The Metis List of Top AI Researchers, High Schoolers Beat AI At Math Olympiad, Apple Might Ditch Camera Bump, GPT-5 Rumors Heating Up | Ryan Petersen, Ty Haney, Antonio García Martínez, Ian Webster, Ori Eldarov, Aaron Tan

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Today is Tuesday, July 29, 2025. We are live from the TVPN Ultra Dome. The temple of.

The temple of technology.

The fortress of finance. El Capital de Capital. We created a list of top AI researchers. It's called the Metis list and it's available, it's live now@metislist.com. these are the top AI researchers. We're of course experts in AI and AI researchers. So we are fully qualified to curate this list. But we did have some help from some friends and we pulled some data, we looked at.

It was interesting. Many of the people that we asked to do kind of like an ELO style ranking did not want to be named because nobody wants to be picking favorites on the inside. But I think we put together a great list. It's honestly some of the most impressive. There's people in the top 10 with no Dwarkesh experience, appearances.

I don't know how that happens. It's crazy.

How do they do it?

You got to get on door cash. Yeah, we tried to have some fun with this. We pulled some Google citations, some Google research citations, looked at some of the previous companies. This was of course based on the list which apparently has been going around Silicon Valley. Mark Zuckerberg has been, you know, using this to recruit top AI researchers. We've been following the trade war. As Jordi Points put it earlier, we.

Should have put a. We should have put a buy it now price on here for, for Zuck. So he could just add to cart.

Add to cart. Yeah, just. Just create the super intelligence team directly on metislist.com maybe that's how we monetize this thing.

Yeah, it was good to see Alan Turing make the list.

Fantastic. Yeah. Underrated. George Boole, not doing so well. Inventor of Boolean logic, but he didn't make the list. But I think he's sitting in the 80s, not doing too well. Tyler, tell us more about the list. What do you think stands out? What'd you learn from the process? What was your methodology? How did you build this thing?

Yes, this is a lot of fun. I scraped most of Google Scholar, like the top 5,000 people, maybe. And then with some friends from the big labs, I kind of narrowed it down. You can see a lot of the papers they've written. Interest, stuff like that. Another gem in there is Alan Turing. He's doing pretty well right now. He's. Let's see, he's ranked number six.

Yeah, people love touring. I mean, we passed his test. And how long did his test stand? What 60, 80 years. Not bad.

Yeah, something like that.

That's, that's longer than most benchmarks and evals.

Alan Turing versus Goalpost wins.

Yeah. Yeah. Wait, what were you about to say?

Yeah, I mean, it's the longest enduring benchmark, I think ever.

For sure. 80 years. Yeah. But who knows? RKGI V3 might be around for 80 years. We might be here. I beat in 20, in 2034 or something. Wait, no, 2120, I guess would be like the, the, the Alan Turing test benchmark. We got John Schulman. Who else? Jurgen Schmid Hubers on here. Jeff Dean, one of the greatest to ever do it over at Google. He's been at Google for a long time. Still no. Yes. A DWAR cash appearance. Let's go, let's go. Good built. MapReduce, BigTable, TensorFlow, Yann LeCun's in here. You got all the different countries, really wide representation. Canada, uk, Australia, Russia, China. There's all sorts of people from all over coming together. A couple people without photos have been able to stay anonymous, but most people, we got their photo. Sholto Douglas. Good to see him on here. So this should be fun. Well, I'm sure we'll get a lot of feedback. Oh, Dwight Sholto ranked 56, but three Dwarkesh appearances.

There we go. How are you? Were you waiting, Were you waiting Podcast appearances properly, Tyler, you should be at the top once he gets four.

Putting up numbers like that. For sure. Yeah, for sure.

Yeah. He's going to be coming for Elia's spot.

Yeah. So this is a lot of fun. There's an email sign up. You can drop your email at the top to learn about the next. Drop whatever we send out.

That's right.

Whenever we go live with stuff, we will let you know first.

And we're getting big into email soon, by the way. Yes, Stay tuned for that.

Very excited about that. And yeah, hopefully this speeds up our trading card generation because you'll just be able to screenshot this and say this person's just got traded because it's moving fast and furious and we can't spend that much time handcrafting each of those trade deal trading card images too quickly. Indeed, indeed. There's. There's a lot of stuff going on. Well, interesting. Related to Zuck. Did you know that one of the kids at the IMO that was competing against OpenAI and DeepMind was named Alexander Wang? Wow. Great nominative determinism. Yeah, Future Alex.

Great future.

And speaking of imo. Yeah.

People are calling him the Alexander Next in line.

He does have a drone. It's not, it's not ALX and D E. It's D E R instead of Dr. So slightly different, but still Alex Wang nonetheless. Well, let me tell you about ramp.com time is money saved. Both easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. And we just closed an account for Ramp. Do you want to break down?

So Cody over at Jones Road Beauty, the CEO over there, which is a massive, massive brand, hundreds of millions of revenue, fantastic business and they're absolute dogs over there. Yep, he posted. My team has an in person demo with Ramp tomorrow. If they bring us a TVPN hat, I've instructed them to sign on the spot. And Ramp posted a picture earlier today with the contract.

They closed the deal.

Love to see it. Cody, enjoy your hat. We're glad that you're gonna be wearing it. And welcome to, welcome to Team Ramp.

Enjoy travel, enjoy bill payments, enjoy accounting.

Enjoy easy to use corporate cards.

Enjoy a whole lot more. Have fun with it. So yes, the Wall Street Journal has a, has a deep dive on the IMO. And what happened between Google DeepMind and OpenAI of Converse Machine. Of course DeepMind and OpenAI won gold medals of the math Olympics, but these American teenagers still got higher scores. Absolutely mogged by a child. Will this be the last time humans outperform AI? And I think the answer is clearly yes. But it's still hilarious because, you know, there's so much attention on AI and it's so impressive and it's so great. But high school is, but I mean, we'll go into it, but basically all the high schoolers are like, yeah, they're going to get us next year, but like we still got them this year. So anyway, from the Wall street, this was the year.

This was the, this will be one of the most meaningful wins. Right? Like the passing of the torch, maybe.

I mean, I think that what goes into a meaningful win is, is more of like the drama and storyline behind it. Just like, you know, what's the reference? Computers beat humans at chess in 1997. Computers beat Go Humans at Go in 2016. Like there have been dramatic chess matches since 1997. Yeah, it's just a, like you just assume that computers are the best at it, but you move on and then you go back to like caring about what humans.

The players.

The players and the personalities.

It is cool to think about what, what the energy requirements would have been for the high schoolers to win versus OpenAI and Google you have to imagine the high schoolers like, I had peanut butter and jelly sandwich and I won gold. Google's like we, we use. We burned energy of Houston, Texas, the energy that Houston, Texas uses in a year, in an hour. I don't think it's quite, not, not that dramatic, of course, but it is probably more than a PB and J.

So the Wall Street Journal says the smartest ever made just went to the most prestigious competition for young mathematicians and managed to achieve the kind of breakthrough that once seemed miraculous. They still got beat by the world's brightest teenagers. Let's go. Let's go. Every year, a few hundred elite high school students from all over the planet gather at the International Mathematical olympiad. That's the IMO. This year, those brilliant minds were joined by Google, DeepMind and other companies in the business of artificial intelligence. They all had come for one of the ultimate tests of reasoning, logic and creativity. The famously grueling IMO exam is held over two days and gives students three increasingly difficult problems a day and more than four hours to solve them. The questions can span algebra, geometry, number theory, combinatorics, and you can forget about answering them. If you're not a math whiz, Jordi, you give your brain a workout just trying to understand them. Because those problems are both complex and unconventional, the annual math test has become a useful benchmark for measuring AI progress from one year to the next. In this age of rapid development, the leading research labs dreamed of a day their systems would be powerful enough to meet the standard for an IMO gold medal, which became the AI equivalent of a four minute mile. But nobody knew when they would reach that milestone or if they ever would. Until now. Scott Woo knew. He called it out on our show in April. Also, let me tell you about Restream, how we're streaming right now. We're using Restream One livestream 30 destinations, multi stream and reach your audience wherever they are. If you're trying to Stream, get on Restream. The unthinkable occurred earlier this month when an AI model from Google DeepMind earned a gold medal score at IMO by perfectly solving five out of the six problems. And we're going to go into what happened with the sixth. In another dramatic twist, OpenAI also claimed gold despite not participating in the official event. This is the they were running the marathon in the parking lot. Strategy. Absolute dogs getting the press without needing to deal with all the red tape inside the stadium or buy a ticket. Yeah, yeah.

Winners win.

Yeah. I'm in the Olympics. I'm Usain Bolt. Usain Boltz. In the parking lot. Don't worry about me. Don't ask questions.

Yeah, it really is, it's great the way that they were able to get.

Yeah.

Credit for basically on the same level of Google, arguably more on X.

They went super viral at midnight on Friday. Like the moment the exam closed, like they got a lot of the attention and it's clear that they actually did the job. And they did. It was just like, you know, certain, you know, mechanics of like how they participated and like, does that really matter or does the quality of the model matter? Really, just the quality of the model. So I think that it makes sense to give them just as much credit here or 99% as much credit. The companies describe their feats as giant leaps toward the future, even if they're not quite there yet. In fact, the most remarkable part of this memorable event is that 26 students got higher scores on the IMO than the AI systems. 26. It's a lot. Among them were four stars of the US team, including a man named Tiger Zhang, a two time gold medalist from California, and Alexander Wang.

Tiger.

Tiger.

He's a tiger.

Get this man a term sheet right now. Future enterprise SaaS builder.

Yeah, for sure.

Founder.

Easily deserving of 10 on 100 precede gates and secondary.

Yeah, get him a term sheet immediately. Get him on Stripe Atlas immediately. Get him a FIGMA installation so he can design his software. He can think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design development teams build great products together.

That's right.

Get started for free@figma.com else and we built Metislist.

We created it with FIGMA make.

Yep. So you can go check it out. You can see our work in or Tyler's work, you know, in action. Our work. We of course, if there is any backlash, we will be distancing ourselves from.

Tyler's work and Tyler will be quickly terminated.

We will not. I will. I will fall on the sword.

We will ride. We ride for Tyler.

We do.

We do until the end.

So Alexander Wang had a third straight back to back gold medal. He's from New Jersey. That makes him one of the most decorated young mathematicians of all time. He's just got three IMO gold medals hanging around his neck. Looking good.

Do the picture with like biting.

Yeah, but he's at the top. He's at the top. Yeah, we're, we're at the bottom. Spraying the champagne, being like, yeah, imo.

America.

Yeah, America's back. He's a high school senior. Who can go for another IMO gold next year. So he could wind up being a four time gold medalist. That would be crazy. Maybe you got to up that valuation at that point, but in a year he might be dealing with a different equation altogether. And he actually gave an interview to the Wall Street Journal. Alexander Wang says, not the Scale AI founder, not the head of Meta Superintelligence, but the IMO gold medalist says, I think it's really likely that AI is going to be able to get a perfect score next year. That would be insane progress. I'm 5050 on it. So given those odds, will this be remembered as the last imo when humans outperformed AI? It might well be, says the leader of Google DeepMind's team. So until very recently, what happened in.

Australia, this really is insane. So Tiger has three gold medals, Tiger.

Has two and Alex Wang has three.

Alex Wang has three. And going into. But is it Wang that can get a fourth?

Yes, he can get a fourth.

So he's going into his fourth, going for his fourth.

He's got a freshman year and he's.

Competing against the brightest AI researchers at Google and OpenAI. And he's potentially the last man standing between total machine domination and this. I mean, I can't wait for next year. We might have to go in person.

I think we have to live stream it for sure.

We have heckling.

Full body paint for sure.

Full body paint for Alex Wang. Yeah.

Until very recently, what happened in Australia would have sounded about as likely as koalas doing calculus. But the inconceivable began to feel almost inevitable last year, when DeepMind's models built for math, solved four problems and racked up 28 points for a silver medal, just one point short of gold. This year, the IMO officially invited a select group of tech companies to their own competition, giving them the same problems as the students and having coordinators grade their solutions with the same rubric. They were eager for the challenge. AI models are trained on unfathomable amounts of information, so if anything has been done before, the chances are they can figure out how to do it again. But they struggle with problems they have never seen before. As it happens, the IMO process is specifically designed to come up with those original and unconventional problems. In addition to being novel, the problems also have to be interesting and beautiful, said IMO president Gregor Dohlenaar. Let's hear for beautiful math. We love it. Beautiful mind at work at this IMO championship. If a problem under consideration is similar to any other problem published anywhere in the world, he said, it gets tossed. By the time students take the exam, the list of a few hundred suggested problems has been whittled down to just six. Meanwhile, the DeepMind team kept improving the AI system. It would bring to IMO an unreleased version of Google's advanced reasoning model called Gemini deepthink. And it was still making tweaks in the days leading up to the competition. The effort was led by Thong Luang, a senior staff research scientist who narrowly missed getting into getting to the IMO in high school with Vietnam's team. He finally made it to the IMO.

Last year with Google, he never gave up.

Before he returned this year, DeepMind executives asked about the possibility of gold. He told them to expect bronze or silver. Again, he overdelivered expectation.

He overdelivered.

We love to see just like Vanta over delivers. Automate compliance, Manage risk, improve trust continuously. Vantage Trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. So the head of Google DeepMind's IMO team, he adjusted his expectation when DeepMind's model nailed all three problems on the first day. And so they get past day one. Nailed, nailed, nailed. Three for three. He's feeling good. He's going into day two. He. He's optimistic. He says the simplicity, elegance, and sheer readability of those solutions astonished mathematicians. The next day, as soon as he and his colleagues realized their AI creation had crushed two more proofs, they also realized that would be enough for gold. They celebrated the monumental accomplishment by doing one thing the other medalist couldn't. They opened a bottle of whiskey 21. They're 18. They're 18.

It's so funny. Whiskey is such an odd choice.

It is a funny ch.

But they're thinking, what would. What would.

Good luck to you.

What would a normal person do? What would a normal person do to celebrate? Not champagne, Grab a bottle of whiskey.

