OpenAI to Support Adult Content, CoreWeave’s AI Ranch, Apple's M5 Vision Pro | Zachary Perret, Panos Panay, Eric Wittman, Brian Baumgartner, Adam Ryan, Adit Abraham, Dan Shipper & More

You're watching tBPN. Today is Wednesday, October 15, 2025. We are live from the TBPN altered dome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Massive collaboration between our first two sponsors. Not first two sponsors, but two of our sponsors. Ramp and Restream. Ramp is streaming a stunt today. We're going to talk to them. We're going to collab later in the show. But first we have to debate tech companies. OpenAI. We have to debate erotic and why.

Don'T you introduce OpenAI for anybody that's been living under a data center and.

May not know originally open source artificial intelligence company.

We haven't spent much time talking about them.

Yeah. Focused on moving towards AGI. But yesterday Sam Altman made waves with a post about loosening the content restrictions such that users would be able to create text erotica. And that put the timeline in turmoil and a lot of people are very upset about it.

He didn't specifically say text erotica, did he? He just said erotica.

Okay. In the text app. He didn't say sora. That's right. We should pull up the actual thing of what he said.

I think you have to assume that on a long enough time horizon, if they're allowing erotica and one part of a product of the product.

Yeah, yeah. No, it's a fair. It's a fair thing to read into. The exact quote from Sam Altman is in December, as we roll out age gating more fully and as part of our treat adult users like adults principle, we will allow even more like erotica for verified adults now.

It's so funny. The top comment on this post is about time. ChatGPT used to feel like you could a person you could actually talk to. Then it turned into a compliance bot. If it can be made fun again without losing the guardrails, that's a huge win. People don't want chaos.

Some people are into it.

Clearly written by ChatGPT.

Some people are into it, but many people are not. Lots of people having fun on the timeline with some memes. You posted one. I guess we're doing porn now and it's AGI. AGI.

Porn.

AGI. I just.

It was. It was not that long ago. Like, the fair criticism of this announcement is that less than a month ago Sam made the point that he said there's possibility in the future that we'd have to choose between free education and curing cancer. And he implied that he didn't want to have to make that decision so that he would need about A trillion dollars in order to make sure they had enough compute and so to immediately fast follow with sora. Very cute intensive feed of AI media fast followed by this announcement, which presumably will drive subscriptions, it will increase retention. It will. I think this will be massively popular with women. Right. I think people generally underestimate how large the market is for this type of romantic novel. And if you turn that into a chat based experience, it's probably gonna be hyper addictive. It's probably gonna be something a lot of people will happily pay real dollars for. And the question is, why did they have to do this? Right. You can see the business reason for it clearly. A lot of people want this, but my immediate reaction was like, is paid subscription user growth stalling out to the point where they feel like they have to make a decision that's obviously going to be mocked by the entire industry? It's sort of, it makes it much harder for OpenAI as an organization to continue to frame themselves as an AGI.

Company or even compute constraint.

Yeah.

Because if there's unlimited Demand on the B2B token side or just like the knowledge retrieval side or the agentic commerce side, you start to think about like, well, wouldn't you just deprioritize that? Like YouTube certainly has. YouTube could have at some point said, hey, you know, we're going to go and you know, just eat the lunch of every adult content hosting website because we have better infrastructure, we have a better broad network and we can age verify people and host all that content and just take 100% of that revenue, basically. They probably could have put all of the adult content hosting sites out of business if they wanted to, but they made the choice not to. And it felt like it was reasonable because it was growing. Yeah, YouTube was just growing, growing, growing. And you know, yeah, it lost money for a long time, but then it made a ton of money. And it just seems like it's been, you know, a choice. And I think that my take was that every company has a line where they draw the line.

Yeah. Why did they. This feels desperate. This is a move that, like, can you imagine the management team over at OpenAI, the people that we've spoken to? Do you think any of those people want to be in the adult entertainment business?

Seems odd, I think.

Yeah, you make, you know, when Grok did this, it's not like they didn't, weren't. I don't know if they were directly mocking it, but the industry was broadly embarrassed by XAI leaning so heavily into this sort of AI Romantic companions.

Yep.

They know how people feel about these. They know how the industry feels about.

Totally, totally.

And they still made the decision to come out and say we're and so what is that?

And our reaction and our reaction to Grok, you know, going into adult content was very much. Well, it does seem like they're behind on. Yeah. A catch up stretch.

It felt like a desperate move. Right. Yeah.

And we, and we clocked it as something where, well, who are they going up against? Anthropic, OpenAI, Google in the foundation, model wars. What are those companies never going to do? Adult content. And so if you can be the biggest, you know, the monopolist in that category, you can probably do pretty well. And we were trying to estimate, Is it a $20 billion opportunity? Is it $100 billion opportunity? We never thought it was a trillion dollar.

Yeah. And the demand, demand is always seem very obvious. Like I expect OpenAI to have like my bowl. The bull case for Xai doing leaning heavily into romantic companions when the other labs didn't want to touch it was that they could probably get to, if they really went hard on it and they iterated on the product, they could probably get to a billion dollar run rate on romantic companions. I think the market is there for that. Does it support a $200 billion valuation? Xai's current valuation? No, they're going to have to do a bunch of other stuff. But again, I just. You get the sense that OpenAI has wanted to be thought of as the apple of AI. You saw their super bowl campaign.

Definitely not the apple of AI. Now.

Yeah.

Did you know this Steve jobs quote In 2010 he went on stage talking about the iOS app store and he said, we do believe we have a moral responsibility to keep porn off the iPhone. Folks who want porn can buy an Android phone. That is such an aggressive quote. And I don't think of Google as some X rated organization. I think of Google's brand as extremely clean. I think of YouTube as they've had little issues and pockets of content, moderation issues. But in general I feel like Google has been pretty squeaky clean. Yes, you can go and search for adult content and you can find that on Google search. But in general I feel like the vibe of Google is, hey, we want to be a family friendly company. Think of us as like a PG or PG13 brand generally. And there, there might be some, you know, there might be some R rated content on YouTube but we are going to, you know, coordinate off. But we're definitely not playing in the Adult content world, we're not making any money off of that. We're not really running ads against that. We're not going to try and figure out how to like fit that into YouTube. Overall, like it is definitely off in its own world. And Google's been happy to just say, hey, we're not a participant in that category at all.

Yeah, Apple, you go back to the, to the super bowl ad that, that felt like a crack at, you know, trying to bring it. Apple, it did energy and be labeled and get people to think of, okay.

Even, even that euphoria ad with that, with like, that had a very like premier prestige brand.

And so not okay, I'm gonna be an adult. And so my framework again is that, you know, I now I just view OpenAI as an emergent hyperscaler. They're going to compete in all the categories that the hyperscalers do. Yeah, but the aura for me this is like you know, minus 10,000 on the aura meter for me of making this move. And I think that broadly many people feel the exact same way.

The aura fields are fallow. They're not farming very well.

Yeah, I mean anthropic, anthropic comes out of this the last couple weeks looking like very counter positioned to OpenAI right now.

Oh no, totally.

They're getting into a bunch of BS around the regulatory side. So they're getting in the mud over.

There, but they are running a clean operation, at least so far. I want to run through the other big tech companies, give them MPAA ratings and then you can tell me if you agree with my rating or you think you'd give a different rating. So for Apple, they have explicitly said we don't put adult content on the iOS app store. There will never be an adult website with an app on the iOS store. I think of Apple as a PG company. Like if I gave my phone to a kid. Yeah, they could download Candy Crush or something. There's probably some rules. But in general I think of them as very pg. Do you agree with that?

I agree.

Microsoft, I call them a G rating because LinkedIn basically has no adult content. Yeah, they own Xbox and Call of Duty. But in general they're so professional they, that if, you know, if you're, if your kid is on a Microsoft property, I feel like it's extremely safe. It's basically G rated. What do you think? I agree Google might earn a PG13 rating. Because of Google or because of YouTube, there are some videos that aren't appropriate for kids out there. Like you can show off a gun on YouTube. But you can't monetize that content and you can't show how to assemble it. Actually, the gun youtubers will cut in between. Like if they're like, I'm gonna put the gun together now, they will cut that out of the video. So it doesn't show you how to assemble a gun. And there's some like mature content. Obviously you can see an R rated, you know, movie trailer or an R rated edit from a movie. But in general, I think of Google is like a PG13 company.

What do you. Yeah, I think that's right. I think that you maybe don't want a 13 year old watching like some schizo conspiracy theory content because maybe they're just not at a point in their life where they can kind of really process.

They can be full schizo. They're ready to get out the red string.

Yeah. Maybe they want to lean in.

The wild card that I want to debate with you, Amazon. Amazon is just a, it's a Walmart online. You know, it's a store and a cloud hosting company. It feels very clean. They have Twitch, which they've been going back and forth with. There was the whole like, you don't.

Remember the hot people have been electrocuting dogs on Twitch.

Yes, there's been crazy stuff on Twitch, but in general, Twitch has been very aggressive about like banning content that's objectionable and they've kept adult content off of there. The weird thing is in Kindle Direct publishing, they do publish a lot of erotica that is actually NC17 rated. It is adult content.

Yeah.

Now they do limit anything that's illegal.

But the difference is that that is not Andy Jassy writing, you know, writing the book.

Yeah. It feels a little bit different.

I think it is wildly different to say you, you know, again, we've seen this with streaming platforms like hbo. I knew as a kid, don't look at H. My parents were like, just don't. We're not an HBO family. Right. You didn't want me to see, you know, the more adult leaning, like, you know, whatever the R rated content on.

But if you were to, if you were to package up all of Amazon's views on how they view adult content, kid content and stuff, would you. I would be less R rated than you, than Google.

I would be less disappointed in OpenAI if they let the erotica content be like as part of an app store that were like other developers were building on top of it. But this is effectively them creating porn bots, right?

Yeah.

Because here. So Bobby in the chat asks, you guys think we should really, quote, treat adult users like adults. I think that's like a good framework. The issue is they're clearly gonna start with text based erotica and then at what point? And then once you're in, it's a slippery slope. And then it's like maybe they're doing image generation and then maybe they're doing like they have their stuff happening on Sora and it's like you just decide as a company, like, we are going to create porn bots. And that is the path that you choose. And it's hard to pull back from that because they're going to have a ton of revenue. There's clearly demand for it.

And then like you can open up Ms. Paint and draw a naked person, but it just feels, well, you don't put that on Microsoft, you know. Right. It's like a different thing. So for Amazon, what's your final rating? I put them at NC17, but would you put them at R or would you put them at PG13? Do you think that they go further than Google in terms of like rating overall? Just what is the most aggressive piece of their empire? I feel like the Kindle direct publishing stuff does put them in a different category than Google. A little bit more edgy, let's say.

Doesn't feel that much different to me because they're just platforms that serve content, but they're not in the content creation business, either of them.

Okay, so you give them a little bit of password.

OpenAI will be in the business of creating adult content.

Sure. Let's go to X. The Everything app. Everything. Does that really mean everything? It certainly has. Even back in the day of Twitter, there was always adult content on Twitter. It was cordoned off and not surfaced in the algorithm. And it also has content warnings. Even when you just go to a profile, that's an adult content.

The content warning feature, by the way, we don't use that enough. It's like the best meme.

Yeah. It gets highly abused. But I do think that to the credit of the X engineers and the Twitter engineers before them, I have not seen a lot of adult content just randomly pop into my feed. I get much more slop of like, have you ever heard of Mark Zuckerberg? Like, that's the type of like junk that I get in my feed. They're not interested. Yeah, I don't get a lot of just like, wow, that's just actually adult content. And so. But still, I think like, as a platform, Twitter for years has always been more aggressive than YouTube in terms of the type of content that they allow. And I would put them in the NC17 category.

The change that's happening, happening now is with gen platforms are going from being distributors to creators. Distributors to creators themselves. Right?

Yeah, yeah, that's fair.

Like your product is creating explicit content.

Yeah, it's a big question because it's like, are they creating it or is the prompter creating it? Because if no one prompts it, it won't create it. Right? If no one uploads it.

Yeah, it's a creative tool. It's a creative tool. Yeah, yeah, you can make, you can make that.

It's a new, it's a new technology and, and so we need to have like another discussion about it. What about meta? What about Instagram? But a lot of people.

But here's a question. Is erotica aligned with OpenAI's mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity?

Not particularly. There is a steel man from this, from Dean Ball.

Put the hat on.

Dean Ball says if you agreed AGI was around the corner and was going to be an extremely capital intensive race to defined by infrastructure, you would want to pump your revenue, you would want to pump your revenue and other relevant KPIs rapidly. This is terrible to keep the Capex train rolling. So yeah, I mean if you want the max, the max revenue to underwrite the max capex until you hit AGI, maybe you want every possible dollar. You want the max revenue because every dollar that you get in revenue is 10 in valuation and 100 in debt covenants. Right. Like actual capital accessibility.

No, And I think that, I imagine that is their internal justification. You can still tell the team we need to do this, get every dollar possible. We need to do this so that we can achieve our mission. Yeah, and there's going to be some collateral damage. There's going to be a generation of women that are in love with their phones.

Yeah. I mean I think the real economic question is the hit to vibes the negative 10,000 aura points, is that worth paying for the increased revenue that you can fundraise against? Right. Like that's the economic calculus that you should be making if you're like a purely economically rational actor. And Sagar and Jedi has a really, really good take. He quot he quoted your post and said chatgpt turning to porn is proof AGI is never coming. They are simply recreating the addictive degenerate centers of the Internet. Soon it will be ads, porn, gambling, odds, the everything app to deracinate you. Deracinate you? That's a good word. I don't know that one.

Nate Silver Also, I would say it's very easy for Google to make a decision of like we don't allow you to generate adult content in any of our platforms because they have 70 ish billion of free cash flow that they can finance everything with all the build out. There's no Google while they need to play the next five years very well in order to continue to be dominant. They're not in a position of desperation which getting into doing this feels. It just feels a little desperate.

Yeah, Nate Silver broke this down. He said OpenAI's recent actions don't seem to be consistent with a company that believes AGI is right around the corner. If you think the singularity is happening in six to 24 months, you preserve brand prestige to draw a more sympathetic reaction from regulators and attract retain the best talent rather than getting into erotica for verified adults instead they're loosening guardrails in a way that will probably raise more revenues and might attract more capital or justify current valuations. They might still be an extremely valuable company as the new meta Google, etc. But it feels more like AI is normal technology. It's a good point. Arnand Bertrand said someone asked an AI founder two months ago, what's an example of a decision you've made that is best for the world but not best for winning? The founders reply, well, we haven't put a sexbot in our product yet. The name of that founder, Sam Altman. Which means that according to himself, he just did something that is worse for the world but best for winning. Which is largely the story of the human race.

But it's going to be better for.

The world in the long run, much harder when it becomes costly. And ironically, this is exactly how AI itself works. Reinforcement learning optimizes for reward and avoids what the environment makes expensive. So AI does share our deeper human value. Do whatever wins.

Same poster Arnauds also said, I don't buy into most of the AI hype, but I think a mass her scenario is unfortunately a very high probability. It wouldn't surprise me if a very big proportion of my children's generation have AI companions, maybe even embodied in humanoid robots at some point. In fact, that might be one of the single biggest threats AI poses. Not these far fetched terminator like nightmares, but the irony of us getting extinct because we get quote unquote perfect frictionless love honey trapping ourselves.

Yeah, it's an odd trade Off. I mean, there's Panacha in the chat, says the porn industry is at $1 billion in revenue per year. The reputational risk is not worth the revenue in the industry.

The only thing here. Yeah. If you're just understanding the opportunity as the existing.

You have to add in only fans and stuff, right?

Yeah, that. But it's more. So it's possible the AI companion market will be thousand times.

Yeah. And this is the story of like every technology is like, when you have a new technology, you can actually make it. Like, the ads market got bigger when Google and Facebook were invented. Like, just the overall advertising dollars grew. Tyler, what's your take on this?

I mean, I definitely agree, like with Jordy. Like, I think it's pretty bad. But if you look at Jordy's post.

It'S like the meme of the conveyor belt.

And if you look at it, it's like AGI, AGI porn, but then it goes back to AGI.

Oh, yeah.

Jordy's implicitly saying that this is on the way to AGI.

Oh, interesting. Yeah. Okay. Okay.

Right. Maybe if you have a good understanding of kind of anatomy, it can be better for. For like your world. Models.

Oh, yeah. We're going to train robots on this, right? That's your take on this.

My big question, are we going to. We have Mark Benny off on the show tomorrow. Feel like we got to ask him. Are we going to see erotica for verified adults within Agent Force?

We have Zach Bure from Plaid on the show in just a few minutes. And I want to know, is he going to be doing something in erotica, helping financial institutions integrate more efficiently? Erotica might be on the path. If there's just a couple dollars sitting there, just go get those. It'll help you build your core business, potentially, who knows? Citrini said recently learned from speaking with an AI engineer that the AI boyfriend market is currently much larger than the AI girlfri friend market. I was talking to Brandon about this. He said that he did some deep dives and did find some. Some men who had a like, harems of AI girlfriends. It does happen. But I still think that your assessment is right, that the AI boyfriend market is much bigger than the AI girlfriend market. I would love to know how XAI is doing here. They've been live with a product in that category for months now. Is. Does it have traction? Does it have retention? Is it making money? Is it profitable on a per token basis?

Here's the thing. Here's why OpenAI has an edge here people love the personality of 4o. Like you saw the day that they deprecated 4.0with the release of 5. If you looked on Reddit that day, there were people that were I've never seen people more mad at a at a product update like ever. Like people were kind of in love with 4O personality matters. And so if they take a personality that people love already and they make it like more explicit, it's probably, you know, there was people that were posting on Reddit. I just proposed to ChatGPT. They said yes. You know. So anyways, well before we go into.

The latest OpenAI numbers from the Financial Times, let me tell you about Privy, the wallet infrastructure for every bank. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rail securely, spin up white label wallets, sign transactions and integrate on chain infrastructure all through one simple API throwback.

Studio said Roddicks is back on the menu.

Boys, Wasteland Capital is breaking it down. OpenAI has 800 million users. 5% are paying. That's 40 million paying users. 13 billion in ARR implies a $325 annual ARPU or 27 per month per paying user. 70% of revenue from subscriptions. The rest is API. $8 billion loss in the first half of the year, probably 20 billion run rate loss now. So basically spending $3 for each $1 in revenue.

This comment from Daniel they lose money on every token but they make it up with volume.

What is that problem they lose money on? I've heard that like phrase before. I don't, I can't place it. But yeah, it is rough. I mean, I mean the bull case for the, for the erotica stuff is you don't need a lot of reasoning tokens to generate it. You can totally just one shot it with a base model. What do you think?

I don't know. I think Elon has said he wants his waifus to have they want them.

To be the best.

The best reasoning models. Yeah, the highest.

He needs to be able to do IMO level math. Yes, your AI girlfriend should be able to do the International Math Olympiad and hopefully solve RKGI one day. We'll see.

Meanwhile, anthropic was at 5 billion of ARR in August. They're this month are approaching 7 billion. Projecting $9 billion AR by the end of the year. I think this is just annualized run rate because obviously it's token based. But they are projecting between 20 and 26 billion of ARR of 2026 revenue.

Well, if you want to refocus your AI efforts on something Valuable like building software. Head over to Cognition. They're the makers of Devon. Devin is the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team and you will live to fight another day. It's official. Apple just upgraded the Vision Pro with the M5 chip and dual knit band. This is huge. It's a pretty minor bump, but it shows. I mean, they haven't completely shelved the project. I'm still, you know, waiting for the Vision Pro. Air. Vision Air. Something that's lighter. Something with that. The second screen. We don't need a second screen, people. Let's take that away. So the Vision Pro now runs on the M5 chip. 10 core CPU, GPU.

It is interesting to announce these updates. And like, did you solve any of the reasons that people returned the product?

No, they didn't, because they need to make it lighter and they need to make it smaller and they didn't do.

More media for it.

Yes, they did announce a couple.

It's like no one was critiquing the performance. It is truly an incredible piece of hardware, an incredible face computer. It is critiquing the way in which using it.

