Benchmark’s Ship of Theseus, OpenAI Kills Sora, SpaceX $2T IPO Buzz | Diet TBPN

There's been a debate, uh, truth bomb dropped by Emil Michael. He says forgiving Benchmark and others would be like letting the Wuhan Institute of Virology slide back into a good reputation because the new senior manager of pandemic causation has made more friends than his predecessor. And so this got me thinking, and I'm probably going to have to put on the steel helmet for this one because this is wading into dangerous territory defending Benchmark. But my question is, how close are we to actually being able to forgive Benchmark? When is the right time? It's been a decade. Obviously the drama between Benchmark and Travis Kalanick was awful. I think everyone's against what happened. But the question is like, what is a venture firm? It is its partnership. If the partnership turns over at some point, like, is it a new team? Do you get a second shot? Can you actually change change the reputation. And so believe me, like, I get the benchmark criticism. Like, Travis is truly a generational entrepreneur and was on such an amazing run, right? So he was attacked.

Jason, Jason from Saster was reacting to our interview with Travis and his take, which I totally agree with, is it's hard to— if Travis had stayed in the role, it's hard to imagine Uber being worth less than something like $1 trillion today.

Yes. So our friend of the show, Owen McCabe, over at fin.ai said, Waymo is superior to Uber in literally every way. This was a year ago, on March 25th, actually to the day, a year ago he said this. Waymo is superior to Uber in literally every way that matters to consumers. Smoother, safer, more reliable, no chatty, weird, rude drivers, private, quiet. Self-driving car services are gonna dominate their human driver incumbents. And Owen says, TBT when I think that's throwback to, right? Throwback to when Benchmark pushed Travis out of Uber and canned the self-driving division that he started literally 10 years ago. And so this is what's so, so tricky about this is that Uber survived. It's $150 billion market cap. It's bigger than when Travis was ousted. But getting a 2x over a decade is not what I think people were expecting from Uber under Travis's leadership. And Lyft has fallen to just $5 billion. Like he won the capital war and Dara's done a great job managing the business, but I feel like a lot of the success of Uber has been built on the foundation that Travis set up. It wasn't a complete reinvention. If anything, they just honed down the core business.

Yeah, and I think that the thing that is holding the business back right now, at least from a valuation standpoint, is this big question, right? Around self-driving. Dara has answered this question thousands of times right now. The strategy is to invest in self-driving companies, partner with self-driving companies, but not the same as having developed their own internal IP and product starting a decade ago and seeing where that would've been by now is hard to think about.

Yeah, and so Uber is valued at $150 today, something like that. Waymo, Waymo was valued in February of this year at $126 billion. And so yes, Waymo's been working on self-driving longer, but you have to imagine that there's another $50 billion of market cap if you have a serious play.

What would Waymo be valued if Travis was the CEO? Yeah. You would get some type of Travis premium on it. Oh, just, yeah, just the market would be, would, would say totally, totally, totally, totally. You have this sort of, yeah, one of one. Entrepreneur.

Yeah, 100%. So Shervin said, in my opinion, Gurley single-handedly destroyed hundreds of billions in value. Travis and Emil staying in charge of Uber would have led to a Tesla-sized win, $500 billion plus for everyone, including Benchmark's LPs. He nuked decades of Benchmark's reputation with founders. The market has spoken, and no future Travis-quality founder would ever touch him or his former firm again, especially since 3 of the partners that approved of the ousting of of Travis are still at the firm. And so my question is, how many partners need to be at the firm until we can call this a Ship of Theseus? So for those who are not up to speed on their Greek mythology, in Greek mythology, Theseus is the mythical king of the city of Athens. He rescues the children of Athens from King Minos after slaying the Minotaur, which is his mythical beast, and then he escapes onto a ship going to Delos. Each year, the Athenians would commemorate this success by taking the ship on a pilgrimage to Delos to honor Apollo. Over time, because they're sailing the ship every year, various of its timbers rotted and were replaced. A question was raised by ancient philosophers. If no pieces of the original ship remained in the current ship, is it still the ship of Theseus? If it was no longer the same, when had it ceased existing as the original ship? So some people might say 50/50. Some people might say, yes, it is the same ship because replacing one board at a time, the ship is the concept and you can swap everything out 25 times, it's still the same ship. There isn't like a, it's a paradox. There is no like right answer. It's a philosophical question, but it applies, I think, to Benchmark because back when Kalanick resigned as Uber CEO on June 20th, 2017, after investor pressure that included Benchmark, on that exact date Benchmark's equal GP roster was Bill Gurley, Eric Visria, Matt Kohler, Mitch Lasky, Peter Fenton, Sarah Tavel. Today, the partnership has changed dramatically. The only two that remain are Peter and Eric. And you have Chetan, Ev Randall, and Jack Altman who are new to the partnership post the Uber scandal. And so it's not a full ship of Theseus, but only one-third of the original 2017 partnership remains. And my question for those who remain reluctant to forgive Benchmark is like, what happens if Peter and Eric retire or leave at some point, and the full ship of Theseus is complete. Maybe you'll ship—