Whiskey is a funny choice, but I guess they like Whiskey@Google DeepMind. So to keep focus on the students, the companies at IMO agreed not to release their results later until later this month. But as soon as the Olympiad's closing ceremony ended, one company declared that its AI model had struck gold. And it wasn't DeepMind. It was OpenAI.

Wait, so I don't understand how OpenAI was. Was not a part of it officially, but isn't there like a pretty complex grading process? And they invited companies to participate, so I don't.

Yeah, I don't know, maybe we'll get into this. But I think the. The IMO questions go up as soon as the. As soon as the competition ends. So you can just hit them immediately with your model and you could probably have your own imo, like, like tutors or former coaches or former graders grade the results, and you could kind of just evaluate yourself on them. And I think also I just thought.

That they graded based on, like, the actual process to get to the result as well, but maybe that's.

I don't know.

In that case, it becomes a little less clear.

I think you're right because there are six questions and they're not binary because you can. The six questions add up to 42. And so there's. There were five high schoolers that got a 42 perfect score. Nothing missed. But there was one that got 40, so minus two points more than five out of six correct. So got five out of six correct. And then on the sixth one, got almost all of it. So got some partial credit. But I still think you could grade that and figure out, you know, how to score it. So, anyway, let's go into OpenAI. The company wasn't part of the IMO event, but OpenAI gave its latest experimental reasoning model all six problems and enlisted former former medalists to grade the proofs. Like DeepMind's OpenAI system flawlessly solved five and scored 35 out of 42 points to meet the gold standard. After the OpenAI victory lap on social media, the embargo was lifted and DeepMind told the world about its own triumph and that its performance was certified by the imo. Not long ago, it was hard to imagine AI rivals dueling for glory like this. It is hilarious to think about. If you've scrolled back to 2016, you know, Demis is with Google, DeepMind battling it out in Lisa Doll, the AlphaGo match. And then, like, Sam Altman and the OpenAI team are just, like, playing go like, in the parking lot, being like, we also are superhuman at go like. And people are like, but you're not actually in this particular competition. And they're like, but we're still really good at it.

How go? You're not even in the stadium.

It's very funny. But, I mean, they still demonstrated, like, fantastic performance, you know, so you got to hand it to them. In 2021, a PhD student named Alexander Way was part of a study that asked him to predict the state of AI math by July 2025. That is right now. When he looked at the other forecasts, he thought they were much too optimistic as it Turned out they weren't nearly optimistic enough. Now he's living proof of how wrong he was. Way is the research scientist who led the IMO project for OpenAI. So five years ago, four years ago, they asked him, when do you think we're going to beat the imo? He's like, definitely not in four years. And then he's the one that does it in four years. So even, even the insiders are bad at predicting how the future is playing out. Yeah, the only thing more impressive than what the AI systems did was how they did it. Google called its results a major advanced, though not because DeepMind won gold instead of silver. Last year, the model needed the problems to be translated into a computer programming language for math proofs. This year it operated entirely in natural language without any human intervention. DeepMind also crushed the exam within the IMO time limit of four and a half hours after taking several days of computation just a year ago. You might find all of this completely terrifying and think of AIs as competition. The humans behind the models see them as complementary. This could perhaps, this could be, perhaps be a new calculator, said the head of DeepMind. That powers the next generation of mathematicians. And if you want to generate the next generation of your code review process, get on graphite.dev code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. The problem of problem six. They got five out of six. Let's talk about problem six. Speaking of that next generation, the IMO gold medalists have already been overshadowed by AI. So let's put them back in the spotlight. Team USA is looking there, looking great. So a 17 year old student in Los Angeles on his way to MIT to study math and computer science, Zhang. As a young boy, his family moved to the US from China and his parents gave him a choice of two American names. They said you could pick your two names.

Here are your options. John. John, what are you picking? Tiger or elephant?

Elephant.

He chose tiger.

He chose tiger. His career in competitive math began in second grade when he entered a contest called the Math Kangaroo.

Is the journal messing with us a little bit? This guy's had a very animal themed life.

It ended this month at the Math Olympics next to a hotel in Australia with actual kangaroos. Zoo themed math. Math battle. So when he sat down at his desk with a pen and lots of scratch paper, Zhang, or Tiger as he is known, spent the longest amount of time during the exam on problem six. It was a problem in the notoriously tricky field of Combinatorics, a branch of mathematics that deals with counting, arranging and combining discrete objects. And it was easily the hardest on this year's test. The solution required the ingenuity, creativity and intuition that humans can muster, but machines cannot. At least not yet. I would actually be a little bit scared if the AI models could do stuff on problem six, he said. And so we can read from problem six and see if anyone in the audience can get this. Consider a 2000. Just solve this.

Solve this real quick.

Consider a 2025 by 2025 grid of unit squares. Matilda wishes to place on the grid some rectangular tiles, possibly of different sizes, such that each side of every tile lies on a grid line and every unit square is covered by at most one tile. Determine the minimum number of tiles Matilda needs to place so that each row and each column of the grid has exactly one unit square that is not covered by any tile. So, yeah, pretty straightforward. You can just do this in your head if you're, you know, Scott woo. Yeah. Problem 6 stumped DeepMind and OpenAI's models. Very interesting that they both failed on the same question. Probably tells you a little bit about how they're designing these models. But it wasn't just problematic for AI. Of the 630 student contestants, 569 students received zero points for this particular question. The answer, by the way, is 2112.

Yeah. And I see few people.

Few people got it.

Clearly. Clearly getting close.

Yeah, yeah. Only six received full credit of seven points. Zhang was proud of his partial Solution that earned four points, which was four more than almost everyone else. At this year's IMO, 72 contestants went home with gold. But for some, a medal wasn't their only prize. Zhang was among those who left with another keepsake.

And I just gotta say thank you. Thank you to Jane's street in XTX Markets for sponsoring the I Challenge.

That's right.

Really supporting young mathematicians and potentially introducing them to the incredible work that Jane street does to bring liquidity to markets, financial markets.

Absolutely. And thank you for LINEAR for sponsoring us. LINEAR is a purpose built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects and product roadmaps.

Imo, people only get a piece of paper. And imagine if they had game over.

Four and a half hours, they could do it in 45 minutes.

That's right.

No doubt.

Yeah. I mean, so. So again, I guess to summarize the kind of. The human accomplishment is incredible. The controversy and frustration from different people around OpenAI's approach, a sort of rushed announcement that didn't seem to be very sanctioned drama. Terence Tao at the IMO called it rude and inappropriate. So he was not super happy. And then the self grading. So Google DeepMind actually had their results graded by IMO coordinators. They participated into the program that IMO created for technology companies. And OpenAI's proofs are public so you can go see them. But they don't have the official IMO validation. They just used people that were experts and had competed previously. Graded previously but not officially sanctioned.

Yep. So 72 contestants went home with we.

Should figure out obscure Olympic. Olympic, you know, activity sports that we could do and kind of like run our own competition in the parking lot when. When the Olympics come to LA and try to get it. Try to get an Olympic gold dressage.

For sure. You know dressage is coming to la.

Yeah.

They're gonna have it at Santa Anita. It's gonna be the greatest crossover event of capital allocators and technology journals.

Absolutely. Absolutely.

I think the stories hit pieces that will be written. It's gonna be fantastic. There was no.

But it'd be really. I mean, I don't know, it'd be very, very different. There has to be.

We have to do dressage. We have to be dancing on a horse outside of. Outside of San Anita racetrack and be like we got gold. We danced on the horse.

We put together a team of interns.

To grade people inside the stadium. For sure. For sure.

Something there.

There was once a time when such precocious math students grew up to become professors or presidents. The recently elected president of Romania was a two time IMO gold medalist with perfect scores. Let's hear for Romania.

Let's go.

While many still choose academia, others get recruited by algorithmic trading firms and hedge funds where their quantitative brains have been have never been so highly valued. This year the US team was supported by Jane street and XTX Markets sponsored the whole event. After all, they will soon be competing with each other and with the richest tech companies for their intellectual talents. By then I might be destroying.

These gold medalists are going to love Jane Street.

Going to love it. It's going to be fun figuring out little puzzles in the market, trying to squeeze.

Today you're doing mathematics, tomorrow you might be overthrowing a small nation state.

No, it's great. You got an IMO gold medal. Your job is to come to Jane street and buy ads on the Dwarkesh podcast.

You have a bright future.

You're the head of podcast marketing now.

Imo. Winning podcast marketing.

I just assume Everyone who works at Jaden street has at least one, regardless of whether or not you're actually writing any code.

Yeah.

A former IMO gold medalist himself, Jung is now an associate professor at Brown University and visiting researcher at DeepMind who worked on its gold medal model. He doesn't believe this was humanity's last stand, though. He thinks problems like problem 6 will flummox AI for at least another decade. That is a crazy, crazy timeline. I feel like no one thinks that we're a decade out from perfect score. That's wild. Anyway, he walked away from perhaps the most significant math contest in history feeling bullish on all kinds of intelligence. There are things AI will do very well, he said. There are still going to be things that humans can do better. And I guess I believe that broadly, it's very interesting. I think the biggest takeaway is that there are, there are levels to this. There are always levels. And in this, it's that there, there is a level where you want, you know, the IMO math to be solved. Like chess was solved in. When deep. When was it Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov in 1995. And so chess was considered, like, you know, better. Like, computers were better at chess than humans. But then for a while there was something called Centaur chess where a human plus a computer was better than a computer and it was also better than a human. And so the human would sit there and look at the recommendations from the computer that was crunching all the numbers. And then the human would do the soft skill stuff, like read the opponent, kind of see if there were blunders and kind of act as sweating. Yeah, they're sweating.

Sweating.

Yeah, yeah, sweating, exactly. So, like, figuring that out. But now chess is completely solved to the point where they're adding a human to the mix means nothing. But chess had like a 10 year, 20 year run of like, so Centaur chess being the dominant, the actual peak of performance. Then The Lee Sedol AlphaGo match showed that deep learning models were not just better at GO than humans, but could actually come up with novel strategies. And that's the famous Move 37 moment where AlphaGo placed a piece on the Go board that was completely unexpected. Lisa doll stands up, walks away. I think he goes and smokes a cigarette outside and he's like, stressing and he's like, that's weird. That makes no sense. Like, is the computer, like, broken, like, messing with me? And it turns out that that was a new strategy and it wound up winning that game.

Yeah.

And so I think that there are levels in the sense that like right now we're at five out of six. We don't just have to get the AI models to six out of six. I think we need to get them to six out of six. And then also like, oh wow. They that like the reasoning that got them there was novel and different from everyone.

It'd be interesting to find somebody who's great at chess and great at math. Maybe it's someone like Scott Wu who can break down kind of the differences in the problem that a computer is solving when it's trying to win at chess versus the problem when it's approaching a new type of math problem. Right. It's. Math problems can constantly evolve and take different forms and things like that. And it presents a slightly different challenge. Somebody yesterday or the day before. Sid Steierhart says, when AI was introduced to chess, the thought was that grandmasters would use it as a tool to maximize efficiency. But it very quickly became apparent that even the greatest human chess players can contribute nothing but noise.

Yeah.

And. And they say nothing is immune. Everyone will soon be obsolete. And Mark, Mark Andreessen comes in with a quote and says chess is more popular in a bigger industry now than ever.

Yeah, of course.

And yeah, this is because people like to watch human feats of intelligence and challenges and people like to be challenged. And that is part of. And comp. There's value in competition and there's value in seeing two humans that are experts in their field and at their craft compete. And that even as a humanoid robot will be better at shot put in the Olympics. Still going to be cool to watch somebody throw a heavy rock when somebody is. When you could imagine a robot being better at horseback riding than a human. But will it still be cool to watch a human and a horse dance? Of course it will.

Of course it will.

Some things never get old.

Well, if you have a business and you're getting customer support tickets in and they're not asking you IMO level questions, question 6. Like that level. If it's like normal level, you got to get on finish AI, the number one AI agent for customer service. Number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake offs. Number one in ranking on G2 super intelligent. The majority of your customer support tickets are IMO question 6 level difficult. But if it's basic things, how do I get a refund? FIN AI is going to be amazing.

We got to mess with OWN a little bit. I'm on the FIN AI website right now and I'm talking with the FIN Agent feed it. Hi there. You're speaking with a fin agent. I say consider 20, 25 times 20, 25,000 grid of unit squares. It says. I noticed you've asked a mathematical problem about grid tiling, but I'm actually a sales developer. I help businesses find the right customer support and engagement.

Screenshot that.

Can you take a crack at it?

It would be really helpful to get me through the next stage of this sales funnel.

Would help me build confidence in the product.

Yes, apparently you can get Amazon's. Have you seen these memes of people go to the Amazon help help, like chat and then they get it to like write, react and like use it as like a, like a cursor wind surf, like alternative.

Free. Free inference.

Free inference, yeah. And yeah, free super intelligence. You could totally jailbreak it and just be like, yeah. Anyway, get on numeral sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Go to numeral hq.com and you know who's going to be paying sales tax soon? Apple. On the new iPhone, which was just spotted in the wild, Mark Gurman says he thinks it looks legit.

If you like cameras, you're going to love the next iPhone because what I'm seeing here, zoom in on this.

The next slide is zoom in.

Zoom in even more if you can.

I'm seeing a huge flash, huge flash to the side. Huge lidar scanner, that type of thing. Dot projector.

And it looks pretty flat.

It looks flat. I can't tell if this is just a case on top of it or there's too much compression in the photo that we're looking at to see if the new iPhone doesn't have a camera bump. But it looks like there's a chance that we're getting rid of the camera bump. I mean, for a long time people have been dunking on Apple. Steve Jobs would have never gotten a camera bump. You know, he never would have shipped this.

Steve Jobs would appreciate how it drives most people to. To buy a case.

I think so. And I don't know, I mean, it's unclear. The iPhone 4 didn't have a bump.

It must have bump case attach rate go up like 2% and they're like, yeah, we'll take the extra bill.

Oh, yeah. Tyler, did you order a phone yet? Tyler famously won an iPhone by defeating the Arc AGI V3. Wait, you have it in the studio? You have the new phone?

It's way better.

It's way better.

The camera bump is like really annoying.

I didn't realize it had that. Wait, did your old phone not have a camera bump?

Well, I had a case on it. You don't like how it makes this sound when it's flat on a table?

