, sorry, I guess, go ahead.

I guess like maybe push you a bit further there like specifically around Suno and I don't have no insight into what they're actually doing. But if I create a great song on Suno, don't I want to share that with like the most amount of people? So just like take that to YouTube or X. And wouldn't that be an argument that you know, like the value just kind of continues to just like anchor around the sort of distribution platform?

Yeah, I think that would be, you know, a base case or kind of like smaller outcome for Suno if it just kind of gets relegated into the creative tool. But I think if like the number and quality of things that are actually created on the Suno platform starts to exceed or at least like take a meaningful but separate piece of the market, then they, they could just create a more closed ecosystem where the only way to. Way to get that content is on Suno.

Another extremely unlikely. I mean, the thing that I think is like, that I would say I buy is I'd say that there in general, the medium is the message, right? And so you have in a lot of places. And so when you have a new tech.

By the way, Sam, Sam made me read that book as onboarding for Facebook.

I did. I used to control. I used to have the distinction of controlling the reading list, which I invented for all onboarded PMs. And I hired Seth and then made him read Marshall Crashluin. Snow Crash.

Snow Crash, okay.

Snow Crash was well before Oculus on the required reading list. But look, I mean, I think. Here's what I was going to say is if you think about a lot of what the Internet is, people like to think about it as a technology or a. What it really is is like an information economy or a content economy. And like, I think if you start thinking about things on economic terms of like, producers, consumers, like what's the, what's the holistic picture of that? You do get some really interesting frameworks for talking about AI. So I'll give you an example. What is Facebook or what is social media? It really is a content pump, right? There are rules, there's an economy established with it. That economy then produces a certain type of content pumping out of humans that otherwise wouldn't have been pumped out, out, and then recirculates and shares and creates an economy around it. If you said, hey, AI creates some new affordances that makes it cheaper to pump information. All of a sudden we can frack humans in a new way. And by fracking them, there's some sort of new content type that comes out that is super compelling and super different. Sure, maybe there's something there, but I think that the most likely outcome by a mile when you think about process products is it just turns out that most products and the platforms already exist. It's all about getting laid or getting paid. These AI is one of the greatest extensions of existing platforms you could imagine. It just makes everything better. And just like fracking, you kind of get new content or cheaper content from people because AI makes it easier. But it all flows through the same fucking pipelines, right? And the money is not in the Fracking because the fracking itself is commodity.

Yeah, I definitely agree that the fracking is commodity meaning the creation. The question is can you frack something new that then creates a new network? Right.

And I just think it's extremely unlikely because the pipelines exist. Right? Like there's no like what is the new. Like you don't. It's just oil.

Does that make it a good VC bet? If. Even if it's, even if there's like a you know, 5% chance but the new network is, you know, I mean.

That'S what happened TikTok right. Like it was first just those lip syncing app and you would repost that content elsewhere and then they bootstrapped a network on top of it and became a very good app outcome for I guess the ccp. But you know.

Well, but I could imagine that was a new content type. That was a new content like Snap.

Doesn'T Harry Potter Balenciaga videos. Couldn't that be the, the lip syncing video of this era?

I feel like I'm a Democrat with CNN on my side here. Got the votes on my side.

But no, I don't know.

I just think it's, we're just guiding the conversation.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I think you're both, I think you're both wrong.

Now I'm the problem, the problem with AI in general and I think the entire AI discussion is I always like to point that it's like the, the average of infinity and zero is infinity. Right. And so VCs aren't very good at math but they can do that one. And so the problem is you say okay, this is so disruptive that even though the likely outcome is zero because there's like no math you can do on this and market big, then you're like well I'll pay anything because maybe it's a thing. Right. And like I think that's actually what's going on in the industry a lot. I think it's quite bad had because it leads to this like complete lack of like thoughtfulness and discipline. It's just like the most rudimentary math on what happens. I look a lot there are actually projects. I'll give you an example of something I actually believe is like new content that can exist because of AI that not only I've invested in, I helped start. Right. Which is we work on this thing called merit first with Joe Lonsdale and his team. We have some good announcements that'll happen.

Yeah, I like this.

