America's Tech Wishlist, Comcast Splits in Two, Tristan Thompson in the Ultradome | Zach Laberge, Gavin Uberti, Eren Bali, Larsen Jensen, Ricky Rosa, Andrew Rea, Michael Anderson, Tristan Thompson, Grant Gregory & Ian Rountree

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Today is Tuesday, June 30th, end of the quarter.

2026.

We're live from the TVPN Ultra Room, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Let me tell you about Ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Damn, son. Where'd you raise this? Amazing news out of Ramp today. Ark Karazian, one of the greatest economists to ever do it, has canceled the AI job apocalypse. We'll get into it. But it's a very interesting analysis showing that firms that adopt AI are hiring. They're going on the offensive. I've always said that this is the correct stance for a CEO to take is say, yeah, we're getting so much productivity, we're going to crush our competitors. We're staffing up. This is not doom. We're not some— like, there were all these CEOs that went into this very defensive. They were acting like they got bought for pennies on the dollar by a private equity firm. And they're like, yeah, it's looking It's looking pretty bad for us. We're gonna have to fire everyone and cut costs because this AI opportunity, it never made any sense.

My point, my— Go on the offensive, war. You have someone who's like, yeah, we're using AI, we're way more efficient now. We're getting more value per person on our team. And so you're like, okay, great. So you're hiring more people, right? Because you're getting more out of each incremental person. And they're like, well, no, actually like—

Actually, yeah, we gotta do layoffs. A lot of these, we know, we've known this for a long time. A lot of these CEOs just overhired. They wanted to lay people off, they wanted to do They needed an excuse. They wanted to get rid of underperformers, people that weren't fit, like the right fit for this particular company. All of those folks will reshuffle, find their place. Not everyone's suited to work at a giant 100,000-person company. Some people might be better off at a 5,000-person company or 500-person company or a 2-person company or even a 1-person company. There's also interesting studies showing that entrepreneurship is on the rise and it's never been better to go it alone. Thank you, Jordi. What else is in the news? Let's give you a quick overview. People were clamoring for a Rocket Lab story that never came yesterday. Rocket Lab enters the arena with SpaceX. Brandi Garel fired up the TVPN newsletter, which you can subscribe to at tvpn.com today because we were on the horn with Prof G. We did his podcast. Very excited for that to come out. We're warmed up 'cause we already got an hour of podcasting under our belts for today.

Yeah, it's a 4-hour day for us today.

We got a 3-hour show for you.

It's just coming out.

A lot of stealth. We got Aaron Bolley from Monogram coming on. We got Tristan Thompson live in the TVPN UltraDome. And then Grant Gregory, Ian Roundtree from Kantos coming in person as well.

New fun, folks.

We're going back and forth. Fundraising announcement, venture capital fundraising announcement, startup funding raising announcement, venture capital fundraising announcement. The money's flowing. Things are good. Anyway, Rocket Lab, they are duking it out with SpaceX. Let's go through it. Yesterday, the launch services and space systems provider Rocket Lab agreed to purchase satellite manufacturer/operator Iridium in a cash and stock deal that values the company at $8 billion, or 20% more than the share price at Friday's close. Iridium pioneered LEO satellites, launching its first one some 30 years ago. The Iridium network was the original sat phone, this huge block of a phone. You would take out the antenna out of the back, and the antenna was big enough to kill you instantly if you let it get near your brain. No, just kidding, it was very safe.

Wow.

But it would be terrifying to anyone worried about microwave technology or any sort of radiation. But it was wildly successful. The company grew and grew, and now it's part of Rocket Lab. Today they operate a fleet of 66 satellites. That seems low. That's because these are bigger, older satellites, but this partnership is probably going up against Starlink. So that it connects handsets and other devices used by ships, mining sites, US government agencies, enterprise, connectivity play. The move represents yet more vertical integration at Rocket Lab. Over the years, the company has grown from small niche satellite launch provider to an integrated space powerhouse. It now designs satellites and aerospace components, serves the defense primes, has the second most launched US rocket annually, the Electron rocket, and is currently developing a reusable medium-lift launch vehicle. But Jeff Bezos is probably coming for that silver medal any day now. With the Iridium acquisition, Rocket Lab is positioning itself to compete directly with SpaceX, which already connects, which already operates a 10,000 satellite fleet. Rocket Lab has its work cut out for it, says Brandon Garel. Delian had a good post about this talking about the journey of Rocket Lab. We can pull up because it was a SPAC and SPACs have a bad rep. They all went down 99.999%, but not Rocket Lab. On August 25th, 2021, Rocket Lab SPAC'd at $4.1 billion, the usual SPAC price, probably $10 a share, $4 billion valuation. It stayed at or below that price in the public markets for 3 whole years until September 2024, when it started to grow both revenue and get rerated. Now it's acquiring Iridium for $8 billion, twice its original IPO price. And Dalian says—

Yeah, you could buy it for around $4.80-ish a share on July 1st in 2024. $94. It is now sitting at $101.

Yeah, what a run. And yeah, the whole space economy has been booming. Very, very good. It's a $60 billion company. So they're picking up an $8 billion connectivity provider. And we can play a little bit of this from the founder of Rocket Lab, the CEO. Rocket Lab is Rocket Man himself. Rocket Lab is acquiring Iridium Communications.

Last time I was wearing this blue jacket.

Look at this.

I was announcing Neutron.

Yeah.

So I guess that means there's something important to announce.

Do you ever, wait, pause for a second. Do you ever put on a jacket like that? 'Cause let's rewind that.

Is this really the important thing?

This seems to be one of the more. Oh, look at this. No, wait.

Whoa, whoa.

I don't know.

I mean, I don't think I have, but now I want to try.

Something important to announce today.

How do I put on my jacket? I go like this— take the jacket off. And then when I put on the jacket, you usually just go...

How do I put on a jacket?

Now then punch up! No no no no no no no no no that was way too much to either side.

But that's what I do first of all.

Yeah yeah okay but try it his way. One arm out and then you want to punch up through...

Okay so you go one arm in and then... You're punching up to the stratosphere because he launches rockets. No, it's a metaphor. It's a metaphor for the rockets that leave, that go to orbit.

Okay.

Okay.

Anyway, symbolic. All right, let's go back to that.

Let's keep playing the video.

Man, this thing shrunk.

This thing shrunk too.

Okay, we're going to go back to school for a little bit. I want to introduce you to the Space Application Equation. So you've heard me talk a lot in the past about applications. It's where all the value in space truly lies. But in order to exploit that value to the fullest, you need a few other things. The first thing is unfettered access to space. So you need your own launch. And then of course you need your own ability to build spacecraft at scale. We've got that too. But there's some other really big barriers to building large, successful constellations in orbit. And the first one—

romantic companions—

spectrum. Spectrum is finite, almost impossible to get, and of course not all spectrum is created the same. The next thing is it takes a long time to build and launch your infrastructure, a long time to design and build your satellites, launch them, an even longer time to get your first $1 of revenue. And then finally, it's a long time to a sustained cash flow model, a long time to build your business model, a long time to build your customer base, and it takes just that long extended time until you've got proper recurring cash flow. So those of you who know me will know that I'm way too impatient for that. So we found a bit of a shortcut. Rocket Lab is acquiring Iridium Communications. Good music.

Very clear video.

This will be one of the most transformative deals in the space industry. It's the ultimate combination for growth. And if you think back to our little whiteboard session a moment ago, this is a deal where 1 1 3, not just 2. One being Rocket Lab. We have unfettered access to space and unfettered, unfettered—

unfettered access to space again.

And then you think of Iridium. They have an already operational constellation spectrum, not just any spectrum, extremely valuable spectrum.

Oh yeah, the spectrum.

Millions of customers and they're a profitable business.

SpaceX just bought some spectrum too.

Where the 3 comes in is The result of these two things is a fully integrated, self-launching space superpower. One that will unlock more growth from Iridium's existing network and build new constellations to unlock new services and market opportunities. This is officially our entrance into the space applications market, a thing we've been talking about for a long time now. But to be clear, this is not the finish line. Now we won't just continue Iridium's network as is. We're going to build upon it to unlock new markets and pioneer new space-based services. Rocket Lab's future in space applications has just been unlocked and accelerated.

I like this guy.

I'm off to buy a new jacket.

This thing's too small.

See, it goes full circle. The reason that he had to put the jacket on sort of awkwardly was it's too small.

It was a part of the story.

Yeah.

It was good. That's a really good video. I like that. Anyway, will be interesting. Doesn't seem that hard to put up more satellites, just lower.

It's just rocket science.

Eh, I think they got to figure it out. They've been doing rocket science for a while. But congrats to everyone at Rocket Lab and Iridium. Deal makes a ton of sense. And will be interesting to see where it goes from here. A lot of the space bulls will be picking up shares, I'm sure. Comcast split. In 2011, Comcast, which was primarily a cable TV, internet, and phone provider to something like 30 million Americans, bought a 51% stake in NBCUniversal from General Electric.

I love it.

I love an industrial company that owns a media company. It's happened before, folks. It's not that crazy. Just might work. In 2013, it purchased the remaining 49% stake. Since then, Comcast has acquired the European media company Sky, the movie studio DreamWorks Animation, and through NBCUniversal spun up Peacock, among other activity in the entertainment space. Yesterday, The Wall Street Journal reported that Comcast's decade-long-plus foray into— decade-plus-long foray into trying to be a content-plus-distribution company is coming to an end. It's planning to split the business into two. The Comcast entity will once again become a connectivity-only business, and NBCUniversal will focus entirely on content. And there's been a number of spinouts that have been happening for a while. And this is the final, like, big one, I guess. There's a recent history of telecom connectivity companies rolling up entertainment businesses and then spinning them out or getting rid of them. Over the past decade, Verizon bought AOL and Yahoo, reorganized the two into an entity called Verizon Media, and ultimately sold Verizon Media to Apollo in 2021. Over roughly the same period, AT&T bought DirecTV and Time Warner, but ended up fully exiting its position in DirecTV and spun off Time Warner as WarnerMedia into its own entity in 2022. So interesting deal to follow along. The other good news in the space world is that, uh, after that explosion at Blue Origin launch, that New Glenn launch that was, uh, so disheartening, there were rumors that, uh, it might be 2 years until they got that launch pad back online. But there is some updates here. There are some updates. To return to flight this year, we're not rebuilding the same pad. We're going straight to a horizontal-vertical hybrid con ops we had already been developing for our 9X4 New Glenn launch vehicle using existing infrastructure, skipping a new transporter erector and creating a common con ops across two pads. So Dave—

Here we go. They just used the explosion as sort of like a demo. They demoed the old setup. Demolition.

Yeah. But good news from Dave Limp, the CEO of Blue Origin, that they're gonna get New Glenn flying again sooner than people thought. So good news there. What else is in the news today? I have a pitch for you. I have a business idea.

I want to hear feedback.

So let's hear it.

What's the biggest problem with being a doctor? You make a lot of money as a doctor, right? What's the biggest problem?

The odd hours.

No, taxes. You make so much money, you get taxed on normal income, ordinary income. Even if you're a doctor, you're saving people's lives, you're doing the most important job in our economy.

You have a doctor buddy that also runs a hedge fund, though.

And when he runs the hedge fund, he's making capital gains. But when he does an operation, he makes ordinary income.

Which to me is personally very concerning. I don't know if I'd want to go to see a doctor that does surgery that also—

To be fair, he's building a new clinic, and he has time off while he's not up and running it.

But when I heard that a surgeon was also running a hedge fund, I got a little bit worried. If I was under the knife and the market was open, I'd be a little nervous.

Only on off hours, for sure. But the doctor makes a ton of money, saves people's lives, does all sorts of good things, gets taxed at ordinary income, not capital gains. So you're taxing doctors who are saving lives at a higher rate. So my business idea is with the power of Agentik AI, we create thousands and thousands of Delaware C-corps for every doctor. So every time that there's a doctor's appointment, and you have to pay the doctor, you acquire one of their Delaware C-corps. And within that C-corp, there is on the balance sheet of that company, basically an IOU for the services the doctor must render you.

Sitting on the balance sheet.

Sitting on the balance sheet.

Yeah, it's an asset.

It's an asset. And so you can then depreciate that asset since you've acquired it. The doctor reaps capital gains, and then you cash in your—

Yeah, and they can have a sort of a farm of C-corps, so there's not even, you know, they've had them, the shares, for over a year, and they're paying the—

Exactly, long-term capital gains. And then the patient, on their way out, they sign one form, Agentik AI does its thing, winds down the C-corp, and cashes in the asset. And then, the doctor can reap capital gains. What do you think? You think we got a business there?

I think you just created vertical AI agents for tax fraud.

I asked ChatGPT and it said, this is almost certainly dead on arrival. Not clever tax optimization, more like abusive tax shelter with healthcare law side quests. The core problem is the economic substance is obvious. The patient is paying for medical care. The doctor's being paid for performing medical services. IRC 61 includes compensation for services and fees in gross income. And the IRS says you generally include everything received in payment for personal services. Wrapping the bill in a newly minted C corp does not change the income character. Well, I think we'll have to take that one to the Supreme Court.

All the way. Take it all the way. I think if we take it to the Supreme Court, there's a chance. I think you can wrap it in a prediction market, right? So every single time you go to the doctor, you say, OK, there's like 0% chance the doctor is going to do well.

Yeah.—

he bets yes, he bets yes, and then we'll see what happens.

But yes, you know, if it's a good doctor, then he'll be paid out in full.

It also adds insurance to it as well because you don't pay if the doctor doesn't do a good job.

Yeah, it's like insurance is built in, built in. So this is actually—

but are winnings on prediction markets capital gains?

I think it's still mostly unclear. So for the next few years, I think this would definitely be a good strategy.

Okay, I like it. I like it. You have to imagine because they say they don't use the word bet, they use the word Trade.

Trade.

Yeah.

Predict. So capital gains.

Trading.

Capital gains treatment, maybe?

I think that the post last year where someone was saying like, prediction markets will replace everything. If I want blueberries delivered to my house, I go to the market for blueberries being delivered to my house and I bet $15 and I bet no. Someone else, they bet yes. They deliver me blueberries. They get the $15.

Works every time. Works every single time. We keep debating this Meta question of will they launch a financially incentivized prediction market or will it purely be for social clout? You're still in the camp of there's going to be real dollars. It just feels like the first time Meta will—

The only reason I believe that is because I believe they had Meta, yeah, like was reaching out to the various prediction market providers to try to be potential like partners and/or vendors.

But I mean, partnership can mean so many different things, right? Partnership with, with prediction market can mean we'll give you ad reads or discounted ads or we'll vend your data so that if someone is on Instagram and hits the search box acting for something and Llama 5 or MuseSpark wants to answer it and surface data from a prediction market, we have the rights to do that without infringing on your copyright or something like that. Like it could be a data licensing partnership, it could be an acquisition funnel, it could be something where Meta's funneling people to the prediction markets or back. Like that whole, I read the same article that you read and it doesn't make any sense to say, Oh yeah, I want to create a competitor, so I'm gonna reach out to my direct competitors and see if they want to give me their customers. Like, why would they ever do that? That makes no sense. You see what I'm saying?

The only thing is like, the prediction markets have a history of partnering with other applications and basically being the infrastructure providers to actually place real dollar prediction.

But if you go to any, any partner, whether it's, you know, there was that whole suite of like—

No, I agree with you. Like, I generally agree that there is a possibility that there's no dollars and it's just a social platform.

CNN, CNBC, New York Stock Exchange, they all have partnerships with prediction markets. None of them have like, oh, go in the CNBC app and upload your credit card information. Like, Meta's been been on this path of like, maybe we'd like a financial relationship with our customers for decades, and like it's never really matured. There was always this idea that you would be able to like save your payment information, and then when you see a t-shirt, you could just click and one-click checkout in the Instagram app or in the Facebook app, and that never really took off for a variety of reasons.

So John, in this case, it'd be like you see an ad, and then it's like, I place a bet that there won't be a t-shirt delivered to my house.

Yes, yes.

—this is the final boss. Hopefully. Hopefully. If you place a big enough bet. The answer to your question on can doctors reap capital gains by using prediction markets instead— prediction market profits are taxable, but the character's unsettled at the moment. CFTC-regulated event contracts, like Cauchy-style contracts, there is a decent argument that they are financial derivatives rather than gambling. The CFTC describes event contracts as derivative contracts whose payoff depends on the specified event. It also granted KALSHI status as a designated contract market. So, best case, some contracts might be treated as 1256 contracts. That means marked to market annually, and gains and losses split across 60% long-term capital, 40% short-term capital, regardless of holding period. There's a chance that that's the solution. I think we might have solved it, but we'll have to use every tool in the modern financialization and technology box. The Wall Street Journal asked their readers what innovations they want to see in the next 20 years, and the answers are sort of all over the place and sort of cool.

Number 5 will shock you.

Number 5 might shock you. What innovation do you want to see in the next 20 years? Tyler, think of something. Jordi, think of something. I'll read some of what the Wall Street Journal readers wrote in. Mary Gillespie from Irving, Texas said, solar on wheels. She wants, she says, why can't cars be manufactured with solar panels integrated into the top of the vehicle? Then it could recharge the car's battery as you travel and when you park. So this is not actually a new idea. There are cars that have solar panels on the roof, but solar panels are extremely weak. And so you'd have to leave the car outside for like 5 months to charge a full electric car. Now, there have been DARPA Grand Challenge cars and specific almost science experiments vehicles where they have a huge surface area and it's this massive wing of solar panels. And I think there's a plane that's also potentially able to fly indefinitely. By having solar panels that recharge a motor and it spins. But for a normal car, a single solar panel on the roof doesn't get you much in the way of charging. But she's basically asking for stronger solar density, stronger energy density. And I'm in, I'm in. In 20 years, totally feasible. Mary from Irving, Texas. I think it's gonna happen. I think it's possible in 20 years. Anyway, traffic jam plan. I would love to see an autopilot feature. I would love to see autopilot features on cars talk to each other.