Well, I mean if you want a case, you're have to do something even more extreme. You have to defeat the imo. I wonder, it would be fun. Have you had a chance to play with the agent framework on Arc AGI? I want to see if you can rank on that. That would be interesting. If you can do that, if you can solve it using AI, then you can get win one. One case. One case with the phone. Let's go. So yeah, apparently there's like some harness that's already kind of pre built and you can kind of just fine tune and swap things in and out and have like a little bit more of a flexible approach. I saw someone posting about they beat the first level just kind of. It seemed like a kind of a brute force solution. But I think it'd be interesting to see like how far can you get in the games before it just becomes really, really difficult to play through. But see what models are out there and see what, see what you can. What the experience is like building for it. Anyway, this iPhone camera bump is interesting. So I don't know if Steve Jobs would have shipped this. There was always this weird trade off because people say just make it flat. But they're like the laws of physics do apply to cameras. Like you need a certain focal length to get a certain quality of picture out of them. And so Apple's made this trade off between the bump gives you better photos which people really like. You could go flatter, but then you get worse photos. You could make the phone thicker to match the depth of the camera, but then it's big and chunky and heavy and people say that they want more battery life, but the real revealed preference is that like one day of battery life is fine. People are fine being in the habit of charging their phones every day. And we kind of saw this the same thing with like the watches. Like some people are like, oh. Like it would actually be more inconvenient to be like, yeah, I have to charge it every five days. It's like, okay, so I charge it on Monday and then Friday and then Wednesday and then the next Saturday instead of just being in a routine and just doing every single day.

So yeah, there's also like how fast does something charge, right? Like if something can get. If you can add 20% battery life in, they charge really 30 minutes and.

There'S chargers like everywhere. Like you get in any car there's a charger. Any office there's charger. Everything's so standardized on Lightning or USB C now that like you can grab a charger anywhere. So. And then there's also like those add on battery packs. If you're really crazy about that, you can modify it.

So.

So I don't know. I think we need a polymarket on whether or not the next iPhone has a camera bump. That would be interesting to track. I want to know. I feel like I don't know this picture. I feel like this picture is a case. I feel like it will have a camera bump. What do you think? I'm going camera bump. Staying, bump, bump, stays.

Yeah, it makes sense that they would put a case on.

And it's like those cars I keep seeing the new BMWs driving up and down PCH and they're wrapped in that like confusing camouflage so that you can't really see the curvature if you take a picture and you can't really see the full silhouette of the car. Yeah, it's kind of the same thing. They should do that for the phone. I mean they kind of did with this case probably.

Yeah.

But I don't know. They moved the flashlight over.

Well, one thing that we do know is that the company is going to be introducing a foldable iPhone at the end of next year. It will be entering a product category that's already seven years old, pioneered and dominated by its biggest hardware rival, Samsung. And at this time, Apple won't be debuting erratic, debuting a radically new interface or transformative hardware. Instead, the device will offer similar design as Samsung's Galaxy Z fold line and use many of the same core components, including foldable OLED screens sourced from Samsung display. Oh, interesting. So it will be a Samsung screen.

Yeah, basically Samsung's done seven years of R and D on this and the supply chain's really robust. Do you remember the first folding phones? The first folding phones, not the Motorola Razr V3, but like the first foldable screen phones, like, they wouldn't fold flat. So like the hinge it would like when you close the phone.

I had one. I forget what it was. Where the. The keyboard would flick out.

Yeah, Sidekick.

That was an awesome era.

When they folded, they wouldn't fold flat like this. They would fold and be like this basically. And so like you would be able to see through the hinge because like it wouldn't fold all the way close. Now they're at a point where they do fold flat and the Hinges are extremely reliable so that you can use it for a year. And if you get a little sand in there, it's IP 76, you know, you know, waterproof, all of that. They've, they've figured out all the industrial.

Design and so, yeah, so Samsung. Mark Gurman reviewed Samsung's latest Z Fold 7 and called it the first foldable phone with true mainstream potential. That device is a remarkable feat of engineering with a wider front screen and refined design that you can experience first, that you have to experience firsthand to truly appreciate. Already sales are outpacing the prior generation to a significant degree, I'm told that makes sense.

What's interesting is it seems like the Z fold 7 is the size of an iPhone when unfolded and it folds down to be half the size. I think the real demand and the real interesting thing is it's the size of an iPhone when folded shut and then it unfolds to basically the size of an iPad. Exactly. That's what I think people would be more interested in. But I don't know, I don't mind carrying like a bigger thing. I always get the bigger phone and so I guess I might be in the minority there.

So Mark says that means Apple's first foldable won't break any technological barriers or redefine the category to. Samsung has already taken care of much of the heavy lifting. But here's the twist that may not matter. Apple's unmatched ability to market premium hardware to consumers, Vision Pro aside, could make it a dominant player in the foldables market within months of launch. There's a sizable group of iPhone loyalists, myself included, who have long wanted a foldable device but weren't willing to switch to Android to get it. That pent up demand is real and Apple knows it. I also just think, yeah, people used to just love the novelty of a new iPhone and it was like exciting if you had it. If you're one of the first people to have it, people would wait in line. You don't see iPhone lines to the same degree anymore because it's just not that exciting. And I think a lot of people will get the foldable version of the iPhone even if they've never wanted a foldable just because it's new and it's from Apple and they use the device every single day. And I imagine it will be very well done.

Imagine running on a foldable phone, just pulling out your CRM. That'd be so satisfying. Customer relationship Magic Adeo is the AI native CRM that builds scales and grows your company to the next level customer relationship magic. So the new foldable iPhone is expected to cost at least $2,000. So I mean if it delivers at the level of an iPhone and just becomes the highest status thing to carry, everyone's just gonna go. All the top Apple fans are gonna go from spending $1,000 a year every couple years to 2,000. And then also I bet that the change in form factor, like I think my, I used to upgrade every year, then I started upgrading every two years. I think I had the last phone for like three years and I was kind of like, I don't really notice any difference. I got the new phone, barely noticed any difference. I think I got an extra button on the side. But even though it's only one year old, if there's a foldable and it's like this cool shiny new thing, even if I don't get that much value, I'm definitely upgrading, I'm definitely upgrading. And so you know, they just, they just pull forward a ton of revenue which could be very good. And there's an interesting thing about Apple's revenue mix shifting really towards like the services and then maybe this pulls some, some stuff back. This is also extremely popular as a form factor in China.

And so Mark says in fairness to Apple, its foldable phone won't be a carbon copy of the Samsung. As he reported months ago, the company is focusing on addressing a few of the foldable categories long standing weaknesses. The company aims to make the inner display crease less visible and dramatically improve the hinge mechanism. And as part of the development of iOS27, which formally kicks off soon, Apple will prioritize software features tailored specifically to this new form factor. This will be fun for app developers who have been focused on, you know, optimization, optimizing conversion rate at every step of their funnel to have some new surface area to be thinking about. And again, it talks about the popularity of foldables in China, which is interesting. Apple reportedly shut down their first retail store in China ever. They never closed a store, but that points to the struggles they're having in China broadly as people just don't care as much about the status around the iPhone in the way that they once did. Once did.

Whether you're bullish on Apple or bearish on Apple, you got to get on public.com investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi asset investing, industry leading yields and they're trusted by millions. Breaking news from DD Das Friend of the Show. OpenAI is dropping GPT5 next week. Apparently he says the Source is an anonymous DM with some reasonable proof shared out of public interest. Some of the details might be off, he says. A million token window, 100,000 output tokens, MCP support, parallel tool calls, dynamic short and long reasoning. Uses code interpreter and other tools. Code names are O3 Alpha, Nectarine, Lobster.

5, Star, Lobster Mini, Starfish Nano. Fantastic. They're not beating the naming challenges, allegations, But I mean, GPT5 is clean. Yeah, I'm going to call it Starfish Nano, Lobster Mini.

Personally, Starfish, I like it. So Polymarket has GPT5 released by July 31, which would be in two days at 7%, but August 15 at 74% now. So it feels like it's coming. And they have GPT5 released by December 31st at 97%. Swix, as we're seeing almost daily releases of great open models now, in completely unrelated news, GPT5 and Gemini3 drop in the next few weeks. SWIX also believes that GPT5 is coming soon and Gemini 3 is also coming soon. And it's interesting because we're in this era of like, what does GPT5 even mean? Because it used to mean a major version number bump was a order of magnitude in pre training, but then we tested that with what was supposed to be GPT5, the. I think it was called Orion. And they did this massive training run. They started testing it and they found that it wasn't as useful as it had good, like big model smell, it had good vibes. Dylan Patel said it made him laugh. And it could do good green text. And we have one of them here that we'll read through. But it wasn't as useful as O3 or O3 Pro and all the reasoning and all the tool stuff. So we're in this weird thing where GPT5 might come out and it doesn't necessarily mean that like, okay, it's the Stargate training run, it's the 10x bigger pre training run. It's the most massive LLM training run of all time. All the data, it's more like it's just the best, most polished unification of all their different capabilities. So they're putting together the best model with the best tools and the best systems and the best interface. And that's what the version number bump means. Now, obviously, dropping GPT5 will be like a massive moment and everyone will be like, oh my God.

And expectations are extremely high.

Expectations are extremely high. But really what people want is just something that's usable and it doesn't. And so GPT4 point they changed what was supposed to be GPT5 apparently to GPT 4.5 and kind of and then they tucked it behind some UI so it's harder to get to now. It's not the default. It was slower, but people did like talking to it and they felt like it had more personality and it was funnier. And of course this comes from this Tyler Cowen green text Be me Be Tyler Cowen wake up at 5:23am Precisely. Eat exactly seven blueberries, three Brazil nuts and a quarter cup of icelandic skyer skier productivity.jpg write two blog posts, one on obscure Romanian cinema, the other on the economics of parking meters in Hyderabad. Check email reply exclusively in lowercase Very interesting. Thanks for this. Send Perhaps Send Attend breakfast meeting with unnamed intelligence officials Discuss Singaporean Food stalls instead of geopolitics Food stalls instead of geopolitics Lunchtime arrives. Ask waiter what is your least popular dish? That actually is really funny. Waiter visibly confused, recommends some fermented herring special. Wonderful. I'll have that extra spicy. Genuinely enjoy it. Back to Back to Office Podcast Guest waiting is a chess grandmaster who's also an amateur botanist and former dj. Oh, so funny.

Feels extremely accurate.

It's perfect. Jpg Finish interview by recommending three obscure books on medieval Hungarian tax policy. Afternoon arrives. Browse JSTOR for fun, Download papers titled An Economic Analysis of Late Roman Olive Oil Production and Optimal Seating Arrangements in Mongol Yurts. Dinner time Marginal revolution. Commenters awaiting restaurant recommendations. The best fried chicken in America is actually in rural Nebraska. Chaos in the comments. Chuckle softly bedtime at exactly 9:47pm Dream in Straussian subtext. MFW and so Nabeel Qureshi says, honestly, the first time an LLM made me laugh out loud and I agree.

It seems this is the way that it makes this is how this is its first like consistent humor form factor.

Totally, totally. Very good.

Reliable.

Yeah. So Tyler Cowan's hitting bedtime at exactly 9:47 when you're headed to bed. Getting eight sleep. Get a pod five. They have a five year warranty, 30 night risk free trial free returns, free shipping. And we have our first guest of the show in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring in Ryan Peterson.

Fantastic.

Yeah. Whatever lighting you got going on looks super cinematic. Good job.

Good stuff.

Really.

I'm in a hotel room in Las Vegas.

It's the big window. There's a big window to your left and I like it. It looks awesome.

It's the Aria Aria center right over there.

Very nice.

There we go.

Blown out on the house.

Are we getting a Flexport orb this year?

Oh, yeah.

People have been oh yeah, the sphere.

Yeah, man, I want to do it.

This might be the first gong ringing for a sale of a company. Is that what's going on? Break the news down for us. Exactly what happened and is this a gong worthy moment and full backstory. Yeah, full backstory.

This is like six questions in one.

Yeah.

Just cook.

Take us on a journey.

So we sold our Convoy business to dat.

Okay.

And for some reason we're not supposed to talk about the numbers involved. So you get them. They have been reported and I have, I have not protested the numbers that have been reported. So it was very good return for us. We bought this business out of bankruptcy 18 months ago from a bank a little over 18 months ago. And one thing that's been reported, I feel like wrongly where I thought I'd come on clear the record is it's been reported is that we made this amazing trade. We bought this thing and then we sold it for way more than we bought it for. I made a lot of money, that is true, but it was not a trade. The way you buy like a stock and do nothing and you make a bunch of money like you're some kind of genius. This was an active entrepreneurship and business building. We bought a bankrupt. We only bought the asset. No employees, no customers, no transactions, no nothing. Had to go recruit the former employees of Convoy to come back to work for us.

Wow.

We had to recruit the carrier. So the way the Convoy business works is at peak, this thing was worth the $3.8 billion. And you can go read what we bought it for. It was a lot, lot less, but again, it was nothing there. The team did an incredible job, like real business building here to go get all those carriers back. So the way it works, at peak, they had 400,000 drivers on a mobile app. Truck drivers, well, we brought it back to life. And those drivers, many of them hadn't been paid by the former owners. There was really like no transaction volume. Nothing happened. And we had to convince them to come back. It was kind of solving the cold start problem of any marketplace. Like, how do you get loads in here to attract the drivers? The drivers to attract the loads. Pretty hard problem when you start from zero. And Flexport is not a big truck broker. So we didn't have the demand to do that to bring it back to life. So what we did, we completely pivoted the business model to be a neutral platform to say, okay, other truck brokers can come in here and post their loads and bring it and we'll have the drivers come back to serve those loads and get the flywheel spinning. So that was the change to the business model that we made. And 18 months later we had hit real liquidity, kind of escape velocity. There were probably on track to have like more than 100 truck brokers by the end of the year, each posting thousands of, some of them tens of thousands of loads to the platform, some over 100,000. And then the drivers would sign up. You know, if you have demand, the drivers will come. And they all still had the mobile app they liked Convoy. They wanted to come back if there were loads. But the moment we pivoted it away from serving. Being a truck brokerage was kind of also not a strategic fit for Flexport. Like our job is to serve importers and exporters and companies and cargo to move, not to serve other truck brokers with whom we sort of compete. So it was like this strategic mismatch was always an afterthought. When I talk about our mission and what we're going to do and why we're doing it, be like, oh yeah. And we also have this like business that serves truck brokerage which is an incredible business and it deserves to be front and center. So we sold it to dat. DAT is the low, it used to be called Dial a truck, which I love. It tells me their heritage. It's been around forever. Yeah, they're kind of the 800 pound gorilla in load boards. Load board is like if you have, you're a truck broker, you can't call every truck driver in America to match your load to pick it up. And so if you don't have a contract or you don't have relationship and none of the carriers you work with, the people that operate trucks is able to service your load, you'll post it to DAT and then hope that somebody's kind of like Craigslist freight. Well, like Craigslist, you know, there's. They've got. It's hard, it's a hard problem to control. Like who's actually picking up the freight. Is it the Eastern European mafia that just stole your stuff and disappeared? Like some of that goes on and.