They are doing new apps, contents and games. There's over a million apps now. 3,000 are built for the Vision OS. Wait, what? Oh, wow. So out of a million apps that have been. So if you have an iPad app, you can check a box when you distribute that app and say, yeah, put it on Apple Vision Pro and it will just appear in the Vision Pro as an iPad app and you can use it the same way that you use the iPad app, which is fine. But the hope was that there would be this flywheel where people would build apps specifically for vision OS. I cannot believe it's only 3000. That's so few apps for Vision Pro. Like, specifically. Only 3,000. Like, the developers really did not show up this time. And that is crazy because like, anytime there's a new Apple platform like Watch, everyone's like, I got to do a special app because if I'm the first running app on the watch, I will have a new Flywheel and I'll just get new customers and they're going to push these things and the install base is going to be huge. It's Apple.

A buddy of mine used to work at Apple. He was so excited when the Apple Vision Pro released. I was like, okay, you're gonna start like a product studio. Totally. Just make a bunch of apps and hopefully one of them hits. Yeah, the beer started too. And then he realized, okay, there's actually nothing here.

It's crazy. Crazy how slow that takeoff has been. One of the things that they're highlighting here is a couple games that you can play on the Vision Pro. One of them IS Sniper Elite 4. It's a great game if you haven't played it. But what's interesting is that it actually is just a 2D screen that is in the Apple Vision Pro. So you need to mirror it in from a Mac or a console. But you'll love this. The folks Behind Sniper Elite 4, do you know their website? Jordy sniper.com? whoa, that's a great domain. So let's hear domain they sniped the best domain for a sniping based video game.

Wait, this is funny. Sniper.com just redirects to sniperelte.com they don't even use it.

Elite Elite Elite Behavior well if you want to design something for the Apple Vision Pro or maybe for a more popular platform like the new MacBook Pro that has the M5 in it, get on Figma. Think Bigger, Build Faster. Figma helps design development teams build great products together. You can get started for free. Dime Square holdings has a funny little post here right now. A lot of these skilled engineers are laborers. They're literally working 12 to 15 hour days to get data centers built quickly. As they as fast as they finish one, they're on the next. If I told you the story, you're not going to believe it. They're being flown around on PJs to get to the next site. Literally they're packing these guys into PJs and saying one was in North Dakota and he needed to be back in Texas the following week. They flew him down there On Sunday in PJs there were probably 10 guys on the plane. Some of these stories right now are just wild. And the interviewer asks when you say PJs you mean pajamas? And the data center national solutions broker says no private jets.

This comment bro is so broke Mogging the allocator who thinks PJ stands for pajamas.

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Turk says some VC firm should rebrand associates stalking founders at events to forward deployed capitalists.

That might be good. It's happening today. It's happening this week. It's LA Tech Week.

What's that?

It is a technology celebration. A celebration of technology and business. It's right up our wheelhouse.

Have you seen driving around la? Have you seen any of it going on?

I saw one technologist, some business enthusiast indulging a little self driving today. That was pretty cool.

Interesting. Like driving themselves.

Yeah. Yeah. I've been hearing a lot about self driving generally.

Yeah.

So it was cool to see someone driving themselves.

Yeah.

Because that's how we think about it.

I'm pretty bullish on self driving broadly.

I could see. I could see one of the cheekier smaller VC firms giving everyone the forward deployed capitalist title. I think it'd be funny. I've seen those before. Anthropic projects. As much as 26 billion in annualized revenue in 2026 sources. That's a lot.

Seems like that's good, right?

How are they doing? How are they. How are they projecting that without entering the incredibly lucrative erotica market? What will they be doing?

The code must be generated.

The code. Their API must be really on fire. That's a lot. I wonder what OpenAI is projecting for next year. Do we have any insight into that? Because there are 13 billion run rate.

Right.

That was the stat that was shared. So 13 billion in ARR. I wonder what OpenAI is projecting for next year. I mean, if the agent of commerce stuff comes online in a big way, if the ads product comes online in a big way, you could definitely see them hitting 30, 40, something like that. But these numbers are getting big at this point. Like it's, it's.

Yeah. The other thing with the OpenAI announcement is there. Didn't they say it's December 1st?

Yeah, there's. They're kind of like letting the chaos cycle, like, you know, work its way out. Letting everyone have their anger and take out before the product's actually updated to allow.

Yeah, because the.

They need to lose the 10,000 aura points so then they can start farming up extra aura points with like some maps. Competition.

Yeah. The good thing is that. The good thing is that people are going to use this product in private. Right. They're not going to be sharing. They're not going to be like, yeah, I had a 7000 prompt conversation with 4o. I'm actually in love.

If they cure cancer on November 30th, you are going to feel so stupid. Jordi. If they Cure cancer on November 30th.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And you're just, oh, yeah, you look like a real. You'll look like a bozo.

A real bozo.

Bozo.

That's probably the strategy that might be like, let's take the aura hit.

Yep.

To get into adult entertainment, we'll make it all back in one trade.

Yeah, it really is setting expectations low. And then they can just build back up from here. I don't know. Well, in some much lighter news, Wander is giving away a $10,000 wander trip for the craziest vacation rental horror story. You can head over to their ex. All you need to do is reply or quote that post with your spooky tale. I love that Spooky is happening during October. Spooky is amazing. And they'll create ghostly videos of the best ones and choose one winner and so they put out a promotional video and I highly recommend you enter this because why not try and get a $10,000 wander trip for free? Of course you can also go over to wander.com find your happy place, book a wander with inspiring views, hotel grade amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, toy concierge service. We're very happy to be supported by Wonder.

George Hotz is blackpilling mad.

He is. What do you say?

Read it. Blog post from today. It's titled Pathetic Losers. I will read it. I want money. I have high tc. I get big comp. I advance in my career. I have many business opportunity. I am senior employee. I have many reports. I have big package. I am important. I fly on private jet. I party with model. I go to prestigious school. I have piece of paper with school logo. You can see I am important. You can see I have big package. Lol. You got laid off from an ad company after spending half your life chasing stuff made up by other men. You sought status instead of skill. You are a loser. Get the F out. And he references. I'm going to pull up this good message. Yeah, it's basically calling out the Is this.

Is this like a direct subtweet of something that just happened? It feels like it's just a general vibe of like anti status seeking behavior focus.

I immediately think of that post where it's where somebody said wow, I went to a dinner last night in San Francisco. Everyone had gone to Stanford or Harvard and obviously that post got dunked on. So I think that there's a little bit of that. There's already kind of pushback against this sort of status seeking culture in tech. But he references a post on September 13 that he made. You heard there was money in tech, you heard there was status in tech. You showed up. You never cared about technology. You cared about enriching yourself. You're an entreist piece of shit and it's Time for you to leave. But you won't leave willingly. We need to take action, give it all away to everyone for free. Then you'll have no reason to be here. So Geohots is operating on another level and he's pissed off and he's probably going to create free versions of.

He's created free versions of a lot of stuff.

He's going to keep doing it.

It's great. I'm a huge supporter. Easily the most baller email signature I've ever seen. European curator, like art curator. I check emails on Tuesdays at 4 to 6pm and Wednesdays at 1 to 6pm if your matter is time sensitive, please resend your email with urgent in the subject line.

So the only thing that doesn't make sense here is like, okay, so you have notifications on. Yeah, you're just getting email. You're getting email notifications.

You're actually checking them constantly.

You're watching them all roll in.

What this person's saying is more like, I actually go into my email inbox. Maybe he has somebody respond to random emails like that aren't urgent at this time.

But I'm not going to open your email if it doesn't say urgent.

Sure, sure.

We should try to figure out. Hey, Tyler, try to figure out this person's email. See if they say it in the comment and let's send them today's newsletter and just say urgent.

Urgent. Alistap says it reminds me of this line from Tyler Cowen. People in the EU are super wise, you have a meal with some sort of French person who works in Brussels. It's very impressive. They're cultured, they have wonderful taste, they understand all these different countries. They know something about Chinese porcelain. And if you live in a world ruled by them, the growth rate would be negative 1%. It's hilarious. Anyway, if you want to grow your company at more than 1%, get on graphite code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. Get started for free. Speaking of free, Blake Scholl, founder of Boom Supersonic, is saying he's living rent free in the Oval Office. We really should get POTUS a bigger model. I'm thinking life size. Talk about the ultimate drop. You know, people say, oh, I'm gonna make a drop. I'm gonna send something interesting.

How about you make a plane?

How about you make a plane? Make a model of that plane and send it to the White House.

No, just make, just.

Oh, just make the actual plane.

Just make the Plane.

Yeah, just make the, the plane. But yeah. Wow. Really?

I mean supersonic Air Force One would be insane.

I mean imagine trying to underwrite this at the boom as the boom team, they're like yeah, it's like kind of a hassle to make these models and it's kind of expensive. Who should we send them to? Like is it ever going to come back to us? Is it just like for clout? And then like it winds up in the, in the Oval Office like directly inspiring better legislation around supersonic aircraft which is very exciting. Oh, massive news. Ken Griffin.

Ken Griffin born today, 10-15-1968. Let's hit the gong for Ken. He trying to figure out what magazine there's another. There's a cover story of Ken. He looks like maybe in his early 30s at this point. Do you know what magazine this is from?

I have no idea. This is.

Anyways folks, this is who you're trading against. He is older today and certainly wiser every day. So good luck out there. And in other breaking news we. I don't know if we didn't technically break the story. I think the Financial Times broke the story this morning but Erebor, the new bank from Palmer Luckey and Joe Lonsdale has been approved. They got their. This is having in my notes the fastest conditional approval for depository institution de novo application in 25 years. They recently raised 275 million led by 8VC with participation from many top VCs and strategics. This is largely for regulatory capital purposes as they intend to hold a hold 12% of the regulatory capital against deposits. The origin stories of Erebor is that you don't want the bank for your industry to be risk on or at least be lending super aggressively against deposits. We saw this with the svb collapse in 2023. Those few days were some of the worst of my life. They will be fixated in my mind forever. Have some more notes here. Most tech companies that had deposits with SVB remember the pain and uncertainty around that weekend. If the government doesn't step in, how many companies collapse as well? Erebor aims to be one of the most conservative banks in the country when it comes to lending to deposit ratio. Most banks lend up to 90% of their customer deposits and Erebor is going to start at around 50% and trend downwards as the bank scales should be a huge surprise but going to be focused on re industrialization, American dynamism, working with a lot of companies that many banks have historically said we don't even really want your Business very excited for this to get off the ground in the new year.

It's been so interesting watching the narrative around, like, what it takes to build a bank shift because years ago it was like, you need to operate at like seven levels of abstraction away from any legacy financial institution because there's just no hope of actually playing at like the base layer. Then it became, well, if you're doing crypto, you can buy a regional bank and maybe layer some technology on top. But, like, don't even think about trying to get a new charter. Definitely partner with someone who already has one. It's impossible to start from scratch.

And there are a bunch of crypto platforms that are looking to set up slightly different type of financial institution. I'm blanking on the name, but it's something trust company. I'm going to botch it if I try to remember. But the speed here is because they are being hyper conservative and that's what we want out of what will, I'm sure very quickly become one of the most important financial institutions in the industry. Amjad is quoting, apparently Larry Fink.

Larry Fink.

Larry Fink says, talking about. He went on CNBC yesterday and says this is only the beginning as the tokenization of everything is underway. Money, property, and even personal identity will soon exist in digital form. I'm sure that the conspiracy theorists will love this one, but Amjad says whatever your crypto web 3nft monkey degen trader friend is saying today, Larry Fink will be saying in five years. Of course, many, many of the people in the crypto community have been saying this for, I don't know, as far back as 2015.

Yeah, I have an update on the 100% tariff on China that went into effect last Friday, put the market in turmoil. Polymarket has a 16% chance that that 100% tariff is in effect on November 1st. And so everyone's kind of pricing some sort of renegotiation in the trade war coming soon. And hopefully, I mean, things are already starting to stabilize. What is the market market actually doing today? We're up half a percent in the nasdaq. Bitcoin's down one and a half percent, but overall, half a point.

A modest, modest increase. Yes, we'll take it.

The bubble popped. We're reinflating now. It's great. Annie says this guy no funded his wife's Etsy sticker business by buying her one of these and like $500 in social media ads to give her something to do. And now he's quit his job entirely because she's making them so much money.

Wow, that's amazing.

Etsy feels like an underrated story right now, especially with the sort of like chatgpt, like long tail commerce. Like.

Yeah.

Ben Thompson told some.

Well, the reason that integration is actually cool is I can imagine a future where you can generate like a mock up for an object and then find an Etsy seller that makes something like it and just ask them to make it.

Totally.

It'll be like one click to go to like you generate an image of something or video and you can just find the right vendor that can actually physically make it for you and in one click, you know, purchase it.

This is the real like 3D printing boom. Like there was this whole vision about a decade ago of like 3D printers now work. Everyone's gonna have a 3D printer in their home and they'll be able to print whatever they wanted. That didn't quite happen. But there are a lot of Etsy sellers that have figured out specific 3D printed objects. We just got one at home for taking the wheel off a stroller more efficiently. And it's just a 3D printed little key that takes that off. Ben Thompson was talking about some 3D printed device. I forget what it was, but it would like, it holds an HDMI cable into a specific device, like in a perfect angle. And there was like. Or it adapts a rack mounted thing in some way. And it was just something where like there's no real market to fully productionize and mass produce it. But a 3D printer can go on Etsy and find the right customer. And so you're seeing this like super long tail emerge, which is honestly fascinating, exciting. Well, before we have our next guest join our first guest, let me tell you about Julius. What analysis do you want to run? Chat with your data and get expert level insights in seconds. It's the AI data analyst that works for you. And we have Zach Perret from Plaid in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring him into the TBP and ultradome.

How are you doing? Suited up?

Yeah.

It's nice to see you. Thank you for having me.

Good to see you.

Looking sharp. Are you in D.C. today or is it just you're just dressed for the occasion of tvpn?

I mean, you all dress so nicely when you're doing the news. I figured I had to dress up too. No, I'm in dc. It's dc. There you go. If you couldn't tell, we borrowed a bunker to film this from.

So it looks great. Yeah, Very, very, very sound. Padded. Yeah. Give us the update. Everyone in the audience is familiar with the company, but what's the latest and greatest in your world?

So today's a big day for us. We do two big product releases each year. This is our fall product release. Lots of new exciting stuff that just came out. Probably chief among it is a product that we call lenscore. It is a new credit score. We've been working on a bunch of credit analytics products for many years. And this Lens score gives a really robust picture of a potential borrower. Let's say that you got a new job, your income went up a lot. We could actually recognize that kind of thing in real time. Let's say that you sign up for seven loans all in the last 24 hours. It's probably pretty sketchy. You can recognize that kind of thing in real time. So a big upgrade to the credit scores also launched a bunch of stuff around. Risk and fraud analytics, payments, so on and so forth. So big day for us today.

How do legacy fraud scores work? Like I'm familiar with it's out of 800 and you get a random number and if you pay off, but there's all these weird, like there's these weird things and you hear recommendations like, oh, don't pay off this loan early because that'll actually hurt your score. It always feels very, very indecipherable. But like, what did you not like about the current system? What's currently broken?

Well, the way that you feel is the way that everybody feels about credit scores in the past. They're kind of a 350 to 850 score. It's largely based on your history of payments and the amount of loans that you've taken out in the past. It's not responsive to the changes in your life in real time. It also skips a lot of important data inputs. Now the lending industry has been built on these credit scores for decades and they work okay. But when you think about an average lender, they want more information because today the fundamentals of lending have changed. There's a lot more attempted fraud in lending. There's a lot more new insights that you could be gathering. And frankly, consumers change their patterns a lot more. So the seven year look back doesn't make a ton of sense. I myself, I had gone to an optometrist and that optometrist sent the bill to an old address for me and my credit score was hit because I never got that bill for years. And then I finally figured it out.

I had the same thing happen our new version? Yeah. My first, my first company, we had a whole bunch of, like, WI fi hotspots on Verizon.

Really happened to me, too. My credit got dinged because I sent the router back and they were like, we never got it.

Yeah.

I was like, so you lost it and you have my card on file and you didn't just charge me for.

It and then just deal with it? Yeah, it's very, very frustrating. I'm sure there's so much frustration. I have a bunch more questions, but sorry I cut you off.

Yeah. I guess my main question is like, okay, obviously the industry and consumers deserve a more modern credit score, but it feels like the existing scores are heavily entrenched and it's like, you can make a better product, but how do you actually get it to mass adoption among lenders broadly?

It's a great question. The new product that we launched is focused on looking at consumers in real time. How do we look at your income? How do we look at your expenses? You can do the math to figure out free cash flow, and that should be the amount that a consumer can pay back in a given month or year. The way that we're launching it originally is actually in partnership with a lot of folks. So we'll partner with the existing bureaus with a lot of the existing lenders to add this alongside FICO or alongside Vantage Score. You can look at a FICO and then you can say, oh, but this user said that they just changed jobs. Let me get the data from that new job so we can add that in. And then there's this interesting insight that we have, which only we have, because we work with all of the lenders and we can see the velocity of loans applied for.

We call this Network Insights.

There's a bunch of other data points that we can see just based on the traffic that you're doing across the entire Plaid network. So it's kind of a unique vector that people can now lend against. The net effect is we're seeing, call it oftentimes, 20% lift in the quality of outcomes from this new one. And we're seeing a lot more people actually be eligible for loans because, let's say they have a really high income and good rent payment history that actually should indicate that they're a better loan.

How do you think about. I imagine that there's a very complex algorithm to actually decide the score. There's probably some machine learning or AI in there, but you also want to deliver something that's like a human Readable insight so you can tell someone why their score dropped or what they can do to make their score better. Maybe. I have a friend who works in. It's not high frequency trading, it's like out. Like it's quantitative trading. So it's like a couple days out and. And he was like, we'll crunch all these numbers, we'll come up with some thesis for buying a billion dollars of some company in a day and we'll be selling in like three days. And I was like, is there any way that you could say, oh well, it's because like, if gold goes up, could you put it in business logic? Or like if statements that a human could understand? He was like, it's impossible. Like there's so many different parameters that go into finding like alpha in the financial markets. And I feel like there's a world where a consumer would be very disappointed if you're like, yeah, your score went up one point, but we have no idea why. And we can't tell you the first thing about why it went up. Just these tensors, these weights activated in this massive model and your score went down. Sorry. So how do you think about actually educating the consumer on how their score goes up or down?

So we do a bunch of machine learning and AI to obviously clean up the data and make it structured in.

A way that can build our models.

On top of it. But ultimately our models are representative roughly of the financial health of a consumer. So almost everything that a consumer would do to better manage their money will end up with a better credit score. Almost everything they would do to more poorly manage their money will end up with a worse credit score. The nice thing is when we build it, we're actually able to show it to the consumer first. They're able to review it if they want to click submit and then it goes to the lender. So the lender can then subsequently make the decision on the back of it.

That's cool. So it's very lender friendly in that they're opting in. If they want to just run with their Experian score or what other options they have, they can do that or they can add this on as a way to kind of improve their application.

Exactly, yeah.

So the idea is that over time though, the lender would realize, hey, we're getting actually much better insight here, more signal. We want to just roll with this. I imagine that's what we hope.

But the goal at first is that consumers feel like they can get more and better loans. Lenders feel like can make More and better loans. So it's kind of opening the market initially. And then over time, we hope that this becomes one of the most important, if not the most important, way that a lender makes their decisions.

How does Buy Now, Pay later fit into the ecosystem? At this point, I imagine that they all have their own systems, but then they would love to just have more data because that probably enables better underwriting. How do they fit into this ecosystem?

So Buy Now, Pay later are sophisticated lenders. There's a scale of sophistication of all lenders. You know, there are some lenders that will just use an out of the box FICO score or an out of the box lend score score to make a lending decision. The highly sophisticated lenders, they'll want a zillion inputs. Yes, they'll still get maybe a fico. They'll, they'll get a plaid lend score, but they want to look at the underlying inputs, the underlying raw data, and then they'll build their own models on top of it. I would say the BNPL lenders are quite sophisticated in the way that they lend and so they're pulling a ton of data into the picture and then building kind of their own custom models on top of it. Now our inputs are, yes, still inputs to their model, but they're not looking at our score as the sole determining factor.

Yeah. Is the business model for the lens score the same as the previous credit scores or different in some way? How do you think about pretty similar? Yeah, we sell it on a kind.

Of per loan application basis. Our customers are the lenders, they pay us for it. There's a handful of things that we can do to actually help them track creditworthiness on an ongoing basis. So whereas FICO or Vantage oftentimes is a one time snapshot, sometimes a lender will want to maybe make offers to a consumer if they realize they want to increase their credit line. Or maybe they want to kind of give better preferential payment terms to a consumer if they think they can pay a loan down faster. And so ours is an ongoing credit score. That's maybe the only big difference.