You're saying, "Uh, the chat wants nuclear cars. Just get a nuclear car." That's very Fallout.

I like the, what is that, nuclear punk or something? What was that? There's like this alternate history of like the 1960s if it was powered by nuclear, not solar punk, atom punk? Atom punk is the term. And it has all these really cool, things that could be powered by nuclear. Maybe we'll get there. Fusion is sort of promising that. We've talked to a couple of companies that do smaller fusion reactors. And they tend— Avalanche is one up in Seattle, or maybe Washington, where it's basically the nuclear reactor, but it's fusion, not fission. And it's about the size of a large battery. Battery. So you could potentially put it in a car, put it in a drone, put it in a space vehicle, keep it up there for a long time. Accordion traffic jams would be a thing of the past. What is an accordion traffic jam?

I think that's when the traffic's like— Oh, going in and out. In and out. Yeah. People are stopping and going and there's that slight delay when theoretically if everyone was moving at the perfect— Yeah.

So Morgan Clayton from Birmingham, Alabama wants Autopilot features on all the cars to talk to each other so they never do that. So they know, "Okay, I gotta speed up, I gotta slow down," and then they're all perfectly in sync. Probably doable. You need some standard or something. What are you thinking? Musical vision. This is a good one. These people are thinking outside the box. This is not like, "Oh, I want inference at 1/10 of the cost." Silicon Valley is unimaginative by comparison. Comparison. But Mary Stickner Gifford from Alpine, Utah, says she wants musical vision. I'd like to see the invention of a device to help musicians with eyesight limitations read music. There are many ways to help the sight impaired read the printed word, but pianists and others need to read music at the piano. My father's sight was so bad that he had to look at the music about 2 inches away, memorize one or two phrases, then practice what he memorized. He gave his last recital from memory at age 94. What a legend. Let's give it up for Mary Stickner Giffords' father, grandfather. Powerful. Crazy idea. Can't you just print it bigger? If you're having trouble seeing it.

You just invented the semi-truck size printer. Yeah.

I mean, you could just print like poster board and then you could see it at the piano. Also, glasses potentially solution here?

Yeah. I wonder. I mean, it might be a small market of people whose vision is so impaired that even with glasses, it needs to be— Up close?

Up close. I'm just confused by why this— the invention of a device to help musicians with eyesight limitations read music. Why are we focused on reading music? Wouldn't this be— wouldn't any technology that allows you to read music if you're hard of sight allow you to read anything?

Are we talking about a general technology? I mean, couldn't you have— couldn't you learn individual notes and then learn the order of that and have it spoken to you?

I do think maybe iPad app. iPads often sit at the piano, and you could have an iPad app that shows sort of like OneNote or TwoNote.

What about a humanoid robot that grabs your hand and bends— Puppeteers you like a marionette. And, you know, slams your hands.

Totally possible. Battery swaps. We've seen these in China where they eject them with great force. Joseph Magnati from Sarasota, Florida, has a different idea. He says in probably less than 20 years, the technology of all solid-state batteries will reach the point where the owner of an electric vehicle— I like this because he's phrasing it more as like a— pull up this video.

We have— we have Joseph—

we got the technology, we just need to make it less violent. Uh, we'll reach the point where the owner of an electric vehicle will be able to drive into a service station, buy a pack of batteries each the size of an old Phone book, okay, this is a very different technology. Yep, that one's very dangerous. Let's not do that.

Okay, every time I call Nick on our team, he's like on some crazy quest to charge his car. Every time. Yeah. So this—

He doesn't have a car.

Every hour of the day I call him, he's like, oh, I'm trying to find a charger. Like, you know, the map was wrong.

Launching my battery like a broadside cannon at the moron next to me that cut me off. Just committing seppuku with your car. Just abandon the battery, but you take out your rival. It's a crazy thing, 'cause like if you eject that battery, like you're not getting it back. It's gonna be at very least damaged. There's no way that's going back in the car. But this of course is a fire mitigation strategy. Electric vehicle batteries can burn for days on end. If you can eject them, you save the car, you save the surroundings. Things potentially and create a much more safe environment. Totally reasonable. Looks hilarious in the video. Anyway.

Nick just texted me, "Bro, the chargers in Malibu are all fake." They are? I don't know what that means. I don't even know what that means.

No worries about charging taking too long.

The imminent technology will also herald a revolution. That's probably the new, like, "I'm going to the dentist." Yeah. You know, when someone's like interviewing at other places and they're like, "Oh, I got a dentist appointment." disappointment. You're like, again? But Nick is just like, oh, I'm just charging my car. Just charging my car. It's a good excuse. I don't buy it, Nick.

I don't buy that the chargers are fake. Here's one. Ethan Glasby from South Kingstown, Rhode Island wants a trash economy. He says, put trash to work. I would love to see an at-home generator powered by bacteria that eat trash. We already have bacteria that produce ethanol as well as bacteria that break down plastic, so both in one doesn't seem like that much of a stretch. Much like solar energy, the ethanol could be used to offset heating costs and, and keep the fridge running when the power goes out. He's basically asking to burn the trash, but I guess in a more clean fashion, all while being fueled by household waste. Just maybe don't tell your your dinner guests that you are growing bacteria in the next room over. Good little piece of advice from Ethan. Beam me up. This is a great one. Harold Lewis is truly living in the year 2060 or 2600, something like that.

Or 3060.

Because Harold Lewis from Tarrytown, New York says, beam me up. I want human teleportation in the next 20 years. It should work a lot like email. In which data composed of bits and bytes—

It's email for humans.

—exists as a whole in one place, are disassembled, then electronically transmitted to another place where they are reassembled. What is DNA if not bits and bytes of human beings? Do you believe that if you were teleported in this fashion, you would remain? Would you be teleported, or is it a prestige situation not to survive?

I would almost certainly have Tyler go first. First and just like give it a spin. And, uh, well, no, the whole point is that you wouldn't be able to tell, but like I would actually die and there's a clone of me. Yeah, the you would die, like you would have no way of knowing if it was me or not because it's in every way it's like all the same data. Yeah, yeah. You might be in the pocket of big teleportation. No, it's— I'm still—

No, I'm arguing that new Tyler would be like, it worked great. And then the corpse of old Tyler who got disassembled molecule by molecule would be no longer with us and then disappeared. And that is the question in The Prestige.

You gotta go watch the movie. Well, Paul Blanco wants something else. He wants a smart spatula.

This is so much more attainable.

I'd love a cooking spatula that could tell without penetration what temperature or how thoroughly cooked a hamburger or steak is, which is rare. Do we not have like a— No. We literally have things you just—

No, no, no. You want without penetration. It has to— you just rest the spatula on top of the steak, and it tells you inside the steak what temperature it is, which is very difficult, because if you're searing or doing a reverse sear or something, the outside could be a wildly different temperature than what's going on inside. So how do you detect the temperature without penetrating the steak with a thermometer? A powerful X-ray. Imagine it's as big as that brain. Alien scanner thing. It's just like, yeah, here's your smart spatula, load it up. It's like MRIing the entire steak. That'd be a good time. Robot chefs. Oh, this is related. I want a robot that can work as an executive chef in my own kitchen, says Ray Lohr from Lacey, Washington. It could call a grocer, order ingredients, insisting on it all being upscale, and have those ingredients delivered, unpacked, load the fridge, and then use my plants to make dinner. 20 years, I think it's possible. I like that. That's right on the right level of sci-fi, seems doable. Not impossible.

For what it's worth, some of these ideas—

But also not something we can whip up in a weekend with an Arduino, like the smart coffee maker.

Some of these ideas are silly, but I'm viewing it as a very literal request for startups. Yes, yeah, no, I like it.

Quiet Inside, Cheryl Franklin from West Grove, Pennsylvania says, given the negative effects of of excessive noise such as elevated blood pressure, cardiac stress, and lower real estate values. I'd love to see improvements in building materials. For example, drywall with built-in soundproofing capabilities. Love that. Perhaps a lightweight sound blocking film.

It's called lead paint, Cheryl. Bring it back.

Don't sell lead paint. That doesn't do anything to sound. Perhaps a lightweight sound blocking film could also be developed for use in existing buildings and homes. I had a startup idea a while back. So, you know when you have a young baby, a child, and they, every time you go to change the diaper, very noisy? One of my friends put up sound panels like a podcast studio, full slat wall in the nursery. Oh, slat wall. Dual use technology. Dual use technology, for sure. And it dampens the cries so you're not so echoey, 'cause sometimes if a kid's crying in a very echoey room, it really reverberates and it— be kind of crazy.

And lead paint is dense. So in theory, any added mass can reduce sound transmission. So maybe add a little bit of lead paint to your nursery.

Lead plates, whole lead plates, maybe whole Faraday cage. But here was the idea. No one wants a slat wall in their nursery, in their baby's room. I don't know. Maybe if you're trying to breed the super podcaster, but most people don't want that. They want animals, they want, a pastoral nature vibe, some warm pastels, some nice warm tones, something welcoming for the new child who's just been brought into this world. And so, the idea was a typical sound panel, square, flat, you know, you might see the egg crate, the black material, but you paint on it an animal, you painted on it childlike, you know, paintings that you would hang on the wall. It looks appropriate, it fits the decor. Of the room, but it also has the added effect of sound treating the room so that it's less noisy when everyone's yelling. Good business? Banger. Banger.

There we go. Banger.

Got a banger. Better than C-Corps on demand for doctors? For doctors that do tax practice?

Maybe. Certainly simpler. Jennifer Smith, we have made so many advancements in so many areas, but what I want most is a way to control control outside noise. This is the superpower she wants. It would be so nice to be able to sit on my screened-in porch and enjoy listening to the birds without having to hear nearby traffic, which sounds like drag racing these days. Well, that's because it is drag racing, Jennifer. We're drag racing in your neighborhood. If sounds are waves, can't we block some? How have we not invented an open-air type of noise-canceling headphones to shield noise waves and give us some quiet spaces outdoors. Interesting.

I mean, the simple solution here is just more electric vehicles. They're quieter. You don't sound like drag racing. Obviously, there's a whole bunch of emission standards that also reduce noise from internal combustion engines, at least until you chop the exhaust and straight pipe that thing. But if you're not doing that—

Or engine swap your Model 3. Yeah.

V12. But yeah, I don't know. Is this possible? Could you just put out a big speaker that selectively noise cancels car noise but not bird noise? That seems possible.

Seems possible. I personally, I would take my home, I'd get really thick windows, ideally lead paint in the whole home.

You know, really— Even the lead paint.

Just love the lead paint. And I bring the birds inside. Yeah, I got an alternative theory.

If you got drag racers racing down your, your, your quiet, uh, bird-infested street, uh, you got to go Wile E. Coyote mode. You got to put out a fake tunnel out of bricks, paint it with some lead paint maybe, uh, the fake tunnel. The drag racer smashes into the bricks, they'll never be racing down your your street again.

Drop an anvil on their—

yeah, dropping an anvil on the car, that works too.

Well, you're gonna like this one. Okay, tell me, tell me what we got. Daniel Hansen says, first, I'd like to see a dishwasher with racks that can be raised, making it easier for tall people to load and unload them. Literally a thing that exists.

My dishwasher has that functionality.

Can you get it— can you get it to 6'8" though?

No, it doesn't go up that high, but you can adjust it.

But wouldn't that be nicer if it was at eye level for you and you could just—

I guess for the bottom rack, if it, if it elevated. Yeah, this is, this isn't— this is a contraption. This is an invention. I, I, I agree. I like this. Uh, and then Glare, smart glass for windshields that will tint itself in the spot where the sun or reflection hits it at high intensity. That's very cool, very niche. I like this. Seems very difficult to do. There are some electrochromatic windows. Have you seen, is it Porsche or maybe a Lamborghini that has it where you can twist a knob and it will progressively shade and tint certain sections of the glass? The Rivian, which the Rivian team sent me to demo this week, which has been a lot of fun, has an electrochromatic sun or moonroof, I guess, because it doesn't open. It's a moonroof, and you can change the tint, but only for the whole thing, not selectively. There are now cars that allow you to do basically stripes, like every other one, if you want half tint, I suppose. Seems a little bit of a—

I have a funny dynamic with my daily where the material to my right like down and to the right from the steering wheel is like very like glossy plastic. And so anywhere between like 2 and 4 PM, the light just hits it and just goes into your eyes. And I just, every time I think I'll put, I'll have to like take like a shirt and just cover it.

I'm thinking like, if you had like millions of nano machines to reconfigure the structure of the, of the armrest at a particular time to bounce the light slightly differently. That would be the easy solution. Yes, exactly. That would be a simple solution.

Nanobots. I love— Wait, we have to talk about the Rivian team because they sent you this demo unit to try. R1S. And they said— Quad motor. It's a demo unit, so drive it as fast as you want. You can roll it. You can roll it if you want. Like, it's no big deal. Just like really enjoy the car to the fullest. I was pretty surprised. Yeah. They said that. That was great.

It's actually an amazing car. I like it. The self-driving feature, deeply underrated. My latest hot take is that self-driving technology is commoditizing as fast as LLM technology, and that companies that take it seriously and actually prioritize it, it is not some insane tech breakthrough that cannot be implemented in other vehicles. In fact can be implemented in other vehicles. Just like we've seen Chipotle get a chatbot, we will see every car be autonomous. It will not be the domain of a single company. Funniest thing about this, you got someone who's asking for just a dishwasher that's a little bit taller. You got somebody who's asking for a smart spatula. And then you have Nolan Williams who says, "I would like to see significant developments in cancer and longevity drugs." He says, "You're sitting there, you're going around with the Wall Street Journal, and you're like, 'Oh, what did you ask for?'" Like, smart spatula. I was like, "What did you ask for?" Like, longer life, curing cancer. You're like, "What? I didn't know it was that type of question." He says, "Longer lives mean longer runway for brilliant people to bring forth their own innovations and pass on their knowledge." Wow, Nolan Williams, really, really great answer. Early detection. In the next 20 years, I would like to see how new tech and AI-driven diagnostics will improve cancer detection. This is definitely happening. Clement Lee from Atlanta, you're— we are on the right track. A focus on seniors. I would like to see something address the risk of falls. I've seen a couple of things like this, different devices that you can put in your home that detect falls either while you're wearing the device, it detects the motion. I think the Apple Watch has a device as a feature for this, but I saw another, I think it was a YC company that had essentially a smart speaker that could detect a fall in a house. Very, very cool. Robotic home aides, robots that are capable of performing home healthcare, very similar to the chef, but obviously for someone who has multiple disabilities. Matthew Weed here from Colorado Springs.

Yeah, it's gotta be, if, for anyone that's older and has been seeing like the humanoid form factor for decades now, and then now there's actually like a bunch of startups like, you know, that are investing billions of dollars into doing it, they're still probably like, "Yeah, it's just never gonna happen." I like these.

Michelle from Canton, Ohio says, "What do I wish for? A house that never needs dusting. I know, ain't gonna happen." And then there's someone else who says, Donna Helper, true doomer here, says, what tech innovations would I like to see? None. We have too much tech. Keep it real. Very good. Anyway, there's a whole bunch more, but you can go and read them. Let's move on to other stories in the news. We have our next guest joining in just a minute, but there's a narrative violation on the timeline. We got a narrative violation, folks. David Sacks is breaking Bringing it down. This is from Ara Karazian over at Ramp, chief economist, says a new study of 21,559 firms in the United States finds that companies that adopt AI tend to grow faster following adoption. Firms making the largest AI investments grow employment by roughly 10% following adoption, while low-intensity adopters see no statistically significant change. Entry-level headcount rises 12% for high-intensity adopters. Wow, that is a lot considering that the whole narrative was this will be the end of, of entry-level jobs. And that doesn't seem to be the case, at least with this study. The results counter predictions that AI adoption will lead to broad job loss. The study is based on observed AI spending from Ramp, card and bill pay data linked to Revelio Labs workforce records. And what's interesting, here is that, uh, it's clear, especially from that Wall Street Journal article, people want more things. They want more stuff. People want more output from companies. They want cheaper things. They want more of those things, whether it's movies or entertainment or cars or smart spatulas. People want more. They want more specific things. They want more niche things. They want more mass market things. They want more affordable things. And All of that requires a lot of AI and a lot of people. And so you put them all together and you start growing your business. And that's what's happening, at least in this data. Well, congrats to the folks over at Ramp on a banger article that made it into the Financial Times. You'd love to see whenever something breaks loose of the Ramp Economics blog, but you can go sign up for our Substack and subscribe to the Ramp blog. But without further ado, let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in-store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. And our next guest is in the waiting room. We have Zach LaBerge from Omen AI. He's the founder and CEO. Zach, how you doing?

What's going on? How are you guys doing?

Did I get your last name even remotely correct? No, that was perfect. Perfect. Wow. Wow. Let's go. Yes. Thank you. Anyway. Please introduce yourself.

Yeah, I'm Zach, founder of Omen AI. We do blood monitoring for mission-critical machines.

Okay, mission-critical machines. I'm thinking data centers. What do you think? Yes, sir, you'd be right.

We got our start in big mining machines, you know, like the big machines you see on site. That's where I spent a long time working there.

Where does the name come from?

It's a forecast of something to happen, whether good or bad. We obviously don't want our customers' machines to break. Yeah. And so, yeah, we'd like to go good on this.

So the lifeblood of the modern data center, there's water, there's liquid that's cooling the data center, sometimes in a closed loop flowing around, getting cooled outside the data center, being brought in, removing the heat from the chips. What's actually in that liquid? Is it just water? Is it water and something else? And then what happens, like how does it get dirty if it's in a closed loop? Why doesn't it just stay clean and fresh forever? Why do you have a job?

