Warner Bros. Discovery Split, Defense Tech Update | David Senra, Katie Haun, Justine Moore, Anish Agarwal, John Lee, Connor Zwick, Trey Holterman, James Cadwallader, Jordan Black, Ayush Sharma

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Today is Wednesday, June 18, 2025. We are live from the TVPN Ultra Dome. The temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital, the home.

Of the golden retriever.

We are so back. Delian sums it up. Well, he says we thought it was so over but in fact we are so back because Chamath Palihapitiya is launching a small back or he's exploring, he's exploring the idea and he's having advanced conversations, advanced talks.

I think I'm going to vote yes. The reason for that is that 99%, 99% of SPAC sponsors quit right before they're about to hit it big.

Yes, I agree.

I think that this could be the one and I think everybody should be open to the idea. Right? Let's, let's. It's not that the vehicle's not the problem, it's the asset that you know that, that, that becomes a part of it. And so let's, let's keep an open mind.

I agree.

He might, he could very well be spacking stripe.

I've never wanted a poly market on something more. We need a poly market on whether or not this SPAC happens before the end of the year. Asap. ASAP immediately also I mean if the SPAC gets out, you know where to go. Public.com investing for those who take it seriously. Multi asset investing industry leading yields. They're trusted by millions. Go check it out. Let's read through some of the news that we want to cover today. Give you a little bit overview of the show. The big news is more development in the story around Time Warner. Look at that lineup. Wow, that is a stacked lineup.

It's getting to the point. It's actually a little hard for me to read.

It's a little hard to read. Yeah. We might have to condense some of this down, figure out a way to kind of roll up working on a lightning round product. Something where we can go back to back to back. We did it with the Thiel fellows. Worked out really well. We've been doing it at YC demo day. I think we're going to do it more frequently because there's so much news. Have you been following how many funding raising announcements have been going out? Like the timeline is just like six companies raising legitimate like seeds series, series A, series B's every single day.

Yep.

Narrative violation. The venture capitalists do not appear to be on vacation somehow. We'll see. These might be deals that got done before, before the private jets left for Europe, but they're just getting announced now, but we'll be here covering it, talking to the founders who are raising big dollars from big name VCs. And we have some news about who's joining what team. And there's a lot of movement amongst the tier ones.

A lot of action.

A lot of action. There's an update to the David Zaslav story about Time Warner. We'll dig into a little bit of the split of what's going on. This is of course hbo. Hbo. Max. They went to hbo. They went to Max. They went to hbo. They went back and forth with the brand eventually. Now they're splitting up the company entirely. And big news. Warner's chief to receive pay cut after split. This is David Zaslav. And so he will be making less money now as he's only overseeing kind of half of the organization. Kraft Heinz is also removing all artificial dyes on the back of the MAHA movement. And a lot of stuff that RFK Jr. Has been pushing.

Right.

Bobby Kennedy.

I've been surprised at how quickly some of these players have been willing to give up.

They're moving on artificial dyes at the same time. With the artificial dye story. I don't know. I still don't have a firm idea of exactly how dangerous they are. Exactly the impact. Like it seems like there's a study.

That shows you've never been afraid of them.

I've never been. I'm still not afraid of them. But, but it seems like right now the, the narrative is that they might lead to increase slight increases in ADHD symptoms amongst kids. And so if that's true, that's obviously something we want to avoid. It seems like, you know, a lot of the rational they don't have.

You're taking the side of big food.

I'm just saying like, like the, the, the, the actual narrative, the commute. The science communication I think has been lacking on the food dice. It's been a lot of like, it's scary, but it hasn't been concretized in the sense of like, of like it takes two years off your life. It, it raises your chance of cancer by 5%. Like we're not there yet and we've been there with other products and, and I. There's like, we need more from the scientific community or from, from the actual thought leaders in MAHA anywhere else to really make it clear, like what are we getting when we remove this? It seems like something that like we could do without because apparently food dyes, they just make stuff like more enticing Basically, yeah.

And there's plenty. Well, the more important thing is there's plenty of natural alternatives that are already used in Europe and other places around the world that we can just.

So it's kind of like a why not? Conversation, which is fine, but it would cool if we actually knew to a point exactly how bad it was for you. I would always like to see that, if possible. Other news, Obviously, the war between Israel and Iran is raging now. There's a more interesting dynamic emerging in the oil markets. We're going to have a founder on to talk about oil markets soon. But China will pay if Iran's oil is cut off. The country's refineries have become hooked on cheap imports of sanctioned Iranian crude. So there's a very interesting dynamic between Russia, China and Iran as they all are kind of going to various levels of conflict with neighboring countries, neighboring areas. As they get cut off, they kind of drive each other towards one another. And so it'll be interesting. They would be unlikely bedfellows because of the difference in religion between China and Iran, but certainly likely trade partners if, if they, you know, need to keep the oil flowing. And Iran obviously needs to keep the money flowing as they fund their war effort. So interesting story there. Andy Jassy from Amazon is also talking about AI potentially cutting the size of their big workforce, which is interesting. We've heard this from Klarna. We're going to have a CEO of Klarna on the show soon and dig into how much of that is real. Where exactly is generative AI agent stuff like actually affecting hiring? Where can you actually get leverage? Get leverage. But the thing with leverage is like the game, the game theoretic outcome is usually like, you know, I can do X with 10 employees plus AI. You can do X. You can do the same amount of output with 10 employees and AI. And so we both wind up using the maximum amount of employees and AI like you like. It doesn't always play out that, that there's an advantage to be gained by cutting your workforce totally. Especially if we're in kind of this more like Centaur era where we're not fully delegating entirely. And it's more like we want these AI enhanced employees and we need lots of them.

So.

But, but, but it is interesting. He says about 41% of employers said that they would downsize their workforce due to AI, a World Economic Forum survey found. And so lots of people are talking about this. It's unclear if it's just a signal to the market that, hey, we're going to be more profitable going forward.

It'd be interesting to to think about what type of of messaging There was from CEOs in the dot com era.

Hey, we're all the fax machine employees are going away. Yeah, Eli Lilly is buying a gene editing startup. They're paying 1.3 billion for verve Therapeutics so on the COVID of the Business and Finance section today. So I'm not super familiar with this. We need to have some more biotech people on to really dig into this. But they're paying $1 billion upfront adding potential training treatment for cardiovascular disease to its portfolio. Under the agreement, the company has said Eli Lilly will buy all of the gene editing startup shares outstanding at for about $10.50. The stock was at around $6 beforehand. There's another $300 million contingent on the company's lead treatment, achieving certain clinical milestones. The treatment is being evaluated in Phase 1b clinical trial study and has been granted fast track designation by the Food and Drug Administration. There's a lot of excitement about Martyn at the end.

Some quick notes on.com era CEOs and how they thought about workforce expansion or contraction because of the Internet So during the dot com era, many CEOs and founders of Internet companies believe that the Internet would enable them to operate with leaner workforces compared to traditional businesses. This belief was rooted in the idea that the Internet could bypass establish distribution channels, automate processes and reduce the need for large numbers of employees to deliver products and services. The web was seen as a killer app that could connect buyers and sellers in seamless, low cost ways, fueling optimism about efficiency and scalability. However, this vision did not always materialize as expected. While some companies did achieve efficiencies, many dot com firms rapidly expanded their workforces in pursuit of growth and market share, often hiring hundreds of employees within months. So when the bubble burst, these companies faced quite a lot of pressure with layoffs and it did lead to a glut in the job market, but it was ultimately driven by that desire to compete and capture market share. So many of these CEOs they, they aspire to say hey, we're going to have these much leaner sort of workforces. But the reality was that it was a lot more complicated than that and there was some overhiring. So anyways, I think we will probably will see some of that right? There's this pressure to just compete and just access the best talent and scale headcount in order to win market share. And I'm sure that will lead to layoffs at different points. That might be blamed on AI because right now AI is a great scapegoat. If you want to downsize, you can be like, we're 10 times more efficient than we were last year.

And if you want to upsize, you can be like this stuff's too dangerous or it's too big of an opportunity or you want to spend more on capex, we have to go after it. Yeah, it is the dominant narrative. It drives everything. It even drives the fda because the FDA reporting to the Wall Street Journal here says FDA chief to fast track some drugs. This is what Eli Lilly is banking on. And tap AI. And so artificial intelligence top line even for the, even for the government, embracing artificial intelligence, taking on companies that make ultra processed foods and offering a fast track to approve drugs the Trump administration views as a priority. Welcome to the new FDA as envisioned by Dr. Marty Mocheri, who is leading the agency under Health Secretary RFK Jr both men have said they want to overhaul the agency, citing what they see as FDA's reputation for coziness with the pharmaceutical companies. Makery's goal is to deliver more transparency, unleash innovation, eliminate conflicts and lower drug pricing, said Cali Means, a White House advisor and ally and former guest of the show. Of course, here, of course, very interesting the changes. And so I'm not exactly sure how they're planning on implementing AI, but it actually does make a ton of sense because FDA Officials said about 6,000 people at the FDA are using AI weekly. AI can modernize the FDA and radically increase efficiency in the review process. I mean that is huge because you wind up sending in like A hundred thousand doc, 100,000 page document citing all this stuff. And a lot of the early FDA trials are just fact checking that you actually filled out the form properly or fact checking that you even have scientific data like did you do the test at all? And then if you did the test, then we will evaluate the results and put the scientists on it. But there's a lot of folks in the FDA where their job is not actually to understand the efficacy or the results of the trial, but just to understand that the trial happened at all. And that is something that AI could probably jump into pretty quickly. So that's exciting. Other news, the Senate is set to pass a bill regulating stablecoins. This was on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. The Senate was poised to pass legislation to regulate a widely used type of cryptocurrency, a key victory for the digital asset industry after it poured money into last year's election. The bill, the first of its kind, put federal guardrails on digital currencies, would set up oversight of stablecoins, a popular crypto asset typically pegged to a fiat currency like the US Dollar. The peg keeps their price steady, making them attractive to traders looking for a store of value while they buy and sell more volatile cryptocurrencies. And stable coins can also be used for cross border payments. We've covered the genius act a few times. We're having Catherine Hahn come on the show to talk about exactly what's going on.

For her to break it down, it'd be fun. We've talked plenty about unstable coins as well as stable coins. Yes, but. But yeah, her analysis should be spot on. So excited to get that.

In other news, there is a shake up at Renault. Is that right? Kering, Renault's star boss tests his skills at caring. Demeo revived the carmakers fortune at Renault as CEO, but views are split on whether he can do the same for the luxury group. Luca de Meo was among French business elite celebrating the opening of the 2024 Olympic Games at a party hosted by luxury group LVMH at its five star Cheval Blanc hotel in Paris last July. Let's hear it for luxury group lvmh. The Renault chief executive joined LVMH patriarch Bernard Arnault and top executives such as Louis Vuitton chief Pietro Beccari. But few expected that within a year the motor industry veteran would end up with the top job at lvmh. LVMH is longtime rival caring and so he's hanging out at the LVMH party. Little do they know there's a trade deal in the works and he's going to go. The direct competitor at Kering, the Italian is set to leave Renault next month and become the boss of Kering, the struggling owner of Gucci and Saint Laurent from mid September. While Demeo has spent his entire career in the car industry, he has been making discreet overtures to the luxury sector from some for some time. According to two people with knowledge of the situation. He cemented his reputation by leading a turnaround over no. Which he took over in 2020 when it was reeling from the exit of Carlos Ghosn. Do you remember this?

No.

He escaped.

He.

He escaped in a suitcase. Do you remember this whole story? Oh, it's amazing. Yeah. The Carlos Ghosn story is insane. Ghosn had been ousted after his arrest in Japan on charges he denies later. Later making a daredevil escape to Lebanon in a musical instrument box. That's what happened. So he, so he. In a plane, in a private jet. So he chartered a private jet under someone else's name and then basically was sleeping in a, in a, like a large guitar case or something like that or you know, one of those like roadie cases that has like speakers in it and stuff. So he goes in there and then he gets out and he can't be extradited cause he's in his home country because. And he claims that like the Japanese government was accusing him of, was basically being anti competitive with him because he was dominating the Japanese market and they were like, you're cooking the books. It's unclear. And like we'll never really know, I guess, who, who did the right thing. But demeo came in and was like, okay, I'm going to turn this around. Be a little bit more by the book. Maybe, maybe don't get, you know, you.

Don'T want to end up in a situation where you're getting stuck in a private jet in a musical instrument case. Yeah, you just want to avoid that.

Yeah. You want to be in the couch.

Life's not about what you should do, it's about what you shouldn't do.

Yes.

About avoiding things.

So he took, so Demeo took over. In July of 2020, Renault shares price has almost doubled. Let's hear it for that. While Volkswagen has fallen by a third and Stellantis has been almost flat, Stellantis is also in trouble. Renault's operating margin improved from a loss in 2020 to a record 7.6% last year. As he moves from one top French group to another, he prepares to steer another turnaround. The question is whether DeMeo's lack of experience selling handbags and high heels will help or hinder his bid to revive caring. Luxury is a bit different from carmakers, said one luxury executive who said DeMeo was a big captain of industry and a real star who could still succeed in his new role. Caring isn't lacking in creativity, but in structure and discipline. A combination of strategic missteps and global slowdown in demand for high end handbags and watches has left caring in a difficult, difficult position. Flavio Creata, fund manager and luxury specialist at gaming, said caring had to do something big to address the situation. Caring slowdown follows.

Years ago, caring. The caring, caring lvm LVMH dynamic is interesting. So caring has Gucci, Lant, Veneta, Balenciaga, Brioni, you know, a bunch of other brands. LVMH has pretty much every other one besides Hermes, which is obviously an independent company.

I thought they were investing or they own a.

Some ownership and it was always the goal to just kind of buy up and eventually take control, but that didn't happen. But the power law dynamics that we see in venture clearly playing out here. Kering is a 22 billion euro market cap group down over 60% in the past five years. LVMH is an order of magnitude bigger $270 billion company at that's up 27% over the past five years. So if you remember not too long ago, Bernard Arnault was richest man in.

The world still up there.

Everybody said this is. People weren't exactly excited about that. Except for us.

We were excited.

No, I think the pushback was like, okay, the Instagram era made it so that it a.

He's not exactly curing cancer.

Yeah.

Is that the criticism?

The criticism was that he wasn't a technologist, but anyways, he's an honorary technologist.

Anyway. In other news, this is There are two crazy deals happening today. Dylan Field is leading around into Senra Systems, which is a wire harness company.

Named after David Senra, I think.

So we'll have to ask.

We'll have to ask.

We have both of them on so today so we can figure that out. And then Spotify, Daniel Ek is leading a $600 million round into drone maker Helsing at a 12 billion valuation. And so I mean Spotify and Figma, they're in different categories, but I see them both as like, you know, like consumer ish, Internet, like design heavy, like not hardware.

Everyone should aspire to be an angel investor that leads $600 million rounds.

Yes. Or $25 million rounds in the case.

Yeah.

I mean there's a range.

Yeah, there's a range. You can do a lot.

But yeah, stop, you know, don't aim so small and think, oh, I just want to write 100k flyers, you know, shoot for the, you know, 25k. Sorry, 25 mil lead check or 600 million depending on the opportunity.

So we can dig into this more when we get to that. Also, you know the $5 million US investor visa, the gold card.

Yeah.

People were joking that like common A is going to apply for one and just be a citizen. Even though he's like, you know, public enemy number one in the war for Iran. Well, 70,000 people have applied for it. It's a lot.

How many of those are real?

I don't know. But yeah. Is it, Is it like you put down a $5, you know, placeholder model.

Yeah, 100 bucks.

I mean, I believe that there, there are that many people that would, that would be willing to pay for.

Sure, for sure. Just look at demand for luxury apartments in tier one American cities. Like there's so much international demand and that's just to have an asset in America that feels more durable than something in your country.

In your local currency.

Right, in your local currency. Exactly. So the number seems staggering but also maybe believable. We'll have to dig into where it goes from this, we can read into this, this article more, but I thought it was an interesting headline.

Yeah. Apparently there's 59 million millionaires. Many of those wouldn't be able to just, you know, slam 5 million down for a gold card, but many of them I'm sure would be able to.

So there's also an interesting article in the Financial Times today breaking down the weapons that are being used. Obviously we know some defense tech founders that are playing in the, in, in this world generally mostly on the smaller drone side. But the, the, the, the, the Financial Times has a good breakdown showing the different missile types of systems. There's ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and then UAVs. And you can kind of see the different arcs that they take. We were talking about this with like regard to hypersonics, But Iran has four different kind of ranges and different, different classes of ICBMs that they've been sent sending over. One is the Hajj Qasem solid propellant missile named after the IRGC commander. That's Qasem Soleimani, who was assassinated by the United States in 2020. They are immortalizing him in the name of this rocket. It has a maneuverable warhead and according to Iran was used Saturday night and might have struck the Haifa, Haifa refinery. There's the Fatah one, the Quorum Shah and the Ahmad. And there's a few different trade offs between range and payload. And it'll be interesting to talk to some defense tech founders over the next few weeks about what's actually on the ground. And then how do you counter this stuff?

Some interesting electronic warfare or propaganda happening right now?

Oh yeah.

Apparently the satellite signal for Iran's state run television channel has been hacked. So every channel is now playing anti regime messaging. Interesting. Which are calling for freedom and revolution against the regime. So interesting.

I think that's like the biggest question to answer is like how popular is the actual, how popular is the current? Because there's obviously, you know, it's, it's very it's very advantageous to someone who's attacking. If I'm attacking your country, I'm going to say Jordy's really unpopular. Everyone who says. Everyone who says Jordy's popular is lying. And you never really know. But something that shows that there is at least enough.

We got to get Shervin on the show. Yeah.

Oh, yeah, that'd be great.

He.

He's, according to X, very excited to be. To be able to go home.

Yeah, he wants to go home. And there's a lot of folks that are in that camp. The other news, Musk's X AI nears a $9.3 billion fundraising. You highlighted this later on the show yesterday. Investors shrug off White House spat. Makes Sense. They're closing $9.3 billion in debt and equity and the burn rate is over a billion dollars a month. Right? Yeah, I think that was a stat burning.

A B.

Investors have placed orders on more than 5 billion in a bond and loan offering, giving the company's bankers at Morgan Stanley confidence that they can finalize the financing round. I know the banks are on this.

So Tesla is down 5% in the last month. Is that the number that you would think if. No.

If no, the narrative would be it's 75% down. Like, based on the news and like the drama.

I don't think many people could pull this off, though. If you're a, you know, series C founder, don't make wild accusations about the president. Expect, you know, take a little bit of a hit. Yeah, you're going to get a bigger hit than. Than, you know, 5%. Yeah.

Yeah. It's wild. Well, people know naturally aspirated V12 is coming in the next Tesla. They're moving on.

This is.

If they can. If they can do that. This is a $10 trillion, I think maybe $100 trillion stock, maybe even bigger. They can. Why not really hit the right engine?

Why not one quad. Yeah, one quad. Let's do it. Musk Co. Told investors that it also expects to complete a $4.3 billion equity raise alongside the debt package. The firepower to build the data centers it needs to expand. It is competing with OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and others to develop and commercialize AI tools. Musk's group launched a chat bot, Grok, as an irreverent alternative to ChatGPT and Google's Gemini, claiming that it would seek truth rather than a politically correct narrative. Musk combined XAI with his social media company X in March in a deal that valued the company the combined entity at $113 billion. That's up there. TBG's in the deal. There's a couple other folks in the deal. Anyway, let's move on to some timeline. What's going on in the timeline?

Let's get into it.

I think we should go deeper on what's going on at Warner Brothers because this is an interesting story that we didn't really get to somewhat in the tech. In the tech world because of course they interface with Netflix. Former Fang, current Fang, I guess. But Fang is just falling is forever. But the news today that's driving the story is Warner's. The chief executive, David Zaslav, will take a pay cut after the company splits. And so the news is that Zaslav could receive over $150 million in stock by exercising options if share price targets are met post split. Gunnar Winden Weidenfels will become the CEO of the cable networks company receiving a 15 million stock and options granted. And so we'll go into this. Into this split. The new pay package goes into effect only if the split happens by the end of 2026. We need a poly market on this to be tracking it. But Zaslav already received options for nearly 21 million shares last week. The underlying stock was valued at more than 200 million. At the time, the board gave priority to retaining Zaslav and giving him strong incentives by trying by tying pay to performance. He will head the streaming and studios business after the split and is often. He's often one of the highest paid CEOs in the S&P 500s. Last year he received a pay package of 51.9 million. Up there with Tim Cook.

Pretty big.

Pretty big feeling. Criticism among shareholders. Yeah, a lot of folks have been kind of saying that his strategy has been misdirected. A lot of focus on the brand, which we'll go into with the HBO stuff. But interesting to see how this dynamic's playing out at the new company. He would keep his $3 million a year in salary. His target bonus would fall to 6 million with a cap of 12 million from a target of 22 million and a payout of 24 million last year. The contract promises Zaslav a target of 15.5 million in equity awards the first year and 7.5 million annually after that. The amount could rise or fall with performance. He's going to invest. They kind of go into the. This is like an incredible amount of detail, but I guess they had to share this with the board. And so it's in the Journal now I'm kind of interested in like how this actually plays out. But anyway, I don't know, should we. We could do a little bit of backstory on Warner Brothers Discovery to kind of set things up to, to take us up to speed. I mean, it's a really, really old company. Literally started by brothers like Harry, Albert, Sam, Jack Warner began screening motion pictures in mining towns across Ohio and Pennsylvania in 1903.

Wow.

You don't see many Brothers companies anymore. We've completely lost the. The user last name as the name of the company.

Yeah.

Meme. That's completely gone.

I do think Chris Amadon is bringing this back.

Oh, he's doing it.

Amazon Heavy Industries.