Here's the thing about it, here's the basic, here's the basic setup for it and it is, it is an interesting AI oriented business because you say, look, the way you hire people to date in most worlds is credential based. You're like, ah, you went to Harvard, you studied this thing, you got this checkbox. Now you're in my pipeline hell. I hired Seth because we used to go to New York and say we want to talk to the hardest people from Bain, McKinsey, Goldman, BCG and Morgan. That was it. That was like the entire thing. Like we don't know how to look at everyone. We're just going to go call those people and we'll pick some of them. Right. That was how we did hiring. At least in the alternative PM hiring we were doing. What is way better is to do it based on what you can actually do, based on tests, based on forget credentials. I don't care how you got good at something, show me what you can do. Here's the problem is if you go to a most hiring manager and say, hey, hire based on tests, you have three problems. One is they're like, well, I don't know how to design a good test. Right. Like what is a good test for this role? It's actually pretty hard to figure that out and make it meaningful. Two, how do I know you're not cheating? And three, the biggest, most non obvious, once you have like 10,000 applications for something, you're screwed because you can't possibly actually grade all those tests. Right. Unless it's like a multiple choice which is like not sophisticated. So does AI have leverage on that? Absolutely. Does that mean that there's like a new way to think about a human interaction? Like how do you hire people? Because AI exists. Absolutely. Like that is the type of thing, but it's not. You're not investing in the AI. You're investing in like a new way or a new approach to hiring which happens to leverage AI. Right. And I think there is an important distinction there.

Well, yeah, I'm glad I already got hired, so. So I don't have to compete.

Yeah, you don't have to do it.

Yeah, I don't have to compete with 20,000 other people.

But.

That'S actually kind of the second big bucket, Sam, of AI opportunities that to me are very obvious which is just AI opening up new markets that were historically owned by labor.

Right.

And right now you're talking about recruiting massive industry. It's mostly human led. There's a long list of others where technology is now taking labor spend, whether it's Legal, whether it's accounting compliance. We have a company in our portfolio called Greenlight that's growing super fast. And it's just, you know, these large banks and fintechs have like thousands of compliance analysts that just go through checkboxes and write reports. And so you're competing with BPOs in these cases?

Well, kind of. But I think this is something you have to be really careful about because this goes back to the whole like, what are you actually investing in? And is this an AI company? Like the, one of the big memes right now in venture capital capital is, oh, we should like buy accounting firms and make them robots. Yeah.

And by the way, I'm not doing, I'm not doing the roll up.

And it's like, I mean, we've actually done a bunch of roll ups that we think do make sense. But like, this is one in particular I think is really stupid because it. People don't understand the point of accountants. Right. The point of an accountant is not like you could have a robot. You could have a, you know, some fancy AI that has a 1% error rate or even a 0.1% error rate on your tax. Taxes. Your accountant might be running a 3% error rate. Who do you hire? You hire the human. You know why? Because you know, you're really hiring with an accountant. You're hiring someone so that when the IRS is like, you up your taxes, you're like, I don't know, talk to Steve. Right?

And like, but you could still do that.

You can still sell software to big accounts. Like 6 million accountants right now.

Send them the chat GPT.com link.

Yeah.

So the basic point is like, there's a lot of jobs that people want wanted, like, ooh, machine can automate. And you're like, you don't understand. Like this is a liability shifting thing. Like most, a lot of human jobs are not actually about doing the thing, they're about shifting liability and responsibility. Right. That's actually, I agree that the job.

Will change to its essence, which is like trust and sales. Right. But that just means that that individual guy, Steve, who everyone trusts to put a rubber stamp, can do 10 times the amount of business with, with.

But every, the problem is the AI itself is commodity and everyone will have it. And like that's not where the leverage is. So you're not really investing in the AI business. Right. You're still investing in the accounting business, Steve's business. Right. And everyone has the same level. It's a classic war of attrition where like you, you And I just don't think this is a place where like unlike where you're going to like make money on the arms dealing. Because the arms dealing is all commodity.

Well, the question is, does Steve like. Is the software that Steve's using to leverage himself, is that OpenAI and ChatGPT?

It doesn't.

Is that Thomson Reuters or is that as.

It doesn't matter. It's all commodity.

Okay, how do you map this to the mobile wave? Because we were just talking to Logan Bartlett about this. It's kind of the classic innovators dilemma, sustaining innovation versus disruptive innovation. And with mobile it's like it was, it did feel like a sustaining innovation in that the mobile salesforce was just salesforce. And yet a lot of VCs made a lot of money betting on mobile companies. If they got into WhatsApp. You don't think so they didn't make.

That much money on it. I mean I think Silicon Valley has a story that venture capitalists like to tell LPs which is every X years the whole thing gets reshuffled and there's all this money made. It's bullshit, right? Like the going from shrink rack software to Internet, that was a big deal, right? That was a paradigm shifting broke the machine think thing. You know, I would actually argue that the shift to mobile was not disruptive at all, right? Like you have all the same winners, they're just bigger, right? I would argue that the shift to cloud was barely disruptive. Right? And it just turns out that like there's, there's a very big difference between things, things that are so important and paradigm shifting. They break the incumbents and there's huge opportunities for like that's why crypto is really interesting. Think what you will of it. It's extreme. Crypto is extremely hostile to encode incumbents. Right. As like a concept. We can talk about how it's being now co opted by incumbents. But like in general, like it fundamentally is. Whereas I could not think of a more classically extending innovation than AI. Right. It just makes the rich richer.

