OpenAI Acquires TBPN

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Today is Thursday, April 2nd, 2026. We are live.

364 days until April Fools'.

Yes, that's right. We are live from the TBPn UltraDome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. We have some huge news. This is from the OpenAI blog. OpenAI acquires TBPn, accelerating the global conversation about AI. This is not an April Fools' joke. April Fools' was yesterday. We didn't do anything for April Fool's Day. This is real. This is a very interesting deal. I think a lot of people will be interested in this. We're very excited about this. We have a bunch of context and information to share about how this changes things, what changes, what doesn't. I'm sure there's a million questions. We're trying— we're going to try and get to them all. But then we also have a huge normal show because—

normal show. We got Mark Lore.

That's the first thing that's not changing. TVPN is not going away. We're going to be live every day, 3 hours, as long as we want. We have a lot of flexibility. We're going to do a lot of interesting things. We got Marc Lore, the LeBron James of e-commerce. This is from his Wikipedia page. We can pull up the— if you are calling me right now, I can't pick up because I'm live. And I think, you know, it might be time to turn off the phone. I think, yes, it might be time to turn off the phone.

Yeah, very, very strange. I think this is maybe the first time in history there's been a deal like this and then two people that are a part of it have to go and talk for 3 hours straight. But it's technology business as usual over here. Yes, we have a fun show for you today. We'll get into the news in a second. But we have Adam Meyers coming on from CrowdStrike.

Yes.

To talk about all the recent Axie attack and more. We have Jeremy from Circle coming on in person. In person, which is exciting to talk about stablecoins. Justin from Shepard, Gaurav from Mirage, and then Philip from Star Cloud.

Lots of space news. We're very excited about the Artemis II mission going successfully. Hopefully you all watched it. It was a lot of fun. We were watching it here on the screen and we were gripped as the rocket took off because—

Yeah, we were so locked in. We were joking around that it felt like it should have been a pay-per-view. Like, could we turn space into a profit center for the government?

Somebody was saying that it was not entertaining. I was extremely entertained. I don't know. Maybe they could do more, but—

NASA has a decent e-commerce business too. We were watching, they were selling like 10,000 patches a minute or something like that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think we were doing the back of the envelope just from the main call to action at the bottom of the YouTube stream. They were selling a patch for, I don't know, tens of dollars and they'd sold like hundreds of thousands of them. So as we were watching, they were selling like something like $10 million worth merch. So maybe go get some for yourself. Anyway, let's go over to Fiji Simo's post on the OpenAI blog. She shared this message with the company earlier today. She says, I'm excited to share that we've acquired TVPN. This acquisition brings a team with strong editorial instincts, deep audience understanding, and proven ability to convene influential voices across tech, business, and culture. That's—

I'm still going to be hitting the soundboard.

Yeah. Yeah, you are. TVPM has built something pretty special. It's one of the places where the conversations about AI and builders is actually happening day to day. A lot of you already watch it and rely on it to stay close to what's going on. As I've been thinking about the future of how we communicate in OpenAI, one thing that's become clear is that the standard communications playbook just doesn't apply to us. We're not a typical company. We're driving a really big technological shift and And with the mission of bringing AGI to the world comes a responsibility to help create a space for real constructive conversation about the changes AI creates with builders and people using the technology at the center. And that's exactly what TVPN has built, which is what I was gonna say is the next line. That is a huge part of the show is making sense of what's going on, how these tools are actually being used, all of the implications. We've gone all over the place and we will continue to go all over the place.

Yeah, and over the last year, like, you know, for multiple years, there's just been so much uncertainty about AI. I don't think we can change that. But there's also a lot of fear and just talking through it with the people that are actually helping diffuse AI through the economy across every single industry is something that we've enjoyed a tremendous amount and is exactly what we're gonna continue to do if you wanna continue.

Yeah, so she says, so rather than trying to recreate that ourselves, it made a lot of sense just to bring them in. Support what they're doing and help them scale while keeping what makes them special. A core part of this is editorial independence. We can say whatever we want because we're live and we don't need to run anything through anyone.

It's not possible.

It is. It would be very difficult to have somebody here. Can we say this? I'm about to say a sentence. TBN will continue to run their programming, choose their own guests, and make their own editorial decisions. That's foundational to their credibility, and it's something we're explicitly protecting as part of this agreement. And also, we were never in the scoop industry, people were kind of asking like, is this journalism? Is it commentary? I think we've always been like, hey, we, you know, like to talk to a lot of people, have a conversation, bring in people.

Yeah.

And even, even when companies have approached us and said, we'll give you the exclusive, we don't—

yeah, we'll say give it to somebody else.

It's like, hey, you can come on the show, but we actually want you to go talk to the Journal or the Times or Bloomberg, wherever, Bloomberg, etc., wherever you want to go.

And then come and contextualize it with us and let us dig in and understand more about the strategy. And so TVPN will continue to continue running their programming, choose their guests, and make their own editorial decisions. That's foundational to their credibility and something we're explicitly protecting as part of this agreement. I'm also excited to bring their amazing comms and marketing instincts to the team. We got lots of ideas, and we're very excited for this. They've helped many brands market online. And because they have a strong pulse on where the industry is going, their comms and marketing ideas have really impressed— did you see my— me. I can't wait to leverage their talent outside of the show to innovate on how we bring AI to the world in a way that helps people understand the full impact of this technology on their daily lives. TVPN will sit within our strategy organization reporting to Chris Lehane. Really excited to welcome Jordy, John, Dylan, and the broader team. And here's a statement from you. Do you wanna read this? What did you say?

Over the past year, we've had a front row seat, not just to OpenAI, but to the entire ecosystem covering the daily news announcements and launches in real time. While we've been critical of the industry at times, after getting to know Sam, Fiji and the OpenAI team. What stood out the most was their openness to feedback, feedback and commitment to getting this right. Moving from commentary to real impact in how this technology is distributed and understood globally is incredibly important to us.

So I contextualize it a little bit more shared. You know, a lot of people are like, is this an April Fools joke? I've been saying expect the unexpected. This is a plot twist. I'll give you that. It was unexpected. It was unexpected to me. And but I'm really happy about it. And when I reflect on my career, it's— I think it makes a lot of sense. And I can walk you through some of my career and my experience with OpenAI and with Sam Altman.

The—

I've known Sam for maybe 13 years. He invested in my first company in 2013, and then we got in a really serious logjam during a financing. And I wrote him an email. I told this story in Bloomberg a couple of years ago. I wrote him an email and said like, hey, like, this is getting really rough. I'm a first-time founder. I don't know. If we're gonna be able to get this done. And he called me and we hopped on the phone for like 5 minutes and he was able to completely resolve everything and everyone walked out of the deal feeling pretty good. And so that always left this impression on me that like he was founder-friendly. Obviously he didn't— in this particular case, it was to my benefit, not particularly to his benefit, the way the deal wound out. And he was just a great great addition to the negotiation and really—

And you were very young at the time. Yeah, I was just a wee lad.

I was, I was.

You were about 23, 24, something in that range.

Something like that, yeah. And then when I took my second company through YC, he was president at the time. And then when I joined Founders Fund, the very first deal that I saw in motion at Founders Fund was the post-ChatGPT round in OpenAI in late 2022, early 2023. And so I sort of had this like front row seat to all of this and then, Once we actually started growing TBPN, he was one of the first people that I texted to say, hey, do you want to come on the show? And he was the first lab lead to come on the show. And we're excited to continue having him on the show, hopefully have other lab leads on the show, have other people from all over the industry. And just generally, I think that when I was at Founders Fund, I was not particularly in the weeds of intra-venture capital fights. I was much more interested in the conversation around technological stagnation, not funding companies, not making great companies happen. I never was in a situation where I was like, oh, like if a different VC firm backs a great company, that's bad, you know? And I think that's the same philosophy that I have always taken forward and will continue to believe in, which is that like the American AI industry is the most important thing and that will continue to be the case. And I'm excited for, all the different competition and everything that's happening in the industry to continue and push further. Jordy, did you have anything else to say?

I just wanted to say some thank yous because a lot of people have been a part of this journey to date. It's been, I think something like, let me do the math here, 496 days, roughly 16 months. Since we put out the first episode. It was just the two of us and Ben sitting in a room, couple cameras, couple microphones. And I will just say, I didn't know this special of a business relationship was possible between you and me. Like, I think like, if you look back on that almost 500 days, we've had disagreements around strategy or approaches or things like that, but we have like, almost universally stayed perfectly aligned on everything that matters every single day, every step of the way. And I think that's somewhat of a miracle given that we went into this not really knowing what it would become.

Yeah, we'd done like one side project together and it took like 8 months and it was like not, it was like successful, but it was not like, oh yeah, like, okay. We were working together daily for months, you know? It was a lot of, just jump in and leap of faith, right?

Yeah, and I think we've got this question so many times, like, do you guys get sick of each other? You know, you just have to talk to each other for 3 hours a day. And like, I've said this before, I'll say it again, and it is actually hilarious. The second that we leave the office, we both get in the car, we call each other, we end up talking for like another hour on the way home. And so it's just been, it's been the, privilege of a lifetime to just build this business with you and the whole team. The team has been absolutely incredible. Give it up for the team. The team's been working really hard. You guys are all truly amazing. And this very much is a team, like a team sport. Like business is a team sport, but this is like a live team sport. We come in here every single day, And the show doesn't happen if we don't all come in and make it happen. And so the consistency of the team has been just incredible. And watching everyone's individual talents just flourish has been incredible. A lot of people came into this, you know, having done a thing or two in the past, but learning new things. Brandon has been absolutely incredible, just an absolute rock in the organization. Brandon, if you're not familiar, writes our newsletter every day and is just remarkably consistent and has, like, you know, helped us shape our editorial approach. And it's been incredible. Dylan, who joined us, I guess, technically Q4 of last year, you know, I'd worked with him at my last company, but is truly, truly one of a kind, remarkable. I never wanna, I never wanna do business without him. And he has just done such an exceptional job working off air. It's like, you know, challenging when you're building a company and you're also having to put on a live performance for 3 hours every day.

He wrote the newsletter yesterday.

That's true, that's true.

The op-ed, he wrote the op-ed.

Ben, Ben, who's been here since day one.

Since before TVPN, he was working with me on my YouTube channel. When did we start working together?

I was here before Jordy.

Yeah, maybe like, wait, mid-2024, maybe something like that.

That sounds right. Yeah, there's fun videos.

Yeah, yeah, we traveled a lot, a lot of Pelican cases.

No, but it's been, it's been absolutely incredible to watch you grow from, from an extremely talented individual into a very capable and talented manager and, and building out a team of people that are so hardworking and wonderful. And, you know, Michael, Scott, Jackson, you guys, you know, are so, you know, such a joy to work with, even though what we do is, is not easy and it's changing, you know, day to day. To all the guests, seriously, it's been, it's been so much fun. Like, if you went back and rewound to the beginning of of the show to— we started with no guests. We did something like 50 episodes without any guests. We thought that— there was a time that we thought we would just do that forever, 'cause that was the only thing that was really unique about the show.

That's the reason I started creating content in 2020, because it was during COVID there were no events, there were no places to meet other founders, meet other business people. I wasn't thinking of it as like a media business. I was thinking of it as like, a way to just have conversations and meet other people who are building companies. And now we get to do that all day long, which is just a dream come true.

Yeah, so, so many guests have turned into dear friends. Yeah. You know, the Joe Weisenthals, the Dylan Patels. There's really too many to list, but we will have you all back on the show, and I can't wait. To everybody that's tuned in, whether you've watched the RSS feed, the live show, the clips, the newsletter, everything. You know, we've strived to create the right product regardless of how much time you have. If you have 2 minutes a day to read the newsletter, great. If you've got 5 minutes to watch some clips, if you want to watch the entire podcast, if you want to watch DietTBPN, the Daily Cutdown, thank you. Thank you for tuning in. And Fortunately, pretty much everything is going to stay exactly the same. Tyler! To our one and only Tyler. Tyler, you are truly, truly incredible. One of the brightest young people I've ever worked with. And you have such a bright future. We always knew that I've felt from the very beginning that you would go on to start your own company, and we cherish every single minute that we have with you. And we're gonna do our very best to retain you for decades, but thank you for everything you've brought to the show, everything you've built. Tyler, if you're just tuning in now, has built all of the internal software that we use to run the show.

It's insane stuff.

It is a, you know, fully custom, you know, content management system, CRM. It helps us edit all of our videos. Is the backbone of the show. It's a tool that the entire team uses on a daily basis, and truly the show would not be possible without it. And yeah, your contributions on air as well, it's amazing. It's so much fun to be able to cut over to you. And so it is with great honor that I give you this soundboard. Um, and, uh, our sponsors. Yeah, we can start with, uh, with the Ramp team. Eric, uh, Eric, Kareem, and, uh, the whole, uh, uh, uh, the whole team over there has just been incredible. They allowed us, you know, at the, at the beginning— sorry, the end of 2024, when we had started doing the show, we really loved it.

They were—

they committed to sponsoring the show for a year, and that allowed us to do, um, to do so much in terms of investing in all the equipment that we use, hiring people. They made it possible and have been truly, truly exceptional partners. And watching Ramp's growth over the last couple years has just been phenomenal, and they deserve all the success. And every other sponsor that has been a part of this, truly. Shout out Nick as well.

Oh, did he not get one?

Oh, we got to get a direct shout out for Nick.

We got to get a direct shout out for Nick.

We don't know what to call Nick. He's a producer.

We can't give his name on air because he'll get 10 times more emails. He— the lineup every day is crafted by Nick. He is our liaison to 99% of the guests that come on the show. Sometimes it starts with an interaction over X or a text message, or there's other intermediaries involved. There's a lot that goes into actually getting someone into the waiting room, into the show, making sure that they understand how the show will work. It's sort of like you're hot-dropping into this live show. That's new for a lot of people. And Nick does a great job communicating and parsing all the noise to understand what the best news of the day is, how we can contextualize it best with the optimal guests. And he's done a fantastic job and will continue.

It's an honor. David Senra?

Yeah.

One of a kind. He literally inspired us to grind harder. Yeah, David was our very first listener that I'm aware of. He gets sent a lot of podcasts.

We sent him a link in a Google Drive.

And he listened. And from that first episode, even though it was very scrappy, he said, take this 100 times more seriously than you are right now. And we did. And it's the best advice that I've ever gotten. And he has been— And we have a picture of him here.

We couldn't print it full size. And it appears that it was printed on a black and white photo printer. But it's a black and white photo and he's a black and white brand. So thank you to David Cenereau, who's been the podcast godfather, truly.

And the gong. The gong.

The chat is asking us to hit the gong. We have to oblige.

The gong will remain.

The gong will remain. Will Manaitis has already Will already chimed in with his take. He says, many people are saying we're in the Deal Guy Yuga. Many are saying. And it means a lot that Will Manidas, the only— he is the only guest who has co-hosted a full show from start to finish with us. And if you want to go back in the archives, you can watch that episode. It's a wild one. It was in a hotel room. We had yet to figure out the remote shows fully. The team worked really hard to make that one happen.

Very chaotic.

It was a good time. Very chaotic. And yeah, where else should we go? Should we go to— is there anything else to say about OpenAI? I mean, of course we'll be in conversation with you forever. Anytime on the show, you're welcome to leave a comment or chat in the— the chat is asking, where is Will Minitis right now? I don't know. Probably sailing a boat. I don't know.

Yeah. And yeah, it's an honor to partner with OpenAI and every single person on the team that we've had the pleasure of meeting, we've been impressed by. They are ridiculously talented, and every single person is committed to getting, getting this AI thing right. So we're very excited. We're incredibly excited.

Great. Well, let's move on to the Artemis II pictures and images and news. Very, very exciting. It made the front of the Wall Street Journal. NASA aims to orbit Moon for first for first time since '72 to boldly go.

The crew of NASA is asking, is that 3 Diet Cokes? Yes. You got to thank, you got to thank Diet Coke.

Thank you to the Coca-Cola Corporation for making this possible.

Thank you to the Huberman team, the Mataína, for the Mataína Yerba Mate, the podcast in a can.

Yes.

Wouldn't be possible without you guys.

And thank you to tailors and suitmakers. There's a lot of people that make this possible. The horse. The prop department. There's a million things here. It's been a great time. So the crew of NASA Artemis II head to Cape Canaveral launch pad Wednesday for the first human spaceflight to the moon in half a century. John Kraus posted an incredible photo. Is he someone who actually— yeah, he—

Special comms assistant.

Special comms assistant. He actually goes to the launches and brings special photography gear to get the best possible photos. And man, did he deliver with this one. What an incredible moment. We talked about it a little bit. There's an article on TheWATCHES.com, NASA Artemis II.

John, we have to thank our lovely wives.

Of course.

How could we not?

Our families. Did you get a text?

Maybe. We don't talk about them a lot on the show.

Yes.

This is a show about technology and business, but they have been— they are the back— they're the— truly the backbones of the show and have put up with a lot of travel, a lot of late nights, a lot of phone calls, incredible hours, a lot of early mornings. A lot of early mornings. I think out of the last— out of every single day that we've done the show, I haven't— I've left the house past 6:00 AM maybe twice, right? It's been a long road. And the good news, ladies, is nothing's going to change. Thank you to both of you for supporting us and allowing us to do what we do.