I just saw, I just saw friends company this morning, had somebody show up at his warehouse, looked completely legit, like an official kind of, kind of distributor kind of purchase order and just like got over a million dollars of product and then just disappeared.

No way.

And I think that, I'm sure, I'm sure that happens quite frequently.

Probably is through this kind of scam where people and it's like now Convoy built incredible machine learning based detection algorithms for this to go like do pattern matching and find it. So we've actually over the 18 months that we operated the business doing hundreds of thousands of loads of zero incidents of freight and tons of busting people. We even got a guy trying to commit freight fraud from the courthouse and it was a known actor who was like connected through these pattern matching algorithms. And so they. And we have GPS coordinates because you're doing it on the mobile apps. They're like oh this guy's at a courthouse right now. So we looked up his records and he was facing trial for freight fraud.

No way. Doing freight fraud. Wow, that is crazy.

So yeah, it's really rampant and that I think that's going to be one of the biggest wins from all this. I think DAT is going to make a ton of money doing this better business model. Making a percent of every transaction instead of currently they just sell subscription. So DAT is part of Roper by the way public company. Their stock didn't move on the news. I think Wall street didn't quite understand how big this can be for them. Sure not. Not investment advice but yeah, but there's something there. But the big and Flexboard does great. We got put a lot of money on our balance sheet help us on our mission. The Convoy team is going to get to scale and instantly put tests there algorithms at scale. Right. Test the matching because DAT is the monster. Like something like 40% of all the truckloads run on the DAT load board. And so piping them through convoys. Let's see how that works. It's going to be awesome. But the industry in general. Yeah, I think it's a massive way to combat fraud. Truck brokers will really benefit because about 30% of the expense structure of a truck brokerage is of an ftl. Brokerage is what they call carrier sales because these are the guys that are making phone calls to carriers to try to cover the load to say okay, I got this load, I got the customer. Let me find a trucker that'll move it for me. And with Convoy that goes away. You don't have to spend that money or those people can work on harder loads than more interesting problems. Go do more sales. So huge win for the industry. I think probably the biggest beneficiary of this all. So yeah, it went down.

How did Convoy go go bankrupt originally it was, I remember kind of watching that unfold quickly and then you guys move super fast on it from. From what I remember.

Yeah. A lot of theories. I'm sure that, you know, it'd be interesting to get the Convoy founder, Dan Lewis on your show at some point, see what his ideas are, what. What he thinks, where he went wrong. There's sort of the proximate cause, which is, you know, every company goes bankrupt for the same reason. You run out of money. They. They were in a. They were in a transaction. They were. They had agreed to sell the business to a large competitor of theirs. Big public company shall go unnamed.

I don't want to get sued.

But big company.

Who.

They should have. They should have done. And it was going to. But because they had a deal to sell and then the big company unwound it.

They didn't raise the dealer. Yeah.

He hadn't gotten proper board consent. And he had a couple of activist investors who didn't want. Didn't like the deal and backed out. And Convoy had two weeks of cash left and they were supposed to close. But like, you never should have got yourself into that situation in the first place.

Yeah, that's right.

Especially, you know, you kind of allow your competitor to do that for.

To you.

Like, don't let.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Kind of like a win for the competitor.

Yeah. We can. We can buy you for a lot of money or we can just put.

You out of business and then we're just like, you know, more strong. Yeah. So how did this particular.

So you're, you're.

You're.

That all of that is sort of proximate causes upstream of that go back a few years. My, my. If I. If I ran the business, we'd have been way more sales heavy. I think they were really product and tech driven. Like, we're doing hundreds of thousands of loads through convoy. Only 2% of them. A human has to touch at all. The tech is dialed.

Yeah.

So like.

But you were able to bring your salesforce to bear pretty quickly to ramp.

Up the business just in general. Like, it's kind of like. It's a Midwest kind of steak dinner industry.

Totally. Yep.

And they're like west coast product people.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no, that makes sense.

A little more steak dinner.

Yeah. How did this particular. It's all about.

It's the steak dinner capital of the world.

How'd this particular deal come together? Is this like there's an investment bank involved? Is this like founder to founder deal? Like, like, walk me through a little bit of the anatomy of like, how you sell what is essentially like a subsidiary. I've never Been in that situation. I think a lot of founders haven't been in that situation.

Yeah, well, great. Businesses are bought and not sold. So they approached us. I think they started to realize we were getting escape velocity on the marketplace and that at scale, that would be quite threatening to them.

Sure.

Because you don't need to go to the subscription and load board if you load is already covered via our business model. Now that. Our business model, I think, is better at scale when it works because you're taking a percent of every transaction instead of just a monthly fee.

That's cool.

Like, by my math, very amateur math. I think this could add like $5 billion in EBIT.

Wow.

To the business. It's crazy. So it's very valuable. I'm sure that's off, but, like, order of magnitude is right. And so I think they. I don't know how they. They decided, but there's a relationship. DAT is a big player in the industry, obviously, and our convoy team was just connected to them, and they were like, hey, we got this inbound, and they're pretty interested in selling the business. What do you think, Ryan? I'm like, well, I have to pay a lot money for it because I really like it. But the more we looked at it, the more it was like, dude, it's worth more to them. I mean, I think that's the core in any M and A transaction. It needs to be worth more to the acquirer than it is to the seller so that there's room, there's grounds there for a negotiated price of settlement. And we found a good one.

Well, congratulations on the deal. Let's ring the gong.

Amazing, Amazing work from the team. Super impressive. Yeah. We've been told we got to warm up the gong. We're going to break it if we hit it too hard. There you go.

People are very opinionated about the Gong hits.

Yeah, they are.

We're doing our best.

Interesting.

Super. Super.

I mean, given. Given, you know, everything that Flexport has navigated through the last few years, it's pretty incredible. To just casually is kind of like a little. Little side project. Buy, you know, turn around. Turn it around and sell it.

Fantastic.

In such a short period of time. So nice work.

Great work. Pure testament to the convoy team, frankly, like, and I hope they all. We feel like we've put them off in a good place here financially, but the potential is all. What can they do for dat and how does DAT make the best of this? Right? Because, man, if you can pipe all that volume through this platform, you have the Potential to generate something really, really massive.

It's exciting. Well, thank you so much for stopping by. Thanks for taking some time out of your day in Las Vegas. Good luck with the rest of your.

Enjoy your steaks out there.

And enjoy the steaks.

I will be having a steak dinner tonight. Golf with the customer.

So topgolf steak you like.

That's what it's all about.

That's the American dream right there. Have a good one.

Good stuff, Ryan. Great.

We'll talk to you later. Dan Primack has a report says Flexport sells Convoy assets to dat for $250 million.

So there we go.

Well, plenty of people can't comment on it. Dan Premack has the scoop and we.

Will, as he often does. Well, we have Ty Haney in the restream waiting room. Let's bring her in.

How are you doing, Tom?

Speaking of backstories, what's happening?

Welcome to the stream. Good to meet you. How you doing?

Yes, I'm doing great. I'm actually reading a tweet from Emily Sundberg. I know she's one of your best friends.

Mind you, we are good friends. Amazing. Are you in New York?

I'm in sf.

Okay, cool.

Give us so SF where. I mean, I want to get into everything, but is that where you're going to be basing the company out of going forward? How are you thinking about that?

Tyb, my rewards platform. We actually work out of the X Twitter office on Market Street.

Cool.

So it's.

Wait, the X, like the X office? The X, Yeah.

The former Twitter office or the current X office?

The last X office. Former Twitter office. There's like old Twitter merch, which we should probably put places, sell places. And then there's some X branding. And now there's Tyb. So cool. It's worth it.

We will, we will market by all the old Twitter merch.

Yes, yes. I saw there was like a huge bird sculpture that was going up and Elon first bought it. He was thinking about auctioning this stuff off and it was like $60,000 for this massive bird logo. I don't want this bird logo anymore. There's a bunch of stuff.

Whatever you got. Well, congratulations.

Congratulations.

Why don't you give some quick, quick background on yourself for a few people that might be living under a rock that do not know. And we'll get into the news from this week.

Yeah, I'll give you the quick walk up. I started a company in the activewear space called outdoor voices at 23 out of school in New York City. It really Became a darling in the direct to consumer world. I ran it for eight years to 100 million. I left five years ago. There was kind of an ego battle at the board level. And then between me as the CEO and this person, I left. And that was a sad point of time. 90% of my experience building that company was awesome. 10% was hard. That said, it was a masterclass in learnings. Anyway, since then I started a tech platform, a community rewards platform called Try your best. We work with the top consumer brands to essentially create a more fun and effective loyalty program. All that to say I announced yesterday that I rejoined my original company, Outdoor Voices and so pretty cool to see. There was a very warm response to original OG OV ers and here I am. I'm running Tyb and I'm running OV as well.

Amazing.

The video was amazing. Maybe we'll play it after you jump off. But my wife said she almost teared up watching it. It just was like, it's such a, such a cool story. And yeah, I think everybody's excited to have you back in the driver's seat. So what is that, what is that going to look like going forward? How are you going to like, what do you think the takeaways from the last go are and how are you kind of. Where do you want to take the brand going forward? Is it back to its roots? Back to what people loved originally, more.

Retail, E commerce, shifting the mix? I'd be interested to hear about that.

Sorry, can you say that again?

I'd be interested to hear about the. A lot of brands, you know, they, they start online, then they go offline. There's owned retail, there's channel partners. How do you see that mix changing going forward? How did it change while you were there or over the last.

Yeah, yeah, 100%. The North Star vision for obvious to build the number one recreation brand. Our call to action or kind of motto that people have a crazy emotional connection to is doing things. You guys might have seen the doing things hats, like trotting around the west, west side Highway. That was kind of like a souvenir from the brand that people would wear, but you could only get them by participating with the brand. All that to say, like, we started in 2013, so we were very much part of this direct to consumer model that I'd say in a lot of ways has not proved to be all that successful. And so similar to others, we were able to raise a lot of capital. That meant I was diluted pretty significantly as the founder and ultimately we Spent too much money trying to acquire people online that were expensive and didn't last. We also kind of had this grassroots, what would I call it, like, community of 10,000 or so or so people that were really our superfans. And as we clicked into the data, like anyone who came through this community activation was ultimately four times more valuable over time. And so that's essentially what prompted me to start Tyb. To allow brands to directly connect with their superfans and grow their value over time. Own that relationship, own that data. And then now with ov, it's been cool. I've been working on it for a year.

Oh, wow.

I rejoined obviously as a founder, as an owner with new owners and a partner. But the last year has been just almost like a cherry on top. It's been a creative outlet. I obviously spent eight years obsessing over every detail of OV to kind of play again in this space and think about, from a product perspective, the recreational lifestyle and what the core products are here. It's just honestly been fun. And so no change in terms of the vision, but we're off to the races.

I feel like there's such an opportunity for almost like a turnaround fund, venture capital fund, private equity fund, to specifically target companies that where the founders left and we're going to set them up to bring them back. I think that there's so much more value unlocked from that as opposed to just like, okay, let's trade this asset to someone who's going to squeeze even like the last few pennies out, Just kind of wind it down and bleed it out, as opposed to, there's actually something here, but we need a founder back in the. Back in the seat. And we need to bring them back.

And see the cool thing too is it seems like every apparel brand that went ultra heavy into online only, not online only, but made that the priority struggled all the way from, like, Nike. You see their, like D2C efforts, they basically capitulated there and realized like, okay, people like going to stores, like, they like experiencing go to Amazon.

They went back in person.

They want to be on all these different, different channels. And so I think it was just a massive lesson for everyone in the industry. I'm curious how you see the, like, kind of broader athleisure category evolving. It feels like there's kind of distinct categories around. Nike is still for athletes, but Nike kind of missed your insight with OV was like, okay, what is like activewear for people that don't consider that, like, don't aspire to be a professional basketball player or people that aren't like weight training. And then we've seen the rise of aloe targeting kind of the Pilates industrial complex and kind of the lifestyle around that. So I'm curious, kind of where you see kind of the broader market going.

I'm curious, what do you guys wear activewear wise?

I wear cotton.

Yeah.

Like, I wear like cotton tank tops and shorts.

I actually don't know.

John doesn't know John. John's one of the categories.

My wife shops for me.

John's like, I think I need new shorts. And then shorts appear. His lovely wife. But I, back in the day I would wear. I remember I was the first person in my friend group in college to discover outdoor voices. I was early to Lululemon at a time when, you know, men were just criticized for wearing what people saw as like a women's brand. I was like, the product's just great. Try it. And then people would try it and it was great. And then I got on ov okay. And. But yeah, I think, yeah, for me, I think I'm excited about the return of natural fibers in sportswear. I'm excited about that. But it's a broad category.

Yeah, I ask that because for this five year gap, like similarly, I would only wear vintage. I feel like every brand, every brand in the activewear space says so much about you. Like aloe wasn't for me, etc. So I also think of this space almost like the artist space where there's like different flavors of pop stars and each of them have like equal amounts of fandom or cultiness and they all can coexist. One thing I'm excited to kind of really blast away from is just this over saturation of like compression top and bottom and that like being the look. So our collection launches next week and like, we've really infused more styling options. And to your point, like, that includes like cotton poplin striped button downs that you wear to like protect from the sun and like put over your Pilates pants or cotton, cotton cashmere cropped cardigan. Similarly, like, I'm going to the grocery store in that. I think it's like time to infuse more style beyond just like stretchy, you know, bottoms and tops. So that's, that's certainly what you'll see from us starting next week.