When's the SAM lesson mag 7 ETF coming then? If you're so bullish on the.

No, you gotta buy jelly.

Jelly.

Well, first of all, I'd say the Mag 7 like I would actually argue I was I. Because I like to lick the cookie on these things.

Yeah.

Is like, I was like, I think, you know, if you go back two years like pitching the, like these are the five companies that are going to win in AI and it's all the Same ones that already exist. I mean, it was, you know, so I'm into the Mag 7 thing. I also would say, like, when people ask me, like, my AI investing strategy, I'm gonna say, like, thank God I held onto some Facebook stock. Sure, right? Like, that's the answer.

It's like, yeah, what about the idea that, like, Apple's slipping or Google's not shipping fast enough? Like, this does create opportunities for entrepreneurs at least to build a company that gets acquired or something.

Like, they're not gonna get acquired, they're just gonna get copied.

Here's what I'd say. Like, I don't think the. I think here's maybe some common ground with salmon. I. I don't think AI is going to kill incumbents in favor of startups, but I do think it opens up new markets. And yes, they're outliers, but that's kind of what we're in the business of doing and funding. And like, for mobile, yes. Like, it didn't kill Facebook, it didn't kill Airbnb, but it created uber, it created DoorDash, it created Instacart, it created TikTok Talk, right? It created Snap, it created Instagram, created WhatsApp. And so these are tens of billions, hundreds of billions of, Of. Of value that, that were kind of mobile first. And it's a similar thing, which is like, what are the new capabilities? Gps, camera, video. Can you create. Can you use that as a hook to then create a sustainable business, whether it's a network? You know, I agree with you, Sam, that, like, AI by, like, doing an API called OpenAI, is obviously not defensible. But can you use it as a hook. Hook to then build a real business?

And I just think the answer is in almost all places, no. Right? Like, I think it's a thing. It's just like, everyone uses it. Everything gets leveled up, you know, like, to your thing about incumbents and Apple. Look, Apple is comical. We talked about this last week. Like, the Apple stuff is, like, pretty funny, right? Because it's so bad, right? But it's not gonna make me buy an Android phone, right? Like, and so you're like. So they have a hell of a lot of time to figure out something like, like, it's. We are a long way away from that being a real issue for them, even if it's pretty funny.

What about the more sclerotic industries? I mean, you're thinking about, you know, like, management consultants seem to be printing money on AI, just strapping on AI pitches onto legacy businesses as I see like oh, I go to IBM or something with oh, I want to replatform my app and I just need a bunch of programmers to do that. It feels like an AI native company there could potentially scale up and get really big.

I don't know. I mean like look, Accenture is going to make a lot of money short term on trans. On the stuff, right? Short term. The problem is Accenture is mostly in the business of BPO outsourcing and they're going to kind of eat themselves in doing that. Right? And so it's very, it's going to be a very different world for them in terms of how they navigate this. Good, good. Any but like anyone who sells business consulting is going to do pretty well in a period where like it transformation for a little bit. It's just like these are not VC backed businesses. Like these are consulting firms that will make money for a little bit, right?

I mean it seems like you're just super bearish on VC as an asset class. Like should founders just go and build, just, just go and build a, you know, lifestyle business or something or pick some different capital structure.

So go for it. Seth.

Yeah, no, I mean AI is also great. I think AI is just an accelerant for everything. It makes large companies more profitable. It opens up new markets for startups, whether it's services businesses or new networks. And it's also great for lifestyle businesses. There's a long tail of random problems that you can now solve really specifically with a very small team.

So the way I would phrase it is related but a little differently which is in life the middle usually drops out, right? And I think AI is a great example of dropping out the middle. Like no one want being a. There's no such thing as being a $10 billion public a company anymore. It's just like a dumb place to be. No one cares, right? You either want to be a hyperscaler, right? Which is a great, I mean it's a great place. Like most of the market says AI interesting where put money for AI, right? And like that's like been the seek and that's why you've seen like the mag 7 in particular things like Facebook just crushing it because you're like no liability, tons of upside, like easy bet. Like why is everyone buying Nvidia? They're like we don't know how to invest in the this Nvidia seems fine. Or like we don't know how to invest in this. Let's just buy power, right? Like because we're not sure how this Plays out. So like the big will keep getting bigger and there'll be like a massive thing and then on the very small end you're like, lifestyle. Look, I. The reason we have a creator fund, right, the reason that we do a bunch of stuff at the low end is I totally buy the thesis that you're going to see individuals that have a lot of trust and brand and community and deeply understand a need niche, do things you haven't seen before. Like I buy the one person billion dollar company thing. Like, I think that's real. With like, with the leverage you have. I think the key is you just have to have the right capital for the mission you're on. And having the wrong capital is a really bad place. And by the way, the worst capital you can have, I personally think is being a subscale company competing with hyper hyperscalers using venture capital. Right? That's like a recipe for total disaster because the hyperscalers have orders of magnitude more money and time, right? And you're just like, you're kind of truly bringing a knife to a gunfight.