Can we pull up this picture, Ben, in the production chat of the first episode that we recorded in the Jonathan Club in downtown, showing a little bit of—

Yeah, I put it up earlier.

Oh, you did? Yeah, behind the scenes. This is such a wild time.

Remember that?

Yeah, remember that, Jordan?

Suitless.

Suitless.

We had the flag. Yeah, but no suits.

It looked, it looked, it looked pretty good on camera. I was happy with the way it came out, but Ben can cook.

Ben can cook.

Well, where should we go next? Artemis II?

Let's do it.

Yesterday, the long-awaited Artemis II mission took to the stars en route to the moon for the first such manned mission since 1972. Rolling flashbacks.

The chat asked for a flashbang.

Flash out. Okay, that's good. Yes, the flashbang has been a highlight for sure, both literally.

Yeah, the sound, the soundboard, it's truly, is truly a character on the show.

And I have some too now. Uh, its members all had Omega Speedmaster X-33 models strapped to their flight suits. Danny Milton, uh, just wrote a full article on the site now detailing the watches worn on the wrists of the 4 astronauts throughout their time as part of this mission. Watches Omega watches have a long-standing history with spaceflight, most notably through the Omega Speedmaster Moonwatch, but there are countless others that have cemented their place in the cosmos. Head to the site to learn more about the watches of Artemis II, from the Speedmaster X-33 to a surprising Breitling. You won't want to miss it. And this is from Teddy Baldessar, who's a great watch creator.

So we can pull up this video now of the astronauts working on it on what looks like some type of tablet. This was—

Do you think this is an iPad? I don't think so, right?

I don't think it's an iPad. Looks like it's running some Windows. They seem very committed to the—

Oh yeah, they run Outlook or something.

Yeah. So here he is typing in—

Most secure password known to man. What is that? 9393 or something? 3939. 3939.

Powerful. Powerful.

Well, we're going back to the moon. Apparently that video we played yesterday was a little bit of fake news. The young man, the adolescent who swears and says, "We're going to the effin' moon!" He was— the real line, I believe, in the community note is that he says, "We're going to the frickin' moon." Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it had been altered to add the actual F word.

Oh, interesting.

But the sentiment is still the same. It's very exciting, very inspirational.

And Jared Isaacman on launch day says, "Oh, this kid is definitely getting it back in NASA gear." That's great. Very cool.

There is some— there are some wrinkles with the launch, right? Fortunately, nothing like disastrous or catastrophic or anything, but the good news is that we're on our way back to the moon. The bad news is that the toilet's broken, apparently. And I believe this is from the live blog from the New York Times. The NASA associate administrator said there is a controller issue with the toilet on the Orion capsule, and it would take a few hours to troubleshoot. We're just getting started, he said, when addressing that some that and some other glitches with the spacecraft. The spirit of Apollo 10 lives on, they said. 1:35, they told us that. Here's another. It seems like this is not the first time that this has happened, but we're hoping for the best here.

Sounds like there were some other issues with Outlook as well. We can pull up this video from Tom Warren.

Yes. Oh, so there's audio with this too? We can remote in and take a look directly. Yeah, go for it. And then I also see that I have two Microsoft Outlooks and neither one of those are working. If you want to remote in and check— why do you have two? Like web and desktop, or you think it's like two separate desktop installations? Join in on your PCB and we'll let you know when we're done.

Honestly, this is the best possible failure scenario, is Outlook, not the rocket itself.

So can they—

I think it's a good outcome. There were so many amazing images coming out yesterday.

Yeah.

Uh, Peyton Alexander says, this is the real reward for Artemis. This is who we are actually doing this for. They will grow up knowing they can one day work in their country's bases on the Moon and Mars. We are not just abstractly hoping for a better world for them. We are going there. Uh, and, uh, two kids here watching the launch from Orlando. Uh, just beautiful.

Yeah, my 5-year-old said it was boring, which is not what you want to hear, but we'll have to give some more context to him about how big of a deal it is. He was like, yeah, I don't know, maybe he wants more flashing lights on the screen.

We were driving for the actual launch.

Yeah.

And it was so funny listening to the audio feed and sitting in traffic and just looking out at everyone.

Yeah.

And realizing that it felt like the majority of the world still wasn't paying attention or didn't care.

Yeah. I mean, like rockets do launch like every day now.

I know SpaceX has normalized it. To such a degree.

Isn't there some sort of subplot on the Apollo missions that by the 3rd or 4th Apollo mission, there was no, like the actual viewership had dropped off and like the American population had gotten bored?

2.6 says, "Put Subway Surfers on it." Yeah. On the NASA feed.

Crazy that you actually need to, maybe need to do this. Ed Ludlow was at the launch, but he—

Yes, he was. Let's pull up this, This video of legendary tech anchor.

I mean, it's an emotional moment, so I guess it makes sense to capture his result, but everyone's saying you should turn around and actually watch it. It's very funny to do the selfie video. I mean, it contextualizes the moment perfectly, but it is— oh, he was live on the air. He was live on the air. Okay, so I mean, if you're live, like, you, you, you don't want to necessarily turn around, I guess. I don't know. There's that famous clip of What? It's a wild video. There's that amazing clip from that documentary where the host is giving this monologue and then the monologue ends right as the launch happens. Like he timed it up perfectly and it's very cinematic. Anyway, I don't know. Delian shared the coolest orbital animation he's seen of Artemis II. It looks a lot less fishy when you see it this way. It's fascinating how close they have to be.

That's— and by fishy, John means one of the other animations actually was shaped like a fish.

But this one is a little bit more of a straight shot, uh, but it really emphasizes how short that window is where you're actually next to the Moon. Uh, it really, uh, Delian says, really, uh, just really shows you how far away they're flying today and how precise they need to be to go to the Moon. Yeah, remarkable. I'm very excited to—

All right, following this New York Times article, how AI helped one man and his brother build a $1.8 billion company. Who needs more than 2 employees when AI can do so many corporate tasks? It's super efficient and a little bit lonely. Aaron Griffith has the story. People are calling this the prophecy, the prophecy, the one man, $1 billion company.

Yeah, if you're in tech and you're in the business of making predictions, No one wants predictions. We want prophecies.

Prophecies.

You need to be prophesizing for sure. So the article, "How AI Helped One Man and His Brother Build a $1.8 Billion Company." Who needs more than 2 employees when artificial intelligence can do so many corporate tasks? It's super efficient and a little bit lonely. So Aaron Griffith tells the story of Matthew Gallagher, who took just 2 months, $20,000, and more than a dozen artificial intelligence tools to get his startup off the ground. From his house in Los Angeles, Mr. Gallagher, 41, used AI AI to write the code for the software that powers his company, produce the website copy, generate the images and videos for ads, and handle customer service. He created AI systems to analyze his business's performance, and he outsourced the other stuff he couldn't do himself. His startup, MedV, a telehealth provider of GLP-1 weight loss drugs, got 300 customers in its first month. In its second month, it gained more than 1,000 more. In 2025, MedV's first year in business, the company generated—

Full year.

The first full year in business, the company generated $1 million in sales. Mr. Gallagher then hired his only—

This is absolutely insane because as GLP-1s were starting to take off, I remember distinctly talking with somebody that was like, I wanna start a telehealth company for GLP-1s. And at that time I was like, okay, there's a lot of telehealth companies that are at scale and they're well aware of this. They will immediately introduce this product and other similar products to their customer base. And it's gonna be incredibly difficult to be competitive. And it turns out there's just such overwhelming demand for these products that you could come in as a new company and scale. I'm sure this guy, Mr. Gallagher, is incredibly talented, but the market overall is just growing so quickly that it didn't matter that every other telehealth company was also getting into the game. There was just such an incredible volume of sales coming in.

Yeah, yeah.

So like one year in, maybe he hires his only employee, his younger brother Elliot. This year they're on track to do $1.8 billion in sales. A $1.8 billion company with just two employees in the age of AI. It's increasingly possible, says Aaron Griffith in The New York Times. Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, predicted the rise of a new breed of super efficient company in 2024, a one-person business worth $1 billion would have been unimaginable without AI, he said on a podcast. And now it will happen. Now, as AI tools spread, entrepreneurs are harnessing the technology to expand their startups to an enormous scale at breathtaking speed with very few humans. Big companies, especially in tech, are getting in on the disruption too. Pinterest, Block, and others have cut thousands of workers in recent months, citing efficiencies enabled by AI. Mr. Gallagher, who formerly, formerly ran a startup that sold wristwatches, said he thought Mr. Altman's prophecy of a $1 billion one-person, $1 billion company would be a firm that built AI. He was excited when he realized he may have done it, taking an old idea, being a middleman for weight loss drugs, and using AI to turbocharge it. I am interested to know, and we're gonna try and get him on the show, like what the margins are on this. I imagine that the revenue is, you know, like a lot of this needs to accrue, a lot of the value needs to accrue to the, companies that actually designed and—

Yeah, and the one-person, $1 billion company is at a $1 billion valuation.

Yeah, at the same time.

It's at a $1 billion run rate.

I would imagine that even a reseller would trade around like 1x revenue maybe. I have no idea. Maybe way more.

I imagine these people raise money. Does this count? Does this count yet though? Like, I feel like to be the one-person, $1 billion company, you've got to be able to log into your payroll tool, and you're the only person. In there.

Oh, so—

and he's got his brother in there.

Sorry, bro. Take a walk. He's got— he's got to let his brother— let his brother go.

In an email, Mr. Altman said that it appeared he had won a bet with his tech CEO friends over when such a company would appear and said that he would like to meet the guy who had done it.

Yeah.

MedVie is technically not a one-person, $1 billion company since he hired his brother and some contractors. The startup, which has not raised outside funding, also has no official valuation. But many highly valued tech companies can only dream of hitting $1 billion in revenue with so few workers. MedVie is also profitable. That is great and important if you're bootstrapped.

Yeah.

Can't, can't get very far.

Is this a wrapper company? It's like a GLP-1 wrapper, but it's AI-enabled, but it's not wrapping the AI foundation model. It's like using the tool to wrap another industry and just create the efficiency between the manufacturer and the actual distribution. It really is remarkable. That they were able to hoover up so much revenue in such a competitive space, because you would assume that the other telehealth providers would have significant ad operations and that the margins on customer acquisition would be very, very tricky to crack. But you must have found some unique insight into how to distribute the product, get actual people to the website, because like the, the, the AI certainly can build the website and write the copy, but it can't necessarily get people to show up and actually put down their hard-earned cash for the product.

Yeah, just to put it into context, Hims did $2.3 billion in full year 2025 revenue.

Wow.

For 2025.

Yeah.

This guy started in 2024 and got to $401 million in sales.

I wanna know more about, yeah, the strategy here, how this built. Up so quickly. As a teenager, Mr. Gallagher began building websites for local businesses. He always had a hustle, including selling candles and samurai swords on eBay. This is the classic founder journey, selling something on eBay.

I studied the blade.

That's how I— I was selling DJ equipment on eBay back when I was a teenager. At 18, after building a web hosting business, he sold that business for $6,000. He briefly attended the University of Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky University, but did not graduate. In 2010, he moved to Los Angeles to become an actor. He eventually returned to coding, bouncing between tech jobs. In 2016, he built Watch Gang, a startup that sold Ritz watches via subscription. Interesting. Is that like buy now, pay later for watches?

Or are you renting them?

That would get a lot of people in trouble.

You're like, you got another watch?

You're just subscribed to new watches.

I didn't realize I was getting a subscription.

Oops, it came in the mail again. "It had fans but never turned a profit," Watch Gang, "even as Mr. Gallagher chased revenue growth and hired 60 people." So wildly different business outcome here. Wow.

He's like, "I'm not doing that again." Yeah.

"OpenAI's release of ChatGPT 2022 inspired Mr. Gallagher to start tinkering with AI. 2 years later, he met Jiten Chhabra, a co-founder of CareValidate, a medical startup in Atlanta. CareValidate offers what is essentially telehealth-in-a-box kits." companies, employers, and retailers that want to sell customers prescription drugs can use CareValidate's technology and network of online doctors to set up a business. The company's software connects patients with doctors and pharmacies, which write, fulfill, and ship the prescriptions. CareValidate charges fees for its software. You have to imagine that there's a fairly decent cost structure here, but that's not to diminish it. It's an incredible amount of revenue. You look at the comps, and you're— blown away. But yeah, it's just interesting to understand the—

Yeah, the other big question here is like, how much are you spending on ads? Like, it's very possible that, you know, the company is profitable, but if you're spending 60% of every dollar you bring in on paid acquisition plus COGS, and then any other expenses that actually go into fulfilling and actually getting prescriptions out. Can you imagine if he takes the company public by himself?

He's like, I don't need I'm just gonna like vibe code the roadshow.

100% retail allocation.

I don't know. I mean, I think like taking a company public is just technically a bunch of SEC filings. And if the investors sign up and the emails are sent and everyone agrees, it can happen. So who knows? Maybe he takes his company public with 2 people. That would be a— like it's just the New York Stock Exchange bell ringing. And normally it's like 20 people and it's like only the executive team and bankers and all the employees are, you know, outside or on the trading floor. And he's just standing there being like, oh yeah, I did it like by myself. Wild. Gallagher saw an opportunity for his own telehealth business. He could use AI to do the branding and marketing and let CareValidate and a similar platform, OpenLoop Health, which is another interesting company, and someone was posting about handle the doctors, pharmacies, shipping, and compliance. He planned to start with geolocation IP-1s. He was entering an established market for nearly a decade. Hims Hers Health, Ro, and other companies have sold drugs for erectile dysfunction and hair loss online using an online network of doctors to write prescriptions. Hims, which went public in 2021, has 2,442 employees and generated $2.4 billion in revenue.

Yeah, this is what I— this was what I was explaining to my friend who wanted to do something in this space. Yeah. Like, hey, you're going to be going up against a company that has billions of revenue already.

Yeah.

Thousands of employees that already has all the infrastructure to prescribe these drugs. But again, the market is just growing so quickly.

Yeah, he really used everything. ChatGPT, Claude, Groq, ElevenLabs, Midjourney, Runway to create media assets for his website and ads. He spent $20,000.

That's definitely something quite notable out of any time we're seeing these stories where, you know, the guy guy who was making a cancer drug for his dog. A lot of people are picking, if you can think of LLMs as like digital guys or girls, like people are working with multiple digital guys to do, to like complete these projects.

And so one model's better at writing, one model's better at coding, one model's better at marketing or strategy or anything else. Interesting. He said from the beginning, growth was insane. He quickly became one of CareValidate's and OpenLoop's top clients. The companies were blown away by the startup's speed and scale. You're like, do you have an army of people behind you somewhere? And he's like, nope. Wow. Well, you can go read the full article on The New York Times at newyorktimes.com. It's Aaron Griffith's latest piece. You can also listen to it. There's an audio version. There is some commentary on this, just a lot of people people having fun with it. Clayton Petty says, "Who has two thumbs and wants to know what the ad spend is?" This guy. Yeah, I'm very interested to know. I would still be shocked if this is not a fantastic business.

Yeah, at that scale, you can have truly terrible EBITDA margins and still be printing.

Yeah, and it's impossible that it's negative margin, because he hasn't raised money. And so like, where would the losses come from? So you can't be losing money, and if you're—

Could've levered up.

Maybe. I don't think so, though. I think everyone's gonna be shocked by how much cash flow this business is producing. But it is a very exciting moment in the story. Let's go over to Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution. Yeah, he just shares this. Sam said one person running a billion-dollar company, but if two are closely genetically related And Tyler Cowen's still counting this as a correct prediction, and some people in the comments.

Huge opportunities for other siblings to fulfill the prophecy as well.

So people are moving the goalposts already, because technically he had agencies that had humans that worked there. And if he works with a marketing agency and then there's a bunch of people there, it's more just like the disaggregation of the different institutions and the different organizations. What's your take?

Yeah, I think the real goalpost we gotta move is just you can't talk to anyone the entire time you're working.

You can't talk to a human at all?

Yeah, you can't say.

You can only be on the command line basically, or prompt box?

Yeah.

But you can tell the agent or the LLM to go and call someone? Yeah.

Can I do that? I think that's fine, yeah.

Okay. 'Cause then you're not interfacing with someone, right? Do you have to be truly a shut-in? That's the prediction now? Absolutely ridiculous.

Chat is asking for John Exley. John, get in the UltraDome.

Get back here. We didn't know how to unplug Exley.

We got to get him back in here. He's somewhere.

We'll find him. We'll get him back in. Jonathan Ross is talking about the petrodollar. There was a story about how there has been an interesting flight to the dollar. The dollar is very strong, even amid all of the geopolitical political uncertainty. Jonathan Ross, the founder of Groq, now the chief software architect at NVIDIA, said the petrodollar defined the last 50 years of American economic dominance. The token dollar, the currency AI compute is bought in and sold in, will define the next 50. Oil is priced in the— in U.S. dollars. That means every country on Earth needs dollars to fuel their economy. That single Simple fact has been the foundation of American financial power since the 1970s. Now consider AI. Training runs cost tens of billions. Inference is scaling to hundreds of billions. The companies that are selling compute are American. The currency it's priced in is dollars. The petrodollar, the petrodollar had oil. The token dollar has compute, same structure, same leverage, new resource. Countries aren't just competing over AI talent and chips. They're competing over whether AI remains a dollar denominated economy. That's the game nobody's naming yet. And so he is coining it. He says the token dollar is the concept.