Why do you have a business? Yeah, that's a great question. So it depends the type of fluid. Normally it's a water-based fluid with some sort of mixture of either ethylene glycol or propylene glycol. You're seeing a big shift recently towards more like safer fluids. So propylene glycol is more preferred since it's less toxic. But— Can you drink it?

Could you have a sip?

You can definitely vape it. Both of those are heavily used in the cigarette industry. Really? Yeah, no joke. The whole VG/PG ratio is a big thing in the e-cigarette world. But good that we found a good use for it.

You're basically smoking data center when you hit a vape.

That's one way to put it. The other way is that this is the solution to the vape crisis, is that drive up the price of propylene glycol so that everyone's like, "Ah, I gotta quit vaping.

I gotta save it for the data centers." I'm gonna use that now. Every time I see someone hit an e-cigarette, it's like, "Oh really? You're smoking a data center?" Yeah.

Anyway, so what happens? How does a liquid cooling system actually degrade over time? How long does it take and what's actually going on? Yeah, so a bunch of different things can happen in the system.

You know, you see a lot of, basically infrastructure wear. So when your pumps wear, your seals wear, all of that stuff starts to contaminate the liquid itself. Okay. And so whether it's like copper or chromium from the pipes, or we're starting to see some get in. What also happens is the more heat that happens and the more wear that happens to your fluid, the more it starts to break down. So you go from this very nice high concentration of glycol to water to then that starts to degrade, and then you start to get biogrowth and other crap that gets in there. Starts to eat your chips and, you know, sit on your pipes.

Has anyone tried using beef tallow to cool a data center? I think that might be the solution. That's a real meet-in-the-middle compromise policy position, maybe. Now, what is the go-to-market like?

Most niche, niche joke of all time.

What is the go-to-market like? $31 million raised. There's some hyperscaler mega data centers centers, do they pick up the phone for you? Can you sell into them or are you working your way up with smaller data center providers, sort of a walk crawl run approach? Like what's working?

Yeah, I mean, we've just, we've been working with almost every, you know, kind of NeoCloud that's out there in some form of pilot and deployment. It's been pretty crazy. I mean, you think about like 9 months ago, folks were just starting to get these systems online and these clusters online for like, cooling and now you start to see folks who are running dozens, maybe hundreds of megawatts worth of liquid-cooled compute and they're starting to see failures. And so we kind of went from, hey, we're selling and folks don't really know what the problems are, to now everybody's like, shit, we've had failures or we're starting to see failures, our competitors are seeing failures, we need to adopt something.

Yeah, and it's probably pretty easy to underwrite because every hour that the data center is not functioning, is leaving hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of dollars on the table. What is the actual installation process? Can you just like cut the pipe and then insert your device into the flow? How long does it take to install? How big is your solution?

Yeah, so our solution just fits across the rack manifold. So we're kind of plugging in those OCP quick disconnects, mounting it if you were a GPU. So it only takes a couple minutes to install. What's great about like, you know, a cabinet is that we get power, we get, you know, network, and, you know, the fluids right there. Again, coming from industrials, that was not fun where you have every machine that has completely different integration. So, you know, we get to eat a lot less pain over on this side of things. Sure, sure.

Who did the round? What are you actually going to be spending it on? Is it just staff up? Like, what is the cash conversion cycle like for the business such that— because I imagine there's a lot of cash flowing around and they might be able to just pay you up front. How much did you raise first? Tell us, we want to hit the gong. Jordi's warmed up. Raised $31 million in Series A.

We got a bigger mallet.

Really, we got a bigger mallet.

Okay, one of the first, one of the first rounds with this mallet.

$31 million. Is that, is that hiring scientists to iterate on the product? Is it just, uh, scale up manufacturing? What are you actually putting the money to work for?

Yeah, I mean, it's really just growing up the team and growing on manufacturing. Uh, you know, when we raised our seed like 8 months ago, it was basically just me, you know, working on this problem, you know, putting sensors on excavators. And so we've kind of gone through this interesting process of going from 1 to 20, and now, you know, we're going to go from 20 to 40 folks by the end of the year. And the round was mostly like just really smart data center experts. And so It was led by a fund called Nova Ventures. Really a lot of strategic value from the data center space. A big LP in their fund is Sheryl Sandberg, who is also now an investor in us. And so we're really happy to have her on board. And then we also have like CRV and a few other awesome like kind of C-suite folks from CoreWeave, SensorWave, and some other smart places.

Is— oh, sorry, Jordi, you have something? I got another question. So Detection is only one piece of the puzzle. If you detect something earlier, you detect microbial buildup or copper leaking into the liquid cooling cycle, what does that actually, what happens downstream of that? Is it that you swap all the water out or you go fix the root issue? Like what is the technician side doing with the information that you give them.

Yeah, I mean, that's kind of the problem right now is like you have these monster labs that like they pull a sample from every major data center you can think of, they ship it off to their lab and now it's like, let me wait a couple weeks to get a result back. And normally it's pretty binary. It's like we either flush it, which is millions of dollars in downtime. I mean, you think about a loop that's like, call it 1,000 GPUs, it takes 4 to 5 hours to flush a rack. And so now that's 5,000 GPU hours that just went down just to flush it. One rack. And so monitoring it every day, you can say, okay, what are smaller chemistry changes we can make, whether it's bio shocking, whether it's adjusting the propylene glycol to water ratio. Those are all things that the CDU can do. We just can't do it right now because we have these silly lab tests.

That's very cool. Very cool. Um, is the business 100% US right now? What is the state of the data center build-out internationally?

We work with only US like NeoClouds to date. You know, some of these folks have projects all around the world. So we're looking at some projects in Europe that are run by a few of our partners, but it's been primarily US-based. We're based in San Francisco and we have an office in Orange County right now.

Amazing. Thank you so much. Great to meet you. For coming on the show. Great progress. Congratulations. And we'll talk to you soon.

Come back on soon. Thanks, Zach. Have a good one. Cheers, Zach.

Let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era unlocks seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. Um, Derek Thompson has a new newsletter out. He's breaking it down. He says there's never been a better time to get rich working alone. Is he saying the goose is not valued? I think he's saying the goose is not valued.

He's saying the goose is not valued.

He says the debate about AI and jobs often breaks down into two extreme groups, both of which have an evidence problem. On the one hand are the doomers who say AI will take everyone's job, even though unemployment remains low and the unemployment rate for prime-age Americans is still very high. On the other hand are the deniers whose insistence that AI is a worthless scam prevents them from seeing the many ways it's changing work and the economy broadly. If you want strong And if you want a strong and evidence-based take about AI and jobs, I have one for you. Quote from Derek Thompson, "There's never been a better time for workers to get rich by going independent. This is the golden age for tiny startups with big revenue." The evidence, charts 1 and 2, the number of solo entrepreneurs and tiny startups is taking off. Great news. Chart 3, there's rising evidence that these small firms are more likely to use AI and sell AI-related products, whether it's software, consulting, or design.

Chart 4— This is saying that the matter is not the eggs, it's the goose itself. Is the true value is the power to keep laying eggs? Yes. Yes. Okay, continue. I just want to make sure I understood.

Today's micro startups are becoming multi-million dollar firms faster and more frequently than any generation of firms that Stripe has measured. Today's article is about the rise of the solo act in the U.S. labor Force and its implications for the future of business. Social life, more solo entrepreneurs, even more aloneness. And America's fiscal crisis, more pass-through firms, even less tax revenue for a revenue-starved government. Interesting. So if you have a bunch of talented people that would be earning money as doctors, but then they go and they wind up starting a business, then yeah, maybe that's lower tax. That feels like that's further off. When I looked at cap gains rates. Like even if you brought cap gains in line with ordinary income, it doesn't close the deficit gap whatsoever. It's such a small portion of the tax revenue base. But interesting that he's calling that out. Would love to know more about where that trend line actually converges. The interesting thing is this a bull case for—

I don't, I don't really get the pass-through firms point. Like you still end up paying.

It wouldn't be. I don't know if it's pass-through. It might be. So I guess in a mature C corp, the company is paying taxes and then also the employees are paying taxes. And so this is why most people don't set up a C corp if they're just a solo entrepreneur because they don't want to pay corporate taxes and then also personal taxes on their income.

Yeah, but like one way or another, you're going to have to—

No, no, it's actually like double taxation. That's why you use an LLC, because you pass it through and the income that you distribute is not taxable at the corporate level.

I know, I know. But I'm saying like overall, overall, the money is being taxed one way or another. By their flowing to individual—

Currently, like a just a Meta employee, Meta pays their taxes. And then the Meta employee pays income taxes. If that Meta employee spins out, starts an LLC, and then is making the same amount of money that they were making at Meta, the overall number of dollars that's going to the government is lower. That's what he's identifying. Now, do I think this is a crisis just yet? It would need to go a lot further, I think, to get there. But I understand, like, the math that he's laying out. It is a, it is a risk factor. But is this a bull case for coworking spaces? The rise of solo entrepreneurship.

Nothing is bullish for coworking spaces to me. It's rough.

Why is it bad? Why has no one been able to make a good coworking space?

'Cause I think it's just nice to have your own space. It's the same, I mean, the same logic would be like, why don't they make an, You know, why don't they make an apartment building where you get a tiny little, I mean, they do do this.

You're like, why don't they have a pod?

Yeah, yeah, I'm basically, I mean, it's basically like, imagine if you rented your apartment and it was actually like as big as like one.

Why don't they make like a smaller version of a house that you can rent that's like in a building with other, other like of these mini houses?

I'm just saying like a 20, a 10-foot by 10-foot room that you rent and then all the amenities are.

You're just telling me that you would have I would happily live in the Union Bomber shed. You were saying that it's the pinnacle of lifestyle.

I did think the picture of it in stores looked cool.

But it needed a slight solidifying.

But the difference there is like that shed on the right property would be very cool. That's true, that's true. But the property is sort of an amenity. Yes.

People don't feel that way about going into the office. They don't feel like, oh, this is a coworking— like, people feel worse about a coworking space than they do— like, your sentiment is correct. Many people feel this way about coworking spaces, that they are unproductive or annoying. But people don't feel that way about going to a campus with a bunch of buildings and a bunch of— even like cubicles or like desks that are pretty close to each other. Shared effort. But it's everyone's space. On the same team. Shared culture. Yeah. So, you need to create a kiretsu of every company in the coworking space potentially. I don't know. We'll figure it out. But fortunately, we have our next guest from Etched in the waiting room. We're very excited for the launch of this company. I did an interview with Gavin. What was that, 2 years ago or something like that? You were laying out the idea. Idea for this company very early on. You made a ton of progress. Take us through the story. Begin at the beginning. Introduce yourself first. Well, I'm Gavin.

I'm the CEO and one of the co-founders at Etched. Yeah. And we are building rack-scale inference hardware. And what that means is that we're building the full system. That is chips, boards, platforms, racks, and clusters. As well as of course software and importantly the production lines. Wow. To build those things at scale.

So the original viral soundbite that got so much attention around your company was the idea that you were going to bake the— you were all in on the transformer. You said AI will advance, but the transformer is here to stay. That architecture will be here to stay. And so, We are going to fully commit to the transformer and we're going to sort of etch that into the chip. How real is that today? Has that— that thesis feels like it's been borne out very well, but it feels like you've added a lot of new strategies to the portfolio. How are you thinking about the bet that you made 2 years ago?

We looked at a lot of early research directions and we realized the key things that models need are way more compute. And way faster memory. If you think about inference, there's two key parts: pre-fill and decode. For pre-fill, it's a compute-bound problem. You need to have more flops, more operations per second on each of your chips. Yeah. And on our GPU, the bottleneck's actually thermals. You can't really run our GPU more than around 50% of what it could theoretically do, or it'll melt. So we're introducing a new technology today called low voltage inference to try to solve this problem. And what that is, is you bring the voltage of the chip down dramatically, which allows us to have way, way better efficiency in terms of how much power is drawn per unit of math, and thus fit way, way more flops onto the chip.

Why can't—

pausing there, why can't you supercool the chips, liquid nitrogen or dry ice or something to make it colder so that you can run it at 100% power? It's a great question.

If you look on the internet, there's some videos of folks trying to super overclock CPUs using these things on them. The problem is you actually can't go a whole lot above where they're meant to operate. For example, original CPUs can go ahead and do 4, 4.5 gigahertz. I think the world record's on the order of 8, 9 gigahertz with the liquid cryogenic helium. And the problem is you have to get the heat actually out of the chip, that you can't physically go touch the transistors with your liquid nitrogen. You have to go ahead and go through the silicon itself, and that by itself has a good deal of thermal resistance. Unfortunately, there's no way around it. You have to solve the power problem if you want to run inference.

So low voltage, and then the other side of the equation, take us through that.

Well, for decode, it's all about bandwidth. And it's not just bandwidth on a chip, but bandwidth across your cluster. And that's why we have this technology, what we call cluster-scale memory. It reduces the amount of time it takes to communicate from one chip to another dramatically. And as a result, we can go use all of our HBM and HBM bandwidth and SRAM and SRAM bandwidth in our scale-up domain as a single coherent pool. And that means if you're a user, you can go get much faster tokens per second speed while still keeping your costs low. Mm-hmm.

How are you and the team dealing with various bottlenecks across the supply chain?

How did you get TSMC to work with you as a startup?

TSMC has been a fantastic partner to us. We are so, so grateful. And one of the great things about them is they're very technical. You can just sit down and say, hey, we believe this will be a big market for these reasons, and we need your help to figure out how to go co-design transistors that can run at a much lower voltage. And that was a particularly challenging piece. As you bring the voltage down, manufacturing gets way, way tougher. We would not have been able to do it without a great fab partner.

Where else are there bottlenecks right now that you're experiencing?

I think all across the chip supply chain, there has to be much more build-out. People don't realize how big of a market inference is going to be. Right now, only a couple million people have access to the frontier models. And those are going to have to get deployed to 8 billion people across the globe. And that's not even counting agents that exist already. And will exist in the future. There need to be way, way more tokens produced. And that requires both much bigger assembly lines, many more factories, and some new technology.

2 years ago, you predicted that AI would not kill everyone within 2 years. You were correct about your prediction. How are you feeling about the, the general prospect of doom?

I mean, I don't understand it. I think right now is an incredibly exciting time to see all the breakthroughs that are getting made. Things like the unit distance conjecture, stuff I learned about in college, and to see that now get cracked by an AI model, man, what a time to be alive. And we are still so early. Models will keep getting smarter and like Man, I could not be more excited for the moment right now. Yeah.

So what is the— why was like now the time to come out of stealth? You clearly have had no issues getting customers. Sounds like there's a billion-dollar pipeline that you're working through. But what made you decide to talk about the business today and what are you hoping to get out of this little media tour?

It's all about talent. I really strongly believe that our company's best asset is the people we've been able to hire. And I'll give a couple of examples. Look at our platform team. Around half of them are from NVIDIA. Or if you look at the VP responsible for designing that thing behind me, that used to go run NVIDIA's HGX and DGX programs. That made up most of their revenue for a hopper in Blackwell. And people like that just move the needle so much for a business, especially in a hard space like semiconductors. And not to mention, we're now working on our roadmap. Finally, I have Gen 1. If you want to go do multiple generations in parallel and take really big, ambitious tech bets, you need the best of the best.

Are you a car? A car? Are you a car? There's a debate around whether modern large chip companies are interchangeable with one another, whether the moats around the software—

Like if you have a logistics business, you can buy trucks from multiple vendors.

I can get a new car tomorrow. In fact, I am demoing a new car right now. I got in it, I connected my phone over the Bluetooth, and it works just like any other commodity product. Uh, that has not been the pitch in semiconductors for years. For years, we've been told about moats, about how complex the software is, how hard it is to write efficient software that runs on a particular chipset, that you had to be all in on one ecosystem. And with the advent of agentic coding and insanely high rewards for figuring out how to run on other ASICs or other chipsets, it feels like chip companies are becoming more car-like. How do you think about your moat as you go into the future?

Well, I would say a Toyota and a Ferrari are not the same thing. You look at the speed gap there, you see what? A 2x. And I think chips similarly is very, very meritocratic. If you're able to go out and be faster, you can go command a huge premium, just like, uh, the fastest cars can. The difference here, the way cars work under the hood is very similar. There are no more 10x to be had in cars. I think in chips, over the next couple of years, there's going to be a lot more technical innovation.. And I'm very excited to go ahead and show the world, not just the current gen, what the roadmap for these things looks like. We believe we can go push low voltage inference and cluster scale memory much further and get even bigger unlocks here.

So next time you get that question, say, I'm not a car, I'm a Ferrari. Doesn't make any sense.

So is the source— It makes perfect sense, John.

It doesn't make sense.

Is the source of strength, is the reason that you will have positive margins in the future intellectual property, trade secrets, patents? Like what is the shape of owning that technology and not just being copied and commoditized by other chip companies?

I think it just comes down to those things matter. We of course do trade secrets and patents, but you need to build a lot of products And you have to go out and have really great economics as well. Yeah, being faster isn't enough. You have to go be able to do that at a price people can afford. You see folks stretched thin today, and that's why we think about doing the thing. We want to go do the whole hard thing. That means building not just the chip but the board, the platform, the rack, the cluster, and especially the production.

What is the last any AI innovation or product development that has updated you on your strategy, if anything? I'm thinking about the transformer-based LLM, obviously a huge moment, but then we got diffusion models and image models. We got agentic software that requires CPUs and, and other memory constraints. You got reasoning models. Has there been any development where you you've either said, I'm glad we're on the path we're on and we need to double down on that, or we need to slightly adjust our strategy to deliver the best performance for the latest and greatest use case?