Isn't it possible that we wind up looking back on this in a few years and think like, oh, we just hadn't thought of what the Uber for AI is. How do you think about the Uber story with mobile to, you know, today like Uber was hard to predict when the iPhone dropped. I mean, we're already seeing Uber for AI.

Like, what's the order for AI?

Cursor? Like the next Roblox?

No, those, like they're fine. They're fine. I think, like, it's interesting. Why do you think Cursor is interesting? Like it's Cursor's. I like it, I use it as a product. I don't see it as a good business.

I just think like it's the classic, like startups need to get distribution before incumbents innovate. And now because these tools are so powerful, you're actually able to get distribution as a new company very quickly. So if you're first to market with the best product, then you can start leaning into all of the other things that kind of give you defensibility.

I don't know. I think that's true. The thing is people are applying network thinking to what's fundamentally just a technology. Right. It's not a net, there's no network, there's no lock in.

But there's a lot of things that.

Become very sticky because I think so I think the whole point of AI is the switching costs for almost all this stuff. Goes to zero. Right. And because switching cost is zero, there's just no. I mean, people. Like, I have. I use chorus. Have you guys played with chorus?

No.

It's awesome.

I haven't used it.

It's great. It's basically just like a desktop app and you plug all the LLMs into it, right? Like, you have keys for all of them. And, like, I don't care. Use the best one marginally when a new one comes out. You know, the only defensible thing it is is there are so many fucking LLM models at this point, I'm happy to give someone the job of actually researching them all and deciding which one to send a specific question query to. Like, there's some sort of aggregation value there for a little bit for now. But I don't know, man.

One fun thought exercise on the social side is that, you know, we went through this generation, you know, social media was great initially because people were like, oh, it's actually more interesting to see what my friends are kind of talking about and doing versus just like, traditional media, which is, like, random people. And then it was like the Kim Kardashian era of, you know, it's more interesting to, like, follow a famous person's life. Life. And it's. It's possible to imagine a world where just being in a version of Instagram where everyone's a bot and they all, like, you know, are either polarizing or exactly aligned with your views. And there's just like this kind of constant stream and you get. Everybody gets a thousand likes on their posts and they post.

Like, my line on this has been that for. For 20 years, the way you start a social network is you say, say, who do you want to follow? And the way to start a social network today is say, who do you want to follow? You. Right. Is like the. The inversion that you could see. Like, I'd actually argue Twitter is already doing this. Like, Twitter, I think is intention. My. I'm not. I have no inside information. My sense is it is intentionally full of bots. Right. Because people are lonely. People want responses. It's clearly dopamine. Yeah, they want the dopamine.

We talked about this, Sam, as, like, a new social network.

Yes. You're like, look, it doesn't. You clearly there just aren't mathematically enough humans to fulfill people's need for, like, validation. So, like, sure, throw a bunch of machines in the mix so that people have more validation floating.

This is why I debate, Sam. I just want more billboards. Yeah, I think.

I think one. One Example that is way too easy to like or way too early to make a call is you have. So, Seth, you guys are in Tome, which started out as, like, the ability to, like, generate. Generate slides, which, like, people spend a ton of time all day long making slide decks. Like, there's probably billions of dollars spent just producing slide decks in the US for various use cases. They recently sort of pivoted into a space around, you know, automating sales research and Outbound. You can imagine, like, you know, like a real test will be, can Tome compete with Salesforce? When Salesforce has this sort of just, you know, army of people, like, jamming comparable products, you know, and actually, for, you know, there was some news in the information, I think, yesterday, that Salesforce is basically saying, if you don't pay for agent force, we're, like, raising your regular, you know, rates on the CRM side, like 3x.

I can already give you the answer. So let's say I fancy his company, but I love Keith. I really respect him. He's a great guy. Used to work with me too. Same team is no way can Tom compete on this. But I'll go even a step further, which is this entire industry of outbound goes away. This is where we talk about the real displacement of what's going on. So first I have several portfolio companies. They're calling us, saying, we have this thing. We tried this thing in AI but now all the platforms are just bundling it and giving it away, and we can't compete because even if we're better, that's happening all over the place. And you're like, duh, of course that's to happen. This is an easy tack on. But then the step two, which is where the really interesting social displacement comes, is everyone's excited about, oh, I can use AI to, like, customize outbound sales or something. You're like, your inbox is now worthless because once all the sales are customized, you can't tell what's real and what's fake, that entire economy collapses. Right. So I would actually go, the more likely outcome is a no, Tome can't beat Salesforce. But two, even if they could, that entire emotion goes away because of A.I.