Yeah, right now, 40% of the partnership was there.

33%.

The question is, did Chetan, Everett, and Jack come in and as part of the interview process say, like, you're absolutely right.

You're absolutely right. I mean, to defend Ev, he's done a strong, good job.

Knowing 2 out of the 3.

Ev had just graduated from college. —like he was truly not involved in the Uber scandal. And yet, you know, people will visit upon him.

Knowing Everett and Jack, I'm sure during the interview process they were like, the storied firm. I'm excited to join, but we can never do anything like that again. And so one question that's worth asking is, is the firm that did this and ultimately stained this storied brand and has certainly suffered the consequences, right? They've put up incredible returns since then, but I'm sure they've missed a lot of deals that would've made their returns even better because of that kind of narrative around the firm. And so Emil, Michael, and others are upset that they're doing great deals at all. But I think it is, if they're in a situation again, right, in the same situation, kind of situation, are they more— what decision are they more or less likely to make, right? I would argue, like, they are probably less likely to— I would think so. —go against the founder, given how this entire situation has played out.

Yeah, yeah. The only steel man— and this needs the full steel helmet because it's so hard to steel man the benchmark thing. The full steel man of the benchmark thing is really bad. It's really bad to bench— I'm sorry for everyone. I'm sorry. But it's basically that— Every partner at Benchmark, it's an equal partnership. So every partner was going to make a clean $1 billion. They were all going to be billionaires from this one deal. And it was such a power law that there was no path to becoming a billionaire for, you know, from the other investments, most likely. And so you see the endless 24/7 hit piece pile stack up and, you know, you got Mike Isaac, you know, bloodhounded on at the New York Times, writing books, they're turning into movies, like it's getting rough, it's getting rough. Mike Isaac's at your door. Yeah, Mike Isaac's at the door, the barbarians are at the gate. And you're like, I'm either a billionaire or I'm going back to your paltry $10 million. And I can't do that, I can't do that. And so they freak out and they're like, we gotta salvage this thing, we gotta just push it out in the public markets, we gotta get out of this name. And so they basically just— it's just too nerve-wracking. And yeah, it's not a strong steel man. But I think that's a little bit more of what happened than taking a stand on, oh, this particular thing that happened was so egregious. It was more just like, OK, wow, all my money, like 99% of my net worth is in this asset. And it's looking like it could be a zero because Lyft is coming from behind. There's a whole bunch of VCs that are piling into that. The narrative is totally flipping. There's a boycott Uber campaign. Pain, like, and everyone's like, ah, what's going on? I got to get out of this. I got to salvage this. And I think that was maybe more of the underpinning than like, like, I'm taking some sort of like moral stand on a particular hit piece or something like that. Anyway, it's rough, but fortunately, you know, ship the ECS process. Maybe it happens. I don't know. Would Dallin accept that argument? Probably not. Would Emil? Probably not. But they're not making it any easier with the Mannis investment either, because like there was a world where it was like, okay, yeah, the Uber thing happened a decade ago. The partnership is basically entirely new and they're focused on— But it's—

but it's not there yet. Yes, it's just not there yet. It's not there yet.

But I think—

I think you can rewrite this in 5 years.

Yeah. You— yeah, you made this point that this is— it's too early to call this, but—

but I think it's directionally, given that the firm is still putting up great returns. They've gotten to a bunch of great companies over the last 5 years. I think we are on a path to the benchmark.