How are you integrating Tyb? I'm assuming that's going to be a big part of the launch.

It launched today. So these community launched on Tyb today in a very full circle moment. We're off to the races there. Our designers are in there. We're essentially, like, getting all of this amazing feedback in terms of what people have missed from a product standpoint, what hero products they want to bring back. Like, it's shocking to me how much people care about out there. Voices five years later like, holy shit. But OB is perfectly suited for this toolkit. Now, it's a tool that I wish I had as a brand builder five years ago.

What comes to mind when you hear the phrase growth at all costs. It feels like one of the challenges with building an enduring lifestyle brand, apparel brand, whatever you want to call it is, is the D2C era was like, okay, here's $50 million. Turn this into as much revenue as you can as fast as possible. And when you look at the great brands throughout history, very few of them had founders that were that. That where growth at all costs was.

Like, we know it's a marathon. We know it's a marathon, but what if it was a sprint?

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, but it's like, it's more like, you know, I can see the path to outdoor Voice Getting to $1 billion in revenue in. In 10 years, but if you tried to get there in three years, like, it probably make the job a lot harder.

Yeah, Becoming takes time.

Yeah. You'd have to have too many shortcuts.

Totally.

100%. I mean, for me, like, success looks like longevity, and I've felt that, like, pain of not having longevity here firsthand. So if you think of obviously, like, Patagonia and Yvon Chouinard, like, I met with him somewhat recently, and like, that's the model for success, I think. I think in terms of this lifestyle physical product brand. At the same time, I went from software with a wear to software ware in terms of my businesses. So I understand how tech companies deserve the capital and require the speed just by nature of they don't have physical products or widgets that they're trying to get right from a planning perspective and then sell it just makes a lot more sense to me why funding around software companies is the way it is and the speed that's required and then possible there. I very much just felt firsthand. So I'd say, like, winning to me, yeah, is around longevity, endurance, and no pun intended, it's an activewear brand.

Can you take me on a tour of some of the good community, maybe good and less good community building stuff? We were talking about this. Emily Sundberg highlighted a candle company that put a bunch of influencers on a private Jet and the private jet maybe didn't even take off. And. And it feels like that is a unique, unexplored space of, like, take the super fans, whether they're influencers or not, and just do something way above and beyond for them. Even Red Bull went back and did this with, like, the supercross community. It was just a bunch of guys driving motorcycles on dirt ramps, and they were like, let's turn this into a real sport. That sport came back to, you know, love them forever. They do this with F1. There's companies that have done this really well, but then it can go less well. So, like, I understand that, like, you know, surveys are valuable, but, like, how else can you integrate or activate a community?

What I'm, like, what we're seeing really matter on the user side is status and identity as essentially, like, signaling my proof of fan. And, like, so giving people the ability to level up and, like, prove their fandom and then have something, like, as a bragging rate that they can share on social around that is ultimately, like, what they care about beyond anything. And so, like, that proof of fan idea, I think, like, loyalty becomes kind of the new identity or status, and, like, your ability to signal that, like, really matters. What else would I tell you there?

So the proof of fan, does that need to be, like, qualitative or quantitative? Because there's a world where it's like, okay, like, you're in, like, the Kohl's cash world where, like, you buy $1,000 and you get 50 bucks back versus this, like, more qualitative world where it's like, look, you came to some event and you bought some stuff, and, like, you were. You know, we saw you in our replies on social a lot, and, like, yeah, we didn't really try and put, like, a. Send five tweets and you get a free hat. But, like, how quantified does it need to be? Because I feel like it can feel a little sterile if it becomes an algorithm and then people are gaming and then you have bots getting the hats and then reselling them and stuff. How do you feel about that?

I think it's. It's definitely all about social. So, like, within my profile, I'm essentially collecting things from, you know, events I've gone to. So Rare Beauty is a good example. They do. They're. They're excellent at essentially, like, creating these little collectibles or souvenirs that. That their fans can collect as they launch new product or host an event. And essentially what TIB allows you to do is, like, Build your consumer profile, but it's very visual first. And so you're earning these things that then essentially are like your top shelf. Like here's what I'm obsessed with. I bought it seven times. Here's a Selena Gomez event I went to. It sits next to kind of, you know, my streaks or for lack of a better term in terms of product purchases. And all of this like essentially builds your identity in a really social first way. And so we see people share like this wallet or profile content just reflecting kind of their engagement with brands in a really fun kind of like social game led way. The other thing, just to your guys's point, I think there is certainly like oversaturation of brand events is like the way I think about building fandom is kind of four part. Like one, articulate the purpose or mission very clearly of the brand. Like why do people care? What's the reason for being? Two, build rituals for activation. And obviously we're seeing like run clubs take off. But like the key for me there is like something that you as a brand can do consistently, not just one and done. The third is connection. So like allowing brands to like or bands that like obsess over Nike or whatever to connect with one one another and like that flywheel of engagement really takes off. And then the fourth is incentivization. And I think for too long fandom's been like clicking like on Instagram. But like ultimately that's not giving me anything for my loyalty over time. So there's a lot to play with as you think of kind of like the combo of those things. But I agree like brand events, there's too many, like I don't care.

Yeah, makes sense.

What's the. How are you thinking about product release schedules coming back to ov? You've been working on this first collection sounds like for a year. But are you thinking drops, collections, capsules, a mix of everything.

It's just a consistent drumbeat of excellent newness. And I think we've always like done a good job of having a kind of stunty or unexpected perspective in the space. And so we have another collection dropping in September that's like a very specific activity, like not going to be relatable to all, but like something you certainly haven't seen Nike do before. And I remember like early innings outdoor voices on our site we merchandised by a category of dog walking. Sounds simple, non issue, but like Reddit went nuts. They were so mad. Dog walking is not a sport and that was perfect. It's so ownable.

Dog Walking.

How dare you make a pocket for.

Get in the Olympics. I want to see Olympic level dog walking. For sure. For sure. That sounds amazing. Thank you so much for stopping by.

Super excited to see you, but congratulations. And it's great.

We got to ring the gong for a founder back in the seat.

Founder mode.

Do you have the soundboard? Founder mode. Thank you so much for hopping on. We'll talk to you soon.

Great to see you. Cheers.

I'm excited for Outdoor Voices. Maybe they'll do a billboard. Maybe they'll get on adquick.com out of home advertising made it easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only Ad Quick combines technology, out of home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. And next up, we have AGM coming in. Probably talk about ads, too. We were talking about AI ads, but I want to talk about a whole bunch of stuff. Kick us off with an introduction. How are you doing?

I did good. I dressed it up for you guys. By the way, you look fantastic. As Jordi mentioned, I've got the Patagonian fleece. I look like I trade bonds at Caner Fitzgerald.

Yes, you do.

You guys.

Yes.

Trading tariff rebates today.

That's amazing. Cool, man. So, yeah, what's new in your world?

What's that?

Yeah, yeah, just what's new in your world?

So, bit of a product announcement today.

Let's go.

We a little bit related to a guest you had two weeks ago. You had Brian and Jesse on there from Coinbase. I'm here to announce we're launching ads, or sponsored offers, as we like to call them, inside the new app that Coinbase launched, which is a new social app on chain. It replaces the previous wallet. It's really quite cool and interesting. And, yeah, I mean, it's kind of the fulfillment of the Spindle vision. So we recently got acquired by Coinbase and I was a little late to crypto, to be honest with. I bought some Bitcoin in 2013, but, you know, circa 2022, when bored apes were worth like a million dollars and FDX hadn't happened yet and crypto was pumping. I mean, it's pumping now, but it's pumping even more.

I like, you know what crypto needs?

Ads.

Well, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. That was not the first thing, Jody. The first thing is I talked to. I talked to the head of marketing. I won't name the names of, like, billion dollar crypto companies. And I got this case of, like, what's your cac? What's your ltp?

Ltv?

What does your retention look like? And the guy looks at me and says, what's ltv? I don't know what you're talking about. Yeah, and I basically had a personal existential crisis that I couldn't believe that people in crypto didn't know their LTVs. And so what do you mean?

The number, the number goes up, that's all that matters?

Well, no, that's, that's, that's part of the problem in crypto. Often numbers go, if money is free, then cats don't matter is the kind of the problem. But, but money doesn't always stay free forever. So we first built what's called an attribution system, which I know sounds super wonky and may not be totally familiar to all your listeners, but basically, whether you realize it or not, every time you click or install an app or monetize on your app, an event is getting fired into an attribution system that's trying to figure out where you came from and how much you're worth. And this is like a billion dollar business. It's incredibly disorganized. There's literally billions of events firing a day. I worked inside one of these big attribution companies and I just remember like, what if we just had one database? What if everyone just agreed what happened in the world? And then when I really got into blockchain and Ethereum ecosystem, I realized, oh look, this is the consensus layer of truth that we actually need. And we also have user identity and we also have a payment layer. The blockchain is going to be the biggest marketing database in human history. Right. And so the question is, how do we build it? How do we take the best learnings from Web2World and then build it into the on chain world in a way that by the way, respects user privacy and all the rest of it, but also kind of functions in a much better way than Web2 ever did.

Yeah, I remember hearing the original pitch for Spindle and being like, there was a lot of like froth and stuff and I was like, this feels like enterprise SaaS for crypto. This feels like it's like valuable regardless of what happens with everything else. All the craziness, you don't need to, you know, feel about like, oh, what's the value of art? It's like so subjective. But it's like it was like you and like that other company, Chainalysis, I was like, no matter what happens in crypto, chainalysis is Going to be a good company. So congrats on the deal with Coinbase and coming into the team. Bunch of questions about how this actually manifests. I imagine that the first advertisers will be Web3 companies. Is that the correct way to think about it or is this kind of untapped low CAC for outdoor voices or something?

Yeah, yeah. By the way, you totally put your finger in, John. My, my goal in life is providing actionable analytics and enterprise SaaS.

Yes. And I, I love it. I, I'm not joking. I genuinely love it because it's like I, the, the value is very traceable and not built on any sort of like, okay, there's like some perpetual motion machine over here that we're going to find out about. It's like, no, like this is just like what people want.

Wake up at 2am you wake up at 2am, what's your first thought? Enterprise workflows.

Let's go. I love work that was legit. So, yeah, yeah, first users. I imagine you're onboarding folks right now. Who loves this? Who wants this?

Yeah, yeah. I mean it's heavily, it's heavily biased towards Defi apps. When we started Spindle actually I thought gaming and web3 gaming was going to be like a thing which, who knows, it might still be, but as everyone knows, gaming was one of the biggest drivers of like mobile ads attribution and like that whole, that whole cycle from 2010, 2015 was basically mobile casual games and Zynga and the rest of it. And I assume that would be the earliest adopters. Web3 gaming, I understand, is still the perpetual technology of the future. You know, it takes a while to make these aaa games in Q4, maybe it'll change. But actually it was Defi apps actually because of course they actually, I mean stablecoins have PMF and DeFi does have PMF. And there's protocols like some of our advertisers morpho, I can call it, a few other ones that have billions of dollars of TVL on chain in which people are actually earning and they basically function like a lending and borrowing institution. And so, yeah, they're the biggest ones. And what's interesting is that getting back to LTVs, right, like the MAUs in crypto might be relatively small, say to the whatsapps of the world, but the LTVs, like the actual individual user value, LTV or ARPU, however you look at it, can often be significantly higher, right?

Like order and where, where have, where, where have companies like Morphu advertisements to Date Are there, Like, if they're, if they're defi app, are they running. Can they even run ads on. On Meta? Is that, Is that like.

Yeah, I mean, that's. It's more for. By the way, because if I don't, if I don't correct you, I'm going to get an email from the CEO in a second. But yeah, the answer is nowhere, Jordy. And that's the problem, right? Like, we built all this amazing measurement technology, like, comparable to the best in Web2, but it's like the growth guys, like, this is all great, but like, what do I do with this? Like, where's the other leg of the flywheel where I go and like target the users and figure out and provide like a compelling user experience. It didn't exist. And so Spindle's big obsession and part of the reason why we joined Coinbase is, you know, consumer crypto, where you have a wallet connected user who actually interacts with the chain is an important step and you're seeing more and more of that. Just to cite a random company that I'm not involved with at all, Stripe bought Privy. Right. And why did it buy Privy? Because Privy is a wallet provisioner and it gets people on chain in a very seamless way. And then boom, suddenly users on chain, they don't even realize it, but they are. And so we've really kind of exclusively focused on really compelling crypto consumer experiences where that wallet is present and where the user can engage with things on chain, whether it be content, coins, NFTs, lending and borrowing, sending money to their family overseas, whatever it might be.

What role will ads play in the overall base ecosystem? I imagine some of that money might flow. Where does it flow to?

Well, it's a good question, by the way. One thing I have to mention, and we've got like a blog post dropping on it, everyone hates the word ads. Like, it gives everyone the ick in crypto. But just as a quick little comment, everything in crypto is an ad. Like literally, you scroll through every wallet and every publisher, every mint, every swap offer, all of it, whatever you're looking at usually gets a referral kickback as a function of the value of the transaction. So, like, literally everything is an ad.

Well, and here's a funny story. So back in 2021, my team party round we made, we realized if you send someone an nft, it will just sit in their wallet that other people look at and track. And if they want to get it out of their wallet, they have to figure out A way to burn it, send it, send it off into the ether. So I was like, great. So I can spend five, whatever it was, $5 to send an ad that's just permanently sitting in their wallet. And so we sent like NFT ads out to a bunch of different people. And I was like, oh, I can go to Dylan Field's wallet and see you now here.

That's great. Really great actor. Really, really, really white hat work. Jordi, to be clear.

Jordan, I hate to break it to you, most wallets figured this out and they don't surface the junky NFTs anymore.

I know. I was, I was, I was early. I was early.

I'm the reason I'm the bad actor that caused that change.

No, it was, there was much worse actors that were like, if you clicked one of these crazy.

All your money, this was just, can you can, you know. Yeah.

