Soham Parekh Exclusive Interview | Chris Miller, Aaron Ginn, Bridget Harris, Pryce A. Yebesi, Jacob Rintamaki, Auren Hoffman, Mehran Jalali, Kushal Byatnal, Avlok Kohli, Nico Christie, Flo Crivello

You're watching TVPN.

Today is Thursday, June 3rd, 2025. We are live from the TVPN Ultra Dome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. And we have some breaking news. Soham Parikh, he's, he was fired multiple times yesterday. I believe he's been fired many times.

First person to be fired by five startups. Five plus startups in a day, In.

A day, in a day.

The positive news, any timeline exploded and any companies that he works for that are predominantly on LinkedIn, he's safe for at least a week. Another payroll cycle will come through for sure.

And so there's a big debate raging. Is he a scammer? Is he a misunderstood builder? How wrong was what he did? The headline here, India based engineer is accused of juggling multiple jobs and misleading YC startups. He defends his passion for building and lands a new role at a video AI Startup investor. Online backlash. Yeah, break it down.

Atlas says they hated Soham because he was profitable.

Probably was extremely profitable.

It is wild to think, you know, if, if five plus companies came out yesterday and you know, realized they were all employing him, how many others was he? Was he, is he actively working for that just didn't happen to pop up on X that day.

Yeah, yeah. The only, it seemed like the, what do they call it in manufacturing where there's like the, the single rate limiting piece of equipment is the one that you need to like build, build everything else around basically like there's some choke point. And for him it was probably like stand ups and so could he do 10 stand ups and stuff at the same time? It's hard to juggle those. Yeah, but I mean it seems like he got the numbers up there.

I bet you his TC was on average significantly higher than the ARR of the companies that he would work with.

His personal TC across all the jobs grouped, which you put as over 2 million.

Over 2 million is my estimate.

I was thinking over 1.

That's 5, that's 5, let's say TC200K.

We were thinking cash, not equity or were we counting the equity?

As the thing is, he interviewed very well. I think pretty universally people were impressed by him. He could easily go in and get 180k for cash comp and then you add some equity into that. I mean the big question, Matt from Anti Metal who had hired him over two years ago said that he was joking about how much equity he'd actually left on the table over the years because probably unlikely that he was hitting the cliff These companies, that wasn't really the strategy. The new CS grads, Ben Hylack called out, they are poor, poor CS grads. Soham getting all of the jobs.

Well, the market is ripping.

Wow.

Bitcoin's almost at 110. 110. $110,000. So we are in white suits to celebrate the jobs news and the market news. We'll be doing a deep dive on the news and doing our normal interviews in just a minute, but we believe we have Soham Parikh joining the show in about four minutes. So we can go through coordinating this, but we will keep you up to date. Hopefully it happens.

We can go through some other posts. We have a post here from Anna Mostarek. She says the tech industry needs. Are we dating the same guy group? These are groups that pop up on Facebook and things like that where people coordinate and see if, you know, girls, see if they're dating the same guy. Clearly we needed something like that or we needed. I think the big question that we were kind of debating is, was he? A lot of these companies don't typically have something in their offer letter that says you legally cannot have other W2 income.

Yeah, that's a big question.

Yet he probably was signing full time.

Yep.

Job offers, who knows, you know, so.

We'Ll have to dig in, dig into it with him. But we believe he's here in the studio with us here. So. Welcome to the stream. Soham, good to meet you. How are you doing?

There he is.

Welcome.

The man himself.

Thanks so much for joining. Why don't you, why don't you introduce yourself and just take a few minutes to just give us what's going on in your world. What's the last 24 hours been like? How would you describe yourself? What, what, what do you have to say to people?

And then I'm sure, let's go back to the very beginning. Who are you? Where do you come from?

I mean, I'm, you know, I'm originally from Mumbai. I kind of grew up, you know, here all my life. Obviously drove into computer science, like, you know, coding and everything, kind of without a choice, kind of process of elimination. Fell in love with it. You know, as you're aware at this point, I'm like, everyone's like, favorite founding engineer pretty much, or Worker 17 or whatever you might call it, like AI Bot or Soham as a service. I don't know. But, yeah, don't have much to my story, essentially. You know, I've just been always passionate.

About, you know, building what Was your first job?

My first job was actually at a company called Allen. It was like a voice assisted, like conversational startup. You know, this is back in like 2020. 2021, 2020.

And when did you come to the States? Because I know I was talking to Matt and he said you would go to the anti metal off sites and you're very much a part of the team.

So to be honest, I have family in the east coast. The first time I ever visited us was in 2018 and then I was supposed to do grad school there. You know, different financial circumstances, couldn't do that. Had to kind of like, you know, not go with that plan. But obviously, you know, I have visited, you know, America mostly for like off sites and stuff, just to catch up with team members and things like that.

Okay, so the main claim that was levied against you on X yesterday kind of started with Suhail over at Playground. He accused you of working at multiple jobs simultaneously. Is that true?

It is true. And yeah, I would love to add color to it, but that is true.

Yeah. I guess the question is, do you believe that you were in violation of your own employment contracts or do you believe that there was some sort of legal loophole that allowed you to do this without committing any sort of legal violation?

I mean, honestly, I think going back to like how it even like started to happen and what the motivations were.

Yeah, please.

Probably have. You know, obviously I would want to like preface with saying, like, I'm not proud of what I've done. You know, that's not something that I endorse either. But you know, financial circumstances essentially, like, no one really likes to work 140 hours a week. Right. But I had to do it this kind of out of necessity. Like I was in extremely like dire financial circumstances and somehow like, you know, I don't. I'm not a very people person. I don't share much in terms of like what's going on with my life and kind of in my internal thought process, you know, was kind of like getting more stressed with like, hey, you know, I want to like come out of the situation, what should I do? So it's more. It was not more so kind of out greed, but essentially like necessity and just like thought that if I work like multiple places, you know, like I can basically like help myself, like elevate the situation I was in much faster.

No, it's very economically rational. What about the conjecture that you had a team of junior developers underneath you helping you actually accomplish the tasks? Is there any Truth to that, I.

Wish I had the money and I wish that was true, but that is not true. Any of the founders that you know, I worked with can vouch with that. I have multiple locations, like paired program with people. You know, I've written every single inch of the code. You know, Anti Metal is one of the companies I worked at. You know, they have pretty high bar for design. As you might know. They did a launch recently. You know, there were two occasions where, you know, just before the launch, like, you know, the contractor who was going to do the front end for us essentially had bailed out and you know, we as a team had to figure out and do everything, which was a team of only three engineers. Right.

So how did it originally happen though? You started with one job in 2020, then you realized, hey, I could add another and then you realized you could just continuously add them. Did you create any type of financial models to kind of model out potential churn as you would get? You know, I'm curious if you were operating this looking at as basically a SaaS business, the SaaS of Soham.

This was not a business to me. Every company that I've worked with I have deeply cared about. Like, you know, and again, people who spend, you know, a lot of time with me can like back that on multiple occasions. The. And again, I did not have any financial model. The. Like I said, the only motivation for me was, hey, you know, I'm in a financial jeopardy, you know, so I didn't do this until 2022. 2022 is actually when I was, you know, running into issues. I had deferred my, you know, grad school admit and you know, did like an online degree but basically, you know, did not have like enough, you know, like essentially like, you know, just to get out of the situation I was in. Don't want to talk like too much deeply about it, but no, no, that's fine.

Yeah, so that's talk about your own abilities. Every. It seemed universal that the teams that you worked on said that you were extremely talented, that you interviewed incredibly well. It's easy for new CS grads to be frustrated because you were probably running laps around them in the interview process. But yeah, it's very impressive if you actually didn't have a junior team and you were just juggling, it seems estimates seem to put it at maybe five companies at once.

Yeah. Are you just hyper productive? Are you leveraging AI tools and coding assistance? Are you just able to move really quickly in a startup environment? Or are. Are you also like talented like systems engineering and algorithms and like solving really, really hard computational problems.

So I'll preface with this. You know some of these companies I worked at was before the copilot boom, right? There were no AI assisted programming. At least three startups have went on the record like saying this. People who've paired program with we can also watch with this. The real truth is, you know, there's this funny line in some of my interim is like tldr, I don't do anything outside coding. That is very true. And if you're like spending hours like you know, sitting in front of the computer, you will eventually like at least I hope so, like get good at it. I would. There's obviously a lot for me to learn in general. You know, I wouldn't say like I'm you know like a, like a, I don't know what they call like a platform engine, something like you know, top principle or whatever, but I would like to believe that I was a decent enough, a good enough engineer to essentially be able to work at three places because that's the only thing I did the entire day.

So an average day for you, an average week for you, it feels like basically maybe you sleep for six to eight hours and then you're basically programming for 12 to 14 hours every single day for seven days a week.

But as, as some of these, you know, new coding code gen tools came out, Claude, code cursor, Devin, et cetera. Did you feel like you could add maybe a few more jobs? Were you getting more efficient or do you still hand CR crafted code farm to table, Organic, handmade.

Obviously having more AI assisted tooling definitely helped, but it did not amount to me working on more jobs because I would still love to spend a justifiable hour working on something and it doesn't have a measure. It's not like hey, I'm going to split time, four hours for this company, for us, that company. I was essentially like working until I got something done for that day. And I think people around me will probably say this, that I am notoriously known for not sleeping. I am, you know, I'm a serial like non sleeper at this point is what I would say.

Insomniac.

But yeah. And as far as the interviews go, right, like so one, there's also been a lot of things around like hey, you know, I probably used you know, some sort of like tool like Cluli which you know, I would love for the founder to essentially go on record and say if I'm a paying customer, I'm not, but or Some sort of like, you know, hack to game the system. The truth is a lot of these companies did not have lead code style problems. And if they did, I would have bombed interviews, you know, because I don't practice lead code as much I am. I know my data structure as well. I know what to use when, but you know, like typically a gun.

Well, you're also great at cold email. I saw some of these cold emails. You got a great format. It pulls people in, it shows your personality, it shows that you care about, about coding. And I think that helped a lot as well.

Totally.

Yeah, I mean I do care about coding a lot. But again, like, you know, most of these companies essentially had a take home assessment or a work trial. Right. So it's very difficult to like game a work trial or game a take home assessment. Like you have to do it and then deliver it. And I did everything, you know, on my own. Like I was also doing the work trials on my own. And yeah, like, I guess I'll leave it at that. If they did have lead code, I would have bombed the interviews, but luckily they didn't. Like, startups usually just like care more about like working with you.

Talk a little bit about the companies that you chose to work for, you applied to. Do you think you could have pulled this off with Microsoft, Google, Amazon and split three times? Or do they have defenses in place that would make this difficult? There's a variety of memes around. Maybe big tech companies, it's easier work, maybe startups are harder. I'm just kind of curious about it seems like you went for a lot of startups. What was the reasoning behind that?

Yeah, so it feels counterintuitive. Like if I was in dire need of money, like why would I work for, you know, startups as opposed to big time? Because they clearly pay well. They have a 9 to 5 schedule for the most part. Like I would say, you know, people don't really care about like what you are essentially like doing. The thing with me is like if you're spending, you know, multiple hours a week like working on something, you would have to at least decently be passionate about it because otherwise you'll just like burn out. Like I said, you know, each of these companies that I work for and again, you know, founders, some of the founders have spent meaningful time with me, can vouch would say that I actually cared about these companies. So it wasn't like cold email without context. Like I deeply read into what a company was doing, what the business model was, you know, who their customers Were I had great ideas about, like, you know, what to build for them, what not to build for them, you know, what the platform is. Like, you know, I did deliver, like, beyond engineering for a lot of these companies. And yeah, like, it was more kind of like, hey, if I'm spending like 140 hours, like, I want to do something that I actually care about, like, I don't want to, like, you know, do nine to five and kind of like center a div in like six hours or something, you know, that's, that's just not me because I do like what I do.

And that's kind of cold email hack. Send the cold emails from the heart, put some real thought into them.

Talk to me about other alternatives that you maybe considered or maybe didn't. Did you ever think about going to a startup and saying, like, hey, I'm doing a great job, I'm working 40 hours a week, I need to make more money, I'd like to take on a second job. Would that be amenable to you? Do you think that founders might be actually open to that?

Or say, I'm working 18 hours a day.

Can you, can you pay me three times as much? Me, I'm doing the work of three devs, because there is a world where you could have allocated all that time and one startup would have gotten three times as much value, but they probably should have paid you three times as much maybe to make that balance out. And so did you ever have those types of decisions? Like, we're seeing this with the AI talent wars, the 10x. You can think of yourself as like a 3 to 5x engineer, I guess. No offense. You know, the 100x engineers are getting.

100 million, maybe 10x if you just, if you really focused.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, and so it's almost a question of, like, why couldn't you get the money that you wanted from a single job? What was, what was the, what was the stumbling block there?

Yeah, I think the part where, you know, I should have basically done is like, come clean with my situation, you know, to be very frank with you, like I mentioned, like, I'm not a good person with sharing what my internal conflicts are. I do like to keep boundaries between my personal and private life, you know, like, whatever is like going with me mentally. And that's true with any person I'm with as well. Like, you know, that's outside of work. So one, there was an embarrassment to essentially, like, admitting that, hey, you know, I have this. Struggles mentally, you know, like, and talk in open about it. And then the second thing is, you know, I really did not, like, think through this because like I said, it was an action that was done more out of, like, desperation to get out of the situation I was in rather than like.

I mean, the flip side here is that you don't necessarily need to have something going on in your family to justify $10 million salary or a $1 million salary. Like, LeBron James doesn't need to say, oh, like, you know, I have a sob story and that's why I need $50 million. He's like, I'm delivering this value to you and you should pay me the value that I'm creating. And so I'm wondering if you ever considered just coming to a founder and saying, like, I can do the job of three engineers, but you got to pay me three times as much.

Honestly, I. It again feels counterintuitive. Like I don't really care much about the money. I was really into it for building. So, like, greed was not like an incentive for me. Again, regardless of my financial circumstances in most of these companies, I always took the lower, you know, pay, higher equity offer. Again, like, equity for me was not even, like, vested until I would make the move to US which, like I said, you know, I was based out of India, so I had to go through a whole visa process in order to make that happen. So I wouldn't even be getting equity as long as my immigration was uncertain, which it was. So the decisions seem counterintuitive. Basically, for me, it's like, hey, I have to do something to kind of get out of the situation I'm in. I also want to spend time building something meaningful. As long as I like the startup and as long as it's not like hand to mouth, it did not matter too much.

So what are you going to do now? You have the intention of the entire tech ecosystem. And I appreciate how candid you've been with us.

And I want to talk about DevShop specifically.

Yeah, I mean, there's a few angles here. You could do the dev shop of Soham Parikh. I think you would be able to get a handful of clients immediately. I think you could sign a max out contract with Clulee. They would probably pay you a pretty penny to join the team over there. And also it sounds like you're interested in joining as a founding engineer of a new AI startup. So how are you thinking about your opportunities right now and how can you turn this into a win?

Yeah, look like I've, you know, regardless of the situation like I've been privileged to like work with some of these companies like you know, Antimatter, you know, Shares and man the founders like Sync Labs, you know, Pratti, Rudrapa, they're one of the most, you know, crack places I've been at in general. Partly because they had me, maybe not, I don't know, I guess time with that. But I think the main thing is I am really excited about what I'm going to be a part of next. So working with a company called Darwin, they are essentially building a new AI driven video platform essentially for more kind of UGC style media. And we're going to release to the market very shortly. This is the only thing I'm going to focus on. I think they've put a bet on me. I have a lot to prove and there's a lot for me to say.

So how do you rebuild trust? How do you give them the confidence that this isn't just you're focused on it for a couple weeks and then the second job creeps in and then the third job creeps in. Is there something that you see happening down the line around worker monitoring or checking when the GitHub commits are coming in or doing something to understand if someone else is, is working multiple places? Somebody was saying tech needs some sort of service to see, hey, are we employing the same company? How do you rebuild trust and guarantee that you won't be working multiple jobs against the will of the current employer?

So I think all of this that has taught me is just coming to Canada probably makes people understand your situation. After all, we all are humans. I don't anticipate working on multiple gigs again. But my financial circumstances have not changed. So even if it did came to them, which it won't right now I'm very clear that this is my sole focus. I would probably approach with being very candid with the founders and just letting them know and if that's not a possibility, that's fine. Maybe I can figure a way out where there's a higher pay or whatever. Kind of like to your point. Right. But in, in, in another spectrum of the world, I think like what I've really realized is that I just, you know, I just want to be a part of like building something that I can like focus on a longer term. And that's always been the goal, you know, it was always the goal with any of these companies I worked with. So you know, I obviously, you know, like I, I believe in actions more than words. Like I guess what we'll Build and launch in a month would probably be a testament to what we've been able to build.

Well, you're certainly going to have a lot of attention around that launch. I hope you. Now is probably not the right time to renegotiate your offer letter for the new company. You should probably stick with it, but I think you're going to bring a lot of marketing value to Darwin, the new company you're joining. What's the reaction been like at home getting a lot of messages from.

Has this broken Tech X and broken containment into kind of your. The world beyond, just people asking you about this?

Yeah, I mean, obviously reaction is natural. Like, a ton of people have been asking about this. What's also funny is, like some of the memes, like, I am very new to Twitter. I joined Twitter yesterday. So this was a lesson for me in social media in general. Like, I am not a social media person. So you just like. I was like, you know, very overwhelmed with it in general. Obviously, you know, feeling shitty about it as well. Like, I. Like I said, you know, I'm not very proud of what I did. I think there was a way where I could have course corrected in a much different manner. So there's a lot of, like, reflection in general. But I think friends and family have been strong. You know, like I said, I was lucky to work at some of these places where I had really close relationships with the founders. A lot of them reached out to essentially be like, helpful here, kind of give advice on what I should be doing next. Even, like, you know, sometimes, like, staying through with me, like, you know, just to make sure that I'm like, all right, you know, like.

No, I think it says a lot that a number of the people that you work for that fired you because you were working multiple jobs still care about you. It shows that when you were working for them, at least, you know, it does seem like you really, you really did care.

Are there any startups that you've worked for in the past that you were working multiple jobs for that you haven't gotten a chance to apologize to yet that you plan to.

I mean, in general, like, I plan to apologize to everyone. Like, that's. That goes without saying.

Any companies that you still need to resign from?

None whatsoever is the only focus I have.

That's great. Okay, he's on the record.

You're on the right path.

On the right path. Well, I'm rooting for you. I hope this is a story of redemption. I believe in forgiveness.

I believe, believe mistakes.

And I'm Optimistic that this can have a good ending.

Me too. So to be clear, your X account is Eel Soham Parikh, right? That's the real one.

That's the real one.

Because there's a lot of fake ones floating out there trying to ride the hype wave.

Yeah. I mean, 100%. There's been so many fake accounts and a lot of fake narratives as well. But, yeah, that is my real account. There's one person who asked me to post a picture of Banana on my head with a fork in my hand, and I did not have Banana at my home at that point in time, but I was trying to do that just to show proof of Parikh.

Okay.

But it's been interestingly, like, in a while to notice how people are taking this in different ways. But, yeah, that kind of helps. Like, just feel a little bit less shitty about it. But, yeah.

Yeah. What are the questions here? Remote versus in office, Us versus international AI?

Yeah.

I mean, I think we had this post from Ahmad at Mercury. I think the reason this struck such a chord is, you know, again, it's this remote angle, the international angle, the ideas around a 10x engineer, the potential of new AI tools. But this has been really helpful to get to know you, and I think you were getting. You provided entertainment for a lot of people the last 24 hours. So I'm glad to hear that you're going to apologize to everybody that you misled, and I am excited to follow what you do next.

Yeah. Thanks for stopping by.

Thank you so much for having me.

Cheers.

We'll talk to you soon.

We'll talk soon.

Bye. Fascinating.

Fascinating. I think he's handling it quite well.

Yeah. And I do think this is a situation where the damage is hopefully minimal to the companies. It's not like he was working multiple jobs. And then there was, like, the customer database leaked because he wrote bad code because he was working multiple jobs too stressed out. There's no one alleging that yet. At least that we've seen.

And I think the founders that hired him and then fired him in general probably noticed it pretty quickly. This is not like somebody joining a big tech company and working there for five years, not doing any work, and just sort of like being a cog in the machine. And so, yeah, ultimately, it's unfortunate. Silicon Valley runs on trust. Yes, he violated that trust, but I was happy to see that he was really apologetic.

And that's the thing about the startup ecosystem. Silicon Valley has really, really leaned into the trust thing to the point where a venture capitalist can shake your hand and say, I'm gonna invest a million dollars. And the expectation is that they actually do that and they don't back out. And if they do back out, it's a big thing, it's a big deal. And so yeah, even even though, you know, I don't know how, I don't know how ironclad every work contract is like, we were going back and forth on like, is there a specific. No moonlighting clause that describes exactly what you can do in your free time? And can you go do doordash or Uber Eats on the side or can you take a, you know, you know, can you earn an ex creator pay pay share? Like rev share?

Yeah.

Like, does that count as moonlighting? You're posting, you're making 200 bucks or a thousand bucks from X. Is that moonlight? You know, maybe there's not very different, but people know what full time means. And if I send you an offer, I'm, I'm offering you a full time job. I'm expecting you not to take another full time job. Like maybe. Yeah, maybe, you know, someone throws you 50 bucks to, you know, walk their dog once, you know, once on random on the weekend, but the idea is that you're not taking a very similar job at another company. So it seems pretty clear, even if there's no major like legal ramifications. So I don't know, he seems, he seems like he's handling it well and going on the correct apology tour and there could be the good ending here.

Yeah. Lulu said, come clean, be sorry he did that. Be willing to laugh at yourself, Embrace a good meme.

Yep.

Worker 17. He did that. Feed the curiosity. What was it like? What did you learn? Don't sugarcoat. I thought it was interesting that it would have been hilarious if he came out and said, oh yeah, I'm running 10 Codex agents, I'm running Devin, I'm using Claude code. He was just like, no, I just worked really hard and I don't do anything other than.