There you go. That's.

So that's a good start. I do think that could be the next meta because Totally. It allows you to quickly, you know, the dot coms attaches some meaning.

Yeah.

As shows or as an investor. It's like I want to invest in the company that the founder attaches their name to. Right.

Yeah. I'm putting it all online.

What's.

I'm not just going to like dip on this company because then we're like.

Oh yeah, that company named after me, you know, failed.

Yeah, exactly.

Putting it online.

Yeah, it's good. I think it could, could become a meme just like the Browser company of San Francisco or New of New York and the Compute company of San Francisco and American Manufacturing Company of Americ. Like there's a whole bunch of those and we're maybe reaching the end of that. Meta and a new meta show that meta is over. You think?

So do not name yourself the Media Company of Hollywood. The Media Company of Hollywood. Although you did throw that out at one point as a good name for.

It'd be disrespectful to the folks who are actually using that name. So they. So in 1923, not far from here in Hollywood, California, they incorporated Warner Brothers Pictures in 1923. So they were grinding for 20 years just showing motion pictures in mining towns. Just showing up to some mining town in Ohio or Pennsylvania saying, you guys want to see a movie?

You guys like flicks?

Yeah, just like not even incorporated really as like a Proper Company. 1927, they released the Jazz Singer popularizes the synchronized sound talkies. This was the, the generative AI, the VO3 moment of the day when you could hear sound synchronized with the, with the movie. And this propelled them to major player status. And then you jump forward 40 years. 1967, Jack Warner sells his remaining shares, 7 Arts by the studio and the firm is briefly renamed Warner Brothers 7 Arts. In the next three years, parking and services conglomerate Kinley national acquires Warner Brothers. It just like changed hands a bunch of the Discovery channel launches in 1985. In 1990 there's a $14 billion merger of time Incorporated with Warner. This creates Time Warner and we're going to get to Time Warner in 1996 acquires Turner Broadcasting Systems, Ted Turner's company, that's CNN, TNT and Cartoon Network for 7.5 billion. And so now it has a cable portfolio. And then in the dot com boom, you gotta get on the Internet action. And of course you get to America on Online announces it closed a hundred.

And one of the best names of all time.

It really is a great name. America Online. Yeah, it's fantastic.

And I think, I think the, I think the, that the IP is like kind of floating around.

It's like the Enron IP.

You can just like AOL.com still exists but, but like does it really exist?

Yeah. So I mean this was the, I think this was the biggest merger of all time.

I go to aol.com I get a ramp ad.

Oh yeah.

So that's cool.

Well, time is money save both easy use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. Go to rank.com the official corporate card.

Of the golden retriever.

Exactly. So AOL announces a hundred and sixty five billion dollar merger with Time Warner forming AOL Time Warner later judged one of the least successful megadeals in US history. Over the next 10 years, the early 2000s, AOL has dropped from the corporate name. Time Warner ultimately spins AOL off as a standalone company. In 2018, Discovery Communication closes its $14.6 billion purchase of Scripps Network Interactive for HGTV and Food Network rebrands Discovery Inc. So they have like a package of cable assets there. Warner brothers. So in 2018, AT&T completes its $85 billion takeover of Time Warner and renames its division WarnerMedia. And so Comcast has Universal and ATT as Time Warner and kind of like the pipes of distribution are also owning the networks of distribution which also own the shows, which own the content. And this is the nature of the, the TV media era basically pre, pre Internet. We haven't seen this with the social networks that much. We've seen like a couple big deals from like Spotify, you know, doing like one offs but there, there aren't as many. Like okay, the social social network bought like a creator organization that's operating on top of it, it just doesn't really happen. But maybe in the future, who knows. In 2020, WarnerMedia debuts direct to consumer streaming service HBO Max in the United States. And HBO has a fascinating history too.

Disney at one point bought Maker Studios. Do you remember that? For, for did that go?

I wonder if they like kept pumping stuff because like it feels like like the core Disney IP portfolio maker at.

One point had tens of thousands of creators and I don't true network were.

They thinking of it? I wonder if they were thinking about it like the new what's that? What's that like farm team that Disney has where they, where like Justin Timberlake came up from and like Britney Spears was part of it. It was like Mouseketeers. Are you familiar with this? So like there was some sort of like child actor farm team that Disney had for a while. They would put different child actors on for like little bits to kind of like audition and they'd get some screen time, but it wouldn't be like they're starring in their own show. And if they did well, they would wind up getting music deals and movie deals and kind of rolling from there. So I could imagine them thinking about that as being like a, like an arm into the next generation of talent, but unclear if.

Yeah. So make Maker. Maker Studios was absorbed by Disney digital network in 2017. This was a couple years after the acquisition and it effectively is no longer operating.

So not be interesting to talk to them and get the postmortem, see what they're up to now. So yeah, HBO Max AT&T agrees to spin off Warnermediate. These assets change hands so much. But they merge it with discovery in a $43 billion reverse Morris Trust transaction. Discovery CEO David Zaslav is tapped to run the combined entity. This is in 2021. Deal closes. Warner Brothers Discovery, or everyone calls it WBD, begins trading on NASDAQ under the ticker WBD. They consolidate HBO Max and Discovery in 2023 into a single streaming platform, branded Max. And then responding to brand recognition concerns in 2025. This is May 14th. Warner Brothers discovery announces Max will revert to the HBO Max name in summer of 2025. And that was like everyone was saying that's a massive l to drop the HBO brand name because they've spent decades building HBO home box office. Like the Sopranos, Sex in the City.

It used to mean something and still.

Mean something meant it meant for quality, quality television.

Yeah.

And you turn it on, you're going to get movie quality content the entire time. And they built that it was such a premium brand and then they just were like, yeah, we're not going to use it. See, yeah, it was a mess. I mean there is the counterfactual which is like they wanted to put Discovery assets on an app. And so if they put that on HBO and all of a sudden you're going to HBO and seeing like home and garden content or I don't know exactly what's on Discovery these days, but confusing Food Network, you might be like, this doesn't feel like hbo. It's like diluting the HBO brand. But still it was, it was a little bit of a mess. And so facing debt and strategic pressures, Warner Brothers Discovery unveils a plan to split the two publicly traded companies into two publicly traded companies. By mid-2026. Streaming and studios will be headed by Zaslav and Global Networks will be headed by CFO Gunnar Weidenfels. And so this was the big, this was the big News last week, June 9th or the week before, they're going to split into two different companies. There will be Global Networks which will be home to cnn, tnt, TBS and Warner's dozens of cable channels as well as international holdings. Global networks will hold 20% stake in the second entity which Warner is referring to as streaming and Studios which they're going to give a different name to. And it plans to use earnings from that stake to pay off debt. And so it's still a little bit of KU happening but they are drifting apart.

I mean it is, it'll be interesting to see how these two entities trade once, once they're independent. Right. They're could be more of a growth story around HBO Max. You know, if they, if they continue to want to compete with, with Apple and Netflix and many other players, prime, et cetera, the cable division will, you know, it's hard, hard to see what, what the long term growth story there. But I'm sure they'll continue to find a way to make money.

I mean the weird thing about this is that like the, the Wall Street Journal has this little, little infographic about what's in global networks and what's in streaming studios and in global networks. It's Bleacher report cable channels. CNN's plan streaming service. That's I believe CNN. Oh yeah, they're not calling it is it, is it was that ESPN where they're pro screaming services just called ESPN is what is CNN going to do? Are they going to do CNN plus? This is the chart Jordy. So Global Networks has Discovery plus which I believe is a streaming service and then streaming in studios has HBO in addition to hbo Max. I believe HBO is just a channel because they're still selling HBO to cable subscribers as a premium channel. And so even though they are like separating these things out based on whether or not it's streaming or a cable network, it's really more of like a separation around the brands and the ip. And what I'm seeing is that is that CNN and Discovery are more like news, reality tv, more ephemeral, less durable franchises, less long lived ip. And over in streaming services I'm seeing dc, you have Superman, Batman, hbo, these there are real assets. Westworld and Sopranos and Game of Thrones. Right. Like Game of Thrones could become its own whole world and they do more spinoffs and more movies and stuff. And so it feels more like they divided it along IP lines than really along like technology and distribution.

But I don't know. Yeah, we'll see, we'll see.

We are empowering these iconic brands with the sharper focus and strategic flexibility they need to compete most effectively in today's evolving media landscape, zaslav said in a statement. Riveting. Zazlov is under increasing pressure to boost the company's sagging stock price, which before Monday had dropped about 59% since the company was created from the merger of AT&T's WarnerMedia and Discovery. Community Communications shares closed down 3% Monday. S& P Global ratings friend of the show, downgraded Warner's debt to junk status earlier this month. It's really, it's really such a dig that they just have, you know, it's like, it's kind of like how if you're in school, you know, it goes like A, B, C, D and then they skip E and just to F, F. Right. It's like they needed to give you that extra like you did really bad. And so because they could just do like AAA debt, double A debt, A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, they could have it be much more, you know, random or just like linear. Instead it's like you go from like triple A. Sounds amazing, sounds really safe. Like I'm not going to lose my money in triple A. And then junk sounds like extremely risky to me.

Junk.

Anyway, they're going into, into his pay package again. Significant portion of Warner's roughly $34 billion of debt will live on the balance sheet of Global Networks, which currently generates more revenue and has stronger cash flow than streaming studio. So maybe this is more of like a CFO play figuring out the, the finances Kind of like the reverse version of what X and X I did, right?

Yeah.

Warner said it secured a 17.5 bridge loan. $17.5 billion bridge loan from JP Morgan to buy back a chunk of its debt. Yeah, if you're, if you're, this is, this is the big leagues. You don't go to that VC for, you know, oh, I need $2 million bridge loan to get me to series A. Is you go to J.P. morgan, ask for 18. Bill.

Yeah, it is interesting. You know, people love to poke fun over the HBO Max Max. Now back to HBO Max over the last few years. But if you actually look at the full corporate history of these assets, it's always been constantly renaming, changing things around, et cetera. So in many ways it's just a continuation of decades of rebrands and restructuring and mergers and reverse mergers.

So lots of, lots of fodder for the Journal. Maybe that's what we're here for.

My, my key issue is getting rehearsal renewed for another eight seasons. Ten seasons.

Yeah. It's so good.

I don't know how you top flying a commercial aircraft.

He has been like changing the direction.

Of that a lot, maybe. Oh, oh, here, here's how it goes full circle. So Nathan Fielder becomes the CEO of, of HBO Max.

Yeah, your cfi.

And he actually convinces management and gets sort of a critical mass of shareholders aligned to, you know, become just to, to sort of sell off all the legacy IP and just focus on him. It's really go. Really just become a personality led media company that's just centered around Nathan Fielder. And maybe they could go into consulting. You could see other media companies like Netflix coming to Nathan Fielder saying, how do we already have subscribers in every household in America? How do we grow? And I imagine he'd have some wild ideas around how to catalyze growth.

Yeah, I like that he's been able to basically like do be incredibly impactful at a global scale. Like as a bit. Basically he's like, wouldn't it be funny if we fixed serious problems with the faa? And then he like goes and like kind of makes it funny, but mostly is just actually doing like investigative journalism and like a documentary about aircraft safety. And yes, there's like a layer of comedy over it, but mostly it's just, it's just like impactful work and insightful analysis. And yes, I would love to see him do that at Warner Brothers Discovery. Come in and you know, as a bit just make it a high performing growth stock, give it a growth story.

Yeah, I mean he could potentially Double. He could potentially double HBO Max's revenue if he used. You remember when he did this gas rebate?

Yes, yes.

It was A$75 gas. But you had to, like, take the rebate up, you know, a mountain.

Yeah.

So you could do something like that with HBO Max, which is like, you know, you can actually. We'll give you. You have to sign up for. For $50 a month. But once you've been a member for a few months, if you hike up Mount Everest and you actually put, you know, this rebate in. In the box, we'll offer you a free subscription.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And so there could be some. A lot of different. A lot of different strategies. I could see him rolling out.

I'd be more interested in his investor relations strategy. As CEO. I want to see him, like, as a joke. Go to Sun Valley as a joke. Go on squawk box regularly, you know, as a joke. Tell a really convincing story during earnings. That excites retail. Turn it into a meme stock as a joke.

Yeah. He could do something like blow out the shorts. He could live stream and day trade with the company balance sheet as a way to kind of just drive retail engagement.

Yes, yes, yes. I think you got to put him in the boardroom at this point.

Put him in the boardroom for sure.

He deserves a board seat after the rehearsal.

We should buy, since apparently after the whole Tesla pay CEO compensation saga, if you own like, seven shares of a company you get, you could. You could sue. So it's possible, you know, we could buy some shares of Warner Brothers and start, you know, or sorry, HBO Max, and start actually lobbying to get. To get.

Nathan, I've been saying this for our buddies who wind up selling companies to public companies, and we always tell them our advice for anyone who does some sort of, like, acquire or like, sells their company to a bigger company. Like, your job is not to rest, invest. Your job is to become the CEO, put the company back in founder mode. We're half joking, but oftentimes the. The company that's acquiring you is acquiring you, because they're not a founder mode. And you are. And you are more agentic and more aggressive, more creative. And so you should actually try and get into the boardroom.

You should, regardless of what the CEO that bought your company actually wants.

Exactly.

And I think very likely you know better than they do.

And I think we as we as we as friends should potentially buy some shares in the acquiring company, fire up a shareholder lawsuit and say, hey, put our friend who you just acquired for A couple mil.

Yeah. In the boardroom, you got an MVP that's basically benched right now.

Exactly.

Because they're not in the boardroom.

Perfect metaphor. That's the perfect metaphor. Well, speaking of MVPs, Ben Thompson, MVP of strategy, has breakdown on his reaction to the news. He says he feels compelled to cover this because as much as he likes celebrating when he gets things right, he also needs to own his L's. And I'm taking a big one here. He says, I was very optimistic about the idea of combining Warner Brothers and Discovery. And this is what I love about Ben. He's like, he really holds himself accountable. He gets a lot of things incredibly right. I mean, Nvidia and Meta, when they were down, he was laying out really, really detailed bull cases. But he does it in a way that's not. He doesn't issue like a buy rating. You know, he just walks through the strategy. But he still holds himself accountable. Even though he's like, like, you know, he's kind of like the opposite of Kramer. Like, Kramer's like riffing, offering like buy and sell ratings like all the time, and then like constantly not afraid to change his mind. Yeah, exactly, because he's going, going, going on the daily basis. Ben's obviously much more detailed in his analysis, but then also revisits what he said before. So back when Warner Brothers and Discovery were in the process of that merger, Ben Thompson said there would be increasing bargaining power with MVPD providers. I think that's Netflix. I don't, I don't, I don't even know. Do you know what MVPD stands for? This is like industry jargon. A streaming package. A streaming package that appealed to the entire household with a combination of prestige content and top notch mvpd.

MVPD is multi channel video programming distributor, which is traditional TV providers like cable, satellite, fiber optic.

Got it. Okay, so, so, so if they, if they go to Comcast and say, hey, in the bundle that you're offering to Comcast subscribers, you know, there's usually like the base tier, the premium tier, and then like every channel possible and like sports package. Yeah, they would have leverage to say, we want you to push HBO harder and get the upsell for that and give us more of that. Because otherwise you don't get, you know, Discovery reality TV shows or something like that. Theoretically. And so, yeah, that's what he's saying is that the streaming package could appeal, appeal, appeal to the entire household because you get the prestige content, Game of Thrones on the weekends, but then you also get filler content, which he calls, you know, his affectionate term for Discovery style reality shows. And so I don't actually know what the top. With the top Discovery reality shows are because there's so many different ones. And I know Bravo, I believe, is owned by NBC and they have a whole bunch of reality shows. I'd love to know what Discovery is working with, but there's clearly stuff on HGTV and other Discovery channels. I imagine they do. Doesn't Discovery do like Shark Week? Isn't that the big one? I imagine, like, that's a Discovery thing. I don't know. They have so many.

Yeah, they have Deadliest Cats.

Deadliest Cats there. Must go mythbusters.

That's Alaskan bush people.

I haven't heard about that one.

Dirty Jobs.

Dirty Jobs. Mike Rowe. Okay. Yeah. So. So that, that, that kind of content is something that you'd be putting on the background like a laundry. Never heard of that. Not interested.

That's where. No, no, no. It's not as bad as it sounds. It's. Contestants are dropped into remote wilderness locations with no clothes.

No clothes, water.

And must survive for 21 days. This would be great if we could get venture capitalists to do it. Yep, I think they could. You know, it's a, it's a high risk, you know, move for them to say, I'm going to take my August instead of going to Europe. I'm going to be dropped into the Alaskan wilderness and forced to survive for 21 days on camera.

They have some grit coming out of that.

They'd have some great credibility.

Credibility.

Able to say, you know, I've pushed through. I've. I've faced.

I'm in the trenches.

I'm in the trenches with you.

You might be in a literal trench.

Yeah.

Muddy and naked and afraid.

Yeah.

Anyway, Ben Thompson also laid out reason for optimism. A better advertising offering that extended across linear TV and streaming. But he says his biggest mistake in his analysis, which was. Was not properly accounting for the debt which the new Warner Brothers Discovery was taking on. A mistake that was greatly amplified by the significant rise in interest rates that occurred over the past few years. Interesting. Although Warner Brothers Discovery debt is still fairly cheap and is going to and is going down, S and P Global downgraded them to junk, thanks in large part to declining linear TV revenues. Interesting. It's important to acknowledge, however, that my reasons for optimism were overstated as well. First, there were serious questions about WBD's MVPD leverage going forward, particularly now that TNT has lost the NBA. Second, there's no evidence that Max's breath does anything to mitigate Churn, which remains among the highest of any of the streaming services. Is that just because it's so expensive? And it's like, either there's a takeover the world moment with the Game of Thrones, like, you got to be subscribed or else it's. It's like, nah, I can skip it. I feel like HBO is something that like, once a year I'm open.

They don't have it in them to slap it up.

Yeah.

I'm not like, oh, going to slop. They're down to just. I mean, all the mud at the wall.

Watch Netflix. I don't even have it installed because, like, I just don't really.

Very little stuff on there. Like, you can't get to Netflix on your tv.

No. Wow. I can't get to it on my phone either.

You're the last one. Hey, Netflix. No, I got a guy for you.

To be clear.

I pay.

They're going to be banging on the door. Okay.

Okay, good.

I pay for it. And I'm probably like the most premium.

Tier, but very un American. Did not support, you know, I American tech company.

So. So unlike you, I do. I do enjoy the current thing when it comes to cinema and television.

Yeah.

But it needs to be take over the world. Everyone is talking about it and then I watch it. So White Lotus. The last thing I watched on Netflix was Squid Game season one.

Really?

Yeah. Because it was like so important to see it and everyone. And it was good. I liked it. But like, what was the biggest show on Netflix this year so far? Like, it's all just background TV to me. I feel like. I mean, I guess F1 drive to survive is pretty good, but I just haven't had a chance though.

Yeah.

But even Drive to Survive, I don't. I would be fascinated to understand their viewership in late these later seasons. For some of the initial ones.

Yeah. You know what they should do? They should have designed to survive. Kind of some figma spawn con on Netflix. All about designers. The best fighting for their lives.

Mobile app enterprise.

Exactly. Go to figment.com. think bigger, build faster. Figment helps design and development teams build great products together.

Dylan, consider Absolute Dog. Designed to survive.

Designed to survive.

If we don't increase the conversion rate on this button by 5%, we get thrown into this pit of sharks.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But it would be this pit of snakes.

That's actually not the stake with drives to survive. Like, like the stakes are just like.

All like interpersonal job and like deals. I would.

Yeah, it would be like, oh, who's poaching who? Yeah, oh, this person.

Coinbase. Coinbase reached out, Reach out to one of.

Oh, yeah, we know, we, we know the story.

The U.S. army's designers.

Yes.

And they're pulling them in.

Meta is trying to pull designers in. It's a hot market.

Meta just offered $200 million.

No, it's too much. The number is 100. And that's not confirmed.

It's not confirmed. Speculation.

Yeah. And then they, and then of course, they, they dropped the, they dropped the, the, the HBO name and they went back and forth on that. There was a funny thing. Compare that to Netflix, certainly the streaming services investing tons of money in having differentiated content. But the long term goal, and by extension the ultimate value proposition for consumers is offering something for offering something. Something. Offering something for everyone all of the time. To be. To be tv, in other words. But freed from the constraints of geography and time, one subscribes to Netflix not to get a particular show, but simply because that is what one does. Just as one once subscribed to cable. Can you see the difference? Just think of the tagline, it's not tv, it's hbo. That's not simply a slogan. At least it wasn't. But it will be if AT&T sees the brand's ultimate value as a consumer front end for a de facto Netflix competitor. That is to say, to. More broadly, if my interpretation of these comments is correct, and AT&T plans to build a streaming service to rival Netflix. Well, first, good luck. And second, that is quite a bit higher level of ambition for the Time Warner acquisition than I anticipated, was what he said. Okay, maybe I can take the W on this analysis. It holds up pretty well. In the end. The mistake was not so much about combining Warner Brothers and Discovery as it was trying to take on Netflix in the first place. My instincts were right about that. I just wish I'd stayed anchored on that point all the way through. And if you look at the. I saw somebody being like, oh, whatever happened to Fang? I think we covered this in the show and it's like, it was like, why was Netflix ever in Fang? It was kind of a good question because like, Netflix doesn't have the same just intense power of the hyperscalers and the other trillion dollar tech companies. But you look at the stock chart and yeah, it went way, way down for a little bit, but it's, but it's back up and it's been on absolute tear and for a long time. It was the best performing stock in the stock market and I think it's up like millions of percent or something like that. Like the numbers are insane.

It's trading at a 57x.

Earnings.

Yeah.

Price earnings, yeah. What's the market cap?