Yeah, look, I don't think you need to be beat Salesforce to be very successful and to find a segment of the market that wants a more modern product that, you know, understands your business has everything in one place and can actually make your sales team a lot more effective with a more modern architecture. So I think Tome is going to be successful because again, you can think about this hypothetically or you can talk to customers, customers especially in different segments, and just see where the pain is. But one thing I'll agree with Sam on is I think we're in an outlier business. You have to be very selective. I think people who are overpaying for things that are not durable at like crazy prices, that's not a game that we're playing and not a game that I believe in either. I think, you know, backing like amazing product builders and technologists going after are either existing markets that need to be totally re architected using AI or totally new markets that open up. Whether it's like a gaming network or replacing services in a very long tail of really large markets. I still think there's a massive amount of value to be made.

I just think that it's such a different. I'll give you an example. I think you don't want to back generic Facebook PMs anymore who know AI and product. Right. Because they don't know anything. Right. And like it's just commodity. If anything. The irony is it's all getting. All those things are getting hyper commoditized in terms of an AI, only commoditizes it faster in terms of how do you build and what is a product. This stuff doesn't like if you told me, and we look at some of this too, you have a truly unique market insight. You understand a market that no one else gets because you've been a specialist for 20 years in IT or whatever. By the way, the tools of building and the paradigms have changed so quickly. There's an opportunity to build things new. Yeah, there's interesting stuff there. We do businesses that are AI quote unquote enabled all the time that fit that pattern. But those people are generally not building quote unquote AI tools. They're just like, it's kind of like saying like they're not building cloud companies or Internet companies, they're just building great companies that happen to leverage technology.

Okay, yeah, I agree.

Like there was like an AI conference last week and I'm like, this concept of an AI conference is going to last like six months because eventually, you.

Know, it's just, it's like building an Internet business.

Everything.

Computer.

Everything. Everything's computer. Everything's computer.

For sure. Everything's computer.

We're at 30 minutes. We got to ring the gong. We gotta wrap it up.

Who won the debate, guys?

Closing arguments. We'll let the. We'll let the fans decide.

Let the Internet decide.

We'll let the Box decide and let the boss decide. Whichever. It's an economic battle. It's a capital war, capital fight. Whoever deploys more bots to vote wins.

So no, no. Here's the real way we're going to do it. I will put a calendar invite for like five years from now.

Okay, I love that.

And we'll just come back, we'll watch the debate and we'll just pause and, and people can take little victory laps they can talk about.

I love that.

That's great.

So five years from today, mark your calendar.

Calendars.

I look forward to it. Thank you guys for jumping on on. Have Fun on the 101.

Enjoy. Have a great weekend.

See you.

Sam. Yeah, we should host the follow up to that debate at a wander. Go to wander.com. book a Wander today. They're also doing a giveaway sign up and wander.com tvpn.

You can also use TVPN to get $300 off your first day. One thing about wanders, the properties are so amazing. They do get booked down out be far in advance at times but not.

Five years in advance. Definitely get something.

We can get something in the castle.

Home sweet castle. For inspiring views, hotel grade amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning and 247 concierge service. It's a vacation home but better folks. Check it out. Let's go back to the timeline. Wrap up.

Let's do it.

We got.

And that was, and, and just, just to summarize, that was fun.

Who do you think won?

I mean I do tend to side with Sam. I think Seth has good points. I think Seth's an optimist. He's in the outlier business. The entire model of running a fund like Greylock is if we can back one or two really impactful companies per fund. They have more aum, they can make bigger investments and I think they're in the sort of optimism business. Sam is much more of a pessimist but he has some real points. Right. The tome company specifically, I brought it up. They started, they were very hyped sort of AI slides company. Didn't find a market for what they were doing. Now they are competing with Salesforce and I can imagine, I mean anybody in sales is competing with Salesforce. They're an AI assistant for sales.

Sure.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And it's, and it's, I mean it is good to kind of like break down like what it means to be bullish on AI generally because you could just say yeah, the AI thing is real. And the way I'm expressing that is in a Mag 7 ETF and going long hyperscalers. Or it could be I'm building a lifestyle business as a solo developer, vibe coding, pumping it out on X with videos and making money that way. And so there's always a bull market somewhere there. But I think Sam is narrowing it down to hey, maybe $20 million. Series A's are particularly fraught right now and I don't know it's possible. It just depends on if you get in the right business. I still think it's early enough that we could get our WhatsApp, we could get our Uber, and you might see some funds dump $20 million at $200 million. The big thing is still get 100x return.