Yeah, it is always tough with this stuff because somebody who would lie about working multiple jobs might just come on here and lie to us. But he seemed sincere and so. So I'm inclined to believe that he is an insomniac and just was working three jobs, 40 hours a week each, and that's 120 hours. And that's Morgan Stanley investment bank associate. It does raise this question of there are people out there who are willing to work 100 hours and if they go to Wall street, they get comped on that immediately and Startups don't really have a mechanism. Not necessarily immediately, no, but. But the comp and the expectation is matched. And I think Wall street has absorbed that latent demand for work and capacity of young people who are down to grind basically, and they can choose to opt out of it and getting a different job, but they kind of know what they're going into. No one shows up at Goldman Sachs and is like, oh my God, I had no idea I was going to have to do a slide deck on Saturday. But in startups there's kind of this like, hey, we have this good work culture. It's kind of chill, let's do 40 hours a week. But then also there's no real way to make three times as much if you're willing to work three times as hard. So, yeah, it's interesting. It's an interesting story.

Yeah.

And to be honest, he posted yesterday, he said there's a lot being said about me right now. Most of you don't know the full story. If there's one thing to know about me, it's that I love to build, which I do believe. He said, that's it. I've been isolated, written off and shut out by nearly everyone I've known in every company I've worked at. That doesn't feel completely true because he's in conversation with the CEOs that had hired him. But building is the only thing I've truly known and it's what I'll keep doing. Earlier today, the timing of this is amazing. Earlier today I signed an exclusive founding deal to be founding and team at one company and one company only. They were the only ones willing to bet on me at this time. I actually think there's a lot of companies that would take a bet on him now and it just has to be. You have to promise me that you're gonna work for this just for us exclusively. And I think the right thing to do for this next company is try to bring him out to SF or wherever they're based because he will probably spend 18 hours a day in the office.

Yeah, it's so much easier to deal with a known unknown or like a known risk factor. It's the devil you know, like forever. This will follow him as like, hey, monitor this guy. Make sure he's not working a second job.

If you scroll down on this post says, I'm pissed and I've got something to prove. It's like he had a very aggressive.

Posting style and he came on was very like sweet and nice and just like Kind of contrived.

It seems like he got in a bad spot, he made some bad decisions, he's sorry about it, and he's now got something to prove.

Yeah.

And he's now infamous.

Yeah, infamous. Well, that's a fun story. I'm glad we were able to get him on and cover it. That's. That's part of the beauty of the show. Live, baby. Anyway, Newsmaxing.

Yeah. And I think that provides some good closure to this chapter of the timeline.

Yeah. We have a million messages coming in from various sources. I can go through a little bit of the stories if you want. We gotta ring the gong, though, because the U.S. economy added 147,000 new jobs. Let's go.

Go.

Manufacturers are. It's a. It's a. It's like a very, very slight job speed. It's not actually that big of a. We're very excited. Joe Weisenthal has a post in the stack somewhere where he says, breaking.

It's a beat. 147,000 new jobs. Unemployment rate falls to 4.1% last month. Revised higher analysts had expected 106k new jobs and a 4.3% unemployment rate. So we love to see it. Stark contrast with the calls from our president to reduce rates. If jobs report is good, it's hard to argue to drop them.

So manufacturers are pausing hiring amid tariff uncertainty, while unemployment fell partly because fewer people are looking for work. So that's never a good sign. But it does seem like the American consumer seems resilient and things are, we're staying in the kangaroo market. We're neither. You know, it's not so over, but we're maybe not so back just yet. We're kind of right back where we started at the beginning of the year in terms of the stock market rates. Anyway. The CEO of Ford had a controversial quote in the Wall Street Journal.

He's AGI pilled.

He's AGI pilled. He's been talking to Dario over at Anthropic, clearly, and the. So the CEO of Ford said AI will replace, quote, literally half of all white collar workers. Which is something that was definitely set on Dwarkesh Patel. First, I think Sholto might have mentioned that and then Adario mentioned it in the Post as well. And Anthropic has been kind of noodling on this. And then OpenAI and Meta have kind of stayed back from that. And a lot of the other labs have kind of said, like, I don't know, like, you know, I think the quote from Sam was like, Dario Is a scientist, like, he should apply more scientific rigor here to like do this prediction.

Like, this is a very jarringcap over.

That's right.

Brad Lightcap at OpenAI was pushing back a little bit. But look, when he was making these comments, he was also talking about just how advanced Xiaomi and these other Chinese EV manufacturers are. So this was coming from a broader conversation and it's a good. Ultimately, whether or not he actually believes this is true, he's signaling to the market that he's on top of this trend. And if this does turn out to be the case, it's very possible that Ford will be a beneficiary in some way.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's a tough business. And I'm sure he's looking to the Chinese manufacturers and looking at their cog structure and their SGNA spend relative to revenue and seeing how they can benchmark. Not that, not that the Chinese EV manufacturers are necessarily adopting AI any faster than Ford, but it's certainly the idea of like how the shape of the.

Business will be a little bit. They do like facial recognition attack. I think it will like you walk up to your car for you.

I think there's a story about the Ford CEO dailying a Chinese car just to get a taste of like, okay, we need to step it up a bunch of different ways.

Yeah, yeah. You know, there's no reason that, that Ford can't catch up on these type of things.

Right.

In other news, we have a massive story out of the United Kingdom, folks. Britain's royals gave up their luxury train, citing fiscal restraint. This is sent to us by a friend. In an era of hard choices for economies around the world, Britain's Royal Family is also playing its part, waving farewell to perhaps its most extravagant mode of transport, the Royal Train. The House of Windsor's personalized service that chugs the royals to engagements, will be axed in 2027 after a review concluded that it no longer offered value for money and that two new helicopters.

Nothing is sacred in the world. Nothing is sacred.

They're getting rid of their train. The locomotive service, which features bedroom compartments, a dining room and a study has. Has been a lightning rod for anti monarchy campaigners who pointed to its costs as emblematic of royal excess.

Shows the power of democracy that we have anti monarchy.

You can't even be a king with a private train anymore. What's happening to the world? It's ridiculous, you know, Royal excess. What is royalty if not excessive? It's the brand. It's terrible. Last year, King Charles iii undertook a 190 mile rail trip to the capital from England's East Midlands, which was billed at nearly $62,000. It's like the price of a Model.

S. Wait, the trip was 62, it.

Was 190 mile rail trip on a private train car. And so they have to staff it, they have to load it up with fuel and food and all this different stuff. And the study has that book.

Does that book strike you as. I mean, it's, It's a.

It's $62,000 for 190 miles, it's a bargain.

But 190 miles, it's across maybe a few days. Probably bringing multiple people too, having meetings on there. Yeah, it's cheaper than, you know, taking a zipping around in a pj. That whole.

Well, they. Well, a review by the government concluded that buying two new helicopters would be a relative, a reliable alternative or a viable alternative.

What about safety, though? I have to imagine trains have a better safety.

I would think so. I would think so. James Chalmers, who manages the Royal Finances as Keeper of the Privy Purse, said the decision to halt personal train would be the fondest of farewells. Yes, this is the Wall Street Journal. In moving forwards, we must not be bound by the past. He added rough. This kind of public fiscal self flagellation is nothing new to the British monarchy, which is often at pains to point out its value to UK taxpayers who bankroll the franchise. The late Queen Elizabeth II gave up the Royal yacht in the 1990s in the name of financial prudence. But this latest decision is all the more surprising given that the Royal Family's finances are arguably stronger than they've ever been in modern times. The Royal Train.

Let's give it up for the Royal Family finances.

Let's give it up for the Royal Family's finances. Thank you, Ramp.

I don't think ramp's in the UK yet, but they'll be able to get to the next level. Obviously, when that happens, the Royal Train.

Will stop rolling for the first time since Queen Victoria first commissioned coaches to be pulled by a locomotive in the 1860s. The train's importance in an age of air travel has repeatedly come into question once the train is mothballed. Charles, who has long advocated protecting the environment, will instead use two newly leased helicopters that run on sustainable aviation fuel. The train will be taken out on one more tour of Britain before it is retired and can be placed on display. So rip to the Royal Train.

The Royal Train.

Hopefully it makes come back at some point. Yeah, I think American train You know the Royals are backing off. Let's get an American train.

Yeah, this is actually could be bullish for trains because them shutting it down creates an opportunity for them to start it back up, which would be a positive catalyst for the train.

Yes, yes, I agree. Well, you mentioned ramp time is money save. Both easy as corporate cards, bill payments, accounting and whole lot more all in one place. If you're trying to expense train trips, do it on ramp.

That's the way to do it. Travel, baby.

Ramp travel. What else is going on in the news? JP Morgan is revamping its bank for the super rich to cater to global clientele. David Frame named global head of private bank helping deep pocketed clients invest more abroad. Oh, there's also big news.

Not very American.

No, not very American. But Ilya Sutskever has issued a statement on Daniel Gross with Super Safe Superintelligence. So, Ilya Wrights, of course, the OpenAI co founder now at SSI says I sent the following message to our team and investors. As you know, Daniel Gross's time with us has been winding down. And as of June 29, that's three, four days ago, he is officially no longer a part of ssi. We are grateful for his early contributions to the company and wish him well in his next endeavor. I am now formally seeing between the lines.

Do we think he hit his cliff?

I don't know. When did SSI start? Probably one year cliff. Four year vest. Do you think they went default? I don't know.

When was SSI founded? 1970. Scuba Schools International.

Wow.

Super intelligence has not arrived in Jordy's web browser just yet.

Oh, he hit. He may have hit his cliff. It was founded June 19, 2024.

No way. Wow.

But it's very possible this was resolved prior to that.

Absolute dog.

Anyway, so Elia says, I am now formerly CEO of SSI and Daniel Levy is president. The technical team continues to report to me. You might have heard rumors of companies looking to acquire us. We are flattered by their attention, but our first focused on seeing our work through. He's a missionary. We have the compute, we have the team. We know what to do. Together we will keep building Safe superintelligence. Ilya. So DG has entered the trade portal and seems.

Trade portal? I don't even know what that means. I've never heard that term before. But I understand that it's vaguely from.

It's portal time.

It's portal time.

It's portal time. But anyways, the rumor is that he's going to meta but we will have to see.

Yep. Well, speaking of Meta, Nat Friedman officially posted that he has in fact joined Meta. This was rumored and leaked multiple times. It seemed pretty, pretty confident. Everyone seemed pretty confident in the reporting, but he has confirmed it. He said, I started work at Meta this week. This is Nat Friedman tweeting, my job is to make amazing AI products that billions of people love to use. He's in the application layer, baby.

He's productizing the app layer.

Love it.

I'm so excited for Will says taking the balance sheet of the world's largest megacorp and using it to develop the technology to find Noah's Ark, the Ark of the Covenant and other biblical artifacts is top tier stuff. Congrats, King Ashley Vance says if you're not hiring an intern to use ground penetrating radar to find the ancient first copies of Solaris buried under Building 12, I'll be disappointed.

I love it. He says it won't happen overnight, but, but a few days in, I'm feeling confident that great things are ahead. Yeah, I posted something when, when the news leaked that it's like it's 2026. I put on my Meta quest for Llama, open Instagram and pull up the latest Vesuvius scroll because I certainly hope this means more Nat Friedman side projects. Obviously he's going to be incredibly locked in. Has a huge task in front of him catching up to the big labs. He's, you know, has an incredible team now, a lot of funding, but it is a big challenge and I'd certainly hope that he has time for some side projects. I wonder what this means for AI Grant. I wonder what this means for the. The rest of the Nat Friedman cinematic universe of. Of kind of cracked interns that have gone on to the. The. The Nat Friedman diaspora is really illustrious at this point. Yep, sort of. Sort of a new Thiel Fellowship.

So, breaking news. The big beautiful bill has passed.

No way.

The House I had polymarket just about 45 minutes ago, it had rocketed up to 99%. It's now sitting at 100%. So Axios has the reporting. The House passed President's big beautiful bill Thursday. This article's from 5 minutes ago, clearing the way for Trump to sign it by his July 4 deadline. It's a massive victory for Speaker Mike Johnson, who was able to flip dozens of members who had initially threatened to vote no, as well as for Trump and Senate Republicans. The bill passed 218 to 214. Representatives Thomas Massie and Brian Fitzpatrick were the only Republicans to join all the Democrats in voting against the measure, moderates and conservatives demanded adjustments after the Senate made significant changes to the House version. But but ultimately none were made. Several key holdouts flipped following meetings with the president at the White House, but a ground of a group of hardliners needed more persuading anyways, so we will wait to see the impacts of all of this. I'd be curious to get Zach Kukoff on maybe at the end of the show to just kind of break it down.

We will be continuing to track the big beautiful bill, but if you're trying to design something big and beautiful, head over to figma.com, think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. You can get started for free@figma.com Palmer.

Lucky has another loving the S1. Absolutely loving it.

Yes.

Then they're going out.

We got to get Tane on who does the S1 deep dives. For sure we got to do that. And if you're Also in the S1 deep dive business and you have an interesting take, hit us up. We'd love to have you on a chat about the figma S1. Very interested in that. And Earl Palmer Lucky has an update on the story about how many weapons from America are flowing to Ukraine. He is kind of giving his take and where he stands on this issue. So Andre Yermak says today I remembered an early wartime meeting with Palmer Lucky. I remember. I think I remember this photo or a photo like it going out at the early start of the war. Steady, kind and clear, like Tanjiro in the face of darkness. Grateful he chose to stand with Ukraine. His company's growth is proof good people build strong things. And Palmer chimes in and says, andrew had people slash hardware in Ukraine two weeks into the invasion. Our autonomous weapons have destroyed hundreds of millions of worth hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Russia's war machine. The United States should give them the tools they need to win. It is the fastest path to peace one way or another.

I had to look it up, but Tanjiro is an anime or a manga. Tanjiro Manga Demon Slayer. So Andre clearly knows his audience with that post. Luke Metro has a post here. So OpenAI came out yesterday and said these OpenAI tokens are not OpenAI equity. We did not partner with Robinhood. We're not involved with this and do not endorse it. Any transfer of OpenAI equity requires our approval. We did not approve any transfer. Please be careful. And Luke Metro says what every CFO is thinking. Yeah, these tokenized Shares on Robinhood are every startup CFO's newest headache. They are derivatives, from what I know. So they're not. It's not actual equity. It's closer to it. You know, something like a prediction market.

Yeah. No one is more creative financially than secondary salesmen.

Yeah.

Do you remember the whole Ford contract situation? This whole thing?

Yeah.

Yeah. You'd write that. I mean, it's derivative contract, but people were doing that for a while and then that got banned. And I don't know how they're doing this one, but.

Odd to never bet against American financial.

But the interesting. What does this say about Robin Hood? Says that they're not AGI pilled. Because if you truly believe that OpenAI is building God, you wouldn't want to make God angry. So not AGI built.

I guess something.

Is that the conclusion?

That could be one. One conclusion.

I think we need to. We need to frame everything in the context of.

Do you believe every decision is how AGI, you know, you're just reading between the lines.

Yeah.

Yeah. Even. Even the evening. You know, the UK is clearly not AGI pilled because if we're approaching superabundance.

Yeah. What's wrong with having a royal train?

Figure out how to operate the royal train.

Of course.

Cheaper than, you know, walking.

Yeah. This is. This is very damaging for their brand.

Yeah.

Ford CEO, though. AGI build. That's right. Let's get him on the show. Anyway, let's tell you about Vanta Automate Compliance. Manage risk, Prove Trust Continuously Vantage Trust Management Plan platform takes the manual work out of your trust, out of your security and compliance process, and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. Anyway, Zach Pogrob has some fantastic photos and Getty Images. He went through Getty Images and found some insane photos of Steve Jobs that I hadn't seen. I thought I'd seen every viral photo.

He's watching in the bottom right corner. If we can pull this up. He's watching Larry Allison game tape.

I love it. That's amazing.

So good.

Yeah. Wow. He's really watching Ellison just being like, okay, what's he saying? How am I going to counter this? How am I going to do that? I assume, or just learning from.

From one of the best.

Yeah, yeah. Zoom in on the bottom picture.

Laying on the floor like, you know, deep in conversation or argument.

No, no. Oh, is he on the phone? I think he's just thinking. It just seems like he's on the. He's just on. He's just like exasperated, like taking a second.

They didn't have. It's funny, I just assumed he had an iPhone up, but the phones weren't that small.

No, he invented the phones.

Yeah, they didn't have that.

This is pretty much he had to.

Go through that to make the iPhone.

Indeed.

Speaking of hardware and jobs, I have Reggie James new book here. It looks absolutely fantastic. I got it last night, so. Well, thank you for making it. I purchased it to support support the fellow technology brother. But it is absolutely fantastic. Portfolio company in there daylight.

That's very cool.

Love to see it and bunch of other features.

I love these books.

Nothing. Oh, we got nothing in there.

No way. That's amazing. Yeah, very cool.

Beautiful, beautiful stuff.

So go pick it up. What is it? Hardwarebook.com I think was what he said.

Hardware book 2024.

Hardwarebook2024.

It's sold out.

So it's sold out. But I don't know DM Reggie with something.

He'll figure it out.

Figure it out. But if you're trying to build a product, go to linear.com or linear app.

It's Linear app.

Linear app. Linear is a purpose built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development. Streamline issues, projects and product roadmaps. And they got linear.

World's best team. Best teams use linear. They got cursor, perplexity, retool ramp, OpenAI scale, boom. Cash app. Vercel. You should be one of them.

Kind of LeBron James of product planning.

Speaking of LeBron James, breaking news from Emily Sundberg. LeBron was in the Hamptons last week and needed somewhere to practice. Instead of going to some weird rich guy's home gym who would have probably asked for photos afterwards, he turned to the most obvious solution, a high school. And Emily interviewed a teenager who played pickup basketball with him. This is amazing. Great story.

Good for his brand too. It's just great for his brand all around.

Great for his brand.

Yeah, it's like it's an unexpected gift and unexpected time. Like you played, you're a teenager, you probably played basketball at this high school gym. Like you know, every day for a couple months during basketball season, probably off season a little bit. And then all of a sudden the greatest basketball player of all time, potentially. I don't know where you stand on the goat debate, Jordy, but he just shows up, puts on a clank.

There's only one goat debate I care about.

The best entrepreneur of all time.

We have another post here from Ira Tickets. Good morning. 10,000 new AI startups with cute little minimalistic names and logos just launched and they say they're gonna change everything. Please enjoy your timeline scroll. Just call me if you need anything. That's true. We have a post here.

Is he just saying that there's a ton of AI startups launching every day.

On the team timeline, basically, and they're all going to change everything, John.

Okay.

They're going to.

They're going to do names, logos. I feel like. I feel like what's clogging up the timeline more is like, you know, people actually taking, like, the viral video seriously, like, and, like, breaking through. I don't see that many like, cute little minimalistic names and logos that much, but I don't know. It's interesting. Yeah, I guess. I guess it is. It is a paradox that there could be so many things that all that all change everything simultaneously.

My recommendation for Soham. We were on the drive in today. We were working on this. It's hard to see.

Maybe text it to the group or put it in the tab.

The dev shop of Soham Parikh.

The dev shop last. Yes.

And just flip the browser company logo. You're at 5 million of ARR by the end of next week.

I really do think that I'm hopefully excited for him if he's going to this new video AI startup and he's working seriously on that and he enjoys the founding engineer role there rooting for him. But I do think the dev shop, he's teed up for something amazing. Like, I think that that would be a fantastic business for him.

Deeply aligned with the culture, clearly loves building.

Yeah.

He got over his skis, made some bad decisions, disappointed some people, maybe broke some rules.

Yep.

But if he just stayed in Mumbai and found 50 other guys like him and he was the guy that was onboarding clients, he would absolutely crush it.

Totally. Totally. Yeah. Onboarding clients would be huge.

And it seems like he likes juggling. He likes juggling, bouncing around.

Totally. And I think most importantly, with this crazy viral attention that he got, I think he had a chance to kind of rewire people's brains on what it means to use a dev shop, because using a dev shop feels very antithetical to, like, the way startups are built. We talked about this a little bit yesterday. Like, you're like, it's a. It's a sign that, like, you can't hire or you can't actually build. Like, you don't have a team on your, like, aligned to you. But he is, he has such an interesting story. That I think a lot of people would. Would say, yeah, let's get Soham on for, you know, the dev shop on for a quick sprint for three months. Seems to be good. Good at that. He has a good team and he could grow it from there. So I don't know. I'm. I'm optimistic about that. I was surprised that that didn't. It didn't seem like when we talked to him that it was even in his mind that he. That he could do that. It also seemed like he hadn't considered just having a bidding war between the three jobs and saying, like, who can actually pay me more? Yeah, I think there's equity thing was weird.

Surprisingly, there's a bunch. There's a bunch of teams right now where if you just said, I'm going to work 18 hours a day on your company, it would probably pay you 350k.

Yeah, there was weird. There was something weird about the fact that he's like, like, I don't want to talk about my personal life, but I have financial needs. But also, I did. Wasn't doing it for the money. And actually, like, I cared about the equity because it's like, if you're really in, like, I have medical bills or something, you'd be like, cash now.

No, the Schetzo takeaway is that like, there. He's like the mob, the Mumbai mob is like saying like, go get equity. No, no, no. Like, go, you.

You.

You work for us kind of thing.

Sure, sure, sure. But. But in that case, you would just.

Max out the cash.

You'd max out the cash, right? You max out the cash comp and you. And you try and go get one. One job or multiple jobs that just pay all cash or as much cash as possible. And we need to talk to more of the founders on the other side.

Of it wasn't like, he had this. This master plan of I'm gonna like, sure. Taking the takeaway from yesterday is. I was coming away and being like, okay, five people came out on X. Are there 20 more on LinkedIn?

Yep.

And it's like this massive conspiracy that he was like, master plan.

Yeah.

But it didn't. That wasn't my takeaway.

We'll have to dig into it more and talk to more folks because it's totally possible that more people.