520 billion.

Not bad. Half a trillion. Like that's pretty, pretty big for something that the narrative was like it's just a streaming service. So it's not as dominant as, you know, Google which has the Google search and YouTube which competes with Netflix and cloud platform or Apple which is the iPhone. It's the gate to Netflix like or Tesla with the car and the humanoids and the self driving and all this different stuff. Netflix was always just an app that you watch stuff on and there were a lot of them for a while and so there was a question about like how solid would their lead be long term. But they have solidified it anyway. Hopefully they're on Vanta Automate Compliance. Manage risk, Prove trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation. Whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program.

Get on there. Intercom is on there. And you know why I said Intercom? Because SPAC sponsors are reaching out to own at Intercom.

No way.

And so I highly doubt he would entertain any of that. It seemed like a sort of boilerplate email that they were just blasting out.

Wait, did he, did he post this?

He posted. He said we are so effing back. And he posted a screenshot. And anyways, I'm sure you know, part of being ready to get spacked at any time, you got to get on Vanta, got to get your got to do it compliance dialed.

And so Buco Capital bloke, this was actually two years ago back in 2023, he talks about Warner Brothers discovery and talks to license HBO original series to Netflix. Zaslav strikes again. Corporate financial decisions won out, selling the future for money. Today the HBO streaming's world walled garden is coming down. It seems you can already watch HBO on Hulu. Somehow you can like pay through Hulu and so that's been a thing.

Who's a weird place? Weird place?

Hulu's Hulu is an odd story because it was like crazy joint venture between all the different platforms and then eventually Disney acquired most of it. But like it had like all sorts of content.

Never been big into that whole world.

No, you're not a Hulu guy. In a hugely surprising move, Deadline understands that Warner Brothers Discovery is shopping some of its HBO library titles to rival Netflix. And this was kind of the Ben Thompson takeaway, which was that when you have a fixed priced asset, it is often better to auction that off to the highest bidder and not need to sell it to yourself in the form of your own streaming service.

Which then if Max already has some of the highest churn of any of these subscription platforms and then you can get some of the best content from HBO on other platforms, what's going to keep people on hbo?

Yeah, and so HBO Max. So it's a good question. But, but the, but the, I mean the cash flow should flow directly to them and it should be most efficient because whatever service can monetize it the best could potentially just pay them upfront for that. And again, like yes, Netflix has a lot of original productions, Netflix originals and whatnot. But a lot of that is just stuff that they purchased right. Or purchased exclusive, exclusive rights to. They're not necessarily producing everything there. So Warner Brothers Discovery has been an absolute roller coaster ride. The stock was up at $75 a share in mid-2021, sort of a top tick of the ZIRP era. And then the debt kicked in and the streaming wars took off and the rest is history. So the stock's been kind of languishing between 10 and 15 bucks for the last two years and hopefully they're on to greener pastures now. Yes, but whatever they're planning, if you're planning to manage a debt schedule, you're planning to manage a complex demerger, you got to get on a linear. It's a purpose built tool for planning and building products.

Meet the building products, not reverse mergers.

But I am determined to use Linear for everything. Yeah, Linear should eat everything. It should be the one stop shop for any planet.

Not very adaptable. You can do a lot with it.

It's a system for modern software development. You can streamline issues, projects and product roadmaps. And they got Linear for agents. Of course they could use it for the development of their streaming platform. They have software engineering to do and LINEAR is the perfect tool for them.

Hopefully your agents, your various agents are smart enough to ask, hey, I'd really appreciate, you know, I don't ask for much, but I'd like to be orchestrated on if you could just get me on there.

I just don't know why you're holding back Zaslav from getting a Linear installation going to run his office day to day.

Well, if they want to compete with Netflix and other the primes of the world, the hyperscalers on streaming and real technology. They should absolutely get on linear.

Anyway, there is this fascinating kind of like, I mean it's a Nathan Fielder style stunt almost. So Pierre Rischelson who's from Cal.com is fake suing a former employee. Have you seen this whole thing? Have you dug into this?

Jordy?

This is, this is a wild trying.

To figure it out.

So it seemed really real. But then he posted this joke Google Doc that made it clear that it was a joke. He says, today we are suing Nizzy AB0 email in the court of Mailifornia for secretly building an actual, an actually pretty good email client while Getting paid by Cal.com Read the full case below and you can kind of dig into it and but it does seem weird because when you dig into it it's like Amrit who's the founder says, happy to announce I will be joining0.email as a full time engineer. Came across this app some months ago, literally saw it grow up from day zero. And, and Pierre says that cal.com to zero pipeline is two for two. And so two people have left Cal to go build this new company. That can be very rough, that can be sometimes looked down upon to leave the organization to build something new. But it seems like maybe it's good. So Shams Twally says so I need to work on Cal first. And then Pierce says well the best people don't leave Cal. So it depends, are you good? And then, and then Nizzy says didn't Cal.com want to acquire zero email before I left? And then Pierre quote tweets that and says hey Oric at Grok. What happens if you build a new startup on company on a company device during work hours? Which to me looked like he was serious. And John Siro, Josh Sirota says, ooh, shots fired.

But they're just joshing around.

Seems like they're just messing around.

Lawyer that submitted the complaint.

Yes.

Is named Chad Esquire.

Love it. And the amount that they asked for is like $420,000 and 60, something like that. But it's weird. Like it's weird. It's this weird like fake stunt to draw attention. It's working. It got my attention. It was confusing.

And you've wanted somebody to build an AI powered email.

Maybe I'll, maybe, maybe I'm going to wind up checking this out. They, they got me, they, they definitely got me with all this nonsense. But it really is like the new era of like, you know, content marketing and like going viral Crazy like a fake lawsuit is what is the stakes now to break through? You can't just say, hey, like, you know, this new company's going through. But it seems like they went through YC and they worked together and they're probably friends. And I mean that, that does happen all the time. That's always like the good ending when someone spins out, Hey, I was here for a while. I had a good experience, but I want to go build my own thing. And they get the blessing of the CEO and usually the founders, like, well, angel invest or something like that. So hopefully it really is that narrative. It's a little unclear, but I think that's part of the joke that that's going on here. Anyway, whatever, whatever they wind up doing, they got to get on numeral sales tax and autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Go to numeral hq sales tax, AGI love it. Sam Altman's been on a podcast tour. He's firing shots at Elon Musk. He says, I didn't think Elon was going to abuse his power in the government to unfairly complete. I regret to say I was wrong about that. I genuinely thought he wasn't going to. I really, I think it's really unfortunate for the country that he would do these things. I wish Elon would be less zero sum or negative sum. So the, the battle between the AGI gigachads is raging still. Although it feels like maybe that like this is coming to a close. Like, like they now just have to duke it out in the app layer, win in the store.

Like if you remember, I mean, if you remember felt like the big winner of the blow up between Elon and Trump was Sam and people that had bought a Tesla before Elon went crazy. So there were two winners coming out of that. So hopefully. But again, I'm sure there'll be more updates coming down the pipeline around. Around the active lawsuit between both parties.

Well, either way, they got to get on Adeo. Customer relationship magic. Adeo is the AI native CRM that builds scales and grows your company to the next level. Newcomer is on Substack. He's an investor in Substack. He's also leaking information about Substack. On Substack. It's the pimp my ride of Substack scoops. He's the exhibit, right? So he's generated $400,000 a year from Newcomer paid subscribers subscriptions. He's paid substack $50,000. He sells his own sponsorships and Substack doesn't get a cut of that revenue. He also invested $5,000 in Substack's crowdfunding round in 2023 as a show of support. And he's a fair weather friend, constantly agonizing about the huge chunk of subscription revenue that we fork over to substack2friendly tech newsletters. Platformer and Garbage Day decamped from Substack over a year ago to Ghost and and Beehive respectively. Executives from rival newsletter platforms like Beehive and Kit regularly try to get us to consider jumping ship Subtext app oriented strategy has at times annoyed me as it sometimes asks. Newsletters do that. Ultimately he stayed. What's interesting is that now he, he has the, he got the scoop that that Substack might be out raising new funding on the back of a bunch of growth scoop. And so it's just a funny dynamic that is, it's just unique to the new era of like these independent journalists. Like I really is a thing I.

Have to call out. Eric should come on the show and talk about this dynamic. But he's generating, he's netting $400,000 a year and paying Substack $50,000.

Yep.

Fraction of that.

They take like 10%, I guess, or I guess it's a little bit more 12%.

And this is the backbone of his business, which, which you would imagine being on Substack, I would guess helps him generate an incremental $50,000 a year of revenue and would probably pay for itself.

Yeah, certainly. I mean, yeah, there's two ways to look at that cost. One is so if you went to a more DIY platform like Ghost that has a lot of the features, but you still have to customize it yourself and you're not getting the Substack team of engineers constantly releasing new products. Well then you're probably going to wind up paying someone maybe more than 50k a year to, you know, enhance your Ghost installation or like optimize it and get the most out of it. So there's like the cost side of that. You can probably do more and more now with AI and get more leverage out of someone around 50k. Probably not right there, but maybe 100k starts to get interesting. If he winds up paying substack, you know, 2 million in a few years, maybe it makes more sense. But this is kind of one of the interesting, you know, problems that Substack has to play ball with. But they can probably negotiate at a certain point because there is, there is some element of like, hey, you've gotten really Big, we'd love to keep you. Why don't we give you a little bit discount on. On our take rate so you don't move off.

And then there's also crazy snowballing effect though where all the top, you know, creators which talk amongst themselves, I'm sure.

Yep, totally.

But ultimately he says that he does get recommend. He gets a large number of free signups.

Yep.

Through recommendations though.

That seems good.

Those readers convert to paid subscribers at low rates. So anyways, interesting. It'll be interesting to see where Substack's new round gets priced. Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised, surprised if it was fairly close to their peak valuation. But that would actually be great to see them kind of growing into that. Whatever their 2021 valuation was. I think it was like 750 million.

750.

It's up there.

They raised a series B in April 28th of 2021 at 650 million. So per year.

Post probably. Post.

Post. Okay, so they sold 10%.

Oh, not bad.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean the business seems to be like very much sustainable at this point. It seems like it's accidentally profitable. Remember that reporting in the information and talking to Chris. It seems like things are going really well. Yeah. Just I guess there is this question of like how can you quantify the impact of substacks features on growth?

Yeah.

Because like the. Yeah. The question is like they're driving free signups for newcomer, but is it actually driving incremental 50k in profit for him?

Yeah, who knows? I mean he's selling ads against the newsletter.

Yeah.

Which you know, he's able to. He's, he's monetizing those free subscribers. So who knows?

Anyway, who knows? Promoted post from public. We haven't done one of these in a while. We're hosting a private screening of one of the summer's most anticipated films starring Brad Pitt and set at 200 miles per hour. If you're a New York based public member, you can access the exclusive experience and be there on opening night June 25th. Reply Aston for your chance to win tickets. So if you are in New York and you're on public reply, Austin to this post and head over to the movie. Be great. Over in defense tech world, Anduril has partnered with Rhein Matal, the German. The German defense tech company prime, really to manufacture Barracuda, Barracuda and Fury over there. That's very exciting. And then we also touched on Spotify founder Daniel ak.

Yes. Leading, I guess when Ryan Matal was founded.

The way you're saying that makes me think it's like 1650.

I'm putting you on the. I'm putting you on the spot like Tucker put.

Yeah. How can you possibly report on the news if you don't know when it was founded?

This, this is the best bit earlier. I have to read it out.

Yeah.

Muffin man Tucker. Do you know the muffin man? The muff Ted goes the muffin man.

The muffin man.

Muffin man. No, I don't know him personally. How can you know anything about Drury Lane if you've never met the muffin man? John, this is a post from Zach Stewart. Really, really good. Anyways, you can still. I give you permission to common on even though you don't know 1889.

I knew it was really old. 1889.

Dusseldorf.

Okay. I was pretty, I was pretty far.

Off.

But over 100 years. I mean. Yeah, that's the same. It's General Atomic is part of like this roll up and the, and the, and it came out of like I think General Dynamics at some point. And the company that, that the founder of the company that competes with Fury for the, for that autonomous program that they're competing for right now was like the designer of a submarine in the Civil War or something like that. Like I'm pretty sure that he's. He died more than 100 years before Palmer Lecky was born. Yeah, that's the, that's the cultural difference between the two companies that are competing for this like one contract. It's like a fascinating dynamic about like how legacy they are. Like it's not just like you're in.

The game for a while, you know, decades after, after you start the company, your, your greatest enemy will, will be born and then they'll have to grow up a little bit. Yeah, they'll have to learn the game.

Yep.

And then they're going to come for you wild.

So. Yeah. Spotify founder Daniel Ek is leading a $600 million funding round into the German defense tech startup Helsing. This is the, this is kind of more of an Andrew equivalent over in Europe, valuing that four year old company at 12 billion. The business makes battlefield AI, drone submarines and robo fighter pilots. It's now one of Europe's most valuable startups.

And they're using some renders here. John Render this image. They're render maxing.

They're render maxing.

Happens is a cool render. Yeah, look at the water there. It's definitely a render.

Who knows? It's hard to tell these days. It's so. It's we're beyond the uncanny valley. And so Helsing is expanding from its origins in artificial intelligence to produce its own drones, aircraft and submarines as part of a bigger push for locally made and owned defense products for European countries and really companies all over the world.

Crazy. It was founded in 2021.

Wow.

By Torsten Ryle, a video game entrepreneur, Gunbert Scherf, a former German Defense Ministry official and Nicholas Kohler, an AI researcher. And they have partnerships with Saab already as Mistral.

Yeah. And tons of American venture capitalists. And the deal you got Lightspeed, Excel, General Catalyst, Connor's Cooking. They've raised over 1.37 billion. Daniel X said. The world is being tested in more ways than ever before. That has sped up the timeline for Helsink's financing, x said, pointing in particular to the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, where drones and other AI powered systems have been deployed at scale for the first time. There's an enormous realization that, that it is now really AI mass and autonomy that is driving the new battlefield. And so yeah, exciting, exciting deal. If they want to get more attention, want to do some hiring, they should get on Ad Quick out of Home Advertising Made 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.

They make it just about as easy as launching a campaign on Meta or any other ad platform.

I love it.

Get over there. Check it out.

Ad quick.com we have David Senra coming in the studio in just a minute. In the meantime, if you're looking to go deeper in AI, there's AI. Startup school has been going on for the last two days up at Y Combinator and Andre Karpathy gave a banger talk and Swix, friend of the show, grabbed pictures of every slide from his talk and reconstituted it into a full into a full like slide deck. So you can go and read the full talk if you want. And so go check that out on Layton Space if you're interested. And we have David Senra in the studio. How you doing, David.

Brother, welcome to the show. I can hear you on what's going on. It's great to see you.

How much?

How are you guys?

Great to see you again. Long time no talk.

Long time no talk.

Did we talk yesterday or the day before?

Yeah.

It'S too long.

I need it every few hours.

Yeah, yeah. Honestly, between the show and then the hour that we typically talk with you afterward, at some point we should just start, you know, streaming it live. Get up to. Get up to five hours.

This is, this is. This scratches the itch a little bit.

Yeah.

You guys haven't announced our month long extreme podcasting summit in Malibu yet.

I was going to wonder if you wanted to talk about that. I'm super dumb about it.

I'm excited. I've been inviting other podcasters. Like, you need to fly out.

It's going to be summer podcasting our month, Rob.

No, you have to have a podcast to go.

Yeah. The summer of extreme podcasting in Malibu, California. I want to. I want to create. I want to create the center.

I think, I think we're going to tip it in Malibu, though.

Oh, yeah.

With the people that are coming. Yeah, for sure.

The weather.

Come on. No one's like, hey, come visit Austin in the summer.

We need it. We need a fresh start. We need a fresh start.

Yeah. You know, there's something about the mothership where like, I think Austin works because you need to have like all the cross pollination, kill Tony and random people coming in. Malibu's for monk mode podcasting.

Yeah.

But it's for. Yeah, if you're a comedian and you're friends with Joe Rogan.

Yeah.

Obviously move to Austin. That's really good for your career.

Yeah.

But that doesn't apply to us. So.

Yeah, there's been a good crew amassing out there. Break it down for us.

What's top of mind for you before I have something. So James from Profound announced their round today. He's coming on the show later today. David and I are both investors in Profound. They announced a $20 million Series A LED by Kleiner with participation from Nvidia Saga, South Park Commons and SV angel, and of course Guillermo.

It's hilarious. The lineup of investor and it's like Jordy and David.

Yeah, yeah, it's Guillermo from Vercel. Jordy and David and Jordan Singer, friend of mine, snuck in there as well. So stacked. They're building an answer engine, helping teams, you know, optimize. But we'll get into that later.

But maybe let me actually, there's a perfect, like ramp crossover. I don't know if you guys have heard of this little company called Ramp.

Heard of that.

So I was actually in New York with James yesterday and every time, the last few times I go there every few weeks and the last few times I've been there, I've made sure to like spend time with him. James frowned. And there's actually a funny way that I met him. So Kareem obviously co founder and CTO of Ramp, is a good friend of mine. And the reason I think that Kareem is such a great founder is because he has this, like, divine discontent with everything that he does. So nothing's ever good enough. The product's not good enough, this go to market's not good enough, the sales isn't good enough. Like, everything can be improved. And I was at dinner at his house, like, I don't know, maybe like two months ago. And this is going on and on about all the things that, like, need to be improved and things that he thought, like, he hated or whatever. And I was like, all right, enough of this. Tell me, like, what you actually like, like, who are the founders or the products that you think are great? And one of them was Profound and James. And so I wound up looking, looking James up on Twitter, and I found that he followed me, and so I actually followed him back. And then we wound up DMing and I was like, hey, are you in New York?

He's like, yeah.

I was like, I'll be there tomorrow. He's like, come by the office. And so, yeah, I just thought it was hilarious that, you know, Kareem, his. His Bar for excellence is excessively high for people and products, and James and Profound have exceeded that. So that's actually how I met James and why I was invited to invest in that round.

Awesome. Love it.

Should we move on to Jimmy?

Let's talk. Jimmy, break it down for us.

How did you originally land on Jimmy Iovine as someone to profile?

That's a question I had for you guys because you guys both grew up or lived in LA for a long time. So my interpretation of Jimmy Iovine is like, every single person in the music business knows who he is, but the average person doesn't. Were you guys familiar with him at all?

Yeah, I was, loosely.

But I think part of it, when you. When I actually think back, it's like the tech angle. Beats and Apple is probably found out.

About my introduction to it, but also like reading stories about Dr. Dre because I was a fan and kind of like the Interscope Mafia, like that was. That was in the news when Dr. Dre was like, the one of the leading artists at that time.

So Jimmy Iovine is easily like, top three people that I want to meet. And when people ask me, like, out of all the living entrepreneurs, who you want to meet, that usually when I say that, that's surprising. Many people don't know him. I've been fortunate enough to have dinner with Two people. One that was mentored by Jimmy and worked with him for a very long time, another person competed directly with him. And the way that people speak about him, there's like an unbelievable level of respect and just the. The guy's unbelievably driven, really, like, relentless. And one of my favorite documentaries. So, like, you know this because I read the same books over and over again. I, like, read the same quotes over and over again, but I also watch the same documentaries over and over again. And so my favorite documentary is the Last Dance. Obviously you see what, what comes up when I text you guys it's Jordan from the Last Dance. But the second one would be the Defiant Ones, which I probably watch at least 10 times. And everybody's like, oh, what's the documentary about? And if you go and like, look it up, it'll say it's about the long term friendship and partnership between Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre that goes back, you know, three decades. It's like, yeah, it's about that. But really, it's a documentary about entrepreneurship. This is like, if you think of founder mentality, think of, like, the way entrepreneurs think, the way they act. It's like in that documentary. And I've been wanting to do an episode on him forever, but there's just not. There's no books about him. He's never written an autobiography or anything like that. So I was like, you know what? Fuck it. I'm just going to watch the documentary again. I'm going to take notes on the documentary and build an outline just like I would for a normal episode. And then I found every single good interview, every done, and then transcribe that and then essentially combine all that to use that as, like my own book. But I, I think it's. I'm really interested in these people that are not well known to, like, the general population, but everybody in their industry. There's a great line from Warren Buffett where he's like, hey, if you want to learn about an industry, he's like, interview every single, like, top CEO, top executive in the industry. You might have to talk to 20 different companies. And then you always ask him, like, if you had to eliminate one of your competitors, I think he used the example, like, if I gave you a gun and you only had one bullet and you could take out any of your competitors, who would it be? And he's like, and Warren's point, he's like, that's. You're going to ask all these people, Usually they're going to arrive at the same question. He goes, that's the guy. That's the guy. In his case you should invest in. Jimmy is very much so that in the music industry. And I just find his. I mean, there's. There's a line in. He's been like, really good friends of Bruce Springsteen for, like, I don't know, six decades, five decades, something like that. And there's a line that's in the documentary. It's also in Bruce Springsteen's book where Bruce was talking about. And Jimmy has this mentality. He was like, I didn't want to be rich. I didn't want to be famous. I didn't want to be happy. I wanted to be great. And I think that's what really attracts me to. To Jimmy Iovine in particular. And people like him is just this relentless drive where he started out with nothing. He started sweeping the floor in a recording studio to working with John Lennon, Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty, Dr. Dre, Eminem, founding one of the most successful record companies of all time, then saying, hey, I got bored of that. What are we doing next? I'm going to start Beats, you know, growing that, starting a streaming service, and then selling that to Apple for billions of dollars. Like, he's just incredible person.

Insane. Did you get. Did you get much into his. He has a program at usc. Have you covered that at all? My buddy Ben Taft is on the board there.