Yeah, it's a cool position.

Yeah. So I mean, it'll be interesting to talk about Circle with Jeremy about how stablecoins fit into all of this. Also yesterday talking to CoreWeave about compute-backed credit lines and all the different financial products that are popping up related to debt issued against GPUs that have essentially a flow of business that will be expected to come in against them. Very interesting watching the larger AI economy mature. Brixton says compute-backed credit lines are the next frontier for fixed income and will quickly turn into one of the largest asset classes on the planet. People are going back and forth. No shade trying to Learn, isn't compute as an asset depreciating quickly due to innovation scale economies, uh, hence bad collateral? Uh, Brexton says, no shade taken, you're right, but it's still a couple notes. Supply constraints on chips right now makes older chips still valuable in secondary markets. Because of the above, capital markets care more about revenue produced from chips rather than resale value, and chips are only a subset of the total cost of compute. Heterogeneous builds, the rack, powered shell, shell, interconnect, cooling. It was interesting when we were talking with CoreWeave about the— I was really expecting the answer to be chip constraints, and he was saying powered shells, powered shells, which is what we've heard from Satya Nadella.

Yeah, and I think it makes sense given their business. It's hard to get chips, but think about all of the logistical complexity to actually get the the location, the energy, the shell, everything built together and navigating all those regulations. It's just like one of the— it's an incredibly complex infrastructure project that you're trying to compress onto timelines that America has generally not done infrastructure projects at in a long, long time, right? And so this was always some of the, you know, one of the exciting things about the data center buildout among the fear has been that a bunch of people are learning how to build complex things fast again, right?

Well, the year is off to the strongest start for big deals ever. Corporate mega deals flourish despite turmoil. This is in the Wall Street Journal. Large corporate deals had their best quarterly showing ever as companies forged ahead. Ahead with tie-ups and investments despite the Iran war rattling markets. So far in 2026, 22 transactions valued at $10 billion or more have been announced globally, a record quarterly number according to LSEG data. The next closest quarter was the fourth quarter of 2015 when 21 such deals were announced in that year. This week alone, Unilever, uh, failed a more than $65 billion deal, including debt, to combine its food business with spicemaker McCormick. And Cisco, which we talked about a few days ago, agreed to buy JETRO Restaurant Depot for over $29 billion, including debt. Uncertainty due to oil growth rate— growth and rates isn't going away, but major deals are still getting done, said Ben Goodchild, a partner in the M&A group at law firm Paul The M&A market is focused on the long-term fundamentals— right deal, right price, and right strategic rationale. There's more.

The total value of all deals announced globally jumped roughly 29% in the first quarter from a year ago, but the number of deals is down more than 17% as smaller deal activity slowed. The mega deal tally includes a handful of big equity investments in AI companies such as Amazon's $50 billion investment. In OpenAI, announced in February. A number of other big transactions are in the works. Estée Lauder has been in discussions to acquire Spanish beauty group Puig Brands, a deal that would combine two of the world's biggest beauty companies. And there is a number of others.

Absolut is buying Jack Daniel's. Tilman Fretta is buying Caesars Entertainment. There's another heist on the Caesars Casino referencing Apollo. Many companies see a moment to pounce on bigger deals that would normally face prolonged antitrust scrutiny. The Justice Department's top antitrust official departed in February after clashing with Trump allies who at times favored more lenient oversight of big deals. All this all comes as US stocks deliver their worst quarter in nearly 4 years, led by a 7% drop in the tech-heavy NASDAQ Composite Index. That makes it harder for buyers and sellers to agree on price to agree on prices. The Iran war has sent crude prices above $100 a barrel, which could keep interest rates higher for longer to combat rising prices and make funding deals more expensive. There's a very interesting chart. I don't know if we can pull it up in the Journal. Big deals have big first quarter. Number of global deals valued at $10 billion or more. There we go. And it's just—

look at 2020, 2021.

2021? What was going on?

Oh, this is another chart.

This is '09. Oh, if you want to scroll down, you can look at the smaller deals. These are deals valued between $1 billion and $5 billion. And 2021 was huge. What was going on then? It was ZIRP era, right? Post-COVID. Lots of—

I mean, when interest rates are near zero, you may as well lever up.

I guess that's— yeah, I guess that's the law.

Buy some assets.

Bankers and lawyers. Say smaller deals are less of a must-have. Buyers are more willing to put them on hold, but the big deals, they have to have it happen regardless of what's going on in the economy. Also, private equity firms are sitting on a record number of portfolio companies they need to eventually sell or take public, including many software firms threatened by the rise of AI. But many are hesitant to strike deals at today's depressed prices. While dealmaking activity in the software industry has stalled, there has been plenty in other sectors, including financial services and health healthcare. Eli Lilly struck a deal for Cantessa, and Biogen bought Apellis. Dealmakers have high hopes going into 2027.

A couple questions in the chat, and a special arrival. John Exley has entered the chat.

Let's go!

Welcome, the original chatroom general. Yes, hit the gong for Exley. John Exley. I don't know that John has missed an episode. And, uh, it's an honor to podcast with you, John.

Thank you, sir.

Another question: who is blacklisted from TVPN now? Uh, no one.

No one.

We've never, uh, there's never been any, anyone blacklisted from the show. In fact, uh, the evidence of this is every single one of our sponsors ever, we've had the competitors on the show. And, um, all of that will continue. We want this to be a place where Conversations can happen about anything. Yeah.

And there's also just a broader trend of this. I don't know if you watch the broader podcast landscape, people from quote unquote rival firms or different firms go on each other's shows all the time. Not uncommon these days for crossover content to happen all over the place.

James Kramer says, if private credit is so horrendous, how is KKR oversubscribed so easily on its $20 billion fund, they raised $23 billion. Some kind of disconnect here. Boy, are these firms ill-advised in how to tell their story.

This was the early confusion about private credit. People were seeing a whole bunch of private credit deals during the AI boom. And then when the nervousness matured, it was much more when we talked to Carry No Interest, for example. The worry was much more around software companies, not hard assets. It was not, oh, in this private credit fund, there's a data center that Meta is going to pay their bill on. It's some other company that maybe is not going to have as high of dollar retention going forward. And so, I think that the different private credit firms have a messaging problem of like, what is in the fund? Because it can be a lot of different stuff. And KKR clearly did a great job explaining why their particular strategy will endure for the long haul. There's other news about—

Let's pull up this video quickly of Cramer talking about our friends at Semi Analysis.

Oh yeah, this is great.

What are you talking tonight?

There is a company that I regard, it's the absolute, it's the gospel. Semi Analysis.

And I've got this guy, Dylan Patel, and look at that picture. Realized that Semy Analysis is the arbiter.

They're like semis, and they do— when they bless something, it means that it's the benchmark, the best.

They are the most honest guys I've come across, and I've always been reading them.

But Jensen plays—

really praised them, GTC.

So I reached out to this guy whom I regard as—

is Jeez, that's good. That's, that's, that's a promo. Yeah, we'll see you tonight. It was good promo.

Add money, 6 PM.

It's awesome.

Dylan says, can I short myself? And some people, some people were saying like, yeah, come on dude, like he's complimenting you. And Dylan and Kramer, this is the meme. And I've always said that Kramer having this thing where no matter what he says, people say like the inverse. They'll take the inverse ever. It is the best engagement hack ever for a content creator personality because it just means anything you say, you get a million impressions from people saying the opposite. And the fact is, like, Jim Cramer is— he's an entertainer. He's incredibly fun to listen to. And we'll be having another conversation with him in the next month or so, which I'm excited about.

Let's head over to Cliff Cliffwater and Stephen Nesbitt. He brought private credit to the masses. Now the masses are fleeing. This is more context around the private credit story. Cliffwater is racing to calm investors after steep withdrawals. So Stephen Nesbitt is private credit's chief evangelist. His investors and industry are having a crisis of faith.

Nick says, hope this still means my invite is open.

We'd love to have you, Nick.

Of course, Nick, your family.

Yeah, we're always positive.

Some—

as long as, as long as we keep it positive, we can say it's— and, and we keep the camera roll smiling, and we, and we maintain that occasionally we are back. It's not always over.

Very frequently we're back.

Very frequently.

Nick will admit that.

That's true. No, we had a great conversation with him when he came on. For more than a decade, the 72-year-old championed the hottest asset class class on Wall Street. His firm, Cliffwater, went from managing no money to nearly $50 billion on the back of impressive fundraising and big gains, turning Nesbitt into a billionaire. Now many of the wealthy individuals who powered Cliffwater's rise are itching to leave as investors rethink their views on private credit. After a handful of high-profile defaults, investors are pulling so much money out of industry funds that managers are restricting withdrawals. We've talked about this many times on the show. Shares of big are dropping. Few are like Cliffwater, which until recently was an investor darling but now finds itself in the hot seat. Its top executives aren't lending specialists themselves. Instead, the firm invested alongside and sometimes in other funds. So it's a fund of funds strategy, a feature that is now being treated as a vulnerability. Investors asked to pull the equivalent of 14% of its biggest fund in the first quarter. Wall Street skeptics who long questioned Cliffwater's Growth are now calling it a canary in the coal mine and a turducken of problems. Turducken of problems. That is such a weird phrase. Nesbitt's ability to quell the fears will be a test of his funds and the industry's future.

Are they calling it a blue owl in the coal mine?

Something like that.

No, I'm just joking. Of course. Blue Owl capped private credit fund redemptions at 5% after steep request levels. This was the other news. Oh, from this morning, I think they got something like 21% redemption requests outstanding during the first quarter. So they had to cap it at 5%.

Well, you know what this guy did before he started a, what, $50 billion private credit fund? He was a gravedigger. I'm not kidding. Yeah, he grew up near Rochester, New York. He worked as a gravedigger in high school. He spent a quarter century at Wilshire Associates consulting for pension funds on private equity and hedge funds. Nesbitt was a soft-spoken presence in a business of outsized egos, says Greg Williamson, a longtime pension fund executive. He didn't preach like others, Williamson said. He spoke about his clients' needs. In 2004, Nesbitt started Cliffwater after the 2008-2009 financial crisis. He began recommending private credit just as banks were pulling back from lending to riskier companies, giving Blackstone, Ares, and others the opportunity to make high-interest-rate loans. Nesbitt became a private credit advocate. Cliffwater launched an index tracking performance. The firm shared research, and Nesbitt wrote two books on the topic. In 2019, he shifted to managing money, launching Cliffwater Corporate Lending Fund, or CCLFX, with Blake and Phil Hasbrook, a then 30-year-old executive. They marketed to wealthy individuals through independent financial advisors, the kind of clients Hasbro worked with. It was built as an interval fund offering to buy back 5% of its assets each quarter from investors and provide daily updates on its value. It charged lower fees than some rivals and allowed clients to avoid the messy tax filing requirements of traditional private funds. By February, the net assets totaled about $33 Cliffwater made $375 million in fees from the fund in the first 18 months that ended in September. A 54-person crew researched and managed the portfolio of 4,100 or so underlying loans. Along the way, Cliffwater wrangled with rivals when an executive at bond powerhouse PIMCO said the returns of private debt didn't compensate investors for its growing dangers. Nesbitt sent investors a letter saying PIMCO had a failed track record of predicting market changes. After J.B. Dimon used a cockroach analogy to warn about looming defaults, Nesbitt declared there were no cockroaches in private debt. Others criticized Cliffwater's marketing, especially when it boasted of hedge fund-like returns with minimal risk, citing industry metrics like Sharpe ratios and standard deviation. Critics said private loans rarely change hands, so they lack the volatility that funds face. Anyway, he goes into the Trojans problem.

Well, speaking of Jamie Dimon, uh, the Axios show. Jamie Dimon eyes post-JPMorgan media venture.

He's potentially launching a podcast. Is that what this is?

Matthew Zeitland, friend of the show, former guest, says the desire to post is the only force in the universe that holds a candle to compound interest.

It's actually true. Everyone Everyone needs a pod. People have been talking about him running for president. A lot of presidents and media people have podcasts. He's acting very presidential. Well, there isn't all that much news here, but Dimon said that if he were to start a media venture, it would be something different about policy. He said, "I think media is critical. Media teaches everybody. Media is the great influencer." A lot of bad policy, he believes, stems from from people in the media doing a bad job of explaining issues. And so we talked about this yesterday or the day before in the Wall Street Journal. He has the new plan, the Diamond Plan for the American dream, wanting to lend to more small businesses. That seems more important than ever in the world where you have a one-person, $1 billion business. More people should have shots on goal. And if you think about the $20,000 that gentleman was able to marshal to get the business off the ground. If you have more people that have the opportunity, that's probably a good thing. But we'll be tuning in when Jamie Dimon launches his show. Should we go over to Apple?

Should we? I think it's time.

They really dominated this entire week. I mean, it's spring break, which is perfect timing. This must happen all the time.

I think they probably planned this 50 years ago. They knew the 50th would be during spring break. Spring break in 2026.

Yeah.

And so it would be a good time to, you know, really celebrate the anniversary.

Yeah. We had a great, great conversation with Eddie Cue yesterday. You can go listen to it on Apple Podcasts, which he created. And but there's more reflections and stories about Apple from all over the place. Ben Thompson wrote a great retrospective. The Wall Street Journal got access to Rare Apple archives that even Tim Cook hadn't seen before. It's very cool because, and you think about it, it's like, that's crazy. He's the CEO, should know all the archives. But then you think about like how busy his day is and he probably doesn't have that much time to just like go reminisce.

Obsess over every small decision or prototype.

Yeah, there's like so much work to be done. He doesn't have that much time to go look at like the original patent for the Apple II. Or whatever he, you know, is in that archive. So, the Wall Street Journal took the viewers through that in a video. We have a big read from the Financial Times here that's very interesting, talking about the roots of a tech revolution. So, Winston Churchill called it, quote, "The most daring and courageous act of the entire war." On August 30th, 1945, General Douglas MacArthur landed in Atsugi, southwest of Tokyo. He wore aviator sunglasses, a corncob pipe dangled from his lips, and he was unarmed. A man of war was arriving to make peace. Over the next 6 years of Allied occupation, MacArthur would demilitarize Japan and franchise women.

And by the way, you know, you guys know AGI will be very close when Tyler is smoking a corncob pipe himself. Because AGI of course should be able to one-shot any sort of lung issues that might come from using a corncob pipe. So some people skip sunscreen, other people indulge.

In 2012, I lived in a hacker house in Sunnyvale and the best engineer, still one of the best engineers I've met in my entire life, the best engineer in the house, was completely straight edge, would not drink or use caffeine or anything, but he would smoke a literal pipe. It was a very odd thing. And he just— That's so Lindy. Yeah, I don't know.

He was like, "Yeah, I just enjoy this." I would actually expect it to make a comeback, right? People are a little nostalgic, right? It's clear that vapes are maybe not something that people should be using, but the corncob pipe, Yeah. Who knows?

There's a chance. Tyler, what do you think about corncob pipes? Yeah, super Lindy.

I think I'm—

You're in?

Yeah, I think we're probably like 1 or 2 models away and then start ripping pipe.

I'm into it. I'm into it. So over the next 6 years, he enfranchised women, oversaw the writing of a new constitution and a decree of democracy. But first he faced a more prosaic problem. Japan's communication industry was in such shambles that he could barely issue commands. This is MacArthur. Solving this challenge turned out to have enormous consequences, not only reshaping Japan in the 1940s, but upending global manufacturing in the 1980s, and by the 2000s, revolutionizing new products.

[Speaker:JOSHUA MACHT] Gandalf in the chat says Gandalf, Max.

[Speaker:MAX BRADLEY] Thank you. Revolutionizing the way products would be built at Apple, a company that did not exist at the time. So Apple, which turns 50 years old on Wednesday, is arguably the world's most iconic company. It is also notoriously opaque and secretive in virtually all accounts of how Steve Jobs transformed Apple from near bankruptcy in 1997, which we talked about yesterday, that EQ, to the world's most valuable company by his death in 2011. Product vision and design all get the credit. But what actually makes a $1,200 iPhone possible at global scale with vanishingly few defects is a manufacturing philosophy that traces back not to Silicon Valley or southern China, but to war-devastated Japan.

And it took all my energy yesterday to not use the 20 minutes we had with that EQ for, for kind of like a tech support session. Yeah, I'm having this issue where you seem to be having like particularly— I'm actually— I actually need to— I think I need to like return the iPhone.

I think you are having some weird issue because there are weird UX/UI issues that you can learn and adapt and change. And I would say that they are skill issues. Like, if you can't use the camera roll effectively by now, you are needing to—

you're lost.

Yeah, you should just throw off some—

my issue, I don't know if any— anyone in the chat has experienced this, but when I open the Messages app or the phone app, I just get a blank white screen and then the app crashes like a bunch of times.

You have something weird.

And then I just— doesn't matter what I do. I can do a hard reset or anything like that.