Where does the revenue go? So part of the spindle vision was always that like the publisher could be anybody.

Right.

So like an influencer who like pumps a thing or endorses a thing and has an audience, you know, affiliate marketers, consumer apps, anybody can be kind of a publisher. And one of the unique things like, like our ambition is not just like equal Facebook ads is actually to be better and a little bit more user conscious than web2ads. And one way we're better is that we can pay people that otherwise wouldn't kind of get paid.

Right.

If you're. I'm on YouTube, you do get a rev share with ads, but broadly speaking. And then with Elon Bucks, you get a little bit of the Twitter thing. But broadly speaking, if you're a creator and you have an audience, you have to monetize in some other way. And it's really just your top of funnel.

Sure.

In the case, in the case of Base app, that's, that's not going to be true. Anybody who can drive like real user actions that advertisers or builders or developers want can actually share in that revenue. And again, the blockchain just makes it much easier. I mean there's, there's this wonky thing called multi touch attribution, which is always the dream of every Web2 marketer. What that means is if someone converts to Vonta. And by the way, John, you're going to fly right into an ad, I'm.

Sure.

Because they see tvpn, but then they go Google it on Google. Guess who gets all the credit?

Not you, John.

Google.

Right.

And it totally sucks because attribution is broken.

Yeah.

In the Crypto world, it could be different. You can make a cut of that too.

Yeah, yeah. And you see this online where like, let's just say like a new protein bar is going viral and it takes a while for a health influencer to actually set up a deal and set up an affiliate code. But, like, you could potentially do that on the base app, like in an ad hoc way, so that as soon as you repost, you're basically tied into the affiliate program.

Yeah, there's something amazing too, about. There's something amazing. Every time we get our Elon Bucks, I'm like, wow, I'm getting paid to post. I was doing that for free. And it's a weird thing, but at the same time, like, these apps have no value if the users don't post, right?

No, it's crazy.

Every user is coming together to create value, whether you're just providing attention or you're providing content. And yeah, most of the value kind of will accrue to the people that are creating the content. And that's probably right. But yeah, just kind of taking another look at these systems is worth doing.

And that's how it works on Base app, by the way, the plug the app side of it, rather than the outside users get paid to post. If you're like a mega poster on base, you're going to see your wallet balance just go up and again, it all just happens effortlessly. You're not setting up a stripe account, you just check your balance and oh, there's like 100 bucks there and it wasn't there yesterday, right?

Yeah, that's the other. Yeah, that's the other. Making the feedback loop faster where Elon bucks or what they hit every couple weeks, you never really know. But if you can effectively like stream, like getting closer to kind of like streaming payments based on how much attention you're capturing, that's pretty cool.

Can you bridge the outdoor. Outdoor voices kind of case study that we just ran through to. To like how. How crypto companies are thinking about CAC to ltv. And it doesn't need to be outdoor voices specifically. There's just, you know, we all lived through the D2C boom and the Facebook ad boom where, you know, 99% of VC dollars are going to Facebook ads. That whole meme. And there was this time where companies didn't understand their LTV from really when they crazy scaled their advertising budgets on digital platforms. But pretty quickly DTC companies at least figured out the analytics. What does that look like today in crypto? Are people thinking about it more Is there are there still like case studies of crypto companies that like raise too much vc? Because I feel like a lot of crypto companies, they do a lot of incentives to onboard users, but they do it with like their own tokens that they created. So there's maybe less bankruptcy risk. But walk me through how that works in, in Web three.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, so crypto marketers have gotten a lot smarter about LTV and CAC since 2022. Most of our advertisers actually understand that very well.

Sure.

And I think one of the innovations that crypto introduces is the business model. So the DTC thing that you're talking about typically operate in a world in which you paid, what's called CPA or cpi, cost per action or cost per install. In other words, you paid Google or Facebook literally if the user installed the app, you didn't pay if the ad showed up in front of them. That means that the ad system actually takes on some of the risk of the conversion and advertisers love it. Right, but you're still juggling the ltv, what the user is actually worth versus what it costs to acquire one of the business models we offer that you're not going to find on Web two. And again, we're trying to build a better ad system than Facebook is what we call cpv. It's ad tech, so it's got to be a three letter acronym. And what CPV basically means is cost per value. And what that means is you can actually literally pay like your bid is not like I want to pay $30 for a user. It's I want to engage in a 40% rev share with the publisher on the lifetime value of the user. And that's like a baked in two and a half or whatever it is. Roi. Again, you can't do that in Facebook. I can't tell Facebook. Look, bro, Zuck, I'll go have these with you on the LTV going forward. As long as you acquire me a user and they retain, there's no way to do that in the web world. And you can do that actually inside base apps very naturally because again, you've got a consensus. Truth. I know how much that user is worth. I know how much they stuck around. And by the way, I have payment revenue.

And that's because you can see it on chain.

Right, Exactly. There's mutual transparency on both sides, by the way. The publishers can look down.

Yeah, because Zuck doesn't want to. Zuck doesn't want to do that deal because he's like, well, I'm going to have to like get, I'm going to have to keep hitting you up every month for years to figure out what, you know, if the user stayed subscribed or whatever. And it's just too much of a hassle. So you do the work of figuring out the cactl TV kind of analysis and if it's not a good deal, just stop running ads basically. Or figure out different creative and make.

It work exactly well in this world, right? The publisher, the new base app can actually look down funnel via the blockchain and say, okay, I know how many users I showed ads to and I know how much value I drove. Right? So you can't stiff me. You've got to give me what you said you would, which is 30% or whatever it is of the LTV. And again, that's the advantage of having a consensus sort of reality layer. And there's no way to do this in Web two.

It's basically right now it feels like online advertising is dominated by search engine ads, whether that's in Amazon or Google and then social media ads on X and the meta platforms and TikTok. What does the ad ecosystem look like in the future? How big is the crypto ad slice vs the AI LLM ad slice? How do you see these two things playing out? Because I feel like there's bull cases for both of those but there's only so many ad dollars flowing around, right? Even if it's like a trillion or several.

Well, in this case, I mean the exciting thing about this new product is there's a lot of advertisers that can't advertise elsewhere that can now get AGM's ad products and have these kind of splits. But yeah, we were quoting.

Yeah, we read your post yesterday. I would bet my entire net worth that one, we will have ads and AI. Two, if they will take the, if they take the form of highly relevant offers, users will welcome them. They'll have sky high conversion rate and web shopping will die. And three, they will be necessary to pay for the compute.

Yeah, this is a crazy parlay.

Love the Take the whole. Love the parlay. Forgot to like it. Also leave a like on it now even though a thousand people have already liked it. But, but yeah, give me, give me your take on the evolution of the ad ecosystem more broadly.

Yeah, yeah. So to be clear, I don't think it's a zero sum between crypto and. I think it's different sets of budgets and at some point they're going to intersect. I mean people are going to start using crypto inside. I mean for micropayments and AI agents the natural way to do it. And Coinbase is building stuff there as well. I mean just to switch the topic a little bit to the side, I mean I'm obviously an AI mega user. I barely use Google anymore. I probably fire up touchy beatty over 100 times a day. And what's interesting is that again, ad sellers actually aren't limited. Human attention is limited because you only live so many hours a day. But the amount of intent I can actually express inside an AI is fascinating. I think so much about what we do is so skeuomorphic to like the pre Internet world. I'm a little remember the before times. Like why do I go to an E commerce site and it's organized by type of thing. Like when I go to Instacart, why is it organized by food type? I want to make boeuf bourguignon or whatever it is. Here's the seven things. Just buy me those seven things. I don't want to go to seven aisles. And yet somehow the Internet websites or even PDFs still reflect like the pre Internet world. I should just be able to tell the AI give me the recipe for this complicated thing I want to make and then just go buy the things. Or I want to travel to Paris and not pay more than $3,000 and stay in this place and I should see a big green go button and I just buy and transact and it's done the business of having to go to three different websites. It's just, I mean kayak. I like it, but it drives me crazy. The fact that we're clicking little radio buttons and dropdowns, it's ridiculous. We've been doing that for 15 years. I don't understand how we haven't proceeded beyond that ui. I think AI is going to be the absolute gate to that, to that intent and that desire. And what's going to be interesting is E commerce sites that are typically buying ads are going to have to surface offers. And what does an AI ad mean?

Right.

There's nothing to see, strictly speaking. But when the AI scrapes your website and sees the product metadata and sees a price you may want to service given the personal, they're like oh, this user hasn't bought from you before. Here's a 10% off coupon. And that shows up in the results that AI returns. Which by the way the phrase the expensive AI cost to go to 0.3 in my tweet.

Right.

Yeah.

And so you're going to have to have some way to actually channel intent and actually get paid for that intent. And there's also issues around, I mean cloud.

Yeah. What are, what are the, what are the kind of like potential traps or you know, the people. Mark Cuban's I think primary concern is that the, the results are just going to be, they'll be like profit maximizing conversations. And our take was like, this has been solved in search, it's been solved in, in the influencer space. Like ads should be disclosed. If you just have disclosure, it's probably fine. But I think there's.

Yeah, I find it funny that a guy who made his fortune selling ads suddenly finds ads problematic. I'll just say that off the bat.

Yeah, he's like, ads. He said something and we're going to have him on the show to talk about it. But he said something to the effect of like ads are about manipulation. And it's like, okay, well do you want to ban them all then? Should we just.

I take the under on that. And in fact, I think people actually like Instagram ads, for example, as a form of discovery. I think the rates that the revealed preferences of how users actually react, the click through rate is probably higher on some of that paid content than is on the organic content. And I think users, if it's a good ad and if it's a crappy ad, I agree it sucks. But if the good ad and gives you a discount and helps you discover a product you didn't discover before, users will like it in the only way that matters, which is what is their engagement and conversion rate.

And dozens of founders have tried the. It's this but paid no ads and it rarely works, if ever.

Yeah, I mean I think, I think the interesting thing is, you know, like it makes like I like paying to not have ads on X because the ads were never that relevant to me. And it's nice and I use the app a lot, so it's nice. But the fact that Meta doesn't have an ad free product at scale. Ad free. Free product says a lot when people use that app. I'm sure more on average, I don't know. More. More on average than.

The only people that would upgrade would be people whose, whose ARPU is higher than the price. I feel like it's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. If they're getting, if they're getting $1,000 worth of ads against me, they're going to be like, it's $20 a month and I'm gonna be like, yeah, I'll buy that every day. And that's bad for them.

Yeah.

And then the people who are like, oh, I'm only driving, you know, $50 of ARPU a year, well, they're not going to upgrade. And so it's going to actually wind up with lower revenue. I would imagine that's the calculus. I don't know. Yeah.

I mean, look, ads pay for the Internet, right? As much as you might dislike them, it pays for a large swath of the Internet. And I think we've done the experiment for 20 years, and users aren't going to pay $200 a year for Facebook, which is roughly their arpus.

Right. Like, they're just not right. Yep. Last thing. I want to ring the gong for a big product launch, but I also want to get a risk check. What's on the wrist today?

It's the war.

So I posted this earlier today. I've got to. This is somewhat ironic.

Okay.

The war Rolex I got on. I've got the Rolex Submariner that I bought first yc. Let's go full, full disk here.

Yeah.

I bought this thing with cash when I sold my first YC company. And then on my other side of the wrist, a little brief product plug.

Okay.

I became a whoop American. So I can actually see exactly how bad my. How bad my sleep is. So, yeah, that's what's amazing.

Well, congratulations on the product launch. We'll ring the dong for you.

Hit it. Good stuff. Great. Great having you on. Finally.

Congrats.

Long overdue.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Congrats.

You gotta come back on and just chop it up with us for a little bit. We can talk about so much other stuff, some other things. Yeah, yeah. But congratulations. Good luck with the rest of the launch. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good day. Bye.

I'll be right back. John, I'll let you. You kick off the next one.

I will be kicking off a bezel ad. If you want to get a Rolex submariner just like AGM had on his wrist, you can go to getbezel.com your bezel concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. And we will bring in our next guest, Ian Webster. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing, Ian? Good to meet you.

Good to meet you as well. I'm doing well.

Thanks so much. Thanks for joining. Would you mind kicking us off with an introduction on yourself, your company? What are you doing? What's the news?

Yeah, so the company that we're building is called promptfoo. We are building security tools for Genai applications. So if you have a Genai application, you probably want to secure it, make sure that behaves well in production. And that's what we're doing. The big news today, I guess, is that we have raised a Series A. Congratulations.

Give us the numbers. Yeah, we.

We raised 18.4.

Congratulations. Yeah. Who'd you raise it from?

Insight partners and a 16 also participated.

Yeah, two kind of smaller, smaller firms, you know, they really had to scrap the money together to get this deal done.

Yeah, I mean, I'm very lucky.

Yeah, it's fantastic. Well, congratulations on the round. Talk to me more about security in generative AI. That could mean so many things. We've talked about LLM psychosis, someone 7,000 prompts deep. We've talked about leaking user data from one instance to another. Somebody like hallucinations and just kind of like not, not performing. I'm trying to, you know, use an LLM to convert raw text to JSON and it's just kind of messing up. Like what are the key areas where you would define a security that you're going after solving? Or are you trying to do everything all at once?

So there are kind of two sides to the coin. The first is the foundation model, security or safety. Basically, stuff like is the LLM going to say something racist that reflects badly on the company? Like is it going to drive people into a psychosis? Like all that type of stuff, Brand risk, basically, yeah. But I think the part that's actually more interesting is at the application layer. Once you put a model into the hands of a developer, they put an application on top of it, they connect it with a database and pii, they connect it with an API and now you've got a rag, you've got an agent, et cetera. That's when there are many ways to shoot yourself in the foot. So the biggest concerns that we see, there's definitely an aspect on that foundation model side. But the big problem that scares a lot of large companies that are working with LLMs are things like PII leaks, tool misuse through agents. And also just think softer issues like LLMs recommending competitors or giving you medical advice when they're just supposed to be like an E commerce chatbot, stuff like that.

Financial advice too would be a risk.

Yeah, I mean, we were talking about Amazon's. Amazon has like a chatbot that you can ask about the product that you're searching for or whatever. But then people were getting to write like React modules and getting it to write JavaScript for them. And it's like that's not a big deal, but it's just like clearly not the intended purpose of that particular chatbot.