That's at the end of the documentary. That's actually funny, the. The least interesting parts of biographies, because everybody can understand, like, the struggle, right? It's like, you start out, talk about family life, all that, trying to figure out your. Your path in your early career. Then you, You. You might hit on something, and then it's going well, and then you take another step back and there's this whole, like, climb that everybody can empathize with. One of the things that I think should be cut out of IR completely.

Is the end where they're like, I bought a building.

I'm so rich, I donated a building named after me. It's like, that's just not relatable. It's just not interesting. So, yeah, it is covered in the documentary. I, of course, is not going to put that on the podcast, but they.

Probably want to talk about that, too.

No, that's. No, like, there's a great line. Actually, let me read this to you, because here's the funny part. Jimmy is a great storyteller, too, which I think is really important. And I think above and beyond, like, yes, we're studying these great entrepreneurs to learn how to build a big business and to take ideas from them. Like, hey, that idea work from them. We can use it for us. But like, more important to that is like, I. Building a business is just part of our lives. It's a huge part of our lives. I'm interested in having, like an interesting, fun, unique life. Like, I want my kids or, you know, my friends after, long after I'm gone, to like, read the life story of mine and be like, oh, this is a page turner. This is actually interesting. That is. Jimmy has incredible stories, you know, for five decade long career in. In music. And what I like is he intersects with all the other greats. So David Geffen, who is, you know, one of the. The greatest, I think, entrepreneurs, investors of all time and somebody that's like, really reclusive now, and I really wish wasn't. I would love to read his autobiography. But David Geffen started this huge, like, gold rush because he wound up selling his. His record label for like $500 million. And I think with stock wound up being, you know, six or seven or $800 million. And so when that happened, all the other people that were record producers, just like Geffen and Jimmy Iveen were like, oh, shit, I need to start my own record label. And so Jimmy goes, and David was his mentor, and he goes, hey, we kind of do the same thing, but you just made a lot more money than I did. Should I start a record company? And David goes, you should definitely do it. There's a lot of people in the record industry way dumber than you are. And Jimmy talks about, like, that actually giving him inspiration. It's like, oh, wait, okay, this guy's succeeding. Not Geffen, obviously, but other people are succeeding. And, you know, they're not. It's not just a test of intelligence. But there was. There was all these different record labels start at the exact same time as Interscope. And somebody in the documentary says this great thing where it says the reason that Interscope was successful versus a lot of other startups at the time was Jimmy was an animal. The most driven and brilliant person at the same time. He was never off, and he didn't understand why everybody else wasn't the same way. And so, like, these are the kind of people that, like, I like to study.

These are like, kind of people.

These are the kind of friends I like to make. These are the kind of people I like to be around. Just like they're fully alive and completely committed to what they're doing.

Do you have any insight into how he transitioned from sweeping the floor to actually engineering and contributing to studio sessions. Like you. You told us that story about. I think it was Jim Cameron, like reading textbooks while he was driving. Was that Jim Cameron? I think like there's usually James Cameron. James Cameron, yeah. There's usually like an arc where there's go to where the heat is, get in the room with the greats. And it seems like he was able to do that by like sweeping the floors and showing up and just being like, I will do anything to be in the important place. But then there's also this second step of like learn to contribute beyond just.

Floor sweeping because you just fucking nailed it. This is exactly what happened. So he, his first, his first two jobs in working in a record studio. He got fired.

Okay.

The third one set up.

Why?

This is amazing. They're pro getting fired, so.

Yeah, well, because he's a college dropout. So let me. I'll just like give you like the 15 minute version. Interrupt me whenever you want. Of the hour long episode. And because it's like. And especially because we're all fathers, I think this is like really important. Like the, one of the most important relationships between father and son. And like, if you really think about all the work that I'm doing, I'm gonna hit, you know, the 400th biography read in like three weeks or four weeks from now. It's like all daddy issues all the way down, like just stacked on top of each other. Either want to be like your dad or you hate him. And like you're trying to like, yeah.

We got it ready for.

Please, I'll come on. And it's, it's going to be about the vacuum cleaner guy who I'm obsessed with somebody.

Just this guy. Most people would be like, oh, for 400 you're gonna do like Steve Jobs or like Elon Musk. You're like somebody really, really powerful. Let's give it up for vacuums. Vacuums. That's why.

You tell me another guy that has been running this company for 40 years owns 100 of it. Highly likely. I have a friend of mine, a guy I know actually tried to, gave. Try to. I'm going to take a tangent real quick because it's a funny story.

Please.

You know, Tyson is 100% of his company. I've heard the rumors he's taken out. Everybody's like, oh, he's worth $20 billion. No bullshit. I've heard like five plus billion a year in cash and has for a very long time. And so it's like, wow, that makes.

Mark Benioff look like a chump. Mark Benioff sells $2 million of Salesforce every single day. So he's making like $600 million a year in liquidity. But that sounds like.

Wait, he's selling or is this.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So Mark Bennett has a.

Retains the equity.

Yeah, yeah, I know.

Don't give me that. And so the, the funny part is this guy I know told me the story where you know, he's, he's managing ever larger peer pools of capital and has to keep buying more and more private businesses. And so you can't buy a 500 million dollar business anymore or $2 billion business just doesn't move the needle. And so he, he gave a very friendly like, hey, would you guys be interested to Dyson to, to sell. And again, I like highly disagreeable people. I like people that are obsessed with their product. They do it forever. It's just like people like us.

Yeah.

And that you can't buy. It's just no fucking number. It's just like, I'm not for sale. Thank you very much. And so they approached Dyson and I'm paraphrasing, the response was fudge you. This is a family heirloom.

This is the paraphrase.

Family heirloom.

This is the paraphrase. That's amazing.

Let me, let me go back to Jimmy though. Yeah, Dyson forever. Somebody just pulled a tweet. They're like, this guy's been tweeting about the vacuum cleaner guy for, since 2018. I was like, yeah, I saw that post.

I mean, this is great. David lore, but in 2019 you got like four likes on a post. You said like, I just read my 83rd biography.

Yeah, yeah, I've slipped some of those in. Like, isn't it like Jay Gould or something? It's like this is a person that only. Only you know about, basically. And you've done like multiple episodes.

No. So, so we like. I have very few entrepreneurs living knew about Jay Gold. But the reason you should study him is because again, I'm always interested in who's influencing the influencers, Right?

Oh yeah, yeah. So who is the one that influenced Steve Jobs? Right?

Edwin Land.

Edwin Land.

I'm sending you Edwin Land shirts, by the way. I'll bring it with you. Thank you. No, but the Jay Gold thing is interesting. And, and then let me get to Jimmy if you want. I mean, sure, you can do whatever fuck you want, but the reason I, I studied Jay go. And I've read A bunch of old books about him is because I'm reading biographies of Rockefeller. And he was asked, like, who's the best businessman? You know? And he said without hesitation, Jay Gold. I'm like, well, that's interesting. And then Cornelius Vanderbilt. Keep in mind, when Cornelius Vanderbilt died, okay, he owned 5% of the money supply.

That's like, that's like the GDP metric for Stripe. They're like, we want to power 1% of the GDP.

Founders need to be more ambitious. They, they, they put up the, the, the, the page in the deck. 1% of the TAM. Yeah, no, no, try to get 1% of the money supply.

Supply.

5, 5%.

Well, you got to start somewhere, you know, 1% of the money supply.

And so when, when Cornelius Vanderbilt was in his 70s and he was by far the richest person on the planet, he said the smartest man in America was Jay Go. Jay go was like 33. And he had said that because they just went head to head to compete over the. The control of a railroad. And Jay Gold smoked him. And then, you know, interesting thing, then Cornelius Vanderbilt actually sent hired hitmen to kill Jay Gold's partner. He didn't succeed. Yeah, that kind of business was completely different than it is now. But, yeah, there's all these interesting stories in these books that nobody reads. That's why I love what I do. And I try to, like, highlight them for people because I'm like, these guys had interesting lives and they arrived, they worked on something for 50, 60 years. What's the chance that they, they built a wonderful business for six decades. They didn't come up with any idea that you could use. Like, that's ridiculous. So going back to Jimmy Iovine, it's just like, so he gets fired. I forgot the first reason he got fired the first time, but the second time was they just gave him a 90 day trial and they just didn't think he was good enough. They. On day 89, he gets fired.

You know, you're missing dust all over the floor.

The response they said to him is like, this just isn't for you. Working in the music business isn't for you. And this happens over and over again. Like Sam Walton, you know, his first manager when he was working at GCPenney, said, hey, Guy, I know you're interested in retail. Sorry to tell you, you don't have a future here. And Sam's like, okay, how about if I become the most successful retail person in history and I'll build a $400 billion fortune? How about that? Like, so I find, like, I love when people, you know, doubt other people and they don't know what they're talking about. They're proven wrong. But Jimmy went to. Being fired the first time is really important because then he goes to the Record Plant. The Record Plant is owned and run by this guy named Roy Sakala, who is a legendary engineer. The reason this is important, exactly. You just said John is. John Lennon, after he was a beetle, wanted to work with Roy Sakala. So nobody will come into the studio on Easter Sunday. And Jimmy Iovine is from Brooklyn. He's this old school Italian family. He gets. Roy calls him. He's like, hey, we need help with the studio. No one else is coming in. You got to come in on Easter Sunday. And Jimmy's mom's like, you're fucking crazy. You know, we're having a feast. This is church. You can't do this. And. And Jimmy says, He's 19. He goes, I will do anything, anything to make this work. Shows up to the studio. Roy says, good, I'm glad you're here. I was testing you. In the room is Jimmy, Roy Sakala, and John Lennon.

Oh, so he didn't even know John Lennon was going to be there. He showed up anyway, and that was like the reward. Wow.

Bingo. And so he said, he goes, listen, I would do. There's a really interesting idea. So I actually talked to Daniel act, the founder Spotify, about this, and his whole point was just like, he's completely like, he'll do anything it takes to get information that he feels is helpful. So when Spotify was going through a lot of rough trouble, he would reach out to other. His peers, other tech company CEOs. He says, hey, can I just, like, shadow you? Because, like you say, you can run meetings with like 30 people. When I went to meeting 30 people, not like, it's. I don't even understand how you do this. And Daniel's like, there's no ego involved. So he did this with, like, Mark Zuckerberg. He spent, like, I think a few weeks shadowing. He goes, I got Mark's coffee. I don't care. Like, I'm there to learn. And so Jimmy Ivy was the exact same way. He says, I did everything they did. Like, I took care. I cleaned the equipment, I set up the wiring. I eventually learned how to be an engineer. He goes, I figured out the way that John Lennon was. He's from Britain. He's very particular about how he likes his tea. So I memorized exactly how he wanted his tea. He goes, the way I was about his tea was the way it was about everything. He got so good at making John Lennon's tea that John Lennon wouldn't let anybody else make his tea. So his point was like, man, you're. These guys are. They're legends are letting you in the room just be useful. Sometimes it's running an errand, sometimes making tea, sometimes it's fixing the drum sound. And then John just felt he could trust him. And so John starts sending them to.

He.

He just takes them everywhere. They go to LA together, they're recording in London or in New York together. And like, it's exactly what you just said, John. It's just like you get in the room and you do whatever you can to stay in that room.

Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. I want to talk about his, his picking ability and how he became immediately successful. You know, Tom Petty, Stevie Nicks, U2, the list goes on. How much of that do you think was a function of just like his innate taste and an ability to spot greatness versus just drive and relentlessness and just listening to every single possible.

What is, what is the comp to the venture world where you can be a great venture investor even if your hit rate is like, you know, 5%. Because it just matters in getting, you know, actually getting into the companies that matter and move the needle and people will kind of forget about a bunch of Mrs. And companies that didn't go anywhere.

Okay, you guys know I don't give a shit about ventures, so I'm definitely not going to talk about that. But I will talk about how this relates to founders building great products. How about that? Because that's the only thing that's actually interesting and matters. So Jimmy's idea was the example I used in the podcast where his thing is like, okay, producers, which, you know, he was an engineer. Then he turns to producer. He goes, producers are always like, I did this and I did that. He's like, this is the analogy for venture and founders. He's like, would be producer and musical artist. He's like, I'll read this to you. He goes, you're only as good as the artist that you're working with. You're only as good as the founder that you're investing in. Right? Any producer or any venture capitalist who says, I did this and I did that is full of shit. 99% of what's going on in the studio is the artist. And so his point was, I don't have. He wasn't the founder, right? In this situation, he's I don't have the talent. I'm there to do whatever I can. I'm in service of them. And so his whole point is, like, if I want to be successful, then I'm going to pick the best possible talent. How do you arrive at that? Well, the, the thing about excellence and greatness is, like, people don't actually know what it is until they, like, get close to it. And so part of this is luck and randomness because Bruce Springsteen's most important album that he ever makes is Born to Run. Okay, that's his third album, right? Bruce is still doing it. He's one of the top selling artists. He winds up becoming a billionaire off his career and everything else. But before then, his virtual albums were not doing well. He was not doing well. And so Jimmy is the engineer on that album. And he sees firsthand the level of work ethic and dedication that Bruce Springsteen will have to this. And so the way that Bruce was about like a drum sound is the same way that like a Steve Jobs was about every single pixel that's on any device that he's making. And so Jimmy tells the story where it's like Bruce would stand over me and say one word over and over again. He said, stick, stick, stick. And what that means is like, we're hit the. Hit the drum again. Because it's not producing the actual sound that I want. It took them three weeks of just in the studio every day, hitting that over and over and over and over again until Bruce got what he wanted. And so once you see, it's like, oh, and then what happens? Border Run comes out, winds up being one of the best selling albums of all time. It's just a complete phenomenon. So now he sees the level of craft that John Lennon puts on his work then, and Bruce Springsteen. Then he starts working with Stevie Nicks, who just came out of Fleetwood Mac, who was a fucking legend, Tom Petty. Then he gets in the room with Dr. Dre 15 years later. You just know it when you see it.

How much do you think it was driven by, like, like casting a wide net and meeting lots of people. I'm thinking about, like, as a founder. There's a very different approach to hiring talent. If you can think about this in the sense of like, hiring talent, knowing who to work with then, like the Bill Gates mindset versus the Jim Simons mindset set.

Like, I think Jimmy's more of a gym. That's exactly what I was thinking of. Jim Simons, his whole thing. And I just did an episode on him too.

Right.

Ren Technologies, kids, people don't know, essentially just has a money printing machine.

Yeah.

And.

And most importantly for this, Renaissance Technologies hasn't. Is. Isn't in the business of hiring thousands of people and firing the bottom 20% every year. Micro. There's no turnover. Years. There's. Yeah, exactly. There's no turnover.

There's no turnover because if you're.

Microsoft is notoriously high churn. And that's by design. It's a very different thing.

If you leave Renaissance Technologies, your money, your personal money comes out of the medallion fund. And the medallion fund is a magic money making machine. So you do not want. Whatever you want to do in life, you don't want your money out of the medallion fund. So you will stay there. So when you go and read Jim Simon's biography, that's a great analogy, John.

Thank you.

It's very similar to how Jimmy picked his talent where he's just like, this is the most talented person I could possibly work with. And it may take me years to recruit him, but I will do anything. I will go take, I will go to his house, I'll meet his kids, I'll spend, I'll do whatever possible. And then what happens is then you read up on the people, which I just did for the Jim Simons episode on who he recruited. And it's like they weren't like normal mathematicians or PhDs. Every single person was a mathematician or physicist or PhD working. They have like theorems named after them or they like they discovered something in mathematics. They were literally the best of the best. And so like Bono. And again, I think some part of this is like pattern recognition. You saw the, the edge that Bruce Springsteen had. And then he gets introduced to Bono when you. At the very early days of YouTube and he sees him perform, he's like, oh, he's got the edge. And so he's like, let's work together. Bono's like, no, let's work together. Bono says no, let's work together. Bono says no. And he says that he chases Bono, says he chased us around the world until we agreed to come to the studio with him. He would not take no for an answer. He happens to you, he is like a virus and he takes over your organs and brains. He just knows that this is going to work out well for both of you. I don't think there's a person alive that won't listen to this Jimmy Ian episode and get something out of it. And it's just like this relentless pursuit of what you want to do and his whole thing is like, he wasn't a big fan of how the music industry, they, they, they. Their, their. Their metric of success was like total record sold. His was like, did you make a great album? He's like, great is success. A lot of people sell a lot of albums and they suck. If you can make something great first, then you'll be able to get more customers, more listeners, and more everything out. But the, the primary thing was great. And there's a great example of this, which I think is really important too. And you see this all the time. We're at the end of the documentary. Towards the end, Dr. Dre, he had all this issues. He starts his own record label for the very first time. His first two albums he puts out completely flop. And Jim's his partner, and Jimmy has corporate partners. They're like, hey, you need a fire tray. And Jimmy and this, this is another thing I admire about him. He has these lifelong relationships. We have been friends for years. I hope I. I hope we're friends for decades. You know, this is. I'm not. This is really important to me. Like, these compounding relationships. And so they're like, you need to fire Dre. He goes, yeah, we could do that. And we'll save on my salary too, because I'm going with him. And so what happens? They try to fire Drake because these idiots that can't do what the artist can do don't know what they're talking about. This guy's a generational talent. You're like, get him off the payroll. And what happens? Jimmy is spending day after day after day doing these listening sessions with Dr. Dre. Dr. Dre would come over to Jimmy's house every day. They'd listen and try to find an artist for Dr. Dream To.

To work with.

Jimmy gets his tape of Eminem at the Rap Olympics, gives it to Dre. J's like, what is this? Right? And then they, they. Dre starts working Eminem. He becomes one of the top 10 selling records artists of all time. But more important than that, Jimmy says something that was great because at the very beginning, his first, like, two albums are super controversial. There was, like, protests, There was congressional hearings about Eminem's lyrics. And he goes, we weren't looking for, like, a white, controversial rapper. Yeah, we were looking for great. He's so consistent from the day one, from when he's 19 till when he retired at close to 70. Great can come from anywhere. You just have to find great.

Congressional hearings are such a success metric.

You know, Palmer Luckey Told me that he said the thing he learned from Zuck was that it's not. You're not getting dragged in front of Congress because you did something bad. It's because you're being crowned as like the victor, essentially.

What was Jimmy's approach to finance different deals? How did he think about control? It? Was it possible to. I, I understand in the record industry there, there can often be like a parent label and then, and then you can have a new label under it. Did you get anything there? Did that not come up?

He. No, he like, he, he actually does like a really interesting deal. See, I mean, he. Wait, keep in mind. So like my metric of success is not like he wound up being a billionaire, but that came like way after. Even if he never did beats, to me, he'd be unbelievably successful just with the life he lived and like the, the experience, you know, probably made hundreds of millions, but with beats, he made, you know, billions there. One of the things was like what we went especially with like a tech focus is like when he sells, I think he sells like 50 of his. Of Interscope, I forgot to admit, maybe to MCA and it was like for like $150 million. So it's like, it's fantastic outcome. But when we're talking about 3 trillion dollar market cap tech companies that look small but, but no, finance was not like a, a focus on any of the interviews or any, anything in documentary other than like mentioning random dollar amounts with like taking in partners and stuff.

Yeah, yeah.

On the, on the protests and congressional hearings. Did you. It feels like there is something there where when a founder is successful enough, eventually they have to put on the suit and go to Washington and start lobbying and do something like that. Did you dig into any stuff that he was able to do or apply his methodology to even trying to smooth over that situation? Because it did seem like an existential risk to the rap industry at that time if they were really going to clamp down on explicit lyrics beyond just the, the, the content warning.

He doesn't, he doesn't state it. Like that's part of the reason he had to sell. Like he like went with one partner to another because like I forgot the company he was with. But they were like, hey, like, I think it was like underneath. Com, it was like a bigger conglomerate that owned like another label and then under that label was Interscope kind of thing. And they're like, we have senators calling. Like we. This is such a small part of our business. Like you have to go elsewhere.

Sure.

Because like, I'm not. I have a, you know, 200 billion dollar cable company or something. But I, but the, I think the interesting part here is I think he, he's a phenomenal marketer and that's what everybody would keep like a relentless salesperson. I think that's one of his gifts. But I think he understood that, like, remember he signed like Marilyn Manson, Trent Reznor, Eminem, like Tupac, Death Row Records. Like literally people were. There was. They were. The rappers were killing each other. Like that was under Interscope. And obviously he didn't want them to shoot each other. But his point was with all of this, with like this congressional protests and you know, the, the media saying that he's like a smut pedal and everything else, like it's good for business and like it's. It all this outrage. Because what happens when we were kids, remember I was listening to Eminem. Emma was like a huge influence on me because I had this like, all this like pent up anger about like my early life. And like I, I felt I was born into an environment that I didn't belong in and I was better then. And like Eminem was kind of a soundtrack of like, yeah, like you. I feel that way too. And so like music is very much like a young person's game. So you have like 60 year old Congressman or Bob Dole saying like, you should listen to this as a kid. You remember was like being a teenager, like, oh, that makes me more interested. I want more of that. And he does this too, like with Beats. So the idea, before the streaming service, he had the headphones. He's like, it doesn't make sense for Dr. Dre to endorse anything. He had like sneaker endorsement offers and all this other stuff. And he said, there's a great line documentary. He goes, dre, fuck sneakers. Speakers. You should do speakers. He's got that like, you know, high pitched Italian twang voice, which I absolutely love. And so they're like Bo, the leading at the time, in 2006, or whenever this was happening at the time, the leading headphone product was Bose. He's like, headphones to put you to sleep. I don't want to put you to sleep.

I want to make you move.

I want you to get off your ass. And so what happens is they made them distinctive so you could tell with the big logo on the, on the, on the ears what they were, right? And then he's like, our idea, my marketing idea is very simple. I'm going to put them with the best musicians on the planet that's going to get everybody to try them. And then once you try them, you'll stay because it sounds good. And then he expanded out to athletes, but what he did is he wind up spreading it to the 2008 NBA Olympic team or US Olympic team, the men's basketball team. And they. It got banned. And there was all this coverage because Beats wasn't an official sponsor. Right. And so you can't wear them. And so they wore them anyways. They wind up getting fined and everything else. And Jimmy's like, this is the best thing ever happened to us.