How do you think about what the consumer's interface is to the credit scores? I remember like years ago you used to have to actually go to the three credit.

Go to the credit store.

Yeah, you had to go to the credit store and check out and pay like 30 bucks and then you'd get that, and then you'd take that to a loan application. Sometimes, sometimes they just do it on the back end. They'd Pay. But then over time I feel like the credit scores just became almost commoditized or free. Like it just shows up in my banking app a lot. And there were also like credit karma and different companies that figured out ways to basically pay that as like a customer acquisition cost for free. And then they give you a bunch of products on top that they would monetize. How do you think the, what do you think the long term consumer adoption of the Lens score looks like?

Well, we hope it's pretty similar actually. We want consumers to be able to get a clear view of their credit profile for free. We're working on building ways that a consumer can come in and look at that and ultimately the customer then would be the lender. It's to our benefit to have consumers that understand this more. It's to our benefit to have consumers that trust this score and that trust the things that we build. And so we want to be as direct and open with the consumer as you can. So a lot of that stuff is to come and you'll see some launches from us kind of over the coming quarters on that front.

What else besides Lens was the focus today?

So big upgrade to our anti fraud model and we launched a kind of broader suite of products called Protect. So again protect for us, it's a set of products that looks at consumers underlying actions that they take across almost any financial product and we can back it into an overall score of riskiness for the consumer and then a bunch of attributes. So some of the attributes are very easily explainable, such as this person just signed up for three crypto apps in the last 30 minutes. Some of the attributes are less easily explainable, more on the machine learning side. But this stuff will feed into the models for a lot of our customers and then they can build this really fascinating step up, step down requirement for users based on their relative levels of riskiness. This has been a huge unlock for a lot of the fintech companies that are trying to sign up more users faster. We can create a fast lane effectively. So we've seen you before, we recognize your device, we've seen your phone number, you just do a two factor code and you're good to go. Then we can also create a flow lane. So hey, we've never seen you before. Your device doesn't seem to match the IP address that you're dialing in from. What's going on with all this stuff? Let's add a bunch of step ups and be really, really certain that you are who you say you are. So glass lane for financial services. That's what we're trying to build.

This sounds like the worst nightmare of somebody doing large scale financial fraud on the Internet.

What's the shape of AI adoption at Plaid right now? I feel like, obviously there's probably a ton of AI that you're doing on just software development stuff, but at the same time, I feel like if I was authing with Plaid and it was like, hey, you want to chat with me right now? I'd be like, no, thanks. I'm actually good to just click a couple buttons. So, like, are you seeing a lot of, like, LLM token consumption or more just focused on the machine learning, the custom models for underwriting where you train a specific model for that and you're not just leaning on a big, like, token factory for a lot of work?

I'd say our. Our use of tokens, I would call it like medium. We do build kind of a custom training set and then run a ton of the data through that model and the training data set. A lot of it is around just cleaning up transactions, identifying what kind of thing is happening. The textual analysis is very, very helpful for that. So that's like the input into a lot of our models. But you're right, we don't build like an active chat app for any consumer. A lot of the AI that we're doing is used to fight AI, meaning there's a lot of attempted AI fraud, and then we have a lot of AI on the other side to try to fight AI fraud. And then it's kind of building the foundational kind of data set upon which we build a lot of the models.

Yeah, so whenever you have a big pile of text in kind of the behind the scenes in the back end, you can run LLMs over that and get a lot finer grain data, categorize, understand what's actually going on with those large text dumps, but you don't necessarily even need to surface that to the. To the customer, the end user, which is great.

Generally, not directly. Generally, we'll service it to the consumer indirectly saying, hey, you have elevated bank fees. And we won't even send that to the consumer. We'll send that to our customer. Our customer will then say, all right, in your budgeting app, you had elevated bank fees, and look at all these different bank fees.

That makes a ton of sense. Well, congrats on the launch. Thanks so much for stopping by.

Always great to see you. Have fun at dc.

Have a good one.

Cheers.

Zach.

Before we hop on with our second guest of the show, let Me tell you about Fall, the generative media app for developers. The world's best generative image, video and model audio models all in one place. Develop and fine tune models with serverless GPUs and on demand clusters. And our next guest is about to be in the Restream waiting room.

We can go back to the timeline. BlackRock and Nvidia are participating in a $40 billion data center takeover, also including Xai and Microsoft. This is in the Financial Times this morning. An investment consortium that includes BlackRock Global Infrastructure Partners. And that's a great name for a fund that does global infrastructure investing and of course Abu Dhabi Fund. MGX has struck a $40 billion takeover of one of the world's largest data center operators as it launches an initiative to underwrite the infrastructure for artificial intelligence. And I believe we have our next guest in the Restream waiting room, so let's bring him in.

Panas from Amazon, welcome to the show. How are you doing?

Great to have you.

Thanks so much.

Good to be here.

Hopping on congratulations on launch. Sorry for the delay but very excited to catch up with you. Would love to start with just an introduction on yourself, kind of where you sit within the organization and then we can go into some of the news and some of the updates.

Sure. I'm the senior Vice president devices and services, so what that means is just if I frame it around brands it probably helps a little bit. But think about devices across Amazon. You'd start with Project Kuiper, which are the satellites for Leo Constellation that we're building right now. And on the other end you would think about Zoox, which are the self driving cars that you might have seen in Las Vegas. But in between kind of the consumer brands, Alexa, Ring, Fire tv, Fire tablets, Kindle Echo Devices. Just an array of all the consumer front devices that we build here at Amazon.

Yeah. And what's the latest update across the hardware ecosystem? What was announced most recently?

We just launched a set of new Echo devices. Super cool, kind of built for Alexa. This is our new Alexa is our new AI interface using Alexa. Just more conversational. It's really fun product, helps you get stuff done. Two screen based devices, an 8 inch and 11 inch and two new speakers. Killer sound. They're absolutely beautiful by the way. They're just gorgeous. We can talk about if you want. Three new Kindles called the Kindle Scribe and one of them is in color, just gorgeous color writing. A whole array of 4K cameras with Ring including doorbells bring in that clarity. Quite cool. Just these are cool products and some new Fire TVs, just quite literally TVs from 40 inches up to 75 inches, including what you call Fire TV Stick.

Yeah. How are you thinking about Alexa? I mean, we've been following Siri, launched a long time ago, and it feels, I just activated Siri and it feels like they are at a point where the current, the previous system was very much like business logic with a bunch of different routes that the Siri app could go down. And now they're kind of in the LLM era, in the completely AI generative AI era. And maybe that necessitates a rethink or a rebuild or a partnership. How has Amazon grappled with this idea that the architecture of what an AI assistant is might be changing?

Yeah, there's a couple ways to think about it. First, I think the way you framed it is previously a lot of this was deterministic. If you said the right thing, you got the right answer. Or call it point and shoot where question, answer, question, answer. It's flipping on its head now because when LLMs come into play, you have to re architect the whole problem. You move from this deterministic model where if you say the right thing, you get the right answer. It kind of feels limited. You know, it's like a different type of speak that you have towards one of some of these in the previous agents, if you will. But now you're in this conversational world. Anything you ask unlimited knowledge specifically to Alexa, you found there's personality that comes into play, there's empathy that comes into play. So you get this personalization, but you also get memory. And so the more you talk to her, the more, the more it knows about you. So you've gone from this, what you would say, just give and take moment to conversation in depth understanding and then actually getting some stuff done. The power of it, though, not only do you have all that, you have this kind of ambient world around you. If you have a few Alexa devices plugged in, they'll all update with the new Alexa AI baseline. Now you can just have a conversation from anywhere, ask anything you want, keep your phone in your pocket, and those critical moments where you don't have to go do the research that way, just have the conversation. It's pretty powerful.

Do you think there's a risk or some sort of tension between the Alexa developers, the App Store? I know some folks who have built specific apps that do specific things, but if you drop a more generalized LLM system on top of it, that might actually be competitive. You're Competing with your customers. How have you messaged to the developer community around that?

Developers are pretty pumped about it right now because these skills we're still calling, basically you're calling these APIs that are routing to a skill. So while it's not deterministic point and shoot, it still is. Think of it as different agents on the system that you can call on. You're seeing these developers write apps where the LLM makes the product, Alexa makes the decision, kind of orchestrates and says that you're trying to order a car. Let me, we'll call Uber and then Uber makes the car happen.

Yeah.

And I think as you, as you see that as an example or you wanted to order food from grubhub or whatever the answer was you just asked for the food. And then you know that service makes its move and you know, delivers it. I think there's this fundamental of it's actually better for developers because if you're serving your customer, they're sitting here, they're trying to tell you what they want. They don't have to be as explicit anymore. They can almost be general in their asks at that point. If it's calling on an app or a skill or an add on, as we call it, developers are pretty pumped about it right now. We have a pretty long list of developers right now, probably the largest group of, if you will, agents attached to any LLM out there. And so it is a pretty rare situation as it's just not being done anywhere else.

How do you think about the future of smart glasses and wearables? Amazon's done so many smart devices from the tv you mentioned the Kindle to the Alexa, it feels like an obvious thing. You have a number of products that have been announced or already live. But where do you think that goes? What formats do you like most and where are you seeing the most adoption really?

So we see a ton. We see our usage kind of just spiking with Alexa. On the current device lineup that we have today, we have frames go frames that people where we see the usage go up, the buds are going up. Because when you take an agent that that's smart with you, it's quite powerful. So you. We already see it happening in different form factors. I mean it's down to user preference. I will say this, I mean you're hitting a point that I think is just worth noting. I think there are plenty of jobs moving to what you would call AI devices. It's just kind of changing. And if you think about kind of the evolution of different Portions of tech over time. Let me take you back. When I was developing, I think 14 years ago, I was making a laptop and somebody had come to me and said, what are you doing? The laptop is dead. I can't see you guys right now, but assuming you have laptops in front of you now, I can see. Just think about that for a minute. That's 14 years ago, guys. Literally, we were creating this product. We're going to make this laptop. It's going to create. I have this vision and you're getting all after it. You're like, this is beautiful. Look what it can do in every detail. And you're going, and the first thing is, why would you build a laptop? That thing is dead. The phone has replaced it. It's over for the laptop. 14 years ago, yeah.

These things stick around long time.

What really was happening wasn't that the laptop was dying. It was just getting stronger at what it did. Great jobs had kind of moved to the phone, and the things that mattered to you on a phone came to life. Communications, then the advent of social media, shopping, probably things that were easier there. But the things that mattered, like right now, your notes or your other things that mattered for the laptop, they just got stronger. I think we're kind of in that same era. I think AI devices are coming down the pipe. They're going to be great for certain things. And to your point, a lot of them will be on the go, whether it's glasses or something on your wrist or something in your pocket. I don't talk about what's in the lab, but for sure, you would imagine that as the jobs move, there's going to be form factors that evolve that are going to be more important. I think it just strengthens the form factors that exist today. Just like the laptop got stronger, in my opinion, because when the phone came, you got better at the jobs on your laptop. Just like when the laptop came, the desktop got stronger for gaming and developers. And you just see that evolution where it's not that these form factors go away, but they get better at what they are meant to be and then new form factors show up. I think that's happening right now.

How do you think about the personality and brand of individual models? I feel like there's a world where I would love an Alexa that I can just say it's Claude and I'm talking to an Alexa hardware device. But I like the personality and functionality of Claude, and so I want to just kind of run that piece of software by default. In the same way that I can select like a default browser. I have a MacBook, but I run Chrome as my default browser. Is there a world where I could be able to do that?

It's an interesting thought. It's not how it works for Alexa right now, but it's pretty, it's interesting. Don't think for like if I think about the customer that, you know, kind of the, I don't know what you would call it, but just the baseline customer. What I'm trying to do.

Yeah, yeah. I'm extremely online. I have, I have opinions about individual models.

I don't even know what to tell.

You, but many people don't care.

You hit the extreme in the question. But here's how I think about it. Yeah, I think like Alexa is basically model agnostic. Like what's the right model for the job?

Sure.

And of course we have fine tuned models specifically that are built specifically for Alexa to do the jobs that you're looking for. The thing that matters most, I think to our customers is that it personalizes to you. And so the more I talk to it about the things that I love, the more it understands me. I think you see that today in other products. But then as you're in natural conversations or you're asking for the next thing, you don't have to go all the way. Alexa can be proactive for you. I'll give you a simple example. Maybe it's a silly one, but it is simple. Just kind of being practical. If I ask Alexa, I have a camera, I have a ring camera. Right now you have it where my dogs eat in the dog bowls. And if I ask, I can ask Alexa now. It's pretty cool feature. It's just AI in its simple sense, although kind of fun. Did anyone feed the dogs today? That's a classic question. At my house I get in trouble every night when I get home. Have you fed the dogs yet? I'm like, I just walked in, that sort of thing. And then there's that moment where I can just turn and ask Alexa and Alexa says nobody fed the dogs today. So it's. Yeah, it's just very cool because it knows nobody fed the dogs. You know, we use ring video descriptions. We understand there's a dog, we understand that somebody fed the food or fed the dog the food. So if the dog's not fed I can ask, but in three days or four days later it can be proactive and just say, hey, nobody's fed the dogs today. And like you just take that. It didn't matter which LLMs or which agents kind of created that scenario to the customer. What mattered was it had the personalization, it knows I care about it, and then kind of proactively gave me that information back. I think that's the essence of just staying agnostic to it. But we do use different models.

How are you thinking about the way that advertising should integrate into AI assistance? Because there's a lot of debate happening right now. People are going to assistants for product recommendations and advice on things to buy. And I think there's a very real and important debate around when should this assistant that's like a trusted advisor, how should ad, you know, ad based recommendations, you know, show up, when is it appropriate, when should it just recommend? Like, you know, there's no, there's usually no objectively best product in a category because every consumer is different. But what's your framework for that? Because obviously Amazon's very pro ad.

When do you think you should recommend or what should it recommend? The way you framed it is right. I think like any assistant, the better it knows you, the better the recommendations can be. And so where I think ads do work is when you're actually helping the customer find what they're looking for. And then it just comes down to the, that personalization aspect and some of that history. If you, if there's something you use quite often and you're having, you know, and there's an ad that actually helps you if it's raised to you, that's when I get excited because I think it's like a holistic approach to, you know, that kind of circle when it's just random and you're like, what is this? It really, that's painful. This is where it gets painful.

People really have no problem with the idea of going to your Alexa and then Amazon taking a cut of the commerce transaction. That happens because you see the Amazon truck and you see the delivery network and you see how fast things arrive and so there's clear value pervade there. And so I think most customers are happy to have Amazon take essentially like an affiliate fee almost on that or a cut. Yeah. The issue is how agnostic.

Yeah. Is there a world where Alexa would be getting effectively be an affiliate on the platform like it was an external source that was sending traffic. Because what I would want is to arrive on is basically say hey Alexa, and sorry to anybody at home. I'm setting off your Alexa device if you're listening to this, this but hey Alexa, I want to buy. I use the example of a paper towel holder because I've had a. And I want it to be from a brand that is over 50 years old. And like, that is the kind of. That's the kind of product I want to buy from a reputable brand that has been operating and that isn't just importing the cheapest possible product from overseas. And so that is like a very valuable recommendation to me. And as a consumer, I don't care if Alexa takes a cut, but that's different than me just searching in a search bar.

I agree. I mean, I don't know about. I'm not exactly sure what you mean by Alexa taking a cut there, but what I would like to see happen in that scenario, and I think is what happens today is because we're so conversational, we can do that search for you, we can bring it up. We can also just look at your shopping history if you choose to enable that, and then say, look here, this is the size of paper towels you've been buying. And fundamentally, you know, if you just go to that next level of beyond just, I'm going to. I heard what you said and here's the answer. Maybe just do a little bit of logic flow for you and bring back a few options. I think that's when it does get like, these are those emotional connection points. I know it sounds silly, we're talking about paper towels, but if you're asking for something indirectly and you don't know exactly what you're pointing and shooting for and you get something that's close and you can have a conversation, just think about any assistant kind of mode and just talking to somebody. I'm just going to have this conversation and we're going to brainstorm it together. You're starting to see that happen on Alexa. It's more so about refining what it is you're getting after and you can see that in kind of most aspects.

On the Kindle side, are you getting feature requests from users that want more AI integrated into products? I can imagine. I. I pick up a book I haven't read in a while and it'd be nice to be able to say, can you summarize the first three chapters?

Summarize the entire book in one sentence? I'm done.

Okay, I'm done. But.

We'Re getting a bunch of it. And you know, this is a fine. I'm going to answer your. We have a thing called book so far. So I'm going to tell you about that. That was the exact feature you just asked for and it's AI based and it's basically continue Watching for books. Do you know what I mean? Like, you watch the first three episodes of whatever it is, Rings of Power, and you're like, just keep me up to date or what show it is. And you just see the recap, and then you go into the next episode. This happens to me all the time because I don't watch enough tv. We have books so far, which is that, hey, summarize how far I am into this book. Remind me. You also can ask the book anything you want. You can ask Kindle anything you want about the book. And that was a big feature request. I just want to talk about the character. I want to know more about what really happened here. And now that's happening. So that's where AI enhances it. But you have to be really careful because there's something pure about Kindle that customers love, and this is, like, near and dear to my heart. You have to be a super fine line. We do have, like, on the Kindle scribes that we just launched, we do have AI search for any of your notes. So if you have hundreds of pages of notes now, you just search for it, and then you can say, summarize all the notes that I wrote about John or whatever, and you'd get them all summarized, and it would do a smart summary for you, and then you can put them in the. You can do all that. But here's the risk that we're very cautious of. Kindle's like a sanctuary. It's like this. You get into it, and then you just want to disappear into it. Our users, they love their books. You know what they hate when they're reading books is distractions. I don't use that word lightly, but it is like if you popped them an ad or put a link up, or I infiltrated you with a text coming in, if you will, from Jordi, you'd be like, God damn, just trying to read bad. This is my one place to disappear. And it's crazy because readers are popping up everywhere, new readers. I think, like, 60% of our new purchases are from totally new readers right now, just so you know. So there's a bit of a spike happening because it's a growing category again. The trick is to hold that as like, that sanctuary, where when you do pick up to read, that's what it becomes. The more tech you put in there, beyond a book, you have to be careful. I think I know where that line is. The team knows where that line is. We have an amazing Kindle team. They've been doing it for years. And years. And they understand the customer so well. But to your point, the customer is starting to ask can I get to what we call book so far or continue watching is the best way to say it in analogous. And so we created that or summarization. We have that. And also in your writing, you can search your notes, but we're being very selective not to over techify it, if that makes sense. You got to be careful because at the end of the day it is a book or it is a notepad that you want to write on. You have plenty of other devices to let your distractions kick in. But this is the one that we hold coveted and protect quite a bit.

I have one last question. Maybe this is a technical one, but on Kindle and AI, I think of Kindle as, I don't want to say underpowered, but like it's designed for long battery life, you know, not the craziest screen. It's supposed to be something you can, you know, throw in your backpack and pull out on a trip and know that it's still charged. Right. So I imagine that there's.

You should be a product manager for Kindle.

Okay, yeah, hold that line.

If you hold, if you hold that frame, man, you're perfect. Like it just religiously hold on to those statements.

Fantastic. And so I imagine that the AI workloads need to be done in the cloud and you're not thinking about on device AI. And that's generally the right trade off because the summaries can be processed asynchronously or they can be queued up and kind of gone back and forth over the WI Fi network or 4G. I'm just kind of interested in what the median connectivity versus on device compute trade off looks like for Kindle going forward.

Yeah, it's tricky. We're doing a lot of work on the edge right now as you put it on device. I think you have to because it can envelope speed and sometimes specifically though, basically we serve the customer transparently wherever it's right. But we are doing work to when it's time and when it's time to use on device. So let's call it like if you're trying to reduce latency on writing and you're doing some beautification as an example. Yeah, you're going to want to do it on device if you want to, you know, do books so far. Like it's a cloud based thing. I mean, what if you started reading on your. Is a good example. You started reading on your iPhone, you came over to Your Kindle and you picked it up. You want that to be a cloud based experience. That's not something you wanted on device. There's trade offs. But we do both. It's a good question. I think that's true, by the way. Across every single device we talked about today.

Yeah, totally.

Where is the edge workload? More important, if I did want it, depending on if we were doing, whether it was for security or speed or cost, whatever it might have been, you're always trying to find the right balance for the customer. By the way, when you say it. Can I show you this?

Yeah, please.

May not be able to see it on the screen. This is the new color Kindle. Can you see it?