Well, yeah, Venture Lazard, the Venture Ship of Theseus and VC Bragg said Airbnb has no homes, Uber has no cars, and Benchmark has no partners. Of course, that was an exaggeration. Sora, rest in peace. Sora, the app is leaving.

Hev is in the chat. There he is. Class of '17, represent. Yes, yes.

Ev was chugging beers while Uber was getting ousted. Do not visit the sins of the father on the son. That's what I would say. Ev, not guilty.

Ev was a boulder.

Yeah, he was hanging out.

What happened? Senior year? What happened?

Anyway, Sora is now— is it still in the App Store? I think it's like the announcement was that it will be leaving the App Store.

Millions of people have made content on the app. —have to leave it running for some amount of time.

There's a phase-out, but the announcement happened and now it is going out. And there's— I have a bunch of takes on this. Obviously this is not the end of video creation for OpenAI. This will be rolled into ChatGPT, I imagine. Tyler Hodge put it well. Bullish. Killing products quickly is hard. Almost no one can do it. It's a good sign for OpenAI. They're consolidating. In many ways, it's like last week you heard about like the red— the code red was like a month or two ago, and then it was like, we're refocusing. And then it's like, here's step one of refocusing, like a single app that we're going to push everything together. And also, I've enjoyed making some videos in Sora. I've never enjoyed having to go to a separate app. I want all of that to live in one place. So that makes a lot of sense. Let's see what Dax said. It's lame to see all the people saying, ha, I called it. I knew Sora wouldn't work. Yeah, duh, because everyone thought— Everyone thought that, including me, who were working on it. They probably learned a lot trying to make it work anyway. For every successful thing that exists, 100 efforts like this had to fail, and those learnings are fed into making something that ultimately does work and provides you with a steady paycheck. Yes, it's interesting because this, this quote of like people saying, ha, I called it, I knew SORA would work, that is not how I interpreted the vibes around the SORA launch. Like I went back and revisited the essay that I wrote on October 1st. We had the slop versus farming debate. I was really on a tear back then. I said slop is bad. We, the timeline, don't want to be pigs at the trough. We don't like it when tech leaders treat us like farm animals, but we love farming. Farming is Lindy. We, the timeline, want to return to a world where we are filling up troughs with slop on a daily basis, I guess. So between Google DeepMind, Meta Superintelligence, and OpenAI, we now have 3 different variations on AI video products, each met with slightly different responses. So the, yeah, the interesting thing here is that like Google has been like charging ahead, launching it, it's in Shorts, and that's just been like not a story at all. What was interesting was that the vibes around both Meta vibes and Sora were like, this is going to one-shot humanity. They're like, this is going to be too successful.

That was, it was like interesting chats. It was like an entertainment doom loop. Exactly. You could imagine it just getting so good at generating the next thing that you would wanna see better than even a billion humans on Instagram could do. And that's not what we've seen so far.

And so like my big question was like, will this actually be sticky? Will people like this? And at what rate? I mean, I read LLM-generated text daily, but I also read a ton of not LLM-generated text. And my ratio has grown exponentially, but it hasn't gone to 100%. Nowhere near it. Like probably 5% of the text that I read is LLM-generated.

I mean, we should actually revisit how we were processing it during launch when it was, you know, rocketing.

We should just throw on that 3-hour stream and just watch them react to how our tweets were that day.

Even at the time, I remember saying very obvious that they built like a very cool creative tool. Yeah. And they have the potential to seed a network with this. There's a all this, you know, novel content. They had allowing creators and, you know, people like Sam to allow people to use their IP. It was very, very well-executed launch, but even from the beginning, it was like, okay, obviously cool creative tool. It's a totally different ballgame. You know, this like come for the tool, stay for the network has been like an enduring strategy, right? Chris Dixon probably wrote that in like 2014. 2014 maybe, or like a long time ago, over 10 years ago. But just because you build a tool that is attached to a network, like that jump is just really, really, really, really tough.