What are, what are the key reasons why you think over the long term companies will want to outsource a lot of this function versus build their own kind of systems to protect against some of these, these edge cases? I'm sure there's a bunch of good reasons, otherwise you wouldn't be building this and raising all this money.

Yeah, so, I mean it's pretty hard to do so. I encountered this problem firsthand because I was leading Genai Engineering and Products at Discord. We were launching these apps to hundreds of millions of people. And to do this right, you really need to be able to train models that can behave adversarially because your GPT or your CLAUDE is not really going to be a good red teamer or attacker off the shelf and just kind of test extremely extensively over tens or even hundreds of thousands of test cases to try to find all those rough edges. The thing about AI is that the attack surfaces all of human language and then some. So it's a really difficult problem. And the way that many large enterprises are dealing with this right now is they are doing it manually and just covering a very small fraction of the risk areas. So that's why we think that there's big opportunity in this space.

And if somebody engages with prompt foo, I'm assuming you start running, do you start automatically trying to jailbreak the LLMs? Are you running these sort of repetitive attempts in order to find problems so that you can stop them, or is the product itself kind of, you have things figured out enough that you can sort of, you let them kind of like in their communities try to jailbreak it and then react to it?

Yeah. So the way to think about it is that we've trained models that behave as adversarial users, like misbehaving users in your application. And we have agents built on top of these uncensored models that target specific risk areas like PI leaks or toxicity or talk about competitors or whatever, 70 plus different areas. So the way that we work is we have these attackers generate use cases or attack objectives and then we feed those objectives into a bunch of different, what I would describe as like search or optimization techniques to kind of poke and prod the entire attack surface of the application. So what this amounts to is we wind up having thousands and thousands of conversations where the attacker is just trying to wiggle its way around some of the guardrails or some of the safeguards that are put in place.

Is there a big difference right now in the perception of security or ability to deliver on a certain secure application? Whether you're using a closed source or open source model? I can imagine, like, if I'm like, oh, I'm using an open source model, I have the ability to fine tune it. Maybe I feel more confident or maybe, hey, I'm using a closed source model, I'm paying a fortune to OpenAI or anthropic. Like they're going to do more work to secure this thing than I am. Like, what's the perception around, like, which, which paradigm leads to better security?

I would say right now the perception at the top of market at least, like we work with some of the world's largest companies. There's definitely a strong preference for closed source right now, but I don't really think it's the security that's driving it necessarily. I think it's more just performance per.

Dollar or just overall intelligence. Even if it's more expensive, it's just.

Like, I want the best. Yeah, I would say so. I think the thing is, for security, even on the closed source side, the incentives really differ based on whether you're OpenAI or a company building on top of OpenAI. OpenAI has plenty of geniuses who are working on making sure that it doesn't say racist things or whatever, but no one's going to stop you from shooting yourself in the foot by by hooking it up incorrectly to like a database of PII.

Yep.

So that's.

Yeah.

Or OpenAI. OpenAI's like, you know, they're not release, giving you this API and telling you we're making sure that it will never. The model will never recommend a competitor. Like you have to kind of build a layer on top of that.

Has there been a big case study of like LLM security gone wrong that people like to point to in the industry yet? Like, we were just talking about the TAPP getting hacked and that did not have any generative AI features that I'm aware of.

It was potentially just made with maybe.

It was vive coded, but it seemed like it was just a misconfigured Google Firebase bucket. They just changed the access rights on an old database that they were using. And it seems like something that could have happened 10 years ago, it happened today. It's not a uniquely new phenomenon. But I'm wondering if there's any case studies that you point to as to Your clients like, hey, the value of working with us is that we can avoid that happening.

Yeah. I mean there have been a handful of things that have been pretty public. I think it really depends on the industry and also the geography. There was a mail carrier in the UK that had a lot of issues with a chatbot that basically had no guardrails. I think there was a case where Canadian Airline, I think Air Canada had a chatbot that, that like committed to a refund that was out of policy.

That's right, I remember that one. Yep. And then of course you have Sydney and Bing and Microsoft Tay and there's, there's.

Yeah, the fact that the like biggest companies and labs are struggling with this. At that scale, with that amount of resources, can you imagine some random company with that rolling this out to, to use users? They just don't have the ability to stress test these things to the same degree.

So my not so hot take on this is that this is really the blocker for big companies to use. Genai. If AI doesn't live up to the hype, it's because companies are too scared to go public with their AI because of incidents like this. We encounter Fortune 50 companies that have hundreds of internal AI use cases but just haven't pulled the trigger on pushing these prototypes out there really because of this issue. So that's why I think this is a big bottleneck in this wave of AI right now.

Yeah, yeah, it's way better to just take all of your employees, give them ChatGPT Pro and say hey, you're still responsible for everything that you all your work product. But you can use these LLMs as a tool to speed up your workflow. But ultimately, you know, even if Claude code is writing a lot of the software, you got to review the diff and you got to review the email that gets sent to the important client so that you know, we go from 99% accuracy, 1% hallucination to zero. That's your job now and you're going to do, you're going to hopefully be faster, hopefully be better. But there's still a human in the loop in these things. Fascinating. Well, thank you so much for joining. Congratulations on the new round. Great to see it. Thank you so much for stopping by. We'll talk to you soon.

Appreciate it. Take care.

Bye. Up next we have a someone who proved the oh cinematic viral videos don't work anymore. Yes, they do. They still got it. He beat the odds.

Very excited to have coming in from off deal.

How you doing?

Oris what's going on.

Hey, gents.

How's it going? Good to see you both.

It's going great.

It's great to see you.

The Financial Times article. We love the Financial Times.

We got the pink sheets right here.

We get it delivered in print every day. We have tons of respect for the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times. It makes sense given your company and your target market. But talk to us about the company and the target market. What are you building?

Yeah, so we're building an AI investment bank. To my knowledge, it's the first one of its kind. Probably the easiest way to think about it is think of what, what would Goldman Sachs look like if it was started in 2025 and not like 1865 or something like that? Yeah, Right. So we have our own software, our own data, our own infrastructure, our own bankers, and we just rip sell side deals for small businesses that are ignored by traditional banks.

Let's go.

Yeah. When we met just over a phone call a couple months back, and my first question was, why not build the software and just make it?

Why not the Harvey approach?

Yeah, the sort of more SaaS approach. And I think it'd be awesome if you kind of broke that down for our audience today.

Yeah. And I'd be lying to you if I said that we didn't consider building software for banks. And I do think there's some great products out there, like Rogo and some others that are doing good work. But when we were thinking about this from first principles, we saw how bureaucratic large banks are and how long it takes to enact any meaningful change. I personally spoke to dozens of bankers. When I was asking them, what is the most requested sort of like, problem that you want us to solve? They would say, call transcription. And I would say, well, zoom exists. And they said, well, we're using Cisco WebEx. I would say, well, Cisco WebEx has Zoom transfer or Call Transcription. And it would say, oh, well, we don't have that allowed. And I'm being a little bit facetious, but that is verbatim what the number one requested feature was. And I just kept thinking to myself, if I was running my own bank, I would do it completely differently. And we kept kind of noodling on this, noodling on this. And then we eventually came across an article from Sarah Tavel from Benchmark that famously said, sell work, not SaaS. And after some deliberation, my co founder and I decided to go all in on a crazy idea of building our own investment bank from scratch. And so here we are. You Know, just over a year since we started and you know, closing all kinds of deals.

Yeah. Break down what, what your initial deals have looked like, what, what kind of businesses you're targeting. I know it's generally companies that are valuable but, but not big enough kind of ticket sizes to get the traditional investment banks on board.

Yeah. So even though we say that we're what Goldman Sachs would have looked like in 2025, we're not actually trying to compete with Goldman Sachs. We're much more interested in going after the market that is currently unserved by legacy incumbents because the unit economics don't make sense. So there's millions and millions of small businesses in America and hundreds of thousands of them change hands every year. For vast majority of them they end up doing it on their own. Like less than 1 in 5 small businesses under $10 million of EBITDA actually have a sell side advisor, which is kind of crazy if you think about it.

Right.

This is the most important sale of their life. It's an asset that's worth over 80% of their net worth. And these business owners, palmers, roofers, et cetera, they're just doing it on their own. I've personally experienced this actually all the way back in 2019 when I tried buying a small business and it was a complete disaster. I was talking to brokers or I was talking to owner Oper who didn't really know how deals work. It was really hard to get a deal done. So when we saw this opportunity we got really excited because AI allows us to have vastly better unit economics and therefore go after the segment that's firmly uneconomical for the hooligan Lokis or their lazards or other cores of the world.

Yeah.

So when I think of Goldman Sachs, I think this monster bank that's not just an investment bank, they also have of wealth management and you know, not just sell side advisory but you know, you know like sell side coverage and they're doing, you know, buy sell hold reports and then they're also doing IPO stuff but we're talking here specifically narrow it down to M and A, then take it down into the mid market and then take it down even further. And there's been companies that have done kind of like the, it's a buy and sell a company platform at the super sub scale. You can, I mean Justin Kahn famously like sold a calendar app on ebay. He sold a company on ebay for like I think $100,000, a couple hundred thousand dollars. But walk me through the actual, the actual approach. Because when I think of a traditional M and A advisory firm, it's. It's find the companies, build the relationships, then build the materials, then value the company, then be kind of a back channel while everyone's talking to actually get the deal done. A lot of that feels automatable, but what, what in the flow do you feel like is the lowest hanging fruit? How does it all piece together?

Yeah, maybe it's helpful to think through a journey of a off deal customer, please, when we think about this. So I'll speak about a deal that we recently closed. It was a Montessori school in Arizona. They actually tried selling it on their own, but the private equity firms told them the business was too small for them from a cash flow perspective. So they have somehow found us on Google. We have this cool AI tool that people can check out that allows you to put in your company website and we preview some of the potential buyers for your business. Because we built a proprietary data layer over millions and millions of businesses, we have our own recommendation engine so we can actually pinpoint which companies in the United States could be potential buyers. So they got in touch with us and we decided to take them on. What we did is our banker used our software to identify every single Montessori school in the United States, find their contact information, who the owner is, et cetera. Then we reached out to them. There's about 1100 of them that we've talked to, 72 of them signed NDO. You know, that means all of those people got to check out the SIM that we put together, the financials, et cetera. About 20 of them actually met with management in person for meetings and then four submitted final offers. And then the offer that got it over the line was 40% higher than the first one that came in and it was an all cash deal.

Congratulations. That's amazing.

And the cool thing about this is that even though most of what we do does involve private equity buyers or private equity backed strategics, in this case, we were able to bring a subscale asset to market and activate companies into being buyers when they weren't actively looking for a business to acquire. Right. Because the investment banker on our team just reached out to Montessori school and they said, hey, are you interested in expanding your footprint? We're actually working with a school that looks a lot like yours, etc. So these kinds of things are only possible with AI because the, the buyer universe is just so, so fragmented. Right. And so we. How do you avoid our own software for each part of the workflow.

Sure.

How do you avoid the. I feel like VCs get these emails a lot. Or they'll get an inbound email from an investment bank and it's like, hey, I have somebody interested in buying your.

Ton in E commerce. When all this E commerce roll ups is happening, it doesn't matter how much money you'd raise. They'd be like, we'd love to buy your business for 200.

And I think that's a challenge for you guys. You eventually want to get to the point where you're selling thousands of companies a year. You want to make sure you're not sending millions of emails that people are looking at it being like, okay, this is clearly not nobody a person did not approve sending this email as part of a kind of an automated system.

Yeah. So this is literally a daily point of discussion like what does this look like when we're doing hundreds and hundreds of concurrent deals? The nice thing is that we're not spraying and praying indiscriminately. Right. We actually pinpoint buyers and we're very thoughtful about who we reach out to. So today the volume is not as high as you might think from a pure outreach perspective. But the nice thing is that there's a network effect here. Right. Because every time we interact with the buyer, they join our platform and next time we just get an instant notification when the deal matches. Our investment mandate goes up. And actually right now we have about 30 businesses for sale ranging from 1 million to almost $8 billion in. And there is dozens of private equity firms that are participating in multiple of these sell sides. Right. It might be different teams.

Right.

You might have an industrial team versus a health care team. But, but these firms get onboarded onto the platform and then from then on their repeat customers because they're going to be accessing deals all day, every day. That's their job. Right. So that's kind of the long term play here is to build this ecosystem of buyers. And we track, by the way, all buyer behaviors. We know who's betting on what, how much are they submitting, how do they like to structure deals, et cetera. So there's a lot of first party data that we're collecting. It's going to be tremendously helpful moving forward.

Very cool.

What's the goal for the next 12 months? What's the deal volume?

So the nice thing is that the messaging has been resonating really well. Turns out that an average business owner in America has already heard from like 100 private equity firms banging on their door because everyone is doing roll ups and now we see even getting in for all ups etc. That's been actually great marketing for us because an average private equity firm will look at about 100 opportunities before pulling the trigger on one. And so it's a pretty bad user experience for the sellers who end up engaging with one of these guys maybe twice, three times and then they get ghosted at the 11th hour. So when we come in and we say hey, we're able to flip the script and put you in front of 100 buyers. So only one of them is the lucky one to buy a business that's been really working really well for us. So in terms of our pipeline, like I said, we already have 30 businesses for sale today. We have over $1 billion worth of businesses in the near term pipeline. Sort of over the next nine to 12 months we expect to launch. And the ramp has been just exponential both from the inbounds. Right. And the referrals we've been getting. But as well as our outbound motion has been very effective. Our internal metrics for end of 2027 is to hit $100 million in fees which will require based on current level of automation, about 15 or 20 bankers. Right. So each banker is able to do about 10 sell sites concurrently.

Wow, that's amazing. And what's the news? Raise money?

Well, the news is that we got 12 million bucks in.

Congratulations. Great stuff. Thank you so much for having me.

Awesome having you on the show. I'm sure you'll be back on soon.

Yes. We gotta hit them up. I have this interesting idea I was thinking might blow people's minds. I'm thinking about buying an H vac business. I don't think anyone's thought about this. Roll up a.

We're selling three.