I wonder if we were pushing it to the limit too hard yesterday because we were on a FaceTime call together and then also watching the Artemis 2 launch on YouTube. And then I was, I was watching it on my phone and I was streaming Jordy my screen via SharePlay. And I think that might have, The phone was really hot, I can tell you that much. I don't know. Anyway, by and large, the products are flawless, and I have enjoyed my Apple journey the whole way. So in the decades after the Second World War, Japan's economy grew rapidly. This is a story of how ideas travel across oceans and factory floors, and sometimes through a single person changing jobs. It is a story about how America invented a manufacturing philosophy, exported it to Japan, forgot it, relearned fragments of it through a handful of companies, and then re-exported the whole synthesis to Asia. The story leads us to the present moment with the US spending vast sums to bring it all back, southern India investing to be the next global tech hub, and China fighting to hold on to its manufacturing dominance. It is above all a story underscoring that what Apple started to build in Shenzhen Shenzhen, China, a quarter century ago is not merely an assembly line. It is the endpoint of a multi-decade chain of civilizational knowledge transfer, a feat of enormous complexity that cannot be replicated with tax breaks and car— or ribbon cutting in Texas. Tax breaks aren't gonna be enough. You need civilizational knowledge transfer. The whole chain begins with a question. In occupied Tokyo, a 33-year-old engineer named Homer Sarason stood before a group of Japanese executives and asked, why does any company exist?

Powerful.

When the telegram arrived from General MacArthur, uh, Sarason initially thought it was a prank. A physicist by training, the paratrooper turned radar engineer was working on a transcontinental microwave relay system.

This is Tyler, the physicist by training, the podcaster, that's a vibe coder.

That's true. He dismissed it, only realizing his error when an indignant colonel called him back a few weeks later. Then he was dutifully off to Tokyo for what was supposed to be a 9-month stint. Sarasone's mission was to reestablish and rehabilitate the communications industry, but he found there was nobody to work with. American bombers had devastated industry, and MacArthur had abolished the zaibatsu, the powerful pre-war corporate cartels. "We had to start from scratch," he recounted in 1988. "When we looked around, not only did we see no facilities, but we could find no managers. We had to find lower-level people, second-level managers, and I said, 'As of today, you're going to start up this new company and you're going to run it.'" The quality of manufacturing in Japan was shoddy even before the war. But as Sarasone began learning the language and immersing himself in Japanese culture, he realized the root of the problem was not technical, it was managerial. When he asked a group of employees how they might improve quality, they murmured among themselves about what an answer would please him rather than answering directly. Sort of the opposite of like the Elon walking the floor and like, "I want to get to first principles." They're really like, "What "Okay, what do you think he wants to hear?" "When will this plant be online?" "I think he's expecting it in June." "Tell him June." Lie. Yeah, this is not good. Everyone understands this now, but that was not the case in Japan in the '40s and '50s, I suppose. They had been taught to be deferential, he concluded, not to question authority. So Sarasone set out to teach them a philosophy of management. Despite initial opposition from MacArthur, the need for economic stabilization meant that Serresohn got his wish. He and another engineer, Charles Proetzmann, went off to an Osaka hotel for a month to write a textbook on industrial management. They designed a rigorous 8-week course and made it compulsory for top managers. The seminar began on the importance of quality as, quote, a guiding state of mind, a devotion and dedication. After asking, why does any company exist? Saraswati encouraged his disciples to draft a mission statement by invoking a motto from a shipyard in Newport, Rhode Island. We shall build good ships here at a profit if we can, at a loss if we must, but always good ships. It's a good line.

That's a good line.

Good line. Manufacturing Everything he taught had to be considered a total system, its disparate parts orchestrated with such repetitive precision that defects could approach zero. He inculcated his students, in his students, a sense that quality was foundational to the whole enterprise, empowering workers close to production and telling managers they needed to understand the details. Quality control is not a Band-Aid, Sarasone he later recounted, "To be effective as a control, the total process to which it is applied must be well-designed to begin with." So, when Serosone left Japan in 1950, he recommended his successor be the academic W. Edwards Deming, an advocate of statistical process controls.

Let's give it up for statistical process controls.

Let's also give it up for using the first initial of your first name and then your middle middle name. That's an under— that's sort of a lost art. You don't meet a lot of people that introduce themselves that way, but J. Alexander Coogan, I think that sounds pretty cool. Maybe I'll rip that at some point.

That sounds very regal.

Yeah, it sounds good. Well, what would you be?

That'd be J. Tyler Cosgrove.

That's good. Yeah, because Tyler's the middle name, so J. Tyler. That's good. Okay. Well, W. Edwards Deming would prove so influential that the Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers.

Kendall says, sometimes I get emotional about manufacturing.

It's true. Yeah, that is—

they're good ships.

The ships quote is so, is so good. I'm sure it's already been printed and hung on many of the, you know, new defense tech and American manufacturing companies. But it is a good reminder to always build what is of high quality. Aim for profit, but—

Justin says chat is on fire today. Of course, it's great. It's great to see all of you here. Someone asked, how are we going to celebrate? I think, uh, we're going to have lunch with the team later. I'm excited about that.

Yeah, we're excited for that.

Um, but I, but I think, uh, funny thing is just really our lives aren't, aren't changing. It's business as usual.

Chop wood.

Uh, we're gonna go hang out with our families. And I'm already excited for next week.

We do have a holiday tomorrow. It's Good Friday. So the New York Stock Exchange is closed, the market is closed. And so we will not be streaming tomorrow, but we will be back on Monday. But just so you're aware, don't be shocked. Oh, like this OpenAI deal happened and then they stopped streaming. That's not what's going on. This has been on the calendar for a long time. We haven't been booking guests for months because we know that this is a holiday coming up, which we are very excited about, and everyone will be enjoying the long weekend. So, Sarasone recommended the work of Joseph Geron, a consultant who during the war had managed a program shipping war materials to Allied nations. Geron's work in Japan would go on to earn him the highest honor from Emperor Hirohito.

We don't have a ton of time. I wanna tie this into Apple, Yeah, let's go there. Just go on this insane tangent.

We used to do crazy long reads where we'd spend like 2 hours on one New Yorker article. And then of course the show got much more complex. We talk about a lot more topics, but I like going through a long read. But of course you can pick this up in the Financial Times, which you should go and subscribe to.

Alex asks, how long did the acquisition take from start to finish? I don't remember. Have the exact number of days, but it was incredibly, incredibly quick. Incredibly quick.

Yeah.

And, you know, part of what enabled that was we had been having people from OpenAI on the show, having interactions with them. We had spent 100 hours talking about OpenAI. I didn't have like, you know, we didn't have a lot of questions on them. Yeah. And, you know, just, just given how much time we've spent And so that enabled a quick process. Also, you know, your long history with Sam.

Yeah, just like you beat your acquirer like years before anything happened.

Yeah, in this case, 13 years before.

That's crazy. Okay, where do we go to close this out? It was the early 1990s. We're flashing forward. And Jobs was half a decade into leading NeXT, the startup that he had founded after being ousted acquired from Apple. Next first product, a cube-shaped workstation costing $6,500, had already been a much-hyped flop. The team's goal had been to make a computer their friends could afford. By the time it shipped, the joke goes, the only friends that could afford to buy it were Steve's. Japanese quality ideas had been all the rage for a decade. The superiority of Japanese production had become clear in March 1980 when Richard W. Anderson, a Hewlett-Packard executive, famously discovered that the best Japanese memory chips performed 1,000% better than their American equivalents at initial inspection and 50% better over time. The so-called Anderson bombshell made HP start to obsess over quality. Its Japanese joint venture, Hewlett-Packard Yokogawa, won the Deming Prize in 1982 and became the foundation for rigorous standards applied across the whole company. HP aspired to improve quality unfold within a decade. And when that looked to be failing, it adopted a Japanese step-by-step approach to quality known as Plan-Do-Check-Act. Let's see where else.

Jobs was clearly taken by the ideas of quality Silicon Valley was beginning to import from Japan. Having set out to build a computer company that would create better products, he commissioned an automated factory in Fremont inspired by the plants of Japanese electronics manufacturer Alps Electric. Anyways, we can continue, but—

We have our next guest, Mark Lord, joining in just a few minutes. Let's run through some of the timeline posts.

Yeah, this was cool. Taylor Johnson said, nothing gets me hyped like a reaccelerating top line.

This is the definition of an AI company, right?

Sharing, sharing. or just a founder-mode company, but really both. You can see this is data from Sacra. Sacra shared. So funny, people calling me right now.

I know, I know. If you have called me, if you have sent me a text message—

We are live.

I'm sorry. I will get back to you after the show.

Feeling the love. But anyways, incredible chart here. Plaid ended in 2023. They went from $308 to $390 million of ARR and then jumped up to over half a billion in 2025. So Zach and the team are on an absolute tear.

You know who else is on an absolute tear? Taylor Lorenz. Apparently she spends 17 hours a day in screen time. I guess that means phone, but maybe phone and computer.

She has to spend a lot of time because she's defending big technology.

Exactly.

There's some incredible quotes in the story. She said if she could put the screen in her brain, she would.

That's wild. That's very unexpected.

I mean, she's got to get, got to get set up with the Neuralink team. But get me a true timeline merchant.

Yes, yes, it's— yeah, uh, well, yeah, extremely online is what That is the name of her book and she certainly lives her brand. Eliezer Yudakowsky had an interesting post here. He said, today I learned that Gemini Claude and ChatGPT, but not Grok, are told that today, he was referring to March 1st, April Fool's Day yesterday, is March 32nd because if you tell LLMs it's April 1st, the conditional text predictions downstream become less reliable for obvious reasons. Obvious training dataset reasoning.

The model's like, okay, understanding April 1st.

Yeah.

How do I understand?

It would be very, very confusing. I mean, we were confused all yesterday because you see so many news announcements go out and you're like, is this a joke? There is news. But if you're told it's April 32nd or March 32nd, like, you should be more confused.

You're going to be like, that's clearly wrong. Yeah.

I wonder how real this— Yeah. You would think they would just keep it March 30th or something. Yeah, I don't know. We'll see. We'll have to ask some people. Rune says, "The AI doc reminded me mostly of Kony 2012 documentary 'Slactivism,' selling the feeling of 'we need to do something' as a product oddly centering the filmmaker." When is the embargo lifting for the AI doc? Because I did see it with Tyler and a bunch of other folks from the team and enjoyed it, but I would love to talk about it. I believe we're gonna have the—

I think it already came out.

It came out?

Yeah. March 27th?

Yeah, yeah, it was interesting. The biggest gap between the AI doc and his, like, you know, the press tour that the creator is on now is that he seems like he doesn't believe AI is real at all, I guess. He was very worried about doom in the movie, comes away sort of like, "Oh, there's an optimistic scenario here. It's a very nice ending." But then he came away being like, ah, this stuff is not real, which is a very funny conclusion because he's not really asking about any of the financials or economics or business applications. He's having a much more philosophical debate and then came away with a financial conclusion. I don't know, it's interesting.

Yeah. Google has released Gemma 4, the best AI models in the world for their respective sizes. Demis is excited to launch Gemma 4, available in 4 sizes that can be fine-tuned for your specific task. 31 billion dense for great raw performance, 26B MOE for low latency, and effective 2B and 4B for edge device use. Happy building. Excited to see what people do with it. They're available now under the Apache license in Google AI Studio or on Hugging Face and some other platforms. So massive launch. Very exciting. What else do we got? There's more on the Mercure leak. Very unfortunate. Gary Tan says incredible amount of state-of-the-art training data is now just available to China thanks to the Mercure leak. Every major lab, billions and billions of value, and a major national security issue. I'm just feeling that the national security issue is one thing, I'm feeling really concerned for individuals that not only gave PII as part of onboarding, but maybe now there's like live video of them tied to that PII. So it feels like there's some real deepfake risk.

I'm very glad that we have Adam Myers from CrowdStrike coming on today to explain the surface area, what the trends are in cybersecurity, because things do feel like they are ramping up significantly. Significantly. Very, also just very odd that there's now a leak of data that could be used to RL models. There's new open source models. There's also the leak of the Claude code harness. And so if you piece all these together, you get pretty close to the frontier. And that's something that we're certainly going to have to contend with, the fact that every time that there's a leak, You probably shrink the gap between the frontier and the open source community a few, by maybe a few months or something as they catch up, even if they're doing it like sort of above board. Anyway, Louis says—

Louis, he found a public company with 99% of revenue coming from one customer.

You've heard of the one employee, $1 billion company. Now we found the one customer customer, $1 billion company. I actually don't know how big this company is, but we need to figure out what company this is.

This is TSS Inc.

Okay.

The ticker's TSSI.

And they said, we derive a substantial majority of our revenues from a single OEM customer. Revenues from this customer comprised approximately 99, 99, and 96% of our total revenues for the year ending December 31st, 2025, 2026, 2027, 2028, 2029. 2024 and 2023. So they actually had more revenue diversity in 2023, and then the revenue concentration increased over the last 2 years. Although we provide services across multiple business units and divisions of this OEM and have entered into a long-term AI rack integration agreement that includes minimum monthly payments, our overall financial performance remains highly dependent on the continuation and scope of this relationship.

Well, Well, you know, yeah, and they're, they're trading, uh, very reasonably. They're at something like a $240 million run rate as of Q4, market cap of like $366 million. Okay, so yeah, it's priced— seems to be priced in.

Yes.

Um, uh, Buco says, imagine being a software company with like 250,000 customers, $1 billion of revenue growing 20%, and the market says you're worth $3.5 billion. And then Rigatoni Computing has generously 5 customers 5 customers and basically no revenue is worth $4.5 billion. It's a cold world.

I don't know. Yeah. I mean, this is the reality of like working on a sci-fi technology is that if it works, the value is really, really big.

Yeah.

Potentially.

Prepared remarks says, but those 5 customers might go to 6. So you have to get in before that.

What is, what's going on with Scott Wiener's Based Act. Did you see this? Probably the most radical bill ever to degrade tech products. It bans Amazon Prime, stops iPhones from having FaceTime, strips travel, shopping, local, and AI results out of Google search results. This feels like a stunt almost. I don't know. It must be a commentary on something else. This feels like something that's like sort of being misinterpreted almost.

I don't know. Adam sent out an update. To the Chamber Progress Group. He said the BASE Act is likely the most radical proposal to regulate and direct technology product design ever advanced in California legislature. The bill dictates how core products must function from search results to app stores to e-commerce marketplaces.

Well, we have our next guest in the waiting room. Let's bring in Mark Lore from Wunder. How are you doing, Mark? Mark, good to meet you.

Hey, how you doing, guys?

Thank you so much for taking the time.

Uh, great to be here. Sorry we couldn't give you much warning around our news. Uh, it's kind of a wild, wild day over here.

I just saw it. Congratulations.

Yeah, thank you. I'm sure, I'm sure we can get into M&A war stories and whatnot, whatever you want to talk about. But, uh, why don't you, uh, uh, since it's the first time in the show, sort of take us back in history and give us a little, uh, a little background on yourself for the viewers. Yeah, sure.

I started my career in investment banking. And then in the late '90s, did a first startup, sold it to Topps, the baseball card company.

No way.

Then started diapers.com. OK. And then sold that to Amazon in 2011 for $550 million. And then worked inside Amazon for a couple of years, started Jet.com which is another e-commerce site. And 2 years later, sold that to Walmart for $3 billion and then became the CEO.

That's why they call him the LeBron James of e-commerce, folks. It's on the wiki.

Became the CEO of Walmart's e-commerce business and did that for about 4 and a half years.

Yeah.

Yeah. Now I'm the founder and CEO of Wonder. A food tech startup.

Maybe take us back to diapers.com. I'd love to know, like, how you were thinking about that business when you started it. Was there a thesis that sort of vertical-focused e-commerce was going to be a trend? What was the ecosystem like? What was the competitive landscape? Were VCs saying like—

Or did you just snap up a great domain and think, I gotta make some money with this thing?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. How much of it was just organic?

The way it started, I was just searching on Google what search terms people were searching for a lot, and, uh, doing it at night, searching, searching, searching, would tell you how many times it was searched. And I saw—

oh, so they didn't even have— so did they even have like Google Trends at that point, or you just had to search and they had— they would show you?

There's Alexa, I think it was called Alexa maybe or something. You can type in a search term and it would tell you how many times it was searched on Google. Yeah. And, uh, Diapers, I remember, was 200,000 times a month. And so, I went online and I saw the price of diapers was like $10 more expensive. And I thought, I mean, I had a baby at the time. It was a pain to go get diapers. Why aren't diapers delivered like everything else, like books and all this other stuff? And I thought, yeah, diapers.com. And that was actually 1-800-DIAPERS. It started because I couldn't afford the diapers.com domain.

[Speaker:CHRIS_SULLIVAN] Wait, so the 1-800, There must have been a moment where like the 1-800 was like more expensive than the dot-com though. And then did it flip at some point?

Oh yeah, it was very like, when I was there, it was very cheap. It was like, you know, I don't know, just tens of thousands, whereas the diapers.com was like a half a million or something.

So what was it like building an e-commerce website back then? Like we, I mean, we just, we just read a story about a one-person or I guess 2-people company, 2-person company that's at $1 billion in revenue. And that feels unthinkable. But like, what was the team like? Were you racking servers? Was there cloud? We were racking servers.

We were racking servers. Yeah, it wasn't— nothing was in the cloud. It was just, you know, eventually transitioned to it. But yeah, no, it was servers in the server closet. And yeah, we had, you know, designers, you know, designing the website and building it out. And like, it was, yeah, old school.

And then, I mean, how were you thinking about fulfillment, vertical integration, what you want to do, what you don't want to do early on with that journey?

I mean, we had very little capital, so everything was, you know, hand to mouth. It was, we would sell a diaper online, a box of diapers online for, let's say, $40. And then we'd go to to the wholesale club and buy it for $42 and ship it to the customer.