Especially when there are 3 or 4 or 5 serious networks that are at scale that can on day 1 support the format of the file that is produced from the model. So in a world where generative AI video came out not in an MP4 file or an MOV file, it came out in some sort of format that could never be uploaded to Instagram Reels, then you have a chance to build a network and run away with it. And this was the story of Instagram. Like Instagram just had better support for images than Facebook did. And then Vine had support for video literally before Instagram. So Instagram, it was like, I have a video on my phone, it's cool, I want to share it. Yeah, sharing it to Instagram was not possible. Yeah. Now on day one, you generate an AI video, you want to share it, you can share it on TikTok. Yeah, it's just the incentive.

If you create, if you create an amazing video on Sora, yeah, what is the most logical thing to do if you're a creator and you want reach? Post it to Instagram. There's just naturally, there's billions of people there. Yeah, there either were Millions of people on Sora and a lot of energy momentum. Yeah.

And it's not lost on me that the same day that Sora was killed, you have a viral breakout reality TV style series show putting up incredible numbers on TikTok for Fruit Love Island, I believe it's called. It's an AI-generated twist on Love Island. There's romantic intrigue and plotlines and stories and consistent characters and a lot of things that have come from a variety of AI models. And we should talk to the person that's the entrepreneur behind that project because I would be interested to know what the stack is because I imagine it's not just, you know, going to a single GenAI app. I imagine that they have a whole pipeline, like a workflow in place to actually generate that. And so we're at this weird moment where, you know, Sora, the app is going away, but we're also seeing more and more AI-generated content slowly see success, whether that's the podcast that's at the top of the charts that's fully AI-generated. There's this Love Island show. There's a number of niches where they've found the right product-market fit for AI-generated content, but it's not overnight we're living in Infinite Jest and we just can't look away. It's like for specific things, it makes a lot of sense. And so it's working there.

Yeah, it's interesting to think about Google's strategy with video. Even Google was like, we cannot operate this for free at scale. $250 a month. No, that was the discounted rate.

Oh, I think I had $500 a month or something.

Yeah, it was like an entry to start. It was like $250 a month.

And it was brutally weight limited.

Yeah, even with— we were laughing at this because— I could get 3 a day. I remember we'd be like at the gym in the morning, you would fire off a couple prompts. Yeah. And then you were like rate limited.

I hope I got it right.

Yeah, you wouldn't get it right, then you were rate limited. And you're like, wait, I'm rate limited on a $250 plan that's going to jump to $500? You're probably paying— got to check the ramp. Yeah, I got to check our ramp. He's probably paying $500 a month still.

No, seriously. And that rate limit?

And that's Google with— all this. Yeah, it's literally an insane data advantage for YouTube.

Let me tell you, rate limits kill retention like nothing. Nothing is worse. If you're in Instagram, the endless scroll exists. TikTok, you can, you can scroll endlessly. You can use the— imagine if TikTok was like, after 5 minutes you have to close the app and come back in 20 minutes. Like, how successful do we think that would be? It would be a disaster. And that was the experience for both Sora and v03, where you would fire off a prompt and it would be like, okay, come back in a couple minutes, it's going to take me a while to cook. And then you fire off 5 and it's like, okay, no more for today. Clearly the compute constraints are immense and there's just so much more value that can come from enterprise and can come from deep research and so many of the other models that are immediately economically valued, like code gen, like enterprise workflows. And it's maybe more boring and less viral, and less controversial, but it's where the compute needs to go. And so I think you're going to see the chips be moved around inside of all the labs to like compute will find the most optimal output, like the tokens of the most value will always be the ones that it flows, that the compute flows to and endless random generations that aren't quite dialed yet. Even the best video models, like they're just not there. They require a lot of work is not the same as as where we are in terms of knowledge retrieval, where we are in terms of cogent. It's just way more valuable. You said—

what did I say— September, people overestimate how much brain rot happens in a year and underestimate how much brain rot happens in a decade.

So yes, yes. So, so I mean, I'm using brain rot pejoratively there, but, but I do think that like this, this move does not really bend the curve of, of just AI-generated content. But I still think it's like a slow rollout. Like it's fast in the sense that like we went from no slop on the timeline to lots. And we went from like actually zero, there was like one cool AI video, Harry Potter Balenciaga was like entertaining to general people. And now we get like 5. And then we get like next year we'll get like 20. And then eventually it'll be like hundreds and it'll be like, oh yeah, I'm actually into that. Like people are into cartoons and people are into CGI movies and superhero movies. Some people will be into it. Some people will never like it. Some people will always say, "I want a black and white film from the '40s. That's what I wanna watch." And these rollouts, the diffusion of this stuff will happen.