Well, the thing that's been the most exciting for me has been seeing the models get so big. Mm-hmm. Get so big and demand be so large. Yeah. When you think about economies of scale, it all just comes down to, How much is there to go serve? And the market's relatively small and justified small factory, but not some gigantic mega cluster. And with what we're seeing right now with these many, many trillion parameter models, with these quadrillion token demands that we're seeing that are increasing every month, there has never been a better time to go ahead and invest in those economies of scale.

That's great news. Last question, the customer, are you focused on serving hyperscalers, the frontier models, neo clouds, open source models, all of the above? How do you think about that? All of the above.

We want to go out and do is build tech that you can go ahead and see that'll make your tokens faster and your tokens cheaper. And that means working with the full stack.

Well, congratulations. Talk about the round.

Who participated? We have a gong, and it would be an honor to hit it on your behalf.

Well, I am blown away at the quality of investor we've been able to get on the cap table. Folks like Jane Street, folks like— Folks like FNTech Alliance, folks like those partners. Yes, indeed.

Yeah, it is, it is a very interesting, uh, group. I mean, obviously a lot of, uh, a lot of traditional venture capital firms that focus on technology.

I was, I was ready to do one hit for Jane Street, one for HRT, one for Two Sigma, one for Jump, one for Scott, one for Peter Thiel, one for Hinton, Scott Wu, Patrick O'Shaughnessy. What a great— Zach Dell. Absolutely. I think the people are just fantastic. Yeah, Maki, Kareem. Wow, this is the best, best party round of the year. You really put together a good list. It's a Coachella poster.

Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us.

Yeah, so great to meet you, and congratulations to the whole team on the launch. Uh, looking forward to the next conversation.

We'll talk to you soon. My pleasure, guys. See you.

Thanks for having me. Goodbye. Great.

Cheers. Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. You know who won't be raising capital at the New York Stock Exchange anytime soon? These fly-by-night peptide companies. Because the peptide battle has commenced, says Jessica Adams. FDA recommends against adding all 7 peptides under review to the 503 bulks list. Is that for bulking up? Is that a list of things that get you bulky? No, I think it's things that cannot produced in bulk, but the FDA has effectively delivered a blow to BPC-157 for ulcerative colitis, KPV for wound healing, TB500 for wound healing, MOTS-C for obesity and osteoporosis, and emediltide and DSIP for opioid withdrawal, C-Max and Epi— talion? You can tell I do not know my peptides by the way I'm pronouncing these. Anyway, um, lot of people are fans of this stuff. Uh, sorry if this is a dark day for you. A lot of people are in the camp that the FDA serves a functional purpose here to review these things and make sure they're effective and safe for public health and...

Then It's a blow for them. Ben texted, we're just about to take all of these now. Yeah, a lot of people are going to be upset here. I think a lot of people would also say that this is like maybe good if, you know, there could be some very real downsides with, with any of these. I was texting with a friend in health care this morning. I said, "What does this mean for peptides?" He said, "Tonso." And I said, "Can't sell anymore?" He says, "Unless RFK overrides the FDA, not legally." And then I said, "But they were already in a gray area. Now they are explicitly banned?" He said, "They've been banned other than research use and haven't been enforced for human use." So they've been banned, but there hasn't been enforcement. Justification for taking them off the banned list was to kill the gray market. A lot of people have been taking peptides from random websites online. They either don't even have active ingredients, or they're contaminated, or yeah, they're effectively just nothing. And he says, I think the real companies that are, were moving into the space net new in anticipation of this changing are in a real pickle. So— pickle. Yeah, so we'll see. They now face a newly constituted Pharmacy Compounding Advisory Committee, making the July meeting one to watch. That will be July 23rd to 24th. Hmm. So we will keep following.

Well, in other good FDA news, nicotine pouches finally got MRTP, which is Modified Risk Tobacco Product. Zyn is the first one to go, and Zyn can now market and put on the label and advertise that it is better for you than cigarettes, which is such a mild claim, but it's huge for the industry. If you know what this means, it's an extremely high bar. They have to run a bunch of tests and whatnot. Uh, every product in the category currently says, "This product contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chemical." But the products for ever have not been able to say this is better for you than smoking, which is the obvious benefit that every company wants to make. They want to make that claim. There's a ton of literature out there. A lot of it's from Sweden. A lot of it's international. The FDA has to review it on a per-product basis to make sure that your particular product maps to the data, because the Sweden data that everyone points to is about snus, which is a tobacco product. It's not exactly the same as, as white nicotine pouches that actually don't have tobacco in them. But anyway, the FDA has to review each one. They reviewed Zyn and they gave them the MRTP approval. It's huge news for the industry. It's very good news. It's good news for everyone, I think. Anyway, the other news is that Nvidia and Eli Lilly are building an AI lab, $1 billion lab for drug discovery in San Francisco. Eli Lilly CEO Dave Ricks talks about their data advantage. Some scale biotech, bioplayers are just training on public data, but there's only 4,000 ever-approved drugs. Lilly alone has 3 million failed drugs. We're learning from failure, which is interesting. So a lot of big, a lot of big talk about the next biotech boom. There's acquisitions going on. Anthropic bought a company. There's all sorts of predictions about the impact that AI will have on bio, whether that will accrue to the labs or the biotech companies, who knows? We'll figure it out. Maybe both, maybe everyone. Hopefully lots of consumer surplus. But we have Aaron Bolly from Monogram in the wheel room. Let's bring him in to the team. Aaron, how are you doing? What's happening?

Thanks, guys. It's great to be here with you guys.

Finally to have you. Finally. Long overdue. Talk about the launch today, talk about the fundraise, introduce yourself a little bit, tell us about Monogram.

Okay, so I'll try to do it in a different order. Whatever you want. I'm Aaron, I'm the, I guess most people know me from the two other companies I started, Udemy, the online education platform, went public. Hopefully most people know it by name. I started Common Health, big tech-enabled healthcare company. And now the new company Monogram, we have been very stealthy about it. Intentionally. Essentially, Monogram, which we launched today, just like I explained 5 minutes ago. Congratulations. Thank you.

It's a general-purpose AI. Congratulations.

Sorry, now we can continue. Okay.

So, Jordi's on one today. Yes, continue.

Yeah, it's a general-purpose AI application for everyday use. Yes. But what makes it different is with other AI applications, you usually have a chat-based interface. Yes. You ask a question, you write some text, you get some text back. Yes. With Monogram, you ask something and then you get a complete visual interface back. Yes. It's essentially like a, like a It's like when you think about computers had command line interfaces back in the '80s and then we switched to graphical user interfaces where everything became visual, interactive. To be frank, we will be the first company to do this in AI.

I love it. I've been seeing glimpses of this with ChatGPT images. So I wanted to know the rate of air conditioning in every European country 'cause there's this whole debate over France. They don't have air conditioning there. I wanted to know how France stacks up. And instead of asking for a text output, I just said, go get the data and then generate me an image, a graphic of that. Of course, it's not interactive. It's not HTML-based. It could be so much richer. And people are seeing glimpses of this with vibe coding, but it hasn't come to the consumer. So I'm interested to know, have you found a beachhead? Have you found a killer use case? I feel like there's probably—

Yeah, I guess assuming every single person listening uses AI 20 times a day, even if it's just casual asking questions, et cetera, what are the kind of prompts that you would traditionally take to a normal language model that people should try with Monogram? Yeah.

Yes. So first of all, if I explain, This is one of the things that when you see it, it becomes very obvious. But it's hard to sometimes describe. But the big difference is we generate a visual interface response in roughly 1.5 seconds. You ask a question and you immediately start seeing something. So it is not a do this work, make some research and get me back with a dashboard or report. It is I ask a question, I lift my finger, from the audio button. And then, like, in a second, you start seeing the— that's really cool. So what we— to be honest, we didn't know what use cases would really work with this technology best. But what we realized as, like, testing the application ourselves is it works best for the, like, very, very simple day-to-day use cases. Like, I, for example, say, okay, the Oscars are live, so which Which movies were nominated for Oscars this year? Can I find something to watch and maybe something from a South American director? Just really open-ended questions like where do I eat? Is there an In-N-Out on my way to the airport from here? So all like this day-to-day questions. And then what you realize is like, yes, if you ask the same question to ChatGPT, it'll also ask that. But behind the scenes, We are using OpenAI's model, but we do it quite a bit on top of it. I'm sure to make this response very interactive. Like you get information architecture, right? You get a lot of interesting visuals and when you tap on something, you get even more information, right? So it's really just a day-to-day search discovery, basic questions. That's where we actually start seeing the most like kind of enjoyment ourselves. Is it—

so it's voice first? Yes. And talk about that. I mean, John was like such a— is such a power user of voice. I was a laggard, but now I don't even like to prompt without voice because I can get a much better result if I just talk for 20 seconds and then give it a bunch of context, and then it'll give me back closer to whatever. I'll answer this from first principles.

I'm a first principles person. Talking is a lot faster than typing. Roughly 4 or 5 times more information can be conveyed with the audio per second. But the problem with voice is when you do voice mode, you have to listen. Listening is very slow. Listening is maybe 4 times slower than reading. That's interesting. But if you You think about them, there's something even faster than reading. That's just seeing. So, if you can, the fastest, the most, I would say, frictionless experience for me with AI is voice in and then visual output back. Yeah. Except when you have visual output, sometimes you can tap on things, right? Tapping on a card is a lot faster than saying, can you get me more details about this thing, right?

Totally.

So, we support every form factor. But we design everything around audio as the primary input, camera will be the secondary, and keyboard will be a third input. They all work well. Really, in the output, we do have some audio output. We have a short answer, but maybe 90% of the information is conveyed through the visual interface. And you're getting a short answer with a text-to-speech back.

Yeah, so cool. I wish I could— bet on how quickly Apple tries to buy you, because I'd be like, term sheet by end of week.

So yeah, I mean, this is your third huge company. Like, do you have— I mean, I guess it's like, where do you want to go with this? What are your aspirations? Because you've checked a lot of the boxes on the entrepreneurship journey. But then I'm also interested in like, it's— you're not building the same business 3 times in a row. There are certain founders that do that very successfully, and it's impressive. But between Udemy, Carbon, and now this, very different companies. So what lessons, what strategies are you actually taking through the 3 companies that you feel like, oh yeah, I'm running— you might not think it, but I'm running the Carbon playbook in this particular area, or I'm running the Udemy playbook here a little bit.

So the, the common thing between those three companies was that, like, what my brain gets obsessed on is how do I make something that is complicated and has high entry barrier and make that accessible to more people. Yeah. With Udemy, when everybody was focused on higher education, online degrees, we focused on how do I learn Photoshop, like in a week. So it was the most mainstream of the education companies. And that's how we got a ton of success. And the difficult part was not being overly caught up with what was hot in Silicon Valley at that time. With Carbon Health, when everyone was going after premium, cushy-ass healthcare, we were more focused on how do we make healthcare that everyone can access better. And I think here right now, the focus on AI has been the coding agents and how to make really complex enterprise workflows work. But what I'm really obsessed on is if I make AI a little bit easier to use, it'll just benefit more people. So it's just like, again, there's not a ton overlapping, as you said. Like, I also do like a new challenge for myself. So I do like rotating things over. And I would say healthcare was difficult. So It is nice to have software only.

Pure play consumer app. This is expert mode.

Yeah, it is. Exactly. How are you thinking about image models, diffusion models? I saw a really cool demo for something that looked like a website, but in fact was real-time diffusion. You probably know the one I'm talking about. It looked like a sort of a beige cityscape, and you could sort of zoom in, and it it was all being rendered in real time. Is that something you see yourself implementing in the future or is it a distinct different arc of the technology tree?

So the answer is yes and no. So I don't believe AI outputting pixels as the primary form factor, that sounds cool. Like maybe 10, 20 years later, it might be the reality, but in the near future, near term, you'll want something that's more of a representation of the user interface as a layer. So I think pixels is probably not the right output medium. But diffusion models, I'm obsessed with. So every time a new diffusion model comes in, we say, oh, is this the day we switch from LLMs to diffusion-based models? Because that sounds like the right architecture for what we are doing. They haven't been realistic enough. We have been trying everything. So essentially the way Monogram works is there's one major model because when you ask a question, there is language in the interface. So you just need a language model or something model that can do language. But then there's a lot of maybe 20, 30 parallel things that are happening at the same time. So it's a very different agent architecture. So we do have a We have some of our own models, some fine-tuned models, but one big one. So I think eventually that main model will be diffusion-based, not LLM, like transformer-based, but not today. I think that their tech is still not good enough to be able to handle this.

Yeah, maybe in the future. Super cool. In the App Store now, iOS exclusive, Android as well.

What do you What are you thinking? It's iOS exclusive. We'll be working on web application, desktop, Android. But part of the idea here is because the entire interface is built by AI, we are just building clients. Yeah. Like this will become the most cross-platform.

I imagine it has to be so fast, especially in the age of vibe coding, like porting has to be so simple now. Instagram took like 5 years to get to Android. I imagine you have a shorter timeline, so good luck for the—

Tell us about the round. Yeah, tell us about the round.

So the round was led by DST and Lux. It was a $40 million seed round. Woo!

You already hit the gong for the launch, and you hit the gong for the round as well. It's a double gong day. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

Very cool. I'm super excited to play around with that.

I'd love to have you back on the show and chat more soon. Have a good one. Yeah, great to see you, Ryan. Yes, thank you. Cheers. Let me tell you about Figma. If you're designing the next banger app, get in Figma. Agents meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context. And our next guest is in the waiting room. We have Larsen Jensen from Harpoon Ventures. He's the founder and general partner.

How you doing? What's up, boys? Good to see you. Thanks for having us.

What's happening to you? I'm obsessed with the portfolio. We can go into that, but introduce yourself first and get us up to speed on what the fund is doing and what the news is today. Sure.

Jordi, John, great to be here. Thanks for having me. My name is Larsen Jensen. I'm the founder and GP at Harpoon Ventures, early-stage venture capital firm focused on investing in technology in the national interest of the United States and our allies when appropriate. Today, we're announcing that we raised a $155 million fund for it. So, fired up for the gong. Wish I was there to see it in person.

We wish you were here. This new mallet setup we have, it really, like, you just feel the full force of the gong coming right back at you. That's sick.

I felt it on my end. Thanks, guys.

Good, good. Harpoon Ventures, great name, great name. Thank you. Take us back. If it was necessary, would you invest in a company that was using whale blubber to power data centers? Is this even a question?

Of course I'd do that. Like, if it's necessary, it might be necessary. We need all the energy we can get.

So let's go. We do. No, it's great. It's a great name.

This is the show I'm on. So, yeah. Take us back in time.

Give me a little bit of the journey to venture capital, because you have a you have a fascinating— you actually have the non-traditional background that so many VCs wish they had when they say, I went to Stanford and then I worked at Google before becoming a venture capitalist.

Well, a lot of these guys say they're an operator, you know, in the background of what operator meant, a special operator in the career that I came from.

Insane stolen valor. It's interesting.

Yeah, it's interesting to hear. When I showed up to Silicon Valley, everyone's like, oh, I'm an operator. I'm an operator. I'm like, I don't know if it's the same kind of operator that I was used to, but I guess different, you know, Different ecosystems have different terms, uh, which is fine. Yeah, um, definitely. Sure, sure.

The real operator should start saying like, yeah, I was an employee. I was an employee. Yeah, yeah, basically. That's cool too, you know. That's cool. Just trade. Just trade. Exactly.

So yeah, grew up in the Central Valley of California. My parents are almond farmers. Uh, went down to USC. Fortunately, was pretty good at swimming and worked pretty hard at that. Brought me to two Olympic Games. '04 and '08. I got a silver in '04, bronze in '08. '08 is where Phelps got his 8 golds. So, you know, if there's anything that's common about my trajectory is I'm sort of like a nothing compared to the people that work in the industry or in the careers that I'm in. Had to compete against guys like Phelps and Lochte and that whole generation when I was swimming. And then similarly, you know, moved into the SEAL Teams thereafter, wanted to serve my country in a different way than just serving on the playing field. But do so on the battlefield. Felt like I had the, you know, hopefully the courage, I guess we would see some of the determination and the hard work to make it through SEAL training, which fortunately did. And then deployed in combat to Afghanistan, had the opportunity to be an early adopter to Palantir. They told us we were an early customer, but you never really know what the government, what the truth is, you know, across history. But they said we're early adopters to Palantir, and I was just mind-blown by the capability, and that gave me the tech bug. Um, so decided to apply to Stanford, and if I got in, I'd move up to the, to the Valley, and if I didn't, I'd do another rotation in the SEAL teams. Fortunately got in. Um, you did go to Stanford? Traditional background. Traditional background.

Traditional background. Wait, I got— how was, uh, I was a DEI hire up at Stanford, uh, at the time. How was, how was Bud as like an Olympic medalist swimmer? Like, was it—

it was fucking hard. It was really hard.

Okay, was there, was there any points where you're like, ah, this is kind of easy? Yeah, I feel like I'm just kind of—

well, yeah, the swimming was, was a piece of cake. Like, you know, as you can imagine, I was literally the fastest— I'm still the fastest American of all time in the 400-meter freestyle. So if it wasn't easy for me, we'd have a real problem. Um, so it was, it was, it was easy. I don't say that brag. I'm just saying you asked the question, like, you know, was it easier or harder? That's what I got my ass kicked in, like everything else.

So what was the hardest part then?

For me, it was boats on heads, which if you've seen the videos, you're like carrying these like inflatable boat rafts and running around and stuff like that. It looks like they'd be in a background, like a backyard pool. Trust me, they're not. These things are a couple hundred pounds and you're carrying those on your head for weeks on end. In the case of Hell Week, you pretty much always have them on your head. And so that was brutal. So anything that was impact-oriented, I'm still feeling today. I think a lot of guys are. I mean, when you're loaded up and rucking around the mountains, I mean, you're doing so in full kit wearing 200 pounds almost of gear on top of what you're already— whatever your existing body weight is. So it's brutal. And I was definitely not the best at it. Wasn't the best swimmer, wasn't the best SEAL, but was fortunate to be part of the community.