Makes sense. I mean, that's fantastic. We could do this all day. This is always a pleasure. Yeah, thanks for having me on, guys. See you soon.

Yeah, next. Next time we do this, it might be in person here.

We got some plan.

How are you guys doing? How are you guys? Have you. Are you gonna. But if people drop in, you're like, okay, guys, this is the end of the segment now you have to get up and leave.

We could do that. We're. We're. We have some ideas we'll share with you, but you can just do a.

Whole show with us.

It's gonna be.

I can't.

I can't do three hours of this. I can do three hours alone with you guys, but not.

You can do it. You know how to talk in three hours.

If it's live and not edited, I'm gonna get canceled.

You'll be fine.

You're good. You're good. We'll bleep out.

We'll do 30 minutes, then 45, then an hour, then two. What did.

What did they used to do on TV? There was like a two minute, like, remember, it was like a delay, like.

A tape delay for you. You're already swearing like a sailor. So we got to clean that up. We'll work on that.

We're going to have to. We're going to. We're going to go do the Porsche experience center.

That'll be fun.

And we'll have to get behind. Behind the scenes of that I cannot wait. Zenra and a GT3RS just tearing up the track.

What was the Ferrari that I sent you guys?

A12. Super fast.

Competition.

Competition.

We got to do that one.

Awesome. I'll talk to you soon, David.

All right, guys, talk to you.

Up next, we have Catherine Hahn from Han Ventures coming in the studio to talk about the stablecoin bill. The genius bill is Slaves of Pass is on the front of the Wall.

Street Journal today and guiding and Establishing. Establishing national innovation for us stablecoins.

We had her on the show and yeah, we're excited to talk to her. So welcome to the show. How you doing? Kathryn?

What's going on?

Hi. Hi. How are you guys?

We are great.

Big 24 hours.

Congratulations, I think are in order. But please get us up to speed on what's actually happening and where things are in Washington.

And I love that you called me Catherine. That was my Washington name. I haven't been called that since I used to appear in court. Off. But Katie, let's update the.

Let's update the chiron. Katie Hahn.

Oh, thanks for having me on, guys. Actually, I literally just walked off a plane. I was down at the CO2 conference.

Nice.

Where I was talking to a lot of founders, crypto and non. And everyone loves your show. So I'm happy to be here.

Well, thanks for.

Yeah, thanks.

I think congratulations are in order. I don't know if I would say that yet. I mean, first of all, the bill passed through the Senate. Great, great news. Obviously, it's another signal, I think, kind of like I feel like I did when ETFs were approved, by the way. Not really by the SEC, although that was the body that formally approved it. But as I said last time I was on your show, guys, make no mistake, the D.C. circuit, that Article 3, that other branch of our government, left the SEC no choice. The courts don't always get it right, but sometimes they do. And the courts unanimously in that case said that the SEC had acted arbitrarily and capriciously. So to my mind, the court system is the reason we have ETFs in this country today for Bitcoin and for ETH. And I think of this as a bit a similar thing. Now here we have another branch of government stepping in in this case. You have the Senate passing this, introducing this legislation, passing this legislation. Now, of course, the House has to vote on it and then the President have to sign it into law. So if those two things happen, you can say congratulations are in order for the industry. But I think one thing that is not really being discussed and I hope we can discuss today is there's another very important bill. And I'm not going to slap a percentage on and say which bill is more important, but that's the market structure bill. And to me, that's really the transformational bill for the crypto industry.

Okay, so breakfast. Yeah, break that down for us.

Yeah. So there's one bill, Stablecoin bill, as you just mentioned, that the Senate passed and One of the things that I loved to see about that is the bipartisan support for that bill because I think we used to be, as an industry, pre political. Brian Armstrong always talked about the industry being pre political. And I think I don't want it to be the case that this industry is too political on one side or the other. So I really love to see these moments like we saw yesterday in the Senate where you have a number of of Senate Democrats voting in favor of sensible rules of the road. And I think this is a classic example of that. So I'm delighted and I hope the House passes it. But I don't see why we have to choose between just a stablecoin bill and the market structure bill. And the stablecoin bill obviously paves the way for a regulatory framework for stablecoins in this country. So that's that. Then there's another bill, the market speed structure bill, and that kind of will answer or attempt to answer the question of what's a security, what's a commodity? And I know you guys have been covering crypto for long enough. You know, this is kind of an age old debate and you know, where can there be an enforcement action? Well, the big question is, well, what's a security and what's not? And I think the market structure really goes a long way in answering that question. And that's why I think it's so fundamental. And we've seen courts across the country weigh in on that question and that's because we don't have legislation. Gary Gensler said it was also clear and of course it wasn't also clear.

Yeah, so what's the timeline there? What are the different players? What do people want out of it? What is the core kind of crypto industry, both on the investor side and company side want out of it? And what, who would not want it to go through? At least how the crypto side has it in mind.

Look, I think everyone in the crypto industry wants the stablecoin bill to go through and become law. I don't think there's really any question about that. The question is, do you go for both? Someone just described it to me as in a sports analogy and I'll probably fumble that one. But it was like, do you go for the field goal or do you go for the touch down? And the thing about after a field, you know, after a field goal, the other side gets the ball back. And I think Congress really operates in kind of 6 to 10 year windows and you know, it's on their mind. Reform, regulatory clarity for crypto right now. And I think the transformational bill for crypto right now is very much that market structure bill. We also want that stablecoin bill, and we have this unique moment in time where we have bipartisan support for both bills. So, personally, I say go for both of them, and worst case, you end up getting the stablecoin bill only. But I do think that's not the most desirable outcome for the crypto industry. I think the crypto industry deserves, especially after years of uncertainty, both a clear message from Congress. I think Congress ought to do its job and pass both bills. And I especially think that because after the Supreme Court last summer in a case I said that this was the most important case for technology policy, not for just crypto, but for tech policy in decades, was the overturning of the Chevron doctrine. And that takes power kind of away at a high level, away from regulatory agencies, and puts it back more in the hands of the courts. And do we want to have another 10 years of litigation percolating up from the district to the appellate court to the Supreme Court on what's the security or what's a commodity in a patchwork of different answers throughout the country? Or do we want Congress to answer that question for us now? And I think it's incumbent for Congress to answer that question now. You asked, who. What does the industry want? I think, people, this is a big industry. We say, crypto's not a monolith. It's a broad new asset class. And stablecoins are a very big, important piece of that asset class and a growing piece of, as you guys saw, I shared with you the stats. You know, almost a quarter of a trillion dollars. I think you banged the gong for that stat. Locked in supply, growing enterprises across the world, integrating stablecoins. You probably saw those announcements from some of the big tech companies in the last few weeks. And I think one thing that everyone's wondering is those ones that haven't yet dived in for stablecoins is, well, what are the rules? So this bill that was passed yesterday out of the Senate, the genius act, so important for that, it's like, here you go. And so what kind of institutional interest will be unleashed once that bill becomes law? I think that's really exciting.

How do you think about big companies getting excited about stablecoins and thinking or institutions and being like, there's a lot of potential here. We should create our own stablecoin versus we should just figure out how to leverage this technology? Where do you see the kind of Line and opportunities.

Well, look, we already have two very dominant stable coins, right already today, Tether, USDT and then we have usdc. So clearly it's not winner take all. I mean those two are both growing and they both have market share. So we think there will be stablecoins like those that will have network effects. But we also think at the same time there are some businesses that are just so big and just so important and if they launch their own stablecoin, we could also see that too. I don't think we see a world where everyone. I think we get asked this question all the time, is there going to be a world where every company has their own stablecoins? We don't think so. We could be wrong. But that's not the view of how we see this evolving.

We do see that we had Aaron Frank from Lightspeed on earlier and he was comparing certain companies would launch a stablecoin and it maybe would feel like Kohl's Cash where it's like, yeah, good point.

I don't have any of that. Nor do I. I don't have any. And that's the thing. If I did, would you want to use it on other platforms? Right.

I mean every bank could launch a Visa Network competitor. Theoretically, but that doesn't necessarily make sense.

Yeah. So in your mind, is the broader market structure, Bill, the kind of thing that could catalyze a massive amount of new activity? From my view, stablecoins have been getting adoption. There are a bunch of exciting use cases. We have a public American stablecoin, you know, issuer in circle. Now it feels like yes, regulatory clarity is important there. But having broader clarity around how tokens are treated by, you know, how the government actually views tokens feels like it could catalyze, you know, much more of an explosion in investment activity and new company formation and new use cases for tokens. Is that the right framework?

I think that is the right framework because like I said, stablecoin is a big important piece of the pie and very low hanging fruit by the way, to my mind. But crypto as an asset class is much broader. So when you say where do the industry players, where do the crypto investors, where do we want to see it? I don't think it's a monolith. I think crypto as it grows to a multi trillion dollar asset class, like any multi trillion dollar asset class, you have different factions and I think some fairly and some really smart people think just take this, take this win and move on and don't worry about the rest And I think that's a little. I see why they might think that if they think that it's this or nothing, but I think that's a false choice. I think that we can have both. And this is a really opportune moment to have both. And I think the question that has beleaguered the industry really has been the question over securities commodities. Which agencies are going to have jurisdiction? I think that's a bigger question and I think it would be a real shame if we let this moment go to waste. You know, the irony too. So you have some stable coins that were only stablecoin companies who are like, yep, genius, act and move on. They don't want to get dragged into this broader, kind of a more omnibus package. Right. With the market structure legislation. But I think that's a missed opportunity and I think we'll be sorry as an industry if we don't go for both now, again, go for the touchdown. And with, you know, I think all of the, like I told you, all of the fundamentals are kind of working all at once together now when I last talked to you guys. And it's very much part of it. So why would we not go for that? So I think some folks who don't maybe have an appreciation for how sometimes, sorry to say it, slow Congress operates, they've been trying to update the money laundering laws for two decades and it's like out of sight, out of mind sometimes. And I think we have a really unique moment to press for both here. And the irony is, some Democrats who were opposed to market structure because of potential abuses, who are opposed to the crypto industry. They cite abuses, they cite fraud, they cite speculation, they cite Trump coin. And I get all of those criticisms. But I'll tell you what, had the market structure bill been passed, that would have answered a lot of those questions totally. The irony is if you would have had the market structure bell, you wouldn't have had a lot of the blowups that you had in the past several years in this industry.

Totally. Is crypto truly coming home to America? We went through a period where crypto is being pushed offshore. We've heard over the last year that some crypto founders feel like they can come back to the States now, maybe actually have an office stateside. Are you seeing more and more momentum there with some of this positive regulatory movement, or are you still seeing momentum around places offshore, Singapore, etc.

I think, look, everywhere that you're going to want to develop does is going to have some rules that you're going to have to follow. When I hear founders who say there is no regulate, it's often not that there is no regulatory regime whatsoever. Sorry, apology if you're watching. But I am seeing that onshoring a bit. We were kind of seeing the offshoring in an unfortunate way. But it's not only regulation that matters, it's hiring top talent. And certainly there's top talent right here in Silicon Valley and other places in the world. I mean, you mentioned Singapore. Singapore has top talent, to be sure. But you know, there's a lot going for the US So we're still very optimistic. And I don't think it. But we were getting to a very dangerous point with the crypto industry. Had the likes of Gensler and others like him been left kind of to just do this. Now, fortunately, the courts were pushing back. So it wasn't a partisan issue, it was just the courts were starting to say, no, you've gone too far. I mean, I lost track now I literally lost track of how many federal courts of all political persuasions and appointments ruled against Gensler's regime. And not just Gensler, but others like it, where you had very activist regulators who were really far out of their lane. And you saw courts curbing back on that. So I think that was already, we're at a dangerous spot, but the courts were maybe going to save us. But you don't only want to rely on litigation to save you, of course, because then you've already lost. But I think hiring talent is important. I think, you know, access to capital and traditional venture, maybe that's a little different in the crypto asset class. But I think also fundamentally what you have going on right here now with AI, particularly in Silicon Valley, and we've talked a little bit at the early stage about some of the synergies between AI and crypto. Because of course AI creates digital abundance and blockchains are good at enforcing digital scarcity. And I think you're going to see more and more synergies emerge and use cases over time. And I'm not going to say what they are because we've seen that before in crypto, a lot of over promising under delivering on use cases. So let's just stick to right now we see synergies. There's a lot happening in Silicon Valley, obviously with AI. We think that's going to benefit the crypto industry. And so in addition to regulatory clarity, if you're a founder, you want access to great talent, you want your VISA situations sorted out for your employees, you want access to other founders, depending on what type of company you are, you want access to capital. So I am optimistic about the state of crypto in the US but also elsewhere. And we invest in companies, we invested in squads, we've announced that. And I know Stepan, one of the founders of squads, watches your show, but Stepan's based right now overseas and I was just having a conversation with him about how do we get you to come and bring squads to the U.S. awesome, awesome.

I want to talk about the longer tail of regulation because it seems like the stablecoin bill is very straightforward, like the least, the least ambiguity there. Then you have the market structure act and there's a lot more to do there. But I'm sure that there's like riders getting pitched and all sorts of long tail things like how much are we actually. Like where does the line end between what we're actually trying to define versus what we're still in the exploration phase of? Because you have NFTs, crypto gaming, there's, you know, prediction markets, there's so many different crypto applications that trying to kind of do them all at once. Maybe that's the right approach. Maybe these need to be handled like after we've done the technological exploration. But what's your view on kind of the long.

My view on that is, is no, because we can't just wait. We can't have an NFT bill, a bill for bank contracts, or we can't have specific bills. And if you saw, if you think back to the advent of Internet, that's not what we had. You know, we had section 230. It applied broadly to platforms and I think we need something similar here. So on the one hand, I would say it can't be so specific that it's like, okay, if you're a events contract platform, it's this rule. And if you're an NFT player, because again, we don't even know yet what will be created really at the end of the day. We've seen some early use cases with product market fit. Obviously chief example of that is bitcoin. But what if we had had this conversation, guys, back in 2010 and you said, okay, we've got Satoshi's white paper and there's this thing called bitcoin, let's pass some crypto regulation. It would have just been for bitcoin and that would have been a mistake because then a couple of years later on the scene we have Eth and a few years later we have Solana. So I think what we need to do. So you don't wait for the end state to have any regulation. Right? You don't do regulation by and forth. I can tell you what we don't do. We don't do regulation by enforcement. You don't wait till the end state of things, but nor do you want to get with such specificity today and do the current state of regulation by the end state of regulation that you can't do either. And so I think what you have are some guiding principles, some generic rules of the road. And really that's all the market structure bill is. And there's enough clarity that you had Democrats vote for it last time it came up. So it's not like it's so specific it talks about. And I think, look, I think you have people like Hester Purse, who is SEC commissioner, has written and given speeches on this of what that ought to look like, what is a decentralization test. And those are some guiding principles that you can kind of look at and apply as you think through this legislation. You know, what body ought to regulate it. And sure, you're gonna have some outliers and new technologies emerge that you're like, okay, does this fit neatly in the bill?

No.

But we have laws for everything in this country with technologies that develop that don't fit neatly in a particular bill. And that's why we have, that's why we actually have. We don't do regulation by enforcement. We do notice and comment. We do things like advisory opinions. Certain bodies, by the way, do do advisory opinions, not judges. And then if all else fails, you do go and sometimes seek Article three, seek a judicial interpretation. But I think that's, like I said, that's kind of the failure state if you're having to go to the courts. But indeed, that's what was happening because we were getting no rules of the road and we were only getting unfair regulation by enforcement. And I say unfair because Gary Gensler basically picked what should have been the best companies in crypto, the poster children for compliance, and brought enforcement actions against them. And then the complete spectacular disasters. I didn't bring anything, so until after the fact. And so I think regulation binds.

We gotta have you. We gotta have you and Gary on the show to hash it out. I'm sure you guys have had some funny conversations.

Thank you so much.

Thank you for joining, guys, for having me.

Great having you.

Have a good rest.

Talk soon. Okay, bye.

Bye, bye.

Up next, we have Justine Moore from Andreessen Horowitz, incredible map knowledge, dropped a fantastic new Market map alert all around. AI image, AI video models. We're going to have her take us through it. Welcome to the show. How are you doing? Can you hear us?

Can you hear us?

Hello?

Oh, I can hear you guys now. Sorry.

There we go. Hey, I was saying to John, when you dropped your new market map, I was saying, you know, it's a great sign of respect in our culture to drop a new market map and, and come on the show.

I've been incredibly bullish on market maps. I find them extremely interesting and I think they got a bad rep a couple of years ago. But I'm glad that you've stayed the course.

We are pro, strongly pro market map.

Yes.

The people love market maps. It's like you can guarantee a popular tweet if it has a market map in it.

Absolutely. And I think people got kind of sick of like, oh, like, we know the playbook, we've seen it, but there's a Playbook for a reason. It works.

Yeah.

So, yeah, take us through the latest market map. What are you tracking? How did you decide what to divide it up into and what kind of inspired this moment specifically?

Yes. So I mostly do AI creative tools here at a16z, so I spend all my time testing all of the image, video, audio, etc. And obviously the past few months in particular, video has been the thing. There's been VO3, obviously, which was a massive moment with adding the audio for the generations.

Yeah.

Hydra around the talking characters, the new Mini Max model, the new ByteDance model, see dance, which is in the arena already outperforming VO3, so it just felt like a good time to refresh sort of what's going on in the video space. And I kind of formatted this market map just thinking about more from the perspective of a creator, like, less in terms of the go to market of the company, more just like if you're a person trying to create a video with AI, where would you go for these different use cases? So there's first sort of the model, like the foundation model, companies, where it's either text to video or image to video. Most places do both, where they actually take your input, generate, have their own proprietary model that generates the video for you. So that's the vos, the clings, the runways, the picas. And then there's also now this emergence of what I call, like multimodal apps, places like Crea and Flora and Visual Electric that enable you to run a bunch of models in one place. So, like, if you want to take a single prompt or a single image and see what it looks like in five different models super easily. You can do it somewhere like that. And then the other side of this market map is sort of like what happens when you add speech and talking characters. And so some folks do that by like generating a talking avatar from an image where you can eventually have the person move. And other folks do that by taking like a video of a person and then applying lip sync over it and then syncing the audio. So that's sort of the distinction between talking avatars and lip sync.

Yeah.

It's interesting that you're in the consumer group because I can imagine that a lot of the talking avatar companies wind up selling to corporations that want to vend in talking avatars, for example. Are you seeing a lot of that or I guess how rigorous or stringent are founders about like hey, we are trying to build a consumer app or we're just building a cool technology and it might land as a consumer product, but it also might land as a B2B play.

Most people are not at all rigorous and often don't even know at the beginning. So what we actually saw with the first generation of AI video was it was only researchers making these magical models and they had no idea what the use cases were going to be. They all just put like a text prompt box in front of the model and then you got an output and like a big company and an individual were using the exact same interface. Now I think we're starting to see more at like what we call the app layer which is essentially like how do you productize this? How do you create workflow and, and therefore how do you go into specific verticals? Maybe an example of that is all of the like standalone video ad creation products. So things like creative I or captions where or hey, Jen has a product for this too. You can literally just like paste in a link to your Amazon or Shopify store. It will pull all of the info about your product, your logo, your brand and it will generate a talking head avatar like holding your product and describing it. And that's something that like a VO3 or cling the general video model companies won't do today.

Yeah. Where are you seeing the strongest like low churn adoption of these tools? Because just personally like vo3 was the thing that got me to subscribe to Google Pro Max 25 which we can go into the names and how difficult is to access these. But, but other than that there, there haven't, I haven't seen that many where like we've Seen the ASMR Stormtroopers or something. But. But it hasn't been clear to me that someone's building like the next Pixar and they're actually thinking about it like Mr. Beast and they're like, I'm building a studio. This is a business. I have ad integrations and I have a content schedule. It's very much in like the testing phase. We see the studio Ghibli moments go viral. So where, where is like the true long term value playing out right now?

Okay.

On the content creation side, where we are at right now is actually there's a bunch of content agencies. Like, you know, there's a bunch of wonder studios, dream studios. There's. There's probably like 20 of them now. One called Paracosm. That's. That's really cool. And these are people who are just early adopters of the tools and they're getting hired by brands and ad agencies and entertainment companies to use the tools for them and make content. I think the problem now in what you're describing is like, the people at Pixar would have to know how to use the AI video tools and how to set up the workflow in order to create their next movie using AI. And we're not yet at like, the tools aren't mature enough and we don't have enough people who are working at those entertainment companies who know how to use the tools that. It's primarily being done with these external AI native agencies or contractors today. I think, like one of the first AI IP we've seen is the Italian Brainrot characters. I don't know if you guys.

No, I don't know this. I haven't seen this.

The Italian Brainrot characters are huge. So I can't even say the names here because they will sound ridiculous, but it's people basically making images of like an animated talking baseball bat and like a ballerina whose head is like a cup of cappuccino.

Okay, okay.

And a shark who wears sneakers.

Okay. But they're starting to build like a cinematic universe.

Oh, it's massive. Yeah. Accounts have like millions of followers.

The world isn't ready for Italian Brain Rob.

So is it like decentralized in the sense that, like, I could just go and participate in this, like, broader trend?

So, yes and no. I would say there were a couple accounts that originated the first few characters and then other people started participating using the hashtags, remixing.

Okay.

And then the good, the characters that were good that came out of that sort of bubbled up to become Part of the cinematic universe and the canon.

They have Bombadiri, Bombadiro, crocodile, which is a bomb.

He's a crocodile plane that shoots bombs.

This sounds like. Yeah, yeah, super, super viral.