No way.

So it was like that kind of thing.

So we're actually losing money on every box we sold.

Yeah.

And then what was the integration with Amazon like at the time? Where was Amazon as a business? Where was the vision? What was the thesis and like what you saw was going on at Amazon? An exciting opportunity.

Yes. I mean, it's still early days. Amazon was actually crushing it in 2005 when we started diapers.com, but they were mass. They weren't focused any one category. It wasn't a great experience. Like if you're like me, a new parent going on to Amazon and wanting to buy like your stuff for your baby, you're like all over the place. It wasn't a great experience. The diapers were actually more expensive on Amazon than in the store. So they just weren't— they weren't getting the sort of whole diaper thing and saw an angle to create a specialty site that focused just on that vertical, everything the parents want, everything they need, all in one spot. And it was really working. You know, we also were able to ship the diapers and all this stuff out of the same fulfillment center with 2-day delivery, which wasn't being done on Amazon at the time in that category. Yeah.

Um, is that more important in that particular category? Because parents need diapers for the kids, it's a more urgent— like, it's, it's a fast— like, you might wait for a book or you might wait for a TV or something.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. You realize I'm running out of diapers, I need them tomorrow, you know, that sort of thing. So, um, definitely. I also think there's a lot of— you're buying like a lot of different things and it's expensive to ship them from multiple warehouses. So wanting to get them all in the same box.

Yeah.

Like getting the wipes, the diapers, um, the baby formula, you know, bottles and things like everything in the same box because they're low margin.

Yeah.

And so it's too expensive to ship them separately. But we were also the first ones to, uh, bring in Kiva Robotics into the warehouse.

Oh, no way.

And then Amazon ultimately bought Kiva Robotics. We were the first ones to, to use robotics in the warehouse. Warehouse. And again, all in the name of the margins are low. We have to, we have to figure out how to automate. We create this software that told the people in the warehouse exactly how to put everything in the box so we can get all the things in the smallest box possible.

Sure.

Because FedEx a lot of times would charge you for the box size. And so we tried to like, we had 23 different box sizes. So like, we were very advanced when it came came to the logistics and, and trying to pull costs out of the system.

Yeah.

And, uh, what, what, uh, what elements of the internet boom— like, what are the ways in which the internet boom feels similar to the AI boom, and, and how does it feel different?

Um, I think it feels very— I think it feels very similar. Um, I mean, certainly, um, you know, just, there's people on both sides of the fence. This is good, this is bad. What's it going to do? Like a lot of uncertainty.

Yeah, we were, we were looking back on, on how people, all the fears people that had about the internet are almost mirrored one to one with AI. Like every single one kind of matches up, you know, the job displacement, Y2K fears, Y2K, you know, Y2K, things like that. It's pretty remarkable how, how Humans feared the internet in the exact same way as—

Humans fear everything. You go back to when they, trains, okay? I don't know if you guys know this.

I wasn't alive.

When trains were a thing, they strongly advised people not to go on trains because at that speed, they don't know the long-term effects it'll have on your brain. And they told pregnant women, Do not go on a train if you're pregnant because for the same reason. Like any industrial advancement that's ever taken place in history, there's always an incredible amount of fear.

Yeah, it's fascinating. Can you tell me about the process of the idea for Jet.com? I remember that process happening and it felt like Okay, at this point, you know, with diapers.com, like there's a niche, there's a landing zone, like it makes so much sense, it's complementary to Amazon. Jet.com felt much more like, okay, this is like a direct competitor. Was that the correct framing? Were you thinking about that? Were you just thinking there needed to be more options in the market that you could differentiate? What was your thought process going into launching jet.com?

Yeah, I think there's just a massive market and there was no number 2 to Amazon. And we had an angle. Amazon at the time was shipping stuff from multiple warehouses. It was very inefficient from a logistics standpoint. They were burning a lot of money, but they had no competition, so they could do it. And the idea was very simple. Let's empower people and teach them how to shop smarter so that they can save money. And so, we built this smart cart technology where when you started adding items into your it would reduce the prices of the items that could be fulfilled from the same warehouse in the same box as an incentive to get people to save money. Because if you shipped an item from two different warehouses, you had to pay at least $5 per shipment. And if you shipped it from the same warehouse, the marginal cost to ship might be $0.15. And so, that was the idea of teaching people how to shop smart to save money.

What was the fundraising environment like throughout that journey?

I doubt you've had a hard fundraise.

At the same time, it's like, you know, you're going up against Amazon during this time.

I mean, I tried to raise money in 2001, 2008, '15, some really tough years.

I've been through it all.

I've been raising money now for 30 years. I've done probably as many venture capital pitches as anyone. Probably over 1,000 pitches easily now over the career. But the fundraising has changed. In the early days of Davids.com, if you were to raise $100 million, that was like a huge deal. And then today, it's raising billions, tens of billions. It's a very different environment today. But back then, it was much harder to get private capital.

What drew you to food? We had Travis Kalanick on a few weeks ago, and we were sort of joking around, is like, you do, if you've done, food feels like the hardest possible, you know, massive opportunity, but it's like probably the hardest food tech, probably one of the hardest categories. And so if you've mastered, you know, at-scale logistics in these, you know, incredibly, be, you know, capital-intensive. Things like e-commerce or rideshare, it feels like the final frontier, an incredible challenge. But what, what brought you, uh, what drew you into it?

I mean, first of all, I think the margins in food are just so much better than e-commerce. And I felt like it is— it's a restaurant sector was ripe for technological disruption. And restaurants haven't changed fundamentally in 100 years. They're still capital-intensive. Labor-heavy, difficult to scale, and they're, they're places. And, um, we wanted to challenge that and ask the question, what if restaurants weren't places? What if restaurants were just ideas? What if you can build a restaurant and scale it across a network like software without any incremental capital or incremental, uh, labor with robotics in the back end? And if we're able to do that, then we're able to bring, you know, make great food more accessible. We can bring restaurants to places that currently don't have access, at times of the day that don't have access, and at price points that are really unfathomable today. That was really the sort of the thinking there. And, you know, we managed to today in 2,500 square feet have 25 unique restaurants across 20 different types of cuisines, everything from a high-end Bobby Flay steak steak to José Andrés to barbecue burgers, Chinese, Mexican, Italian, Middle Eastern, fried chicken, pizza, all in one 2,500-square-foot kitchen with no gas, all electric, no open flames, with very lightly trained labor. So it's very systematized. And we see a future where we'll have 1,000 or more unique restaurants operating out of the same 2,500-square-foot kitchen. And so—

Wild.

Have you read any of those like old stories about the automats in 1950s? Have you heard of this? It's like this restaurant, I think it was in New York, and basically there was like a wall of cubbies where the food would be prepared in the back and then you would just sort of open the cubby and take your food and there was no interaction and they were like they were heralded as like the future in sci-fi, but they never really took off in like the '50s, I guess. And I've always wondered about like how important is the online interaction, like the delivery point, because there's been a number of attempts to make like robotic restaurants work, but it feels like if people are going to a restaurant, they want a a particular experience, but if they're ordering food online, they want, they're okay with a different experience. And I'm wondering how separate those are, even though we think of them as like, it's the same name, it's, you know, this pizza place in person or this pizza place on delivery, they're actually maybe much more different experiences and like experiences delivery, like what the value prop is.

Yeah, I mean, we're focused, it's primarily delivery first. So 70% of revenue is delivery, about 25% is pickup.

Okay.

And then less than 5% is sit-down. So we have 10 to 20 seats.

Sure.

In the front. So it's like, it looks like a high-end fast casual in the front, but it's a pretty small front of house.

Yeah.

Um, but being vertically integrated, so we bought Grubhub, so we own the delivery.

Okay.

We own, and we also own all the restaurants.

Yeah.

So we own all the restaurants, we do the cooking, we built all the technology. Technology. And so the vertical integration combined with a very tight delivery radius, yeah, allows us to offer an incredible experience— like faster, more on time, hotter food, great quality. And of course, everyone in the family could order from a, from a different restaurant, and it all gets cooked and delivered at the same time. And we can do that in ex-urban and even rural areas where restaurants can't typically go. And that's one of the advantages of the model. And then recently we just added drone delivery in New Jersey, and that'll be a big part of the, uh, of next year's—

is that flying or, or road going with wheels?

Uh, sorry, flying.

Flying.

And who did you guys partner— did you fully verticalize?

Uh, yes. No, no, we're partnering with a couple different, uh, drone companies to do it, but, but we're live. You can order from drone, uh, in New Jersey, uh, in this one location.

And, uh, what are the challenges with doing prepared food delivery via a drone? Like, I've seen some of these videos where a package will fall, you know, 10 feet out of the sky, and obviously that's not going to work if you're ordering a nice meal.

No, it comes down with a tether. Yeah, it comes down with a tether and very gently puts it on the ground. But the advantage is no tips, it's more on time, you can service a bigger area, and then you could also deliver to— if you're on a boat, on a lake, on a beach, a field, you could be camping, So the idea of being able to deliver it to the point as opposed to somebody's residence is really cool. And it's really at an inflection point now. I know we've been talking drones for 10 years, but when we go to Texas next year, we fully expect half of our deliveries to be done via drone.

Wow.

But this—

yeah, we've had, we've had Keller from Zipline on a number of times and we've been feeling the acceleration with every, every interview we have. How do you—

Yeah, one of the things that—

Go for it.

Oh, sorry.

Go ahead. How have you approached everything on the supply chain side? Because I imagine some of that is out of your control, but that you're heavily reliant on those inputs no matter how good your whole technology stack and process is. The food's gotta arrive at each of these kitchens. What is that?

That is absolute most important. I'm glad you called that out. We have, you know, 40 culinary engineers on staff. We just hired Victoria, who's the head of global supply chain at Cisco Foods. So we have a 700-ingredient library. We source everything from a number of different purveyors. It brings it to our distribution center. And then from distribution center, every day we replenish every location. Today we have 100 and I think 18 locations open. Next year, we'll have 400. So growing very fast. But the food quality is the most important.

I'm assuming it would never have worked to work with third-party food distributors. You need to control it. You can have them come into the central hub, but you need to actually understand what's waiting for them.

You want to have specialists. So if you have everything from pizza dough to barbecue to ceviche, steaks to that. Like everything comes from a different supplier, in some cases co-manufacturer. But yeah, the food quality is most important. But the 700-ingredient library is fixed. All the equipment is fixed. Think of that as like a data center. Once you have the data center and piping in the ground, anybody can create a restaurant using the platform and launch it across in instantaneously across all locations. So at the end of this year, we're launching Wonder Create, where anybody in the world with just an AI prompt can create their own restaurant and launch it across all Wonder locations for $10 a month. So we think it's going to fundamentally change how people think about restaurant creation.

So yeah, walk me through this. I come in, I want to prompt, I start prompting or even I'm just typing out what I want to make. And then your guys are using robotics, you can just make it on the fly? Like, what is the lead time? Can you actually open up the floodgates here? Like, how limited are you?

In December, yeah, in December, you'll be able to go to WonderCreate homepage and say, create me a fast casual Mexican concept for Gen Z. And that's it, hit create. And I will brand your restaurant, name it, give you a couple of options, do all the images, do all the recipes, write the descriptions, price everything, do all the health information, create your entire restaurant in under a minute. You can decide to publish it in all Wonder locations for $10 a month instantaneously. And now you're live to potentially 20 million people next year. You can push it on DoorDash, Uber, and Grubhub if you want as well. And you own the restaurant. You price it, you own it, it's live. And if you're an influencer, you have—

so are you doing a rev share back with the, with the creator, or how does, how does that work?

Yeah, you just basically— the creator would pay us for food and pay us for robotic time. So we plug in— let's say you created a fast casual Mexican concept, it would plug into our Infinite Bowl machine that we acquired from Sweetgreen. The Infinite Bowl machine would make your bowl according to your recipe And then we would actually print your packaging on demand to match your logo. So you're fully in business. You don't need to do anything. You can be live in a matter of minutes with your new restaurant. And then we're next year launching an automated sauce machine, the Infinite Sauce Machine, which has 130 raw ingredients and can make 80% of all sauce recipes on the internet on demand, 500 sauces an hour.

Your own.

So, you can also create your own sauce recipe, your own dressing, your own whatever sauce you want on these bowls that are made from the Infinite Bowl Machine. So, that's sort of all— it's all going to launch at the end of this year.

I mean, like, you're describing a very broad vision for the type of food that can be delivered and made. Walk me through the level of robotic automation. Is you walk into a place that toasts bagels and they have a machine, it's sort of robotic, that will like move the bagels down and toast it, or the pizza goes through the oven. And then we see pitches all the time from humanoid robotics companies where it's operating a toaster that's not automated at all, but the robot is moving and it's fully humanoid. What is actually useful? Where are we in the deployment of this? Robotic form factors are actually moving the needle and driving value?

No. So, okay. So where we are today, we have conveyors in every location. We have, again, no open flames, all electric cooking platform. When the item gets onto the conveyor, it goes down to the expo area, it gets auto-scanned, no human, robotic arm picks it off and puts it into the right bagging lane. So like that is, that is the extent of the robotic today. Yeah, but the robotic machine, the Infinite Bowl machine we bought from Sweetgreen, is live in 32 Sweetgreens. It makes all the salads and all the bowls without any human intervention. The only thing you have to do is put the ingredients in the machine, but the bowl is beautifully made. It turns the bowl neatly, puts the ingredients in the bowl, and there's no human labor. You're pulling out 25 points of labor, um, on, on making those bowls. And the bowl machine can do 500 bowls an hour. It can do $13 million in revenue in 300 square feet. Incredible piece of machinery. This great team from Spice Robotics, they have 34 MIT engineers up in Boston, are now working for us and they're building the sauce machine. The sauce machine will go live early next year. We're working on an infinite beverage machine that could make basically any drink, you know, in a coffee shop or cold brew concept, all the foaming, layering, blending. That machine will also go live next year. So we're layering on the automation. And then in the middle of next year, we're launching an automatic, automatic retrieval system where all— it has a cold storage, frozen, and ambient, and everything's stored in there. And so if you order wings, it'll robotically pick the wings and send them to the fryer, and then you The person just puts them in the fryer. In the future, the fryer will be automated, but that's where we are today and where we're going next year.

But we envision— Yeah, go for it.

But we envision in the not too distant future being able to generate $20 million of revenue at a 2,500-square-foot with only 15 people operating that $20 million in revenue. So, your labor cost is a small percentage. Your rent is a tiny percentage and we're able to make a 50% full wall margin, which we're going to take that extra margin and put a lot of it back into price. So we'd expect prices to come down and be deflationary over time. And it's consistent with our mission of just making great food more accessible price point.

Yeah. Food is food. Ever been deflationary? It just feels like it all forever. It just goes up and up and up. I wanted to get your thoughts on humanoid robotics, specifically in a restaurant context. I'm guessing I already know what you think, but what's your take?

Yeah, so we don't use any humanoid robots, so I think—

Oh no, I understand now. I mean more like diffusion. Do you think a humanoid form factor will ever be productive in a commercial kitchen, or are these kind of like bespoke systems like you've created going to dominate?

I mean, I think definitely the short term, what we're doing is sort of like first principle thinking on this stuff, like the humanoid robots going into a kitchen that exists as, oh, there's the fryer. This is what you do. You put the fries in the basket, the basket down, the basket up, the basket over. We like to rethink and think, why do you need to do that that way? Why can't you just create a fryer that has a conveyor conveyor, and the conveyor goes through the fryer and fries it along the way. So you don't need to put anything in a basket and take it out of a basket. Like that sort of, that sort of thinking. I do think there's some things that can't be automated. It would be a long time before we could ever automate it, like assembling a burger or rolling a burrito. If a humanoid is able to roll a burrito or assemble a burger, we'd be very interested in that and we would look at it. It doesn't seem like anything that's going to happen in the very short term, but I'm always open to know that anything you think is not possible today, you know, could be possible.

Yeah, we were asking a humanoid founder about what we're calling Diet Coke bench. How effectively can a humanoid open a Diet Coke? It's simple, but probably not too easy.

Yeah, we really like this.

Sorry. Okay, good. Just my last question is, Okay, I'm wondering about your vision for the future of like restaurant brands generally, because if like, will we get to a point where I can go and prompt or design a specific meal? And if I want buffalo wings put on pizza in a, folded into a calzone, deep fry, like all, as long as I'm using the tools that are within one facility, Will I be able to just create something that's essentially a one-of-one meal that is to my exact specifications and actually be direct to consumer?

Yes, you'll be able to create your own restaurant recipes the way you want and go direct to consumer. So we envision a future where there are not only influencers creating restaurants, but every college student can have their own cold brew concept. A high school student can have their own salad or Mexican concept. We envision in the not too distant future there are tens of thousands of salad concepts in the US, tens of thousands of fast casual, and the market will be very long tail, very fragmented. It won't be consolidated the way it is today.

It's fascinating. You're basically taking franchising and bringing it, bringing it online. And franchising in a way has been so successful because you're giving people a system and a proven product. But in this case, you're not asking for them to take on, you know, hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars of of debt to set up these—

$10 a month. That's all it is. It's $10 a month.

Well, thank you.

Incredible. Are you guys— what are you hiring for right now?