Didi had a post from yesterday who was on the show yesterday. He said, Soham is just tip of the iceberg. Just like this redditor pulling 800k a year working 5 jobs.

Wow.

There's a Reddit what is it? A group called r overemployed. There's 500,000 people where people just maniacally discuss this. There are thousands of Soham Parikhs we don't know about. There's a post here from user big fat phony account. He says 5 jobs at 800k TC using an ROI mentality. I've jumped from 3 jobs to 5 jobs 2 weeks ago. I'm now making 3 3k a day. It's doable for me. Here's why. I'm an expert in my field, which is data. I know how to solve problems in various forms. Clients, as I call them, know my value if there's a problem or they need my expert help. They like having me on the team. This expertise has come from from 15 years of experience but also three years of overemployment. Teaching me the latest methods. I'm all remote. None of this one day in the office bs, just say no. So he's basically giving the playbook. The funny thing is you could just have a consulting shop and do this above board and probably be way more successful. You just have to build the muscle to sell your services and and not just get fixated on just applying for jobs. Yeah, like you can still look, okay, this company is hiring for this role.

Great.

I should reach out to them. Hey, I offer XYZ service. I'll be, you know, fractional staff engineer, whatever it's called. I command a premium because I'm super experienced and I have this team. You can call me anytime. I'll be available, you know, 18 hours of the day and you could just build a legitimate business. So I think that that should be the takeaway from engineers that are getting inspired by Soham in the wrong way is just build a consulting practice.

I agree. Well, if he does, he's going to have to reach out to a lot of people. He needs a CRM that he can trust. He needs Adeo Customer Relationship Magic. Adeo is the AI native CRM that builds scales and grows your company to the next level. Let's mix it up with a post from the P. God if your pure.

Is important going into the weekend, everyone.

Yeah. This is huge for July 4th, which is tomorrow. If you're pure of heart, drinking 17 ice cold beers isn't bad for you. We gotta have Andrew Huberman back on to debate this.

Debate this.

And Brian Johnson too. We'll get both of them. They'll love it. They'll be like yeah, heart agree.

I think we feel this way about splitting a Bottle of champagne. It certainly doesn't feel bad.

Everything in moderation. Including moderation. That's what I like to say.

That's right. Anyway, what else should we go leaf over at? Public. Our friend said this is some interesting context on the tokenization of private companies. So he says tokenization of private companies is tricky and risky. Public used to offer alternative assets like music royalties. And we look deeply into offering tokenized private company shares. Here's why we haven't done it. The risks come down to four aspects. Liquidity, supply, information rights and investor protections. First, some background. Public offered private assets via regulatory framework called REG A. Think of it like a wrapper that turned a private asset like ip art, real estate or private company into a security, I. E. Securitization, enabling it to be traded. It's very similar to what a crypto token represents in the Robin Hood tokenization scenario. Same thing, different database. And he goes on to give a lot more context. He says let's say Robinhood now owns $10 million worth of stock at a $300 billion valuation. They could spin up 10 million tokens priced at $1 each and offer them on their platform. Customers then own the token, not the actual shares in OpenAI. Think of it like a ticket representing a sliver of ownership in the SPV, but not OpenAI directly. And he says the issue one, a $10 million float on a $300 billion company with major hype is unlikely to meet demand. That limited float can quickly lead to a price spike, aka the shares will trade at a premium. The $1 token might jump to 10, implying a $3 trillion valuation for OpenAI. What started as a fundamentals based investment quickly turns into pure speculation. People buying tokens in the hope someone else will pay more.

I mean the float on some of these things is crazy. I mean the numbers, that's what I was saying with, with $5,005,000 investments, $5,000,000 total. So there's 1,000 people that are putting 5K down to set the price of SpaceX. It's like, does that make any sense.

Not setting the price, the initial.

Well, they're setting. Yeah, offering. No, no, no, but, but like there are essentially 1000 slugs of 5k value to kind of set the price. It's like the, the smallest possible market. So yeah, I mean I, I think that there's, there's a lot of risk to that. They could just trade like the other.

Thing, the other thing. Because you know, these types of offerings will typically be tied to SPVs, not the underlying shares. There's usually no information rights. There can be dilution, other changes, and so you actually don't know the value of the underlying assets.

Well, really quickly, let's tell you about numeralhq.com, sales tax and autopilot spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. We have Chris Miller joining the author of Chip War in just a few minutes. I wanted to run through this post in the. It's not a post, it's an article in the Wall Street Journal from yesterday. China is quickly gaining in the AI race. I think this is something we'll be talking about with Chris. Chinese artificial intelligence companies are loosening the US global stranglehold on AI, challenging US superiority and setting the stage for a global arms race in the technology. In Europe, Middle East, Africa and Asia, users ranging from multinational banks to public universities are turning to large language models from Chinese companies such as startup Deep Seek and E commerce giant Alibaba. That's Quinn, of course. As alternatives to US offerings such as ChatGPT, HSBC and Standard Chartered have begun testing Deep Seq's models internally. According to people familiar with the matter. Saudi Aramco, the world's largest oil company, recently installed Deep SEQ in its main data center. Which is interesting because Saudi Aramco, I believe they have their own model as well. And so they're testing Deep Seq very AGI pilled. And I mean you could, you could rewrite this to say like, hey, like, you know, Perplexity has a Deep SEQ for Microsoft serves Deep Seek. So maybe it's okay, but obviously the larger geopolitical narrative is here is like, we don't want to have the rest of the world standardize on non Western models that could be very harmful to global competitiveness. And so that's something that we'll be digging into. Even US major cloud service providers such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Google offer DeepSeek to customers, despite the White House banning use of the company's app on some government devices over data security concerns. Of course there's a, there's a separation between the layer there. If you're running the open source model on your own chips, it shouldn't be able to call back to China. But if you're installing the Deep Sea app on a government phone, well then everything that you send it has to go to a server to be processed to then be inferenced. And so like when, like I assume that everything I've ever said to ChatGPT exists on an OpenAI server somewhere, right? Because they have to store it because when I open the app, I want to see all my chats.

Required it.

Yeah, yeah, it's required. Well, that's a slightly separate thing. It's about like actually disclosure, but yes.

Hegseth app just being like. Thoughts on Iran right now? What should we do?

Brutal.

OpenAI's ChatGPT remains the world's predominant AI consumer chatbot with 910 million global downloads. Let's hit the gong for OpenAI. There we go. Compared to with Deep Seeks, 125 million. Give me the 125 million for Deep Seek. Not even close to OpenAI. Deep Seek. You got to catch up, buddy. No, it's very impressive. 121 million. Serious, serious number figures from Research Sensor Tower. The US's AI is widely seen as the industry's gold standard because of advantages in computing, Computing, semiconductors, cutting edge research, and access to financial capital. But as many other industries. But as in other, as in many other industries, Chinese companies have started to snatch customers by offering performance that is nearly as good at vastly lower prices. I imagine what they're gonna say, let's see, prices, yeah. A study of global competitiveness in critical technologies released in early June by researchers at Harvard University found China has advantages in two key building blocks of AI, data and human capital that are helping it keep pace. The competition, some industry insiders said, has set the world on the path toward a technological cold war, potentially even a chip war. And we have our guest, Chris Miller in the studio. Author Chip War. Welcome to the show. How are you doing?

What's happening?

Good, thanks. Are you.

Thank you so much for joining.

It's great to have you.

Great to have you. I would love. I mean, we were just reading an article from the Journal about the, the China versus the US AI race. There's a whole bunch of modern details, but I'd love to kick it off with a little bit on your background and how you initially came became interested in the idea of a chip war and kind of how things emerge from there.

Yeah, I got interested in the idea of a chip war because I realized we've been living through multiple iterations of one since the first chips were invented in the late 1950s, that you couldn't really separate the development of military power or a country's strategic position on the world stage without understanding their ability to access and deploy computing power. And so we're seeing a new version of that right now with AI, but it's actually replicating what we saw in the Cold War competition between the U.S. and the Soviet Union or the economic competition in the US and Japan in the 1980s. And so then as now, there's this deep link between access to compute and your strategic position.

Yeah. Going back in the history, we were digging into some of the efforts that the Chinese government had.

Yeah. How many, how many five year plans have they done? Keep stacking these five year plans and it seems to be working for decades.

Just to stay on the lagging edge. What did you learn about that and what can you tell us about that narrative as maybe the chip war is heating up right now, but China has been aware of this for decades and has been investing against it.

Yeah, they've certainly been investing for a long time. I think really the last decade or so it's kicked up a real notch both because China solved a lot of its other technological problems. It's become self sufficient in many other spheres of manufacturing and making chips is the one of the really few areas and the largest by far where China still has to import manufactured products from abroad, such that today China's largest import, more even than it spends on oil, is importing semiconductors from Taiwan. And so this is something that they.

Wanted to break free from more on semis than oil. That's insane.

When you talk about that. Is that driven heavily by stuff that's not sanctioned on the lagging edge, the, you know, the 15, 16 nanometer, like the bigger chips or are we talking about like smuggling numbers of 3 nanometer chips that have been repurposed through shell companies or something like that?

It's a mix, but it's mostly things that are legal to sell to China and you can sell both the lagging edge, like things in your dishwasher, but also a smartphone chip at 3nm that you can still sell to China. And there's a large volume of those for PCs and smartphones and autos that are still being sold.

Yeah, yeah. So every Huawei phone has a chip and those are not sanctioned. We're just talking about the large accelerators, the big GPUs that are really under.

Exactly.

Under lock and key.

That's right.

Interesting. Then take me through kind of how you process the initial rollout of the chip ban during the Biden era. How did that play out for you? Were, I assume people were calling you. I don't know. I want to know your side of that era of history here.

Yeah, well, I would actually rewind the clock back to 20, 18 and 19. That's. That's when ASML, the Dutch company that produces the lithography tools you need to produce cutting edge chips was first thinking about selling a cutting edge tool to a Chinese customer. And then the, the Trump administration and the first administration leaned very heavily on the Dutch and said, don't let this go through because if you do, China will have everything it needs to catch up in chip making. And so I think that was actually the key turning point. And then the 2022 restrictions that not only tightened up the rules around chip making equip equipment, but also banned the GPUs that you can make with these tools in some ways naturally followed from that first 2019 move. What was different in 2022 was that there was a real, I think, understanding, and it came before ChatGPT, that AI was going to be a big deal and that access to GPUs was going to be a critical input into building bigger and better AI systems.

Yeah. How did the chip shortage fit into all of that? During COVID I mean, everyone experienced, you know, the, the chip shortages from like, auto prices going up, used car, There were so many market distortions. How did you process that point in time? And then I want to step forward even further.

Yeah. So I think the chip shortage didn't really impact tech companies, impacted, as you say, autos and dishwashers and microwaves, but it brought together a political coalition across the west that included the auto companies and the tech companies and, and medical device companies, all of whom realized chips were very, very important. We needed reliable supply chains and we needed to stay ahead technologically in, in this. And that's why, whether in the US or in Japan or in Europe, you had CHIPS acts being passed to reinvigorate domestic manufacturing to try to provide some more resilience for these supply chains. It would have been unthinkable five years earlier, but because of this coalition, it was possible.

Yeah. Is it, is it a misnomer to call China's strategy around semiconductor and domestic production of semiconductors and all of their semiconductor strategies communist? It feels like they in some ways have an extremely capitalist system with not picking winners and putting out, you know, huge government incentives. They're, they're shifting the market. But from what we've heard a lot of times, there's just a huge pool of money and there's vicious competition to go after it. So how would you actually characterize, like, what words are we using? How are we describing the Chinese political system now specifically with regard to not just how they elect people, but specifically their chip policies?

Yeah, you know, I think you got a strange mix of policies being deployed by the Chinese and, and in some ways that's why it's worked relatively well by a lot of metrics. You have the benefit of the market weeding out firms that can't compete, but you've also got the benefit of the government devoting long term patient capital into its priority areas, which pulls in resources, pulls in entrepreneurs to these segments. I think the risk for China is that unlike other sectors that they've done well, like solar or EVs, where they've had a thousand flowers bloom and you figure out which ones are capable, which ones are not, in the chip industry you don't have nearly as much of that. And in fact the key players today, like the most significant, most advanced maker of processor chips today, was also the most significant advance in China 10 years ago. So there's much more that would be SMIC which produces chips for Huawei. Got it. Yeah. And so you don't have this thousand flowers bloom dynamic in the chip industry just because it's so capital intensive and the number of people with the know how is fairly limited that you've got a small number of flowers blooming and all these flowers now have state ownership.

Yeah. Can you.

So it's a different dynamic.

It feels like they're building like a, like a mirror stack. Can you walk us through the equivalent to Nvidia TSMC ASML over in China and then maybe give me a little bit of color. Yeah. And on the SK Hynix side as well. Are they doing stuff there and then I'd love to know kind of if you can give me like a qualitative grade of like how serious these, these competitors are. Huawei seems super advanced. It seems like SMIC and smee. Maybe not, but I'll let you explain it.

Yeah. Yes, I think you're right. They are trying to build out the entire supply chain. On the memory side you have ymtc, which is their leading producer of NAND memory, cxmt, leading producer of the DRAM memory, including eventually the DRAM memory that will go into be paired with GPUs, the high bandwidth memory. I think on the memory side, China's done really well. You probably wouldn't say it's the cutting edge in terms of its ability to produce that volume, but in terms of the kind of pure technological capability, if they haven't caught up, they've gotten very close. I think for the processor chip side it's been more complicated. Huawei is very capable at chip design. It's done it for smartphones at the cutting Edge now it's catching up very rapidly in terms of GPU design. Hard to exactly benchmark vis a vis Nvidia. But Huawei is very capable in chip design. The challenge it had is that SMIC is right now about five years behind TSMC five or six years in terms of its ability to produce processor chips at quality and at scale. And so that has been a real limiting factor. And the reason SMIC's behind is because there are no real Chinese equivalents today of companies like ASML or Applied Materials or Tokyo Electron that make the tools that make chips. There are companies that would like to compete with them that can compete with some of this really simpler lower end tools. But when it comes to the advanced tools, the Chinese firms just aren't there yet. And so SMIC needs to buy.

How far behind?

Hard to say. I mean I think certainly, certainly 10 years behind today. They're now investing a ton. They're reverse engineering usual playbook. But if you look at the leading edge fabs that SMIC operates, it's still mostly western tools inside. And every single year for the past decade or so, China has been one of the largest, if not the largest importers of chipmaking equipment in the world. Last year China accounted for ballpark half the revenue of all of the world's key chip making equipment vendors. Which is a pretty good data point for where those firms are relative to their Chinese competitors.

What about the scale of the shell company activity buying from TSMC and other players? Have you tracked that closely?

Yeah, well, certainly a big shell company was discovered and then we hope shut down last year. But the scale was vast, truly enormous. Several million chips procured from TSMC and then appear diverted to Huawei, which is at a scale that I am frankly surprised by. Everyone knew there would be smuggling in the scale of dozens or hundreds or even thousands. But smuggling at the scale of millions really calls into the question the ability of the US government to properly enforce these rules. And the only thing worse than a rule that is overly broad is a rule that's overly broad and not seriously enforced. You get the worst of both worlds. And so I think the US government has a lot of thinking of its own to do. And how do you actually make these rules stick in the real world? And thus far it's been a real struggle.

Are there any under explored areas in data center build out where people aren't really tracking the competitive dynamic between China and America? I was listening to Dylan Patel talk about how with Huawei's Cloud Matrix 384 they were able to do, I think fiber optic connections between the chips and basically do NV link at a much larger scale. And Nvidia had tried to do that and maybe not been able, not been as successful. And it felt like, you know, Huawei is slightly behind or seriously behind in a number of categories, but that might be one place that they're actually ahead. Have you tracked that at all? Is there anything that people should be digging into there? I feel like the narrative was like everyone was getting up to speed on Nvidia and then people learned about TSMC and then they learned about asml and then they learned about SK Hynix and I feel like we're all about to learn about a networking provider soon. But what's been your take on that industry?

Yeah, yeah, no, I think you're right to focus on networking as a key area of rapid technological advance. You know, it's hard to benchmark who's how far ahead. Unlike in Foundry where you've got like a really clear way to measure TSMC versus smic, there's not such an obvious kind of benchmark. I think the underexplored area in the Chinese ecosystem is actually not at the chip level, but the cloud level, which is, we know that China's smuggled in a large number of chips. We know that there are a meaningful volume of chips that SMIC has produced domestically for Huawei. But it appears that a lot of these chips are in data centers that have low utilization. And anecdotally, all the anecdotes we hear about utilization of AI data centers in China suggests a lot of real challenges in terms of getting utilization, partly because there's some state owned telecoms that are just mismanaging their cloud businesses. But it's, I think, surprising that Chinese firms like Deepseek talk about compute limitations given the number of chips we know that are actually in China. And so if you're, you know, if you're starting with a thesis that China is good at centralization, that doesn't appear to be what we're seeing here. We appear to be seeing an inefficient decentralization, perhaps driven by some of the pathologies of having state owned firms run data centers.

Do you have any insight into what's happening that benefits China, but happens outside of China? I've heard reports that folks are taking training data on hard drives and flying it to another country, or doing a training run, saving the weights to hard drives and flying back. You know, you could imagine, you know, Deepsea V4 or something being trained by, you know, a series of shell companies and it's just an American guy with a big AWS account. Right. But at a certain point I would hope that Amazon says, wait, who are you and why do you want to spend $100 million this month on cloud? Like we like billing everyone a few thousand dollars. But this is going to set off some alarm bells. What are the risks there? Is the government doing anything about that? What is your take on this idea of just hopping onto other clouds and then routing the data backwards?

Yeah, I think this is an emerging area of focus for the government. I think you're right that it's an area where the US Government doesn't have a whole lot of visibility. And I think cloud computing companies haven't. They've got your customer requirements, et cetera, but not nearly as much investment as say, a financial institution spends on making sure they're not transferring money to a sanctioned Iranian entity, for example. I wouldn't be surprised if for the next couple of years we have a lot more build out of this type of regulation precisely to deal with what you're talking about. And I think a large training run is large. I think we shouldn't be surprised to see heightened know your customer requirements as you get larger and larger in terms of the scale of compute that you're you're using. The other nuance is that certainly US cloud providers are, are key here, but there are also cloud providers from other countries in other countries that are playing a role. We read a lot about Malaysia the last couple of months as one of the key buyers of GPUs and a variety of Malaysian companies that are maybe working with Chinese companies operating there. I think that's also an area where we might see more regulation. There's been proposals out of the House of Representatives, for example, to say we want more GPUs going to US cloud providers and fewer going to non US cloud providers precisely for that type of region. America first for AI is sort of the way to think about that. And there are different parts of the government that would find that pretty appealing.

Can you, I mean, you mentioned Malaysia. Can you take me on a little bit of a tour geopolitically of what's going on in some of the other countries that might be on the horizon for AI. Relevance? I'm thinking about, you know, we've obviously everyone knows the US and China and then Taiwan's role and then Malaysia pops up and then France has Mistral now and there's deals being done in the Middle East. I was always Surprised that Russia was not on the conversation at all because they have a very, like, long lineage of incredible math prodigies. And it feels like you would. I mean, there are a number of AI scientists in America who come from Russia. And so I was. I'm surprised that we're not seeing, oh, Russia's getting in the supercomputer game or trying to build out some massive data center. They have been busy. And so what are some of the other countries? Can you take me on a tour of maybe. Maybe. Let's just start with, like, what's going on in the Middle East? How are you thinking about that? Is it just like a jump ball bidding war between are they going with the west or the East? And then we can move on to some of the other regions in the world that might be relevant or not?

Yeah, the Middle east has a real advantage in terms of the amount of capital they can deploy, which matters if you're trying to build big compute clusters. And I think both for Saudi and especially for the uae, there's a desire to build their next generation of industries if and when oil becomes less, less, less reliable for them. And that's driven this investment in terms of building infrastructure. And we saw after Trump visited a couple of weeks ago now big deals announced, especially in the UAE, you know, 500,000 GPUs a year to the UAE is a large number. I think the question for the UAE is there's no doubt they can build data centers. No doubt they can afford the GPUs. Can they build businesses on top of that? And I think all these countries want to do more than just host Azure or AWS data centers. They want to own their own businesses and build on top of that. And that's a harder thing to do than simply building data centers. I think the UAE has big ambitions in particular, but it's easier to have ambitions than it is to realize them, and it'll be a challenge.

What's your take on TSMC's traction in Arizona? Nvidia has had some announcements as well. How, how bullish are you on. On the progress they're making?

So I think the good news is that TSMC has publicly said their manufacturing yields, the share chips that they produce that actually work are just as good in Arizona as they are in Taiwan. That's a really powerful data point. I think the bad news is that on a unit cost are still a lot more expensive than in Taiwan. And that cost differential will decline over time, but it's a real differential and it's not going to go to zero. And so the key question I think is to what extent TSMC's customers are going to keep pushing TSMC to build more in the US versus be comfortable with production in Taiwan. I think the trend has been that they're pushing TSMC to do more in the US and certainly TSMC looking at the tariff dynamics has registered that they've announced plans to build six spabs beyond the the one operational one under construction right now. Unclear exactly over what time horizon that happens, but so long as you've got these kind of tariff and geopolitical issues front and center, I think TSMC's customers will be encouraging them to pursue this diversification.

Yeah, who would eat that cost? Because Nvidia has famously very high margins. All the hyperscalers are thinking about doing in house chip design now. I'd love to know your take on, on Microsoft strategy, the TPU at Google, anything else that's going on Trainium and Amazon for example, because you could see those. You could see, yes, TSMC in Arizona is more expensive, but that cost is kind of mitigated by being able to route around Nvidia's margin. But I don't know if that's a reasonable thesis.

Yeah, I think my assumption would be that the cost is shared by across the supply chain. And actually if you look at the supply chain, you've got a number of high margin companies involved. TSMC has a pretty healthy margin. Its key customers do as well. And if you take an iPhone as an example, ballpark, the share of the TSMC content in an iPhone. $50 let's say if that goes up by 30% in the context of a thousand dollar iPhone, it's not dramatically going to change the economics. Same for same for an Nvidia server. So I think you're right to say there's plenty of places where you could absorb some of that cost. What share of it goes to TSMC versus customers, I'm sure is a constant source of negotiation.