That's awesome.

So take us from Stanford to venture. What were some of the first investments? What was the strategy back then?

Where'd the money come from? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, my venture career sort of started pre-Stanford. I got lucky and got an internship at Andreessen Horowitz, which was awesome. Great learning opportunity to go there pre-GSB. Similarly did between years over at Lightspeed of the GSB. And then after Lightspeed, had the opportu— or after the GSB, had the opportunity to go to Lightspeed for about a year. I just really had this, like any crazy founder might have, like this harebrained idea or a gap in the market, something you're so passionate about you can't sleep without. And that was me in terms of investing in technology for the national interest. And at the time, there really wasn't a fever for this. Now there certainly is, thank God. But at the time, there really wasn't. And I sort of had this idea that's maybe not that novel, but I effectively said, hey, what if we could create a private sector In-Q-Tel? Wouldn't that be pretty cool? And that's what I set out to do. So fortunately pitched the GPs and the team over at my former two employers at Andreessen and Lightspeed, and they're our first LPs ever in Harpoon to sort of go out there and start taking it, taking that mission to the market. So that's what we've been doing. When back in 2018, when we started, the market was obviously very, very different. Most of what we did was very much known as dual use at the time. That meant very much enterprise technology, and we would try to work with them to help them break into a government market that these founders didn't really know existed, but we and our team knew existed from our lived experience, I guess you could say, for cybersecurity tools or next-generation data infrastructure, what have you, for autonomous, autonomy platforms, all the things that people sort of like know today are applicable to the government market. But back then it was super faux pas, man. It was crazy. I felt like I was gonna get laughed out of town. It almost was. And so now we're doing much more defense-focused things because I think the founder ecosystem provides for it. I think that we've evolved along with the ecosystem. At the time, there really wasn't very much national security or government-focused, you know, companies or engineers or talent. Now there's a ton. I jokingly say that I— go ahead.

Go for it. Go for it.

No, I was going to say, I used to go to these conferences that the government would put on, you know, in and around the Pentagon and Crystal City and all these places. As a venture guy, and like, there'd be like nobody there. There'd be like no, like, high-horsepower entrepreneurs. There'd be no other venture firms. And I'm like, man, what am I doing going to these places? There's nothing for me to invest in. Um, and, you know, ultimately now that's all changed, and I'm so happy about that. We're going— we're celebrating our nation's 250th birthday this coming weekend. Hopefully all of you are celebrating the Fourth in, in traditional good fashion. Um, and, you know, I think that now to see the ecosystem what it is, is just tremendous. I'm super fired up about it.

Where, how are you thinking about early-stage defense? Like, are you still, are there still pockets of white space and opportunity? It feels like the boom of defense. Or do you really need to be doing like hardcore R&D? Like, it seems like the last 5 years there was an opportunity to do hardcore R&D, like actually new technology, or just like deliver a capability that's necessary and kind of leverage existing technologies and just deliver a great product for a need. Whereas it feels like there's less and less like, you know, we have a bunch of great maritime-focused companies now doing kind of every major category. So does a new company need to do like, you know, real R&D and come up with something totally novel or compete with existing, or is there still like pockets where you're like, there needs to be?

I think both are true. Like one, I want the discombobulator. I wanna invest in that. I don't know exactly what it is, but Trump came out with the discombobulator and said that that's what helped in Venezuela. And like, I wanna find the next version of that. And I wanna back that technology. Similarly, I have a buddy of mine that we might need some R&D on that. Also have a buddy of mine friend of mine who I went to OCS with. I'll keep his name off the tape here, just, you know, but he testified to Congress on the UAP phenomenon, which I know you guys are deep in as well. And I texted him not too long ago, and I'm like, hey man, we got some alien tech. I'm ready to go. All the rest of this stuff is like, I don't know, not really doing it for me. And so we had a quick call, but, you know, didn't, didn't end up going anywhere. So if you got any founders out there that are, you know, want to reverse engineer— listen, I got a signed poster of Bob Lazar in my office. I'm super fired up. I go deep on this. Um, so Jesse Michaels guy, yeah, listen, I, I, I dive into anything you'll give me. There we go. Send me some books, send me whatever you got, I'm ready. But like, ultimately, I think that there's plenty of meat on the bone for other novel capabilities to come up and get funded. Um, I think for us as a venture firm, I used to superimpose my view of what should be created on the ecosystem, and we've effectively stopped doing that and just tried to be We're good judges of founders that are high octane and have a huge vision. And when we're surprised and we believe them, we want to back them as early as possible, which is another evolution of the firm. When we started, I don't think we had the brand, the reputation, the credibility or the credibility to credibly lead some of these, these rounds. Now I think we do. And we launched our Black Flag Accelerator, which is helping us go earlier, creep into doing more pre-seeds and seed stage investments where we've let a a lot through that. And so I think the future is bright for entrepreneurs, you know, chipping away at a variety of different problems.

You're wearing a flag on your hat. It's the Stars and Stripes, beautiful American patriotic flag. Black flag, I associate with pirates. They're not on my team.

Why, why black flag? Well, I should have wore my other hat, so I got the Jolly Roger over, uh, the red, white, and blue. I should have wore that one for you guys, you know, figuring that you'd bring that up.

But are they Are they on our team? Have we recruited the pirates? How does it work? Yeah, we've recruited them. They're on our team now. Okay, okay, I got it.

This is an American pirate. I like it. Pirate hybrid. I mean, if you look—

I mean, we thought about this for a while, and if you look at all the squadron patches that are out there for aircraft squadrons, you know, various SEAL teams, special operations, etc., like, they all have some pirate-themed, you know, uh, insignias. So it's actually not all that Believe it or not, we were pretty thoughtful about the name Harpoon and the name Black Flag. We actually thought about the pros and cons, and some people might not like it, but you can't, you can't win over everybody. I like—

tell us, how did you— what is your overall take as an Olympian on, uh, the Enhanced Games? How did you process it? Uh, if, you know, if this was like before your venture career and you were done with the, you know, Olympics, would you have considered going in there. I want, I want your whole take.

You know, I, I should have tracked it more closely. You guys are probably much more better read on this than I am, but on the swimming, I, I, you know, I believe somebody entered that wasn't enhanced at all and still won and did a best time, I believe in the backstroke, um, which is interesting. And I saw some jokes on Twitter about people saying like, oh, these guys are already enhanced, you know, they don't need to be even more enhanced. And I think that's just a lot of BS. Like, you know, we get drug tested so so much, it's insane. We could go a whole offline segment on, you know, what it's like to have the drug testers show up and, you know, watch you go to the restroom, take your blood, and all of this stuff unannounced. You have to fill out where you're going to be for literally a quarter in advance, down to the day. And if you miss 3 tests in a row, it's the same as being, you know, being a positive test. So, um, you know, I don't know. I mean, I think that you might not be attracting to the enhanced games the right athletes right now. I don't know else to put it. I don't know if they're the gold medalists, silver medalists, bronze medalists that are showing up.

Yeah. Um, yeah, and so it's maybe they like— a gold medalist is still gonna outperform the like number 8 guy who's taking—

totally, I would whip those guys' asses for sure.

Like, I mean, like, it's not just me, it's like anybody who's like—

who medals, anybody who medals, like there's a big drop-off between like medaling and sort finaling and then not finaling. And so, yeah, I would have sort of welcomed it. I think an interesting aspect of the enhanced games would be like, let's, let's load these guys up and put them head to head with, you know, whoever the modern day— Katie Ledecky. Let's see if they can beat Katie Ledecky.

I mean, that was part of the interesting production of the enhanced games was that it did tell you something about the real games and that, and that there is a gap there. And that was in— and if you look at it as like a science experiment, It was a cool experiment that we got to run, and I think we all learned a little bit from it, even if it wasn't this, "Oh yeah, obviously with the drug regimens, they just blow everyone out of the water," which is sort of what some people expected, but that wasn't really the message of that campaign.

I know, it was a really cool experiment and great to see.

Yeah, anyway, thank you so much. You're the man.

Where are you based? San Diego, California, but I'm on the road. I'm actually in New York right now, but I'm back in San Diego quite frequently.

All right. Fund 5. Come on, come on live, hang out.

We'll come back, boys. Thank you so much for having me.

We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. Our next guest is Ricky Rosa from Oasis Devices. Ricky, how you doing? Welcome to the show. How you doing? Can you hear us? Introduce yourself.

I can. Can you hear me?

Yeah, all good.

Can you hear us over the drumming and the air horn?

It's a very chaotic entrance. You get hot dropped in here, you're trying to drink your coffee in peace, and all of a sudden it's welcome to the Ultradome. But welcome to the Ultradome. Introduce yourself. Awesome, thank you guys.

So I'm Ricky Rosa, I'm the founder and CEO of Oasis Devices, and we're— we make smart ring to try to replace the keyboard. Uh, what we're interested in is the next platform of computing. Are our smartphones the final form? I don't know. I mean, I don't think anybody knows, but once you take that as your baseline—

I'm, I'm praying every day. Yeah, I want to throw it in the ocean. Yeah, yeah, you and me, brother.

So, so once you take that as your baseline, you can start to explore. Yeah, but what we noticed is that You can only ask people to take one step from current. And it is very easy to get tangled in crazy new platforms and devices and that sort of thing. But you can only ask people to change things so much. You cannot ask them to change the entire workflow overnight. We've spent years in the Idea Maze trying to figure out what would be good use cases for smart rings and different things. And what we landed is private dictation, because what rings are really useful for is bringing them very close to your mouth and whispering. And it just so happens that we also have a trackpad in our ring that allows you to edit. We spent a lot of time making sure that it had the resolution for navigation for smart glasses. But smart glasses are, you know, a little bit slower to take off. So we, we channeled all of that development into editing what you see on screen. And so we made it work with Whisperflow. Um, the founder tonight is an angel, uh, investor in our company. And so, um, that's what we're launching today.

Amazing. Very cool. What, what does good look like in terms of churn and retention for a new device? Because I imagine that the product looks great. I imagine it will work and I imagine people will keep it on for a long time and use it. But the baseline is so low. I mean, we had an Apple Vision Pro in the studio this morning and the team was trying it out and like laughing and enjoying the demo. But that product has to have like 99% churn, and same thing with most VR headsets. A lot of hardware companies, like, if you can just find that smiling curve of, you know, the conversion rate of a few people that come on, do you— how are you thinking about actually getting people over that, that goal, that honeymoon period where they try something?

Well, I'll tell you, I'll tell you why, like, I like this approach is you're one, utilizing a device that is already a daily product in the workspace utilizing like audio transcription, which like Whisperflow. I was at dinner with a buddy last night and he was showing us like his whole Whisperflow setup. He's obsessed, obsessed with it. And then you're utilizing the Ring, which is also a form factor that people are used to by now. The Oura Ring is proven. And so you'd like take that combination of like people want to be transcribing more. Yeah, they're using their computers all day long. You deliver it in a form factor that is that is like, you know, understood already that people are comfortable with. And I think that's a recipe for potentially a hit. But again, yes, the sort of median new consumer electronic device has like 0% retention. So it's still very hard.

Well, I will say I use the Vision Pro every night. I don't know if that helps or hurts my credibility.

I use one.

Yeah, no, I love new hardware, but I admit that there's, that it's always hard to get people on. But yes, is it important that this is both effectively a peripheral for a daily-driven device and then also a fashion accessory? Is that important that it's both?

Yes.

So the way that we think about retention is— and this is why we struggled so much in years past— is we really needed to find a use case that was a must-have. Not a nice to have. Yeah. Right. And so with WhisperFlow, you can speak loudly to your computer, but it just so happens that in crowded offices, coffee shops, those sort of public environments, you can't speak out loud. And so it really helps to have a peripheral that you can speak quietly too. Once we move to other platforms like iOS and Glasses eventually, then the fashion accessory or the fashion point starts to become more important.

Does that make sense? Yeah. It also feels like— I don't know. Because you can wear AirPods, and you can talk to them. Can you not whisper to AirPods? Because even if you can, even if it's the same functional device, it's way different aesthetics talking into a Ring and having earbuds in that feel like, okay, this person's like out in their own world. But I imagine with the microphone a lot closer, the Ring allows you to speak at even a lower level and produce a higher fidelity transcript. Is that correct? Correct. Yes.

Yes. Okay. That's cool. The Ring outperforms AirPods, but also it has the modality of touch.

Yeah, which is awesome. Which allows you to do more.

Yeah, it allows you to do, to edit the things that you see on screen. It allows you to navigate. It allows you to completely interact with AI and your computer and your workflows without ever touching the keyboard. Yeah. And this point is important 'cause what we think is that if we can, it's a big if, but if we can get people to interact with laptops without touching them, then the output piece of it becomes a little bit more fluid. Yeah, now it's a smaller ask to ask people to put the display in glasses or display in, in another device, right? So, but you really need to, to solve the input part first, and that's kind of what we're going after at the moment.

The demo is someone using basically a Word document. Is that intentional? Why not a code editor? Why not an LLM interaction back and forth? Why, why, why text specifically? Well, we had—

we do have a demo of the person using ChatGPT and, you know, and that sort of thing in the launch video. Yeah, but for the B-roll, it's just like more aesthetic to have the text. Okay.

Okay. Okay. I was just wondering if there was a hint at like where you see the first killer feature. With writers or with someone who's doing more like Word document-based knowledge work as opposed to something who more of a programmer. But I don't know, maybe I'm reading into it too.

Remember Whisperflow is like a platform agnostic tool. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They see retention across emails, Word documents, coding tools, and the rest. And so we are an extension of that. So we kind of sit in the same plane. Than, you know what I mean?

Um, what's the, what's the status of the company? How big is the company? Have you raised money? Where do you see all this going?

So we're pretty small. We're like a 5-person team. We're scattered across the globe. We have, you know, people in Australia, Abu Dhabi, China. We're, we're an eclectic bunch. Um, uh, we've raised a few angel rounds and we shipped our beta this January. That's great.

When do you want to go into public release? Where can people sign up to learn more? Where can people—

we launched our pre-order campaign for the microphone and trackpad version today, and that's going to be shipping in small batches from 2 weeks from now till Christmas. So we're gonna roll it out.

Yeah, that's great. A testament to the modern— let's, uh, I love it.

Well, We'll order one, Tyler, if you can order one, and then try to put us— should I ask to be put at the front of the list or near the front of the list? It'd be nice to get in the next month. Would be awesome.

Be great. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Congratulations on the progress. Very cool device. Thank you.

I appreciate it, guys. Thank you for having me on.

Have a good one. We'll talk to you soon. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one Intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agents to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. And our next guest is in the waiting room. We have Andrew Rea from TaxWire. Andrew, how you doing? Good, guys.

Thank you for having me. Thank you for having me on the show.

Welcome, Jordi. Great to see you. I know you guys know each know each other, but for the audience members that don't, maybe introduce yourself, tell us what you're building.

Yes, Jordi, good to see you. I did not have it on my bingo card 3, 4 years ago, whenever it was that I worked for you, with you at PartyRound/Capital, that we would be talking about taxes on your podcast. We're back. We're back. We're so back. Congrats to both of you on all the success. But I'm Andrew Wray. I'm one of the co-founders of Taxflyer. We are a full managed solution for global sales tax compliance, and we just raised $25 million because death and taxes are forever. And I think, I think they're probably— our bet is that Brian Johnson will solve death first. So we're here to solve taxes. I got the hat for it.

Okay, I see that you're actually hoping that he solves that to just have more customers. Bigger TAM.

Bigger TAM. Yeah. Exactly, because the TAM just keeps growing. We just have more consumption in the economy. GDP goes up, there's more taxes. Hopefully we can improve the subway system in New York with some of those tax dollars. And we just, the good times keep rolling.

Why business-to-business taxes? Why not go after TurboTax?

Yes.

It's a great question. My immediate initial reaction is because Intuit has a hell of a lot of distribution, and so that's probably one. But no, more for me specifically, I had this problem in a really big way at a company I was at before this. Very much felt the pain of managing indirect tax compliance. And I think it's a market that's dominated by a bunch of companies that are very old. I think about $5 trillion in taxes remitted in sales tax and VAT by enterprises around the world. It's a very big problem. There's a bunch of very not so customer-obsessed software companies and services firms like the Big Four, Avalara, etc., that dominate this market. And it's a pain point that I had before this. And we— so it's a mix of market opportunity and our customers are finance people. They're super smart, but they do not have the expertise or time to be managing their taxes. So we deliver that outcome for them.

And reality check me on this, I would assume that sales tax enforcement is increasing significantly. In the early days of the internet, there were all these crazy loopholes where if Amazon's based in Seattle and you buy something in Florida, they don't pay tax. And I think a lot of those loopholes have been closed, so more and more e-commerce companies companies have flourished on the back of Shopify and other platforms, Stripe. And, but so there's more people selling products all nationally. And so they have a much higher sales tax burden. Is that roughly correct for the secular trend?

Roughly correct. The secular trend is kind of like a few things. One is regulation. So there's that regulation's been rolling out. And what we're seeing now is that a lot of states are now actually starting to roll out taxes of not only like more enforcement, they're using AI to do audits. A lot of states are increasing increasing sales tax as well and trying to increase audits of companies that have been complying now because they're getting squeezed on income tax. They're getting squeezed on property tax. Gavin Newsom in California is trying to start taxing the software industry. And then very similarly in VAT around the world, there's a lot of enforcement of real-time reporting and e-invoicing that's coming down the pipeline. So it's a— nobody gets voted out of office for raising sales tax or raising VAT, whereas income tax or property tax can hit you. So you're seeing big reinforcement, that's like just a, I'd say, a secular tailwind. And then the incumbents in the industry are not incredibly AI native or customer friendly. And so you've also kind of got this general customer frustration that gives a new player like us a lot of tailwinds as well.