I mean, across the board, we're kind of, you know, big open— a lot of open positions in robotics and engineering. So, you know, we've got over 1,000 engineers on staff, but we can't seem to get enough. So yeah, if you're listening, reach out.

Amazing.

Well, thanks so much.

So great to meet you, Mark.

For taking the time to come talk to us.

Nice to meet you guys too.

Yeah, I've been following your career.

Yeah, same here. I was building an e-commerce company in 2012 and I was like, yeah, this guy's the LeBron James. So thank you for everything you've done for the industry.

Great to see you guys.

Great to talk to you. We'll have to create a TVPN kitchen.

Yeah, love it. Goodbye. There was something that you wanted to pull up, Jordy. What should we pull up?

Hear from Rat King, our friend over at New York Times. Yes, tech reporter.

What does he say?

Uh, he wrote, he wrote a profile on us. Yes, uh, he was able to get, uh, a screenshot actually from our contract.

Okay.

With OpenAI. Uh, and he says, interesting, as part of negotiation with OpenAI, TBPn has a commitment to editorial independence written into the contract which states the following: TBPn retains full control over its daily pro through programming, editorial decisions, guest selection, and production schedule. TVPN will continue to host a broad range of voices and perspectives, which we shared earlier. Yep. Yeah, open stage to talk about whatever you're building in technology and AI. TVPN independently determines its external appearances and commentary. OpenAI will not control TVPN's planning materials or working documents OpenAI will not provide direction on TVPN's editorial calendar. OpenAI will not influence who TVPN books or what topics it covers. Again, we just talk about so many things. Oftentimes we're talking about topics like on the fly, there's breaking news. This was incredibly important.

Yeah, it's also just more fun to have the directors be the hosts as well.

Yeah.

So that we're not talking heads, we just say whatever.

Yeah, people have always asked us, how do you guys decide? Decide who comes on the show or decide what to talk about. And whatever the honest truth is, we, you know, it's whatever we're interested in. It's always been that way. It's super important. Uh, it's always been important because, uh, we have to sit here and talk for 3 hours every day.

It's got to be interesting.

It's got to be interesting. That's brutal. Um, and, uh, yeah, OpenAI will not materially alter, discontinue, or rebrand TVPN. OpenAI does not have rights to TVPN host likeness Yeah, we specifically have it set up where they can't even train models on TVPN. Can't train it on the chat. They can't train on anything TVPN related. I'm sure other companies train on TVPN already in one way or another. But yeah, this was incredibly important to both teams and I think we got it to a really good place.

And thanks to Mike Isaac for covering it. Well, let's bring in our next guest, Adam Myers from CrowdStrike. He is the head of counter-adversary operations at CrowdStrike and the host of the Adversary Universe podcast. Adam, welcome to the show. How are you doing?

Adversary's worst nightmare.

The adversary's worst nightmare. Yeah.

Thanks for having me. Congrats on the acquisition, too. I was reading about that earlier.

Amazing.

Awesome.

Yeah. And thanks for hopping on. A crazy week. I imagine it's a extremely crazy week for you. Can you sort of level set for us, is this a really, really weird week generally?

Yeah, it's interesting because when we had, last time we had George on, or maybe the time before I was talking, it's like we haven't had big AI-related security breaches to date. And not everything that's happened this week has been, you know, directly tied to AI, but it feels like everything is heating up.

We're seeing more of it. There's been a couple in the last 2 weeks of these supply chain attacks. And, you know, I think what's clear is that especially with the use of cloud code and some of the different agentic solutions that are out there, people don't know necessarily what these things are downloading, what they're loading on their systems. I know you guys have talked about like Open Cloud before and things like that. And it's just, you know, the supply chain for software has has been an issue for a while. And I think it's just escalating, right? We've seen so many of these over the last week. We've seen Team PCP doing a few of these, and then this most recent one, which was a big one, tied back to North Korea.

North Korea. Yeah, it's two things are happening. People aren't reading code. They don't understand the ways in which they're actually building products. And then there's also like, you know, feels like 100 or 1,000 1,000 times more software just being created too. And the combination of those things is what's driving this.

Maybe—

I've been doing, playing with it a lot. And it's crazy. You can't even see it as it's running. And it's just pulling down npm libraries and God knows what else from PyPI and stuff like that. So it's just, who knows what's out there. And the other thing is you install these libraries one day, and then they become evil overnight. And you have to go back and review everything that you're using.

Yeah, can you give us a supply chain attack 101? Some people might be familiar with SolarWinds. That was the last one that really broke through to the mainstream, but just how does this work? What's the anatomy of a supply chain attack? And then we'll go into how to fight it and why they're on the rise in particular.

Sure, yeah, so generally supply chain attacks, you know, are gonna impact the software supply chain. And so in SolarWinds, I actually worked that one. So I can, I can tell you that one was, was pretty special because they got into the CICD environment, were able to actually affect the building of the software so that it was done in a way that nobody really could tell that that had happened. What we're seeing in these new supply chain attacks is that they're targeting the developers themselves, many of whom probably listen to the show. And so it's important to pay attention that they, you know, they go after your credentials, they phish they get access to your logins to things like npm and PyPI, and then abuse that. And there's a number of ways they can do this with git tags where they can actually hide the code and then redirect git to a git tag. But effectively what happens for the layman is that you have software that is depended on by enterprise applications by open source stacks. And Axios was downloaded something like 100,000 times per week, right? So that gives you a sense that these things are being used extremely frequently. And people don't look at them. They don't analyze that code. They don't analyze that library. They trust it came from npm. It must be good. The community's looked at it. But those things can be updated at a moment's notice. You don't know what that latest update is unless you review the code yourself.

Yeah, okay.

So on reviewing the code yourself, we were debating this. The two sides that we were kicking around was maybe the reaction to this is that, sure, we're not going to write as much code going forward. We know that the models are good at writing code, but there will be a lot more code reading that goes on, and people will just demand that if you're hired as a software engineer that you read You read every line, you work through the dependencies, you are in charge of the code that you ship regardless of whether or not it was generated by an LLM or not. The other side of it was sort of like maybe the answer to, you know, bad code, bad AI code is more good AI code and that we will be doing more AI code reviews and that we can actually throw more AI at this problem. I imagine the solution somewhere in the middle. But how are you wrestling with those two paths forward?

Well, I think what we're looking at is how do we secure it absent of is somebody reviewing the code or not.

Okay.

And so there's things that you can look for at the endpoint, at the security fabric, right? We kind of see ourselves as the operating system of security at CrowdStrike. So being able to see that, you know, the AI agent is writing code and it loads a library and inside that library use this Axios example, there's a chunk of it that's Base64 encoded and it's being decoded and instantiated. That's suspicious behavior, right? Just if I say that out loud, I'm like, hey, you guys are gonna pull down a bunch of Base64 code and then decode it and run it. You'd be like, no, we're not. So I think that those things that we could see at the endpoint at the build time, we can actually look for that and say, okay, this is suspicious behavior. Let's flag this and pay attention to what's happening with this particular thing. Because to your point, you could demand everybody read all the AI slop that they're generating. But the reality is that even if they do that, they're not looking at all the libraries that they're using, right? How many libraries does a standard build have, right? I mean, I've been vibe coding for a while and who knows what libraries, you run it and that's the beauty of it, right? You run it, it spits out bunch of stuff and then it works.

Yeah.

The reality is nobody's looking at those code bases until something like this happens.

Yeah. What does the future of security products, CrowdStrike— I can just imagine a world where more people need security products for open source projects, for their personal projects, for their personal life. Like if you have someone whose day job is important, but then they're vibe coding their family calendar at home, but all of a sudden that creates a vulnerability where you can get their phone number and then SIM swap or something like that.

There's just so many different vulnerabilities. People have had relatively high trust with software for the last 10 years, right? Totally. It's like, oh, it's a Google login, and only this year have I started to be, like, really question in different apps and things like that that people are making because there's a tendency if you're working in tech to like wanna try the new thing, right? And now when something pops up, it's actually kind of a headwind for startups because I think we're probably headed into a lower trust era.

[Speaker] Yeah, yeah, I think that's part of it. I also would point to the people that are building these libraries, right? They need, and we've seen this with Chrome plugins, too, and browser plugins, you need to have MFA, multi-factor authentication, on all of your authentication for pushing code out to these library bases. Because somebody comes along, phishes the developer, convinces them to enter password for Drive or some sort of cloud storage or something like that. They take those credentials, and then they use that to log in and change the code base. So the developers really need to be focused on securing their own accounts and identity. And we've seen, you know, we released this global threat report a few weeks ago. Identity, you know, for a long time, endpoint. And when CrowdStrike, I've been with CrowdStrike since we started back in 2011, endpoint was kind of where the bad stuff happens.

Endpoint success. It really is. What a good pun.

What advice are you giving to developers today that are, you know, I think everyone, that my advice would not be freak out, you know, slam your computer into the table.

We're going back to pen and paper.

Yeah, we're not going back to pen and paper, but like, what are the, you know, two factors, an obvious one, any other like advice that somebody should basically implement immediately?

Look, if everybody secured their identities, my job would be a lot easier, right? The number one thing that we've seen is identity attacks. I mean, 2 years ago we saw the voice-based phishing. So threat actors calling up the help desk and being like, hey, this is Jordy and I can't log into my account. And sorry, Jordy, I'm just picking on you there. But hey, it's, you know, I can't log into my account. And they're like, all right, well, you know, who's your supervisor? What's your work location? You answer those 2 questions and they reset the cred for you. And that happens to the point, hundreds of percentages of increase that we've seen that occurring from threat actors. So, you know, one of the ways to get around that from a defense perspective, multi-factor authentication. Don't use SMS, by the way, for multi-factor authentication because that's a whole other thing because I can SIM swap you or I can, you know, and, you know, if you have a backup for your multi-factor authentication as your Gmail, Well, I'll target your Gmail, and then I'll intercept that key. So having smart secondary factors and using Passkey and things like that, really important. And then using different, you know, I tell this to everybody, and, you know, even if I'm talking to a bunch of school kids, like, hey, use different passwords for everything. And I love nothing more than going into a room with people. I'm like, all right, raise your hand if you don't use the same password for every account. And they all raise their hands and I'm like, look around, if your hand is up, you're a liar because everybody does password reuse.

Yeah, of course. Give us the pitch for the podcast. Give us a summary, tell people where to find it.

Yeah, it's the Adversary Universe podcast. It's myself and Christian Rodriguez, who's our field CTO of the Americas. And just like you guys, we like to have a good time, just kind of back and forth banter, bringing guests occasionally, but we really dive into the adversaries. So in this case, In this case, with the Axios incident, we're attributing that to Stardust Chollima, which is a North Korean group. We've been tracking them since 2015. And one of the things that they—

Wait, so, and then Lapsus$, I don't know if I'm saying that correctly, was connected to the LightLLM attack, but that, do I have that correct? Or was it a different group?

Well, yeah, that's kind of, Team PCP, I think, claimed credit for that. But you know, they're actually fighting. You can watch this in some of their channels. The two groups are kind of, you know, talking.

They're like, I did it. No, I did it.

Well, I think the Lapsus$ guys, or Shiny Hunters, was like, this is why we hacked them, right? So, you know, they hacked Team PCP. So there's a lot of back and forth there. But you know, this one was North Korea who has been doing, you know, they stole last year $1.46 billion in just one, attack against a cryptocurrency company. So they've been stealing cryptocurrency since 2016. You know, billions of dollars is kind of the current total. And when they do a supply chain attack like this, they want to go after developers who are doing blockchain and kind of DAOs and stuff like that, because they know that if they can get into there, then they can, they can actually steal cryptocurrency and use that to buy things for their weapons program.

Wow. Yeah, a lot more straightforward than acquiring data and then trying to auction it off.

Yeah, totally.

Or the ransomware stuff.

If you get the coins.

Well, yeah, some of those are interesting because they actually, they were deploying stealers, right, to steal credentials to then go after other targets. And there's a whole ecosystem on the underground where you could go in, you could buy creds to an organization. And if you have creds to an organization and you log in, you can go straight into their single sign-on. You can get into Microsoft SharePoint or any of their data stores, and you're off and running. And there's really very little that organizations can do to prevent that. It's a legitimate user logging in with legitimate credentials, so it becomes very difficult for them.

Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come break it down for us. Have a great weekend.

Yeah, this was insightful. Come on more often.

Yeah, that'd be great.

Anytime, guys. My pleasure.

Have a good one. Goodbye. Our next guest is Jeremy Allaire from Circle. He's live in person in the TVP and Ultradome with us. We're very excited to talk to him. Jeremy, good to see you. How are you doing?

I'm good.

Take us through the, the announcement. We were covering it over the past few days around maybe, maybe reset on where the business is today and then we'll go into the Quantum story.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, look, obviously, we went public last year. And as we went public, we talked—

thank you.

There's a soundboard in person too. Don't worry.

Can I hit that now? And at that time, we were talking a lot about our stablecoin network, which is rooted in USDC. But really, over the last year, we've really widened out. We are a broader platform company now, and we have an operating system that we've been building called ARK, and that's getting ready to go mainnet, as we say. And then we've been kind of building out abstractions around kind of payments and sort of making payments more simple and mainstream, and then just building a lot of infrastructure and tools for developers and stuff. So the platform has really broadened, but I mean, if you You look at where we are now, like USDC has become the most widely transacted digital currency in the world, bigger than anything else basically, and has overtaken Tether in terms of transaction volume. Interesting. And we're seeing new uptake. We're seeing new uptake from major companies now, whether it's like a fintech like Ramp that just launched like whole treasury management with it. It's, you know, a global bank like JPMorgan that now has used it to like sell digital bonds. And so it's all over the place, which is pretty cool. And then, you know, one of the things that we saw really start to pick up and we'll talk about, I think hopefully today too, is effectively like this explosion in people building agents.

Yeah.

And agents consuming services and needing ways to kind of pay for all of that and the technology and standards to kind of do agent-to-agent economic transactions, financial transactions. And USDC has played a big role in that. And that's emerging. And to me is like one of the most interesting things happening in the agentic economy. And yeah, USDC and our stablecoin network is like 99% of the transactions happening now at that layer.

Yeah, so how are you tracking adoption? What kind What kinds of use cases are you expecting to be the first to really kind of go more mainstream? This is something that people have been talking about for years now, and as agents have become massively more popular, it feels like now could really be the moment. But like, what are you tracking most closely?

Yeah, I mean, look, there are a bunch of things. I think, you know, if you think about like the agent stack as it's emerging, right? You're clearly seeing a lot of companies that have services, have software, have other things, and they're basically like, okay, I need to kind of convert what I do into an agent consumable system. So I want to have an MCP server, I want to have, you know, CLI interface, right? So all these kinds of things and this sort of discoverability. And then you need ways to basically enable agents to like, onboard and transact really, really quickly and not go through the kind of onboarding that you would typically deal with. And so that's where we see this first wave is basically agents consuming services that are now kind of agent-ready and have been kind of structured that way. And so there's like a registry of now, you know, thousands of services that are basically becoming what's called X402-enabled. World, which is a key standard we're involved with. There's a big announcement actually today about that. And so that's like the first, it's sort of like getting that connected. But to me, the really interesting and more explosive kind of growth potential is really, you know, agents that are providing services to other agents themselves. And so if you think about like, I'm building an agent that's, you know, that's extremely good at a particular form of, let's say, medical analysis, or I'm building an agent that's extremely good at reviewing resumes, or I'm, whatever that is, this sort of agent as a service is again, the way that people are talking about this is like in those models, you're basically paying for intelligence. And intelligence is gonna be priced in dollars, but also as consumable tokens. At that point, like, if you look at like what's the cost for, cost of intelligence for X number of tokens with a given model, it could be 5 cents, it could be a dollar, it could be 35 cents, it could be more, it could be something long running, could be, you know, $100 or whatever. And so once you start having agents contracting with each other and needing that medium of exchange to settle that, that's where I see this as explosive.

Because you get this compounding effect active agents. Yeah, we were talking earlier. There's a guy in the New York Times today that built $1.8 billion business.

Yeah, yeah, no, I've been reading about it. I watched your show before I came in here.

Yeah. And what's notable is he's using a bunch of different intelligence providers.

Yeah.

But if you're just hopping between different LLMs all the time, it's not great. You're like copy and pasting. And it's not unified. And so you would imagine that over time, you get to actual aggregators. And you're like, hey, we need to tap into a different model for this, but you know.

And you know, like an agent marketplace and these registries of agents and obviously, like, because this is all machine to machine, like, it's super discoverable. And what's behind any given agent, which is just kind of consumed through, you know, some kind of underlying CLI or whatever API, right? Like, it doesn't matter what the underlying model is behind it. It's just like, there's a function I need and it's here. And so, yeah, I think it's also, you know, the kind of, you know, compensation fees, transactions around agent-to-agent stuff is obviously has that like huge exponential potential. I think what gets more interesting is when you really start to think about structured economic relationships, like most economic relationships, are not just like, you have a thing, I'm paying you for the thing, right? It's like a labor contract, there might be a lot involved in it, or a service contract, there may be many, many stipulations that are part of it. And like a trade agreement between two companies, there's like all kinds of stuff. And so you can imagine like more elaborate forms of contracts, and those need to be machine-written contracts, machine-enforced contracts, machine validated and audited and kind of have dispute resolution against all of those. And like economic operating systems that are built on blockchain tech stacks are like the way that will happen. And that's more of a view of like, what is the agentic economy? What is the economic system? And actually these new companies that are, you know, the one-person billion-dollar startups, et cetera, all that phenomenon, in some ways, like, these are emergent corporate forms, right, that are using a lot of AI labor. But over time, like, I think even the nature of corporate forms will change, and we'll have more digitally native corporate forms that most of the substance is actually just software execution. And like, there's humans involved, and maybe the legal system will always require there's, a person that's there. But I think we're going to face a lot of very hard legal questions around entity substance, like what is the substance of the entity? What is the entity? But I think a lot of this, there's a lot of material here that we have to work with to ultimately create these fully digitally native forms that are composing and interacting with contracts and economic systems.