Yeah, so there's kind of like an interesting supply chain here in the actual delivery of AI applications. And I can't help but wonder if some of the, some of the international players outside of America and China are maybe targeting the wrong thing. It seems extremely valuable to be able to fab chips in your country and own your supply chain and be able to produce a consistent flow. And then it also seems incredibly valuable to have the front end to AI essentially like a ChatGPT national champion that users go to. But the model itself and the data center seems maybe less important there. But it feels like all of the different countries that we're talking about, whether it's France or Saudi Arabia, they seem obsessed with owning a data center. But then if the local population is going to chat.com instead of LeChat for Mistral, like has France really won if they just have a model. And maybe, maybe they're thinking about in terms of deploying within the government in the same sense that the DoD is deploying llama right now. But how do you think these international countries are thinking about the different places that they can try and plug into the overall delivery of artificial intelligence?

Yeah, I think that's the right question to ask. And I think you're right to suggest that just having a data center is not a guarantee of making money off of AI. Yeah, it seems highly likely to be the case that the, the application layer and the, the, the operating system for AI, however that develops, will be places where a lot of money is made. And again, not clear that, that if you build a data center in your country, you're going to guarantee that you have that at all. I think when governments think about this, there's probably a degree to which they're not asking the question you're asking and they ought to. There's also, I think, a degree to which they're thinking about sovereignty, their, their tech infrastructure. And they're worried that if they become wholly, wholly reliant either on US or Chinese AI providers, they're going to be in a weakened position politically now. Is the best use of their resources solving that problem building data centers? I think that's an open question, but we've certainly seen a lot of countries turn in that direction as their first response for trying to build a bit more room for maneuver in the AI space.

Interesting. As the UAE was opening up to western businesses back in the day, there was a structure that was popular where if you were Coca Cola or Michelin and you wanted to sell into the UAE, from my understanding you needed to set up basically a 5050 JV with somebody locally. So it was basically owned and operated to some degree, but almost like more of a franchise model. And I wonder if we're will end up effectively seeing something like that on the data center side.

I just wonder how much that particular layer matters. Like if you look at what China's done in just the delivery of conventional web services, it's like obviously knockout drag out fight to try and build data center capacity and import chips, but also develop the traditional semiconductor, the CPU supply chain, and then ban Facebook and Google and develop homegrown alternatives for the application layer, but they haven't tried to rebuild Linux from scratch. Like, North Korea does have a fork of Linux called Red Star Linux, apparently. But in general, you know, Chinese phone companies have been fine forking Android. That hasn't been a place where they've said, oh, we got to rebuild, we got to own that from start to finish. It's like we want to be able to make the phones and we want to be able to deliver the services so that, you know, Google can't like bring their own censorship rules and we can't. And, you know, Samsung can't cut us off of actually delivering the phones. But in terms of the actual operating system layer, everyone's been kind of fine with standardizing around Linux and Android. I don't know, it's interesting. I wanted to talk about the AI trade. AI trade deals.

Yeah, yeah. So this is where I want to get into. I would love to understand the talent market in China to the extent that you can. It's been what we've been covering for the last couple weeks, these sort of massive changes between. In talent, moving around between the different labs. I'm curious if there's that level of competition for talent or it's between, like deep sea balls.

Yeah.

Because in some ways, you know, these American, you know, researchers constantly, you know, shift shifting around to the highest bidder. It's not necessarily the best for winning the AI race or winning the AI war. It's the right strategic moves for the different labs and different hyperscalers to compete for this talent to build the best businesses and products that they can. But it's not necessarily.

Yeah, an authoritarian might say, hey, let's just consolidate all of the AI talent at one lab in America. That's not the way I'm in America works. But how does it work in China?

Yeah, you still do have a pretty flexible labor market. I think there's an interesting question. Would you be right to consolidate all AI talent? I think if you're a believer that we're going to reach a single threshold called AGI, and if you reach it two months earlier, you've got this kind of enduring strategic prize, then maybe concentration is the right strategy. But if you're a believer instead that there's going to be a bunch of different products which will themselves be pretty transformative, but there's not one threshold you want to pass that actually you probably want a more flexible system that's going to allocate between different firms. And maybe it is macro efficient to have people jumping between firms once every year or two. If they're bringing the cutting edge, spreading it to different firms, that could actually be a good thing on the macro level as well as for the individual level. I would be more pessimistic about China's chances if I found them centralizing more aggressively. I thought one of the most pessimistic data points this year about the Chinese AI ecosystem was the news that deep seq researchers were having their passports confiscated. They had to report international travel, which to me is a strong disincentive to do it, doing AI research.

China seems to love doing that. They were doing that to rare earth element experts as well at rare earth minerals. It seems like it's just in the playbook when. When an industry becomes important, the passports start disappearing.

Yeah. I mean, the other elephant in the room is you can imagine the amount of pressure that the CCP is putting on Chinese AI researchers that are here in the U.S. maybe they want their citizens already or they have a path to citizenship, but if they have any family or any exposure at home, there's still a lever that they can pull.

I want to talk about talent in the context not just of AI model development, but actual chip fabrication. It feels like right now what we're seeing in the foundation model labs is an extreme power law in the value of AI researchers. Hence $100 million offers for top talent and starting salaries in the 300k range. Like that is a wide, wide power law.

Right.

There's always been this narrative around TSMC that you can't chatgpt how to make a semiconductor. There's a couple books out there, but it's. It's a lot of lore. It's a lot of tutelage and mentorship. How power law distributed is talent in semiconductors? And is there a world Where Chips Act 2.0, gives Intel a bunch of money or something, and then they start offering TSA SMC experts $100 million offers, and that really pulls forward American chip production.

So I don't think the mental model is that expertise is power law distributed. I think that there's lots of very unique capabilities you need to make a chip. And the level of expertise you need in each of the verticals is very deep, and you need all of them. And if you only got 90% of them, your chip doesn't work. And so you need to build this expertise over a long period of time. And so if you were to. Who are the three people you need to hire from TSMC to replicate tsmc, I would Say that's not the way to think about it. I hire half the staff or more. When TSMC was bringing the facility in Arizona online, they had hundreds of people from Taiwan working in Arizona. And this was not even their most leading edge ship production. This was two generations behind the cutting edge with all of the explicit help coming from headquarters as well. And so I think that helps illustrate how much of the transfer needs to happen at different levels. But if you look at who's Nick hired over the last decade, it's been a ton of engineers from Western Taiwanese, Singaporean semiconductor firms. And I think a lot of the advances that they made can be ascribed to the fact that they were able to import all of that human capital from workers who had previously spent a lot of time at other companies.

What are you tracking? We're halfway through the year. What kind of events are on the horizon or various potential new legislation are you kind of following?

I think from the policy side there's going to be some action on tariffs and semiconductors. It seems President's repeatedly said that. Unclear exactly what direction that's going to take, but it could have pretty big implications for the cost of building AI data centers. That's certainly one. And I think on the kind of tech controls front, we haven't seen the last of the moves from this administration either. And I wouldn't be surprised to see more there too.

Have you been tracking the leadership change at Intel? Lip Bhutan is coming in. It seems like they're going to be doing a lot of layoffs. I was trying to go back through Ben Thompson's analysis of intel through the years and try and understand how the narrative I've been tracking intel that long to follow whether there should be a split. What has been your take on intel and has it changed and how do you think what should we expect from intel over the next few years? It seems like they're going to be tightening things down. But do you expect any significant changes? Would you recommend any specific changes? Changes? I'm interested to hear your take on Intel.

There's a lot of people who think that a split between the manufacturing design businesses is the right way forward. I think that the question if you think about a split is what does that mean concretely? Because the reality is you'd still need to have a fair amount of integration between the design side and the manufacturing side because the manufacturing side is making chips for the design side that will be in progress for a number of years and the manufacturing side needs business from the design side. So split or no split is probably two things simplistic a way of thinking through the option set. There's a bunch of different variables around that and I think that's probably exactly what Litboo is wrestling with right now. I think that the second challenge that intel has is in its products business, the CPUs for DCs and data centers. I think there's a wide agreement that they've got work to do on both those fronts in terms of remaining competitive with AMD and they've lost market share over the past couple of years. They need to win that back. And so I think those are the two key issues he's got to deal with. And they're of course interlinked and it's hard to say you're only going to focus on one of them. Totally.

This is great. Any other questions?

Fascinating. No, we'd love to have you back on.

This is fantastic. Thank you so much for taking the time.

Next quarter.

Really appreciate this.

Well, thank you for having me.

Cheers. Bye and I'll be right back.

Up next we have Aaron Ginn, the GPU whisperer as his moniker in the information proclaims he has a new piece out in the wild. I believe it's in the Wall Street Journal. We will get the latest from him. Aaron, how you doing?

Hey man, how's it going?

Did I get that right? New piece in the Journal or somewhere else? The one on robots, arena mag. Is that where.

Yeah, yeah, that was Arena Mag and then I did.

You're prolific.

Yeah, it's fun. I'm a kind of a. Not only Christian but academic at heart so I like writing. I like all sorts of things in that zone. So. But yeah, I have a new one on robots.

Okay, take me through it. What was the inspiration? What's the thesis? Give me the details.

I can see I kind of known for hot spicy, hot spicy takes done in a kind manner and it gentlemen. But I think. I think most of the analysis done with people in our space is devoid of any kind of reference framing. They kind of live. People in Silicon Valley, particularly people in AI, live in the. They think they live in this kind of arrogant microcosm as C.S. lewis would say, like chronological snobbery. So they don't appreciate how other things that look very similar are just patterns of repeating as the. You know one of the most famous Solomon phrasing because the theorize in the Bible that Solomon said that, you know, that there's nothing new under the sun. We don't fully know who it's tribute to but generally attributed To Solomon. And in that sense, like innovation kind of goes the same pattern that you have something that innovation's always intensively oriented capex both in the sense of knowledge workers and also capital expenditure. And. And it always starts with the. As a rich luxury. But then it gets proliferated out. And robots as people have been kind of pitching, both in the sense of the doomsday sense and the utopian sense, I think are wrong. Because if you look at past patterns of innovation and how it's been adopted in society, it generally doesn't get oriented towards the rich. Like the rich continue to do what they do. There's a reason why rich people have their own planes, have their own drivers, have a yacht, have multiple houses, have chefs and caterers, things like that. That's basically the same trajectory of lifestyle that they've had for a while. And in terms of like things that you own, things that you do, things you buy. Like there's the. The names that are associated with the Yale Club and the Harvard Club continue to be the same names.

Yeah.

People who go to Davos are the same names. But the real arc of capitalism, which is why the existentialist, the German, the Frankfurt School was completely wrong. Is that what it does, is that it takes those luxuries and gives it to everybody else. I think that there's a. There's a. I've heard the name of the venture capitalist, but he said that his kind of moniker of looking at innovation and adoption is oriented towards taking something available to the rich and give it to somebody else. So Uber is the example of that. Right. Private driver to everybody else. And so robots will be the same thing. Certainly robots will. There will be certainly a luxury version of a robot that will be deployed for people and the rich and famous. But the rich and famous can afford people and rich and famous like character. They like things that are like go listen to like I know people love comparing you and Jordy to all in. Right. And just go look at what Chamath talks about. It's like it's things that are. Take a long time and are delicate.

I love it.

Yeah, yeah. This is made of endangered panda fur. Right. Myself, right.

No all in host has ever ward panda fur. That's. But the King's cashmere is real. Yes.

Yeah, yeah. So. So like. So for the rest of us, right, Upper middle class down, robots will be for us. Robots will give us the ability to do things that we didn't have before. That makes us more like rich people.

Yes.

And a.k.a. time and, and so that's what it's arguing is that.

Yeah.

That robots will not be dystopian, it will not be utopian.

Yeah.

It'll be every other pattern of wave innovation and helping the average American live a better life.

Yeah, yeah, I know. I noticed this when I started interacting with like the, the multi. Multi billionaires that every app on my phone they had a person for. So if you do incorporation of your company through legal Zoom or Stripe Atlas, they have a lawyer full time on staff. You have Uber, they have a driver, you have doordash, they have a chef.

And it's like have guys.

The new technology. Yeah, the guys. Yeah. How many problems can you solve by just calling a guy? Very interesting. What do you think about. It was Chris pike, right.

Who had this Create Guys app. They're going to be democratizing access to.

Guys to just a guy.

It's just a database of lawyers and drivers.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean even, even like, you know, you don't call 911 and that's for everyone. Private security is the opposite side of that. But what do you think about Chris Pike's take that when. I mean, I guess this relates. But I think his take was that if there is a human that is acting as like a roadblock to something that you want, that will be replaced by artificial intelligence or robotics. But if the human is part of the delightfulness of that experience and his example was like an omakase chef that will never be replaced because you want. What do you think about that? Give your reaction, please.

So, so like I'll, I'll like I'll. I'll be at Chamathra, right? Because like there was a question once he said like, you know, he was talking to jcal, right. He's the ultimate like the thing guy, whatever the thing is. That's, that's J. Cal, right? And he goes, you know, talking about watches and Shaman was like, oh, get a handmade mechanical watch, right? So I'm wearing one right now actually. So, so like. And, and so you look at this, right? So it's a lot.

Go to getbezel.com your best concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Literally any watch.

So so it, so it, you know, hand and hand guilloche, hand and car. VGC is a software engineer that he'd be garden watches. And so the reason why this is worth it is because of that human interaction, right? It's that his, his ability to do everything by hand. He has like the machine built in like late 1900s he does everything. He could show it. It's like that's the point. Right. And so another example of this would be like being a waiter. Like you could I use this example like there is automated checkout Applebee's. I don't know if you've been there recently, but there's automated Applebee's like Chick Fil A. Right. One of the most highest grossing per store sale fast food joint in. In the world. One of the best. Delicious has tons of people. Right. So it could if it wanted to, but it's not the point of where you go and, and fundamentally there's this disconnect. I think it's spiritually connected. I think you could watch some of Peter Till's recent interview with do that. You can kind of hear some of these trends. It's like if you remove the ability of the anthropomorphic orientation of what innovation is and why you do it, you come up with these inconclusions that are basically absurd. Like there's people in the Silicon Valley who argue absurd things about the nature of what the argument innovation is going to. Because the presupposition and priors and the metaphysics built into it are basically that humans are worthless and existential and they kind of have a Star Trek Descartes view of the world that's very dark. And the same thing exists with social media. The same thing exists for search, the same thing exists for mobile phones now it exists in AI. All of these are continuations of the same thing. And just like the AI doomers, if you go look at the names of the people, it's like the same people who are like a title to social media is going to end the universe or to people because it's the same line of thinking. So humans just like what you're doing now. People watch this show because of you too.

Sure.

Like it does. Even if there is a memetic machine. Yeah.

It's not the most efficient way to get the news. But it's fun.

But it's fun, right? Like because it's part of what the nature of this. It's hard for me to imagine the.

Idea that let's say a humanoid robot gets real traction in restaurants. Well, naturally. And you can go and sit down at a restaurant, a humanoid can serve you and whatever. And it's efficient, it's fast, it's smooth. That will naturally create even more opportunity for human waiters, waitresses that love the craft of service. And I think it is a real craft. And I think that anybody that's Had a truly fantastic dinner and can attest. Can attest.

Yeah. Yeah. So it's a. This is one reason why I think the adoption curve of AI is going to be kind of like two different buckets of things. There's going to be the infrastructure side, which we're going to excel at, and then there's going to be the adoption side, which we're not going to excel at. And some of it is political, which is everything from we lost the AI moratorium and the bill, but thankfully the bill got passed, so we're not paying higher taxes. So. Thank you, Daddy Trump. Daddy T wins again. So. Yeah, you know, so. Yeah, exactly. Make what a noise, right?

Yeah.

So. But, but the. But. But on the other side is like, if we're going to do, let's say, one of the best things AI does is that it. It allows this, the ability of computers to look like humans, behave like humans. It's fantastic at that. It's the ability to, To. To model us, right? To. To make a memetic version of us. And from an education perspective, that could be incredibly powerful. Because my upbringing, even though I went to public school before, it was insane. So, like, I'll say from that, but my dad, who's Chinese, raised me much more of a Talmudic, traditional, tiger dad sort of fashion. So I still remember this one conversation I had with my dad, I think it was in, like, fourth grade, and I got like 100 in a class. And he said, why did I. Why did I do extra credit, right? It was like his immediate response. And, you know, and the, you know, the, the more Caucasian people in the audience will clutch the pearls. Oh, my God, it's so traumatic, right? But the point of it, right, is like, oh, you always can do more, right? He's teaching me resiliency, teaching me how to challenge myself, teaching me how to push beyond what I think I can do into, like, open by expanse. Because his goal was to not have the upbringing he did, which was super poor. And. And so imagine the AI that could do that, right? That could be your. Your own. Yeah, yeah, it did. Like, your own ability to challenge your thoughts. Like, people are thinking it, like the cluey thing, which I think is a very surface level understanding what AI can do. But imagine if AI was actually like a challenge agent that. Let's say you got the right answer. And I was like, you're wrong, so prove it to me. Like, you're right, right? There's a whole other layer of this, and this is. This is what, like, in terms of The El Salvador project that we're working on is like that, that's kind of like the orientation of why other countries don't have that. Like they don't have the teacher, the, the labor units, let alone they don't have the internal capability of delivering these types of things today. But a computer can come in now because what they have now, they have nothing to do. Right. And they're willing to take a swing, being like, well, you know, if it works 50 of the time, that's a huge win for our country. But America, the lawsuits and this and this and this. Right. But you know, Bukele is just like, oh, this sounds like right here, we should just try this. If it doesn't work well, I'll do something else. Right. And, and so that's why I think we will excel at infrastructure, which is why it's so important we push Nvidia products everywhere. But the adoption is going to be in Africa, second world, third world countries. It's not going to be in America because we already have people doing it today. And people will still be the preferred. Like rich people still have tutors. Right? And they're still going to have tutors, even if AI can actually good at tutoring.

Interesting. Give me the update on sovereign AI generally. There's an article in the Wall Street Journal, I think yesterday about more and more Western companies adopting Deep Sea King Quinn.

It's like, oh, I actually read that.

Yeah, I need to check now. It's Josh Chin. But yeah, I mean, any major updates there? Did anything get stuffed in the bill related to chips or semiconductors or anything like that that's relevant?

Not that I know of. I mean, I mean, people also have to take a step back and realize this is a tax bill, not a spending bill. I'm an Austrian economics guy, as y' all know, so I don't like that. I don't believe that you can keep spending forever. This is a tax bill. It's literally why it's going through reconciliat to be willing to like lower your threshold. Like, I agree with Elon. He's one of my heroes. He's very wrong on the purpose of this bill. But he's, he's, but he's right. We're spending too much money. But it's also we have to get away from omnibuses. So the, the AI moratorium stuff got removed. I'm pro that Sachs is pro that the OSTP office is pro that I, I, this is not be something should reside in the States. It's it's something that we have to win and we can't have these like varying laws everywhere. On the chip side essentially there are like I have a hat that the president seller gave me. So for countries like Bukele, who's trying to basically provide this sort of infrastructure and capital to the world, the market is there for us and we have these basically voices that I think are living in an era of where the moat resided in areas that they previously defined sort of infrastructure ways. And we're at this moment now where we could accelerate victory to where, hey, how about China? We outsource all our manufacturing last 30 years to them that make all the stuff in Temu to make all the stuff in Sheen, all this crap. Why can't we do that to them for semiconductors now? Why can't we take their money? And you see all these people like oh but wait a minute, what if AI destroys the world and it's all this kind of soothe saying I can't title two People go back to that debate, remember free speech debate online and like telco versus where does the right to speak reside and the right to serve content. Those people are the same people in the AI moratorium. It's literally the same line of thinking. And so the AI moratorium was supposedly specifically on training and application. But in El Salvador they passed an AI law, basically a free training law where, which is how the law should be structured. When you train something, it's up to the user to apply it. If the user applies that to make a robot to kill somebody, just like we get a hammer and kill somebody, right? Or get a robot to scratch, you know, Jordy's Mercedes, right? It's that person's fault, right? It's not going to be like if John trained that, you know, open source model and they use it against Jordy, it's like it's not John's fault. So like somewhere they passed that law, but in America they want to commingle these responsibilities most out of baseless fear. But still the policy of the administration is still towards we need to export, we need to become the AI exporter of the world because we have this ability to be the definite infrastructure of the next era and not reside in this kind of loose or not loose. It's actually really hard to understand what the critics are saying.

Even with something less dramatic than like using an open source LLM model to commit a crime or something. Just, just the intellectual property thing. It's very easy that we've had the ability to go and pirate a movie and upload it to YouTube for a very long time. That's not a crazy new technology. But it is, in the sense of copying data is new and distributing it all over the world. And yet YouTube doesn't even need to stop it ever from happening. They just need to stop there to.

To.

From being an economic model. Like, you can't build a business on top of YouTube just uploading star Wars. Like, that's not gonna work for you. And as long as you kill that economic model with enough pressure and say, hey, we're not gonna serve ads against this. We're not gonna pay you out. We're gonna ban your account eventually. There's a bunch of ways to prevent this stuff at the level of like, yeah, like, someone might. Some kid might upload stuff. Star wars and five people see it, and before it gets taken down. Not the world. Who cares? Exactly. And so, yeah, yeah, going after the, like, the individual actors, that. That's a very, very good point. I like that.