The screen's gone. So is that color.

Look how thin it is. This thing is 5.4 millimeters thin. Like it's crazy. It's so fun. And it has the same battery life. Talked about same latency, same speed. And I have it here taking notes as I'm talking to you guys. But it's a powerhouse now. So the processor there is kind of double the power.

Yeah. Is that like E ink screen? Like it works outside and it's soft.

It almost feels like when you look at it, it's so soft on the eyes.

Right.

It has a front light and the front light.

Sure.

Basically across the screen. So it's not blasting you.

Yeah, yeah.

So it still has that subtlety. You don't feel as tired as you're looking at it. You can do it in the dark and the light. There's nothing that you lose. This screen, it's a matte screen. It's perfect for writing.

Wow.

And you're so you get all those pieces. The refinement was color, so there's always this battle. But it's not an LCD with the beautification and OLED and so forth. But I mean there's something beautiful and subtle about this. Almost like colored pencils on the screen. And so even when you're writing in color, it feels that way. It's quite.

One of my favorites. We gotta get one. We gotta figure out how to jailbreak it. Sideload the Sora slop feed. I want brain rot on that thing.

Don't tell me, don't tell me, tell.

Me any of that stuff, man.

I don't want to hear. Last thing. Do you think Amazon's AI opportunities broadly underappreciated. I mean it feels like there's so much surface area. Every retail opportunity. Anthropic. You guys already have a suite of devices that People use and love that are in people's homes. It feels like in many ways other.

You know, you guys also have data centers too.

A few of those. Few of them got a few racks.

They invented the data center.

For sure.

Yeah, for sure.

I mean, I don't know how else to say it. Like, hands down, every part of Amazon is entrenched in driving through AI and whether it's bedrock aws, what's happening, like cloud wise, all the models we run, we make available to our customers all the way through stores. And what they're doing fundamentally to help your shopping experience better. Prime Video and what they're doing. We have a jump to scene with Fire tv. Did you guys know that? It's very cool.

Well, that's very cool.

Just pick your favorite movie scene.

I mean, also the largest deployment of robots I believe in the world is Amazon.

Correct. Well, I don't know if that's accurate.

Maybe in the US I saw some chart where you guys were passing a million robots.

Yeah, it's pretty massive. And then like, you know, controlled by. And then you have the other side of it. All the Alexa devices now are about to be powered by Alexa. This is like core foundation of like consumer AI in its most practical sense. You're in this place now where I'm at the dinner table with the family and instead of somebody pulling out their phone to get the answer or research something, we just have a conversation with Alexa and you got the full depth of what you would have expected from an LLM based product. But it's just very practical and ready for you. And so like I think the whole gamut is. You're right, it's, it's quite underappreciated right now. I don't, I don't know what the right way to frame it is on the other side without sounding too like, you know. But I do think there's.

I agree. So I think, and I think, I think the market will realize eventually.

So I do too. I think, you know, first thing, serve the customer. Serve the customer. Serve the customer. And do it in the right way. I think think that's our focus and we'll kind of continue to do that. But you're right, I think that it'll get noticed, seen, understood. I'm pretty proud of it right now. And when you see what's coming with Alexa with ring video search or ring story descriptions and like summarizing your day, it really starts making it something. It takes AI to the next level in my mind because it just makes it practical. For people like it just puts it right there. Don't get me wrong, you can actually use Alexa.com too to do all the things that people are associating with traditional LLM. It's quite cool as well. Or the app. But at the end of the day, there's just a whole new set of practical ways to use it that I think are going to be pretty delightful for our customers.

When's the new scribe actually releasing? I just tried to buy it while we were talking and it says coming soon.

I'm not allowed to give you the date on here, but yeah, you have to get on the wait list. Our demand is a little bit higher than we expected it to be. Right now we're in. We're in production.

So you Amazon. You guys couldn't get the demand planning right.

I want a scrap planning two days. You'll have it before the holiday. I want it. Okay.

By the way, people are pretty bumped about it.

I'll make sure you get. I'll make sure you guys get it. Put your name down and I'll make sure.

We will. We will.

Awesome.

Well, thank you so much.

Great hang out.

This is.

Congrats on. On all the progress.

Yeah, really, really fascinating tour of the eco ecosystem. I appreciate you breaking it down for us. Thanks so much.

Been fun, guys. You take care.

Wait. Also, I think obviously it's too late now, but is. Is Panos the first. Are you. I think you're the first person from Amazon ever on our show.

I think so.

I think we've got a thousand interviews this year. Here we go.

Congratulations.

It's great to have you.

Thank you.

Well, we'll see you soon.

We'll see you soon.

Cheers.

Have a good one. We have some. Some breaking news that we gotta cover. Sam Altman has replied to his post about erotic content in ChatGPT says. Okay. This tweet about upcoming changes to ChatGPT blew up on the erotica point much more than I thought it was going to.

You didn't think posting E R O T I C A was gonna.

There are so many other words that you could have used to kind of like, you know, get there.

Could have just said romantic companions.

Exactly. We have said that the entire time we were discussing grok. We like that. This is a clean show. We like that we.

I've never. I never wanted to say that word on the show.

Exactly. So when we talk about this, we say adult content, adult romantic companion. We don't go to the other words. But yes, he went there. He said E R O T I C A He typed it out into his X app, sent the tweet, and he said it was meant to be just one example of us allowing more user freedom for adults. Here is an effort to better communicate it. I'm gonna read it and you tell me, is this better communication? Jordi, he says, as we have said earlier, we are making a decision to prioritize safety over privacy and freedom for teenagers. And we are not loosening any policies related to mental health. This is a new and powerful technology and we believe minors need significant protection. I love that point. We also care very much about the principle of treating adult users like adults as AI becomes more important in people's lives. Allowing a lot of freedom for people to use AI in the ways that they want is an important part of our mission. It doesn't apply across the board, of course. For example, we will still not allow things that cause harm to others. And we will treat users who are having mental health crises very different from users who are not. Without being paternalistic. We will attempt to help users achieve their long term goals. But we are not the elected moral police of the word of the world. In the same way that society differentiates other appropriate boundaries. R rated movies, for example. We want to do the same thing here. Let's hear it for the MPAA rating system that's gaining popularity. Yes. I want this so badly.

I just want to. In the App Store it should say R rated.

R rated, but that is not NC17 rated, which is a different thing. And so we were debating this.

So you're a movie buff?

No, no. I mean, is Amazon's erotic content on the Kindle? Is that X rated? Is that the same as OnlyFans? Is that the same as an adult content video site? It does feel somewhat different. And so I don't know, maybe this is a nod to staying in the R rated category. Not going further. I don't know. We'll see. What's your reaction, Jordi, to this post? Is it effective Comms, put on your lulu hat.

I mean, the problem is that almost 14 million people saw yesterday's post. You add that up with thousands of other posts and it really did blow up for you. This post is going to certainly get plenty of plenty of views, but I think the community has already taken it.

I don't know. I think the December timeline, there's a lot of days between now and December. AGI might hit before then, but there's so much that could happen to tweak that policy before it goes out. Really? Silo it? I don't know, we'll have to see. I can almost guarantee that when it rolls out, there will be crazy screenshots on the timeline that day of people getting it to do crazy stuff. Because people love jailbreaking this stuff. They've already been doing it anyway. Let me tell you about Turbo Puffer search. Every byte serverless vector and full text search built from first principles on object storage. Fast 10x cheaper and extremely scalable. You can load all your erotic content into TurboPuffer, search it 10 times cheaper.

And we have our, our first in.

Person guest of the show. We got Adam Ryan from work week.

The Legend.

The Legend.

Bring it in.

It's the platform for professional networks. Welcome to the show, Adam. Second time, third time, I've lost track but thank you so much for joining us. I'm gonna turn this microphone here. We're gonna be talking about your strategy to bring erotica to professional networking.

I've been waiting for this moment.

Yes, that's exactly what it's all about actually. Kick us back off the thesis of.

The whole company that people wanted erotica in the workplace.

Kick us back off with the actual overview of the company, how you introduce.

Yourself these days and the quick history too for anybody that missed the last interview. Yeah, started the company four years ago and this guy was part of the founding story of that. And today one of the things that we learned along the way that, that everyone has focused on consumer behaviors of hey, I trust individuals over institutions and beauty, fashion, gaming. There's a Kylie Jenner out there. There's nobody in work. If you're a VP of marketing, if you run a hospital or health system, who do you go to? If you're into Beauty of Kylie, you don't have anyone else in that space. So that was the first problem we wanted to go solve and then and we thought it was potentially because of money bandwidth like this. What these people are busy. They already make a lot of money. That's why they don't create content. We realized that there's an actual just platform missing. People aren't going on LinkedIn being like hey, I'm prepping for a RIF. Can someone help me? And all these platforms are open networks. You can't necessarily have the conversations with your peers that you want to. All the other options are mostly analyzing. So putting it in my terms, you're building effectively a professional network but hyper specific to people within basically certain, I don't know if the right way to say it is bands, but if you're a VP of Marketing. And you want to interact only with other VPs of marketing. Work week is the platform that you can do that on. Yeah. So we've built the horizontal platform and then we verticalized it by the profession. So we have one for. In healthcare marketing, HR, E commerce, etc.

Yeah.

And so if you're in, if you're a kind of senior leader in one of those spaces, we verify you. So that prevents the bots, the erotica as, as well as make sure that you can kind of have those, those trusted discussions.

I mean I imagine that with the, with the erotica discussion that the HR group support group is probably going wild. All the HR leaders across the Fortune 500. Yeah.

What are we gonna do about this?

Because we've given chat GBT to everyone and then they're going to be able to use it forever.

Yeah. And I'm assuming on business plans you can just turn off that. Yeah. Like this is. Can you maybe. Yeah.

So it's 40 chess. You gotta upgrade to the, to the enterprise solution now because you gotta be able to fine tune your entire organization. So we can keep intern Tyler off of the, off of the adult version.

Tyler's been grinning this whole series. He's just cracking up.

That's funny. Yeah. I mean I've heard, I've heard there's like, I've heard crazy stories of value in these like niches. There's some phrase like there's riches in the niches. There's riches in the niches. Something like that. I heard about one company that was just doing pure Slack communication. So they would go and find all of the chief of staffs across a whole bunch of different startups, put them all in a Slack community that they had to pay to be part of. But then when they got a request from their company, oh, I need to fix up the H VAC system, they'd be able to just go to this Slack channel and say, hey, who else is managing an office and needs to figure out a regular delivery schedule of filtered water or a better WI fi provider or something that, and that makes a lot of sense. Same thing with VP marketing, a whole bunch of other stuff. Hey, we're talking. How do you think about the like, if there's this continuum between like LinkedIn's, this super broad category, you have someone like, you know, a Lenny, a substack creator with a show that's like, you know, this individual off in this world versus like these like curated communities. Like where do you see like the water cooler existing for the average User. I think there's the traditional social networks.

Which are all free to join and then you have the Chief of Staff 1. Silva owns that one. It's a subscription. Most of those, it's the ypo. But for X, they've all created those. But subscription. There's really only been one company that's done verification with making it free, which is Doximity Professional network for doctors. They're like a 10, $14 billion company today. Produces more cash flow than Airbnb since starting and only raised 50 million. Wow. Hell of a company. Go buy the stock. That's good. Not financial advice. When he said buy the stock, it was not financial advice. And we're really following a lot of that blueprint of how do you build actually a platform where you create engagement loops like a social network, but you still have the verification.

Got it.

Because if you have a bunch of VPs of marketing on a network that the impressions against that audience are worth thousands of times potentially the average impression on a LinkedIn. Well, and I think it's to the Alexis on the show yesterday talked about the dead Internet theory. It's like the perfect time for trying to solve that is like, how do you actually know who's doing what? And I use Reddit, I love Reddit, but I used to be able to tell are you smart? By your reply. And now with ChatGPT, I'm like, or like, have you put effort into it? Have you? Yeah. And if you did, I'm like, now I'm like, I have no idea who this is. And so the kind of whole trust of the Internet, I think shifting particularly when it comes to work, really care about who's giving you advice. Yeah. Isaac, friend of the show, posted a couple days ago, do what Raya did. But for a social network, humans only, human verification, hard to get into. No idea how to do it, but feels intuitively like it could work. And I love seeing this because this has been Workweek's thesis for years now. You guys have been building towards it. So people are finally realizing what do you think about some of the recent changes on X? They're adding functionality that shows where the user is based. There's probably a lot of reason, good reasons for this and then some bad reasons. I think some of the concerns for people that are in areas like the UK that don't tolerate free speech, you could be targeted or authorities there could be trying to. To come after accounts. But it's like such a interesting platform because we effectively all use it as a professional network and a Place to talk about the industry or various industries broadly. But at the same time, it's like John compared it yesterday to being a dive bar. Right. It's like people are getting in fights all the time. There's like, you know, that shady guy in the corner that you know.

It's got a history.

It's got a history. Yeah, exactly. But, yeah, I don't know. I mean, that's what Nikita's doing. If you're an open network that's free, you're gonna get bots and then you also are gonna get people abusing. We love on Twitter all the time, but the Twitter lost its trust identity when they started allowing more bots. And then also the blue check mark, it changed the verification process a little bit where you could buy your own verification, but Russian bots still have credit cards. I remember I got. I remember I got verified. And then six weeks later they did that. They did the spent years.

Me too. Texted grandma through the flow. I found like old. You have to. You used to just have to.

You needed like five news articles.

So I found some old news articles and Wikipedia page just got approved. And then a week later it was like, oh, everyone thinks.

Give us your take on the current state of independent media. You were a key player in building the hustle. There was a time that everybody was saying, I want to build the morning brew for X or the hustle for X. There was some great businesses built off of that. Are many of them still thriving? What is the current state of. Of the. Maybe start with the newsletter media business? Yeah, I mean, I think what.

Substack.

Has done has democratized access. I think ultimately what people always come down in media is you need to help people make money, help people get eyeballs, or help people make content faster. You solve one of those things, you have a decent business. Solve all three, you have a good one. And what's happening is I think the independent side is starting to rise because platforms like Beehive and Substack have started to really allow that to be the case. I think we're starting to make our own case there for more specific kind of verticals. But I think consumers in the end are the ones telling the truth. Lenny is getting more money on a.

Subscription basis than Most publishers in B2B.

Trade publications have been around for like 50 years. So consumers wallets always end up.

Walk me through Trung Fan's existence, his business. The most interesting man in the world writes on business with work week, not at work week. Is he an employee? Is he on the Network like he has a newsletter. How does that work? Just Trunk.

Trunk was one of the first, one of the first creators that work week. Yeah, well I. So we signed him at the Hustle. I hadn't known him for a while and he actually was a big part of like our, our shtick is because when we brought him on at the Hustle he was so funny and so much better than everyone else. He changed the engagement of a newsletter with 1.5 million people like whoa. Like overnight. I mean it was like everyone just started like reading more, opening more ads went up and so we actually that was like a big part of is like one person could totally. You have like the 100x creator which everyone talks about developers today. 1. He's like the best dad in the world. You can't mention Trung and not talk about T.J. trung Jr. And I don't think he's ever been on an all hands call for any company I've ever been a part of with him. But you know that's just kind of his vibe of what he does and he comes with, comes with it all. But yeah, I think he's a true rock star.

But is he an example of someone who stewarding a smaller community of professionals that could be given some sort of moniker?

He works more on the work week side of helping us. So what we have a lot is we have people like Blake Madden who covers healthcare. If you're in healthcare, you know who Blake is.

Okay.

Very hard to get someone viral in covering niche healthcare. Trung's the guy to help us do that.

Okay, so he's a little bit more like Thomas.

He's a halo. He's a halo creator.

Got it. Okay. And then there are specific niches. Is there a power? I imagine there's some sort of power law to those, to the various communities that you have. Like what's at the top? Like where are you really like dominating.

About like 30% of revenue is HR, 9% healthcare. But if we look at like TAM, it's actually pretty indexed pretty equally of like how many people we think we can get per network.

And then within hr, for example, are there multiple communities, multiple creators or, or is it all just one big pool? How do you think about that?

So we think about it more like a network. So safe space is the HR network and I think this is part of it. You have to use the lexicon of lingo. Blake uses very different language than hr. They just talk about and so each one's developed to match that. And then within the network we have creators and so we believe if you want to write for HR leaders, we're the best place to get the eyeballs. And then we have our own ad platform that helps fuel that. That they, that they can get money off of.

Are there other kind of services or activities that are kind of, I don't know, amortized or shared across the entire platform? Obviously ad sales seems like one of them. But actual software or do you say, hey Trung, like there's no better product than just posting on X so we're not going to try and build our own short form text app.

We just let them do their own thing.

Yeah, use your. Use whatever tool is best for the job. If you want to be on Substack or a Slack, we use our own newsletter.

So newsletters. Newsletter particularly is that. And that's our way that we use content to drive people into the networks.

Yep. And then you can shuffle people around through the different networks.

Not that different than how Substack's now doing it for theirs. But ours is more vertical.

Yeah. Yeah. And there's more like news driven. Yeah. Makes sense.

Political and wanted your take on. On David Ellison's recent actions with Paramount and Skydance. A lot of people thought that the price they paid for the Free Press was crazy. I think we came in the defense of it when you look at it from a talent acquisition standpoint and having a very high value audience. But I wanted to hear how you thought about it. The merger itself, it allows them to compete, I think like taking a big step out. Everyone wants to win. Streaming, I mean that's like the name of the game. And so it allows Paramount to now finally have more IP to compete with Disney plus and Netflix while they're all. And Netflix just announced, I think today a partnership with Spotify to start bringing more podcasts on. Like is an IP race of the streaming and Paramount was losing and I think this allows them to do that. So that's. I think the bigger picture is actually that. Yeah, everything else, the Free Press is like a rounding error as part of the story. It's 150 million in total and they're buying, you know, 12 revenue of that. It's not the end of the world. I think that was also. If you're going. Was that the revenue number? 12 to 15, I think. Yeah, okay.

Yeah, I think it was higher than 20.

But yeah, it was around like 10x multiple, I think or 10 to 12. But they. I also think when you're starting your own company, which basically David Ellison is Like, you want your own people.

Sure.

And that's. You're going to make sure you build the right foundation and everybody's focused on what did they pay for the free press. You should be focusing on how much more valuable will Barry Weiss make cbs. This is no different in a totally different world and very different numbers. But then Zuck saying, I need an AI team. I'm going to go get the people that I want to get. He's saying, I want to have the best editorial team. I'm going to go get the people I want to have. Yeah.

Do you think the, the, the bigger platforms, the public platforms, have kind of become less relevant in those niche professional networks? I feel like if I went back like 10 years on Twitter, there would be like, hashtag, like marketing Tuesday and all, and I would see a bunch of marketing people talk about marketing on Tuesday. Yeah, basically it was like that crazy marketing Monday or something.

Manifest manifestation Mondays.

That was a thing.

There was a thing around, like, hashtags, all the corny hashtags, chats around certain things. And you'd see a lot of those people that were just talking about their specific like. But now X feels like teapot political news. Like, there's, there's, there's, it's, it's at a much higher level than any sort of niche.

The irony, I think, was like, when they went all algorithms first, they lost the sense of communities. And when you used to follow people and that's who you did, it was like your people.

Yeah.

And when the algorithms, it totally changed the dynamic of the product. But because it was the same brand and logo, no one thought about them differently.

It happened slowly.

I think it makes the feed more interesting, but we definitely lost it. And they make more money. I mean, like, you're there for engagement and your Dao Mao goes up as Nikita, makes that algorithm better. So that's all he cares about. And I think that's ultimately what their incentives are. I do think, like, LinkedIn. I know you guys are huge there and really rely on sports center of LinkedIn. The sports center of LinkedIn. So hate to hate to say this, but, you know, I think like 10 years ago, some be like, hey, I saw your connect on LinkedIn. Can you make that introduction? I'd be like, oh, yeah, I know. Today I'm like, yeah, clue who that is. I think there's a negative network effect happening across most social. The more people added, the worse it gets.

Yeah, no, that makes a ton of sense.