The big thing is it seems like what we now define as AGI is an extending innovation, but it's this sort of looming asiinning.

Oh, that's the disruptor.

The real disruptor is asi, not AGI exactly. As we're sort of currently defining that.

My joke with that is that eventually when ASI comes, you say set up a website or buy me something and it rebuilds stripe from first prison, like all the way. It writes all the code that's ever existed on the Internet in five seconds and builds you everything. And that would be very disruptive. But I think we're along way from there, especially on how much it costs to inference these models and how, how rough the. The vibe coding thing has been amazing. But then we've heard a lot of accounts of people saying, yeah, it'll get you 80% of the way there, 90% of the way there, but there's still a lot of humans in the loop. And maybe we are seeing not acceleration but deceleration in, in the, the efficacy of these models. But they're still really fun, they're cool. And I want to check out some of those ones that he recommended. I actually did play with soon know last night for the first time.

Bedtime song.

No, I was trying to make a theme song for tvpn. I was thinking we need our own, you know, NFL.

No. So what we should do is get a symphony.

Yes.

And we stand in the symphony.

I think we need.

They play it and we. And we just, you know, my takeaway.

Was that, yeah, I would love to get a human to do this because yeah, the first version that came back I was like, you know, ESPN style football song intro and I didn't have lyrics turned off. And so it generated all these funny lyrics like football game starting now and like all these really Ridiculous things, but lots of promise there. And I mean, just the mid journey of music seems fun. I don't know if it'll replace everything, but certainly like a tool in the tool chest for the artist.

Overall, I think having a debate, letting people share their opinion and then circling back to it.

Yep.

Is really the best solution because you can't win a debate like that in the moment. It's just vibes right now.

Yes, definitely. And I think keeping it tight and short is key.

Yeah.

Anyway, let's move on to the opposite of tight and short. Larry Ellison's longevity, which is unreal. He's been in the game for decades, decades, putting up these numbers. Look at this chart. Oracle Corporation is up 210,000% all time dating back to the 80s. Putting up these numbers for life, for the lifetime of the modern tech industry, while also being the true Brian Johnson. If you're not familiar with how young Larry Ellison looks, he's looking fantastic. When he was born, for context, we were still in World War II. Wow. Fantastic.

Insane.

Yeah. Oracle not mentioned as much as the other Magnificent Seven companies, the hyperscalers, but clearly doing something right. The stock is up and to the right.

Yes.

And so we love Oracle here on the show. Big news. This really shook the tech industry to the core. Jawan over at Ramp got a raise.

There we go.

He said, turn it up, hit the size.

Gone.

Congrats. Congratulations. Day one of asking ramp for a raise, that happened November 13th of last year. Now it's March 13th, and he got it done. Based on your accomplishments and results in 2024, we're pleased to provide you with an update to your compensation package. Congrats to Juwan. Let's move on.

I mean, nobody, everybody said it was impossible, this is never going to happen. But he did it. He was consistent. He, you know, survived and thrived through controversy and he got the raise.

This, this would have been a great debate to have on. We could have had Eric and Kareem come on, debate it.

He's got to make a presentation.

Yes, yes. Live on the show. This is how raises will be done at Ramp in a few years. Anyway, let's move on to Luke Metro. He's quote, tweeting Michael Dempsey. YC used to feel like a window into understanding the areas progressing from what the smartest people know. Know what the smartest people are doing on weekends to VC back startups today. It feels like the best window into the current consensus thing. And Luke Metro says lots of tech feels like this. Now here's my theory. Pre2020 there were still novel insights in lots of small offline subgroups. VC scout programs existed to capitalize on this, but post Covid Silicon Valley moved entirely online. Now the time from outgroup to consensus is minuscule. Cool. What's your take?

I think this is totally right. It feels like YC now is a reflection of what the Internet is interested in. Right. What the sort of community is interested in. And I think that that's fine. If ideas are important, we should have a bunch of people attacking them. That's the beauty of the free market. But I think this is totally on point. The other thing is that you, the companies that are truly not like that don't feel relevant at YC or that feel weird are the ones that don't get the hype because they're just tinkering on some weird thing. And then Flock Safety is a good example. Right. I'm sure the Flock Safety batch was just a bunch of sass. And Luke also had another good post from today that I'm just got pulled up here. He says the real project Europe is VCs spending three months in the south of France this summer.

So were you going to say that you had the same idea?

We had a similar idea.

Genius.

Similar idea. I love it.