The. The most. The most freeing phrase you could ever. And maybe you could raise your kids this way, too, because it was the most freeing phrase ever received from a. From a guy who's famous, but I won't say his name because. But he's huge radio star, and he taught me this. He goes, whenever you feel stuck, just say the phrase. So what? So what, right? And then, like, why should I buy into your presuppositions? Why should I believe in these things? Like, prove it to me. Like, so what? And it's so freeing to reside in that zone of like. Like, you just said, so what? Like, somebody does that. Like, why is that a big deal? And it kind of puts people on their heels. Like, Like, I. I said this once in a debate about, like, since we're talking about chips, like, whoa, like, you know, bytedance could get access to this. Like, first of all, Oracle's number, like, top five customers or, like, Chinese. So, like, you know they're already doing it, right? Then I said, like, so what? Oh, my God. Like, it's like, oh, yeah, videos will be more musical. Like, I was like, it's a. And they're like, well, we could do this. Could you do this? Could do this. I'm like. I'm like, yeah, I could say the same thing about anything. I could say the same thing about, like, well, you know, you. If you. If you buy this watch, you could use this to put on a bomb, right? And, like, it's like. It's like, that's like, their level of thinking. There's so many steps.

Yeah, I was gonna. I was gonna ask Chris earlier, you know, how he thinks about AI war versus AI race. And then you would have to ask him the question, well, then, should you have named your book the chip Race? And then that would have sold like.

1% of the copies. Is it a war or is it a race? Interesting.

Yeah.

It's so tough. I mean, so many of the loudest voices in our industry are beautifully conflicted because they run multi billion dollar businesses that are dependent. Future fundraising, current fundraising is dependent on certain narratives. And so it's hard to figure out what's real.

Yeah.

As it relates to the China stuff.

Not just that, even just the progress of models, how much we should be spending when AGI will arrive, when superintelligence will arise.

AI war versus AI race.

Because if you brand it as a war, then all of a sudden it brings in a new level of funding. There's all sorts of downstream implications of. Well, it's really important that we get the AI doom question right. And so we need to over invest or it's really good. Good that we win. It's really important that we win the geopolitical battle. And so it's okay to over invest. In this case, it's all about just like, justifying different levels of underwriting. And when you add one of these infinite numbers, you can say 1% chance of infinity is still. I'll pay any price.

Yeah. I guess my firm is just way more optimistic. I understand. Why can't we just invest? Because it's cool. We like stuff that Elon does. I don't own a Tesla because I like my cars to go boom. Right. So. But it's still cool. Like, why can't we just be cool? Why can't it just be. Hey, this is awesome. This is like moving the trajectory of the human race to something even more amazing.

It seems like getting there.

War, death. Yeah.

Yeah. But it seems like we're getting there. I mean, I don't know if you saw Nat Friedman's post, but, you know, he was saying he started at Meta and he's gonna just build some cool stuff. And I'm like, yes, like, that sounds awesome. Because, I mean, there are a lot of AI products, but a lot of.

Them the great lost wonders of history.

I hope so. I hope so.

Better.

Anyway, thank you so much for stopping by, Aaron. This is always a pleasure.

What are you doing?

What are you doing for the fourth?

Yeah. What are you doing for the fourth?

No, I'm not gonna work. I can do Something with like my church and I usually my house is a third space. So for like the community. So it's very. On the other side of this is I built it. My. I built a custom house. And so, like, it's a big. Basically, like, I don't drink, like, but it's like a big beer hall essentially from front to back.

Wow.

So. So we usually host something. It's like, I don't know, maybe three or 4,000 square feet.

Yeah.

And it's just a big open room with like a kitchen, dining room, living room, outdoor space.

Very cool.

So we usually, like, host stuff and people like, use. Use my house to do that. So I think this goes back to the. The, you know, the human element is like, fundamentally innovation is supposed to be anthropomorphic, is supposed to be make humans better. That's why people pay for it. And there's certainly negative downsides of this, and we have to mitigate those downsides. But you always should start from the phrase so what? Or go read Thomas Soul about can you even regulate downsides without creating a secondary effect of mitigating upsides? I think that from. Many people are projecting lots of things in AI that they could just get from just being in community and just having friends and. And like, y' all have your sauna workout. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Like you, you. You like so much of the projecting of internal problems people have into technology when if they had a friend, they resolved their loneliness academic, they had a good family, they surrounded by a religious community, you know, particularly Christianity, that a lot of these things kind of go away. Where you can just look at a technology, you can look at innovation from where it is, which is like, this can just be awesome. It doesn't need to kill us. It doesn't need to start a war. It doesn't need to be aha, si. All those are certainly things we can talk about. But to overextend, you dig into that person that's arguing that there's typically a pathology built into them that is projecting externally. When it's just like, hey, dude, like, do you like, want to hug? Like, you just, like, you just want, like what, you want to hang out like Lucy Pool or like, go to CrossFit or something? Like.

And then.

And then to kind of like, you know, fades away. Because there, there. There are many things in the world you should not care about. And, And I don't like, I get asked to it about things and I'm like, I don't really care about that. Like, it's not Something I want to talk about. And. And because you care about less things is key to joy. Because less things means you're actually more responsible for more things, which means you can be happy because you can see your work go into something that has output. But there's. When you become unhappy is when you see all this crap happening around you and you get worried about it and do something about it and you really can't. And really, it's like you're just. There's just things you just shouldn't care about.

And then you're like sensing. I hate to cut you off, but I'm sensing a TED Talk. We'll do a TVPN talk very soon, but we'll talk. Have a fantastic weekend. Great seeing you as always.

See you soon.

See you guys. See you, man.

Well, Speaking of fantastic AI products, go to 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 ch.

If you like. If you. If you like winning. Don't get in a bake off with fin. Don't get in a bake off cbpn.

Well, our next guest is Bridget from Founders Fund. Welcome to the stream, Bridget. How are you doing? Busy time in. Oh, wait. Okay. So can you say where you are?

I was on. It was a different format. You guys were in the old format.

We were, yeah. New studio. We are now in Hollywood.

Future Capital Media and entertainment.

Future home of media. But speaking of future homes, where are you right now?

So I'm at EthCC.

Where's that? So you're. You're literally doing the meme. You're a venture capitalist and you're. You're in France at a conference.

At a conference. Conference.

One.

One at hour conference. Seven days on the beach. Is that what we're going on?

Oh, my gosh. It's productive. It's productive.

It's productive. Okay.

Okay.

She's working.

Yeah. I don't know why they have it in France, but last year it was in.

I know why. It looks beautiful.

It's beautiful. And all the venture capitalists will be.

There anyway, all the events for the ocean backdrop.

Yeah, it's fantastic. Yeah. Give us the. What actually happens at an event like that? Is it people kind of voting on direction of the technology or is it just like, like pitch meeting, founders building on top of stuff?

Yeah, I would say it's like, it's sort of a mixture of everything. I would say, like these conferences probably originally started because the crypto industry is like Just so decentralized, like for lack of a better word. And everyone lives in different places. So I think originally it was like for kind of like like minded individuals to meet up. And Peter actually used to go to some of the really early ones called like FC financial cryptography. And then they slowly evolved into like EthCC. There's like token 2049 and it's just a good way to like see everyone in person. Like obviously in person is so much better than Zoom, but people in crypto are just so distributed, like they're not really concentrated in one city. Maybe New York now, but it's still kind of like, you know, since the US isn't like insanely regulatory friendly yet, like people are everywhere.

So no, I feel like there's very serious projects in San Francisco, New York, Puerto Rico, Singapore and Dubai, which is like all over the world.

Yeah, totally, yeah. But Joey and I try to do like one on one meetings most of the day and like, because if you just get caught up in events, it's easy to just do a bunch of events and like not actually get anything done.

So yeah, yeah, we've gotten steamrolled a few times. We're not crypto native enough to know the full calendar and we'll try and book some crypto people and they'll be like, are you you crazy?

We accidentally held our crypto day during.

The bitcoin thing and we just didn't know and we were like, well Brian Armstrong is coming on so you know, if he's not going to this thing.

Like yeah, yeah, yeah.

But we actually had some folks from the conference hop on, which is cool. And it wound up working up well anyway.

Or something.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, and, and getting Mert on the street. We had Mert yesterday and he's always great, you know, always traveling across the world. I wanted to get the update on the stablecoin world. What's interesting is the game over circles out. It feels like the legislation's passing, but what are you seeing? Are there still investment opportunities? Are there still opportunities to build or is it the time of the enterprise SaaS integrator in Web2?

Yeah, it's a good question. Yeah, I think stablecoins are definitely the main character right now. There's a new announcement every single day with something stablecoin related. Like it's very hypey, it's very in the meta. But I think like for good reason. I was joking with Joey the other day. It's like stablecoins are basically the, the part of crypto that has found the most product market fit. And it's just like a tokenized US dollar which is like kind of ironic because the original crypto is like, we're going to rebuild the financial system. Everything's going to be bitcoin denominated. Like we're going to do, you know, basically recreate and now we just have like the tokenized US dollar.

Well, everyone was complaining about volatility of the meme coins and the crypto community said fine, we'll give you something with zero volatility. Are you happy now?

Exactly, exactly.

Well, it feels like some of that hype. I want to get into the tokenized private assets, tokenized stocks as well. But before that, Sax came out and posted that there was a certain concession in the stablecoin bill around stablecoin issuers not being able to pass yield back to holders. Could you, could you dive into that a little bit? Because that was felt monumental.

But yeah, I think that was something that the banking lobbyists probably snuck into the bill and the bill was like a herculean effort even to just like pass the Senate. Like it got blocked once. Just to like get it like to the Senate was like basically like an insane main task. And I think basically the gist of that is like if too much money flows out of banks and into like stablecoin issuers like circle or you know, there's going to be like a million in the U.S. probably that's money flowing out of like the traditional financial system and then basically like net new money cannot be created via loans because stablecoins have to be one to one backed with like T bills or cash and cash equivalent.

So stable coins would kill the entire western financial system.

Like I mean basically. And they make, I mean it makes so much sense because it's like I like, I would rather hold my money in stablecoins. It's like one to one backed. It's very safe. And when you put your money in a bank it's like people think it's safe and whatever, but it's actually like not that safe. Like they're like lending it out and that's how new money gets created and that's how the economy functions.

Yeah, we all experience what the svc.

Yeah, sorry, yeah, and it's, it's.

Yeah, yeah, we all experience this firsthand. I mean most people in tech with the SV crisis and First Republic and the idea of FDIC insurance and everyone kind of learns about fractional reserve banking at the worst possible time when there's a crisis, but you actually Wrote an article all about how a stablecoin bank might be different. Can you take us through some of what you might expect? And why do we. I feel like there's this whole crypto podcast called like Bankless and they're all like, don't have a bank at all. And that was a meme in crypto for a while.

And now the banks are going to issue stake stablecoin.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what is the role of the bank going bank. What even, what even is a bank? Like, like, why do we need that at all? And then walk me through the stablecoin bank idea.

Definitely. Definitely. Yeah. Okay, let's see. Yeah, I think me and my friend ABHI wrote the piece originally, like early this year. We basically were looking into this act that didn't end up passing. It was called the Credit Card Competition Act. It had like a 3% chance of passing the Senate or something. But we were reading it and basically what it did in practice, if it were to be like passed into law, would be to like allow or force banks to accept a network other than like Visa or MasterCard. So it basically create this like golden opening for a stablecoin network to come in and people to be able to pay with stablecoins and like, all of these things. Because right now, like, banks are pretty locked into Visa and MasterCard. Like they have a trillion dollars in market cap app. Like, they're the de facto. And they've also been doing like, fairly well on the stablecoin side. Like, they're kind of like innovating actually, like pretty well. So it's kind of like a regulatory thing where you would have to have like the ccca, the, the act I was talking about pass in practice for like a stablecoin network to come through. And so that was like the first angle we looked at it. And then basically we were thinking about, okay, what about like, from a consumer banking perspective? And it basically would function the exact same way as a narrow bank would, where they're just, it's just a stablecoin bank. Like your deposits are held one to one backed. They're like backed by T bills and it's super safe. But again, it's like if all of that money were to flow out of the traditional financial system and banks and into this, you know, this is why the narrow bank could never get a master account. They can never get a charter, and they never actually got a meaningful amount of deposits because it's like a threat to the Fed and like to the US Economy essentially, if it got Got, you know, in aggregate, like a ton of deposits.

Yeah.

And that was kind of like the way it would trend, I think, if it got a master account. So. Yeah, but a stablecoin, I mean, I think it's something that like, needs to exist. Like, it just makes so much sense. And the banking system is incredibly antiquated. Like, it's actually not safe, as we've seen. And so. But yeah, I don't know, a lot of the banks are trying to explore stuff around stablecoins now. JP Morgan is, is trying to pilot like a tokenized deposit program. Fiserv is trying to launch a stablecoin. And yeah, and honestly the incumbents are doing incredibly well. Like Stripe acquired Bridge, Stripe acquired Privy, Stripe via Bridge, launched their own stablecoin usdb. So it's kind of one of those things where you want to see all these net new winners be created. But also Stripe and a lot of the traditional players are kind of crushing it. It. So it's interesting to see.

What about stocks on chain, Private company shares on chain? What are you tracking there? There was a bunch of memes this week. We talked about it with Mert a little bit. But I'm curious what you're expecting. It just seems like there's, funny enough, a massive amount of demand for regular publicly listed U.S. stocks just tokenized on chain.

Yep, yep, yep. Totally. Yeah. So I, I actually went to the, the Robinhood event where they announced like the private company shares and, and then tokenizing equities. And Yeah, I think basically, like, if you're tokenizing equities, it makes a ton of sense as a regulatory arbitrage, like to, to deliver these equities to people outside the US that have historically had a hard time getting them. But like, for people in the US it actually just makes sense just to like use the traditional, you know, equities market and just buy them from your bank account. And then I think on the private side, yeah, Robinhood talked about what do they do like SpaceX and OpenAI, I think. But again, it's really, it's, it's difficult to issue private company shares. Like we, you saw like the OpenAI response. I'm sure it's just one of those things where, yeah, it's hard to custody them. Where are they living? What happens like, like when you redeem them? And it, it, it kind of, it kind of becomes foggy. So that's why I think, like, unless it's like a regulatory arbitrage, at least for tokenized equities, it, it makes more Sense for outside the U.S. than inside the U.S. but everyone's doing it now. Like Kraken issued X stocks. Let's see. Obviously Robin Hood Coinbase is trying to get into it. So I mean, again I think it makes sense. But within the US it's probably like a, a less interesting market because our system works pretty well as is, I would say. And then I also think like the most interesting thing about like issuing these things on chain is native issuance such that basically like instead of like wrapping, you know, Apple stock and then issuing it on say Arbitrum, like you just like natively like, like, let's say just like a com, like I don't know, like Mertz Co. Just like goes public and you natively issue those shares and such that you don't have to like wrap and unwrap. Add an extra step where you're taking like counterparty risk, you're taking custody risk, there's more fees involved and you don't actually own the underlying. Like you're trusting someone else to own the underlying.

So I think the point of crypto was trustless systems, so.

Exactly, exactly. Like if you want to like natively, like Tether is doing like tokenized gold, right? Where it's like that's the only asset that represents their gold. Gold is that tokenized gold. It's not like they issued it, you know, on like the CME and then they wrapped it in like tokenized it. So I think like if you have that extra step of tokenizing, it only makes sense as like a regulatory arbitrage. Otherwise you should natively issue it. And I think native issuance is going to become more and more of a thing and that's going to like drag the rest of the financial system kind of on chain. That's Vlad's vision too with Robinhood. It's like if a lot of these companies, if you can find a structure that works for like OpenAI SpaceX, you know, all of these like private companies and you just like have them like natively issuing shares of their own that represent, you know, some kind of stake in the company in like a clean cut way, then you don't even really like need to go public, right? Because like that's kind of like your trajectory of like letting out.

Yeah, it is interesting, the strategy of trying to force the conversation and then potentially force the partnership by just creating these things.

Things.

Right. Republic was coming out, we had Ken on and he was basically saying, yeah, some people, plenty of people aren't gonna like this, but we think it's sort of the natural evolution and then, and then, you know, we'll see what. What actually pans out.

Well, yeah, I'm sure you have a big day of yachting and wine tasting tomorrow, right? I mean, I mean meetings, meetings, business meetings. So we appreciate you staying up late to hop on the stream.

Thanks so much for stopping by. Always great to.

To catch up.

We'll talk to you soon.

Cheers, Bridget.

Have a good one.

Enjoy. The fourth in France.

Yes. If you're looking to get a good night's sleep, head over to 8sleep.com tvpn and get a new Pod 5. They have a five year warranty, a 30 night risk, free trial and free returns and free shipping.

We are ready with an 89.

Congratulations. Jordy hit a soundboard for you. And let's bring in our next guest, Price from Open Ledger embedding accounting in your platform. Price, how you doing? Good to meet you.

Did you hire Soham?

No.

Did you interview him?

No. Neither.

Well, check spam. It tends to be a bull signal if you reached out.

But yeah, please kick us off with an introduction on yourself and the company.

Nice. Hi, I'm Price, co founder and CEO OpenLedger. We're building embedded Accounting, an embedded accounting API that helps vertical SaaS platforms embed full accounting suites into their products instead of having to build a general ledger from scratch. 70 million people are running businesses of all types and no matter what type of business they're running, they all have to do their accounting. And so they're turning to a lot of modern platforms like Shopify, mindbody and Service Titan to run their platforms. But most of them still don't have accounting features and the ones they do are usually duct taped together. And so what we've built is, is a set of APIs and components that makes it much easier for these platforms to embed a full accounting suite inside their product for their end users to use.

Interesting. So is this B2B2B software? Yeah, I love it. We're adding an extra layer of B.

Why'd you pick an easy problem like accounting infrastructure?

Well, I don't see it as an easy problem.

No, I'm totally kiddingly hard.

I get it though. I get it. I think at first glance it seems like a very simple company in a lot of ways, but I don't think it's.

To be clear, I don't know he was joking.

It's a simple, complicated, it's simple idea. Extremely compliment to actually create totally.

Because you have to create so much flexibility for each different Client.

But yeah, we had a CEO on from Ambrose that does accounting just for financial, just for farms. And she said it took them like I think two and a half years to like build the core accounting sort of engine.

So. Yeah, yeah, so, so what have the trade offs been as you've, as you've built the product?

Yeah, so we went all the way down to the ledger level and built our own ledger database that, that's what we build all the functionality on top of for reconciliation. And then the actual embedded accounting API itself is all built on top of that general ledger level. And so that, that took a bunch of time, but we really wanted to save folks who, you know, that exact situation you mentioned, folks who are building these custom accounting products that provide so much value to end users, finding a way to really take that, those core things that don't change between accounting systems and turn them into infrastructure that anyone can use to build their own products.

What's the go to market like? How do you actually bring on these businesses? Is it Power Law distributed? Do you need to just get a few, few really huge companies on the platform or are you trying to go super broad like Stripe where kind of everyone's using the product?

Yeah, so I think that's how we, we really got our start and that's how our first clients are larger Power Law as customers. But what we're looking forward to is this, this deeper thesis that we've been building around is this idea that accounting data is basically the best substrate you can get to put at the base of a virtual vertical agent for business. Right. And so as folks are building more types of vertical agents that are working with financial APIs or payments and things of that nature, having accounting data reconciled into a book or a chart of accounts and building on top of that is one of the best places to sit because that information is essentially like memory for a company.

Yeah. I mean, it's the reason that every board meeting starts with like, let's look at the, let's look at the finances of the business. Because, because that is the map of the territory and then you can dig into specific things. So that makes a ton of sense. In terms of agents, it seems like you don't actually need to do all the work of maybe discovering the correct patterns because your clients are working on top of you in that regard. Are you using artificial intelligence at your company? Has there been different trends that you're tracking that are improving the product on your end yet?

Yeah. So what we're really excited about right now is really weaving it inside and through the way we're building our general ledger architecture so that it can automate a lot of those bookkeeping tasks that really are a big part of accounting and turn that into infrastructure that can quietly sit inside of a product rather than having so much human in the loop input. And I think that's really what makes, makes this. Part of, what makes this a really exciting opportunity and different from a lot of other embedded payment or fintech features is that we're essentially helping to automate more of a service as well alongside a suite. That's something that a lot of platforms previously were helping their end users and customers like hire bookkeepers or accountants to sit alongside them. We help kind of add that almost as an extra feature that they can sell alongside their suite.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Jordy, anything else?

Very cool.

Thank you for stopping by.

You know, I'm excited about all the different features and functionality that you can build on top of open ledger.

Yeah, I mean we've seen such a big Trend in vertical SaaS and all the different B2B players. It makes sense that there would be, you know, an enabling technology here. So thank you so much for stopping by.

This is great.

Great to hear from you. Price.

We'll talk to you soon.

I'm excited for you guys. This rocks.

Thank you. Have a great day.

Cheers.

Let me tell you about public investing for those who take it seriously. Multi asset investing into industry leading yields and they're trusted by millions. Folks. Head over to public if you want to buy stocks the old fashioned way where you actually own the stock, it's pretty cool.

There's a lot of being a shareholder underrated. Underrated.

Being a shareholder is underrated. Well, we have our next guest.

Not quite yet. They need a little bit to build the four up so we can do a little bit of timeline.

Oh well, we could tell you about Ad Quick. You could take a four up and put it on a billboard, baby. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of advertising. Only Ad Quick combines technology, out of home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. You saw us deploy ads in the real world. We did an out of home campaign in New York and the response to that has been remarkable.

It's been really fun.

It's been a way to buy it.

Taking pictures.

Yeah. And it's been a way to reconnect. We've gotten so many tickets, text messages from people who are less online, family members, all sorts. It really cut out of home is just built different.

College friends.

It's just built different. Yeah, I mean, you got to do a lot of different marketing strategies. There's a lot of different things. Out of home should be a piece of that.

It is incredibly underrated. I expect people to just start doing the one. No launch video. Just big one on one billboard.

That's the way to do it.

Very efficient.

That's the way to do it.

It's very efficient.

Well, do we have time to dive into the business of Formula one or. Jordy, you want to check out our next guest? Because I saw F1 last night.

Yeah, tell us. Give us. Give us your review.