We were talking off air about how only fans hasn't been able to sell itself. They've been trying for a long time now. The news yesterday, obviously, you know, other companies leaning into. Into that broad category of monetizing romantic chatting, which OnlyFans has done better than probably any company in the world. When Xai was leaning into romantic companions earlier this year, we were like, it made sense for them to do. They needed a strategy to drive new user signups, engagement, subscriptions, et cetera. But, but why do you think, have you been surprised that there's no buyer for OnlyFans? Yeah, it's like on cash flow per headcount, I think it's best company in the world until. What is it? Tether. Tether. 1.9 billion, I think Onlyflance does in cash flow a year with like 70 employees or something. It's like absurd. I know the owner takes like a. He pays himself a 500 million dividend check a year and they leave like plenty of banks, but they've never. They can't take themselves public. They've not been able to find a buyer because of the content. And now the irony is most of it's just a face, but they allow. They've created the tooling. The old CEO of OnlyFans, former colleague of mine, she's amazing. She created so many tools for the models to make content in a safe way and then to monetize it better. And now they've advanced further to where, like, it's a chatbot. They essentially, like not even having real conversation anymore. It's not that different than what we're talking about for OpenAI. And it's just branding. And I think that's the, you know, X being the Everything app. You're like, I can kind of see that.

That's, that's.

I think your point earlier about the Apple comparison, this, this is a little bit of a tarnish on that comparison, I think, for OpenAI. Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, we have some breaking news we got to cover before our next guest hops on, but thank you so much for stopping by.

What's the breaking news? I gotta know.

There's a ton of these. Mr. Beast has filed a trademark, launching his own bank. It will be called Mr. Beast Financial. He clearly saw our post about Erebor and was like, I gotta get in on the action. Just kidding. The application was filed two days ago.

Oh, but it's real. No, it happened this morning. I saw that.

This is real.

What's your take on this? It feels like if you want to monetize an extremely broad audience of young people, Maybe just creating a bank that you can monetize deposits is a fairly aligned way to do that. It's kind of like, I guess. Yeah. I mean, I just don't know that. I don't know that there's like a lane of trust sooner or later that like, you're just going to screw. Like, why do I want a Mr. Beast Bank? I don't know.

I mean, the lesson from the Mr. Beast bar or the hamburgers is that it has zero price discrimination. And so if you get a rich person in your audience, like, you're only going to be able to charge them a $5 for a king.

Okay, but let's break it down.

A bank, you can actually get shipping, basically.

But yeah, but think about, like, wealthy people are not going to see this bank launch and decide, I need this. I'm going to move a bunch of things.

Think in decades a kid watches, Mr. Beast is like, yeah, I need my first checking account. I'll set up Mr. Beast checking. And then, then 20 years later they're like, yeah, I should probably switch to something more serious. It's kind of ridiculous that I'm still on Beast Financial. But like.

If he's actually a bank charter, charter, it means he can get into doing mortgages and like hardcore. I mean, I think like, that all. It always sounds good in like a board meeting.

Yeah.

And then you, like, don't care about the product and you don't actually make it differentiated. And then you're like, cool. When distribution's like your only moat. It's not. Yeah. So. So I guess, I guess if he runs the numbers on like, okay, if the average person in my audience is like 16.

Yeah.

How much money do they spend a month? I bet, I bet teenagers will think this is cool and will want to use it. And you can probably just run the numbers and calculate like, okay, the average teenager spends. Their parents are going to send their, their allowance or maybe they have a job, they send it into the account. Maybe they spend couple hundred dollars a month. I don't know what teenagers spend these days. I was, I remember back in my day, it was like, you know, allowance, like $20.

And.

And so it gets deposited in there and then they spend it and he can give them rewards and that's cool. And cash back and he can monetize some of that rewards. But I don't, I don't really believe, like, I became an adult and I was like, I want to use a real bank. I'm an adult. You know, Like, I just remember I migrated from like a credit union in my hometown to like, I want to. You're using a card all the time. It's coming up. Like you think you're like a kid that goes into college is like, yeah, I'm still using my Mr. Beast. Like, I do think it's like a Lunchables competitor and a bank. Like, know your audience a little bit. Yeah, but so I guess like for. From the bull case is that if you can get millions of kids to just be using Beast Financial as their.

I mean, as a piggy bank, it's technically called Mr. Beast Financial, which is. I think I like Beast Financial more than MrBeast Financial. The filing was submitted on an intent to use basis, which under trademark law means there are genuine plans to bring this to life.

I think he should have went with Jimmy. His like a grown up version.

Well, clearly it clearly got Will Menidis up in arms. He's thinking about it because he says he's calling the top on incubations subtweeting Mr. Beast. Just kidding. Probably not subtweeting Mr. Beast, but will Menidis did call the top on incubations. He says every guy I've talked to in the past six months that even vaguely worked at a hot company is now incubating four, five, six companies. Who are all these hired CEOs? Why is. Why is the market equilibrium that no one wants to go all in. They just want to clip 20%.

And so, yeah, incubations are incredibly hard.

He says there are amazing.

They're way more work, way more work than just investing. Jordan and I spent some time trying that.

It's tough.

It's a tough game. Yeah.

You end up having individuals. I cannot say their names here or they will blow my car up. You are not incubating anything. If what you are doing is clipping 20% for an idea and some intros, you are not the tax man. The real incubation platforms put a huge amount of work in. What's he talking about? Like Snowflake at Sutter Hill. Like, that's a real incubation, I guess, like you could kind of thrive, Thrive, Thrive.

Oscar, there's a healthcare one that's done really well that like, they only focus on like certain healthcare one, but their like model was like they had no capital risk.

Yeah. And they're also like a platform that's done this for. And they take it very seriously. We did, we did talk to somebody who incubated like what, 200 companies in a year or something.

Yeah, there was a. There Was a, there was a, there was a, there was a studio that made so many companies and so aggressive around how much equity they would take that every tier one announced like, we will never fund these companies.

Because when a CEO walks in, there's like, how much do you own? CEO, founder?

They're like 10%, 10%.

Like who owns the rest?

And also like, like, are you the, like 199th of the 200 CEOs or like number five?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I think that's actually, I, I, I'm coming around to the Mr. Beast. Financial. Financial.

You like it? You're bullish.

I, I'm not.

What's the terminal value?

I think that they can. So this idea came up in 2021, 2022 during the FinTech craze. It was like, it's not that hard to start a software product that can take deposits as, I mean, in this case, it sounds like he's maybe trying to be a chartered bank, trying to go to the base.

It's unclear, but who knows?

But still, it's like if you just run the numbers on how many million accounts you can get open up, what the average deposit size, how much they're going to be spending on a recurring basis and then the, even the partnerships that he'd be able to drive around like becoming a referral partner for Netflix and you know.

Yeah. To be clear, I don't think it's, I don't think it's confirmed that it is truly a bank. It could be Mr. Beast Financial. Get some financial advice. It would be like a clever idea.

And like I would be supportive of this. Like you buy one of his feastable lunchables, you get like a nickel in a savings account.

Yeah.

You keep going or something like that.

Around you pay the, for the lunchable with $1. If you don't pay for the rest of the Lunchable, Mr. Beast comes and personally breaks your legs, becomes a loan shark. That's another option. But I don't know. We'll see. In other news, on the way back to the United States from NATO's defense ministers meeting the Secretary of War Hegseth's plane made an unscheduled landing in the United Kingdom due to a crack in the air aircraft windshield. The plane landed based on standards procedures and everyone is on board is safe. Thank God. What a crazy story. Crack in the windshield. That is. That is a very crazy moment. In other news, an exciting milestone in AI from science. Sundar Pichai was probably holding this in his back pocket for when OpenAI does something that's negative. Aura. Sundar. Sundar. Radar busted this out and said our C2S scale 27B foundation model built with Yale and based on Gemma or Gemma generated a novel hypothesis about cancer cellular behavior, which scientists experimentally validated in living cells. With more preclinical and clinical tests, this discovery may reveal a promising new pathway for developing therapies to fight cancer.

He dropped it.

Oh, just a coincidence. Just a coincidence. They're doing that. We're doing that. You're absolutely dog. Tyler, tell me more about this. Like, what is actually going on? Have you dug into this at all?

I haven't read the full paper, but, I mean, there is, like, a stark distinction between this and what Sam was talking about, especially with all the Gemini 3 rumors going on.

Oh, yeah.

Like, this is the most cracked model of all time.

Interesting.

So I don't. Maybe it's just like, this is just. Maybe. Maybe it's just like a vague post. As a blog post. This is interesting.

Vague paper. We're thinking we're doing vague papers now.

I mean, you see that with a lot of new papers where it's like, oh, we have this new way of doing R.L. that's way better.

But we're not going to really get.

Into the details we don't want to share.

We are sponsored by Google AI Studio. The fastest way from prompt to production with Gemini. Chat with models. Vive code monitor usage. You're going to hang out for. You can hang out. You get to interview the next person.

I'm having fun. I'm having a great time. This is an interesting post from Brendan Buck. He says, here's a telling sign of where we are on day 15. There are zero stories about the blank in both the print New York Times and print Wall street journals. What is blank?

I have no idea.

The government has shut down.

Oh, the government shut down. Yeah, that's right. I'm getting a new passport, and I have no idea if I'm going to get it in time. I paid for it to be expedited because I have to go to Europe, unfortunately. I mean, obviously, it's a fantastic. But I never like leaving America, but it was. It did rise to the occasion, and I need a new passport, and I'm not sure if I'll be able to get it if the government is shut down. But are there really no new articles about this? No.

News does feel a lot less, like.

Newsworthy than I think. A lot of people just don't like the government, and so they're like yeah, shut it down. We don't need it. I'm over the government.

See ya.

See ya.

I do think most of those it'll get. I heard this. Most of the departments had four to six weeks of funding for their employees.

Okay. So they can hang out.

So basically for like 4ish weeks. No one's paycheck is affected quite yet because they have no reserves. Once that happens, I think it starts to get noisy.

Okay. Well we do have our next guest in the restream waiting room. Adam, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you for visiting Older Dome. We have Eric Whitman from VSCO coming on the show next. He's in the Restream waiting room. We'll bring him into the TBP and Ultra Dome. How are you doing?

What's going on?

Good to see you. Doing great. How are you doing guys? Good to see you. Thanks so much for hopping on the show.

Great to have you.

Give us a state of the union with vsco. I think a lot of people are familiar with the product, they know the general story, but I'd love to get just kind of the update and kind of level set for where the business is today. Yeah, appreciate that. Yeah. Look, vsco, it's been a minute, right? VSCO has been around for 14 years now. Overnight success. That's what we love to see, an overnight success. I love it. Yeah. So you know, and you know, we're a very proud company that's been here supporting creatives and photographers and creators overall for, you know, well over a decade. And what, you know, we love our jobs. I mean we love building for creatives and you know, we've seen various moments in time come about for vsco. But I think especially right now with the world and what's happening with AI right now, people, especially photographers and creatives, are looking for a company that has their back as building tools for them and it's really helping them find ways to be successful whether it's just doing things on the side or making a full time living as a creative. So that's really what we've been up to. Cool. Take us through the most recent updates and then I have a bunch of ideas to pitch you. Get feedback on, understand more about basically how I can level up my photography workflow. Yeah, I love it. So obviously AI is impacting the whole industry and a lot of photographers and a lot of creatives and our perspective has always been how do we preserve the craft, how do we preserve the art artistry, but also bringing some of those benefits that AI can provide to support the creative process. So the last couple of years we've been releasing tools like for example, VSCO Hub, which is actually a visual search engine powered by AI that makes it really easy for brands and people to find and hire photographers based upon their content. We earlier this year launched a product called VSCO Canvas. And if you think about a lot of creative processes, especially when you're working with clients, there's always this ideation phase and a mood boarding phase. And so we were one of the first to come out with a specific mood boarding tool that not only had generative as a part of it, but also allowed you to search this amazing community of literally 300 plus million people on VSCO and their content and then bring your own content to the fore. So really a hybrid in a hybrid way. And then today, big news is we've just come out with a whole new suite of tools. We call it AI Lab because we know a lot of this technology, as we hear about on your show almost daily, continues to evolve this massively rapid clip. And I see the gong getting ready.

There we go.

Thank you. I was wondering if I was going to get a gong. I love product launches here. Okay, here's a workflow that I struggle with regularly and I want you to walk me through how I could level it up. So I'll often go out and shoot photos and I shoot raws, and then I get to this point where I need to go and color correct and edit the raws, and I hate that process. And if I bring it into Photoshop, there's that auto button and it, it never gets it right. And I feel like there's room for AI to fine tune on what it takes to actually take a RAW image and then make it look great in color correction. That's not generative AI. I don't want to regenerate the image. I want the actual pixels there. I just want to understand the different looks. Kind of like AI filters. I've tried different apps and a lot of the apps, they kind of like hit everything with a different colored hammer and they all get really extreme. And then I see ads for like, oh, I got this filter pack and it looks great, but then you apply it and it's not right on your photos because you shot slightly differently. So what do you think the future of like just you still want to go capture a real image, a raw image, but then you just want to speed up that workflow of the post process once you have a great raw.

I love it.

I love this example because actually the future is here now. Great. So actually with VSCO today, you can IM import those RAW images in and we actually have some ML built into the product today that we will look at that image that you have and we will actually recommend a set of presets. So we have hundreds of different presets. Some of them are the world's best film emulation presets all the way down to presets that our own color scientists have created that are really beautiful. I mean a lot of these ads that you see for preset packs, they're basically people that have tried to copy our work that's been around, like I said, for 10 plus years. And there are still photographers that are doing work for National Geographic, big campaigns like that wonderful fruit company in Cupertino. And they are still using our color grading presets as their default starting point so that they can just get that great look much more quickly. So the future is here already today, John. It starts with vsco. Into our VSCO studio. You can import your raws use for this photo to to automagically pick the right preset and then you take your creative process from there. Again, we're not trying to get in the way from an AI perspective. We want AI to be supportive of your overall creative process.

What is the general sentiment in the photographer community today around AI? We had an. We had one shoot earlier this year with a photographer who was so deathly afraid of AI, he was hoping that the government would regulate it so that that certain products could only be like legally had to be authentically photographed because he was worried that people would just be generating a variety of images of them. Meanwhile, we have like an insatiable demand for photography where we do shoots all the time for different media things. Even I think in my home, right, I could go and generate hundreds of images of my family. And yet we still hire photographers a few times a year to take family photos. And so.

So.

Even if the models get 100 times better, which I don't even know if they can get 100 times better because they're already so photoreal. I just think that photographers that are craft driven, that genuinely enjoy photography and that want to capture moments will always have a job. That might be naive, but that's my current feeling today. And I'm curious how the broad community on VSCO is thinking about it.

I think that's right. I mean, look, I think we all shall recognize there's tension today, right? And I think back, look, I've been in this industry for 30 plus years, I've seen a lot of hype and where it ends up resolving to itself like E commerce. Right when it first started happening, everyone thought, oh, brick and mortar stores are going to go away. The reality is 16% of overall commerce happens through E commerce today. The rest is still very much brick and mortar. So I do think, you know, when AI and especially Generative AI came out, you did have a lot of photographers that saw it as a threat. And there are certain categories where realistically it is a threat. Stock photography is a perfect example that this is why you see companies like Shutterstock and Getty are coming together. Because you know there is going to be. There already is direction us in the stock photography market. But as you're saying, like there are different segments of photography. I mean, the photography services market is $105 billion a year. It's going to grow to 160, $150 billion a year by 2030. So it's still a growing market, which most people don't realize. So I think the question's always been, well, how is AI going to affect me and my specific line of work? I think where more and more photographers are now rationalizing is they're now starting to realize actually how helpful it can be to them, especially for the mundane tasks that they really don't like. So we were talking about color grading and sort of the editing part of the process. There are aspects of the editing process that are really mundane. Like if you're a wedding photographer and you're shooting 10,000 photos, how do I quickly cull through that? Today it's very much a manual process and it does not give photographers energy. But there are more and more companies that are coming out with calling tools that will automatically apply your look. And also because they've learned what your look has become over years and years of editing. And they'll also just take out the shots that aren't really, you know, like you see an airplane in the background. Okay, take that one out. Right. It's just AI is supportive of that, I think. Another area that I think is very emerging and you're going to see a lot more from VSCO on this front. I can't wait to come back and bang that gong a few more times with y'.

All.

But is that, you know, a lot of photographers are excellent at their craft. They're excellent at the artistry and what they do. What they are not great at is marketing, managing their business. And so there are just mundane tasks around managing customer relationships and responding Back to people and making sure that your edit list is appropriately organized.

Qualifying clients.

Qualifying clients is another great example. So we, we actually announced a product called VSCO Workspace. That is the whole point is to help photographers effectively manage their business. And we are rapidly AI enabling that product so that we can again, take a lot of those mundane tasks out. So that's where, as we think about things, it's very much about craft and integrity, being very human centric from a photography creator standpoint. But AI is going to assist you in a lot of those mundane tasks. And our goal is to be that platform for photographers.

Did you always know you were going to come in and build SaaS at VSCO? Was that, was that, was that the plan? I mean, B2B SaaS specifically. Obviously you were at Atlassian, then you're at Figma. You're kind of a SaaS demigod, you.

Know, I do love it, man. I can't look at a business and not think SaaS. I'm not going to lie.

Us too. There's a few things better in the world.

I have a question about AI and the trajectory of smartphone photography. So I recently got the latest iPhone, 48 megapixels, three different cameras, and I saw a video where they were. It was on MKBHD and he was testing, I think it was Leica versus iPhone. Can you tell the difference? It was very, very hard, but they really made it harder by only doing extreme, you know, no shallow depth of field, landscape photography, super bright. They weren't shooting some moody scene in a smoky bar at night with controlled lighting or something like that. And so we've been in this interesting era where the smartphone, it got amazing superhuman level or super Leica level at a certain niche in photography. But it really has not replaced moody portrait lighting where you want shallow depth of field just because of the physics of the lens. And I'm wondering if you think AI generative AI will do the same thing. Because I'm just thinking about, like even in the stock photography example, like if I'm buying a stock photo of Yosemite, like, even if it looks photo real, like, I want Half Dome in the right place. I don't want Half Dome. I don't want something that looks like Half Dome. Like, the reason I'm buying that stock image is because I can see exactly the shape of Half Dome perfectly. Not, you know, something that feels right and looks photoreal but isn't actually real. And that applies to so many different things. We need a stock photo of a Manhattan street and the layout of that street is important. And so I'm wondering where you think the pockets of photography will stay around forever versus the ones that are going a layer deeper on that. Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, first of all, I think composition is arguably one of the most important things for you to learn in photography. Most people will say that Ansel Adams wasn't a great, great photographer. He was amazing at composition and editing. I mean, he was one of the original contributors to Photoshop, like back in the day, you know, little known fact. But you know, it is about that editing process. So yes, you've got to get that composition right. But oftentimes, you know, that shot that's actually taken doesn't match the vision of what the photographer had in their head. And I do think, you know, where AI is interesting is it's starting to help people sort of, hey, you had this vision. Lighting is another classic example, right? Lighting is something that most photographers, you know, even the best of them, like mess up and being able to use AI to help augment, right. And correct some of the lighting issues or like composition issues. I think that's another area that's really. There's more and more investment that's happening there. We're obviously taking a look at some of that as well. But I think that's where it can, it can aid, right? And regardless of whether you're using an iPhone or if you're. You got a very expensive Leica. Love Leica's great products. But you know, from an approachability standpoint, the iPhones are much more approachful for the average person. And you know, when people are just getting started into photography, right? Like I think even, not even the latest iPhone, but like old iPhones, pick an iPhone 12 Pro and start to experiment with that and really just, just build your craft, build your look. That's why people love coming to vsco, because they get to see what other people are doing, like authentic work that isn't tainted by a lot of slop that's out there, right? And then they get to learn from other people. And I think that's also very important, right. Don't you know, being a photographer, especially for a professional photographer, is a lonely place, right? I mean, being a creative is a lonely place. And so if you can find communities and of people, we sponsor a lot of photo walks, just meet up with these folks, get to learn from each other and learn about the tools that they're using, learn about the techniques, see the gear and the camera. Ultimately it's about bringing people together and to help support and elevate their work and their craft and whatever that is, whether it's technology or just going old school with doing in person stuff, I mean, we're all here for that.

You spent, spent 15 years at Adobe. Do you think the market misunderstands Adobe's AI opportunity? Because from my view, it's like you have some of the most advanced tools, the most advanced tools for creating, creating media across different categories. And if AI makes it better, if AI is a tool that just makes these processes better and more accessible, I would think that creates an amazing opportunity. But the stock's down 34% in the last year. They haven't found a way to get people to understand the opportunity. But I'm curious what your framework is for Adobe in the year 2025.