So you raised this money during the SaaS-pocalypse, you overpowered the SaaS-pocalypse. Yeah. But I'm sure you were getting asked like, you know, How did you answer the SaaSpocalypse question? Because now, right, I'm sure when you kind of closed the round, or at least you had a term sheet signed, the SaaSpocalypse was over. Everyone was like, you know, we're back. But how did you take that?

Yeah, we were super back, super back. The SaaSpocalypse is over. But no, I think, being super honest, it's like we're benefiting a little bit from the fact that A lot of the people we compete with are services as much as they are software companies. And so there's more spend to eat, which lets you lean into— we are categorized as AI-native SaaS or AI-native services software. And some of that is that we genuinely are actually delivering an outcome. And so our customers don't think of us as software or services. We have tax experts in-house. We do literally everything that goes into indirect tax compliance. We ripped and replaced a Big Four consulting firm literally this week for one of our customers. And so some of it is that we are benefiting from AI versus being someone who's being displaced maybe by AI. And so it's mostly a tail end. I think you're doing the displacement.

You're coming after the hundreds of thousands.

I am the apocalypse. Exactly. We are the apocalypse. And our category probably benefits from it, which is something that maybe I can't take much credit for. I think it's probably still painful out there for some folks in a way that maybe it's not been for us.

Well, good luck. Thank you so much for taking the time.

Amazing progress. It's been awesome to see the journey. And yeah, congrats to the whole team on the milestone. I'm sure you'll be back soon.

Congratulations. We'll talk to you soon. Of course. Thank you guys so much.

Appreciate it. Cheers. Bye.

Let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? It's quite simple. The question everyone's been asking, it's your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI, own the data platform. Just do it. Just do it. Why not? Our next guest is Michael Anderson from Framework Ventures raising a huge fourth fund. He's in the waiting room and now he's in the TVC and Ultradome. Michael, welcome to the show. How are you doing? Doing well. How are you guys?

We're doing fantastically. Honestly, the view here is not that great. But yeah, this view, where are you? You're viewmogging us. This is— we don't even have any— we don't have any windows in this, in this studio, and you're sitting here. This is like thousands of feet in the air.

Yeah, just in the castle, in the castle. Looking good. Anyways, where are you calling in from?

San Francisco, uh, the Transamerica Building.

Oh, that's a good one. The pyramid, I like that one. Yeah, awesome. Enough about the view, let's tell— let's talk about you. Please introduce yourself a little bit. Tell us about the fund. Give us the news. Yeah.

So I'm Michael, one of the two co-founders of Framework. The quick history is my co-founder Vance and I started it 7 years ago. We're both working for tech companies. I was at Snapchat, he was at Netflix. Quit our jobs. We were obsessed with crypto, moved into my parents' house and started the fund. Now we've raised our fourth fund and manage a couple billion dollars.

Did you have any outside capital in the first fund? Like, what was the— because I imagine with crypto, like, you can just invest in tokens, and like, if you're good at trading and you're early, like, you don't necessarily need institutional capital to get started. But what was the early day— what were the early days like?

Yeah, we, we had an institution as our first backer, um, and it was a small $15 million fund, um, And we started Framework really with a thesis. You know, a lot of people started with trading or a hedge fund thesis. Ours was actually the opposite in that we felt that nobody was going after the early seed stage of venture investing in the crypto Web3 space in 2019. And so that's what we started with. So it's always been, you know, a venture thesis. And I think our first, you know, our second, our second fund, $100 million, was kind of like the first institutional fund with multiple institutions and And now, we've got Ivy League endowments and sovereign wealth funds, and off to the races.

That's great. What was it like in the early days? Was the crypto community really geographically distributed? Or were you focused on investing in America, or California, or San Francisco specifically, if you're going after those early-stage crypto founders? Yeah, good question.

I mean, we moved back to San Francisco. We were actually in— Vance and I were in Los Angeles. San Francisco thinking, okay, well, well, that's the hub of tech. And we found ourselves basically traveling to all the entrepreneurs at the early days because crypto was a global phenomenon. You had pockets in Asia, you know, Australia, UK. I'd say largely now it's still, it's still pretty geographically distributed, but there's still most of the tech is happening in kind of the hubs that you would expect. So San Francisco is definitely one of the top places these days. Yeah, it was a lot of, a lot of travel those early couple of years.

So what's the conference strategy now?

I feel like there's debate on like, you know, how many conference, what's the perfect amount of conferences to go to in a year as a crypto investor? That is the topic of conversation. It's like a billion-dollar question.

I don't wanna travel that much, come on.

No, you gotta do an Asia trip. You gotta do a Europe trip, you know, make some travel out of it. They're always in fun destinations. I think a couple of years ago we went to the Blockchain Week in Singapore and then stayed for the F1 race. That's good. It's, it's always a good time.

What, what, what are you kind of forecasting in, in crypto right now? Like what, what you guys have done well by predicting. I just, you know, it's a balance of like having some idea of, of the future. And just backing great entrepreneurs. But like, what are you— what are you excited about with this new fund to invest in?

Yeah. So I think when we started in 2019, we saw crypto as sort of the next frontier where the smartest entrepreneurs that we were meeting with, you know, the whiz kids popping out of the Stanford, Harvard's are, you know, working on crypto, working on cryptography technologies. And I think that that's still the case. But I think what a lot of What we're seeing now is people who have domain expertise in different areas, different industries, who are saying, help me do the crypto. I think this should be decentralized, whether it's energy, nuclear, AI, or, you know, hard, hard infrastructure. They're coming to us and saying, hey, like, I know how to do energy trading. I've been doing it for the last decade. Help me build a distributed, decentralized utility so that we can go disintermediate, you know, the utility, the the utilities. And I think that that is kind of the new thing. It's not crypto just for crypto's sake. It's crypto getting imbued within really hard tech industries. So it's not really like its own thing anymore. I think now it's just kind of become pervasive in everything.

So the fund's grown, the aperture's probably widened in terms of the industries that you look at. What stayed the same? Throughout all 4 funds.

I'll take it. I'll take a crack. Just remaining bullish on crypto when everyone's calling you an idiot loser is like a really good way to make money, I think. And I feel like you guys have done that. Yeah. Just like, you know, it seems like it's about having a tolerance for being looking silly. Sure. And that can look like remaining bullish during like moments where everyone's like, Honey, you're still doing that crypto thing now at Thanksgiving?

Oh, so many years of that. You know, it's just gonna be another one of those. When it's a good time to buy, it's a bad time to sell. When it's a bad time to sell, it's a good time to buy. So I think, you know, riding the waves for sure. And we hold digital assets in the fund, each one of them. But I think the thing that has been consistent is really just the venture thesis. And then following the founders. And the founders who, you know, we are seeing— like, we have an investment in a company called Mecca. We got to know them because they were previous entrepreneurs that sold their company to Coinbase. They are not doing anything in crypto currently. They could eventually, but it's, you know, how we got to know them was through crypto, and they are building, you know, a data platform for robotics AI. So those types of investments, I think, are just a consistent thread for us. And when we find world-class founders, we're gonna back them multiple times. Interesting. Awesome.

Cool. I haven't been following the Mike strategy, Michael Saylor. We have not been following the story closely. Can you get me up to speed in just like 20 seconds what's going on over there? I mostly just see like the deranged, like, you know, AI images that he puts out, you know, where he is like on a lifeboat, just like, it's like, why are you putting that image in my head? Literally leaving, leaving. You're like escaping the Titanic.

Wait, am I on the lifeboat? Yeah.

Am I on the Titanic? Is this inspiration? Am I?

I think, you know, the quick story is that whenever you mix financial engineering and crypto, something bad usually has happened. Yeah. And I think that that overfitting of the narrative is kind of what's going on with him right now. But he's building this, this entity that has multiple layers to it, whether it's convertibles, whether it's preferred, whether it's common. And he's financing it in different ways. And the question is, can he continue to do with all, all of the legs of the stool, or is one of the legs going to fall out? And I think, you know, the narratives of him blowing up are overblown. I think he's got smart people around. I think it's tough when crypto is down this, this much. But this is exactly what happens in all of these cycles. If we go back to, you know, the calluses on our hands over the last, you know, nearly decade of doing this. This is exactly what plays out all 4 years. So I think we're just in the middle of that right now. And I think he will be proven right eventually. It may just take him years. And talk about somebody who's been willing to just stand in the face of all of the negative publicity.

He's the best at it. That's, that's a good point. Awesome, dude. Well, great, great to meet you. Congrats on, on the new fund. And yeah, looking forward to meeting more of your founders. Appreciate it.

Great to meet you guys. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents. Whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows, Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish. Uh, the goose itself.

It is the goose itself.

Have you ever heard of a hectocorn, Jordi Hays? No, I'd never heard of this either, but apparently it refers to a company worth more than $100 billion. You got a unicorn worth $1 billion, a decacorn worth $10 billion, and a hectocorn, which I'd never heard before. But, uh, you know, somebody wrote it in there.

Something new every day.

Learn something new any day, every single day, especially on this show. Well, our next guest is investor and NBA champion Tristan Thompson. We're very Lucky to be joined by him here in the TDPN UltraDome.

There we go. John, stand up next to the— Oh my God. It's like Wally Zerbiak in here. You guys are pretty— Yeah, what'd I say, right?

I'm 6'8". Hey, yes you are. Let's go. You are all of it. You are a tall drink of milk. Holy schnikes! What's up, fellas? What's going on, brother? How are you? We're doing great.

Yeah, yeah, why don't you stand up? Not even close. No, I'm happy to let you guys do your thing. I just wanted the audience to understand that Jon is an NBA-sized man.

It's true. And, and on the camera everyone thinks I'm 5'10".

And then Jon, and you guys like made my seat the shortest one right now. Like, seriously, you're like, this guy's a Bitch, he was a center for 14 years at this height.

How do you do it? Yeah, what's going on?

Anyway, it's great to have you.

It's great to have you. Glad to be here.

By the way, congrats to you guys.

Thank you. Congrats.

Thank you for landing you. No, no, no. For all your guys' success in that acquisition and all that. You know, come on now.

That's big time. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Yeah, I mean, I want to start with, I mean, tech and investing. I mean, we can go through your career, but I'm interested in sort of how you first caught the bug, how you first got interested in technology investing, just your journey to financial management, understanding more of your strategy, and sort of like oftentimes there's like mentors or books and resources along the way. Like, what was your journey?

I mean, I think for me, and I won't give like the cliché, like, you know, I think other guests are like, you know, I think I didn't start really investing into things outside of the traditional, you know, state treasury bonds and the S&P 500, the stuff that Fidelity and Wells Fargo tell you money market. Yeah, you have a map. I waited till my second deal. Let's be real, like, you know, because— and you know, I tell the young guys is, you know, you're first—

you got to just be focused on being really good at basketball. Yeah, you get the second deal.

Yeah, when you get the second deal— when I got my, my, my second deal, $82 million, you know, I switched financial advisors because the one I was with— bang, bang, bang! Wow. This is high energy in here. I love this. Wow.

But no, um, he got 2 deals.

No, I started getting into alternative assets and getting into tech and investing in companies, whether it's consumer or tech or—

were you getting pitched VC funds? Like, invest in the VC funds? Yeah.

You know, like Carlyle Group and then all those guys, you know, back then I was with Morgan Stanley, so they would give us those opportunities because they had them as a client. Yeah. So that was kind of like my early, uh, to kind of like get my feet wet. But obviously, as I got older and wanted to dive into more, but obviously having the capital to have that exposure, I started to look into more and start to talk to founders and get ahead of the curve. Yeah.

That's how I got started. It's probably good to start— Nice. It's probably good to start like taking deals from Morgan Stanley, because obviously— or a partner like that, because not every deal is going to really hit or be that great. Better than just looking at whatever's coming through, because I think when people start investing, especially in private markets, everything looks great in a pitch deck, right? It's like, oh, I'm looking at the forecast. It's like they're going to $100 million in like 3 years. And then you realize like, okay, well, that's in most decks. And it's about being able to pick out, okay, what's actually gonna do well versus what's gonna flop.

Yeah, I feel like one of the hardest things is you see one deck, and you're like, this is a great idea, great team, and you don't realize that there's 3 other teams that are doing the exact same thing. They started 2 years earlier and they're better. Do you think about trying to— when you identify a trend that you're interested in, you want exposure to, are you trying to pick the one winner, get a huge stake in one winner, or do you want to have some sort of diversification across the market?

I think for me, it's— first of all, I always bet on the founder. Yeah. Right? It's betting on the horse, right? I think that's the most important thing. And I, you know, these pitch decks, before they're $100 million, now they always tell you they're a billion dollars. And now they always look so good. But I think for myself, I try to lean on what my peers are doing as well. And I've been so fortunate to have some guys that have, you know, have early ICOs in Ethereum, or guys that have done great exits. And whether it is a family office or is the guys that are in funds, you know, that have had that experience, because for me, the reality is, is I am still one of the younger guys that are in the space, right? So I try to lean on other people. And honestly, people have been so good to me and kind of like, kind of helped steer me the right way. 'Cause they're like, Tristan, we wanna see you win. We don't wanna see you come in and just give money to everybody and fall off.

And not get much back. And not get much back.

You know, I remember Olaf, a buddy of mine who's on the early Coinbase— Curse me. Yeah. You know, he said, Tristan, you also gotta be prepared that you're gonna invest in 10 things. 8 are gonna fail. But the 2 that do well, he said, don't worry, it's gonna cover all your capital that you put in. So I also had that mindset as well, but I always like to bet on the founder, bet on the horse. It's like a horse race.

That's what I'm the most bullish on. Was there any athlete entrepreneur investors that you look up to maybe from the previous generation or people that were, or maybe underrated investors that people don't know about? 'Cause I feel like people know about the Shaqs of the world, the guys that are super commercial, but anybody that's maybe more underrated?

I mean, I look at Shaq and Magic because I think they were able to use their NIL to pivot to chapter 2 and leverage that to great opportunity, right? Like, the end of the day, like, the fact that Magic Johnson can open up movie theaters at affordable and get acquired by AMC, that's big time, right? That's like, like, that's, that's creating a movement. But I think, you know, guys have done a good job is, you know, of course, had the staff career, Andre Iguodala. He's done a good job. But you know, the reality, us athletes, if we make good investments, we're gonna tell all you guys.

All the guys that are doing very well, we're gonna talk about it.

Yeah, there's no one under the radar.

Yeah, if I'm doing a 25x, I'm not just gonna hide in Indiana and not tell you about it.

Yeah, I'm gonna do a press tour about it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So yeah. Do you think that there's a fork in the road between NIL sponsorship, just get the cash but put your name, everywhere there it makes sense, tons of brand deals, but not a lot of equity ownership versus more behind the scenes equity ownership, just investing. Is that a fork in the road or can you do both reliably? How do you think about that trade-off if there is one?

I think for us as athletes and anytime I go into, you know, into the meetings and I'm on calls all the time, or if I'm going to, whether it's Milken or I'm at Medici or I'm at Token. Yeah. You know, I, we only get one chance at this, right? And I think, for us because when we come in, everyone always— we're always playing down by 5 points, down by 10, because they're like, all right, another athlete in here that's going to write a check. And, you know, he's going to like— I don't know if we can curse in here, but we're always going to like, uh, um, HOE ourself out, right? Okay. And, and that's what we— I want to be very selective because at the end of the day, I don't want to be the guy that's for everybody. I want to make sure if I'm going down one lane, if I'm going to invest in a robotics company, I'm gonna invest in tech, drones. I want to try to find one or two. Yeah. Not just be with 10 guys. Yeah. Because you don't want to be that guy. But I— but in terms of the NIL, I think it's very important as well, because if you look at it right now, who's the biggest influencer on planet Earth? Elon Musk. Ooh. You would probably say Kim Kardashian, but you— but we might say Elon. Yeah. Right? So, but because— but like, he's realized that, you know, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs job. You know, these guys back in the day, in the '90s, early 2000s, right? They would never put themselves out there and sit on Squat Box and go on CNBC and talk about their product. But now you realize that the great founders, you are going to do a press run. You're like Drake and you're going to do an album rollout because you want to create the FOMO for retail for when you IPO.

Yeah, that people are going to buy. Yeah, I mean, you see this with Palmer Luckey too, like very, you know, you get the look.

Michael Saylor's got like the— look, I can't look. And then Elon's got got the, like, doesn't look human. And then you got Larry Ellison, looks like he's like, uh, he's like look maxing and everything, right?

Yeah, yeah, really young.

You do the look back. So like, I get that, and I think that's why I think Ellison really is the OG looks max.

Yes, he is.

He's got the chiseled— No, it's remarkable.

Yeah, he's 80 or something. And then there's no sun in SF like that, so that's a good point, right? But he sails, he sails all the time. Yeah, he's a big You're a boat guy. OK. So maybe he's getting the sun there. Yeah. Who needs to be around the table when you're negotiating with a company? Because Olaf, fantastic investor. I imagine that if he's writing a check, not many people are being like, hey, we'd also like to put you in our Super Bowl ad. But with you, I imagine every founder comes to you and they say, well, we'd like an Instagram post, and we'd also like you to be in an ad. And all of that is a separate negotiation Are there agencies that you work with? Are there, are there, is this something that you can puzzle out? Is it, is it all just one big bucket? Or do you just say, hey, let's table that and let's just do the equity deal here and then let's talk about partnership later?