Well, yeah, go enjoy Europe. Book now. Book on Wander. Book your trip to Europe. Get out there and spend some time recuperating while the well you can feel the AGI. Let the innovation, the acceleration wash over you under the Tuscan sun. Yep, Albedo has some news. They are launching. I was texting with the founder. We're hopefully going to have on early next week. Clarity1 will launch as the first commercial satellite to operate in very low Earth orbit beginning with 10 centimeter resolution imagery previously only possible with aircraft or billion dollar government satellites. Albedo is redefining what's possible from space and so we'll have to have him on. I saw a picture of the fuselage of the the Falcon 9 that they're riding on. Nice and good luck to them. There's been a few delays as there always are with these, with these launches, but it's looking good and so you can tune into that launch tonight. SpaceX is going back to Leo.

What time is it?

I think he said like midnight Pacific time or something. I he was also like you guys are live right? Saturday at midnight?

Yeah.

I was like not yet, but stay tuned.

We're getting there, we're working on it.

Let's move on types fast. Ryan Peterson Founder of Flexport for Friend of The show been on. He is quoting Leonard Bernstein who says two things are needed to achieve great things. A plan and not quite enough time. Civilization 5. When building the Big Ben Wonder, he's.

Been pulling quotes out of Civilization 5.

I love it.

It's awesome. A bunch of bangers in there. We had Captain Price. Oh, yeah.

I, I've never actually got into Civilization. I've wanted to, but it's a big investment because I think the time to actually play a full game is more than like a few hours and so I haven't been able to find the time. But he's spent a lot of time on planes. He's got Starlink locked in. Actually, I think you can play Civ offline. It's not even a multiplayer game necessarily, so good way to spend a few hours in the belly of a 747 ferrying packages around the globe for Flexport. Anyway, should we move on to Augustus?

Direct Augustus himself. He says every 20 to 30 year old man I know who is great or that's aspiring for greatness seems to get mentally and spiritually obliterated daily. They're not without joy, wisdom or purpose, but constantly raw. And Cernovich says adult men are not supposed to feel happy. It's abnormal. You should question what you're doing. You should feel the tinge of fear. It means you're pushing yourself. The alternative is sitting around waiting to die like some muppet. And yeah, I think I put this in the stack just because I think it's important to realize that, you know, optimizing for feeling good all the time will be your downfall. And part of, you know, having a great life is not just not optimized.

You know, it's not optimized for happiness specifically. We talked about this with our, with the Lone Ranger. The goal of a startup is not to be a happy startup, it's to be a successful startup. The goal of a marriage is not to be a happy marriage necessarily. It's to be a successful marriage. And that's a different vector. And happiness is derived from that and adjacent to that, but not the end all, be all goal. Because as soon as you start optimizing purely for happiness, you put a lot of the grind to the side. Totally rest on your laurels. Should we go to Nikita? He was talking about Vibe coding and where some of these apps are going. If you've tried following Vibe coded games over the last month and have tried making one yourself, it should be abundantly obvious that we are very close to someone building a creation ecosystem or App Store where anyone can be a game developer. And success of the creators within this feature ecosystem will be determined by pure merit of their concepts, not technical execution. The only gap that needs to be closed for this ecosystem to exist is abstracting away the remaining pieces that are too complicated for the layman. Authentication, server networking and deployment. Once that's achieved, the only thing left for creators to do is to dream up their concept and click publish. And suddenly we will have millions of people making 3D online games with graphics comparable to N64.

I love that we talked to a YC founder who's basically working on this exact problem.

One of my friends, Kyle Russell, built something like this, I want to say like five years ago. He was working on it right. In 2020. I met him through Andreessen Horowitz. He was like the associate on the deal and great guy. He built this company called playbite and it would let you. It gave you a bunch of primitives and on your phone, in a browser, you could build like a top down 2D game. And he was just like, maybe a little bit too early with that concept to really get Escape Velocity because it was easier than Roblox, but didn't really have the same viral breakout moment. But you can certainly imagine and like, what the vision of what he was laying down makes a lot of sense in terms of App Store, of course, Nikita got a lot of pushback here. Everyone said, he said, stop saying Roblox. I'm talking about something much more customizable. The thing is that I've seen some Roblox games that are incredibly customizable. I've seen people say, like, we rebuilt Call of Duty in Roblox and it looks like Call of Duty almost. I don't know if it's fake, but it'll be interesting.

Somebody rebuild the TVPN set in Roblox.

And we'll record a.

No.

Oh, they should.

We'll record a show there.

Yeah, that'd be great. In the Metaverse. Should we go to Bo Nickel? We got some breaking news.

We got some breaking news from Beau has a new fight. It's going to be on May 3rd. I'm going to pull up a supporting article here.

It's a middleweight bout.

Yeah. So Bo is a middleweight. He has.

I assume that has something to do with like the size of the guys. Is that how it looks?