How are you guys working with companies today? The beauty of USCC is anybody can kind of get the power of it by just permissionless, just tap in. But I know you guys have invested in companies in the past, partner with a ton of them directly. Like, how are people, I'm sure you're getting insane amount of real pitches and then also people pitching you with Open Claw. Things like that.

Oh my God, yeah. I mean, look, I think like, so a couple things, I think within this AI space, right? We're, yeah, we're making investments, like venture investments in different types of startups that are doing interesting things. We have builder programs, so we have, you know, with funding and stuff like that. So we have builder programs in this space, but a lot of what we're doing is just basically like making sure everything that we have, all of the infrastructure for wallets, the infrastructure for money, the infrastructure for creating smart contracts, like all the stuff that goes into this, that all of that is just consumable and discoverable by either AI development tools or by AI agents themselves. And then letting things happen. But like stepping back a little bit away from the AI-specific side of it, yeah, I mean, the range of, The range of companies now getting involved and plugging into this is really broad. And that's exciting. This is definitely kind of going into a mainstream phase.

I imagine AI companies are ahead of the curve there in terms of adoption and turning on agentic payments because you go to an agent and it needs to use some resource. That's the logical pattern versus—

There was a post, I forget who, who put it out earlier this week, something to the effect of AI people are more excited about crypto right now than crypto people.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you know, I've always thought of these as sort of highly complementary. And even going back 13 years when we were kind of starting Circle, the thing that got me really excited was this idea of programmable money. That we were gonna have like self-running software machines that would intermediate economic stuff on the internet. And that was the promise of the tech 13 years ago. You couldn't do it, it wasn't possible, it didn't exist. But it was like, as an internet technologist, that was really exciting to me. I'm like, "Wow, like if you can actually have, you know, these sort of self-running software machines that are auditable and can run." Now, I didn't have a concept of generative AI, but definitely was like, "Okay," programmable money that is going to be like a completely new form of utility for money that's never existed. And so, that was very exciting. And so, I think in many ways, like crypto infrastructure, crypto as a tech stack is very, very purpose-built for the agentic world. Like, they really are hand in glove and will work work very, very closely together. And so, you know, trustless intermediation is like what happens in AI, right? You know, whether it's of data or of—

Yeah, it's interesting to think about how many business transactions, like even if there's a contract, they're so trust-dependent.

Yes.

And stables can play a role in helping that evolve because you can say, Basically, if you can escrow funds, like you said, you can make programmable—

You can make contracts. And these can be very, very elaborate.

Yeah, that's always been the thing. Will people— like, people like to buy from people. But part of that is because you want to know, OK, who's my counterparty? Do they have a good reputation? Do I trust that even if we have a contract, they'll follow it and I don't have to get into some legal—

Yeah. I remember the pitch for machine-to-machine payments. I think it was around like Ethereum, maybe 2015.

Yeah, yeah. So this was like an early thing.

Yeah, and it sort of made sense, but it was very hard to imagine writing all the code to do all of that.

But now, now the code is just writing itself.

Exactly. Yeah, it makes a ton of sense. I'm wondering what you think holds about the current economic philosophies or the economic rules of the road just in business and what might be different as we move towards a world of decentralized, agentic payments? Like, I imagine network effects still hold. I imagine that if you create value, you create the network, you can capture value through some transaction percentage, and everyone will be happy in the ecosystem. How do you think about the economics?

Yeah, I mean, look, I think there are a bunch of different pieces here, right? So Circle is a money issuer. Like, we issue digital dollars. We issue digital euros. EURC is the largest digital euro stablecoin. We issue digital treasury products. We have the largest tokenized money market, basically. So, we're a money issuer. And so, if we can build networks that have wide utility and protocols for those monies that we issue that are super, super widely used and provide a great utility, you can can permissionlessly plug in, et cetera, and we can grow that, the monetary base alone can be massive, right? So we can imagine that these kinds of digital dollars running on these networks, there'll be trillions of dollars of these as opposed to hundreds of billions of them now. And so that itself is significant. And the economics are very significant from that. But I think ultimately, I think, you know, as the infrastructure becomes kind of more widely utilized for real-world transactions, I mean, whatever that means, right? Yeah, we absolutely have an opportunity to participate in the velocity of those transactions and the economics around that. But, you know, we had this philosophy when we started Circle that, you know, over the long run, that the marginal cost of storing and moving value would go to zero and that the business model of charging fees for payments would collapse. And, you know, I think over the long run, that is still going to be true.

Actually zero or like 0.0001%, which is so big.

Yeah, I mean, almost. Yeah, I mean, actually zero to most of the consumers of it because the costs underneath it are going to be so low. It's like Like, you know, you don't get charged for your WhatsApp audio call, right? They're like, you know, we're gonna deal with the business transaction.

We'll make it up other ways.

Yeah, it's too cheap to be—

But like, we just announced something called Circle Nano Payments. It's a module for agents to basically be able to like have a stored balance of digital dollars, of tokenized dollars, and be able to transact them to like different wallets on different blockchains. Chains, and we've gotten it to the point where we can actually have transactions priced at 1/1,000,000th of a penny per transaction. And you're like, well, who would ever need that? Well, if there's like—

Yeah.

Well, here's an example. So yesterday we had Eddy Cue on from Apple. He was talking about the early days of the App Store and how when you bought a song, they would effectively kind of open a cart, and they would hope that you would buy multiple songs.

Oh yeah, I remember.

They would hope you'd buy multiple songs in a 24-hour period before they actually like process the payment, because otherwise you're giving them a quarter.

It's just so expensive per transaction.

Yeah, quarter of a transaction.

Yeah, and so like that right there is insane. Like the fact that Apple, one of the biggest consumer tech companies in the world, had to use this kind of weird workaround just to not give— of 25% of every transaction, taking money away from, of course, like the creators and the record labels and Apple, just like pure kind of rent extraction.

Yeah, it's like payment systems were not designed for a machine and an AI economy. They weren't. And we even see this now where, because the cost to transact USDC has gone to sort of fractions of a cent, in general, you can do that, the velocity of transactions has exploded. And you see that in the growth, in the year-over-year growth. It's like tens of trillions of dollars of transactions on a monetary base of around— we like trillions.

Congrats for saying the biggest number.

On scale, what are you tracking right now to understand where we are in the adoption of— agentic payments? Because I imagine, like, it is happening. It's small.

It is.

Is it— are you doing, like, a percentage of GDP thing?

No.

Percentage of your transaction base? Like, just growth month over month? Like, what's the correct internal KPI?

Well, so there's a couple of ways to look at it right now. So one is, like, there are specifically standards for agentic payments.

Payments.

And so we are a co-developer of the X.402 standard. Actually, the X.402 Foundation just got merged into the Linux Foundation. And a lot of great companies— Stripe, Coinbase, who is a pioneer in this circle.

This has been a proposal in HTTP for like 25 years, right?

It's this old thing.

It's a money—

it's like payment request model. And so— but now if you look at like X.402 version 2, it's like building out into a pretty rich vernacular that's needed for the needs of agentic payment. So one way to look at it is like, what's x.402 traffic? And like, you can look at x.402 traffic. You can track it. You can look at the payloads. You can see what the transactions are. And that's in the like— it's been growing. It's in the hundreds of millions. OK, so quite small from a starting base. But I think if you look at a leading indicator, which is the number of these like agents or services or endpoints that are x402 enabled has been growing very rapidly. And we, as well as like companies like Stripe and Coinbase and others, we're basically like shipping stuff so that it's like super butt simple to like have x402 in front of whatever it is you're doing, or in front and behind. So you could be a consumer and a service provider. And so I think that, like 2026, we're gonna see this huge growth in that. And then the consumption models, the leaked Anthropic code actually had all of these references to X-42 in it. So, you know, it's clearly like even in foundation models becoming something that they're going like, hey, this is gonna be like a common pattern. But you know, so that's one way to look. And then the other is like, it's hard to measure, which is like people are using AI to create bots. These polymarket trading bots or these hyper liquid trading bots or like all kinds of stuff. And those aren't using x.402. And so that's like other traffic, but it's AI-driven transaction volume. And so it's hard to measure.

We gotta talk quantum.

Quantum. Yeah, quantum.

When, I mean, I'm assuming you were aware of the risk of quantum to encryption overall.

Did it hit you?

Did it hit you like a flash? No, it didn't. I mean, so very aware.

I'm saying like aware, predating Starting Circle, right? 'Cause this is just a risk for overall encryption. Of course.

Yeah, and this has been, crypto is cryptography, which is math, and all this is about who can compute these keys and ciphers and all that stuff. So of course, it's always been a background debate, always been a theoretical background debate. As we've been building up our own operating system, our own crypto-based operating system, ARC, we have been saying, okay, we're doing this kind of clean room from the start. It's a new infrastructure. We have a chance to do post-quantum readiness from the start. Whereas, you know, existing networks, and there's this Google paper and all that jazz and so on, like there's a migration and there's risk and all that kind of stuff. And so we basically said, okay—

Yeah, there's this massive coordination problem.

Huge coordination problem. So we basically said, look, We have phenomenal PhD crypto people in the company. And so we made this a key priority. And so we actually just announced today our whole post-quantum roadmap. And one of the most powerful things is that when ARK goes mainnet in the not too distant future, it will have post-quantum signatures there from the start. So if you're issuing you're holding assets and you're doing transactions, you can actually use post-quantum methods from the start. I think we'll be the very first blockchain network in the world to have that there, which is key. Now there's like multiple layers to this. And so the roadmap also details like, okay, you know, how do the validators on the network get themselves to be quantum resilient and resistant and so on? So there's multiple layers that have to happen over time. The base layer, which is the most important, which is the fundamental mechanism for how you sign transactions, how transactions are published to the network, and how assets get defined, like that's post-quantum. There's a lot of detail. We put it out in our documentation today. But we've been thinking about it a long time. And it's sort of interesting, 'cause we were gearing up to launch this, Google, DeepMind, whatever it was, came out and we're like, okay, well, time to launch.

Well, it's an interesting challenge for the industry because everyone needs to get their house in order and like create a plan. But then it's also like the entire industry needs to rally because even if you guys have your—

Oh yeah, no, it cascades across all these ecosystems and like USDC runs on 32 blockchain networks, right? And so like, you know, we are part of the whole ecosystem, obviously. And then, you know, of course, like if from a de novo perspective, people building new stuff, I mean, one thing to remember is like basically like crypto infrastructure blockchains had been an early adopter phenomenon until very, very recently. And like the actual usage at a global scale in the real economy, like, you know, 98% of that's still ahead of us. So we're still very early in all this.

Last question for me. How did you process the 2028 Intelligence Crisis, that paper, the Trini, because some of it was basically making the argument there's a lot of rent-seeking in the economy, and AI can potentially make a lot of transactions a lot more efficient. That's kind of what you're betting the company on.

Yeah, they had a bunch of specific stuff about stablecoins and USDC and all that. I mean, look, we are— so I read that, and there's a lot a lot of really interesting things in there. And broadly, even Circle itself—

Yeah, the interesting criticism too is like, the criticism was like, okay, this is like sci-fi. But when you look back at sci-fi throughout history, there's a lot of sci-fi that is like, you know, kind of come to life.

Yeah, I mean, look, I mean, the fundamentals of completely restructuring what transaction costs are and basically models where, you know, much of the work that's conducted in the real economy is work conducted by AI or by intelligences. And that work is economically going to be measured out and metered out and executed using these new digital currency forms. Like, I believe that very, very deeply. And I don't think anyone knows how big that will be, but it certainly, you know, Again, like total processed volume, which is like this number that like the card networks and others use, like these numbers are going to look so small in comparison. The unit economics are going to be very, very different. So I agree with a number of those conclusions. I'm not a hedge fund. I don't have any positions in any of these companies and all that. But like, I think it's real, and it's happening. Yeah, we're trying to build for that future.

Amazing. I'm glad we have you working on it. Thank you so much for taking the time.

Thank you guys.

To come on down to the TDP and Ultradome.

Thank you.

Really appreciate you. Our next guest is in the waiting room and we will bring in Justin Levine from Shepherd into the TDP and Ultradome. Kicks off our lightning round. Jeremy, how you doing? Oh, sorry, Justin.

Update.

Traveling through time. Congrats.

Big day. Yeah, thank you.

Thank you.

Honor, honor to have you here on this day. Sorry we couldn't give you a heads up, but, uh, well, we are not here to talk about us.

We're here to talk about you. Please introduce yourself and the company.

Yeah, uh, Justin Levine, co-founder, CEO of Shepherd. We're an AI-native insurance business. Uh, we focus on large-scale industries like construction and, and renewable energy.

Yeah. How are you thinking about the growth of the construction data center industry broadly? Like what's the headline number that you're quoting? Because I imagine you have a TAM and it's growing, but how do you actually sense-make about what to expect over the next couple years as you build the business?

I mean, we're in a massive construction supercycle specific to the AI infrastructure layer. I think this year alone there's something like $400 billion of infrastructure spend just related to either either data center assets or the energy assets that need to support those data centers. There's not enough energy on the grid, so we now have to build the energy assets next to the data centers in order to make it all operational. So, you know, from a TAM perspective, we are, we're seeing a massive inflection in terms of construction. This year alone, $80 billion of data centers were started. So $80 billion of new data center starts just happened in the last 12 months. So we're just seeing a massive wave, and it's kind of ironic for us. We built Shepherd on this thesis that AI was really ripe to productize this service of underwriting and doing underwriting differently. And then ironically, a lot of these AI companies became our customers because this industry is really, you know, the driving force of construction right now.

Okay, so who are all the different parties that you guys are helping insure? It's AI companies, Neo Labs, actual—

Who, who calls you?

Yeah, it's a mix of all the above. So everything from hyperscalers to the labs companies to, you know, contractors that are building obviously these, these assets. Our portfolio is actually more diverse than just AI-specific companies. But so, you know, our typical business is a large-scale developer of assets that are either energy assets or healthcare assets, hospitals, things of, you know, all sorts of different, I'd say, large commercial physical assets. And then we insure the contractors as well. So a big portion of what we do is identifying the best contractors who are using the best technologies out in the field and then rewarding them with innovative pricing.

Yeah. So what, what, what are, what are they insuring? Right.

Is it, is it weather, inclement weather, fire damage, labor costs? Like there's so many different—

what is this? What can you, what can you insure versus like what is just too— what could you insure but it's just too hard to price? You have to go to, you know, too high to make it feasible.

There's, there's a lot of different hazards, obviously, like related to the construction cycle. So there's obviously like the, the just the, the, the cost of the building during the construction phase. So the property risk that is associated with, you know, again, a large data center campus might be $20 billion of both construction material as well as equipment that's being installed. So there's an enormous property component in just insuring the actual property during the construction phase is a huge strain on the insurance ecosystem. Then there's a liability perspective. So, you know, the builders that are creating these assets are— they are on the hook for mistakes, for defects, for potential injuries to people. Or buildings and other, other assets that are around these job sites. So depending on sort of like the product offering, you're obviously focused on a specific hazard. We really focus on like the driving hazards. So casualty is our key, our key product offering. And again, that's going to be like property damage or bodily injury to people in and around the building of these large-scale assets. But then we also do property. So we also do the materials and the cost of construction while it's being built.

Uh, what, what are your relationships like on the actual insurance side? Who, who are you? Who are you actually? Who's, who's putting up all of the capital and taking on the risk?

Yeah, so we, we partner with large-scale insurance balance sheets, almost similar to like a neobank that's going to have, you know, sort of a traditional bank behind it, uh, you know, providing all financial stability and rating and the necessary requirements to fulfill whatever the contractual risk that is there between a lender and a builder. So we kind of, we stand up under what's called an MGA model, which is that Shepherd really owns all of the upfront marketing, sales, underwriting, policy servicing, everything from a submission coming in the door, the underwriting that happens, the making the decision-making around what risks we want to that we want to insure, and then ultimately servicing those accounts once they become policyholders underneath our brand.

Take us through the raise.

We got a $42 million round.

That's a big dome.

Love it. And yeah, who came in? What is special about this, like the actual investors on this round?

Yeah, so this is our Series B. It was led by by one of the largest insurance companies in the world. So Intact Private Capital led the round. That's the venture arm of Intact Insurance. Intact, a $30 billion global insurer. I would say what's special about it is the signal. You know, I think a lot of the things that we're trying to do differently specific to the automation of underwriting, making underwriting significantly faster and more efficient. A large insurer, a large commercial insurer like Intact pairing with us and partnering on this, I think signals that they see that the world of underwriting is about to change dramatically, just like other large industries, whether it's legal or accounting or all these other areas where we've seen a huge impact from AI and brokerage and underwriting are kind of, you know, right in that, that wheelhouse of where services businesses can change dramatically. So Intact had partnered with us at the A, they were a capacity provider for us. So they are one of those balance sheets that sits behind us. They've seen what we've been doing. They see the innovation that we're bringing to the industry. And so they, they actually preempted the round and doubled down into the, into the B.