Yes.

Your kids probably love it. It's wild. Before we go into more of the consumer side, talk to me about some of the more like niche B2B use cases. Because I remember when GPT 3.5 and we got GPT 4 dropped, there were still a lot of hallucinations. But you saw companies that were just like, yeah, sure, it's not incredible at writing poetry, but it's amazing at just converting this message text to JSON. And they were all of a sudden just running tons and tons of queries. And so I would imagine that in a, in a, in a, in a video workflow, things like what Runway was doing in the old days of just like green screening or the stuff that like artists aren't going to really get upset about because it just feels like a better, more advanced tool. Are a lot of these companies building tools like that or is all the focus just on like let's one shot the next Oscar film?

Yeah, it's a great question. There's a decent amount of vertical focus I think also like it's very hard for this for startups like if you're not a Google or an OpenAI or whoever to play in the game of like let's train the largest one shot best video model. So a lot of them are focusing on verticals. Like Luma, which is a company we've invested in, did this really cool tool where you can upload like a 9 by 16 like iPhone style video and you can just say extend and it just basically like out paints around the existing video and makes it look like. So you can just change the dimensions of your video really fast.

Yeah, yeah. Or there's companies more of just like a practical tool but super useful for a bunch of creators that are filming vertical content probably and they want to distribute in a horizontal format. So they just do that.

Yes, exactly.

That makes a ton of sense.

Or something like Higs Field that it has all these really special effect like motion loras essentially. So you can take like an image of a car and just say like this is like here's a template of what a car explosion looks like. Make this specific car explode. And then on the B2B side we've seen a lot around like how do you scale marketing or L and D or like executive presence type content. So like, you know, tools like Descript now allow you to take a video of someone talking and then change the word that they're saying by changing like cloning their voice, having the voice say the new word and then doing a new lip dub.

Lip sync. Yeah.

So you could have your CEO sending what looks like a personalized holiday message to like every single customer or something like that.

Yep. Or maybe something worse with a phishing scam. But I'm sure we'll get into safety at some point.

What do you, what do you think the long term ambitions of companies like Google with Veo and bytedance with their model? What do you think they want out of this category? They obviously have a massive edge. I saw Anish was posting about Google's Edge or YouTube's Edge around IP. With Veo, you can generate what was going on there.

That is crazy Disney thing.

Is that like a real deal or is that just a beneficiary of like some sort of relationship?

Yeah. Then I want to get a sense of do Google and ByteDance, do they want to be developer tools that just vent into a bunch of these platforms? Do they actually want to own the end customer? What is this market? Is there a generalized market in the long run of just generating funny videos for the average consumer? Or is it going to all be verticalized out? Where I want to generate ads, I maybe want to generate, you know, customized messages. But I want to understand like this is a good overview of all the, of the ways that you can generate content. But like how does the market structure evolve?

Yes. Okay. On the IP question, I have not talked to Google's IP lawyers and I'm not an IP lawyer, but my understanding is Google.

But this is legal advice, right?

Yeah, exactly.

This is financial advice.

All the above.

Our compliance team is going to love this.

Yeah, they're going to love it.

Sarcasm you can. I think my sense is basically when YouTube came about, it was suddenly like all this IP content is on the Internet and Google cut deals with a bunch of the IP owners about essentially what can be posted on various Google properties and if that content gets monetized, how it ends up going to the end rights holder. And so that's sort of the working theory right now about why VO3 can generate IP content and not get sued when a lot of other people are struggling with that in terms of the market dynamics. It's so fascinating. The question around Google and ByteDance and eventually I think Facebook, I hear is going to do more in video soon as well. Like why they're doing it and what their strategy is. I think first of all like, if I'm one of those huge consumer giants, AI is such a massive shift in consumer behavior that like you want, if you want to own the interface to consumers, you probably want to own text, image and video generation as well. And they have the resources in terms of data. Like YouTube for example, is a perfect example of this. They have a ton of compute, they have a ton of money and they can hire the best researchers to build the best models. I think the question as you sort of alluded to is like, do they sell those models via API and let other people build the consumer experience on top of them or do they own the end to end consumer experience? My honest take on it so far has been like, it takes so long in the big company product teams to get stuff done and get new products out that like the model teams are just shipping the models in like pretty basic interfaces like Google Flow. And then the product teams are going to figure out if they can catch up with some kind of cool new consumer app later.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, yeah, my question is like, how much? What will the market actually look like for the average consumer wanting to generate images and video? Or will it just be something that people default to ChatGPT because maybe they already have a subscription or they're fine with the free tier and it doesn't end up there ends up being a bunch of different applications on the Enterprise B2B side, but then not so many like, you know, core consumer subscriptions on just like cool videos, pictures, et cetera.

I mean it seems like it's a killer, killer moat for Google Cloud platform to have VO3 as an API. Even if Google can't figure out how to productize it fully. It's like they do seem to have a real moat. I want to get into that about. YouTube is obviously an incredible training data resource. You mentioned that there was another company that just surpassed them. Was it Tencent you said?

Bytedance.

Bytedance, that's right. So I have a question about that because Obviously with CodeGen, GitHub has a lot of public repos that people can probably just scrape. It's also just not that much data. You can probably fit it on a couple hard drives, maybe sneak it out the back and go head a flight and train somewhere in Malaysia or something. You can't do that with YouTube. Like it's just too much data. And so my question is, is how durable, how much should we be thinking about a durable data moat in video generation for YouTube? Because it seems like something that they could really like, clamp down on and would give them a durable advantage. But I don't know. There's so many other, there's so many other ways to attack any of these model developments. There's a lot of different options.

So there's a couple of parts of the data question. The first part is like what do you own versus what do you scrape? I mean we've seen companies like OpenAI will.

Yep.

We'll scrape YouTube as well to train their models. Yeah, I think ByteDance also like you know here we think of YouTube and Facebook and whatever here in the US I mean as, as being the big host of content. But like there's all these massive companies in China like bytedance who have their own, have, have their own user generated content on like their version of TikTok and their version of YouTube and their.

And I'm sure there's reposts of American videos over there. So it's not like even has a unique flavor. Probably can generalize pretty well, right?

Totally though. Yeah. Like I was one of the very early users of all of the Chinese video models when you still had to access them on Chinese apps with Chinese phone numbers. And they were definitely very good at things that were more China oriented than the US models.

That makes a ton of sense.

Oh okay. The other, the other thing that's important to mention on data is in video in particular. It's not just the volume of data, it's also the quality of data and the quality of data labeling because essentially you can't just feed a video into a video model and assume it can understand what's going on and pull out the relevant info. You have to have really sort of dense labels is what we call them or super detailed captions about like this is this style shot shot from this sort of camera. The camera is coming from this angle. This is the sort of character, this is how the character is interacting with the background and that quality data is what drives quality in the video models. And China has really benefited there because there are so many more PhDs than there are here and it's much cheaper to, for these companies to hire them to do these, these dense labels for the video data.

Yeah. Well how does midjourney fit into all of this now it's such an interesting company because no venture dollars this like behemoth kind of quietly hiding in a discord server. Still I saw some examples of video. It looks fantastic. Seemed like they hadn't added audio yet. But how do they fit into the whole, the whole piece? Because it seemed like early on they developed A really great feedback loop for the data that maybe wasn't happening with some of the other model providers.

Yeah. So the mid journey model came out this morning really conveniently like 10 minutes after I put out my market map without midjourney video because it's not yet available. I was just playing around with it too. It's really cool. They do image to video, so they don't do text to video, which is actually sort of easier. They can start with their. The super high quality images that they generate on the platform and then animate those. I think they have like a low motion and a high motion setting. From what I've tested so far it's, it's better as sort of like a low motion scenery environment, light interaction type thing. Like you have a photo of a person and you can then animate sort of rain and wind and them walking slowly. And it's not as good at like what I call physics heavy world model type things like two cars running into each other and exploding. That sort of thing requires a very, very large and costly usually like text to video model that is more difficult to train. Whereas midjourney, I mean I have no idea how they did it. It's a great model. They could have taken one of the open source image to video models and fine tune it on all their own data.

Yeah, yeah, I've noticed VO3 is really, really good with some of that physics stuff, but it still gets confused. Like if a car is driving away all of a sudden you'll be looking at the front of the car and then the back of the car and it'll get kind of mixed up. But yeah.

Are you. As all these different models have progressed, I always remember brud and Trevor McFedries and just how early he was to what I think will be this like new wave.

Is that little Mikayla.

Yeah, Lil Mikayla, which was like basically a CGI influencer so very early. I think we're going to see a lot more of this and we've seen some of this to date. But do you expect that to be kind of like a new. A new like how bullish are you on? Sort of like entirely. AI creators getting real adoption following turn followings, turning into real businesses. I'm sure you follow a bunch of them already.

Yeah, I'm. I'm personally super excited about it because it kind of separates the content from the character. Like now, you know, before AI, if you were on Instagram like you were both the character and the person coming out with the content and so you had to like, look in a way and present yourself in a way and talk in a way that was, like, interesting to the Instagram algorithm. And now it's like, anyone with a good idea can create a compelling character. And so I think some of those are human characters. I've already seen way too many examples in my reels feed of OnlyFans models who promote themselves with AI avatars of themselves now, which works shockingly well. There's some photorealistic human influencers, but honestly, some of the more interesting ones are things that could never be influencers before AI. So there's one called like, Raccoon stole my iPhone, and it's an AI Raccoon influencer. There's like, AI Capybara influencers. There's like, mystical creatures, like, all of these things that just come out of.

People'S imagination, competing for mindshare with Instagram pet pages, you know, dog pages, things like that. Did you have a reaction to Fountainhead? It was the. Or, sorry, Mountainhead, not Fountainhead. Oh, yeah, Mountainhead, the movie. The core overarching theme was that basically deep fakes or AI generated content had gotten so good that it was causing global unrest. Did. Did it. Did it resonate at all? It does feel like I now have, you know, multiple times a day I'm seeing content online, and it's like getting. We're both in the Community Notes program. So it's like you see content getting community noted. It's. One person says it's not real. Look at this link. It was this image. They redid it. Another person says it's real. Look at this. So it's like, I just assume. Assume that everything's fake and made up unless I see it with my own eyes. But I'm curious if it resonated at all with you.

So I largely consume AI Slop. So I have not seen the movie. I should watch it.

You should watch the movie, the Motion Picture on Slop.

Yeah. Once they have that, I will watch the full film. But it's so interesting. We talked about this a lot, actually, with audio models with the last, like, election cycle, because video, I think, wasn't there yet to have convincing deepfakes, but audio, like, there were way less cases of. Even though you could make really realistic voices, cloning candidates and saying things that weren't true, there were way less examples than we thought of that actually, like, impacting any. Any election in any sort of meaningful way. And I think part of it is, like, things like you mentioned the Community Notes program, where, like, you have sort of Citizen watchdogs on various platform saying, this is real, this isn't real, running them through various sort of AI detectors. But I also think, like, people are starting to develop more skepticism around everything they see online and whether or not it is real, which is probably not a terrible thing.

Yeah, I had this take that After Effects would be more impactful on the election than AI video because, like, you can just show a clip of a burning building from 2020 and it's real video, but you recontextualize it and say, oh, you know, the Capitol's burning or something, and it's from years ago. Or just, you know, speed up a video, slow it down, edit it out. They would do this with various politicians, you know, cut out the ums and us, and they'll sound sharper, add a bunch of gaps, and all of a sudden they sound like they're slower.

Yeah, it even, you know, we're here in LA and when all the imagery was coming out of the protest from a couple weeks ago, it was like burning Wayos kind of looks like something you generate with VO3 totally. Because it feels so symbolic and just such a crazy image. And then like, make an image of a guy with a Mexican flag riding it, doing burnouts around a. A car that's on fire. And it's like, that looks like. And even.

And even the. Just the way that was photographed there was like. It looked like all of Los Angeles was engulfed in flames, but it was really like one crazy block with a bunch of different angles and then a bunch of different posts and. And you drive around and you'd be like, oh, there's not that many.

See, that's the other interesting thing is, like, even real footage can be manipulated. Like, any kind of story can be manipulated in a way, like AI or.

Yeah.

Are you seeing. I think, like, you know, there's exciting companies like worldcoin, you know, doing like, proof of human. Are you seeing any infrastructure players trying to do, like, do anything on, like, content verification side and, like, trying to create some sort of mechanism to. To prove whether something was, like, authentic, you know, actually shot on an iPhone. Right. You know, proving through the metadata and some type of, like, public setting. Is. Is there any pitches from. From that side?

Yeah. So largely, honestly, today that has come in two places. One is the model companies themselves will often watermark the content in some way. Like the VO3 generations has little VO3 11 labs, which does the audio. They actually have a site where you can upload any audio and it will tell you if it was generated with 11 labs or not.

That's cool.

Which, which is pretty cool. The other place we've seen development there is for like prominent individuals, like, you know, celebrities or someone who's there's like value behind their brands and who potentially even might want to monetize it in the age of AI. Like if you're an actor and you suddenly don't have to fly back to LA when you're filming a movie in Australia to tape like 5 ads for some cell phone brand and you can have your AI avatar generated to do it instead, and it looks just as good. You might actually want to have some licensing company that owns your AI licensing rights, whether it's your traditional talent agency or not. Who can manage that for you?

Yeah, totally.

Very cool. Well, thank you so much for coming. We can talk for another hour. I have so many more questions in the, in our doc, but we'll have to have you back. So thanks for stopping by.

Thanks guys.

Thanks, Justine.

We'll talk to you soon.

Great chatting. Have a good one.

Up next, we have a niche from Traversal coming in the studio kicking off Lightning Round.

It's our new Lightning Round.

We're getting to Every single finance 4, 5, 6, 7, startup update foundry.

Back to back.

Welcome to the stream. How are you? You doing?

Doing super well.

Thank you for having me.

Can you kick us off with an introduction? What do you do?

Hi. Yeah, so my name is Anish. I'm one of the co founders and the CEO of Traversal where we are basically trying to build an AI site reliability engineer. So when you have software systems, they break and we try to help troubleshoot why they broke and how to fix it.

Is. Is the current status of the market entirely human site reliability engineers or are there like a switch suite of tools that are just not AI enabled enough and you can kind of piggyback on?

Yeah. So I'd say the current state of observability, I call it Observability 1.0, has been putting a lot of eyeballs in your data. So essentially the great iconic companies now, like Datadog and Splunk and Grafana and Dynatrace, and what they basically did is help they store your data and then help you visualize it through numerous dashboards. But the toil of actually figuring out for an on call engineer what happened is what I call dashboard dumpster diving. That's what they still have to do. Right. And there isn't that intelligence layer of actually helping you search through this petabytes of data. I think that's what this new generation of AI agents and LLMs and some of the research we have done in our PhDs unlocks now.

Yeah. Have you been tracking? I mean, it feels like site reliability engineering should be a beneficiary of AI and yet it feels like we've been seeing more and more outages. Like Cloudflare went down, Google went down, we had another outage while we were doing the show. The whole Internet went down. It feels like it's happening more and more. Is that just me being more sensitive to it or more news or I'm just online more or are these systems actually getting more fragile?

Yeah, I think two things are happening. One is as humans we like to push the limits of everything we can do. And so we're always going to be pushing the limits of software systems and they're getting more complex, there's more microservices. And that was happening before the age of LLM powered code agents.

Right.

And now with everything happening, the world of AI software engineering with Cursor and Get a Copilot and Windsurf and so on and so forth, I think the amount of code that's being written, there's gonna be like a Cambrian explosion. Right. I think most of it is gonna be written by AI systems. And so the system's gonna get even more complex and less and less is gonna be understood by us who are as engineers. And so I think it's gonna get even harder to debug things because we don't actually understand what's written and it's more complex. And so I think that's actually going to throttle the use of AI software engineering tools and mission critical systems. Because if I'm head of infrastructure, I'll be like, I don't trust this. I'm not going to allow this to affect my core infrastructure. And so I think you need tools Observability 2.0 to help actually be in line with it. I guess.

I feel like finding truly great SRES is, is like massive challenge. Like how do you like, you know, if you can deliver on the product side, like how much bigger do you even think? Like the market, like the market demand for great, you know, basic. Effectively, it sounds like you're wanting to offer productized SRE talent. How much like demand is out there for what you're building?

Yeah. So first of all, like, we've been trying to hire an excellent SRE and we still haven't been able to to. So there's a massive labor market discontinuity where just it's impossible to find fantastic SREs. But I think if I think of the role of an sre, the way I think about it is like it's all about the health of software systems. And I think of it as like the master hierarchy of needs. So in your level one you have a heart attack, you got to deal with it right now. And I think that's what having a production incident feels like. And that's where SREs have to spend a lot of time, where everything else, nothing else matters. Level two is when you have these like constant stream of alerts happening. That's the equivalent of having like some sort of like chronic condition that you have to deal with all the time and you can't think like a year in advance and only when you can deal with these things then you can start thinking about like your long term health and like life hacking and optimizing your sleep. And that's where I think you can think about the long term health of a software system, how you would architect it over the next four or five, 10 years. And so I think all of the time right now for SREs is being spent in like having a heart attack and a debilitation, debilitating condition. What I think they should be doing in the best SREs is thinking about the long term health of a system. How do I architect the system for the next five years so that it's robust and I think that's what they want to be doing, but they're forced to be on call all the time. And so I think that's what we want to stop them from having to do. And they can spend their time on the more meaningful aspects of their jobs.

Talk about the trade off between fully agentic systems here versus more of a copilot dynamic.

Yeah.

So I think if I think about it, I think of it as a two by two. So think of the Y axis as the severity of the issue. So you can have alerts that are happening all the time to really complex incidents. And then on the other hand you have how agentic is it? So close to zero would be. You have a runbook, you have some sort of playbook that exists and you have humans or engineers go execute those run runbooks and on the other end you have where you really don't know what to do. And so you have 50 people in an instant war room trying to figure out what happened.

Right.

So if I think about for low value alerts, typically you have a playbook or runbook that engineers can go execute and that's I'd say less agentic because you can just kind of. The meta workflow is always the same, which is like, look at this dashboard, then look at this logs and you know, correlate between them or something. And on the fully agentic side is when even teams of engineers have no idea how to solve it a priori. And that's where you need to come up with architectures that are truly novel, where it doesn't fall into a pre existing runbook. That's, I think, the type of architecture you have to build to deal with the most visible incidents that an enterprise faces. I think that's really been our focus as a company.

Last question.

I was going to say, are you the first assistant professor at Columbia to raise $48 million in the first two financings of a startup? Do you have any? Is there anybody that's got you beat there?

I don't know.

But Columbia has been an absolutely wonderful partner. I think they've been very supportive. I think they understand the importance of AI and how in my opinion, this is the industrial age of AI. So if you want to be a good researcher, you have to be in the weeds learning how these systems work. You can't just be theorizing in a vacuum. And I think everyone, myself and Columbia understands that. So they've been an incredibly supportive institution and I hope that I continue my relationship with them over a long time.

That's awesome. Talk about the traction to date, you guys have been in stealth. I'm sure you're going to get a flood of inbound interest today, but yeah. Who are you guys building and working with so far that you can share?

Yeah, so we've been. I can talk about a few that I'm allowed to speak with and some I can't. But they've all been some of the largest enterprises in the world who basically any company that cares about downtown time. So those turn out to be companies like infrastructure companies, payments streaming, financial institutions. Because if you go down, your customers feel it immediately. Those have been the customers that we've typically focused on or they've been attracted to us as well. And we found that actually as you go to the larger enterprises, two things happen. One is they actually have all the data, because if you don't have the data, we can't do anything. And so the instrumentation is mature, but at the same time it's fragmented. You have so many teams, so many different services. And so I think that's where an AI agent that can talk to all these different systems at the same time adds A lot of value. So we have found ourselves more and more pulled towards the enterprise and yeah, it's deployed in a number of mission critical environments. People are using it every day to help them troubleshoot pretty complex incidents. I think that's what we feel proud of.

I'd say it's great that this product sort of self selects for really high quality customers that are going to like once they onboard and they're getting value. We'll probably be customers, customers for years and years and years.

Yeah.

So very, very exciting. John. I think it's time to hit the gong. Absolutely not gonna, he's not gonna come on the show. And $48 million.

Congratulations.

Fantastic lineup of investors. Sequoia Kleiner, Great, great group. Yeah, great group.

Fantastic.

Thank you for coming on. Thank you for coming on. When you have news and congratulations on the milestone.

Have a great rest of your day. Up next we have John Lee from Sapphire Building Electric Mobility. Very excited to talk to him. John, are you there? Welcome to the stream. How are you doing?

Hey, doing good, how are you guys doing?

Doing great.

What's going on?

Would you mind kicking us off with a little bit of introduction on yourself and the company?

Yeah, absolutely. Just a quick background on me. I was a former contracting officer in civilian side at Naval System Command headquarters while I was in procurements for different systems from NATO sea spare missiles to submarine solar sensor systems, counter IED jammers to energy upgrade systems on DDG Navy ships left and went to Palantir as head of contracts full of US government where I helped to increase their revenue. You know, landed some of the large contracts there in the over energy million dollar contracts there and then went off to do a lot of other helping startups. Most of them are ex Palantir friends and trying to get contracts from the US government helping them with the go to market side. And then I met with my co founders to start Sapphire and we're accelerating electrification for defense starting with some of the deepest IP from the US government where our first IP is out of the Oak Ridge National Lab. It's great to meet you.

Yeah. What is the main gating factor in electrification in the military? Is it on the supply side, is it just on the deployment side? Can you give us some concrete examples of where electric systems can be leveraged for the warfighter?