So the way I approach it is like this, right? So obviously you have the initial call and the conversation and you figure out what this, what this marriage is going to look like and what, and if I'm just capital, if I'm just capital, then you're not gonna, I'm gonna be more behind the scenes. But if I really believe in it and I feel like I can help you up your GTM and create the narrative and story to be, to show what you guys are building. And if I believe in it as well, we are going to strategize. I've been very fortunate to have people that come from the venture, people that have, you know, from Multicoin and that, around those guys, you know, they've been very helpful with like Tristan. Like if you look at Kyle, somebody like Tristan, you got to be very delicate at how you do things. And for me, it all depends. There's definitely been a lot of investments that I, no one knows that I'm invested in. Yeah, right.

You know, yeah, some of the best opportunities, like, they were waiting until it's a 25x and then you'll go on the tour. Yeah, because it might be a zero and you're not going to talk about that.

Oh no, but you know what, sometimes you guys, you gotta get your head lifted. I was down 3-1 before, so it all really depends. But I love being part of— if I really feel bullish about something, I love being part of the journey. Yeah, yeah. Because for me now, I still have the hunger and drive of I love winning again. I love winning championships. Yep. And this is the next form of doing it. But instead of wearing a jersey, I'm wearing a Tom Ford suit and tie, or I got this nice— I don't know what color you guys call this, but I think it's very like TVP energy, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's on brand. You got that green head to toe. Head to toe.

Yeah. Taking the NBA to the next level, is there anything that could make the NBA bigger? It's at the top of the mountain, but is there an even higher mountain? I mean, is there a drive to survive play? What would make the NBA even bigger if you could do anything?

I don't know if this is legal, but imagine if you— I don't know if this is above the line.

I like where you're starting.

I don't know if the NBA could do this, but imagine if like— So we have this something called the Player Post-Career Income Plan, right? And I'm gonna give some tea and I don't— this is gonna be real, right? So the Player Post-Career Income Plan Multiple Post-Career Income Plan is where basically we take a portion of our capital and we put it into— let's say it's like the Voya or the Principal, right? We give them our money, we give them a percentage of our biweekly check, and they hold on to it. It's good if you have, you know, bad spending problems and whatnot, and that is what it is. But you get nothing out of it. You don't make no yield, no interest, right? But imagine if we were able to kind of create like an MBPA fund. But it's— and but it's— we're not going to be doing the money market 4.5%.

Like, sure, you want to be YOLOing.

No, no, no. But, but, but like, like a college endowment. Yeah.

Where they allocate 10% to alternatives. So I, I— there's a blend. We follow the sport of business, as you know. So I don't, I don't, I don't know really anything about this, this kind of program that you're talking about. You give them money, you don't get any yield on it. And then they just give it back to you at a certain point.

Yeah, so the reason why they created this is, you guys remember the ESPN 30 for 30 broke. Yeah. Right? There was a lot of high-profile athletes that unfortunately— and it happens, right? Listen, at the end of the day, we come from— especially myself, I've come from nothing. You give us millions of dollars, and it's— we can't rely on people back home to help us. It's like the blind leading blind.

And you just get a ton up front, and you think, "Oh, this is never gonna stop." Yeah. So this was something that the NBA—

and I respect it. And I appreciate Adam Silver and David Stern taking the initiative to say, "Hey, we don't want our players to pull out of their 401 at 35, 45." Yeah. Because, you know, you get heavily penalized. Yep. The tax, everything. So we're gonna create a player post-career income plan. Mm-hmm. The day you're done playing, we are gonna give you a check monthly to get you to 55, 60 years old. Sure. Right? Which I love, and I think that's so smart. Yeah. But imagine if now we're able to take some of that capital middle. Yeah. And get some exposure to some of these great, you know, investments. Like, imagine if— think about this— back when SpaceX, back in 2022, right? If I came here and said the NBA Players Association is going to give endowment of $500 million, $100 million to get into some allocation of space. Yeah, that's a pretty good one to get into, right? I'm not saying go ahead and buy a bunch of Sally Beauty Supplies. We're saying something a little bit more protective. Right? A little bit more that we—

yeah, I just don't understand why. So, so if there's capital that's been put aside coming out of your paycheck and it's sitting there, somebody's getting yield on it. Oh yeah. Who's getting the deal?

Not me. That's crazy. That's crazy. But I will say this though, I will say those two, because then everyone's gonna be like, so they're like, yeah, we're taking care of the players.

Meanwhile, they just have this huge pool of capital that they're— well, I will say, but I think that seems a little bit— I think you might be honest.

But I will say the NBA's done a great job with the 401. What they've done that no one else does is that they will match whatever you put in the 401 120%. Wow. Wow. Which is great. So, so the NBA does a really good job protecting the players and trying to put the players in the best position to be successful, which I appreciate. So that's, you know, you gotta give a little bit. It's a start. It's a start. And it's like, you know, we're not— no one's ever a finished product. Every business can get better. That's why AI, robotics, that's a big thing, right? Especially in the workforce.

What guidance do you give to young players that are real prospects? Maybe they're getting, you know, about to become a teenager. They're on the path to college, hopefully the NBA. What advice do you give them around navigating like the internet? I imagine like, you know, same way for any endeavor. People that have some type of following or notoriety or aura, they can get better deals done. But what advice are you giving? Because, you know, I imagine like that wasn't even something that you had to deal with at the time, but then you obviously leverage social media now. Yeah.

I mean, I wish there was NIL when I was playing, you know, back then when I was playing, I was getting the money through the back door. Now you get it through the front door, right? So I wish I was getting that. $11 million direct deposit or that wire to my account back in the day. But what I tell these young guys is that, you know, just be careful. Like, protect what you've built, right? Because everyone's gonna want a piece of you. And the reality is that we are not gonna be the smartest in the room. We are gonna be basically the squirmy fish in the cesspool. And people are gonna wanna, you know, eat us up, right? So you gotta really lean. And I tell guys, lean— I know, I'm sorry, guys. I'm just very honest. Go off, go off. This is part of being a big man, a center in the NBA. We're not pretty. We're very ugly with it, and we get down and dirty.

That's amazing.

But no, but I think it's like, lean on your peers and older guys. I've always been the one, whether it's LeBron, whether it's Kevin Love, whether it's Antawn Jamison, Anderson Varejão, I've always went to my older and my vets to ask questions. And don't be afraid to, you know, be vulnerable. I think that's the one thing for us as athletes. We fear to say like, man, my shit might be screwed up. I might have, might be in some bad deals or I might have a bad financial advisor. That's the one area where athletes become small. Sure. And that's not something we should do. Yeah.

So interesting. What about AI and sports? I'm sure you get pitches all the time. I imagine you seem to like to invest in really big categories. Yeah. 'Cause you're going for the 100x, the 1000x. But what's exciting to you at the, you know, at the intersection of AI and, you know, basketball?

Well, I think, you know, I would, nothing would make me more happy if we had a fourth referee. And my friends think I'm crazy. If that referee was, you know, we used AI. It's worked in tennis. Yes, it's worked in tennis. And it's even in soccer.

Yeah, yeah, in World Cup right now.

World Cup right now.

They have this band or something like that.

And they're canceling goals on Paraguay, they're canceling goals Canada, I'm Canadian. So we scored, they're like, nope, bring it back, VR. But I remember like being a kid watching the World Cup, I said, that never used to happen. Yeah. But now they're using AI technology to try to make the game more efficient. But especially in the NBA, in the NBA playoffs, when it's a one-possession game and, you know, when they're saying it's a charge or block, or I mean, we were, we were a victim of it, Game 1 against Golden State, when LeBron took, took the charge on Kevin Durant and then they called it a blocking foul and they switched it. I think and we lost that game and I think we got swept that year, but that was a turning point in the series. Yeah. Among other things. But yeah, I think like, yeah, that was like, I feel like that's the next step for sports and AI. And I think, you know, AI is taking over so many different sectors in the world. I think sports is like the one area that it's been like the most, like it's like the slowest one. It's like the last one to the party.

Yeah, of course. Yeah, yeah.

And it's like people on the court. Yeah, but in reality it's like guys.

Yeah, I just mean outside of that, like performance, things like recovery.

Recovery. Well, think about this.

Think about last year in the playoffs, you had Jason Tatum, Tyler Herro, and Damian Lillard all tear their Achilles. And Adam Silver said, we got to start using AI technology to protect our players, right? Because don't get me wrong, sports science is great, but there's another level to this. Of course, you can have your best players, the faces of your league, go down at the most important time, where it's the moneymaker time, which is the playoffs. So to, to hopefully that answers your question. I think that's the next step. It's more for sports, sports medicine. Yeah. And science. And I would, wouldn't mind a little, you know, a little fourth referee just to clean up some stuff.

Yeah, that makes sense.

How are you? What, what's your personal biohacking stack?

Are you doing anything?

I, how, how long do you want to live? You thinking like 90? I'm good. Clearly got the height extension surgery.

Yeah, right.

I literally put them in my legs now. No, but, um, for me, you know, I'm very big on peptides. I want to look good for a long time, guys. Okay. All right. Yeah, yeah. I want to look good for a long time. I'm 35. I want to look 25. Yeah. I want to keep this skin good. Sure. I want to keep this jaw chiseled. I want to stay in shape. So I will do— listen, I'm very— when I look in the mirror, I look in the mirror at myself a lot. I want to look good every day. That's good. So whatever I need to do, I'm about it. So yes, I do a little, you know, little doop doop for the hair. Yeah. So, you know, I got to make sure I'm right.

I love it.

I'm sure you've traveled all over the world. If there's one If you had a city where you could put a new NBA team, where would you put it? Ooh. Anywhere in the world.

Oh, in the world?

Anywhere in the world. NBA team? NBA teams.

That's just like— Ooh. I mean, is that not kind of a dumb question?

No, no, this is an extremely dumb question. What do you think? That's the point. Uh, just like it would be exotic. It would be interesting to go play there. I don't know.

That's what— I would say, I would say Marrakesh. Marrakesh. In Morocco. Ooh. Or I would say, I mean, Dubai has a team right now. But Dubai is so beautiful. Yeah, that's a magical place.

See, dumb question, interesting answer. Yeah. How about how much time you spend in Morocco? You know, I'll be honest, never been there yet.

You just faked Morocco.

This is never been there. You gotta go. You gotta go.

Jalen Brown goes there every year. He calls me, he's like, Titi, you have to come. He's been invited the last 3 years. He's like, Titi, you have to come. And then one of the agents that work for our sports agency at Clutch Sports, he's Moroccan. He's like, Titi, you have to go. You have to go. It's beautiful. It's magical. So that's why I say Marrakech, but Dubai, I spend a lot of time there. That place is magical. They're forward thinking. They love entrepreneurs. They're about what we're about. Yeah. They're all about it.

That's what I love.

Morocco is great. Morocco is great. You've been? Surf trip. Oh, wow. Probably 9 years ago. Now I see it in the hair. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

There you go. You spent a lot of time in Laguna? Malibu. Ooh. Closer. Closer. Better.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's amazing. What, like, do you think you'll ever get bored with investing?

No, you know, I'm actually so excited.

That actually does happen. Like, there's some, like, generational investors, specifically angel investors, that are doing it for the love of the game, and then they just get a little bit tired chasing the next deal. The issue is if you're good, you just get, you get too rich, and then you're like, what's the point?

It's the boat, it's the boat. If you get the boat, you'll just be on the boat.

Yeah, you know, it's not about the investment. You know, I love talking to people and like these meetings and the calls that I have, you learn so much. Like, for instance, like I have a call with a gentleman that's creating a nuclear energy company. I just want to learn him, learn about what he's thinking, his thesis, why, what he thinks, where he thinks the world's going. I just love the education, right? It's almost like class is in session. So of course, yes. Do I like investing? Do I like winning? Of course. Like when I did a Hype short, everyone thought I was crazy. Crazy, but now I'm laughing to the bank when I, when I closed out my Hyperliquid trade, right? So that's what I was happy about. So I like being right, but I like, I like the storytelling because I think I, I, I bring everything back to team. Yeah. And, and everything's a team. You guys are a team. The guy, the gentlemen, you guys back here, they got, they love you guys at that. You got a squad here, right? Yeah. Everything is team-oriented, team sports. So I love to always hear how, how this team is trying to operate and what they're trying accomplish. And if I could come, and whether it's capital or whether it's leveraging my resources or intros, I want to do that, especially if I believe in who you are.

Would you ever, would you ever raise outside capital from other players? Say, hey, I don't want you to— don't invest 100% of your money, but give me, give me 2% of your next deal. I'll deploy it. And so they can kind of like, you know, get the benefit of everything you've learned.

Well, you know, I've been running a lot of SPVs the last 2 years. And I've had some great success. I mean, I just, you know, one thing I'm very bullish on is Prometheus, and I just invested in their last round.

You got the Prometheus allocation.

Yeah, I got the Prometheus allocation, the friends and family, shout out the family. Shout out mom for the 70th birthday at Jeff's house. Shout out mom, I love you. So, you know, I definitely allocated to Jeff.

Clean allocation. Yeah, it's beautiful.

I'm grateful and God is good to me. And I wanna give, you know what I really wanna do? I wanna give guys the same opportunity. That's also why I'm here.

That's what I'm saying, that's what I'm saying. 'Cause like you work to get to the point where you get that slug, but.

Yeah, so I think it's like now instead of keep SPV, maybe at some point I might wanna, you know, around Q4, maybe start a fund for me and my people and, you know, give guys the opportunity that I have. And it's globally, it's not just in America, you know, it's, you know, yesterday I was sitting with some gentlemen that work with the QIA. And they've been really good, and they've been very open doors to me and showed me nothing but love and respect. And I love the people of Doha and Qatar. So I want to give the people the opportunity that I have because I think it's about paying it forward, and that's about being a real team player. Yeah. And me being a center, I didn't score 20 points a game. I did if you need me, if Kevin Love was out the game. Yeah. But you know, for me, I'm getting the low double-double, I'm getting the rebounds. Be a star in your role. Yeah. And now my role now is pivoting to be, you know, helping my guys that are still got the jerseys on, or the young guys, or the guys retiring, give them the access opportunity to make their money make money.

Yeah, that's what I'm about to start.

Yeah. Robotics. You're excited about robotics. What specifically? Humanoids, non-humanoids, wheeled stuff?

No, I think, you know, how—

what's your timeline to a humanoid being able to beat you one-on-one? So this is the real— because like, it might be, it might legit be, yeah, like, definitely the Turing test.

We got the Tris—

well, the The day that I go one-on-one versus a robot, and if I lose, I better make sure I have so much peptides in my shoulders and biceps where I can rip it apart.

I better have so much allocation in the robot that beats me. I better be out in 40%.

If you're not making money on the robot that's whooping you, then it's over.

Yeah, but no, I'm, you know, my thesis on robotics right now, and Jensen Huang said this 2 years ago, it's about physical AI. And I think robotics is physical AI. Humanoids, I'm not, We're not there yet.

Yeah.

You know, I'm not going to sit here and say I would want a robot taking care of my 9, 8, and 3-year-old. I'm not saying that. What I'm saying for the physical AI, it's more so, you know, whether it's in healthcare, whether it's in one area like healthcare, agricultural, you know, construction, landscaping, right? All those areas, robots and robotics can help. It's making the owners be more efficient on the business side. Business aspect, especially one area I like to touch on is agriculture, like the farmers, right? Because, you know, back in the day, you know, a lot of the, you know, a lot of the tractors right now are autonomous. They're doing it on their own. But back in the day, you had people, labor workers doing it. And, you know, a lot of these farmers were spending so much time on the labor and missing out on the business growth and opportunity, which was killing their margins. So now us using more autonomous, you know, machines and robotics, even like what Jeff's doing with now the packaging, what he's going to have in Amazon with Prometheus, right? It's not just, you know, the drive the car, the Amazon. No, it's more like the packaging, the arm. Yeah. So it's more efficient, which that's what I'm super bullish on because I want people to find ways to improve their business and less relying on the manpower. Let's focus on building the business side. And I think one area that I'm very excited about is like the agricultural space. How we can improve that. Yeah, because those farms, they're important to us. People always forget, like we're talking about like AI and energy and crops are important.

Yeah. Yeah. And there's a labor shortage. Yeah. You ever start a company?

Whatever.

Start a company, go through YC, run it up.

Oh, like Y Combinator? I mean, listen, those guys have— man, you know, one thing I will say on this, guys, I am a capital allocator. So I do believe in a lot of people and I don't mind writing checks. So If there's the right opportunity, maybe one day to create my own accelerator. I've thought about it as well. You know, especially— Yeah.

Go head to head with Gary Tan.

Yeah. But founding the fund is the entrepreneur.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or, you know, doing a multi— You know how they do multifamily offices? Yeah, yeah. Like do like a multifamily accelerator. Where it's like, Gary, you could both put like $100 in. 'Cause I know like Y Combinator, you just put $250 and then they want like 10% back. We bust it in half. Okay. 10 and 10.

Yeah, 10 and 10. Yeah, 10 and 10.

And when I'll put the 100, you put the 150.

Well, thank you so much. This is so much fun. No, no, guys, thank you guys so much.

Yes.

No, I love it, man. We're all in the same place. Thank you guys so much. Super proud. Listen, I'm a big fan, huge fan. Watch you guys daily. I'm so glad we were able to make this work.

This is awesome. You're welcome. I would love to come back again. This is electric.

I appreciate it. Thank you guys so much.

We'll talk to you soon. Yes, sir.

Gentlemen, thank you guys. See you. Much love, everybody.

Thank you. Yes. Let me tell you about Public.com investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. And we are back to back with two guests in the TVP and UltraDome. Finally, the men, the men. 11. We got shirts. I like this.

Follow the new logo as of this morning.

I like it. Very nice. Well, walk me through the logo design. Well, first introduce yourself. Tristan just gave our pitch, by the way.