Last question for me. How, how human is the process of underwriting? Because I feel like you could probably build a model, square footage, what are the assets, where is it? You know, you probably have underwriting models, but there's probably still like, who are you hiring? How do you, how would, how do, how will the How will the human capital side of the business scale?

Yeah, totally. So, you know, commercial insurance, you know, differently from personal lines, is definitely more complex. It's more, more data-heavy, more intensive. And there's a lot more sort of nuance in decision-making that happens at the underwriter level. So we actually, we equate what we're doing on the underwriting side to a little bit of a similar view of the self-driving kind of autonomous vehicle vehicles type of roadmap. So we've mapped our own Level 1 through Level 5. And the idea is like today most commercial insurance companies have underwriters with two hands on the wheel and they're, you know, literally doing every single thing. What we're trying to do is get to a place where the underwriter at Sheppard is much more of an orchestrator. They are managing a portfolio of 200 accounts rather than just 20 or 15 on a monthly basis. And so underwriters do play a significant role. We hire underwriters who think of themselves as entrepreneurs who want to build a portfolio. They want to orchestrate and manage that portfolio. What they don't want to do is data entry and some of the, I'd say, like process-heavy and high-friction elements of traditional insurance underwriting today.

Well, thank you so much for coming on and breaking it down for us. Congratulations on the round and good luck.

Thank you, guys.

We'll talk to you soon.

Ripping.

Have a good one.

Jeff, congrats, congrats.

See you guys, talk soon.

Our next guest is Gaurav Mishra from Mirage, formerly Captions App. I found out about the company through Ev Randall, who did the previous round. We'll bring in Gaurav to the TPBN Ultradome. Gaurav, how you doing?

What's happening?

Good, thanks for having me. Excited to be here. And yeah, thank you. Yeah, it's crazy, almost a year.

Crazy.

Yeah, you were— yeah, how— you must have been in the first How many guesses?

I'm a huge user of this app. I love this app. I've used it for every meme that I send you. Every time there's a video with captions over it, I'm always downloading on my phone, screen recording, putting in captions, and then I'll even use it to transcribe videos.

John is a magician. Like, he can make basically feature-length memes that usually just get sent to the team chat.

Yeah. But yeah, for those who don't know, the apps, but also just where the business is broadly and where you're expanding to. Sort of give us the lay of the land.

Yeah, so I mean, as you mentioned, we transitioned our name, so we kind of went from Captions to Mirage, but the app remains to be Captions. The company that we renamed basically, and part of that is like we're building out a product suite, so it makes sense to sort of have a different company name for that. Now, obviously we raised about $75 million recently. We announced that, which was exciting.

Congratulations. Thank you. Love it.

Love that. And so, so, you know, with that funding, a lot of what we're going to do is expansion, you know, market expansion. So, you know, we are very excited about the magic moment the product already has. And you talked about it a little bit, right? And when we can bring the product in front of a new customer, they're very likely to convert, very likely to pay, and very likely to retain. And that's kind of what our investors saw. That's kind of why this new investment came in. Now we want to bring this to as many people as possible around the world as quickly as possible. Historically, we've been sort of marketing in like 5 to 7 countries. That's kind of where we've been, US-centric, like a little bit in Europe and stuff. But now we want to go really broad, especially Asia as a big focus region. So that's kind of the plan of where we're going.

How do you think about with just feature requests and all, like the scope of what you can do with video plus AI. I don't wanna narrow you down to mobile, but like I think you've executed very well on mobile, but there's so many different features and a lot of them get broken up into different models, different APIs. I feel like there's so much opportunity to bring all that together. At the same time, you're going up against Meta and edits and CapCut and Divide Dance. Like there are some big players, but there's also a lot of opportunity. So how do you see the landscape of things that you can do? I'll scroll Reels all the time and see some crazy edit and be like, oh, I know that they jumped to Blender for that, or they used a particular AI model for that, or they're in After Effects for that. And I want to recreate it, but I don't want to necessarily sit down for 5 hours and remember how to use it. Use Blender. I mean, it's—

you actually hit the nail on the head because this is exactly kind of what we're— the way we're thinking about how our product roadmap goes, right? I think if you look at the AI video space, there's tons of companies, there's a lot of activity happening right now, right? But our approach is a bit different than everybody else. Like, we're not only about generating video, even though that's a big component of what we do, right? And we use all kinds of models out there. We have our own models as well, right, for audio and video generation. but it's really about the assembly of the video into something that actually makes sense, right? Something that, a narrative that ultimately can work for you, whether you're a small business, you're selling something, whatever it is, you can tell your story, sell your product, market yourself or your business using our product because we can assemble the right video for you. Now, here's the interesting part. What we've noticed is that a lot of our customers, especially the ones that are retaining for long periods of time, It's not just about fully generated video. It's a thing. If you're making a Super Bowl commercial short, go and generate the entire thing. It's going to look awesome. But there's actually a much, much larger market for a mix of content. Think about our average customer. They're like a plumber, or maybe an electrician, or like a nail salon. They want to actually show their actual nail salon. What does it actually look like as opposed to a generated nail salon of some sort? They want to merge that with some generated footage, some cool shots, maybe a founder video talking perfectly about whatever they want to do and put it all together into something that they can give to customers, market on their website, wherever they're putting it out there, social media. It's really about the connection of generated and non-generated together and then putting the narrative together. That's the intelligence layer. That's really our focus.

How do you think about entry points into video creativity? There's something that's be sort of intimidating about an empty text box. At the same time, it is like the universal interface. It's the most broad possible UI. When do you want a user to start with an existing video or an image versus start with a blank text box?

Yeah, so I actually— so even today, over 50% of our users start with some sort of media, an image, a video, a set of images, a set of videos, audio, music, all kinds of things. Over 50% of people start with media, which actually is very different than most other apps. A lot of pure video generators, people start with text, they start with a prompt, and ours is flipped. It's media first, prompt is attached to it. Now, I think the way we think that's going to evolve for us is that it's going to go more and more media first. That's the crazy part, right? I think people expect it to go more prompt first, but I think our angle is a little bit more media first using real footage. I actually think that there's another extreme here. Think about, let's say you want to make a documentary, right? You probably want zero generated footage in a documentary, right? It's all documented reality, right?

Yeah, I've been seeing that. I've been lately, I'll try to pull up a video on YouTube YouTube with, uh, with, with my son of like, uh, a cheetah. But I have to find videos that are older than like 4 years because I don't want a bunch of AI cheetahs. I want the real thing. I'm trying to see like documentary footage. Uh, so you gotta find like the vintage National Geographic stuff. Uh, wow.

Yeah, soon that's gonna be lost. We may never find it again.

No, we will always have the archives. We'll be going deep into the vintage.

Exactly. Yeah, it's real. What are the plans to scale the business over the next year or two with the new fundraising?

Yeah, I mean, so a lot of it is going to be market expansion, right? We talked about that. I think secondarily, it's use case expansion, right? So you talk about, we started off with something really simple, adding captions to your videos. That was the first thing we ever did, right? Straightforward, but quite useful, right? And then From there, you realize that it's really about automatically editing your video, automatically adding edits, automatically doing stuff that people do manually normally. And that's how we build our roadmap. So the future for us is expanding use cases on what can we automatically edit. Today it might be, okay, it's talking head videos, it's real estate videos, things like that. Tomorrow it could be product launch videos. Tomorrow it could be all kinds of other things that we don't do today. Me perfectly, right? So that's kind of where things are going. And with that comes like new sets of users, you know, expanded use cases, obviously, is like expanding the town for product, right? So that's kind of where we're going, both on, you know, product expansion, geo expansion, you know, that's really the focus.

Well, thank you so much for coming on and breaking it down for us. Congratulations. And we'll talk to you soon.

Great to have you back on. Let's not let it be a year.

Always a great time.

Time.

Yes.

And by the way, congrats to you guys. Thank you.

Have a great weekend. Yeah, great to talk to you soon.

Goodbye.

All right. And without further ado, we have our last guest of the show, Philip from Star Cloud, putting more and more data centers in space. We're very excited to talk to Philip. He is, I believe, in the waiting room. We'll bring him into the TVP and the UltraDome when he's ready.

Uh, Google released a feature called Zero. They say inbox zero is a thing of the past. Introducing AI Inbox. Cut through your email clutter with smart prioritization and daily personalized briefings. Uh, Isaac says brands sending 5 emails a day to drive higher and higher ROI won't work anymore. RIP email. Yeah, it'd be interesting to see how this channel does.

That sent us a bunch of, uh, a bunch of emails that he's been getting, uh, and they look like spam recruiter emails, but they all come from newly set up Gmail accounts, and they're not quite human sounding, so we can clock them. But basically, he's getting like an ever-increasing amount of poaching emails. And usually, you'll need another filter on the other side.

Gmail filters are going to have to start going standing outside offices and just waiting for people to leave.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, we have, I believe we have Philip from Star Cloud in the waiting room. We got some vertical video. We'll make it work. We are going to have a quick chat about 3D sensing in space. How you doing?

What's going on?

Hey, you guys, apologies for the vertical video. We're all good. It's great. We got back-to-back sounds.

Okay, so I can't turn this off.

Second time on the show. Kick us off with the fundraising. Tell us what happened.

Yeah, so we just raised $170 million at a $1.1 billion valuation.

That is— thank you so much— a massive round.

So the video is vertical because the valuation is going vertical.

Yes, but, uh, yeah, yeah, this works great. Uh, so yeah, uh, talk to us about, uh, what you'll be building with into that new round? Is this hiring? Are you gonna be in the R&D phase? Do you have manufacturing partners lined up? Are you gonna be buying heavy equipment to make stuff? What does the next couple years look like for you?

Yeah, so we're building the third satellite that's very similar to, it's gonna fit on the Starship PEZ dispenser form factor. So it's this constellation we've just filed with the FCC for 88,000 satellites. And so what this allows us to do build a manufacturing line for that. 88,000 satellites, by the way, would allow us to deploy about 20 gigawatts of compute capacity, which is on the order of $100 billion worth of CapEx spend. So yeah, we're ramping up.

Too low, too low. We've been swinging. Yeah, absolutely wild.

Who, like, what kind of partners are you working with? I can imagine basically every chip company wants to have some exposure to what is an emerg— you know, will be an emerging category. How are you approaching that side?

Yeah, 100%. So working with NVIDIA on— we just announced, and at GTC Jensen announced it, this Space Rubin chip. So it's like a slightly mass-optimized, slightly radiation-tolerant, and then slightly thermally optimized chip chip, which can be used for space inference. And we've been working with them on that for a while because we've got an enormous amount of data now from the Star Cloud 1 satellite, which has the first NVIDIA H100 onboard. And so we're using all of that telemetry to inform the design choices, both on the Rubin chip and also on our second and third satellite.

And are you running workloads, like mini workloads on the first satellite? How, what does testing look like?

Yeah, exactly. So we ran, we trained a model. So we trained Andrej Karpathy's NanoGPT on there.

Oh yeah.

We did the first type-out inference. So we're running a version of Gemini called Gemma on the spacecraft. And then we're now also doing some more like military kind of useful workloads, which is running inference on SAR data. So synthetic aperture radar, which is basically where companies or where satellites collect a 3D image of the world underneath them, and then they can use that to detect things like a vessel entering, you know, entering your territory or other things.

How is it— how is the discussion going? How is the research and development going around heat dissipation? That felt like the key. Will it work? What are the economics? Are we expecting to be like on track for some solution? Do you feel like the solution's in sight on some curve or maybe even already here? How is that going?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And by the way, this is where I want to give you guys credit for shifting the Overton window on this because I think you guys were the first to do a segment where you were like, do you remember the bit where you were like, imagine before they had cameras on spacecraft and people would be like, wow, that's so crazy.

Oh yeah.

From then on, people were like, okay, maybe, yeah, this probably actually could actually be a thing.

I think.

Yeah.

But yeah, so we've been working on this radiator for 2 years now. Okay. It's a solved problem in the sense of the physics of it.

Okay.

What remains to be done is the manufacturing challenge. So making this thing cheap and light.

And also small enough to fit into that, what do you call it, like the Pez dispenser?

Exactly, the Pez dispenser form factor.

Okay.

We've got a design that we've rocked up, so we fabricated it and it's going through thermal and vacuum testing now. It's about 100 times less cost per watt of dissipation than the International Space Station radiator and about 10 times less mass per watt of dissipation than the ISS radiator. And the main reason is we're not doing 3D like additive manufacturing. We have a much simpler manufacturing technique, which, yeah, that's kind of our core IP.

Sure. And then just, I mean, can you give me like a mental picture of what I'm visualizing because I feel like it can't just be a sail that just like, there's no wind, so the wind doesn't expand the sail. Am I thinking about like hinges and little tiny motors to sort of like expand and unfurl?

Yeah, exactly. So the deployment mechanism is what's called a pantograph. So it's like this scissor mechanism that if you've ever seen, like when you walk past the building site, you sometimes see those like, platforms that will raise up and down. They're lifted by this pantograph scissor mechanism that goes like this. It's exactly the same deployment mechanism, which by the way, all Starlink solar is deployed using a pantograph. So what we've done is we've just added, you might have say 20 segments, 20 sections of solar panel that unfold in the Z-fold. And then we've just added 5 segments of radiator at the beginning, which also unfold in the Z-fold, and then they're connected with tubing. And then we're pumping coolant past the chips directly and then out to this, the Z Fold 5 segment radiator.

Oh, interesting. You're at 1 GPU in space. You filed for— 5 GPUs.

Oh, you're at 5.

Okay. I had you short. So you have 5, but you're going to 88,000 or something like that. What will the curve look like? Are you trying to do 50 and then 500 and then 5,000 and then 50,000? Are we going by orders of magnitude or is it like a lot of work and then they all start flying up really fast?

So we are very heavily dependent on Starship before we will be flying frequently. So we're expecting Starship to deploy the first Starlink V3 payloads either end of this year or early next year. And then from there, we're expecting 18 to 24 months before the first commercial payload. So customers like us flying. So we're looking at the end of 2028 before we launch our Starship. But our own deployment schedule is later this year we'll be launching Starcloud 2, and that will be a 10-kilometer kilowatt spacecraft, about 100 times the power generation of the first one we flew. And that has this— this is the first one to have this deployable radiator. It'll be by far the largest commercial radiator in space. And then next year, we launch a very similar version of that. And then we launch on Starship this PEZ dispenser. And actually, we may even launch it on Falcon 9, the first one, just to test it, which will be about 200 kilowatts. So 20 times again the Star Cloud 2. And then we can launch 50 of those per Starship. So then you're talking about 10 megawatts of compute per Starship launch. And once Starship is flying frequently, we're expecting to be launching hundreds of times per month. So that's 100 Starship launches, about a gigawatt of new capacity. So we're talking on the order of tens of gigawatts of new capacity per year being deployed at that point.

Do you have any insight into how space compute might in the short term be better for a particular AI workload? Workload? Like it's gonna be better at diffusion or worse at diffusion or better, you know, we've seen some bifurcation just in the data center around ASICs, Groq chips, Cerebras, et cetera. Is there a world where we're like, oh, there's this one small use case that's gonna really, really work well and then maybe over time it'll do everything, but in the short term we're confident about this?

So at a high level, it's not gonna be any training workload.

Okay.

And at a low level, it won't be anything requires sub-50-millisecond latency. So there'll be a sweet spot in the middle, which in my mind is basically all back-office business processing tasks and all code generation tasks. You know, you could even do voice agents for customer service or, yeah, anything like that, video generation as well. But it won't be things that require extremely low latency or things that require very highly internally networked cluster, like a training workload, you could not do.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Makes sense. Well, thank you so much. Congratulations on the round. I'm very excited.

Yeah, massive. Yeah, and you seem like you've even evolved yourself since the last time you were on the show. I'm sure you've just— you and the whole team have been pushing it to the absolute limit.

Yeah, it's fantastic to see someone call their shot and then it becomes just one domino falls after another and then it's being mentioned at GTC. And Elon's talking about it and it becomes, you know, much more like science fiction fully moves towards like science fact, which is very exciting. So thank you.

I appreciate that. Thank you.

Have a great rest of your day. Have a great weekend and we'll talk to you soon.

Hopefully.

Congrats on OpenAI. It's amazing.

Thank you. We'll talk to you soon.

Thank you. Have a good one.

Goodbye.

I texted my dad the news. He said, Dads, congratulations. That's so exciting. Thanks for letting me know. Talk to you soon. Have a great day. Thank you. Thank you, Dad.

Oh, it's amazing. Well, if you've texted me or you've called me in the last 3 hours, there's a good chance that I might respond to you in the next couple hours because we are winding down the show. Please leave us 5 stars in Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Subscribe to our newsletter. Tbpn.com. Everything is the same. We will see you on Monday, 11 AM.

Next week, 5 shows, 15 hours. Let's be honest, it'll probably be more like 17 or 18 or 19. We'll see.

Who knows?

The world is our oyster. And thank you for being with us along the journey. We appreciate it.

Let's get one more gong hit, John.

One more gong hit.

It's been an honor.

Goodbye, everyone.

See you soon.

We'll see you tomorrow.