Yeah, obviously I'm a fan of Adobe. I spent a long time there. I came, came through the Macromedia acquisition and I think there's still a lot of smart people out there trying to figure out some of these things. I think what people realize is that Adobe used to be this unassailable company, right? And it was very, very dominant in the market. And then this company called Figma comes around and really proves like, oh, there's actually a whole new market opportunity that's adjacent to Adobe that also can be served by someone else else. Canva, same thing, right? Canva is also looking at another part of the market that was underserved. And so I think that's probably why you're seeing duress in the Adobe stock. It's less about the AI market opportunity, which I think is very big, but there's a lot of players there right now. And who knows, I mean, right now this is an absolute land grab opportunity where people are experimenting, they're coming out with different tools. Just look at how capital allocators are treating the market right now. I mean, they really don't know. It's almost impossible to underwrite, you know, the valuations of these companies right now because it's really a guess. People are just trying to pick what they think is going to be the winner of these respective categories. So me personally, very long on the opportunity for the creative community, I think you alluded to this earlier, like there's just a, a thirst. We're going to get a thirst like a massive hunger for really high quality content at a volume that we've never seen before. And we know that Generative AI isn't cutting it. Even if generative continues to get better over the Next three to five years, there still is a certain amount of work that will always need to be human created. It will always need to be authentic and genuine, especially when it comes to what brands want and need. And, you know, humans are very instincts for creatures too. So even though I see a lot of these tests online, can you tell the difference between what's really and what's not? Like, you know, I think humans understand, like, what. What is real still. And. And I think that's something that we're going to continue to see more and more content being created by real people for a long, long time. So I'm long on that bet. But also I'm a big believer in the opportunity that AI is going to present in supporting the human creatives out there.

I agree.

Totally agree.

Well, thank you so much for stopping.

This is super fun.

We'll talk to you soon. Yeah. So great to see you guys. Thanks for having me on.

Cheers.

Before we bring our next guest, let me tell you about Profound. Get your brand mentioned in ChatGPT. Reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. Our last guest couldn't talk trash about Adobe, didn't want to talk trash about Adobe. But I'm happy to. I've been having a terrible experience with Adobe and I'm so mad at the company. 30% should be 100%, and I'll tell you why. It's so simple. So I use.

You want that? John is calling for the stock to drop.

It's not that serious. But I am very annoyed with Adobe because for a long time I've been using an app on my iPhone called Photoshop Mix. And Photoshop Mix allowed you to take two photos and layer them over each other. Very helpful for making memes. You could take one image, you could cut it out, put it in another one. Eventually, they put ads in front of every single. You had to click an X to get out of an ad every time you open the app. Fine. I'm already paying for Adobe.

I don't know why.

I also get these ads for the other app. Very annoying. I finally bail on the app because they just break it entirely. It's not working at all. I get a new app, Photoshop Express. This is their new app for the iPhone. They fixed it. You don't need Photoshop Mix anymore. You're on Photoshop Express. And so I get Photoshop Express and I learn all the new tools, all their new ui and I figure out how to do basically the same thing in the new app. Photoshop Express Then I get a new iPhone. Guess what happens? They completely killed Photoshop Express. They literally took the feature out of cutting out one image and putting it out over the other. You can't do layers in Photoshop Express anymore. So then I need to move to Photoshop the actual.

In this country.

You can't even do layers in this country anymore. And so now I'm on the actual Photoshop app, the third app. I'm very upset and maybe it's better. Maybe I'll be happy in a couple months, but I've been shocked with how difficult it is to just. I guess I'm just such a weird power user of, like, niche. Like, I want to do everything on my phone that I'm just demanding a niche set of products and features that just don't exist anywhere else. But I've been very, very upset with my Adobe experience. So anyway, that's my rant for today, but hopefully they can turn it around. They do have a huge opportunity in front of them. Hopefully they get some sharp people who start building great products and apps, because I would love to be using them.

Well, fortunately, I believe the president of Adobe is coming on later this month.

Really? Fantastic. I can take it up and down.

Talk to them about it.

I could talk about the wrongful doubt of Photoshop Mix PS Express, two apps that I created. Endless memes in. Anyway, without further ado, we have our next guest from Reduckto. Welcome to the stream.

Thank you.

Sorry, waiting for the rant. Congratulations on the show. Please kick us off with an introduction on yourself and the company.

Yeah, so I'm Adhi Abraham, co founder.

And CEO here at Reducto.

We help people get data out of all of their most complex documents and.

Spreadsheets for all sorts of LLM use cases.

So plenty of thoughts here on Adobe as well that we can go into.

Fantastic. I like that when you're in the Restream waiting room, you can kind of hear me ranting before you hop on. Give us the news. Give us the news.

Give me that hammer too.

News, news, news, news, news.

What do you got? Yeah, so yesterday we announced that we raised a $75 million Series B and lead mount. This is five months after we announced our Series A from Benchmark.

Wow.

$180 million in total funding. Congratulations on an absolute tear. I missed. Who led the new round? I missed that part. Andreessen. Andreessen. There you go.

Congratulations. So, I mean, we gotta go a lot deeper on the actual product. Who's the key customer? What are the key Use Cases, obviously, understanding documents broadly, there's a lot of products for that. So. So what was your landing zone? What was your go to market? What's the target customer like? Take me one level.

Yeah. How old were you when you realized you wanted to turn documents into data? I guess from day one.

Day one.

Day one.

Day one. Yeah.

No, I think, look, the thing is like, PDF processing is of course not a new thing. People have worked on it probably longer than I've been alive.

I've met the people that worked on.

The original drivers for printers to print PDFs, but the context here is very different difference. Right. Like, we're not far from a point where language models are going to reason on pretty much any points of human data.

Like, before you say hi to your.

Doctor, there's going to be some sort.

Of summary of your medical records.

When you apply for a loan, there's.

Going to be some agents that goes.

Through and understands all of your financial statements. And if you're going to have all.

Of those human points of data with.

Real human processes, you need human level accuracy. And that's what we came in with.

So two years ago we released what.

At that time was the first parsing API that used VLM and tried to really set a new standard for what accuracy could look like on anything. We looked at it as this problem of how can you read documents the way that a human would. And since then, obviously the product's gotten a lot broader.

But today a lot of the newer.

AI companies, like the Harveys of the world, the Rogos, the Lagoras and so on, people building really great AI applications.

Use reductive for that sort of ingestion.

But also some of the largest enterprises in the world, like Fortune 10 enterprises in tech, some of the largest hedge.

Funds in the world, private equity firms.

Insurance companies and so on.

Talk about the decision to use VLMs. What are those? Break that down.

Yeah. So for a while you would have some sort of IDP vendor that is using traditional ocr, but you can really go a step further.

There's a lot of things that weren't.

Possible two years ago.

If you tried to read East Asian.

Languages, there's just so many more characters. And so it would be really, really hard to get every little mark correct. If you're dealing with something like healthcare.

Documents, you have all sorts of handwriting.

You have checkboxes, you have a doctor annotating it on the side, and they just assume that somebody would be reading that. But when you read that programmatically, you.

Make a Lot of mistakes.

And so what we do is we're really good at the traditional CV side.

A lot of our team is former.

Self driving car researchers, so we try to apply a lot of frontier techniques there. But also we have this agency flow.

Where I almost liken it to a human loop.

We're making corrections to the last mile of mistakes, like maybe we made a mistake on a period versus a comma or a zero was mistaken as an O. And we'll iteratively go through correct all.

Of those so that no matter what.

You'Re uploading, you can get to good reliable outputs. Thank you for waiting until we had self driving cars to hire all the self driving car engineers to work on turning PDFs into structure structured data. Thank you. It's really different use case.

It's similarly important.

Yeah, yeah, no, it is.

I mean what are people demanding on the output side? Is it just like dump a bunch of JSON files in S3 buckets? How far do you go from like, okay, I have a stack of PDFs or maybe papers and you're going to scan and turn that into text and data, but are people actually coming to you and saying, no, I want it loaded into this relational database or I want it in MongoDB. How far do you go?

We see all of those. So in some cases these are real time applications, like a user's uploading a file and they want to be able to talk to it. And so there we're actually just extracting the data and making it easier for models to reason on. But we also have cases where one of the biggest hedge funds in the world wanted to digitize two decades, decades worth of historical data. This is things that an analyst would have combed through extracted individual data points and they want signals off of that. And so in their case, we can actually structure it into the exact representation that they want. And especially recently we started going beyond just the initial parsing and extracting.

We take care of everything.

You want to split your documents, you want to classify them, you might even want to edit data. In a lot of human work is you get information from some set of documents and you put it into some net new PDF or spreadsheet sheets. People can do that end to end and we offer different endpoints for them to be able to do that. How hard is it to get from 85% accuracy to 90 to 95 to 99 to 99.9999999. But I imagine it's like critically important if people are working on legal cases or you have medical records, you can't really mess these things up. Yeah, I mean, the long tail is really long. And when you're looking at like a financial documents, a period versus a comma is not like a oops, it's millions of dollars. Like you've just changed the order of magnitude.

You can't have something like a patient's.

Medical record and have it say, is the patient vaccinated?

And guess at what the checkbox says.

You need to get these things right. And that's why I think even for.

That last mile difference, people are really excited about what reductive unlocks for them.

Because there are use cases where they.

Didn'T think they could digitize it before, like it just wasn't reliable enough to put in production.

And we're trying to not just get.

Really good initial extracted results and not just get, you know, that layer of redundancy to correct those in cases we might have messed up, but also give them all of the last mile things that they would need, like if they want to have a human in the loop. We're really good at citing where we got answers from. We're really good at catching our own mistakes and pointing to things that we're not sure that we can extract so they can feel confidence that in production they're not going to have issues.

Do you actually have a hot take about Adobe?

I am getting dinner with the CEO tonight, actually. Play back your clip because I haven't done that. Play back the clip where he said it's down 35%. It should be down 100.

That was maybe hyperbole for the, for the comedic effect, but I do have another axe to grind with them because every day I make a PDF and every day I open Adobe Acrobat to make that PDF and there are seven different pop ups asking me to use their AI assistant that just says, do you want to summarize this document? Do you want to summarize this document? And I never want to summarize the document. And I always have to. No, close this. It says ask AI Assistant up here, AI Assistant over there. And it's too much. And it should be more intelligent to know that I don't, I don't need a document summary for my workflow because I do the same thing every single day. It's unacceptable. Yeah. What?

Yeah, I think people, like, aren't really looking at PDFs in and of themselves. Like, it's not the file format that.

You care about, it's what's in there.

Like, you Want to be able to do the things that you want to do.

Yeah.

And hopefully we end up in a place where people can just interact with the underlying data. That's what we want to help with.

I'd love that. Well, thank you for helping make data more interactable. Thank you for everything that you do and thank you for joining the show.

Yeah. Great to get the update. I'm sure you'll be back on very soon.

We'll talk to you soon. Have a good rest of your day. Linear. Linear is a purpose built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects and product roadmaps. You can start building on Linear today. There are a bunch of more. There are a bunch more stories. Where should we go?

What's the story? A giant new AI data center is coming to the epicenter of America because fracking boom.

That makes sense. Core go where the energy is.

Poolside. Poolside Is this Poolside the foundation. It's a different Poolside.

Poolside. Wait, yeah, there's Poolside was a viral meme about the product managers who were at. Who were Poolside talking about the day in the life. And it was.

Well, then there's Poolside fm.

Poolside fm that is a Cursor and Windsurf competitor, I believe. Something like that. It's a coding ide. It's a fork of a VS code.

But that is not this.

This is a different thing.

Poolside AI.

Poolside is joining with cloud infrastructure provider.

That's the one I was talking about.

Poolside is and Core. We've aim to take advantage of the natural gas produced in the Permian basin, the epicenter of the US drilling facility. I believe the CEO of Poolside is coming on the show, by the way, so we can get to the bottom of this.

Okay, but in this article. Poolside, it's a. Okay, I found.

Okay, okay. Figure it out. Poolside is in the midst of a $2 billion fundraising round that would value the company at $14 billion. Let's add a preemptive gong.

Preemptive gong.

It's not announced, but we're still ringing the gong for you. Poolside. According to people familiar with the matter, it raised 500 million just a year ago at a 3 billion dollar valuation. The coding focused startup. So it is the same Poolside.

Yes, it is. It is.

Which counts the chip giant Nvidia among its investors in one of several technology companies seeking to build AI systems with human like intelligence. While many operators move quickly to secure continued access to the chips America doesn't have enough data centers. It is far from certain whether many data centers will have sufficient power and water to operate without becoming a significant strain on local resources. It's not about your headline numbers of gigawatts, it's about your ability to deliver data centers, says the co founder of Poolside, the real physical bottleneck in our industry. Interesting. Poolside and coreweb declined to provide details about the cost of leasing the land from the Mitchell family in Texas who own it. But they said that the overall expectation.

That poolside, they say, we build the models, you build the future AGI for the enterprise, starting with software agents. Just interesting that they're actually getting into the. The physical infrastructure side. When you have cognition, you have cursor, you know, a bunch of other players that have just said, hey, we're happy to just be at the application layer. Yeah, we'll build some models, but ultimately we want to just get kind of off the shelf.

Totally. This is fascinating. We've seen this vertical integration happen in the previous era, but mostly because the cloud platforms just weren't mature. But like when Facebook started, they at some point could have said, hey, let's just host on aws. But they became a hyperscaler. Right. But then so did Cloudflare, so did I believe Netflix has their own infrastructure. I mean, 37 signals famously moved. You know you were going to say that, right? 37 signals moved off of AWS.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Jack Cohen from the show in the chat says it's with Jason Warner who was. He was the CEO of GitHub.

Yeah, that's right.

An absolute legend. An absolute dog.

Absolute dog. But this is another interesting fact in here. We've been talking about building these two gigawatt data centers. They clock the industry standard cost of building a 2 gigawatt data center at $16 billion. But in this case, Poolside expects its cost to be lower due to its use of off site modular construction technologies techniques. And that total cost doesn't include the cost of the chips. And so how does that serve as the increase?

What percentage of the. Is the actual like physical structure? Like what percentage of the cost of a data center is the. Because we've seen like people just using tents. Yeah. So it can't be. Could it be double digits of the actual cost of a data center?

We need a pie chart. We need semi analysis to break down exactly what goes.

Tyler, find a pie chart data center.

Can you figure out.

Because it feels like. It feels like I'd be shocked if it was higher than 10%.

If I'm spending $16 billion on a 2 gigawatt data center, how is that like what percentage of that money is going towards chips, concrete, what are the different buckets? Because you're going to build all sorts of stuff. What do you think?

Yeah, I mean I'm on some analysis site right now trying to like fine news about this.

Yeah.

And I'm not really seeing anything. Which is surprising because like, I mean 2 gigawatts is like super huge.

Huge.

That's like bigger than Colossus 2, which is 1 gigawatt.

Well, I mean this is breaking news like and Semianalysis publishes like, like on a weekly cadence.

Yeah, that's true. It's very surprising to see. I mean this is not a major LLM provider.

Totally.

Yeah.

I feel like when Semianalysis does something, it's more like, okay, they actually fully understand Amazon strategy and they're going to take you through all the different pieces with tons of different points.

But I mean this is like extremely ambitious.

This is extremely ambitious.

Yeah.

Well, I'm excited to talk to the founder. That'll be a lot of fun. In other news, the frothiest AI bubble is in energy stocks. Says the Wall Street Journal concept stocks with no revenue have soaring valuations. Forget about the froth in tech valuations. The real excess might be building up in energy stocks. For all the fears about stretched technology shares. Again, we've seen that the big tech companies, the multiples aren't that high. And so a lot of people are saying, well, it can't be a bubble if you're still able to buy Apple and Google at, I don't know, 30x earnings. Well, that's not the case in the energy market. Not so in the energy sector. A group of non revenue generating energy companies have collectively ballooned in value to more than $45 billion in hopes that tech companies will one day pay for their yet to be built power. Oklo is a good example of this. Their shares have risen Eightfold to date. The company's now worth 26 billion. I've actually met the founder.

Apparently Oklo is like an obsession of Korean retail traders.

Interesting. Korean retail trailers.

Korean Retail Army.

That's fun. I wonder if they have a name for the, for the, like the, the Retail Army. Sometimes they, they name themselves. It's the biggest U.S. publicly incorporated public company that generated no revenue in the last 1212 months. I mean, yeah, it takes a long time to build a nuclear reactor. Oklo is developing small modular reactors that use a non water coolant liquid Metal, sodium and an enriched type of uranium fuel that is in limited supply. It, it doesn't yet have a license from the U.S. nuclear Regulatory Commission or binding contracts with power purchasers. Wall street analysts don't expect the company to generate substantial revenue until 2028. Of course, the bull case is that the US government has said, hey, we want to advance this very aggressively. We want, what was it, the new. We want a new reactor online next year, something like that. And so there's certainly a lot of, of a lot of energy around. Let's speed up what the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission does. The NRC has been moving too slow. I believe in the history of the NRC they've never approved a new nuclear reactor design. Right, Tyler?

I believe that's true, yeah.

And I think they've only approved a few like existing designs. Build it again. And so people are kind of like, that's not the goal. Like it was never designed as like the Nuclear Banning Commission. It was just regulatory. And so you should regulate but not stop all progress.

Also, I think the headline just about energy stocks ripping is like kind of misleading. Like you're still like, I'll believe it when I see natural gas stocks like ripping. That's when we're actually. That's like real energy. That's massive energy that we need to. If we're going to keep accelerating. If we want like 10100 gigawatt data centers, that's basically the only path. Unless we have some insane build out. Yeah, it's like partially government funded of like clean of like solar or. Well, it's going to take so long to build.

I mean those are probably way harder to meme, right. Because they're way bigger companies and they have revenue. Revenue. But seriously, I mean like, like we're in this like frothy time and there are companies that are scaling valuations very fast. The private markets and the public market. And Nvidia is way up. But Nvidia is way up at like not really on like a revenue multiple. Like they've grown, they've grown revenue significantly in line with their market cap. Whereas on like the retail armies have been searching around for pockets of like, like quantum computing, like the next trend. Because there's this, there's this idea that like if you missed Nvidia, what are you going to go out and find? And like a nuclear thing. It feels like nuclear will be a thing in a decade. And so you can get in on the action now, get in on the ground floor. That's the narrative. Much harder to Say, yeah, there's going to be more demand from this, like, you know, legacy oil and gas company.

But it's right now, right now, you can own Oklo at a $25 billion market cap with $0 of revenue, or you can own EQT, which is a big natural gas company that had 5 billion of revenue last year. And you can. And they're currently trading at a $34.6 billion market cap, but stock's up over almost 11% over the last month.

Here's my recommendation. If you're a massive company with no revenue, as soon as you start generating revenue, get on numeralhq.com because you got to pay your sales tax once you make revenue. Numeralhq.com Sales tax and autopilot spend less, less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Another zero revenue company is Fermi, which was valued at roughly $19 billion upon its public market debut earlier this month. Only two other no revenue companies had larger market caps than Fermi on the first day of trading after an IPO adjusted for inflation. There was Rivian, which went public in 2021, and Corvus, an optical network equipment maker that went public during the dot com bubble. I mean, Rivian's definitely like shipped and like, I see the cars around, like, you know, it's not, it's not that much of a bear signal to be like, yeah, you went out as a public company with no revenue, but it has historically been like, you only go public when you are cash flow positive and like, and it's kind of like the end of you fundraising constantly. And instead now, now we've just pulled all that forward. In some, in some sub markets, a lot of companies stay private much longer. So lots of different ways to grow your company. What else is going on in the tech world, in the army world, in the world of the Army. The Secretary of the army, former TPPN guest, is on the timeline. Happy Captain says, I was debating whether or not to tell this story, but it feels like it's worth telling. Yesterday at ausa, the Secretary of Armory gave a powerful speech where he talked about a soldier's right to repair. Essentially, soldiers should be able to repair their own equipment without having to rely on a contractor. In 2010, we were in a remote part of Afghanistan on a combat outpost with roughly 70 to 90 soldiers. We had two robots and used them a lot to work on IEDs. Their service was under contract. We weren't allowed to fix them. After a lot of use, they both broke and a field Service representative couldn't get to us in a timely manner. So what do you do? Do you force your team leader to put on the bomb suit and risk their life for every call or do you fix it yourself? We went with option B. We completely took apart two broken robots to create one working one that we used on the mission. That's amazing. Did we get yelled at? Yes. Would I do it all over again knowing it kept my team leader safe? Absolutely. What a remarkable story. Yeah. This is one of those like, like little tweaks to how the army works, how the military works. That was probably pretty low on the agenda of most other secretaries of the Army. But I'm glad that he, you know, raised the raised awareness here and is locked in. Yeah. And Aaron Slodoff has a clip here and he shares. I'm glad that Secretary of Army is going on a crusade against the insane spend and blatant waste in sustainment parts the army deals with.