Yeah, absolutely. So right now, absolutely for sure on the supply chain side there is an absolute shortage of if there is a surge capacity need for us to be able to produce in the US from the cathode to the anode and up and have the vertical integration to be able to do it on our own. There is a lack. So there is a huge push from US government to make sure we onshore or re industrialize the from ground up in terms of that production capacity, especially when it comes to surge capacity. If and when we need it, we need it. And we're lacking behind in that production side. But also we're just behind in the advancement of how the battery cells are evolving and how we need more energy power on the battlefield. It's not interoperable, it's not interchangeable and there's not enough of it, especially when there's no grid.

What are some of the most important weapon systems or just defense systems that are impacted by that?

Yeah, absolutely. So it actually goes all the way down from handhelds for soldiers and up. So we're talking to Air Force Research Lab program manager and there was an actual case where there was a soldier that's doing an airstrike call, halfway through, loses battery and the coordinates are still on him. And because of that battery loss, it was a friendly airstrike fire. And that just is not acceptable. That is such a easy elementary fix to be able to have a battery management system software that allows us to reserve that extra percent. It's an advancement that we have not been focused on. It's something that we need to do. But on top of that it's the grid is to be able to provide a tactical micro grid out at the edge where hey, if all the power goes out, bring it in. And now we've got a tactical micro grid that's solar powered, self sustaining, that provides a interoperable also energy source to mobile systems as well as standing systems. And that network availability also does not exist today.

Well, talk about the decision to be dual use. I'm sure there was a lot of thinking that went into that. It'd be interesting to get your insight.

Yeah, absolutely. That's certainly amazing question. That was something we've been learning a lot from since the company started. So our core IP technology is out of Oak Ridge National Lab where some of the nuclear materials were invented. And our CTO has been there for over 20 years and he's got funded by ARPA E to work on a silica nanoparticle that we're going to lithium ion batteries essentially. If you ever play with water and cornstarch and it creates this thing called Oublay. It's very fun for the project, for the kids, but it's a non Newtonian fluid. But we're Doing that shear thickening effect in the battery cell, and that happens immediately upon a bullet hitting the battery or a car crash hitting it. Then it solidifies from liquid to solid, preventing it from crunching up and providing extra structural strength for added safety. And so we started having conversations. We kicked off the company three years ago, raised friends and family around, and kicked off the company. And we were talking to electric vehicles and defense at the same time. And we really wanted to really understand. What I'm really passionate about is protecting and saving lives. Like, I could care less if it's, you know, 10, 10 technologies or 100 technologies. Do it like I'm going to protect and save lives. That's where my passion is. When I was working on the counter IED jammers to put into our vehicles in CENTCOM so that the enemies cannot blow up the IDs under our vehicles. As a contracting officer then it was just kind of a moment where I was like, I couldn't do anything unless what I'm doing is impacting and open to protect and save lives. And so we talked to EV companies and they wanted more safety, but they also wanted to increase performance and decrease cost. They want it all right. And so we are, so we, so we went to really focus on how do we decrease the cost. So now we're, you know, we're really focused on. We went back to the drawing board on the EV side to say, okay, with our product goals. It's a lower cost than the aluminum steel that's surrounding the battery packs. And so we're looking at how do we decrease the weight to increase performance while having same, if not higher safety on the EV side. But that sales cycle is actually, you know, I've been working with the government, you know, pretty much all my life in defense. And I think government was slow, but EV could be slower. And I was just kind of like, wow, if I wait until we have this technology and we keep building it, it's not like people will just come and buy it. It's just not how it's going to work. That's not how we did at Palantir. We have a playbook here. Don't recreate the playbook. We're going to go to the end user and figure out what they need and then we're going to give them what they need. And however the business model fits, that is what we're going to create. And so that's the approach we took.

On the defense side. Is this something that you could actually go and build a whole program record around or do you just need to be a subprime contractor and vend into some of the larger primes as they build out new systems?

Yeah. So we really flipped the entire business model in its head from the beginning where we say, hey, we've got a core ip, how do we create this? And then in the traditional sense you would say let's build it, let's sell it to another supplier who then supplies it to another system and the system will sell it to a customer instead. We just went straight to the customer, we said, what do you need? And they say we need an electrical tactical dirt bike that can be deployed out of air, decomprigurable, reconfigurable and can be parachuted down when it lands. I don't want it to blow up from that impact and it has to go, you know, x amount of miles and it has to carry £350 because we have gear. It's not 180 pound type of bike and that just didn't exist. And so we partnered up with the subcontractor with a top dirt bike company. I mean newly designed a electric dirt bike tactical for AFSOC aero combat controllers us as a prime. And that was the most important thing. We said we're not going to wait for somebody else to sell. We're going to own the customer, we're going to own the supply chain for it to integrate and become that next gen Systems in your 2.0 that we all know is in a dire need.

Electric dirt bike for the military just sounds like something straight out of like a COD side mission or something. It's incredible.

We're down to test.

Yeah, yeah. Yes. At least send us one. I do not know.

I will be burning around the gong here.

Yes. Yeah, sounds amazing. But yeah, thank you so much for stopping by and telling us about the business. This is fantastic. We'll talk.

Well, thanks so much for having me. For having me.

Really appreciate it.

Cheers, John. Thanks for coming on.

Up next we have Connor from Speak Language Learning program. Let's talk to Connor. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing today, Connor? Hello. Hello.

Welcome.

Thanks for having me.

I was expecting you to come on and say just start talking in a variety of different languages.

You're not impressing us. Drop some foreign languages on us. Do you speak any foreign languages?

Wow, great question. Just getting right into it. I mean I should be able to speak Spanish because I took five years of it in high school and college and I have the classic story of I learned everything except how to speak which segues into what we're trying to do. And we finally have Spanish. So, you know, I'm working on it. I'm getting better very quickly.

Yeah, break down a little bit of history of the company because it's interesting. Go to market, interesting history, interesting strategy.

Sure, yeah. I mean, for context for everyone. We are trying to build the world's best language teacher using AI. So imagine, you know, a really good tutor, but they're in your pocket, available whenever, wherever, thinking about how best to teach you.

And it's speaking first.

But yeah, the kind of interesting and weird thing about our history is we started this company a while ago. We've been working on it for like eight years at this point. The first few years are really just like AI research into how we could use AI to build the technology.

And then we realized that we needed.

To go focus on one market. So we spent the next four years or so focusing on a single market, a market that I had literally never been to in my life before, which was South Korea. A market where there's not really.

How'd you pick that?

So we, we, we kind of did a bunch of different, you know, market analyses. We built a free app and we, and we like released it in a bunch of countries and saw what kind of trash we had.

But ultimately the thing that was the.

Most convincing to me was I went to South Korea to talk to some of our earlier users and I saw like literal skyscrapers that were filled with English classrooms. And it was just very clear that the country was obsessed over learning English, but there was also way more competition and solutions there than anywhere else in the world. So we really thought the only way we were going to build something interesting is if we actually build something substantially, structurally better using technology like a 10x solution. And that market was going to be the market where we would get the most signal, because the only way it would work is if we actually built something unique. And, you know, today we are the clear number one leader. We've got about 80% brand awareness. We've had double digit percentage of all South Koreans try our product and yeah, it's air horns.

What's the universal, universal. This is the universal language of celebration.

It's the real universal language.

Yeah, of celebration. What me through how much value you're trying to deliver in the product? Like, am I benchmarking this more towards like a fun app to noodle on from time to time or, you know, a college level curriculum that actually will, you know, almost guarantee fluency if I work through it?

It's really the second, like, like people do become fluent if they use our method. And, and really the benchmark is these, you know, cram schools in Korea that people are spending hundreds of dollars per month on or you know, there's private tutors that cost 40 to $80 per hour to study with. And that's really like the thing that we're benchmarking against and really trying to surpass in terms of efficacy and enjoyment.

I'm trying to think you guys have raised a lot of money from a bunch of great investors. I was trying to think through how they might think about risk factors to the business. And one of those I could imagine would be real time translation with AI gets so good that maybe people don't feel the same drive to learn languages. Now the counterfactual or counterpoint would be something like robots being much better at chess than humans, yet humans still love to play chess. And so I'm curious how you think of that or if that's something that's kind of come up at all and, and how you would address something like that.

It comes up all the time. One term that is in some sci fi books is the idea of a Babel fish. You put something in your ear. Which by the way, I think will be launched by many companies this year. I mean Google kind of released that with Google I O last month as.

Well with AirPods a little bit. They teased it at WWDC.

Yeah, exactly. So that's going to happen. I mean we're already seeing this bidirectional real time audio speech to speech technology proliferating. And my response is always, you know, what we're ultimately doing is we're building something that is all about human connection and aspiration. Like the reason people learn languages is because they actually want to be able to connect with other people and they aspire to be someone that speaks multiple languages. And that's the fundamental behavior we're helping with.

And so if you think about like.

The world's greatest translator, like the UN translator, that's like highly paid and stakes are high, there's still an immense amount of friction in that interaction. And so especially when you're learning a language because it's, you know, for example.

English and it's the language that will.

Allow you to travel the world and talk to anyone or really frankly any language, I think that people will still want to do that in the era of really great live translation. And in fact, my contrarian bet, acknowledging I'm extremely biased here is more people will learn languages, not less. Because it will become radically more enjoyable and easy. Imagine you just have your best friend who's teaching you every single day, and that person is funny and knows all about you and can talk about whatever you want and make it extremely personalized.

I think a lot more people, yes, humans, like challenges. It's very challenging, it's fun, it's stimulating.

Look@chess.com. yeah, the business is ripping and like chess has been completely solved by AI for years, and yet people do it. Talk to me about what's working on the customer acquisition side. I want to hear about the footprint of the business internationally and domestically, and then just kind of like the pricing model and how customers think about actually paying you for the service.

Yeah. So, I mean, the business model right now is quite simple. It's just a consumer subscription business. We have multiple tiers, and that idea is we can build tiers for the people that are really dedicated and want all the power tools and intelligence behind it. And we do charge a premium. Like it's. It's a little bit more expensive than most other, you know, consumer subscription businesses where we're talking, you know, depending on the market, somewhere around $100 a year to over $200 a year. There's a lot more room there to play. And we're just getting started. But the, yeah, I think, like, size of, you know, business and where we're at today. So, you know, I mentioned South Korea is kind of our bread and butter. That's where we've been up until relatively recently, trying to, you know, standard the radar and just work on building the best possible product. And then we, we've really started to expand in the last two years or so. And so we, we're now, you know, becoming a very popular brand in, in Japan and in Taiwan. And we've actually now expanded coverage to over 40 countries around the world in the last few quarters. And just yesterday, we have now gone from an English language learning app to a language learning app with the launch of learning Spanish, Italian, French, Korean and Japanese and more languages on the way. A large part of why we're even able to do that is because of all the agentic AI content creation that we're doing.

Localization has to be completely one shotable by most modern LLMs. This is the transformer. It's really good at transforming stuff. It transforms things from one language to another. It's the best. The most bread and butter.

Yeah.

Anything else?

Very cool. Very cool.

It's fantastic.

We got to get on there. My Chinese is a little rusty. I know how to.

Yeah, what do you know?

Yeah. What do you call it?

Which is not even factually correct. But it generally means I really enjoy beer. But it's a good line to have if you're ever. I don't think we should go to China. No, but it's a good line to have in your back pocket. Totally.

Totally. I just know. Booyao. Don't want. If somebody comes up to you on the street. I don't want it.

I know.

What's that mean?

Your eyes are very beautiful.

Oh, there.

Honestly, between the three of us, we could be dangerous. We could establish a beach head, tell.

The people to go away.

Some nice compliments.

So it'd be fantastic.

Yeah. Come back on when you have news.

Yeah, we'll talk to you soon.

Okay.

Have a good one.

Thanks, guys.

Bye.

Cheers.

Really quickly, let's tell you about wander.

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Seriously, any watch.

How did you sleep last night? I got destroyed.

I had a rough.

I had a very rough night.

I had a very rough night. Honestly, I got a little cocky. I slept really well Monday night. Yeah, last night.

I know. I got cocky too.

6 hours 17 minutes. The tides have really turned, John.

I know.

That was truly a generational run.

I gotta. I gotta make it all back tonight. I'm sleeping.

Make it all back in. One sleep.

One sleep. Nobody out sleeps me. It's the best.

Sleeping 10 hours is actually surprisingly challenging. Yeah, especially almost too much time.

25 kids. Brutal. In other fundraising news, Applied Intuition closed their series F round of fundraising at $15 billion valuation. We had Kaiser Yunus on the show at Hillen Valley an absolute dog.

He's going to be running out of letters soon. He's got quite a few to go.

I wonder what the latest series letter that has ever been done in venture history like has. I know people have done F, but have we seen a series K? Have we seen a series S? Like how far down the Alphabet has anyone gone ever?

I could see someone like a cluley, just striped. $1 round speed running it to get.

To the C. That would be an interesting strategy. I could definitely see stripe being deep in the Alphabet. They've been going for, what, almost 20 years now, that business. 2007, 2010, I guess 15 years they've been in business.

Yeah.

So they could be deep into the. Deep into the Alphabet.

Yeah.

SpaceX. I don't even know if they are numbering or lettering their rounds anymore because some of them are so like.

Yeah, they're. They're really.

The tender offer, it's a preferred share. It's a common stock sale. Kind of just moves around. What were you laughing at?

There's always stuff to laugh about.

Timeline.

Looking up the timeline, what else we got?

We have our next guest, Trey from tenor. Yeah, here we go. He's fax maxing. Hey, Trey, how you doing?

The fax man.

Well, guys. Yeah, doing well. Daring to see myself on that screen, you know, you never picture yourself in mirror image. It's horrible.

Yeah, it is confusing. Well, thank you so much for joining us. Can you kick us off with an introduction of the company? We've heard TJ Parker teasing and educating us a little bit about this market, but I want to hear from you.

Yeah, 100%. I mean, our solution, we work with providers that receive patients. Those patients get sent from other providers, typically via what's known, referrals, scripts, doctors, terminology. Doctors.

Right.

And those doctors, when they send a patient. Patient, they'll describe it as like sending a patient to a black hole. The patient doesn't get contacted. They don't know where they're at. And it loses a ton of money, actually, to those receiving providers that are trying to convert those patients into real visits that end up getting denied if they don't have complete documentation. So it's a whole mess. It's. It's a real problem. And it turns out it all starts at efax documentation. Over 90% of these visits originate via EFAX documentation. And if you can solve the facts, you can really drive a great outcome for those providers.

So that's what we do. So I, like, I hurt my knee. I go into my general doctor and they refer me to a knee specialist. And at some point, there needs to be a whole bunch of faxes going on. Is that just for insurance or for everything?

Yeah. So I mean, imagine you get sent to that knee specialist, and then the knee specialist says, hey, I really want to send you to a surgical center. Now the surgical center has to go collect all this documentation to say, okay, Coogan, are you. Maybe they don't address you by that name. But you know they're going to say it works. Do I have, do I have enough basically to get past an authorization? Is the payer, the insurance company going to pay for this or do I need to basically say hey, sorry, we don't have complete documentation. I have to send you to PT in that time frame. Weeks go by and you have no idea what the hell is going on.

Frustrating. I mean you mentioned e facts. We've heard a lot about faxes driving the medical industry broadly. What is actually the state of the art in the fax medical world right now?

This conversation usually is like, it's like a misnomer really. When we talk about. Most times you hear people talking about facts. You should really think like emailed PDFs, you should think effects. Right. It's actually very rare nowadays, at least as what we see that people are literally going in and like putting the pieces of paper. Yeah, it's, it's actually, you know, it's more like if you wanted to send, you know, you want to send a patient, I'm just going to right click download the whole chart and then I have to send it somehow. It's as easy as sending an email. It just happens to actually travel on fax wires. Like that's the actual mechanism. The protocol is on smtp. It's fax line.

Interesting. And that's important from like a regulatory perspective, right?

That's right. And to be honest, actually even that is a little bit overblown. In many cases it's very possible to have a secure email inbox which we see a lot of as well.

It's just a legacy network and that's the one they use and as network connect. Interesting. How'd you get into this?

Yeah. When did you realize you wanted to drive efficiency and in healthcare business process.

To be honest, I have no like I view like automation is kind of this like also sort of this like a false prophet. It's. I learned about this from my mom who's sending patients out and she'd say trey, it's like, it's like sending patients into a black hole. And it's not really like automation just so happens to be one piece of the component. Then the other big thing is nobody knows how much it costs.

Right.

So if I tell you look, it's going to be. If I say look, it's going to be $300. And you know that right off the bat you're actually way more likely to show up than if I tell you look, we've to determine your costs once you show up, which is what most people do today. And the reason they do that is because then they also have to go and run a check and make sure they understand how much your insurance is going to cover and pay for in the process. So really, we exist to solve the black hole problem. I don't really give a crap about solving the facts. It's just like if you say you're going to solve a problem and the first sort of hurdle is, okay, there's a bunch of unstructured PDF flow, and if we can structure that, we get, like, a good chance at it. That's sort of how we approached it. No, not that much of a student of the game.

Talk to me about the scale of the customer that you can sell to. Is this. Is this something where, like, if you go to, like, a few networks and you win really, really big, it's kind of like game over? Or do you need to go to, like, every single doctor in a local. Like, in a local neighborhood and get them on board?

Yeah.

So, I mean, somewhere in between, to be honest, right? Like, there's.

There's.

You have so much private equity in healthcare that you. If you think about the size of their markets, they're often consolidating. So those consolidated entities, those are really our ideal, you know, customer profile. We do work with a number of health systems, but, like, to be like, if we're just being honest, right? It's like if you want to centralize an inbox and really a sales funnel, when you think about the patient funnel, is really a sales funnel. You still have to go do it department by department. So there's not like, 20 deals to be done. There's probably more like 200,000 when you look at, like, the size of providers, because we unfortunately can't work with, like, two provider shops.

But, yeah, totally. What's the scale of the business like today?

So we're processing. We have 20,000 providers sending.

Right.

So they're sending faxes, sending emails. We've got hundreds of providers using Tenor to process, and then we've got millions of patients. Millions of patients.

Let's go.

Oh, thank you.

Yeah.

So, yeah, man.

How much did you raise today?

We raised $101 million.

That's right.

Wow. Let's go.

There we go. That's fantastic. How did the round go come together? What was that process like? Was it preemptive? Did you guys go out for it? Who'd you get on board? All right.

Just a little bit of background. I literally got Lost. So I'm. We're in the Lincoln Center. We hadn't like. Completely unrelated to the fundraising event, we had a big prospect customer event in the Lincoln center tonight. I get lost five minutes before because I wanted to grab some. Some food, some. Some nuts, and I get lost. I'm sprinting to the door and I found it. So I'm like running hot. But so to answer your question, like, I feel I sound really salesy right now, to be honest. I'm usually a horrible fundraiser, Historically horrible fundraiser. This came together in like four days. It was like the. The business.

It was 25 mil a day. It's pretty.

Pretty solid.

Good run. Right. You should have just kept going. Why not?

Why not?

Okay.

Most of our rounds have been. So we had a partner at Andreessen. I mean, this is kind of like, I think, some of the fun shop talk, but, you know. So you have a GP partner on most deals at Andreessen.

Right.

So we had a GP and a partner. Now partner at Andreessen goes and actually becomes a GP over at ibp.

Oh, interesting.

And what is. What does he do? He was just board observing us for two quarters. We said, we're gonna hit the thing. And he just calls me up after the quarter ends and is like, so, did you do the thing? And I said, yeah, we did the thing. And so we did the round. And then there were a couple of other firms that we just, like, really respected that were. That were just like, yeah, we're doing the thing. Let's do the thing. And we did it.

That's amazing. What's the. What's the use of funds? Like, is this like R D heavy? Spending a lot on engineering? Are there hard costs in the business? Is it hiring a lot of sales reps? Is there some sort of, like, crazy payback period where you, you know, you have to go and install or win a customer and then you get paid back over, like, a really long time. Because I imagine, like, this C seems like a pretty low churn product if you can get it installed. But it might be expensive to do that.

That's a great. Yeah, it's really. It's an expensive deployment period, and so you're looking at an expensive first year, typically speaking. Yeah. So not so. So, yes, the traditional. Hey, we're gonna, you know, keep growing the sales team that's just been growing off of growth anyways.

Sure.

But get way ahead of the engineering team. We're launching this product. So, like, we have these millions of patients.

Right.

And I'll give You like one quick example, it's kind of interesting. You think about the fact that you got sent over to like a. Let's say you're sort of having trouble sleeping. Turns out you get diagnosed with sleep apnea. You now are going to get a cpap. Now, you might actually qualify based on all the clinicals you've done, because you've been to a sleep doctor, you've been processed through a dme, you've been processed through diagnostics. We have all your clinicals, we have your insurance. We can actually suggest to you all these other services basically that you qualify, you're eligible for. To go and get. And whether that's additional consults, behavioral treatment, pharmaceuticals, things like that. And so we're launching this big network product, and it's a huge lift on the engineering team. And so we've been growing that team really aggressively as well.

That makes a ton of sense.

It's been an honor to hit the gong for you.

It has been an honor.

You're an absolute Chad. Thank you for coming on. Congratulations on the milestone. I have a feeling you'll be back here in the temple with us very soon.

Oh, yeah.

With how you're talking, so it's amazing. Congratulations to you and the team.

I wanted. I was hoping I'd get some credit as, like, I see all these guests. Come on.

I saw the jacket.

I was gonna say, honestly. Honestly, you wear it. It looks natural. A lot of people put it on, it looks performative. You know, it's like stolen valor.

Yeah, yeah. So we don't want to draw too much attention if that's your daily, but we appreciate you dressing up for the occasion.

Yeah, you look sharp. You look sharp. And just do us a favor and never wear casual clothing in the workplace ever again. Just, you know, make this a part of your daily. You know, you're. You're a healthcare technologist. You know, you should be. You're a businessman.

Yep.