Yeah, yeah. You guys must be co-investors. Yeah, welcome.

You guys must be co-investors.

Welcome to the show. I'm sure.

We got a— Is that a Castilian shirt?

We got a Castilian shirt right there for you.

A company is on. A Terra Neurus as well.

Pull off Soren, told you to bring it.

I like the Neurus orange.

I didn't realize that they were verticalizing orange. It's a good color. Anyway, sorry, quick introduction, names, titles, everything quickly, and then we'll go into it.

Ian Roundtree, founder and general partner at Kantos.

Grant, a partner at Kantos.

Fantastic. When did you guys get started investing?

10 years ago. 10 years ago. Almost exactly.

Overnight success. And the latest, the newest fund, take us through it.

New fund we just announced is $70 million. Last one was 50. We kept it.

It's even louder in person.

It feels even better than I expected it to.

You feel it in your bones. You feel it in your bones. First of all, did you ever consider Roundtree Capital? Because you got Sequoia, you got the Green Oaks. Like, there's already a long lineage of iconic firms that are sort of tree related or themed? Not for a second, no.

No. Where does the name come from? Where does the logo come from?

I want to know about the new logo. So I named the firm Kantos because the chapters of an epic poem are cantos. Oh, okay. Yeah. And I always thought we're drawn to startups, these missions that are greater than ourselves, because we want to be part of some grander story. And I think of founders as the modern-day hero and the startup as the epic. And I had these delusions of associated grandeur that I might partner with people who like change the world in a way that's remembered in story and song.

What was the strategy early on? Like, were you trying to lead rounds? Were you going very early stage, whatever would work?

What strategy? The strategy was write checks into startups.

OK, just get allocation. In good company. Got it. OK.

Yeah, I wish I called Fund One Fund Zero because it really was just like lessons. Cobbled together $4 million writing tiny checks, just trying to learn. $4 million.

Wow, what a start. That's amazing. I feel like the lessons there are probably— there's some people that would probably be better off if they'd started with $4 million because it really is a constraint, but that breeds ingenuity, I'm sure.

Well, I also was like, I was early at SoFi. Crazy to go to the US men's opener at SoFi Stadium, by the way. That was surreal because I joined them and they were like 20 people. Yeah. And just started writing that deal.

I think it's like $20 million a year for 20 years or $400 million to just get the name. I think they bought it. What percentage of their market cap is that? I think— aren't they on a rip? You probably sold a long time ago. I did, unfortunately. Paper hand. Paper hand. It's only a $23 billion stock.

Yeah, but I mean, that's a perk of being in the private markets.

I sold secondary to Silver Lake, I think in the Series D, maybe, but that helped me get Kryptos off the ground.

So, Fund 0, Fund 1, whatever the right tool for the job is, whatever the right deal is, you'll get in as long as it's a good company. How rigid are you today? Do you want to be specific, specific first money in, seed, Series A? Do you want to take a certain ownership perspective, percentage? Like, what guardrails do you have, if any?

We feel like the constraints breed creativity in a way. You want to be focused enough that you signal to the market what you do, and we kept the fund relatively small because we want to be able to look a founder in the eye when we write a $1.5 million check, and me and Grant and Ame, our principal, can look a founder in the eye and say, your company at this stage is a meaningful percentage of my network.

Is important to you.

And if you get too big, you can't really say that with a straight face.

Yeah, when I think about the names like Nero's, Castilian, there's a bunch of others, like I'm— the $70 million feels like, yeah, very intentional about like we want to actually just keep doing what we're doing.

Totally. That said, a lot of the best investments look like exceptions. You need to know when to bend. Sure. And Grant led Costellion seed round when he was at Andreessen. And the first thing he said when he joined Kantos was, hey, I know they're about to raise a big Series A, but—

Yeah, let's do it. Yeah.

That makes sense. The logo, the new logo, what's the etymology?

So this is a quill. Yeah. And for right now, we also like that it implies a vector. Sure. We talk a lot about tempo, speed, velocity really matter for a startup because time compounds. Sure. Just like money. Sure. And I like that it looks like a diving peregrine falcon or something.

Yeah, dude, I was just watching videos about a peregrine falcon.

This is what you do in your free time?

With my 4-year-old. Oh, okay.

Fastest creature.

Fastest creature on Earth. They're birds, and they are incredibly violent. Like, they just go after other birds. Literally, they're like a missile. Sounds like some of the founders we've had. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Peregrine falcons.

State of defense tech, we were talking about this. Are we past peak defense tech in terms of— not in terms of the size of the companies, but in terms of the rate of formation? It feels like post-Anduril awareness, there was a boom, there were a lot of founders that came into the category from other areas, experience from SpaceX, etc. But is it picking up still?

You guys have the blessing of like, you're in NEAROS, you're in Castilian. You're not like, "Oh, we need it. We need our drone." We need to find more.

Yeah. And a lot of founders, a lot of would-be founders, if they're at like Boeing and they're bored and they want to I want to do something more exciting, that like they could go work at Nearos. There are so many options now if you want to go have an impact at the early stage broadly that you might not need to start a company. But what are you seeing on the ground?

Well, one of the ways we look at the cinematic universe here broadly is go down like the top 100 companies by market cap. And as soon as you start to not recognize the names, it turns out that those industries are super big and massive. Defensive. Defense was one of the ones that now there's enough people like Andrew Hall, Palantir, that paved the way, and people are realizing that the venture scale outcomes for— but one of the amazing things about Kantos when I was at Andreessen was just observing how Ian and the team were able to find these categories that people still didn't feel comfortable about. I mean, Tristan's talking about ag, right? Like 10 years ago, people were like, oh, let's do agtech, and everyone's like, it's It's a horrible place. You're never going to make money. And then, you know, we turn around a few years later, and Cantos is leading the seed round for Shinkei. Yeah. And it's like fish-killing robots.

That's really weird. Yeah. Yeah. I think it was the pre-seed. Weren't you guys in the pre-seed, or what do you—

It was a small seed, by today's standards.

Small seed. Yeah. Yeah. There's some crazy ag tech things. We had the founder of the laser weeder on. Oh, yeah.

No, I've never heard of that. Yeah, there's a bunch of cool things.

Have you heard about this? No. It's a tractor, but everyone's worried about pesticides. Very obvious solution is just fire a laser at the exact weed so you just burn it. No one has a problem with like having a burnt weed next to your tomato. So it's fully— No pesticides. Pesticide-free. It's way better. And it's just something that's obviously like you can back of the envelope how that's built very quickly. But it's enabled by computer vision and small actuators that can adjust where the laser's going. And there's a whole bunch of somewhat commodity technologies that are just put together in this very interesting way, creates a great product. Yeah, but it's how you package it. Exactly, exactly.

That's one of the lessons when I got into deep tech is technology is not inherently valuable in and of itself. It's valuable insofar as it solves problems and creates value in the world. And if you're better at packaging things that are off the shelf in a novel way and contextualize that in a business that makes money, that's a lot more interesting than like, oh, I did my PhD in this crazy thing and it sounds really cool. How do I sell this, by the way?

Where do you see yourself punching the hardest in terms of value add? Like, you're, you're making investments in a way that you You are an important voice around the table to the founders. That's clear. But are they coming to you with go-to-market consultation or hiring or strategy or marketing? Where do you feel like you're, if a founder calls you about a particular problem, you're excited to talk about it as opposed to saying, oh, this is kind of new. I can help as much as I can, but—

Yeah, I mean, there's all the when I'm fundraising next, we're still working on this.

Oh, sure, sure, sure.

In-house banker or whatever, all the relationships. And we have a very high hit rate there, over 90% success rate in getting your next round. And that's actually—

and that's an advantage of being a $70 million fund, is that there's no signal to, like, yeah, I'm actually not doing the $100 million next round. It's like, yeah, obviously.

I think the other thing that's different about Kantos, and maybe we talk about joining from Andreessen and going here, I think one of the things is really clear about Ian and the team was they're so concentrated. And so, yes, we don't have the follow-on signaling dynamic here, but we also, when we go to another firm and say, we think this company's amazing, they're going to take it that much more seriously. And also, because we're concentrated, we can just devote more time to our relationships here. So, we have a lot more context on any company in our portfolio probably than the rest of the entire cap table. And there are times when founders don't want us to be involved, 'cause they're busy and they're crushing. But most often, early on, you need a lot of help, and that's where I think we've just, they've been doing this for 10 years, I've been doing it a good amount of time too, we have enough pattern matching. And I think the other thing too is, for these categories, I'm fired up that everyone's coming in to the cinematic universe here, but also not a lot of people, I think, have as strong opinions opinions for how to build a company or what types of founders you need to have. And I think with the lessons here, we can package a lot of that and have this cross-pollination between the portfolio companies that's pretty distinguished and helps out a lot.

But a lot of times the founder, they have the intuition, they know what they need to do deep down. They kinda just need to hear from someone they trust that like— Yep. Like when we invested in Shokei, right? Still licensing robots to fish farms. That's right. And they kind of dabbled in selling fish, having their own brand, but they weren't capitalized well enough to go do that. And so we stepped in. We were like, hey, why aren't you doing that thing anymore? And Saif was like, honestly, because—

Everyone's saying no. Yeah.

We were like, that's absolutely what we should do. And it was like we had given water to a man in the desert. Like, he wanted to do it. He knew he needed to do it. The other investors were being more coy about it. And we were like, no, let's go direct, man. Like, use your own robots. Don't sell them. Just sell better fish with those robots.

You guys are super vertically integrated. It's great. Where's the office? Do you have an office here?

I'm in San Francisco.

I'm in LA.

If you could open an office anywhere in the world, where would it be? No, post-LA, and then maybe there's a boom in Austin. Where's the next, next? Boom for entrepreneurial talent, hard tech, defense tech. Where's interesting? Texas has been good to us.

Texas, we're investors in Solugen and Venus Aerospace in Houston, Resurgent Industries in Austin more recently. Um, there's, there's a couple CEOs that live there as well in the portfolio.

We're going to see a bunch of these states though start to be really compelling. Like, yeah, LA is so strong in many ways because Tesla and SpaceX. Austin's starting to get that with a bunch bunch of other companies there. What we're also seeing though is that so many companies were started in the Gundo, they kind of graduate to Torrance or Hawthorne, but then eventually, like Castellum, for example, they're not gonna be able to test their missiles in LA, obviously, that'd be terrifying. And so a lot of these companies graduate, Radiant, same thing for nuclear weapons.

How many times do you meet a Gundo founder and you're like, "Don't test your product." Yeah. "Don't do it here. You can do it somewhere nearby." We're not too, We're not far enough away for me to feel comfortable.

You start at the gundo, or you start somewhere else, you move to the gundo. Series A, you move to Torrance, and then you start building a factory in Texas, Tennessee.

Tennessee. Tennessee's becoming interesting. New Mexico.

I think you'll probably see, we've seen a number of companies out of Seattle because a lot of the Starlink team is there. Oh, interesting. And like within SpaceX, that's a crack team.

Yeah, that's right.

So you'll see people that probably want to stay there.

Avalanche, the fusion companies up there, and there's been a few others that we've talked about.

The lumber manufacturing—

What is great luck from an R&D cycle or an execution standpoint? Because it really just feels like there's such a— on TVPN, 90% of the time we're having founders, 95% of the time we're having founders on that are actually shipping and making really meaningful progress. And then there's the 5% of hard tech founders, some of them raise a lot of money and we're sort of curious, but are not really shipping. And that's like kind of like, that's people, a lot of people have been burned by companies like that over the years where it's like, cool idea, deep tech, and then they just don't, they keep raising money, but don't ever make anything, don't ever get like real contact with the market. Maybe like quantum-related companies.

Well, there's different types, there's different kinds classes of companies. Like, we have some that— like, we put out a deck last year on what we're calling, like, the state of adventure capital. Yeah, there we go.

Delayed, delayed.

But it's like 286 slides, and there's a chunk in there that talks about, like, how deep is the deep tech company. Sure. And, you know, if you're doing quantum or, like, fusion, that's gonna take a long time. The time to revenue is long, CapEx, whatever. I think the companies that we like are higher up up in that score where the time to iteration's really fast. You want to build, break, and iterate. And I think what a lot of people got wrong in prior hardware eras is they just assumed, yes, like you only get a few shots on goal. You have to be really deliberate. Sniper shot it out. You can't spray and pray your way to greatness here. But that doesn't mean that you can still not like test quickly. If you look at Nero's, if you look at Shinkei, Castellian, and all of them are like constantly in the field fielding their systems, seeing what's working, what isn't. And they know early on that those are not gonna be the best ways. But the most expensive part in building in hardware by far are the people. It's not the hardware. And you hear Elon talk about this all the time. Like the cost of Starshield and Starship and all these systems there in the grand scheme isn't a lot. It's the hours of labor that go into it. And so the sooner that you test out and see what breaks and refine it, I think the better off. I think we're seeing a bunch more founders that have appreciated this, that have learned it at SpaceX or in other places now, and they're coming out and doing a lot more. But, you know, I think there's like the other challenge here is a lot of people that are coming in and are excited to make a bet in defense or energy or what have you. They, I think, are missing that way of evaluating companies their ability to test quickly.

You have to get on the learning curve as soon as possible.

You can't sit in the lab. You need to feel technology. And we find that, getting back to tempo, vector, speed, we find that if we're diligencing a company in like a week, I used to think, oh, that's not a lot of time. Of course they won't have made progress. But we've started, we've backed so many people now that like a week to them is like a month to everybody else, and they'll just blow your mind with how quickly they move. And if you don't, again, that compounds. If you don't get that feeling in a week, you're not going to get it in a month, a quarter, a year. All of a sudden, a decade is a lot shorter than it used to be.

Are you feeling the pull of the AI vortex? It feels like we're seeing—

No, not at all. I didn't notice it.

No, it feels like we've seen a number of hard tech companies sort sort of pivot or expand into AI-related projects? Boom, Supersonic, like Castilian, I can imagine that somebody's gonna try and figure out how to bolt that thing to the ground. Yeah, I'm sure. And then Solid Rock is gonna wind up being like security for AI data centers or something. Obviously they have fantastic businesses, but like, are there examples or like how do you negotiate or what do you say to a founder who's saying like, yeah, we have We have a 6 out of 10 market right now. It's going to be a couple of years, but I got an interesting call from a neo cloud and they think that they could put our thing to work.

We were having this conversation recently. We've made a General Robotics investment that's still in stealth. We're really excited about it. And it will be general, but again, we want to get on the learning curve. Ideally, we want to commercialize as quickly as possible. And we're thinking about where do you start? We're just throwing spaghetti at the wall. And one of the ideas was like, should we start a car wash? Have these like robot arms wash your car for you. I love it. And then we're like—

Which are sneaky good businesses.

No, no, great business. Also extremely fragmented. I don't think they've been rolled up. And with self-driving cars, the Waymos, they'll need to go somewhere. Why not match it?

But you know who has a lot more money?

Data centers.

Maybe data centers could use some revenue. Sure, sure, sure. Of the two. It seems like a pretty obvious answer.

I think there will be a lot of technologies that can ride that wave. When I first invested in Radiant, we were talking about military applications. Totally. And the behind-the-meter application for data centers is not even really on the radar.

Yeah. I interviewed Doug a couple of years ago, and I was like, so you're going to get calls. And he's like, we really like the idea of going to Mars and stuff. And I'm like, you'll get there. Yeah. But you're going to power some mail. AI stuff first.

All the energy companies got handed a huge gift. It's great. We had no growth in the grid. Yeah, nothing. 30 years. Yeah.

Now all of a sudden— And there's these niche applications like oil and gas exploration, stranded energy and stuff. And now it's just like, yeah, there's obvious, obvious demand. It's going to be so much easier for these folks. And then all that technology will get commoditized and it'll go everywhere and it'll be great.

And you'll still get— What's the state of IP coming out of universities today? Is that a pipeline of— Gradually it could be.

We have a no PhD policy at Qantos.

I learned this the hard way. Like, I mean, there are some PhDs that are like the Solugen guys, like John Gedmark at Astronis, who are very business-minded. But if you find someone who's like trying to commercialize their PhD, their doctoral thesis, you've got this hammer you're looking for nails, that hardly ever works. You're also trained exactly the wrong way. When you're defending your thesis, it's all caveats and what could go wrong. And you get dinged if you overpromise.

It's like the old school way of thinking about hardware. It's like East Coast mindset of we're going to sit in an ivory tower, think about all the ways that this could make a lot of impact, as opposed to just, hey, we're just going to— like, Shinkei is just going to put 'Put the robot on fishing boat and see what breaks.' And turns out a lot of stuff's gonna break.

Put the robot on a boat, bro. Yeah, let's do it.

Yeah, you'll find like the SpaceX—

Just put the gun on the truck.

Where are you doing this, by the way?

No, this is John's like bit on Allen Controls and stuff. Oh, the gun on the truck company.

But they failed to consider that there's a YC company that's just gun on the ground. Oh yeah, Nine Mothers. Yeah, Nine Mothers, just gun on the ground.

Multiple use cases. Yeah.

Gun on everything, I suppose. Anyway, congratulations on the fund. Congratulations on it. Yeah, thank you guys.

Yeah, a decade in, decades to go. That's the idea.

If you look at our website, cantos.vc, we have these plaques and sort of our version of Trajan's Column because we aspire to back people whose companies will be engraved in stone and metal in 1,000 years. And if that's not you, don't email us. I love it.

I love it. Know who you're— know who your customers are. Thank you. Hit the gong for us. I want you to take it for a spin.

Yeah, take this. This guy's big. Whack that thing. Backhand. Interesting. Thank you for watching TVPN. We'll be back tomorrow at 11 AM Pacific.

Oh, hang out with us. We'll close it out.

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