You're selling three. Okay, I'll go to you. Perfect. Might be the first one.

Your next I got one feature request. I think you should add Tesla robots to the platform that I can go have steak dinners with clients because that's.

The one thing we're trading a model that can play golf with people right now.

Yeah, that's key. That will be the final unlock. That's the final investment bank for eval steak dinners. If you can eat a steak dinner and you can golf, I'd like to.

See AI do that.

Then Goldman Sachs cooked. Absolutely cooked. Thank you so much.

Awesome.

Have a good one. We'll talk to you guys.

Thanks for having you on orey. Cheers.

And we have our last guest of the Day hopping on the stream Viral.

Yesterday for creating a robot that can, that, that looks like a lamp. So let's bring him in from the restream waiting room. There he is.

Good to meet you. Welcome to the stream. How you doing?

Great, great, thanks for having me on.

Break down the video. What are you building? How much of that is cgi? How much of that is real? Where are we in the techno technology rollout of this type of robotics project?

Yeah, so the video you saw probably yesterday, it was rendered. It's not AI generated unfortunately, but it was rendered. So we have a prototype working, this one right here that you see in the background.

Okay.

So we are building robotic lamps. They're meant to sort of disappear into your home.

Look at it working over there.

Yeah, it's working.

Wow, that's working away.

We're getting the laundry floating going.

Yeah, it's a super cool like, I don't know, I mean part of why it went so viral is like people have been talking about laundry folding robots for years and then we've seen companies take it very seriously, but never with a form factor that could just melt into your home. I don't know how protectable that is, but it just felt like from a user experience, from a, from a perspective of like actually integrating this into your life, it felt much more real to me. How much of where the idea come from and what are the benefits of like building it into the bed frame basically?

Well, I mean to be clear, so it's not, it's not actually built into the bed frame at all. It's a single floor lamp that you can technically place anywhere.

Oh, you can put it anywhere. Okay.

So it's like by your couch, by your table, by the bed. It's just through most people that we spoke to, the bed happens to be where you do your laundry. People just dump it there before they go to bed. Yeah, but yeah, like we're familiar with like, you know, some of the previous attempts at laundry folding. And I think the main thing that has always held it back is the form factor. You know, like there's usually they come like sort of with these kind of like pre installed rollers that you kind of have to feed in manually. It's like semi autonomous. It only works for specific type of clothing. What we have here mimics a little bit kind of like the human arms. So we can adapt to different types of clothing sizes, different types of articles and styles. And you know, with the recent breakthroughs in AI, we're finally able to generalize.

Across different clothing how much of those recent breakthroughs in AI can you actually capitalize on? Because I, you know, like, GPT 4.5 is amazing. GPT 4, you know, O3 Pro is amazing. But like, it doesn't seem like it would translate to laundry folding just yet. What exactly are you a beneficiary of? And then what work do you have to do to kind of take it across. Across the last mile?

Yeah.

So, I mean, there's been a lot of tremendous work done in the vision aspect for robots to now really be able to understand what is seen in front of itself. Right. And then also in the last year, within the robotics community, there's also a lot of foundation models for vision language, action models that are also available.

VLMs that are very popular, right? Yeah, yeah.

But we call them VLAs because there's an action component. Got it to these models. So they're doing pretty well. They can generalize the clothing items that, you know, they haven't seen. They're able to plan in sort of like the joint angle space of these robotic arms to be able to fold them into neat piles, you know, whatever.

So do you have to build a. I imagine that like, like recognizing that I'm looking at a T shirt is somewhat commoditized. Like you can kind of get that out of the box for free with some of the foundation models. But then there's. There are probably no off the shelf model that understands exactly how your particular set of joints work. So is that where you're doing fine tuning or post training? Like, how exactly are you translating into the specific robotic machinery that you've chosen to assemble in a particular way?

Yeah, yeah.

So I mean, it comes down to like, I think you touched up on there. It comes down to the data collection process.

Okay.

So right now we manually teleoperate these arms that you see behind me.

Makes sense.

Collect the data and yeah, we fold the laundry ourselves. Depending on what you want to fold, it can be pretty fast. Then we post, train, fine tune the existing models, essentially.

Teleoperation. Is it someone using like gloves? Basically. How are they actually doing the teleoperated folders? I imagine it'd be very hard to do it on an Xbox controller.

There is two methods.

Can we go full screen on this video? Yeah. Oh, you got some gloves on.

Oh, God. Whoa.

This is ready player one stuff. I love it. Okay. Oh, wow, that's awesome. Oh, yeah, yeah. VR. Yeah, with the. Yeah, you.

You hold it yourself and you sort of do the task.

Okay. And then the inverse kinematics. Happens within the robot to decide where, how it actually gets to that particular place in the 3D space. Yeah, that makes sense.

That's cool. How do you, how do you, you know, where, where do you expect? Obviously your number one competition is just people doing their own laundry. I think it's smart to build a robot that has some intrinsic value just like constantly, just even a reading lamp, however somebody would look at it. But are you expecting to have most of your competition coming from humanoids? How do you think about that category? Broadly? Because obviously a lot of people like the first demo or the promise a humanoid robot manufacturer might make is that, oh, it's going to do your laundry.

First promise is dancing. It's always dancing. But then, yes, the second promise is laundry.

That's right, yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, I think humanoids are, you know, they're, they're going to be there and I'm sure that there's going to be a, you know, market segment of the market that, that would welcome those things into their homes. I think where we are sort of the differentiator is that we are really sort of going after people that simply just don't want to share their living space with like robotic humans and they want to be in full control of their own place. And what that means is that in your home you have furniture, you have appliances. Right. And they sort of serve a single purpose. They have a place that they belong, they don't do anything when you don't want them to and they only activate when you want them to. So you're very much sort of in control of your space. And that's sort of where we come in to try to.

Yeah, it's also, I mean, just a cost standpoint. If you were going to buy. Yeah, if you're going to buy a humanoid and let's say it costs $20,000 and you really want it to do laundry and then you can come out with an option.

It feels like it's a fifth of the cost because it's a fifth. As many machine like parts. Yeah, yeah, it's got to be a lot less. So I would imagine that you're, you know, closer to Roomba territory than Tesla Optimus territory. And that just pulls you forward a.

Couple of final, final boss for robotics. Folding socks feels, feels pretty difficult. Maybe you could like line them up and sit them down on top, but you need a kind of humans last job will just be like, you know, folding them maybe.

Maybe.

Have you, have you cracked that problem yet?

We're working on it. I think we can fold most articles of clothing right now. The main challenge we're going on right now is anything that's inverted.

Yeah.

That might require you to sort of like push the stock out the other way.

Yeah, that's hard.

That's a bit more challenging with our fingers.

So.

Yeah. What's the. What's the price Target? You got $50 pre orders right now, fully refundable, but I imagine the final price will be some multiple that. Yeah, yeah.

So right now we're looking at trying to get the price to under $2,000.

Wow.

Per unit.

Yeah, that'd be definitely doable. Would you need two? I know in the demo video there were two arms working together. That feels like folding laundry with one hand would be kind of an IMO level challenge for me at least. Do you need two of these things? Yeah, yeah.

I mean, it's doable with one, but you're just gonna have to wait a little bit longer. So if you're in a movie or something like that, hopefully it's done by. Done the movie. But I think the ideal setup is probably to have two. But again, it depends, you know, whether your space can afford it. You know, if it's the couch, if it's a single chair of a smaller table, you might only have room for one. Right.

So is there a world where you sell the robot with a teleoperation package? So there's someone somewhere else who's folding my laundry remotely and I still don't have to fold my laundry and I pay $2,000 for the install and then $10 an hour for someone to teleoperate it or something like that.

Yeah, well, I think, I mean, our goal, I think is to really try to get to ship with autonomous folding out the box. Because one thing that we're really cautious about is like the privacy aspect.

Sure.

We. We are trying to avoid having to have people that you don't know. Basically now be given a set of arms and a pair of eyes into your. Into your privacy.

Maybe we'll do some like, blurring.

Yeah, I think, I think I. I don't see consumers being down to. To know.

You could say that about Waymails though. Those are teleoperated and they have cameras inside, like for sure.

But it's also like a Google product. Yeah.

Okay.

Aaron. Smart, but not. Not the same.

Not the same level of brand, but good luck.

Yeah, I guess. Like, how. How are you thinking of mitigating people's concerns of like putting robot arms right above their beds and like the, you know, Sort of like black mirror scenario where the robot rips you apart.

We saw a lot of that in the comments, a lot of that in the quote tweets. You know it happens when you set the timeline on fire.

Yeah, yeah.

And I mean, I think, I think it's key that for these arms that, you know, when they're not activated, they have to be and function like a regular lamp. So that means a hardware switch that turns them off. The lamp hoods naturally sort of covers up the grippers and the cameras so they act as sort of a mechanical blockage already as is. And you know, I think, you know, do when, when we do things like that and then we communicate clearly to our customers on how to actually operate these things, that's when we can really set the expectations. Pretty clear. It shouldn't work when there's people in the bed. They should only fold laundry when there's laundry on the bed.

And yeah, it's very cool.

Yeah. The other thing I, I, yeah, be curious. It's very possible that people don't actually need to put these by their beds in the long run. You can put it somewhere else in the room as well if you don't want to have the.

You put it in the laundry room.

Yeah.

Basically.

There you go.

Lots of mud room. Yeah.

Well, I'm excited to see how.

Good luck with the next phase. Congrats on the launch. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one. See you.

Good stuff, Aaron.

If you're looking for top tier cleaning and 247 concierge service, go to wander. Find your happy place. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel grade amenities, dreamy beds. In the future there'll be a robotic lamp that folds your laundry in every wander. Who knows? It's possible. It's a vacation home. But better folks. And in the new in the world of robots that could potentially fold your laundry, Luke Metro has been traded.

Traded?

Trade deal to skilled AI. Modern AI is confined to the digital world. At skilled AI we are building AGI for the real world unconstrained by robot type or task. A single omnibodied brain. Today we are sharing our journey. And Luke Metro says some personnel news. I work on this now. I'm super excited about the future of robot AGI. Check.

Well, no, he messed up. He said some personal news. This feels more like professional news or personnel personnel news.

Yeah, this is personnel news. This is not personal news.

Yes, this is cool. Big vote of confidence for skilled AI. I'm sure there's 100 companies in the Gundo alone that would have wanted to pick up the legend. Luke Metro.

Metro, absolutely.

Number one on the timeline and a great engineer as well.

We will close it out with this post from Alexis Ohanian because we gotta get to New York soon. Let's go to Tyler Cosgrove though. He has a little bit of an update for us. Let's hear it.

This is about something else.

Okay, tell me.

Hit us. I have some unfortunate news. What happened in Bloomberg? Luke Fedor got hit with a hit piece.

Wait, what?

Yeah.

No way. Why?

I might have to cover this tomorrow.

Okay, we'll cover it tomorrow.

We're gonna be in New York. We'll protest this.

We'll get to the bottom of it. We might have to go to Washington D.C. and defend our boy. Luke Farador. One of the best to ever do it. A scrolls enjoyer being attacked. Unless.

Honestly, I pulled up the image. He looks incredibly sick.

It might be one of those things that just builds his aura. You never know.

I think he's Aura Farming Business Week.

Let's see. Well, we'll dig into that tomorrow. But we will close out with this post about Figma because we're going to New York to hang out with the Figma crew. Alexis Ohanian says, sure, I've seated dozens of dozens of billions of dollars billion dollar companies. But I absolutely have my embarrassing miss list. Here are my figma notes from 2016. We passed. Congrats Dylan Field and the entire Figma team. Y' all absolutely made something people love. And his notes say figma. Why now? WebGL co founder was elf on the first was on elf the first people to make WebGL demos. Aviary had a great team, good software but tech wasn't there. Lack of focus. I actually knew someone who worked at Aviary. It was kind of a Photoshop competitor for a while. And then they served an SDK that you could basically bake Instagram filters into your app. If you wanted to have that as a feature in your app, you could pay Aviary to offer that service to you. They launched two months ago. Four out of seven users of seven days in the week. How many people log on four days a week? 600. Now a thousand. Three. Three days per seven users or 3,000 weekly active users at 9,000 80,000 signs.

This was at a time when Sketch was completely dominant.

Yes, that's. That's right. So mostly word of mouth. No paid content. Definitely drives a lot. Interested in learning better. Why someone signs up and invites collaborators. Primarily designers using this but sees engineers PMs and marketing people who are being Absolutely correct. Absolutely correct. A decade early. But Dylan Filled knew that in the long term, engineers would be using it, PMs would be using Figma, and marketing people would be using Figma.

This was 2016.

2016.

It's crazy. It's crazy. This, if you had this, this, this. A team with this competency.

Yeah.

And this kind of early traction.

Yeah.

Today.

Yeah.

You'd probably get a series A done 100. This was A. This was a seed.

Yeah.

Pass.

Crazy. Crazy. So not clear about pricing strategy yet, but excited to get started. The pricing strategy is fantastic.

Obviously they want to have people paying.

Yeah. Users say they'll Pay. Right now, 40% of users are US, 60% international estimates are $25 per user, per team, per month.

Ended up also being, I think, pretty much on point.

Yeah. Amazing. We will close out with one last post from Joe Weisenthal. He says, I'm still flabbergasted that people talk about pursuing their white whale in a proud manner. Setting aside the risks, the book may also makes it clear that that's immoral. Well, I have a white whale. My white whale. It would be doing a show in person, a podcast in person in New York with Joe Weisenthal.

Yeah.

I think it's possible. It might destroy me. It might destroy me, but I'm willing to risk it all to catch my white whale, which is a. An in person show with Joe. He's been on our show multiple, multiple times. I've been on his show, but we've never done it in person. Is it possible? Anything's possible. Anything's possible.

We will catch the white folks. Thank you for watching New York City.

We're gonna hop on a plane and our production team is like, hang up, hang up the phone.

Really want us to go off?

Okay.

Not going off.

Yeah, you know, let's keep going a little bit. He's actually trying to unplug. They're gonna shut us off.

But we will have a regular show tomorrow. We're figuring out the exact even us.

Five stars on Apple podcasts and Spotify. And thank you for watching.

Thank you so much. Have a great afternoon. See you soon.