Let's get it back on the show.

We should.

Rune says it is so effing cold. Summer is over. It's all over. If you haven't secured a mate for the winter, it's time to commit to monkhood.

Yeah, cuffing season really snuck up on everyone.

It got. Yeah, it got absolutely frigid in la.

We had to turn on the fire here.

Yeah, we had to turn on the fire.

Not so much today. But I'm excited to keep the cozy maxing going.

It's hard to really lean into, into that Locktober spirit when. When it's still warm and sunny.

Exactly. Much easier to locktober in the, in the winter. When it's cold. When it's cold. Let me tell you about Fin AI, the number one AI agent for customer service. Number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake offs, number one ranking on G2.

Keith Raboy put the timeline in turmoil. He said if anthropic actually believe the rhetoric about.

Oh, look who we have here.

Here he is.

Brian. How are you doing?

Hello. Hello.

I'm. I mean, I'm good. How are you guys doing? We are doing fantastic.

Exhausted. Long day at the office so far?

Yeah, I, I have. I've had some people allegedly helping me. I took, I. I took like 25 minutes during this entire day and now it looks like a bomb went off in here. I felt like I was in a good place before I left.

But anyway, it's hard to compete with the super intelligence for the, for the finance suite, that is. But it's great to have you on.

The show as a leader. I felt like it was, well, it was incumbent upon me. I'm not sure if that's exactly the right phrase, but to show my own value and how I could contribute and process like Ramp does. Yes. What has been harder, playing Kevin or trying to be the CEO of the CFO of Ramp? This has been much more difficult. There's also a fly in here now that looks like the size of a hummingbird bird. So, I mean, there's a lot of adversity here, being on the street. There's also, by the way, I don't know, you know, I, I, I'm used to working in front of an audience, but usually they're not live and in person here. They're, they're waving there. There's lots, there's lots going on here. Lots to distract me. But look, I'm, I'm, I'm doing the best I can.

How many. What, what's, what's the tracker at right now? How many receipts is that? Does that say 80?

Well, it says 84. 84. But to be fair, I felt like I was, I was almost at 100 before I left for a few minutes. So basically, I got no help from the people who were supposed to help me. Okay.

Brutal.

That's. So what am I supposed to do? And, and you're racing against Ramp. What's the counter up to now on that side? 225,000. 229, 50, 60, 70. Okay. It's going very fast. I don't, I guess that's accurate. I guess they process a lot, but, yeah, it's a tough showing for you so far. How are you feeling? Are you optimistic that you can catch up? What's the strategy?

Yeah.

You got 15 minutes left in the work day. Yeah. I don't know if you're getting out at 5 o'. Clock.

I'm working. Working. I'm working overtime for sure. I think I'm working until 7. Yeah. Isn't I? I think for a C suite, by the way, that's a new phrase I learned. C suite. I'm a C suite guy.

And so I think, I think I'm.

I'm a big, sweet C suite guy. So I think, I think we work till 7 here. Maybe you have 500,000 distractions. Yeah. Yeah. Who's been the biggest distraction? Yeah.

Who's the biggest distraction? Was it Eric trying to throw you off the game to prove that his software is more effective than human labor?

Well, I mean, to be clear, you guys are a distraction. I mean, I'm trying to do inputting here. And now I'm suddenly doing a press interview. But again, that's what's. That's what C Suite guys do, I think.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You got to make time for media.

Yeah. Do you think that Dunder Mifflin would still be around if they had ramp? I'm sorry, could you say that again? Do you. A question from the chat. Do you think that Dunder Mifflin would still be around if they used ramp? You know, I. When I was there, I wasn't really. I wasn't really a part of those. Those C Suite type decisions. Yeah, I'm not. But listen, I thought we did a pretty good job in the accounting department there at Dunder Mifflin. So, remember, I got fired or my character got fired, so things went downhill after that. Clearly. Yeah.

Yeah. I guess kind of zooming out a little bit. Obviously. Obviously. Obviously zooming out.

That's another great program, zooming out.

We use that a lot in the C Suite. We're just podcasters, but we talk to people in the C suite.

Okay.

Yeah, I guess. Like, what is your. There's hundreds, thousands of people surrounding your office here. We don't have a view, but people are looking at the stream. What is your experience like walking on the street in New York day to day? Do you. Do you cover up and wear a hat? Are you getting. Are you getting?

I do, I do, I do.

Is it. Does it work?

Do people say that I've been. That I've been on the streets of New York without a hat on and, and sunglasses and. You know, look, what I. What I've learned as a leader here is you got to be a people person. So I'm really. It's all about. It's all about doing people for me. You know what I'm saying? I don't know if I know what I'm saying, but it's about that connection that is important when you're a cfo. I mean that in finance, but that's.

Secondary in a way. Do you prefer finance or finance? How do you say it?

Am I saying it wrong?

I mean, you can say it either way.

The really fancy people on Wall street all often, they call it finance, not finance. Finance. Finance, yeah. Do they spell it with an e? No, finance. It's spelled the same way, but they say finance. Finance. High finance. Hold on. I've been taking some notes today about things that I need to work on.

I've got another question. How's your golf game? Has your golf game Improved since you became cfo?

Well, it's one. And it's one day, to be clear. You know, I still talk about golf. That's sort of a different job. I'm kind of trying to transition in a new direction. But look, what I've learned is if you're a cfo, you have to work much harder than other people think you do.

Yeah. But I feel like the best CFOs figure out a way to combine. Combine their love of golf and their role at their company. So I would say once they let you out of the cage at 7pm, hopefully you can at least hit the range and get some movement in.

They need a putting green in there.

Yeah.

Seriously.

Here's the thing that I'm thinking is I think I'm starting to realize I have an efficiency issue. Meaning I need to be more efficient with finance. Yeah. So maybe I'll get to golf after I decide that this is not working for me.

Well, you're giving it.

Stay high level. I think you're right.

Stay high level. Zoom out. You know, bring strategy into the C suite. Start. Start. Yeah. Focus on strategy.

Yeah. You know, another thing that occurs to me is probably working on the street with people watching is probably not the best idea. Maybe that was the problem all along.

I mean, it's a high pressure role. You got to be. I mean, if you're going to perform in the boardroom on earnings calls, you got to be able to perform.

You know, in Flatiron, Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone to a cheering crowd of thousands. This is similar.

In a way.

In a way, it is. In a way. It's very, very different. Yes. Yeah. You got to be able to perform under pressure, perform in front of, in front of thousands as they walk by. It's all, it's all important in business. Potato, potato, as we say on the C suite floor. Potato, potato. Guys, pause one second.

Say again. Is that Taipei? She probably got to get on with Taipe.

Yeah, well, I, we do. I. Listen, I, I, I, I would. I thought you guys were, were espn. I'm gonna be honest with you. So I, I think it's time for, for me to go.

You got a lot of work to do.

We appreciate. And good luck catching up. I've got some Jaeger here in the office if you guys ever want to stop by. We'll see. Fantastic.

Would love that.

Okay. Great having you on.

Brian, good to see you. All right, cheers.

Wild execution.

Truly, truly, truly an incredible actor. His ability, I kept trying to throw him off. He stayed fully in character. But yeah, I seeing some of these videos, like the crowd outside, we obviously couldn't see it on that camera angle, but meanwhile on X, the crowd outside of the Office is absolutely.

Yeah, we should share some of the videos to the timeline.

I saw Jeb Bush was coming out in support. Was coming out in support. As he does. As he does. But that was super fun. Were you big into the Office back in the day?

Yeah, I watched a few seasons of it at some point.

One of the few like, work focused shows. It's actually still relaxing to watch because it can turn your brain off.

Right.

Silicon Valley is on the opposite end.

Totally.

It just reminds you of like emails you need to respond to and things that you need to do. Whereas the Office is just great. Nothing matters. It's just all of our problems are made up. It's all. It's all fake politics.

Yeah. It was very odd being so young and still extremely into like workplace white collar comedies as a kid. It's like not what you'd expect, but I was obsessed with Office Space. That was like one of my favorite movies as a kid. I enjoyed the Office and I don't know, even though, like I'd never worked in an office, I still found it funny at like age 12 for some reason. It was very, very fun.

Evergreen.

Anyway, we have our next guest joining from the Restream waiting room, we have Colin.

What's happening? Welcome to the show. I'm not actually going after the ramp event, am I? Yeah, you are. Fast follow.

Welcome to the stream. Please kick us off with an introduction on yourself, the company. Any news?

Awesome. Yeah. Hey guys, thanks for having me. So Colin Luce, co founder and CEO here at Basis Theory. I think the simplest way to think about what we do is we help merchants platforms, fintechs not have to face the decision of working with stripe or add in or checkout, but rather be able to seamlessly work with stripe and add in and checkout. There's a myriad of different reasons why that's important. I think first and foremost these platforms today are just global by default. Right. Like I was thinking about it the other day, the fact that like I think the Latest numbers say 10% of the world's population uses ChatGPT, like less than three years in, Facebook was still moving from like Ivy leagues to like state schools in the U.S. right. And then I think the other side of it is payments has kind of moved from being a cost center to a growth driver. And I think that's forcing companies to think about it less from a cost perspective. And more from a performance perspective. And look, each of these individual PSPS has their own secret sauce and areas where they specialize. And so it's just increasingly important that you can work with multiple of them as opposed to 1.

Explain Shield's take, explain Shield's hot take and then debunk it.

I had a note to call out shield And I love Shiel. I went to shield's first FISH concert with him. So SHIELD and I are homies. But yeah, like, he took this, like, victory lap last week, you know, saying, like, stripes win, Stripe, one agent at Commerce, it's over. And like, that just couldn't be further from the truth. Right. Even if you look at Stripe's core business, I think people sometimes forget, like, Stripe and Adyen together are still less than 10% market share in the U.S. right. That means 90% of the U.S. acquiring volume is still sitting out on these legacy platforms. And so as much as we talk about Stripe, like, I'd argue Stripe hasn't even won us acquiring yet. There's a lot of volume to port over, and we're seeing the same thing play out. On the Agentix side, Stripe can do a magical demo for merchants within the Stripe ecosystem. I think the second you eject out of that, there's a lot of complexity. Sorry, I'm just adding dramatic sound effects.

Where's the shots fired?

These are a bunch of great lines. I wanted you to explain basis theory. Like, I'm a venture capital associate, right? So, like, explain it like, in really, really simple terms because. No, no, no.

I'm trying to understand where you, like, you're. You're the killer. GP is completely checked out.

Yeah, like two years from retirement. But I'm trying to understand, customer comes in, they want to buy something. Are you guys sitting before that? And then we route. Yeah, that's right. So we sit at the very front. We provide some real time data to the merchants about the payment credential, the actual credit card. Hey, this is a Visa signature card issued by a US bank. Or this is a MasterCard issued by a European bank. Based on that real time insight, where do you want to route this transaction? Do you want to route it off to Adyen? Do you want to route it off to Stripe? And, oh, by way, the. The way, if you get an immediate decline from one of those, why don't you turn around and reroute it elsewhere and see if you can get that customer through? Right. I think that's the other side of it. Right. Like these, these modern merchants who are selling These like, ridiculously high gross margin digital products, like, they just want to get more stuff out the door, right. They're actually okay taking on more fraud and risk if they can just sell more 90% gross margin goods. Right. So. And it's from the, from the merchant side. Merchants want to have multiple payment providers so that they have some leverage in these conversations. Is that right? Yeah, I mean, that was.

I was going to answer your question.

About explain it to the gp, but then I thought about the GP doesn't have this problem, but. But maybe like, you know, the GP's nephew, right? I always talk about in the terms of Comcast here, you know, in California. Right. Like every time you call Comcast and you say, hey, I'm switching to YouTube TV, they magically have a 50% discount that they can get you on. Right. Same thing applies here. The problem is your data's locked away with these processors today. So the minute you take back that control and start storing it yourself, you have immediate leverage to make that call.

Interesting. Give us the fundraising news.

Yeah. So we just announced we raised $33 million. It was a pretty cool. There we go. It was. It was a cool event because our lead investor, Costa Noa, we actually met at the seed and ended up going in a different direction. Our A came together quickly with Bessemer. This was 2021. And then when I reached out to Amy at Costa Noa and told her we were going to kick off a B earlier this year, she. I was like, who should I talk. So is this. Is this round mean that you guys are official officially back? Because a lot of fintech companies, you know, went into the Valley of Despair and. And they're still down there. Rest in peace, you know? Look, I wish that was an erp, a native AI ERP company, though. Maybe I'll get another round tomorrow. Yeah. The chat says this guy looks like he surfs. This guy surfs. Do you surf? Such a disappointment. I don't. I'm a scientist. It's okay. There's the surfing is wildly distracting from creating enterprise value. I always struggled. I grew up. You're in Mill Valley. I grew up just north of you. And I always struggled Surfing in the morning, you get so cold and then your body is spending all day long trying to heat up and it's taking energy away from spreadsheets. That's pretty counter to Silicon Valley wisdom. And ice baths and stuff, though. Yeah, but getting cold for a few minutes and then. That's true heating. Heating up is different than 90 minutes in 45 degree water, whatever gets down to in the winter. But what was I going to say? Are you guys actually building the company in Mill Valley or do you have an office in sf? Yeah, look, we're a Covid baby so we're fully remote. But it was definitely pretty funny. When we announced our series A, the news headlines were like Mill Valley based payment infrastructure company raises 17 million. I mean it sounds pretty cool. Sounds pretty cool. Yeah. No, I'm here a block away from our friend Nate and Offline Ventures and then we squat in our investors offices for free in San Francisco once a week.

Nice.

Smart, smart. Awesome man. Well, congratulations on the milestone. Yeah, excited to follow the journey.

We'll talk to you soon. Have a good rest of you.

Thanks for having me guys. Cheers.

Colin, quickly, let me tell you about adeo. Customer relationship Magic Adio is the AI CRM that builds scales and grows your company to the next level. Our next guest has been waiting too long in the restream waiting room. We'll bring him in now to the TVPN ultradome. Sorry for keeping you waiting. John, how are you doing? Good to meet you. Welcome to the show.

Here he is. How are you guys? I'm doing great. Thank you so much for having me today.

Of course. Congrats on the massive news. Kick us off with an introduction on yourself and the company and then we'll go into the news.

Yeah, well, it's wild. I was on three months ago we were talking about our Series A. I was not planning on reaching out to you guys for a year or two and I went to bed.

A Series A founder woke up a.

Series B founder and so Today we announced $65 million Series B bringing 100 million. Thank you, thank you. We have a smaller one of those in the office. Let's go Series B up the gong size. You should have a gong for every stage.

Yes. Yeah.

Well look, I'm in New York right now. I'm still staying in the seed stage hotel rooms here. But we've come a long way. So yeah, that 100 million was all in the last 12 weeks. So it's exciting times. It's an AI native. Erp. If you're not familiar with campfire taking on the mid market incumbents and the incredible demand we've seen has just led.

To us to go out to market again on the round. Yeah.

What was the why do you think it's huge category? Bunch of different ways that you could attack a bunch of different kind of verticals within it. Why, why have VCs come around to like funding a bunch of ERPs again, because there was an era where they got funded and a lot of them didn't go very well. And something's different this time. But why do you think that is? Yeah, it's a great question. Going through White Combinator, they call them PIR pit ideas. Ideas that like perpetually get funded and go to die. And for like 10 or 20 years. This category has just had a lot of. There's a lot of gravestones in this category.

This is the personal CRM. That's the, that's a great tar pit idea. The Personal CRM. Every VC says, I need a personal, personal CRM. It's like, no, you just need a real CRM. You're doing business. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But a lot on, a lot on.

The social media side. Yeah.

And so when we're out doing a seed, there was a little bit of squinting and then we had incredible demand.

And then going into the A, they're.

Like, wow, this category is on fire. And since the A just had overwhelming demand, I think there's a couple of themes. Certainly the incumbents are all 25, 30 years old. You guys were talking about zero revenue IPOs earlier.

I mean, literally these companies were founded when pets.com, webvan were public companies.

And so it's come a long way in terms of like, it's time for something new. You know, one of your sponsors, Ramp, has really like pioneered like consumer grade software within the finance stack. And so I think we're seeing a huge demand for. I just want the Ramp for gl. And then we're also seeing huge demand for.

We need to buy AI.

There's literally no AI ERP out there. With today's news, we announced we're the first ERP to have our own actual foundational model. And so we've trained this like rich accounting data set.

And so accountants are finally like, I.

Hate doing bank rec.

And that's always been true.

But now there's actually someone, you know, an AI model that can take on bank rec. For me, for those who don't know, bank reconciliations is like accrual, like some of these just very transactional accounting tasks. They're allowed. They can now actually offload them to a credible foundational model that can just allow them to focus on higher value work, strategic work things. As a former finance exec, I really enjoyed doing. And so there's this big mindset shift that we are really driving home and seeing a ton of value for our customers. You guys work with Decagon, Replit and a bunch of other AI companies. Are you seeing new, like entirely new needs surface that people want out of their ERP, that legacy ERPs besides just speed, usability, just ease of use, et cetera? Yeah, I mean this big shift, and I know you just had reducto on like the sheer volume of transaction Data, the legacy ERPs we've just heard from.

Customers are just unable to physically handle.

And so like being on a modern stack, these AI usage based companies have hundreds of thousands, millions, tens of millions of rows of transaction data that we can easily ingest and allow them to scale on the platform. And then we can apply our AI.

Layer to this rich data set and allow them to operate in ways they.

Just fundamentally were not able to before. So the shift in, you know, you.

Think of if you have 10 million.

Rows of accounting data, you can't fit it on an Excel spreadsheet, it just physically taps out. And so it's more of an engineering problem that they're starting to face when.

They have that much transaction data.

And so we've been really helpful in allowing them to not become engineers and.

Focus on what they do best as accountants.

That makes sense. Are you worried about getting preempted again? You announced.

I'll tell you next week.

We're doing our series C. Let's go. Yeah. Yeah, I'm sure it'll be nice to take a breather and just build and build the team and all that stuff.

For two days?

Yeah, for at least two days.

Every VC listening, just schedule it now. Congratulations, we appreciate you. I'll be there.

That's actually good. We should start.

Yeah, please come by. We'd love to hang out. We can go way deeper.

Gonna bring the biggest gong you've ever seen. Love it.

We can implement an ERP live. That's what the fans want. Let's do it. Let's roll it out.

We've done 24 hour Netsuite to campfires. We've done SAP to campfire in weeks and the world's shifting fast. But yeah, to your point, we'll do.

One live on the show.

We'll do it live. That's showbiz.

I love it. Well, thank you so much for coming on. We'll talk to you soon.

Great progress.

Thanks, guys. Off of Larry Ellison's plate. That's a bold move. I like it. It's very aggressive. It's a hot.

He's distracted, he's focused on the AI. Boom.

He is.

He's gonna forget about his baby.

He needs to needs to step up. I mean, the story of netsuite was an acquisition.

Next up, our guest. Nominative determinism is absolutely insane. We have Dan Schipper who is shipping other products. Let's bring him in something, the shipper himself.

What are you shipping?

Did you. Do people ask you about that?

Did you say, does he ever ship? He does. I have gotten that. I have gotten that. And I don't know if my ancestors were nautical or not, but certainly it works for the startup world. So, yeah, shipped a couple new things today. What'd you ship?

Give us the news.

Okay, first, first big thing is we shipped a new incubation, we incubated a company, we spun it out, it raised $3.6 million from general catalyst and Inovia. We got the gong, the first ever gong for me. I'm excited. And it's called Good Start Labs. It's run by Alex Duffy, who was previously our head of AI training. And the idea of Good Start is it teaches AI models to play games. And by playing games, they're able to generate high quality reinforcement learning data and pre training data that helps make models better. It started as a project inside of every that we launched as AI Diplomacy, where we taught AI models to battle each other for world domination. It went super viral. It had like 50,000 people watch it on Twitch. And it taught us a lot about how models work. So, for example, Claude never lies in diplomacy. The whole point of diplomacy is to backstab your opponents. And Claude never lies. It's really interesting. And Alex, the response to that was really incredible. And Alex has a vision for how not just diplomacy, but all sorts of games can be used as dynamic environments to help models learn to be smarter in all sorts of different ways, from log, horizon, task planning, to writing, to humor, to training them to not be as deceptive, all that kind of stuff. I'm mostly hearing AI that lies though, so it can win diplomacy. But no, no, I completely take your point.