Yeah, yeah. This is the joke. John is obsessed with professional bodybuilding. I follow UFC closely. But anyway, so Beau, friend of the show and listener, he's also an entrepreneur, has his own business you can check out. He started in Dana White's contender series. So he got a couple wins in there and then has gone on a tear. He's 7 and, oh, he's 29. For those that don't know, which is like kind of the prime years. Right. He's got a bunch of wins under his belt.

Belt.

And now it's time to make a run at the title.

And they're allowed to punch and kick in this league. Is that how it works?

The last. The last time we covered Beau on the show, Beau texted me and he was like, I'm always amazed with how little John knows. So his John's knowledge is actually even like going the ring.

The ring isn't square, right?

Yeah. It's almost like. It's like it has more.

It has eight sides.

Yeah, eight sides. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. I know that.

Yeah.

Good learning this stuff.

And so anyways, Bo is one of the top prospects in MMA right now, and he's. His next fight is against this guy Deridder who was at one championship. He's been a two weight class champion over there. So this will be a huge test for Beau, but we are very excited for it. He's been training hard and good luck to him. Good luck to him. We'll be watching, hopefully live.

Yeah.

But we'll. We'll see.

Good luck to him. I hope he can go all 25 rounds. Is that how many rounds there are? Hope he makes it. Honestly, I hope he gets a gold medal. Honestly, I really hope he gets a gold medal.

I'm. I think. I think he's gonna make short work.

Yeah.

After Ritter. But good luck to. Good luck. Good luck.

Let's go to another friend of the show, David Senra. He shares some sage advice from Peter Thiel. Superior sales and distribution by itself can create a monopoly. Even with no product differentiation. The converse is not true. I love that. And it's funny because it's like MBA advice almost, but it's contrarian in the VC context because for so long there were these naturally growing, like Facebook. They didn't need to run billboard ads for Facebook because it was this social network and it just grew. But they really did have better distribution because of the network effect in the model.

And so an example of this. Right. So we were just talking about Salesforce versus some of these upstart sales assistant companies. Part of Salesforce's monopoly is they have thousands of people that sell Salesforce and they're going to customers current and new and saying. Saying if you don't buy our AI assistant for sales. We're going to increase the price of the product that you actually want. And for many companies, it's just the default CRM. And so that by itself is like they have the distribution, they have the labor force. And yeah, it's going to be very tough for a lot of those players to get anywhere close to threatening. Threatening Salesforce's market cap.

Should we close out with a fantastic private equity story? Boiler Room is apparently private equity backed now levels IO shares. The financial story of Boiler Room is interesting. Boiler room started in 2010 by Blaze Belleville with weekly live broadcasts on YouTube. If you're not familiar, they're DJ sets, essentially. Over the years, he raised $12.6 million in VC funding in total. Then in 2021, while Boiler Room was heavily struggling financially, he sold it to Dice FM, an event ticketing startup. Dice had raised more than 200 million in VC funding. Then Dice sold Boiler Room a few months to Superstruct, a festival organizer that owns festivals like Mystery Land, defcon, a bunch of others. Then last year, Providence Equity, a $35 billion private equity fund, sold superstruck to KKR, which is $100 billion private equity fund. So a $100 billion dollar private equity fund now owns Boiler Room. Many articles state Boiler Room's founder, Blaze Belleville exited around 2021, but he's still involved in the company, so more likely he received more stock while working at it.

So he's, I mean, this is just, this is just a beautiful story.

Yes.

And, you know, a celebration of, I mean, I hope that they do private equity night at the Boiler Room. Yeah, we don't go to events like this. We're just not big into that world. But Boiler Room, celebrate, celebrate the shareholders. You know, put. Do a, do a big party for kkr.

Yep.

You know, I want to see the champagne bottles popping and the big KKR sign walking out. When you spend $10,000 on this bottle of cheap champagne, just know that you're just sort of like supporting big private.

Equity, driving EBITDA multiples.

There's other, there's other. You know, we've said on the show before, there's other fantastic companies owned by private equity equity. TechCrunch, Vail. Vail.

You know, this could be the next veil. You never know.

Yeah. I mean, we made the argument earlier this week that TechCrunch should merge with Vail and just become Ski lifestyle magazine.

Ski Lifestyle magazine.

That's the real way. Anyways, it's been a fantastic show thanks for watching in. Go leave us a five star review. Put an ad in it. It helps with discovery. And see you on Monday. We hope you have a good weekend. If you, if you're working over the weekend and you're missing tvpn, you can go back. We have some.

The back catalog's full, folks.

We've got many, many, many episodes of this show. And if any of you have listened to every single hour, I would be very impressed. But there's probably an hour in there somewhere that you haven't listened to. So it's okay. And anyways, we will see you on Monday.

See you on Monday.

Cheers.

Bye.