Tweet Davidson says— What is this? "Y'all are worried about the wrong open claw." This is a good post.

White Claw did have a fast takeoff for sure. It went from 0 to 60 and it was just everywhere all of a sudden. But anyway, it is a remarkable story because Fiverr is running one of the coolest out-of-home campaigns. Like just from an out-of-home inventory, I didn't know you could do this, Let's, uh, we can pull up either my picture or we can pull up— let's pull up this video from KTLA 5. KTLA 5 had a video breaking down what's going on. Let's watch this and then we'll react to this. Let's pull up the KTLA 5 report about AI coming for Hollywood.

The mysterious sign along the 101 underneath a logo for Fiverr and a search box says find the best AI directors. It's a brash, bold statement. Brash, bold statement for Hollywood. Coming for— Fiverr has made a name for itself connecting projects with freelancers. Now they're launching an AI video hub, which they say can make content at a fraction compared to traditional production. This Billy Bowman guy is one of the directors that you can hire. He's based in Sweden. He's made AI videos for Google, Universal Music Group, and others. As you know, AI really hasn't taken over Hollywood yet, but it has certainly crept into commercials. Brands like Google and Jeep rolling out AI on national campaigns. Many are slowly— are slowing, rather, to see the 30-foot sign which went up over the weekend. I first noticed it stuck in traffic yesterday morning after someone was so entranced they rear-ended somebody. It's causing accidents. Yeah. So interesting. AI director. Yeah. So it's basically someone who puts the prompt into the machine and chooses Is Fiverr going to pay?

Just put the prompt in the box, buddy.

Fender Bender. That's a great question. Yeah. Yeah.

Can they be held liable for such a distracting sign? I didn't—

you know, these apps are flush with money. Whether or not it is a bubble, like, you can debate.

That's interesting because Fiverr is not one of those companies.

KTLA 5 is not prepared for it not to be a bubble.

But of course, the AI wave has not been kind to Fiverr because a lot of the tasks like, you know, generating images for—

AI is very, very, very good at $5 creative work. Exactly. $25. Obviously, the prices go well beyond $5 since the early days. But in terms of the kind of projects that I always use Fiverr for, AI just one-shots all of that.

And the nature of Fiverr is like, you have to define your task in a prompt. It's not, oh, have like a long conversation, get drinks with somebody.

That was often the bottleneck. That was the bottleneck.

Yeah, totally.

It was like, okay, I need to do this task, but I need like 10 minutes to like properly define it, all these things. It's honestly way more time than you spend prompting normally because with prompting you're just like, I'll just try it a few times.

Kind of iterate. Hit my rate limits and then fire back up. Yeah, I mean, it was always a bottleneck. I remember as an entrepreneur, I found out about Fiverr and I was like, this is amazing. I can get random stuff done for $5. But the time commitment, actually finding the right person, making sure the reviews are good, it wound up being like hours of work. And if you have a consistent flow, you're better off just hiring a person. So they got kind of squeezed in the middle.

Yeah, the market is not excited about Fiverr right now. They're being valued basically at 4 times EBITDA.

But this is an interesting pivot for them. They're basically saying that you can come to us to hire someone who has all the tooling set up to actually sit there and sort of nanny all the AI models because it is a hassle. Like as you described with me and VO3, I was sitting there like, okay, I fire off 4 prompts, then I go back. Like it's way better if you're on the API and you have Higgsfield wired up and you have, you know, Runway ML and you have access to the Chinese model, SeaDance, like the right tool for the job. And then you do fine tune on someone's face. There's a whole bunch of things that you can do to get better results, but it takes time and it's a hassle and it's more of a professional job.

It's not actually at a word prompt. Here's the main problem with the campaign. Yes. Is that Billy Bowman is a real person with his own website, with his own Instagram.

Oh, is he for real?