It was incredible. It was one of the best movies ever seen. I'm really sorry because I. We wanted the whole crew to come and. But I, you know, was catching up. A friend, you know, a college buddy and former guest on the show as well, and it just kind of came together. But saw it in imax. Highly recommend it. The entire film seemed to be shot in imax, which I have no idea how they did because half the shots are from the perspective of a Formula one car. And so they must have mounted some massive camera rig on that thing. But it was beautiful. Hans Zimmer delivered an absolutely incredible score. I've been listening to the theme to F1 religiously as I drive at just 5 over the speed limit. Right.

Sure about you? Sure you want to put that on the record? I. I heard that you drive always perfectly one under the speed limit.

One under.

You cap your car.

Yeah.

You actually hacked it.

Yeah. Yeah. I kind of take the Nvidia approach to driving.

Yeah.

You know.

Yeah.

And yeah. Fantastic movie. Highly recommend it. Lots of great sponsorships, lots of great ads within the movie. Shark Ninjas in there. We got a bunch. We got a bunch of great stuff. Highly recommend seeing in theaters. Go check it out. F1 with Brad Pitt. We'll be on advertising. We have our next guest. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing? Could you guys introduce yourselves? I wasn't. We weren't fully expecting two. We're excited to have you all here. Thank you so much.

Of course. So, I mean, maybe just to start out. My name is Jacob. I'm very excited to be here at the temple of technology. The fortress of finance. Capital of capital.

Let's go.

The ultra.

Very early, very early, very early supporter.

We appreciate it.

Never forget you.

We will remember.

It's great to finally have you. So just quick background. I'm currently a student at Stanford along with Jack Whitaker, one of your old Interns. And then right now, I've been working for a lot of guild for the past. Wow. It's like, I think four or five months now. And what I'm going to be talking about today with Ophira is. Wait, wait.

First. First fit check. What is this jacket?

Yeah.

Oh, yeah, no, this is a Sun Microsystems jacket that we got from the old C suite. One of my co workers, the Cleveland mafia of Anne, me, Peter Thiel, a bunch of other folks. There's a bunch of Sun Microsystems merch. Yeah. So every time I wear this, I think that's kind of what you need if you're going to a pitch meeting, if you're fundraising. This instantly gets you into the Letterman.

Jacket of our industry.

Exactly.

And it doesn't have Java on the back, but it does have Java on here.

Oh, that's great.

Yeah.

Incredible.

That's amazing. Yeah. Give us the story.

And then Ophira, quick intro as well would be great.

Hi. Yeah, my name's Ophira and we're going to be talking about large language model art. I actually invented making artwork work with language models like ChatGPT. And Jacob has a really exciting project around that.

Please wait, break it down.

Something on you there.

You're the creator of AI Art. Break that down.

Yeah, one of them. Yeah. No, she's ridiculously. I'm gonna gas Ophir up for a moment, please. She invented a large portion of modern AI ASCII art and is probably the world's best jailbreaker. OpenAI holds these competitions pretty regularly. Like every couple months or so, they invite people from all around the world to jailbreak their models. Usually people can't get past, like, one or two of the tests out of like a 20. Testing ofera just regularly wins them. Breaks everything. Like, it's something where I was talking with Ben Mann, who's one of the anthropic co founders, and even when we were discussing this, he's like, yeah, no, like, there's still a lot of red teaming and cbrn, which is chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear threats that, like, these artists in their communities, they just break through everything. Like, and all the. Like, I don't care what kind of MIT Ph.D. like, hire everybody. Like, doesn't work. Like, they're just. They're killers. You know what? I was using the same techniques to make artwork. So back when Microsoft Bing came out. And like, like summer of 2023, I got like, you know how you guys read poetry books sometimes and the poems are, like, arranged in these beautiful shapes, the words have like, like this gorgeous shape of tree. That's what I do with language models.

Yes.

So I actually first discovered that they could do that in the first place and I've made a whole beautiful art form out of that.

So this is not diffusion based image generation.

No, no.

This is using a language model.

Doing it.

Yes. And so just the alumni.

It's actually a very interesting capability because it's showing spatial intelligence despite all it's doing is predicting the next token. Just like you would normally get a chat reply. But it's doing it in these gorgeous shapes that very often actually reflect the content of the words.

Yeah, I've seen someone put out a benchmark for having LLMs basically interpret secret messages. Are you familiar with this where you draw. You basically write out a sentence in a square box and the LLM gets really confused even though the human can one shot. It's kind of like an arc AGI for this type of thing. But it's very fascinating that you're able to get good results because I thought that that's a place where LLMs were particularly weak. But it seems like you've been able to break through.

I think they also like one thing to note is that they don't naturally. They're naturally not very good at. At this. Like I think if either of you, like both of you I feel like are fairly AI fluent but if you tried to go out and do this, I don't think that you would get terribly interesting results at first. There's a lot like to get some of the artworks that are featured on beautiful aiart.com going right now showing my stuff, our stuff. But yes to go, to go buy this. I usually like, I mean ofera can speak on this like you want like, like sometimes it's like 30, 40, even like hundreds of prompts that warm it up and go into these very weird places of distribution. Since if you think of modern language models they're pre trained on the entire Internet. So the odds of like if it is on the Internet you can probably make it. So for people saying like how do you make this art? How does this happen? Like if you just have creative enough prompts that go on for pages at a time, like you can just find anything on the Internet. You can make all sorts of ridiculous stuff. And that's how honestly I think you can get around these, these jail kind of like these safety measures and so on is that if your this, if your training distribution is the Internet, like anything on the Internet you can just.

You can go and find so give me the. Give me the announcement. It sounds like you mentioned selling art on the Internet. Have you processed your first sale? How much do these things cost? How many sales have you done? Can you give us a number? I'm itching to ring the gong for you.

I'm actually going to check right now.

Pull up the stripe dashboard.

Let's see it.

Stripe dashboard. It looks like we already have six orders.

Congratulations.

There we go.

That's great news. Well, we'd love to have you back on when you hit a thousand sales or take it to the moon or.

Put it in the.

Yeah.

What's the vision for Beautiful. Are you going to add a bunch more artists over time? What does it look like?

I think that my original thought was that first, all of these great artists, we just have to put something out there. We just have to ship, keep shipping. So goal of today was launch, have all the payments set up, have all of the drop. Drop shippers. So that way we don't have to worry about inventory, about shipping costs, etc. And yeah, no, a bunch of people from the NFT community have reached out. The crypto community has been pretty good to us. I think that adding more artists is definitely on the list. Vera can talk about this? Yeah, I wish. Like, I. I just came on the show. Like, I. I found out about an hour ago maybe. So I guess we're gonna admire my telephone today. So this is actually a poem by a historical artist named Aldous Huxley called the Crystal Cabinet.

Okay, cool.

And you can see, like, it's in the shape of a wing and it's very beautiful and it was interesting. I actually prompted Claude Opus 3 by anthropic to do that. And it's very interesting. So it's a whole conversation as Jacob describes, and you actually say, like, can you make this more like the shape of a wing, for example? And again, even though this is like, I can picture that in my head because I'm a human, but somehow the model is able to. To gradually refine the shape more and more. Like that.

That's very, very cool.

Yeah, very cool.

Well, look forward to following along. Thank you so much for stopping by. Do you have a closing? Anything you want to say?

A closing remark, I think is something for people to keep an eye out for. Ofera can speak on this as well, but Grimes is making a movie about the AI artists. And that's how part of, like, the impetus for launching this, this is that there's filmmakers from Cairns that are right now filming Ophira, Janice, some of the Other artists. I'm going to feature our friend, our filmmaker. Our friend, filmmaker Matt Zien, who we actually met through Grimes, who is a huge fan of this artwork and a big supporter of it, is hoping to film an independent documentary about kind of first contact with the AI models. Because so many of us have had like weird experiences. Right. Like you chat with it and it's not like talking to a computer. It's like there's a little something going on there. So this is going to be kind of a, I, I would call myself, like kind of further on the. The edge of that.

Sure.

It'll be about how we interact with models. So stay tuned for that. We'll wear TBPN merch in it. We'll be first TPPN at cans.

Fantastic. Fantastic. We'd love to see that. Thank you so much for stopping by. We'd love to have.

Congratulations.

Much to chat about. But have a great day.

Great to see you guys.

We'll talk to you soon. Really quickly, let me tell you about wander.

Find your happy place.

Find your happy place. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel grade amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning and 247 concierge service. Drop vacation home, but better.

We dropped that video into a timeline in turmoil.

It was a timeline in turmoil and it stood out.

It was a bit of a timeline cleanse.

We did well. We did well. It was a lot of fun. It's having a long life on Instagram right now. It did well on X and I've been enjoying getting it into the hands of the Instagram audience.

Before our next guest, I just want to say happy birthday to John Exley.

Oh, yes. Happy birthday, John.

The most positive person.

He's been very helpful in the chat.

And very rare unofficial moderator.

There's 77,000 people on the stream and so I think we'd be melting down without him. So he's been a huge ass. Happy birthday to John. Cheers. Anyway, we have our next guest, Oren Hoffman in the studio. Welcome to the stream. Welcome back to.

Welcome back.

Great to talk to you again.

Excited to be here. Second time guest.

Yes. How you doing? I had a question for you. Do venture capitalists take their own advice?

Apparently not.

Break it down or hypocrites. Yeah. I want to hear the examples that you have for situations where VCs give advice but then don't take it themselves. And then I want to go into kind of the meta level of why is this happening? What is driving that dynamic? But first, kick us off with some concrete examples of VCs giving advice but then not taking it themselves. Yeah, I think first of all, just.

High levels venture capitals are just really not that ambitious. Like they're not nearly as ambitious as like someone who runs a private equity firm. Like the level of ambition is probably like 10x higher on private equity than it is in venture capital. And so in private equity you might be like really building like an amazing company that you're trying to take public, that you're really trying to take over the world. Venture capital is like you're just kind of like you're, you're just okay with this. You know, essentially just leaving it up to faith. Yeah.

Is that because of duration?

Well, yeah. And on the company side you're kind of, you know, there's certain investors that take a more hands on approach or maybe they're on the board, but it's somewhat you. It's sort of culturally, you're sort of leaving it up to the founder and fate to some degree, after you write the joke.

It's essentially it's a lifestyle business. And so the venture capitalists always deride lifestyle businesses, but they run themselves. They often say to founders, hey, you know, you should have one CEO. But most venture capital firms have like four CEOs and it's like hard to make decisions. They'll say take dilution, but they don't take dilution. They'll say things like, you know, merge with other companies. They never do merge. They almost always say, hey, it's a good thing to go public. But you never see them trying to take their own company public. Like Bill Gurley or you know, Brad Gerstner are not taking their companies public. Public, but they always give advice to take, you know, and they have big companies, they run big, you know, fairly large companies. They could have taken them public, but they don't. You know, they'll say board governance, but they don't have their own board governance. So you know, just this whole host of things where the venture capital will say one thing and then of course they sell like, well, you should have a differentiated product. But most venture capital firms, you know, they're just selling money. It's commodity. And so it's very hard to differentiate. And you have all this competition. And if competition is for losers, well, like venture capital firm is like the most competitive place where you have some of the most smartest people competing against you. Yeah.

In some way the partners are the product. And there's only one Orrin Hoffman. And there's only. So you're differentiated by the product that you're providing is in some way yourself, plus the money. And so that's Right.

But what about, what about some of the rumors that firms like General Catalyst or Andreessen Horowitz might actually go public? And if you look at the way Marc Andreessen's been building his business, it does feel like he, if someone's going to turn a venture capital firm into a Blackstone like financial institution, it certainly seems like he's trying to do that.

I would agree. I would agree on that. So I would say first of all, if you think of Andreessen Hornets, they have, have at least they have two CEOs and not six. Right. And they clearly only have two and they're clearly the CEO and they're clearly running the firm. So I would say they are way more ambitious than almost every other venture capital firm. General Catalyst, like they own like a hospital now. So. Right. So I mean, they're definitely leveling up the level of ambition, but still just if you just look at venture capital versus private equity, just if you just think of like the top venture capital firms versus the top, you know, private equity firms, you just do a comparison for each one on one. Like it's just a 10x difference scale in private equity. Maybe a venture capital eventually get there. And Andresen Horace could definitely be one of those firms that they get there. But today it's like we're the also ran of the. And the ambition level is just so much lower.

Okay, ambition level. Do you think it's because it's kind of a prerequisite if you're going to be a vc that you're already rich?

Well, the other thing, the other thing is, the other thing is I feel.

Like a lot of people go into private equity and they like, they're grinders and they grind their way up and so they build that muscle. Whereas a lot of VCs, they don't kick it off with grinding in VC. They're like grinding as a founder, which is arguably the hardest thing you can do. Eating glass, staring into the abyss. They get some liquidity event, they do a, a rest, invest for two years, then they go into vc and by then they've kind of come down off of the mountain of like grinding misery. And then they're like, okay, I'm like somewhat retired now.

Well, there's also the different types of ambition.

There's.

I want to 10, I want to have a 10x fund.

Yep.

But you could be off of a small base. It could be a 20, 20 million dollar fund. And then There's I want to have a trillion of AUM, which no VC has done. BlackRock has 10 trillion of AUM, right?

Yeah.

So there's levels and I do think there's a bifurcation of certain VCs just want to put up good numbers and have a little lifestyle business and deliver great returns for LPs. Others that have wildly different and bigger in some ways ambitions in that they want to have hundreds of billions of aum. And I think that they will get there. But I think what you're saying is there's maybe not enough, enough investors that or too many, too many people are just not actually wildly ambitious at all. You know, they're like, I just want to.

Yeah, they're running a lifestyle business which is totally fine.

Yeah.

And obviously they're building. They're, they're, they're hopefully doing. These venture capitalists are doing good in the world. It's not like they're not doing good. Yeah, they're, they're out there doing a good thing and, but we just would just tend to not follow our own advice.

Okay, now let me, let, if I come to you and go to the Silicon Valley market and I say I'm going to do it differently, I'm taking high dilution, I'm going to take this company public. I'm starting a venture capital firm that will scale. Is that even a viable strategy or is there some sort of like market dynamic that prevents that from even being possible?

It might be very hard given the constraints that other people want to put on the market and stuff like that. And different people have tried. So Obviously we saw SoftBank try and maybe kind of pull back. We saw some other folks who did have a different level of ambition.

The crossover investors and, and some of.

The tiger was ambitious that be internally have kind of fought against it. It's, it's, it's tough. And the venture capital market itself is very small. So it's, you know, it's a private equity market is just a much, much bigger market. Especially when you talk about things like private lending. You know, Apollo just has a much bigger sandbox that they can play in than at least Andrews and Horace today. Doesn't mean that will change because the venture capital market is getting bigger. And of course Andersen Horizon is going to move into other things. They'll move into wealth management. They're going to move into a lot of other adjacent things over time. So that's really the way it's like you get this niche in venture capital but that niche really can't be that big. And then you'll have to layer on other things to grow just like any other company. If you're Facebook just for Harvard University.

There'S only how big you can grow.

Even for all the universities. You've got to move into other markets if you really want to become a great company.

So many VCs are big poker players. One of the major tier one firms should open a casino and just start running cash games and have rules.

No crying.

Yeah, no crying in the casino. Open a literal casino. That's the way to do it.

I would say. If you start crying.

Booted.

You're booted. Yes. This is great.

Well.

But please, we'll have you back on the next time.

Yeah, I wish we had more time.

To noodle on this.

What are you doing for the fourth?

Yeah, what are you doing in France?

I'm in. I'm in Wisconsin for the 4th.

Oh, stay in America. Let's hear it. Let's hear it for Capital Allocator.

Yeah.

For the fourth, that is.

That's American dynamism in practice.

Yes.

Staying in America for the 4th.

We salute you.

Absolutely.

Great to see you, Oren.

Yeah, thanks, guys.

Enjoy the holiday.

Cheers. Up next, we have Mehran Jalali. I hope I'm pronouncing that right. I think we got through all of our ads, which is rough. I like doing ads. And now we're out of them. Well, we have one more. Graphite. I don't have it in the deck, but graphite.dev code review in the age of AI, graphite helps teams on GitHub ship, higher quality software, faster cursor ramp. Get started at Graph Perplexity. And we got every guest in the building. Welcome to the stream, Mehran. Am I pronouncing that correctly? Mehran or Mehran? Yeah, Mehran. Fantastic. Give us the update. What are you up to? Where are you in the world right now? Yeah, I'm in San Francisco.

I'm back in San Francisco.

I was in Belize for the past two weeks doing the scan there. That is complete. The preliminary results are super, super cool. What were you scanning for?

Yeah, yeah. Give us the whole backstory. I remember, like, the initial post. It was maybe six months ago.

Sure.

That we saw. So this has been in the works for a while?

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, basically, the Mayans, they cleared out forests to build some of their cities and settlements. And so when they moved or they died or in any way, they vacated their cities, trees ended up growing back over them. So if you look at it from the satellite, it's just completely green, it's just completely trees. But beneath the trees are these like magnificent pyramids and roads and buildings and whatnot. And they're invisible from space and they're invisible on the ground because it's just so hard to traverse these rainforests. And so what I'm doing is we're flying planes with very big, very strong lidar scanners under them and we're scanning these trees. And while most of the canopy is just completely full of trees because, you know, it's rainforest, some of the lasers make their way through, through, and then you classify the points, you remove the trees, you look at the ground and then if we discover something like a pyramid or roads or structures and stuff, we know that we found something that.

No one's seen for the past thousand.

Two thousand years or whatever. So yeah, lidar scanning forests to find civilizations. Did you find anything?

Yeah, what'd you find?

So doing two scans this year, 400 square kilometers in Belize, 600 square kilometers in Mexico, the Belize one's done, but only like a third of it has been processed so far. Super cool. There are some, there are pyramids, there are like hundreds, maybe even thousands of buildings, hundreds of kilometers of roads, you know, things that no one has ever seen, you know, since a thousand, two thousand years ago.

Yeah, tell me about the, tell me about the economic model of your entire operation. You're flying planes, you've got lidar scanners.

Yes, it's a non profit, so I mean, so what got me interested in this was I saw this, but there'll be a for profit spin out at some point. Point and I could get units.

We're going to tokenize the Mayan ruins.

Yeah, the capped lidar unit.

No.

What got me interested in this was I saw this cool paper over Thanksgiving or so. Funnily enough, that was about how some conservation efforts scanned some trees in some forests in Mexico and then these archaeologists removed the trees and they found stuff underneath. And so I side to see like, oh, if you can spot random archaeological sites without even explicitly looking for them, I wonder have they been doing more of it?

And the answer is archaeologists have done.

Some of this stuff in the past, but ultimately there's just not a whole lot of money in archaeology. I mean it's not a very well funded thing.

It's like maybe all the money going.

To archaeology on an annual basis is the same as a series A or.

Series B or something.

And so, and it's like massive economies of scale. Because you're flying planes, you know, the more you can fly them, the more you can, you know, divide your total cost by. There are these like extremely expensive, like million dollar LIDAR scanners and. Yeah, I mean, you know, the, the main costs are basically the plane and the LIDAR scanner and the crew to go and actually do the scanning.

Yeah.

So where, where do you go from here? What's the next step?

Yeah, so still the data has yet to be processed. The processing is basically figuring out what, what points belong to the ground, which ones belong to the trees, removing the tree ones, taking the ground ones. And then while the naive visualizations are striking, you're seeing this huge pyramid or whatever. Ultimately the archaeologists draw the most interesting inferences. Is this actually super novel to us? Sure. No one's seen this before, but did anyone expect this to be there or not? So process the point cloud, give the data to the archaeologists, they make their inferences. But my goal ultimately is to scan.

All of this area.

I mean ultimately I think, you know, we need to put more money into archaeology. I think there's really cool stuff to do with tech in archeology. We need more tech talent, industry in archeology. And my goal is essentially to use these results, you know, get like, publish them, all that stuff, raise a lot more money and do like a significant larger scan next year, like 10,000 square kilometers at the very least.

Next year.

And within a couple of years, you know, finish all of Central America, then move to the Amazon, Then other interesting archaeological projects, like, you know, scanning coastlines, stuff like that. So I just.

Anything to, anything to scan in America, considering it's the fourth tomorrow in the.

U.S. i, you know, the thing is.

The thing that's interesting to me about Central America is that they, they actually had like massive pyramids and stuff. The US and the Amazon, like there is stuff there, but like ultimately the, in the Amazon, at the very least.

They didn't have stone. So everything that you find are like.

Dirt mounds, which are cool. Like the fact that they're there, like in places that seem so hostile to.

Life kind of in general, you know.

Like raining nine months ago, whatever is cool. But yeah, there are like dirt mounds and stuff in the US and the Amazon as well. But at the moment my interest is.

Mostly in Central America.

I think there's like, you know, 50,000 square kilometers or so there to scan.

And I plan on scanning all of.

Them first and then, and then other things.

How are, how are the local governments in, in these areas? Are they excited about what you're doing. Are they, Are they, are they emailing you for updates? Hey, what'd you find?

Well, when I was in Belize and I was talking to the, you know, the people in the city, they were super excited. You know, they, they're proud of their history. They find their sites cool. They find that, like, other people are interested in them. They're very cool. And I think that people are super excited.

Excited.

The governments are also very excited because, you know, this boosts their tourism, this boosts their national heritage. It shows that, you know, there were once great civilizations here and, like, you know, that's something to be proud of. And they're also wary because the problem is that there's a big looting problem in these countries, especially countries that, like, don't have, you know, so much money dedicated to archaeology to protect all of the sites. And so they're a little worried about the data privacy and stuff related to.

Relate to this stuff because, yeah, like, you know, when you're earning, like, I.

Don'T know, like $10,000 a year when that's your GDP per capita, and you, like, find like a jade mask worth, like, you know, 200k in the black market, like there's a strong incentive. And so they're trying to prevent that. And so, yeah, I mean, we've been working with the governments to assure them about the data privacy, but generally, like, they're super excited about this.

Yeah, I can imagine.

Can you talk about El Dorado? You know, huge if true.

Big if true.

Yeah.

I mean, what is the lore? What is the. Are there any, are there any folks out there that still believe it's out there? Is there any, like, what is the historical narrative and then what is the modern narrative? Well, I think the meta point is.