So we've got fit. We got Fit Fridays. It's the opposite of casual Fridays. You have to dress really, really nice going into the office here in New York.

There we go. I love it.

That's amazing.

We're doing our part, man. We're doing our part. You guys have a great to see. Great to see you.

Have a great one.

Great chatting. Congratulations. See ya.

Up next, we got James from Profound coming in the stud. Oh, is there another Gong hit coming in? Let's hear it. James, how you doing?

What's going on?

Break down the news. What's going on?

I got the Mallet ready? What's happening? How are we doing, guys?

Doing great.

Well, we've already covered your raise. We've talked with David Senra. We've got the backstory on how David Senra met you and invested. But super excited to have you on to, to break down the news yourself. Yeah, thanks for having me. Yeah. And congrats on all the TPPN traction as well. It's inspiring just to see your story kind of continue to take the main stage. Thank you. Thank you. We had you on recently. What's happened since, talking about the new round and then I want to hear about traction and kind of what you're seeing on the product side as well. For sure. Yeah. I guess since we last spoke, it's just been, you know, a lot of days in the office. We moved office. We moved across the other side of Union Square, New York City. The entire team is here in person working very hard. We're in office six days a week. And yeah, I'd love to hear that. As an investor. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna pretend I don't. I think, you know, it's, it's, it's very exciting. I think the tailwinds are mind blowing. This is a clear platform shift. Maybe one of the biggest platform shifts in the history of marketing is hundreds of millions, billions of consumers turn away from blue link search and instead talk to platforms like ChatGPT and get a response. How your brand shows up, how your products show up, how your services show up in these AI responses is becoming like boardroom level discussion for every brand on the planet. So, yeah, we're building Profound as a new age marketing platform to guide marketers every, every brand on the planet to this new generative Internet and Internet where you can talk to it and it talks back to you. I think the closest heuristic would be SEO for AI. But once you start to look underneath the hood, there's a lot of fundamental differences here. These models are opining, they give, they have sentiment, they give opinions. The kids are using chat these days and more like an operating system. And how your brand shows up there is P0. What are some of the big struggles that maybe legacy brands are facing in terms of shaping there? You can imagine horror stories, yet I.

Feel like it's all pretty good stuff. Most of the time I see examples of this. It's always somebody screenshotting like, oh, I nailed it. ChatGPT recommended my brand. But I imagine that there's probably some people that are having rougher experiences.

Well, the Models are probabilistic, so you ask the same question 10 times in a row and get 10 different responses. So that's kind of the, that's one of the main upsides of using technology like profound is you get the kind of aggregate response across all of the major platforms. I mean, yeah, we, we work with Ramp as an example. They're an example customer. And you know, we 7x their visibility in a category where they didn't have much visibility. And the way that you do that is by, you understand.

Through lots of.

Prompting, you understand how the models are talking about your brand, your products, your industry, your competitor and where they're going in order to answer those questions. And then you strategically start creating content for bots.

Oh, we got.

And yeah, it's pretty tractable. Amazing. Talk about the round. Who participated. It's a pretty good, pretty great list. Biased, but not. David Senra, like, does not really angel invest. It's very, it's very, very rare. So you got him. Yeah, thanks.

Yeah, it's cool.

So it's a, you know, it's a real kind of like pinch me moment.

We're working.

So Kleiner Perkins led the round, so Ilya Fishman's taking a seat on the board. In addition, we have Coastal Adventures. That's with Keith Raboy, Nvidia. Sorry, sorry, didn't let you finish. But had to, had to go continue, continue Saga Ventures. So, yeah, that's Max Altman, Ben Braverman, Thompson Nguyen, South Park Commons SV angel, and then a bunch of really great angels. Obviously the most important being a guy called Jordy Hayes. Too kind. Too kind. But yeah, give us an update on almost like an investor update, which I won't share, but give us an update on kind of the. Like, what is. I'm curious what the sales cycle is right now with companies that you're talking to. I imagine this is like kind of a hair on fire issue where they realize like, hey, we don't know what going on or things are happening is it is. You know, what does that look like with some of these bigger multinational, you know, brands and companies that you guys are working with? Yeah, I think, you know what, the thing, you know, what they're realizing is true is that this platform shift is so big that they need dedicated technology to understand and control how they show up in answer engine outputs. They can't rely on existing marketing technology, if anything, just purely because the space is moving and evolving so quickly, which I think is really evidenced by the fact that we are able to work. We're working with Fortune 10 brands. So literally some of the biggest brands in the world are using profound. There's thousands of marketers on the platform now. It's hard to mention logos. We all know it's tricky, but some of the logos that we are able to mention are. So we have brands like MongoDB, Indeed, Mercury, DocuSign, Zapier, Ramp, Plaid, Ro.

Absolute.

Squad, Chime, US Bank, Clay, Resend. So, yeah, we're working with, you know, that's just the ones we can mention. And yeah, I think, you know, these brands are coming to us because we've built the ubiquitous technology in this new category that, you know, we, we've, we've, we're sucking the oxygen out of the room and we're building a better product. And yeah, I think that's a function of a very talented engineering team here in New York. Basically category leader working six days a week. The only option would be to try to work seven days a week, but then you risk some major burnout. So better, better just not compete at all and just let James Cook just be a customer. Well, thank you for coming on, James. Awesome milestone and I have no doubt we'll have you back on again soon. Yeah, thanks for having me, guys. Appreciate that. Cheers.

Amazing. We'll talk to you soon. Bye. We got back to back guests coming in the studio next. We got Warp and Senra Systems. We're going to figure out who's joining first.

Senra's coming on first.

Okay, we got Senra, not David. Senra, not David's anywhere. We already talked to him.

We got Jordan, the founder of Senra Systems.

Let's bring him.

He is an emerging wire harness manufacturer.

We're going to try and get Senra. In the meantime, I think we have Warp. Okay, let's do Warp. Welcome to the stream. How you doing?

Ready? There he is. Sorry, Sorry for the chaos. I told you now, back and forth. But you're here. We're live on TVPN in the ultra dome. Yes, it's great to have you. Exciting day. Give everybody some background on you and the company and then we can talk about the news. Yeah.

Yes. My name is Ayush. I'm the founder and CEO of War. And as some of you may have seen, we are the best way for startups to run payroll, handle compliance, hire people and do all those fun things. We just also announced our 18 million Series A.

Let's go.

I'll let you do the honors. Let's go. Yes. I have a. I have a feeling we'll need A bigger gong for warp. Hopefully. Hopefully we get it in here before the next round. Yeah, talk about, talk about competing in a, in a, in a big but crowded category.

Yeah.

And maybe kind of a little bit of the origin stories of the business as well because, yeah, you're relatively new but, but clearly making waves.

Yeah, totally. I mean, Jordi, you've known us from the very early days, I think, and we've been, we've been friends and kind of working on this from the very start. So I think you've seen that journey. But really what I think about is there's almost like such a high bar today for building incredible products. Right. I think a ramp obviously comes to mind where, you know, you start out in this like huge market and you see a incredible opportunity. Maybe it looks like there's all these players, but if you can build an amazing product, if you can give startups companies the best product experience, that actually has a lot of demand. So I think on our end we also saw that there's all these different tools that people kind of piece together for running their companies, running payroll, handling, compliance. It's very disjoint, it's very manual still today, especially for startups. And if there's one thing that startups hate, like, and I've done this before myself, is stared up piece of paperwork from government like New York Department of Taxation, whatever, and have to do it themselves. And that's just so, so annoying. So we're kind of automating all of that for once, using tons of kind of automation AI behind the scenes to kind of accomplish that. And also just building really, really amazing products. So I think one of our customers told us this the other day is that using all these other providers feels like you're using like bank of America to pay somebody or like TD bank, but then if you use vorp, it feels like you're using Brex or Ramp or Venmo to pay your friend. And that's the kind of like the qualitative sort of product like difference that we think about.

How much are you thinking about agentic workflows and features versus traditional SaaS, bread and butter crud, traditional FinTech, all that kind of stuff.

Yeah, it's a huge part and I think we're being thoughtful about it. I think there's a lot of players that are just waking up to it and their approach is, well, we're just going to jam some AI kind of buzzwords, kind of sound cool, but I think we have the luxury that we're starting almost in this time where all these advancements are happening very quickly. So maybe you guys don't know, but my personal background actually is in computer science, specifically focusing on AI back at mit. And so it was very cool to see some of these things early on, right before this started taking off. And now we have the opportunity to build this in a way that is from the ground up. We can actually architect this in the right way. So a lot of these manual paperworks, maybe the customer doesn't even know about them or think about them. I know they're completely abstracted away from them. All the PDF, filing paperwork, taxation, that would typically be their responsibility or their accountants or controllers, whatnot, we can absorb them for the first time. And there's no like middle ground that we have to cross where they're kind of doing it and then it's slightly automated and they're asking some chat UI nodes just like fully in the background automated.

Where's the growth coming from? I know you guys are growing quickly. You don't have to give us like, you know, the, the full secret sauce. But how, how and why are you winning customers over?

I think the biggest thing is we have seen tons of founders just telling their friends about us. So if customers using us, we target a lot of our startup founders. A lot of the folks that you would have known of, like Rahul from Julius, AI and Isaiah from Bland, and I think tons of these really cool startups that are building all these amazing products. They have lots of Twitter presence, very online, and they'll tell their friends or tweet about us or say something positive. And I think that's been a huge driver. So first and foremost, just like building incredible product people will tell their friends, but also targeting these very awesome companies that will kind of spread the word.

Why is payroll so oligopolistic? I feel like there's like adp, paylocity, Pay Com, Pay, something else in the public markets. Then YC has like three unicorns in payroll. I get that there's a lot of money. Yeah, I get that there's a lot of money where the money is. But like, why is there not more of a compounding advantage? Like, what's the market dynamic? Is that expected to change? Or is it just like you can go and win even if you get 1% of the market? And that's like, fine?

I think it's definitely more of the latter, but at the same time it's almost like banking, right? Like, if you think about banking broadly, how many different banks exist and fintechs exist and they all kind of fly, can win big. Even some of the biggest players that are obviously like ramp in the grand scheme of things, the market is so, so large that even a small portion of that can be huge. And every five to 10 years, it seems like there's some new wave of technology where the consumer behavior shifts enough. So, like, one thing I think about a lot is the founder expectations have shifted a ton. Right. They're used to using tools like Superhuman and Linear for running their team and then they go log into like a salesforce like junk like hr hefty thing. And I just kind of hate that. So I think there's some consumer behavior shift. There's also the fact that you can reinvent these things from first principles every five, 10 years. And then AI is a big piece of that puzzle too.

It almost feels like the opposite. It feels like payroll. It's so cumbersome to rip it out that it's actually a slower turnover. And so as opposed to some of these tools where it's easy to rip them out, you, if there's really, really great product that's actually better, you're going to take over the market and get everyone to rip it out and replace it very quickly. But payroll system, it's like pulling teeth to get it out of the system. And so like people. Yeah, I don't like the one that I have, but I'm, I'm not, I'm not going to change or anything. I don't know.

Are you thinking about stablecoins at all? They've been in the news in the last 24 hours. People have talked about the potential of stables helping, maybe just like saving you.

Money or earning you more float or something. It seems like most of the payroll companies are pretty mature in terms of squeezing every penny out of the dollars that they transfer around. But is it a bull case at all or does it change the economics at all?

From where we sit, I mean, we haven't seen a ton of requests coming from customers directly, which is the main thing that I try to track. Right. But I think more of macro level, it seems like the moment for stablecoins is definitely happening. So I, I, I'm bullish overall, but I haven't seen a direct uptick into like payroll especially because I think if you, especially for us focused use cases, which is where we are, we do global contractors, obviously, and that's a smaller part of like what we're doing. But for those players, it's probably a bigger thing that they need to think about for international But I think the one one maybe like take that I have is the US banking system gets more shit than it actually deserves. It's actually like quite good. The ACHs, the fed wires, even though they're kind of old and we're stuck with them in some ways and they could be better, they're better than what people realize or give them credit for at least.

Is that just because they've been wrapped in APIs so many times that like they're actually pretty easy to develop on or is the actual underlying system evolved and actually got better?

It's both, I think. The rise of fintechs and APIs obviously make a lot of them very easy. But the one like the interesting thing is like if you look at India and I grew up in India, my family's still there. Upi, which is mobile wallets are actually a huge thing in India and they basically around from 2015 or so there was a period where mobile wallets just went vertical almost within like a one year period. And the reason that took off is India was largely a cash based society. So the delta between going from like cash and change and like counting all of that immediately to phone wallets and QRS was massive. But in the US you'll never get mobile wallets, not in a true sense. What we do have is credit cards and Apple pay because there's not enough of a delta. So like it's one of those things where the US figured out ach Rails and Fed Wire, Rails and credit card rails earlier than all these other countries that are now just catching up. So they get to kind of leapfrog and go to the next level. But we have some of these things that I've actually worked for a while, all these legacy layers of technologies that are built around it that we don't get to immediately cross over because there's not enough of a Delta. So we will be on ACHS and Fedwires for a long time, but they work pretty well.

Lindy, Lindy.

I think gong hit is in order.

Oh, let's do it it talk about the round.

18 million series A.

18 million series A. Life guys, Life Ventures. We've got Drew Houston, Arash, Kyle Vogt as part of the round. Those are all MIT engineer founders. So YC crew we got, we tried like all the technical folks, some great people joining and we're super excited and very thrilled.

Did you, you graduated mit, right?

That's right, that's right.

No, no, no, no.

That's the new bullshit. That's the contrarian move.

The Contrarian thing is. Yeah.

Don't drop out. Don't drop out. Yeah, that's right.

That's where. That's where all the new. The new alpha. Congratulations. Congratulations. It's been amazing to watch you execute over the years and excited for the next chapter.

We'll talk to you soon.

Awesome. Yeah, likewise.

Cheers.

Next up we have Jordan from Senra Systems, not David Senra Systems. These are high quality wire harnesses. Welcome to the stream, Jordan. Hopefully we can bring you in. I know we had some back and forth juggling, but great to have you on the show.

There he is. We did it.

Welcome to the stream.

We did it. Welcome.

I love when a plan comes together. Would you mind introducing your yourself the company and what is a wire harness for those who don't know?

Yeah, absolutely. I'm Jordan Black, I'm the CEO Center Systems. You probably don't know what the hell wire harness is and that's totally fine. Just think of it as like an iPhone charger, but like a lot more complex. Like when you lift up the hood of your car, you see a bunch of electrical wiring. It just connects any two or more components together. And everybody hates it because it's entirely manual process to design it, entirely manual process to manufacture it. And it's just very like bespoke thing that hasn't changed since the Cold war top applications.

I mean, you see it in the car. I seem to remember like the cybertruck changed their wire harnessing and reduced it by like, you know, it went from like 10,000ft of wires to like 1,000ft or so. Is that roughly like the right story or like, give me a more concrete example.

Yeah, I think the thing with wires in, the more you have, the more expensive it's going to be. So you put more sensors and computers and thingamajigs around your car or rocket or drones, you're gonna have more wiring and to become more expensive. So what Tesla did was really kind of minimize the amount of signals they.

Had to go through.

And there's a little more complexity that goes into that too. But it's, it's in everything. Like it's the way you power your coffee maker, your rocket, drone, missile, everything else. Because if you need to connect this thing that needs to send signal or power to this thing over here, the only way you're going to really do it is through copper wire.

Yeah. So cars, rockets, drones, planes. Like what, what is the most common product that you're selling your, your wire harnesses into? Is it everything or do you have a Specific focus. Right now we do a little bit.

Of everything, but right now it's mainly aerospace and defense. And the reason why is because it's very hard to get a high quality wire harness in the space. Like not to get super morbid, but like the reason why like the astronauts died in the Apollo mission was there was like a nick on the cable jacket and there was a flammable gas and the whole thing sparked or there's a lot of launch failures or launch delays that happen because like they can't get a wire harness on time. And it's this hard thing because if you put a wiring in a car, it's kind of like it sits there. You know, it goes through some bad winters sometimes. But like when you put it into a rocket or a drone, like it needs to withstand crazy environments, get beat the hell up and goes to space. It's in a vacuum, it's all over the place. And it has to be like very precise in ways gets built because it's all done by hand today. So there's a lot of like inspection. And so that's kind of where this like bespoke process, on top of the complexity, on top of like it being something really niche that nobody really knows about besides myself and the people who work at center and the very few people in the US this is where we're trying to like take all that tribal knowledge, take all that processing and really kind of make a structured output of it too.

So yeah, what, what is the key innovation here? Is it automation? Is it robotics? Better software? Better just skilled, just caring about it.

Exactly.

Ten times more than the next person.

Giving a damn is say on your website.

I like the high level is like if any of us ran like TSA tomorrow, we just do a way better job than like what it currently is. And so there's just like caring and just make like kind of just getting rid of all the that's going into it. But what we're doing from like fundamental portion is like the way large companies today design wire harnesses. They use like excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint slides. And no one's really trained on this thing. And the way it gets built is like with hand tools and like on a wooden table. And so the like software aspect of it is like we're creating this like industry standard for how wire harnesses should be designed in like our tool called amp, where we can take the tribal knowledge we have. And I tell people like, this is how you should design it. Because every time I get a wire harness I go back and forth to the customer of like, you did this thing wrong. I can't find this part, yada, yada, yada. And then to build it, we're actually using automation and we're using a lot of software processes to make it like a really streamlined effect. Like, you both can come to my factory tomorrow and start building a wire harness. Because it's not the most difficult thing to do in the world. The hardest part is just knowing exactly what steps to do and where to. Where to actually perform the process as well.

Talk about how the round came together. Did Dylan feel. Have some sharp elbows elbowing out, you know, the, the platform, wrong side of.

Board table with him?

Yeah, boardroom.

Yeah.

How did you guys meet and break down the round for us?

Yeah, absolutely. I got introduced to Dylan through one of our investors, and I FaceTimed him. I was on, I think, a weekend in Laguna, and all of a sudden we just started hanging out a ton. And I been pitching that we were creating a wire harness design tool, which is the Figma of wire harnessing for various years. And just to kind of explain what we were doing.

Did he scare you and say, well, actually, figma is the figma for wire harnesses, and I'm gonna eat you alive.

Stay out of my territory.

A little bit different.

A little bit, Yeah, a little bit different. I've yet to get a Figma designed wire harness to this day, but maybe one day we'll get it. And we spent a lot of time together and I. I'll be frank, like, I'm obsessed with the guy. I think he's just so intelligent, the way he thinks from a product standpoint, how he runs company where taking something so bespoke, like a design tool as well, and breaking into this industry that hasn't been changed in a while too. Like, it kind of just really resonated with me. And then we were chatting one day and I was like, I'm gonna go out and like, fundraise. And he's like, I'd like to like, put a check in. And I'm like, oh, okay. Like classic. Made it in Silicon Valley. He's gonna write the angel check. And he's like, oh, I like to, you know, own a substantial amount of the company in the round. And I was like, oh, my gosh. And so just kind of about to start taking out the fundraise and doing that. And I don't know, it just, it. It really thought to me of, like, we have really great investors on a cap table. And I'm just super thankful about that too. But I'm excited to have someone who can be in the weeds with it and just like actually help grow this company. Be this kind of like mentor, but also just like this company that we want to grow into as well too. And it's ultimately really exciting. And so I was like, let's, let's do it. It's, you know, no one else can really understand like the struggles and also the missions or the obstacles we have to overcome than Dylan. And we just kind of get each other.

So that's amazing.

What was the final round size?

25 million is the.

The round size.

Let's go.

There we go.

Congratulations.

There we go.

It's great news.

Well, I feel like you'll be back here in the ultra dome very soon.

Very soon. We might need some custom wire. Wire harnesses. We're wiring up lights all over the place.

There's actually.

Yeah, we got extension cords taped to the ground.

Probably not your icp, but we got a lot of.

We'll figure out a way to integrate for sure.

Perfect.

Yeah.

If you ever need anything, electrical wiring, I'm your guy.

So.

Fantastic.

What's the.

Before you go, how are the, the vibes in. In the Gundo? You're, you're. You guys are technically in Redondo, so I don't know if you claim Gondo.

I'm calling it the Dondo.

No one's Redondo.

Yeah.

That's good. That seems so obvious now that I think about it. Yeah, yeah, it's.

I think the vibes are very high. I think everyone's just so excited to build. It makes complete sense. It's not of like, not only Senra, but just even the companies in this space too, of like there's a time to build, a time to move fast, a time to build things correctly. And I think it's our turn to kind of start changing this entire industry, which is in the hard tech space.

And I think it's what, what percentage of your customers are in Southern California right now versus other states, international, etc.

I'd say most of our. I'd say probably about 80 of our customers are in the US or any of us in Southern California. All of them are in the U.S. but that's because they like kind of having this supplier or this face to just like I can come next, drive over next door and just be able to support them and talk to them as well too.

So it's old fashioned.

I love it.

Yeah, love it.

Well, congratulations.

Thank you for coming. On. Very exciting.

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

Take care.

Cheers.

Bye. Well, that is our show today, folks. We hope you enjoyed the lightning round, the deep dives, the chat with David Cedra and Cedra Silver Systems.

Visualizing that, that conversation or getting dropped in there and Dylan's like, yeah, I'll throw in a check.

Yeah.

And he's like, cool. Like, you know, 50k, 100k. He's like, how about the whole round? Eight figures.

I love it.

Very cool.

It's fantastic. Hopefully we see more of it. It seems cool.

No, it makes sense. It's about the different timeline. It's not about the fundamental or the vehicle that gives you the money. It's about the person. It's about the investor. And it seems like they have an awesome partnership. Yeah, very cool.

Well, anyway, leave us five stars on Apple and Spotify and we will talk to you tomorrow. Thank you for watching.

Thank you for tuning in. Have a great afternoon.

Have a great afternoon. Goodbye.