You can just go and reach out to him, which is interesting because like the primary issue with these labor marketplaces like Fiverr is disintermediation. If a business hires somebody on Fiverr and has an amazing experience, eventually they're just going to go direct because they build up a lot of trust. And it's very different than a platform like Uber, where you don't necessarily want the same driver every time because they're not around you and all these things. And so the reason that the Fiverrs and the Upworks of the world— and there's been a bunch of other engineering-focused marketplaces— just have never reached like insane scale like Uber is because of the disintermediation. And this campaign is effectively an ad for Billy Bowman, who you could just go hire today.

Yeah, disintermediation has always been a problem on these platforms. Bombardier, the manufacturer of private business jets, is down 10% over the past month. A lot of people were wondering why this was happening. I think we now I don't know why, and it's probably because the shot across the bow from United Airlines. So what competes with a private jet? United Airlines' new product, which is an entire row of economy seats. United Airlines says the entire row is all yours. Welcome to the United Relax Row. 3 adjacent United economy seats with adjustable leg rests that can be raised or lowered to create a cozy lie-flat space. Space for stretching out. You'll also get a mattress pad, blanket, and 2 pillows. If you're traveling with kids, a plushie too. United Relax Row will be available starting next year on more than 200 of the 787s and 777s. So what do you think, Jordi? I was telling Tyler Cosgrove, who is out of the studio today, he's in Washington, D.C., he's got to demo this. He's got to get on one of these. I don't know. Every time an airline announces something, it's always like 5 years until it actually is available. I've been waiting for Starlink for a long time. Took a long time for that to get rolled out from the PR release.

United has pretty good pace. Okay, but they've been quick to—

So you think Tyler could get on this tomorrow?

I think if Tyler's resourceful enough, he could just— if he ended up in a row, yeah, two empty seats next to him, he could just figure out a way to detach the armrest. Okay, locking this. Yeah, and just kind of, kind of build your own. Yeah, they might have to land the plane and arrest him.

Yeah, potentially worth the risk. He could also— he could also potentially negotiate with whoever's sitting next to him, say, hey, you go and spend the entire flight in the lavatory, and in exchange, I will vibe code you a sloppy app of which I don't understand what programming language is used.

I'll trade you an app for your seat.

I'll trade you an app for your seat. And somebody might be like, that's amazing. I don't have anyone that can vibe code for me. This is too good.

No, I'm sorry. Brian Peterson says, now we just need to put stairs on the food drink cart so you can climb over the top of them to get to the bathroom instead of holding Yeah, this just, this just feels like this just feels very, very chaotic. I don't know.

Starlink, a relaxed row, a dream. I think that this could be a good option. United built the product that everyone who has been, who has ever been on a plane wanted, says John Collison.

John, you need to work on fixing Bombardier's stock price.

I don't think it's related. Oh, apparently Air New Zealand launched this in 2010. I know it is related because he should.

You should help them build out their pipeline.

Well, he's, he's just pumping his bags because he owns a property in Ireland. How do you get there? You got to fly on United. So, you know, one hand washes the other on this. He's, he's talking his own book.

SpaceX aims to file IPO as soon as this week. Yes, I know everyone is excited for the S-1, particularly I think people will be focused on XAI. Yeah. What they have going on. I think that—

Are they gonna have to break it out in the S-1?

I would assume so.

This might be the first time we actually see the economics of inference, the economics of a foundation lab, even though yes, they are at a smaller scale.

Hard to read too much into it because they've been investing so far ahead of demand. Yeah, yeah.

I just think that like there is a world where we get broken out financials that you can dig through and you can understand based on groc pricing, which we see, and top line revenue and cost, we can actually see are they serving that model profitably. And there will be, you know, a lot to dig into there. Obviously the other labs have different strategies, different vertical integration points, different economic, different pricing regimes. I mean, the true frontier, the models that are dominating Arc AGI, those command a premium, a price premium. There's a wild difference between charging $15 per million tokens versus $2 per million tokens.

So people were posting this as though it was fact. I think it's a very real possibility. So I think Elon will try to aim for the company to actually go out on April 20th, 4/20. Really? And I think it is possible. That's so fast. We'll see what the ticker ends up being. But I think some people would like knowing Elon's very millennial sense of humor. I think the ticker S-E-X is— Oh, you think so? Plus the April 20th IPO. I would assume that—

You think this is a real prediction?

You're not trolling? I'm not saying I would bet on it. I would put the April 20th at maybe like, you know, 30% and then the ticker maybe down at 15%.

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