Kind of that things like El Dorado.

Things like Atlantis, like Noah's Ark and stuff, are like, kind of how a lot of people get interested in archaeology. Initially, they're like, we're gonna find Noah's Ark in Turkey. And then you look and you're like, oh, well, you know, huge if true. But I don't know how much these, these hold up to some scrutiny. And then you're like, okay, like, what are other, like, more practical things that we can do? So, yeah, I mean, huge of true, but, like, you know, most likely not true. But it's, it's good that these persist because, again, got some people interested in archaeology. Yeah. What about other things that we should be scanning for? I mean, if not gold, rare earth elements are top of mind. Maybe there's A secret chip fab somewhere we could grab. Yeah.

Like data centers.

Data centers, yeah, exactly.

No, I'm expecting you to find Mayan data centers.

Yes.

What do you think?

There was a Jensen back there was a Jensen of that era.

That would be true. Truly huge if true. Well, I think we should scan the Amazon.

I mean there's like been really interesting stuff there.

Like the early people that like, you know, the early Europeans that went there.

They reported you know, like 10 foot.

Tall naked women that are like shooting errors, which is how it got the name Amazon. You know, it would be cool to maybe fact check this but like even if this is not real, like there's.

Probably some stuff that this was based on.

It would be cool to look for.

Atlantis, you know, huge if true.

So I think we should scan all the coastlines of the Mediterranean. The Persian Gulf, the Caspian, you know, because there are probably so many cities that are now underwater. I'm Iranian, I would love to do.

Archaeology in Iran as well.

You know, there's so many civilizations that, that like, you know, are mentioned in Sumerian history but like we have no traces of, except for like, you know, that we know there was a powerful king there. So there's, there's a ton of archaeological, archaeological mysteries. But like kind of the bits versus.

Atoms thing is also true in archaeology.

Where like the atoms part of archaeology, doing field work, doing digging and stuff, that hasn't really changed in hundreds of years but they're like interesting opportunities and bits now of like you know, Nat Friedman's Vesuvius scrolls or you know, doing.

Lidar scanning using satellite imagery, stuff like that.

And like those are kind of the lower hanging fruits. The more we can do remote sensing, the more we can do scalable things.

That's a lower hanging fruit. And then yes, like making really educated guesses about like where some like Atlantis might be and like doing work there. But I'll.

Do you find it, do you find it funny or fascinating that, that being an explorer is like super contrarian. Like we have this idea that, that the world is fully discovered and you know, we've, we've mapped every coastline so there's nothing else to do.

Like high school career fairs. Like no one's saying, oh, oh, you can still discover things. Which is like, well it gets me interested. Like I didn't know this was an option. I don't know if it's contrarian but like, yeah, I mean not many people are doing it. I would love if there were more people doing it.

There was more interest.

There was More money in this.

But yeah, I mean, well, you're starting the exploration industrial complex. You're the first of the modern era.

I think when the results come out and they're going to be super cool and yeah, it's going to get a lot of people lot more interested in.

This sort of thing.

Fantastic.

Very cool. We'll come back on whenever you have updates. We should do the next one from the air, ideally Starlink powered.

Yeah, the plane's flying at like 500 meter, taking the sharpest turns that you can. It's not going to be a pretty sight.

Well, it'll be fun. Anyways, thank you for coming on.

Thank you for having. Absolutely. Thank you for having me. Have a good one. Bye. Up next we have Kushal from Extend app coming into the studio. We got some gong worthy news, baby.

Oh yeah. Oh yeah. It's gong time. It's gong time.

Jordy. What's up guys?

How are you?

Good to see you. How much have you raised it?

What's up guys?

Give us the news on the fundraising front first and then we'll figure out what you do for a living. I just answered customer support.

Support for a living, that's what I do. Well, you gotta get on Finercom.

Yeah, yeah.

Then you can just go to France.

Yeah, There we go.

What's going on? What's the news?

What's up guys?

Great to meet you.

Well, we recently announced $17 million in.

Funding across our seed and series A rounds. Congratulations.

Thank you, thank you. With authority. That one felt good.

Okay, now to the less important news. What does the company do?

Well, we also filmed a pretty kick.

Ass launch video to go along with it too. I saw that. A ton of fun. Yeah.

So is this like some type of new like fax machine company you're doing? Document processing? What are you building? Yeah, yeah. So my name is Kushal, I'm the.

CEO, co founder of Extend.

And at Xtend we're building a modern document processing cloud.

So you know, we work with companies.

That just get a ton of PDFs and unstructured documents.

Right.

And we help them ingest and process that.

So we really work with, you know.

Cutting edge AI teams, data teams, technical teams, whether they're trying to build AI.

Agents on top of that data, new.

Products with that data automate, you know.

Manual, back office work with that.

We really give them all of the infrastructure and tooling they need to go after that.

Is the actual physical document ingest problem solved. Is Iron Mountain just dominant there? Is there no need for actual new scanning. Have we scanned every document in the world by now?

Not even close.

It's actually funny.

One of the first customers I talked.

To back when I was getting the company started off the ground, it was.

A large healthcare provider in Milwaukee, believe.

It or not, in the middle of the country. And I talked to them, trying to.

Pitch them LLMs for document processing and.

They'Re like, like this sounds great. Come back to us in two years once we have digitized this mountain of lockbox warehouse of PDFs and boxes that.

Are stored in our backyard.

So not quite there yet, but I.

Think we'll get there pretty soon. Talk to me about the tech stack. Is OCR traditional OCR pipelines? Are those dead at this point? I've heard about some people that will send a PDF to Google for ocr, get a big messy bucket of text, but at least it's in text format, and then run that through an LLM to just kind of clean it up. What's the state of the art? Yeah, you know what's really surprising is so much of the world still runs.

On these PDFs and Excel documents and they just end up being the system.

Of record for such mission critical data.

If you think healthcare, you know, finance.

Supply chain, it's just all powered by PDFs. I think people's mind would be blown.

If they knew how much of the.

Global economy just runs off of PDF files.

And the problem's been around for a long time.

Right. I think OCR at this point is a decades old.

You know, funnily enough, we have a bunch of hoodies for the team and.

We have the OCR patent printed on.

The hoodies just as a little testament to it.

But it's like 40, 50 years old at this point. Right, but it's really accelerating now. You know, I think more documents are.

Going to get processed in the next.

Six months than all of history combined since the PDF file format was invented. And I experienced this myself.

You know, I actually built this back.

At Brex in 2018.

I was an early engineer there.

And we did exactly what you were saying. OCR a document and then just run.

It through a ton of painful regex to try to like pull out these targeted data fields.

And it was so painful.

And fast forward now to today with.

LLMs and the capabilities are just so.

Much higher and the demand for document processing is through the roof right now. Yeah, I was going to say talk about kind of the demand. I know you got a bunch of pretty incredible customers already. Yeah, I mean we have the privilege.

Of working with some awesome folks from.

Large enterprises like Square that are trying to do a ton of use cases around financial statement ingestion or Flatiron Health.

Who have billions of pages of patient.

Medical data all the way to cutting edge startups like Brecht and Mercury and Checker and many others that are all using us in production. And we have incredibly high retention. Ton of folks that kind of refer.

Us to others and come inbound.

And we're growing the team to keep.

Up with it, but the demand has been pretty intense. And I think what we've kind of.

Seen is that as these models have gotten better, it's sort of increased the.

Possibility of what you can go and do.

But for very mission critical use cases.

Where Even, you know, 99% accuracy, for.

Example, is not good enough if you're.

Trying to do mortgage processing or patient.

Healthcare intake because the downstream impact of.

Bad data is so catastrophic, right.

And so we really focus on these, you know, pipelines and industries where you.

Just cannot get it wrong.

Accuracy, reliability, you cannot get it wrong.

And that can, that, you know, constraint.

Puts a ton of complexity on the problem and that's kind of where we go deep.

And that's why we have a number.

Of customers that kind of try to.

Do the model approach and then come back to us in three months, six months, and they sign up for extend and pay for extra extent, despite the.

Models having gotten exponentially better over the past couple of months.

So yeah, I mean the models are getting better, but what models are you actually using and for what use cases? Because I imagine that the price difference and the time cost of using a heavy duty reasoning model versus a really quick optimized like, you know, 4.0 level model has got to be pretty different. And then is tool use at all in in the mix with some of these? Because I can imagine as clunky as Regex is, every once in a while you might want to have a layer of Regex validation on top of things, right? Just to make sure, I think you're.

Getting a really key point, which is there's very few use cases which is.

Like here's a document, extract this data.

Because for any mission critical pipeline, you have the entire end to end system you have to build of classify the document because that changes the schema and.

Then split the document up and then.

Actually parse it to make sure you can handle these tables that span 10 pages, right?

And each one of those kind of.

Adds complexity to the axes of cost and performance and latency and you kind of need to have all three of those.

Right.

Not a single model is going to.

Be great at all of them. And really why customers end up buying.

Us is because they don't want to be locked in to one model. And we give them all the tooling to figure out, hey, this initial triage.

Step, we want to use a really.

Cheap, fast, you know, low latency triaging classifier. But then for this really complex table.

We do want to use a really powerful reasoning model and we kind of.

Help them integrate and build all of.

That end to end.

Talk about where the data is winding up. Are you seeing more clients demand that you map the documents that you're ingesting all the way to a relational database like postgres or something? Are people just saying, hey, just give me a blob of JSON, I'll stuff it in a MongoDB. Do people want a CSV file that's on AWS or S3 or something? Like, how do people want the data finalized from you?

Yeah, I mean, the flexibility is kind.

Of the name of the game, and.

That'S why we provide options for all of that.

Some people that are trying to build, you know, AI agents on top of it, they'll want the JSON payload, but then also put it into a vector db.

Right, okay.

Some other folks are going to want to actually index that in, like elasticsearch.

If they're trying to do text experiences on top of it. Other people that are like just automated mortgage processing, for example, that'll just go.

Like structured data points into a DB.

That then they can take action on. So we kind of give them the data, the raw data, and then get.

Out of their way so they can.

Figure out, you know, where to do.

And what to do with it downstream.

Yeah, how, how real are. I mean, there's, there's, There was this narrative for a while like, oh, enjoy the VC subsidized era. It's like the early Uber days. All the LLMs are cheap, but they're going to be really expensive. How real is it that LLM inference can be a material cost for a company like you that's kind of reselling inference, not to degrade what you're doing, but like that, that's a piece of your business, part of the business. You have a cost that's inference, and then you're earning revenue from the value that you add on top of that versus a startup that's buying from you. How, how big are these line items? Are we talking, you know, something that's material to SGNA for a company or. Or is is intelligence like basically too cheap to meter at this point?

Yeah, it's a great question.

It really depends on the use case. Right.

And our contract sizes range from, you.

Know, we work with small startups paying.

Us a few hundred bucks a month all the way up to large enterprises.

That pay us six plus figures a year. Right.

And it kind of varies all across the board but you know, we haven't.

Played the unit margin game where we're trying to, you know, give away a dollar for 90 cents or anything like that.

We have been positive, you know, economics.

On all across the board because really.

What we benchmark ourselves against is what is the cost of bad accuracy in.

Your downstream product or your user experience?

What's the cost of six months of eng time?

And at the end of the day.

Those end up outweighing a lot more.

Than you know, potential percentage differences on.

Like the LLM costs themselves, especially as.

They'Ve continued to come down. You know, there were some things we couldn't do from a product perspective 18 months ago that now we really can.

Just because it's so much easier to.

Make multiple LLM calls and do things.

More agentically in an end to end system.

Very cool, Jordy. Anything else?

No. Very excited for you. Clearly ripping. I can sense the voice is going well. There's nothing better than seeing a lot of people raise a Series A. Not everybody has this level of pull from the market. So I'm sure you'll be back on for a B in no time.

It's fantastic.

Can't wait.

We'll talk to you soon. Thanks. I feel like that could be very valuable for you. You could maybe use extend to take ingest all the registrations from the G63s from the G wagons and all the service records and then you could have one database for all of them.

Not have to query across. I was going to say. I was going to say. I mean we produce a lot of documents and figuring out how to process.

These bad boys, it's almost like they come from the computer and the Internet and they could just remain there and yet we print them out because it's fun. Anyway, what else is in the news? What else is important to cover today? We have a few. We have one more in review today.

Yeah, we got Avlock coming on in just a little bit. Daniel. Daniel growing Daniel was any breaking news he says watching the Soham interview and I can already tell people are going to see this interview of a legendary liar talking about his legendary lies and be like, wow, I kind of believe him. You can label the tin poison and people will still eat it.

Label the tin poison?

Yes. You can label the tin poison. People will still eat it. He. You had said at some point it's tough because someone who would lie about having multiple jobs might come on here and lie to us. Quoting me, quoting you. He seemed sincere. He did seem sincere. It's very possible that he's a legendary. He's a 10x engineer and also a 10x liar or 100x liar.

Well, the proof is in the pudding.

Yeah.

Figure out how to.

It's very obvious that I wouldn't recommend a portfolio company hire this guy. I think it's possible he goes and works somewhere and just does a great job. I wouldn't necessarily bet on it.

Hire him in the house. In your. Literally in your house.

Yeah, but.

You got to have him in the office. But then you got to live with him.

And he very. Maybe he just is, you know, he sets up his desk and he's just still moonlighting. You know, I think he might be. He might just be built for Moonlight Lighting. He also was the dev shop thing.

He's fine.

He would routinely miss, you know, miss deadlines and then use various excuses. When the India, Pakistan stuff was happening, he was telling people, you know, they shot a drone 10 minutes away, guilt tripping people. So it's rough, terrible behavior.

It's a buyer beware situation for anyone who's employing him.

That's right.

Know what you're getting yourself into. You got to be careful and make sure that that aligns and ultimately the value of what you're paying, what's the value he's delivering? And you just know, okay, could be. Could be some volatility in that. But he's more of a known quantity now. And we learned a couple things at least got him on the record. So, you know, if he goes out and moonlights again, everyone will be able to point to that interview. Feel like he said he wasn't going to do it and he did it.

So somebody was saying a fake Soham. Fake Soham account was saying, Elon can work at nine startups. Jamie Dimon can be on the board of multiple companies, but when you do it, it's a scam. And then Austin says, so tired of this argument. Working at multiple companies was not the problem. Many people have side gigs or contract at many places. They just don't lie about doing so. So that's the key thing. Jamie Dimon is not sneaking on to other boards. Elon's very public about his different companies and it's all about just avoid lying, just don't lie. So you said Soham probably could have had a cracked dev shop, but he chose to lie so hopefully he course corrects.

Oh well, we will see. We will let the timeline decide. I'm sure the timeline will not let up on the meme and the jokes and anything else that's going on. Oh well, should we go through some F1 stuff? So F1 has made an annual sponsorship revenue of more than $636 million, which I believe is of significant multiple to the amount of money that they were asking for for actual TV rights. TV rights?

I think they wanted 200 million ESPN.

200 million for the right to distribute that and show that as content. But the ads inside are generating well beyond that. Yeah. So between 2019 and 2024, Liberty Media says F1 series annual sponsorship revenue more than doubled to 636 million. At a team level, total sponsorship revenue increased by 60% to 1.3 billion over the same period. So Liberty media is selling F1 sponsorships, but then the teams are also selling sponsorships.

There's levels.

The sport is bigger than it has ever been in its 75 year history and everyone wants a slice. But how can sponsors stand out and justify the cost when demand is so high?

Yeah, I. They haven't announced their new media rights or TV rights deal, but given how much they're doing on the sponsorship side, I wouldn't be surprised if they just go for max eyeballs and kind of take it at somewhat of not necessarily a loss. But just understand it won't be the profit center that it maybe once was. Because if you actually look at F1 viewership, that was TV rights in the United States. They wanted 200 million. No, ESPN wasn't interested in doing that.

Yeah, I guess this is global sponsors.

Previously in 2023 onward, they were paying between 75 and 90 a year. And they just don't command the live US viewership to really justify that anymore, I guess. Or even beyond that, despite the sport's popularity.

Yeah, it's interesting. Apparently brands are picking teams based on like the unique personality of those teams now. So they give this example. The team's distinct personalities can be a big draw for sponsors. Heineken began sponsoring red bull in 2017, just a year after the Dutch brewer started its long standing series level partnership with F1. The deal with the team is effective because both are non premium brands in a sport dominated by luxury Car manufacturers, says Hesse, who has previously worked for both looking up and down the grid. At the time they wouldn't have sat anywhere else. And so there's the official like drinks car of F1. And if you're selling alcohol or energy drinks, you head over to F1 Red Bull plus, what was it?

There's the steak. Steak has a. Oh yeah, you love this collaboration. It's like in certain it's the Sauber Steak F1 team.

The Kickstarter, which is kick, is their.

Streaming platform for Steak the Kick Steak Sauber. But without further ado, let's bring in Avlock. He's got a Q2 update for us. Great to see you.

What's going on?

Likewise. Welcome back. How you doing?

Welcome back. Thank you. Great. Been great. Q2 was awesome.

Break it down for us. What was awesome about it it?

I mean overall there's just a lot of optimism. Maybe I'll just take from the top and, and what we're seeing ecosystem wide and then what we're seeing in our data, I mean look ecosystem wide, we're just seeing exits across the board. M and A is up by huge margin. IPOs are up by huge margin. And so what we're actually seeing is a lot of exit dollars coming through, making its way back to LPs and that ends up flowing its way back into venture. Because all of venture is power law. As you have some of the best companies go public, get acquired, all those always float right back in and they go right back in and get recycled back into venture. And I think we just sort of hit the perfect storm in Q2 where a lot of optimism is there. Obviously a lot of exits. A lot of it's been reported, you have Circle, you have scale AI and a bunch of other companies. And these exits are massive, huge. And so the LP dollars, the returns that LPs are getting are also massive. And what we're just seeing is those dollars come right back in and they just get reinvested back into emerging managers and some of the scaled up venture firms. And so the thing that was actually shocking to me personally, you can kind of feel it. So I invest, of course, and you can kind of feel it in the deal velocity and the rate at which companies are growing. Like the revenue growth is real. But what we saw in our data was the LP dollars to micro VC, emerging VC. Think of these as like managers with 100 million dollar fund size to remain dollar fund sizes was up 50%, quarter for quarter, almost 50%. So that's. There we go in One quarter. It was like a giant, giant increase that, you know, for many quarters it was sort of the, the valley of death.

There was a. Yeah, there was a very dark, dark period where you, we.

We tracked that, we tracked those dark periods actually in our data too. It was like we have the boom times and the bus times and for a while there were a lot of the bus times and. But we're just seeing a lot of optimism coming in and it's, it's actually really, really great to see. And I think some of the data that was circulating around X over the past few weeks was around the emerging, the death of the emerging manager class. And I just think that data is actually wrong. It's coming from PitchBook and PitchBook's data is very laggy. They don't actually have information on this super real class of venture. Yeah, they don't have a real time view of it. Angelus does. And so we see, we basically see it all. And that's great. A lot of opportunities, optimism.

Well, yeah, and the emerging managers that we're steadily deploying over the last couple years during that dark period are the ones that are now, I'm sure, showing tremendous markups during this time, which will hopefully catalyze more investment as well.

Yeah. How much of the liquidity is psychological for LPs versus actual dollars going back into LP pocket and then they just need to redeploy them because there's something about like if you've been in some fund for years and years and years and the marks and they don't really feel real and then all of a sudden you actually get a check. You're Even if that's only 10% of the money that you put in or 10% of what you commit in the next fund, it kind of feels like, okay, this is working, at least I'm ready to go back in versus just okay. I actually, actually need to deploy new cash because I have cash on my balance sheet now.

It depends on the type of lp. So if you are a more of a traditional larger asset allocator, you have strict requirements on amount of money that goes into public versus private. So that is a little bit stricter. But you have a large swath of capital that comes from non institutionals. Like you've got family offices, individuals, a lot of wealthy individuals. I just saw a report the other day the number of millionaires in the US has gone up considerably. For them. It's all psychological, a lot of it psychological. Even if you get 10% of your capital in 20% 30%. It feels real because venture is, it's a weird asset class when you think about it. You basically invest in it and you don't know if you're going to get liquidity for 10, 15 years depending on where you invest. But when you start seeing that cycle of liquidity coming back, all of a sudden you gain confidence not just in the asset class, but also the manager that you're backing. And so we do see a lot of that. So that's what the reflexivity is that we're seeing on the platform where you have Nasdaq that was up 18% year over year and even venture dollars deployed as an overall ecosystem is up like, like 30% year over year. But within the micro VC, emerging VC area it grew 40, 50% quarter over quarter. Right. So there's this reflexivity of excitement because you're starting to see the dollars come right back and people are looking at going, this is real. These companies are real. It wasn't just, you know, in their minds like propped up valuations, which was a lot of the narrative, I would say for the past two years post service.

And the thing that interesting, it's interesting to think about people that maybe invested in the first six months of AngelList being a platform and then maybe they just made a couple investments at the time and then checked out for a decade and then suddenly they get an email and it's like it's a liquidity event. It's like, whoa, maybe I should pay more attention here.

We actually have that. There's this thing that happens with banks sometimes and even crypto platforms where, where people have money and they're like trying to get in touch with them to take their, take their money. It's pretty significant in some cases. And so yeah, we have cases of that as well, which is, hey, you have a return, you probably want this. This is actually pretty significant. Yeah, so we see that.

What do you think about potential new sources of liquidity coming into the LP pools coming into venture? I saw some news about some, some crossover funds potentially lowering the requirement to invest in the fund maybe down to from like a million dollars down into like the single digit Thousands or maybe 25,000 code.

You had a 50K, maybe it's a separate fund.

And so I don't know if, I don't know if that changes the requirements around, around in what's it called, Professional investor rules. No, accredited investor rules.

Accredited investor rules.

But we're seeing private company stocks go on chain and potentially be traded on consumer retail stock apps. We're seeing lower hurdles to get into venture funds. It feels like there could be a wave of sort of like retail ask liquidity coming into venture. Do you think that that narrative is real? How early are we in that? Do you think that could be a significant shift in the dynamic of early stage investing?