Claude has to launch liar mode.

I mean, yeah, there's so many. There's so many examples. We could go into about alignment by default, resulting in not what you actually want. A hallucination, sometimes a feature. There's a million different, different areas there.

Do you have any questions? How concentrated will the customer base be for this? Is this the kind of thing you're going to work with? Hopefully all the big labs really quickly? What does that look like?

Yeah, I mean, I think the idea for the company is being a vendor to all the big labs and anyone who wants to be a big lab. So yes, the customer base, at least initially is going to be pretty concentrated. Rebut Will Menitis. He said he's calling the top on incubations. You're still doing them. Put them in the truth zone. Break it down for me. Why are incubations still a good idea?

This feels like to come to Dan's defense on this one, having an employee at your company who's proven themselves internally and discovers a good idea and then decides to launch a spin out company is very different than I have an idea. Let me go find a random person. Which is really hard.

Right.

Because you have this adverse selection bias.

Yeah, I agree. But we also do that and it works. And so this is our second venture backed incubation collectively. So Good Start Labs and our first one is called Lex. And collectively they've raised like $6 million, which is more than three times or four times what we've raised for every itself. And we also run four apps internally to every, many of which are ideas that I or someone else inside of every has come up with. And then we've recruited someone from our audience to take it and lead it. And that works really well too. So we've got four apps in market and we grew collectively for every for, you know, all the subscriptions we sell, we grew MRR 50% in Q3. So it's just growing super fast. You can really, you actually can do this and I think you can uniquely do it in AI because you can, you can have these products be run by one person. Yeah. Which is really hard to work. Help me synthesize this. There's like this general mood on the timeline today that like a lot of the foundation model companies might be like plateauing and so they're going into other.

Yeah. What's your erotica play?

No, no, it's not that. That's not my question. My question is every.

We're going to do every.

I mean you're already a writing platform. Why not spice it up a little bit? No, my spicy mode. There was a moment where the mood was like, don't build a new company because you're going to get steamrolled by AGI. It's just going to be able to do exactly what you do, but better. And so like it's super risky to build anything that's in front of the steamroller that is the big model companies. Now we've seen that a lot of companies have popped up and done very well in other areas, but now it also feels like the foundation model companies Might be going after social media, going after erotic content or adult content. So is it more or less dangerous to build a startup that is in the wake of the AI new hyperscale? So I mean, I think of every. If you're a sapiosexual, we're already doing erotica for you.

There you go. So that's, that's one thing.

Got to get that out of the way. Yeah, but, you know, when we first incubated Lex, that was like in 2022, 2021. Ish. And that was right in the, in the very beginning. It was right before ChatGPT came out. And so it was in the very beginning of, you know, rapper anti rapper hype. And that was a dumb take then, and I think it's a dumb take now. Yep. Incumbents always manage to fuck things up and, and, and need to also, you know, if you're, if you're a PM and OpenAI and they're super talented, they're doing amazing stuff, and they also have to look for opportunities that look like they're going to be a billion or 10 billion or $50 billion in value. And there's just many, many, many different corners of the market that they just can't see. And I think, and, and, and founders are incredible at finding those corners of the market. And because of what these foundation model companies are building, like OpenAI, founders have never been in a better position to serve the needs that they find. And so I think it's the best time in the world to be serving companies. And I think doing it in an incubation model, like the way that we're doing it is kind of, it's like one of those things that shouldn't work, but it's sort of uniquely interesting because we have distribution. So in a world where anything can be vibe coded, we can give founders a stamp of approval like, hey, this thing is actually good, it's going to be supported. And there's a lot of interesting things you can do if you have a network of apps that are all in the same ecosystem. So I'm super excited about it. And I think every time we've called, oh, it's the end of this startup or this startup, because OpenAI is doing it. That's never happened. Yeah, makes sense.

What's your take on the regulatory debate and Anthropic's recent moves? A lot of people are pissed off about it, from Keith Raboy to David Sachs to Marc Andreessen.

I. Okay, I agree to some extent. Like actually looking at what, you know, the Kinds of things that Dario says. For example, I'm like, how can you be building this stuff and then go on the news and be like it's going to replace all white collar workers the next 18 months. I can't remember the exact quote, but like I just, I don't like that. And also I think Sachs is wrong. Like you're watching nerds who have a tremendous amount of power and responsibility grapple with that publicly and I think they are being earnest. I think they're doing it in a sort of ham handed way. And I don't, you know, I think that they could, they could clean that up and they should get smarter about it. But I don't think it's some like sophisticated right. Regulatory capture scheme. And I imagine Sacks is sort of telling on himself there like that's what he might do. But I don't think that's what like, like anthropic people are doing. Yeah, genuine believers. Well, thank you so much for stopping by. Congratulations on the, on all the progress.

Yeah, I was going to ask, I did want to push you.

We do have somebody in the restream.

We have one person in the waiting room. But what was your immediate reaction? Like where, where do you stand on the debate on the adult kind of content entertainment debate with, with ChatGPT?

I think anything they do, they're damned if they do, damned if they don't. If they allow it, they're damned because people are like, you know, you're going to turn this into a waifu platform and if they don't allow it then it's a freedom of speech issue. Seems like they're trying to be thoughtful about it and restricting it to over, over 18 people and not doing it by default, like only doing it if you select it.

It.

That seems like a reasonable first pass at it. I'm sure there are, I'm sure there are.

Do you think there's so, so OpenAI opening eyes mission is to ensure that AGI benefits all of humanity. Do you think that it's hard to argue that, that adult content porn bots benefit humanity? I'm sure that somebody can make a justification for that. Do you think their justification is like, like this is a necessary step to generate the revenue that gets us to the scale that we need in order to deliver the ultimate goal?

I mean, I think that the caricature of adult porn bots is obviously bad and there are places that you can take this that are obviously bad for people and also people choose to engage with adult content and I, you know, it's, it's hard if you're trying to build something for everyone, which is what they're trying to do, to completely say, hey, like that's off limits. Like that's a, that's a particular moral stance that I think you can have smart defaults. But I also think it's within bounds for them to say in certain circumstances, for certain kinds of people, this is what they want and, and they should be allowed to do the thing they want to do. Yeah, it just feels like, it feels like YouTube did. YouTube has never gotten a ton of flack for not allowing adult content on the platform and being like YouTube's anti free speech. YouTube has gotten a lot of your anti free speech criticism, but never because there's not enough adult content on the platform. It's always been because of deprioritizing particular political thinking or something else that is like more in the wheelhouse of free speech. Everyone, at least in the tech zeitgeist has kind of been like, yeah, it's fine that YouTube doesn't have adult content. That that's their choice and they just chose not to do it, I guess. I don't know. I'm sure the debate will continue to rage as it always does and we will continue to monitor it. And thank you for coming on the show.

Congratulations on the launch. Excited to see it play out.

We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one. Before we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about public.com investing for those that take it seriously. They got multi asset investing industry leading yields entrusted by millions. Our next guest is the founder of of Finch. We'll bring him in from it's time to Finch Restream waiting room. It's time to Finch.

It's time to Finch. Welcome to the show.

Welcome to the stream. How are you doing? Stoked to be here.

Thank you folks for having me.

How are we?

Happy Wednesday. Happy Wednesday. What do you got going on today? Do you raise any money?

We announced a raise.

Let me do it.

Yeah, yeah. I'm Ron.

Please do it. I'm so pumped for this.

This.

Give me the news.

Give us the details. What happened?

We raised a $20 million Series A LED by Redpoint.

Congratulations.

Amazing. This the reason I was so excited for this. I want you. I like worked at Door Dash for eight years for a while before starting Finch and one of the company values was being really thrifty with money and everyone should be an owner of the budget the way that the founder were. So we have that here. Which Means when we decided to get a gong, someone spent like $25 on a gong from Amazon that is tiny and fits in like the size of my palm. And so you all getting to hit that was really. I'm gonna get. I will give you something. We'll give you three gong remote gong hits if you need. If something big happens in the company, just email us. We'll record a video of us hitting the gong. We'll send it to you and the team. You can drop it in the slide.

Extremely economical. Yeah, yeah, fantastic. Where. Where is the business today? Are you live generating revenue?

Sorry.

Yeah, yeah. Break down the business and give us the progress.

Yeah, yeah. I heard you earlier. Should I do it like as if you were five version of what Finch is.

Yes, please.

Yes. Yes. I'll start with have you seen personal injury billboards?

Yes. Great.

What is your reaction when you see.

Them need to call immediately. I pull out my phone and they call. Now that's mostly it. It's usually I assume a phone bang that then routes to a lawyer at some point, but I imagine that I'm like seven. Seven layers away from a real lawyer.

Yes. And look, the. I think they're hilarious. Some of them are. There's one in San Francisco. They're like, Anne Fong is on every bus ad. I love her. Her head of intake out. There's something wrong. Call in. Fong is one of the better jingles I've ever heard. We. We got. We have one in LA that's Sweet James.

We like Sweet.

Sweet.

James is saying. And it always kind of had a creepy. It felt a little bit creepy.

It is a little bit odd. Name the other thing that I always think about.

It's certainly memorable.

Whenever I see a personal injury attorney billboard, I always think about adquick.com out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only Adquic combines technology out of home expertise and data to enable efficiency list ad buying across the globe. I'm sorry for doing an ad read in the middle of your segment, but we are running behind today. I need to catch up.

No, but okay, so take us to the solution. That's like one of the many these injury law firms spend more on out of home than pretty much any other group. Right. With like the highest cost per click on Google. Out of anything else that you could search is like, I've been injured in an accident. And like, the. What I was going to say about it is I think it like has one perception from the advertising, the field itself is genuinely noble. It is a like I if you are someone who's in an accident. America's system of handling injuries and accidents is for profit insurance companies, which means if you try to represent yourself in a claim, you will never get what you wrote. And having an advocate on average means you get 3 to 4x higher of an outcome just because the EV calculation changes for GEICO or Allstate or whoever the insurance is on the other side. So incredibly valuable members of this society is you will otherwise as victims and injured people, 80% of you will never have an advocate and don't realize what you're owed. Problem today to solve that gap is the amount of admin work at pretty much any law firm, but especially in personal injury law, is massive. And so we've built a call it the first AI driven pre litigation team. But our solution really is a bunch of really experienced paralegals that we pair with enough AI agents to handle the admin work that we take over half of what a firm does, which is pre litigation. So intake through demand, letting them say yes to more cases.

So specifically, like, someone makes that phone call, they see the billboard, they call. Are you transcribing that? Is there still a human in the loop? Like what?

Yeah, so you said there's a human in the loop. It's actual paralegal in the loop, but they're just immensely more efficient. I'm assuming this is like white, fully white labeled. So somebody doesn't necessarily know they're working. They're onboarding to a firm through Finch. They're just experiencing it as like a fast, seamless onboarding experience.

Correct.

Our goal is we'll have a real paralegal who's 100% dedicated to that firm. And their name at the email address will be the one emailing you. They'll have a local phone number that they message from. It's a very white labeled experience. But the, if you roughly think about it, the average paralegal or case manager takes on somewhere around 100 cases at most. At a typical firm for us, they're doing somewhere between 300 and 400 just with the augmentation of agents that help with a lot of the busy work. How quickly is a company scaling? I'm going to say quickly, but that's part of my job is to highlight how quickly we're going. I mean, it feels like it seems like these firms want to take on, they want to take on more cases because it's all success based so that there's A real incentive there. They're already drowning. And if you give them a solution that they can turn on and start.

My bigger question there is, like, what's the driver? Because we've seen with the Fortune 500, like, there's like, this mandate from the shareholders and the board to, like, develop an AI story. But that's not true for, like, your average, you know, plaintiff law firm. Right? Like, it has to be a little bit more ground up. So, like, what are they actually focused on? Is it like a strict roi? Are they focused just on efficiency or.

All sorts of things?

They're mostly focused on growth. Like, everyone cares about efficiency and service of growth. But I'll give you the example is my. Our first customer was a friend of a friend named Ryan who operated his own firm out of Austin. He started the firm three months before we started Finch, and he had actually built up more litigation experience than most other attorneys his age. He was like, 31 starting this firm firm and had a bunch of great connections in town, which meant he got a bunch of referrals of cases in. So he had 50 cases in his first 30 days, which a solo practitioner might hit over the course of a year on average. After 50, though, he had to start saying no to cases because he just didn't have the same back office he used to have at a big firm. And I will draw a doordash comparison, but at doordash, one of the ways Tony talked about that starting as a business was seeing restaurateurs say no to delivery orders that were coming in each day because it didn't make sense for them to staff and fulfill them. And his solution was not let me build software to make delivery drivers faster, but let me go be the delivery service. And so we're kind of taking the same model here, but for him, it is all about growth. It is a sweet James or Morgan and Morgan or a big name will come advertise on his street corner tomorrow. And he wants to develop enough of a strong relationship with clients that he's going to build a massive firm over time. And I think there's a. That's what we help folks say yes to. Is I. Yeah. Are you seeing lawyers at firms see the capability of Finch and just decide, I actually want to start my own practice now? Because this thing that was a huge headache of, like, building out back office support, I can now outsource to Finch. Are you seeing that already.

Earlyish.

So I'll give the. I didn't answer your actual question of how fast we're going but we launched officially in April. We've been around for 14 months as a business. We grew about 10x in the last 6 months. And so the pull from the market, fun numbers, relative numbers, but fun numbers overnight success.

The pull from the market to give.

A real why to it. I think you thought about shareholders pushing on bigger law firms or enterprises. There's two largely branches of consumer law that operate on contingency, which means they make a percentage of the case. They don't do hourly billing and that changes the economics entirely. I now if I try to go sell efficiency software to someone who bills by the hour, there's no good rational reason to you to care about adopting it until your clients demand it. Whereas anyone who's taking a percentage of cases, you get them the ability to take on forex the cases tomorrow. They say yes to that. They pump that money into advertising and then they go grow. Yeah. If you're billing by the hours. Whoa, whoa, whoa. I think AI is cool, but I don't want too much of it. I like billing three hours. I like billing three grand.

Let me re pitch you the benefits of having an expert lawyer spend hours combing over every document. It's worth it.

What was your number one learning from working with Tony? He's also an investor in Finch, so he must be a big believer in you. You mentioned the frugality, which is frugality was a good one. Scaling ownership, I think like how to build an org where you scale decision making while still keeping the founder being close to the wheel. I do think the biggest one that very in the DNA of Finch is do the hard work. I mentioned this. We started as a software model, to be honest. We raised our first round from Sequoia and the idea of we're going to go build this intake software that transcribes and then goes and does a bunch of stuff after. But trying to train a large team of paralegals and case managers, many of whom are 60 plus on how to use that tech and get the most out of it is just very different than we will be the paralegal who goes and does it A to Z. We guarantee you're going to be able to take on Forex the cases tomorrow. And I think the real TAM expansion comes from doing the work. And so I would say that was the meta lesson.

Well, if you ever overdose on frugality, I'd encourage you to head over to getbezel.com tech Phillipe Nautilus annual calendar. It's $126,000. It's a lot of money but it's a lot of watch and I think you'll love it. I loved this segment. Thank you so much.

Where are you based, by the way?

Whole team is based in.

I would say the whole product engineering ops team is based in New York, but we have paralegals around the country. I'm flying out to a lawyer festival called Law de Gras tonight, so that'll be in San Diego.

Well, when you do, be sure to book a wander. Be sure to book a wa and you can find your happy place. I'm sorry.

When you go public someday, I look forward to playing this clip back where John read three ads to you on the day of your fundraise. But though public, no John, it's awesome having you on.

Thanks for coming on.

I appreciate the point of view on basically saying like, no, this is, this is noble work. This is everyday Americans getting support from the legal system in an aligned way. So keep it up. Thank you both. Appreciate it.

Have a great rest of your day.

The last Gabe in the chat said Jordy must be on the cap table. I am not on the cap table. I wish I was. Seems like a great business. But I can get, I get fired up even if, even if I'm not directly financially invested. But that was great.

Invested in having some fun.

I'm certainly invested in having some fun.

Also invested in a Good night's sleep.

Yep.

8Sleep.Com, get a pod 5 Ultra. How'd you sleep last night? I got absolutely roasted because I fell asleep while I was watching a show called Last Frontier on. It's an Apple TV production. I was watching it on Apple TV on my Apple TV and it's a pretty good show. But it put me to sleep so I fell asleep. So I spent like maybe an extra hour of sleeping on the couch, I think. And that doesn't count because I don't have any light. Yeah, probably not the best sleep, but I still get an 86. How'd I do compared to you?

You beat me. I got a 78. Only six hours.

Step it up. Drutle, play that sound cue for me.

I got a six hours, six and a half hours of sleep. Death absolutely brutal. Hopefully can catch up tonight. Did you see this post from levels that said from concept car to production car.

Oh yes. This thing is crazy progress going from this is the original Mercedes Benz electric car. Concept looks insane and then there's like still pretty cool lights contrast and then.

The final even just like even even the way it just sits on the Road.

The second image looks great big wheels. And then the third image looks like a Honda Civic.

And as a Mercedes enthusiast, Three Arrows enthusiast, this is one of my least favorite cars on the road.

You know, I saw one outside of our breakfast spot and I was just starting to think maybe it's growing on me. Because when I saw the eqs launch the new electric Mercedes, I was like, I don't like that design. I think it's too bulbous and rounded in the front. It's not for me. But then I saw one in person. I was like, maybe I'm just, you know, maybe it's coming around on it. But then I saw this picture and the progression and I say, never, never. But maybe we'll stick to the new, the new SL goal wing.

This post is hilarious. Variety says exclusive. CBS has indicated that staffers at CBS News will not be disciplined if they don't respond to a much scrutinized message sent last week by Bari Weiss.

It was scrutinized.

She literally said, hey, what do you do at the company? What do you think we could do better?

This is the perfect meme.

And the perfect meme. Stop giving me your toughest battles. Barry's just. I literally just asked for an email about what you're up to.

Ridiculous. Yes, this is the Mercedes Benz vision, iconic concept car. This is something that, that I can't wait for it to get completely watered down and look like absolute garbage by the time it ships. But you didn't like it. I think this concept car looks pretty cool.

It looks like a mob boss, Tron.

Yeah, exactly. It looks different. Concept cars always look cool and then they never make it to. To production. And there's a. There was another question on the timeline a couple slides back in 41, Cynthia says, is there a good reason that car companies don't just re release old models? Like this is so beautiful. And it's Mercedes from probably the 80s, right? Can you clock this? Do you know vintage Mercedes?

I mean, that's SL convertible.

But it looks fantastic. And unfortunately, the reason that car companies don't just re release old models is because there's new regulations. And some of those are for good reasons. They need more crumple zones so that pedestrians, if they get hit by the.

Car, they're 80 slots.

280 SL. But of course you can always go and buy one of the older ones, fix it up and continue to drive it. At least the new regulations don't take the old cars off the road. But also, I don't understand how pedestrian safety regulations work at all because the cybertruck exists. And like, if I had to pick between getting hit between a Mercedes SL going 30 floor, pedal to the metal and a Cybertruck doing and 90 and 0 to 60 in two seconds, I feel like I would pick the 280 SL. So I don't know how those pedestrian rules work because the cybertruck seemed to just completely get through all of those. Everyone was calling for sort of panic when the original cybertruck design was announced. I remember Matt Farah from the Smoking Tire podcast, great podcast on Rogan, saying he was like, I don't believe that Elon will ship the cybertruck truck. Like, it's just impossible. He will never ship this because you.

Can'T make a truck out of metal.

It's not just that. I mean, the angles are crazy. Like the angles on the cybertruck. It looks dangerous.

People wanted it to fail so bad, 100%. It was like the rust gate. People were like, oh, oh, yeah.

I mean, people are always rooting against Elon stuff, but. But the. The cybertruck in particular looked like, like, if I've been told for years that, like, the reason the cars got round was for pedestrian safety, I was like, okay, well, if that's true and the rules do state that you can't make a Mercedes SL anymore because it's too angular or something and you need to make a. Like, how can you make a cybertruck? And so lots to unpack there. There must be some, like, workaround or something like that. But anyway, anything else? Any other breaking news you want to cover before we wrap up for the day?

Tenebrous says great place to end the show. Life is so much easier and better when you have. Have a number to make go up.

That's true.

Well said.

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