Yeah. Short answer is it's real. And Angellist is also working on something around there and we'll have something more to announce. The way to think about it is venture has never actually been connected to the public markets directly. Right. It's always been venture. Dollars get invested into companies, Those companies maybe 10 years, 15 years later, maybe never. Right. But go public and that's when people in the public markets end up investing in those companies. But what's never happened is venture or dollars going into venture funds coming from the public markets. And what you're seeing is you're starting to see a lot of these different experiments and people trying this out. Code 2 as an example, and there are a couple of other funds as well. And the accredited investor rule that you're referring to is you can only take on 99 non qualified purchasers in a fund. Qualified purchaser, Effectively you have $5 million in assets and above. So if you have less than that, then you can only take take on 99 of them into a fund. So that's what actually keeps those fund sizes pretty restricted.

Got it.

But you can register your fund and you are effectively under different regulatory regime and you can take on a lot of investors at once. Right. But that takes time, it's expensive. And also depends what SEC regime you're under. Right. And what the goals are of the administration and power at that moment in time. And right now the goal of the Trump administration is capital formation. The golden age, Right? The golden age of America. And so what's happening is everything is optimized towards new startup formation, more capital coming in. And so you're seeing a loosening of restrictions or a reinterpretation, if you will, of some of the SEC rules to allow for this to happen. Right. It's actually not even new laws. It's just most people don't realize this.

Let's look at them differently.

They just look at them differently. It's interpretation. Right. They look at the law and they can interpret it and write their own rules based off of it. So a lot of that is changing in real time. And so that's leading to funds like, like the CO2 fund and a few others. So it's real, it's happening. I think venture is undergoing a Pretty significant shift. It is not the same as it was five years ago, 10 years ago. You have a very large number of these micro funds, emerging funds, and then you have the mega, mega funds. Right. And these mega funds are not the venture funds of yesterday. These are full blown sophisticated financial asset allocators that some of them are now getting into roll ups. And that's a whole separate strategy that comes from the private equity world. And so we're in the midst of a massive change within venture.

How do you think about new products and experimentation? We've seen AngelList doesn't have the same luxury that Robinhood can do, which is run some crazy experiment in Europe and make companies. OpenAI was posting yesterday that they were frustrated with what was going on there and that they didn't endorse it. Obviously you guys have to maintain and build trust within the venture community and part of that is kind of balancing the desires of a bunch of different kind of players. So how do you think about innovating? Because at the same time, it is core to AngelList. The initial platform form was an innovation. Right. And then the RUV and the, and the, and the rolling funds and things like that.

Yeah, it's actually really simple for us. There is a through line that has never changed for AngelList since the very beginning, which is the founder is at the top of the pedestal.

So everything we do, we always ask.

Is this what the founder would want? Right. And if it's not good for the founder, it's not for the startup, we just don't do it. And so this even applies to innovations like the rolling fund. We ultimately asked, hey, is this going to drive more capital into early stage founders? And if the answer is yes, great, we're going to do it, we're going to pursue it. If the answer is ever no or we're not quite sure, we just won't do it. Because founder trust is everything. And ultimately we're here to make sure that we increase the amount of innovation in society. And that always comes from ambitious founders. And so that's actually been a very easy thing for us to do. It's also why we never really went into secondary markets. I mean, you think angellist, with our entire portfolio and everything would be the first to get in there? We never did because there's always this question of, well, are they like, are we adding more work on their plate? Right. And having been a founder myself multiple times and also having been in that seat, the answer is it's just a distraction, right? Like you're busy Running a company, building a company, recruiting, dealing with a thousand fires at any moment in time. And so it was easy for us to not fully pursue that path. But any new innovation we have, we always ask that question, is it good for the founder or not? If not, we won't do it. And that's just a through line all the way up to the. As a board, we view it that way as well.

That's super key. And when you look at many of the new experiments that are happening, they don't pass that test. Still, it'll be interesting to see, to watch and witness. I've been interested to see if some of these experiments can end up kind of forcing innovation or change. But again, that's still, that's still not the role of someone. AngelList shouldn't piss off every Fortune 500 CFO or every late stage company. It's just not a good business practice given your basis.

I think there are some cases where you actually want to push the Overton window. I think that's what you're referring. It's just like, can you push the Overton window and make something normal? And so with that in mind, I'm actually very, I love all these experiments are actually happening. In fact, right now is such an amazing time in venture and startups and starting a company having, you know, even Robinhood experiment is amazing because we have a chance to push the Overton window. But where it is today, that particular one is very fixed. I don't see a way around that.

Yeah, yeah. How are you thinking about the angellist kind of core business and scaling the team? We were about talking, talking yesterday. There's a lot of signs of wild top signals right now between these AI hiring packages and different valuations. And the list goes Soham working six jobs. Right. They're all across the board. Meanwhile, Satya is scaling back on some new data centers. He's doing kind of routine layoffs. It feels like he's not letting at least Microsoft get too exuberant in this moment. Even though there's a lot of. I'm curious what your approach has been and will be for the next half of the year.

Yeah. So as Context Angeles has been profitable for a little while now and so a lot of the way we. Oh yeah.

Yeah. So wait to get you off. Hate to cut you off, but we love profitability. Yeah, I love it, I love it.

We need a gong like that in the office.

Yeah, definitely.

And so, you know, we've actually always approached it, approached headcount and people in the. In the, in the company as do we really need this next person? And how is it, how are they actually going to move the company forward? So none of that's actually changed in how we're approaching any of the new bets that we have. The, the, the bars actually increase now, which is, hey, for this next new person we're bringing in, are they truly curious to work with AI tools and the models? Do they really understand how their job has completely changed? And if not, we probably shouldn't bring them in because as, as you both know, knowledge work is completely changed forever. Right. Whether you're in sales, marketing, definitely coding, right? Yeah. And so you want people who are naturally curious and are naturally leaning into these new tools. And the reality is the amount of headcount needed to continue to scale will go down over time. And so that's how we've thought about it, is you just bring in, people are naturally tuned to this way of working because we're in the early innings right now. It's like so early in terms of how companies are going to be formed, how teams are going to be formed. Do you even have your traditional functions anymore? Sales, marketing, engineering, product design? I don't know. Because people are starting to blend skills very, very fast. And so we're in such early stages that you almost want to rewire your culture right now. I think every company should rethink whatever culture they had and rethink however they form their teams. You may need to blow it up because what's going to happen is I'm telling you that I've been watching some of the newer founders are just graduating from school. They operate differently. They're like, you know, recently for the first time, I came to Tech in 2009. For years I didn't feel like I'm kind of part of an older guard, if you will. In the last 12 months, there was a distinct change in San Francisco. I'm like, these new founders just offer.

I'm a veteran now.

Yeah, veteran. I never felt that, that, I never felt that before except for the last 12 months where they are very capable, very creative. They were just born in a different era. They don't have any of the hang ups of how things used to be done about a decade ago. And I think it's very important for any company that's been around for even five years or seven years or 10 years to just rethink the entire company from the ground up at this point. Otherwise they're going to get completely demolished.

Totally. Well, always great talking, always fantastic. We should make this. Let's schedule it quarterly.

Let's get the next one in the calendar ASAP. Have a great rest of day. Enjoy July 4th.

Yeah, thank you. You too. Thanks for watching.

We'll talk to you soon.

Cheers.

Up next, we have. We have two more guests. We're going long before the 4th of July. We gotta get an extra couple minutes in.

Who?

We got Jordyn. We have added a new guest. This was very last second. Hey, we're here.

Welcome to the stream. You're live.

This is Nico.

Nico.

What's up, guys? How are you?

Break it down. Introduce Shortcut.

Nico managed to go viral yesterday on a timeline that was in turmoil.

That's insane. You were up against a serious competition.

I haven't been able to watch the video yet, so you're gonna have to break down the whole thing for us. But you introduced Shortcuts, the first Superhuman Excel agent. And when I read this line, I.

Was like, shots fired at copilot.

Well, when I read this line, I was like, oh yeah, you should just build agents on top of Excel where people already are. You don't need to reinvent Excel and build agents.

Love it. So anyways, but in your words, what do you do?

Yeah, what's up, guys?

I'm Nico from Fundamental.

I'm one of the co founders here. And we just released Shortcut yesterday. And Shortcut is essentially the first superhuman Excel agent. We actually benchmarked it against Gemini, Copilot, genspark. It's really not even close. What we have to do now is scale capacity. It's about four times better than Gemini, even in the limited stuff that we are allowed to use for Gemini because we just know I couldn't do it. And yeah, we're scaling up capacity now. I'm actually about to drop a million dollar check on scaling up the infra. Just.

Okay, there we go.

Physical check. Did you write it out?

How much are you.

I might do it for posterity.

Yeah, yeah, smack the thing. You need a million bucks. You need a comically large check.

Yeah, drop it off one of the hyperscalers.

Yeah, go give it to AWS Andy Jassy.

Here we go.

But. Awesome. So is this the second? Talk about maybe step back. Fundamental.

Yeah, sure. So Fundamental is a research lab. We're in Menlo park now, but we actually shut down our lab at Miami. It, where my co founder was a professor about 18 months ago. And the mission of the company is to build digital humans. Back when that was like a crazy, deranged thing to say. But from A computational neuroscience perspective. It basically means giving AI more than just intelligence, but like fundamental understanding of life, an ability to perceive and experience emotion, grounded interactions in the world, long term autonomy.

And naturally start with Excel, the foundation of modern life.

Well, you know, it's a perfect storm that we're doing Excel. I cut my teeth like on Excel. I get my knuckles bruised for using the mouse. And then I found my way into a research lab. And the reason it hasn't been done yet is because the people who are capable of doing it are just so out of distribution for like regular people that Excel hasn't been touched until now.

Okay, talk to me about actually building this thing. I remember like Cap IQ and Bloomberg had like VBA plugins for Excel. There's some pretty crazy stuff you can do under, under the hood of Excel. It is very modular. I don't know if that's changed with Excel going more cloud native, but you know, Microsoft talks a big game about Copilot. Are you worried about getting steamrolled? Is there a way that you guys work together? How does that dynamic play out and how are you actually building this thing? Because we've seen like Cluli just does screen recordings, right. And that's a different vector. There's other LLMs that are just like using the like they'll integrate with any IDE by just using, using the ADA features, like the accessibility features to just scrape the text out.

Of course, of course.

But how are you working through that?

So for context, the reason we're doing what we're doing now is because we actually set the state of the art in OS world, which is the computer use benchmark, this computer use but like sweet benches to software engineering. But we wanted to go tackle it in a much deeper way as if we had full access to the machine interface. So what that means is can you write your own code essentially to do what you want to do and to do that you actually have to own the machine interface. So we couldn't build exactly on top of Excel. What we actually wanted to do was recreate it entirely with feature parity. And then from there the big question is how we're doing this. I don't care to give away a little bit of a secret. This is being done through Cogen at runtime, which is a totally new paradigm for Cogen. CodeGen is not about writing your own tools to store in your code base. Right. It's about giving the AI the ability to do what it needs to do as it has to.

Interesting.

So it's writing all of it. It's essentially writing its VBAs as an easy.

I haven't used Microsoft Copilot that much, but I've noticed that the way Gemini is surfaced in Gmail, it's very clear that it's not doing code yet. It's actually just taking text dropping in an LLM. It's a chat interface and that's it. And so I can imagine that we're entering the v2 of software sidebar companions and this feels very logical.

Yeah. Even Gemini, if you actually look into the sheets integration they have now, they are starting to do a little bit of Python integration. So they are doing some numpy. Some. Some data frame manipulation.

Okay, interesting.

But they're much more hesitant to get there and we were very hesitant to even call this Cursor for whatever.

Sure, sure.

Because like it's such a caricature. But there's a truth that's much deeper about how you do that and it's actually about owning the interface the same way cursor had to fork VS code code to own it.

Yeah, talk about the demand. I replied to a comment of yours 15 minutes ago and then a bunch of people are now replying to me saying can I get an invite code?

So it seems.

Seems like all right, all right, announcement.

Well we got. First of all, I went viral on LinkedIn. I didn't even know that was possible.

Let's give it up for LinkedIn. They're always, always getting trouble.

We got about 7,000 comments now and I've only given out about 50 codes. This thing is extremely token hungry but I did just make code tbpn no 1010 uses. It's probably eaten up by now.

Go hunt it down.

But yeah, we are. We are trying to get this out as fast as we can. That's why I'm writing these big checks for infra so that we can scale up capacity to serve. The only bottleneck is GPUs.

That's amazing.

Incredible. Well, thank you for pinging us. This is super exciting. Come come back on. I'm sure you're planning to. So what. What what's the next few months looks like is scaling shortcut or are you going to.

Can I refine this a little bit? I want to ask Cursor. Very ground up adoption. From what I can tell it's a developer who's at a big company and they just buy it or install it, expense it, that type of thing versus going top down to. I imagine Goldman Sachs has a lot of people working in Excel. You could go to McKinsey, you could go to Goldman and say, hey, CTO, install this and let's do an enterprise contract. How are you thinking about go to market?

Yeah, I mean, the stupid answer is I'm doing a little bit of both and seeing what's working. But it's pretty obvious that the same people who adopt AI in enterprise for Excel don't have the same risk tolerance or, like, the appetite to try stuff at the frontier that does software engineers like for cursor. So. And also my intention is that this bubbles up organically and that people bring it in as opposed to me go tell me telling some VP, adopt this, you can reduce headcount by 20%. Because that reality also can exist if I wanted to. Right.

Like, cool. Very awesome.

All right, we'll come back on soon. Thank you for the code. Hopefully we get a shot at it before the audience does.

I'll make you a special one.

Yeah, we appreciate it.

Amazing. Congrats on the launch. Crushed it.

Thank you so much. We'll talk to you soon. And up next, we have Flo Crevello coming back on the stream.

Sohan's for former boss.

Former boss. Former boss. So we opened the show with Soram himself, and now we're going to a former employer to get his side of the story. And the question that I want to answer is that. That point that Growing Daniel pointed out, which is the question is, can he.

A pathological liar that's just going to continue to lie and scam?

Yes. Is redemption possible? Is redemption possible? So let's go to Flo and get his take. How are you doing? Good to have you back on the show.

Yeah, thanks for having me. No, redemption isn't possible when people show you who they are, believe them. No, there's plenty of very honest people. Like, what are the odds that someone who's been lying compulsively and being confronted about it for three years, like two or three years. And look, it's a special kind of person, too, who can do this thing to people who trust them. You have a relationship with an employer. And my understanding is that he basically has been averaging getting fired once a month for the last three years. It's a special kind of person who can do that.

So he could have learned his lesson two years, three years ago, the first time he was called out.

Totally. I wasn't tuning in.

I didn't hear what he said.

To me, the argument of sounds like he has some situation that that's bad, but it's not a justification to go steal Money from a bunch of Silicon Valley startups for years and years and years and years and use them as a piggy bank to solve his own problem.

So really quickly, how long did he work with you?

Two weeks.

Two weeks. And what was the result of that? I mean, I imagine you paid him for those two weeks of work. Did you get any good results?

I am literally out of a meeting like an hour ago with the engineer, described his impact as negative.

Negative.

Well, because we had to onboard him.

Yeah, you had to onboard him.

Yeah, yeah. He wasted our time and money.

Has he apologized to you?

Not yet.

Okay. He said he would apologize to everyone else. He would go on an apology tour. We'll see if that actually pans out.

My big question is, somebody like this, you could have them working in your office as a full time employee and they would probably still, there's a good chance they would still keep doing this thing with people on LinkedIn that didn't see the whole Soham gate.

We never compromise on ethics. Like that's just a thing I don't fuck with. He's going to apologize. Is he going to give the money back?

Yeah, that's a good question. I don't know.

Because stock is cheap.

Yeah, that's a higher bar. If he wants to make a statement, that's what he would do.

100%.

Yeah. Makes sense. How do you prevent this in the future? How does Silicon Valley prevent this in the future? Obviously the Valley is built on trust. This is a violation of trust. There's been discussions about, like, maybe we need a Reddit for. Are we dating the same man? Are we employing the same software engineer? Maybe we need an AI tool to, you know, check the GitHub commits and see that, oh, they're coming in at the same time every.

I was wondering if this, at the HRIs level, this employee has accepted, why.

Are they in two instances of rippling. That doesn't make any sense. Yeah. How are we solving this?

I don't want to over rotate on it. I think a large part of what makes Silicon Valid tick is its culture of trust. There's this whole game theory around hawks and doves and it turns out there is no stable equilibrium. You're in a constant state of shifting. Because if everyone's a dove, then the returns of being a hawk are very high and vice versa. If everyone's a hawk, then you can have these clicks of doves that start emerging. So I'm really careful not to tip Silicon Valley towards this attractor state of the hawk. And a lot of industries end up in this state of low trust and I really don't want to do that. Look, you're going to get screwed over every so often. We had a good laugh. The memes are amazing.

I hope viral posts at least drove a bunch of new signups and maybe he paid back a little bit.

Yeah, a little bit.

Yeah.

I mean, I completely agree. Like, yes, the handshake deal protocol is built on trust. Do some VCs violate it? Yes. Every once in a while a team a term sheet falls through. It's not the best thing that ever happens. But the alternative is so much overhead on every everyone that it's probably worth taking the risk of. Yeah, occasionally the handshake deal is going to fall through.

You're going to get screwed over every so often and it's not worth over pivoting on it and looking over your shoulder your entire life.

So it sounds like he's announced that he's taken a new role as a founding engineer at a single startup. He says he's not going to work at multiple companies. It seems like the jig, even if he is a pathological liar and continues to lie, people like his SEO is terrible. Now it will forever be very easy when you go to Google, search for the person that you're hiring.

He's like, oh, that's a different Sohan Parikh. There's a lot of people change his.

Name and it's going to be really complicated for him to get away with this longer. My question is, we were kind of saying the Soham Parikh dev shop makes much more sense here. Does that make sense to you? Would like if he was saying, hey, I've been working at all these different startups, I'm starting a developer shop and yes, you can hire me, but I'm a contractor. Why? Why are dev shops bad for startups? Why would this not work for him?

I actually think for him the real move is to start a course on how to crack coding interviews. Because he's really good and he's incredible.

He's actually credible.

Right. So he can actually make lemonade here. Like he should do that. And he can make a lot of money. It's very high price.

That in the cold email strategy, he had a very dialed in cold email approach where he would be, you know, he'd be like, say something nice. And really clearly he researched the company and I love building. The funny thing is in his message he said, he said, I'm pissed. And I was like, about what? What? Why are you pissed?

You pissed?

You got busted. You kind of gave himself.

Yeah. He was saying like, oh, yeah, like I'm gonna. But you know, there's gonna be a great reversal here. And he came on and was. The mainstream narrative is basically correct about me, but maybe. I'm sorry.

The redemption of being like, I'm gonna prove everyone wrong by working at one company. It's like, you don't get. You don't get.

Yeah, yeah.

We don't get fourth place trophy.

You worked at one company. That's funny.

Yeah. I mean, look, he's. He's not sorry. He just got cut. Like, it's. That's it. It's really simple. And. And why do dev shops not work for startups? I mean, there's like a. I'm a nerd when it comes to the theory of the film because of my experience at Uber and so forth.

Sure.

There's a book that's called Managerial Dilemmas that explains why dev shops don't work. Okay. It's fascinating. Yeah.

Can you unpack it a little bit more? Because Uber is interesting because didn't. Wasn't the very first version of Uber done by a dev shop? And wasn't that part of the early Uber lore that, like, the code base was written in Spanish and so everyone at Uber had like the Spanish to English dictionary there, which is hilarious because I'm pretty sure Google Translate existed at the time, but they still had the dictionary for some reason. It's like. It's like amazing lore, regardless of how real it is.

Yeah. I think people add a lot. Little bit to it. This is the first time I hear.

About it, but, you know, like, next.

Time I hear about it, there's going to be a guy with like a sombrero in the office.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Travis was in Tijuana pulling random devs off the street. Yeah. Really, really amp it up. The apocryphal ness of the story just needs to grow and grow and grow. It's a tall tale at this point.

The reason why dev shops don't work is because there's like a complicated. There's a complicated game theoretic argument which goes, basically, the reason why you employ people is because they know things you don't. And so there is an information asymmetry which always makes it possible for someone to cheat because they can basically. Bullshit. They're like. And you see it with engineering all the time. It's like, oh, this is so complicated. You thought it'd be a day, but actually it's going to be a month and you have no clue, you have no way to verify. And this is ineffable. The reason you hire them is because there is this information in this imagery gap, because otherwise you might as well just do it yourself. And so basically it is, in a way, it is always possible to change, which is why we are not fucking around and hiring people who do cheat, because there is no way you can always prevent them from cheating. If he doesn't cheat by doing this, he'll cheat by doing something else. So there is always a way to cheat. So you could say that to some extent, not cheating is irrational. You can cheat, you can get away with it. He's made millions, he's made so much money, right? You can't cheat, you can get away with it. And so in a way you've got to solve for the equation where it's like, I can't cheat, I can make a lot of money, I can get away with it. Nothing is ever going to happen to me, but I'm not going to do it because of X. And you have to solve for X. That's your job as a founder. Why would you act irrationally? And the way you do that, thankfully, is we have that bit that you can flip in our brains. As humans, we have these tribal pro social tendencies that are like, I don't want to cheat because I like these people or because I'm bought into the mission. Which is why they always say every startup is like a religion. The mission, the culture really matter on the camaraderie really matter as a startup. And that's what you lose when you have dev shops.

Well, yeah, to be even more specific, the dev shop gives you a scope. They say, it's going to take me XYZ time to do roughly this. Or maybe they're on a retainer. And then if they come back to you the next day and they say, well, actually it's going to take more time and it's going to be more money. Well, an employee is going to say, well, it's going to take more time maybe, but I'm not going to necessarily charge you astronomically more.

Right.

I'm just a salaried team member. And because they have that equity compensation as well, they're bought and hopefully bought into the mission.