Garry Tan, Augustus Doricko, Nichole Wischoff, Billy Thalheimer, Mamma Mia!

You're watching TBPN Live. Today is Thursday, March 6, 2025, and we are live from the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. I'm your host, John Coogan. Right next to me is Jordy Hayes. We got a great show for you today. We got four people calling in. Gary Tan, Augustus Dirico, Nicole Wiskoff, and Billy Thalamer is calling in. We're covering yc, we're covering rainmaking, we're covering early stage seed vc, solo GP stuff. We're cover flying cars that are regulated like boats, sea gliders. I love it. We're going to go over some news first. We're covering Discord's ipo, little preemptive size gong for.

There we go.

Jason Citron, one of the best to ever do it. And then we're going to talk about Amazon's Alexa plus launch. That's kind of weird. I don't know. We'll go through it anyway. But we wanted to kick it off with this post. Did you see this post, Jordi?

I'm pulling it up right now.

This post is from Gabriel, one of.

The top posters in the entire world.

He is. And we were thinking, let's kick it off. It's towards the end of the week. I think he locked it up. I think he's brother of the week material. What do you think?

I think so. I mean, just putting up fantastic numbers here for years. Unique insights for years.

One of the greatest. I mean, I think I was introduced to him during COVID lockdowns. He's over in Australia, I believe, but had just has never lost a step throughout his entire posting career.

Yeah.

Just absolute longevity now.

A lot of people hit their stride.

Yeah.

Put up six months, seven, eight, whatever. And then they sort of fade.

Exactly. Yes.

The unique insights are lost. Stop reading books and consuming. And they're just, you know, fully in the algorithm.

Yep.

But something about posting, you got to be out in the real world. You got to be out doing things. You got to be getting insights from places other than the timeline, other than otherwise percent. You know, gets sort of constantly recycled.

So. Yeah.

Being down under.

Yeah.

You know, putting up big numbers.

Yeah. And I love his. His 360 degree attack on his game. I know about his family because of his posting, but I also know about his deep understanding of rats, apparently.

So let's break this down. I'll go. So Gabe is quote posting Ali DeBoe, she says highest leverage, things you can do in your 20s. Travel, start a company, join a company you love. We're going to cut it off there because that's not what this segment is about. Why don't you read Gabe's post?

He says lots of egregious stuff in here, but calling travel high leverage is insane. It costs $1,500 to fly. Return New York to Tokyo. For $1,000, you could buy 50 rats in a one to four boy girl ratio and release them in a competitor's WeWork. The iPad kids are cut, and this.

Couldn'T be more real. You know, we, we would, we would do this for competitive podcast studios. But here's the thing, John. They all zoom in to record. There's no studio to release them.

You can't do it.

They wouldn't do it in their home. You can't do it. That would just be too disrespectful. But before we get into the rest of the show, I got a call out today. So I was up in the bay yesterday evening and I was flying back this morning and I was getting on a JSX flight and this guy approaches me and says, hey, I'm a technology brother. I listen to every episode.

Let's go.

I just wanted to introduce myself. So it was this guy, Cole Rotman. He's a seed to growth investor over at DST Global, an absolute dog. And thank you, Cole, for stopping me. It was a highlight of my morning and I just wanted to give you a little call out. He's been listening since the early days.

Fantastic.

50 plus episodes ago. So he's an absolute dog. Then the other thing, I'm not going to name this technology brother, but a guy emailed me this morning that's been listening to the show also since the first week and he's going out for a seed round. He said, hey, I'd love to have you involved. I looked at the deck, I committed on the spot and offered to make some other introductions. And in less than an hour, I introduced him to, I think, five separate people that, that immediately opted in.

Amazing.

All you know, would be potential leads for his round. So it's been a lot of brother behavior going down this morning, and I'm fired up.

Doing deals, doing podcasts to get into the show, building a community, building the brotherhood.

Building the brotherhood.

That's the goal. Anyway, let's move on. I just wanted to, you know, really, you know, we call this the dojo of the dollar. We want to respect the dollar and we respect our advertisers. So I wanted to kick it off with an early ad for, for public.com investing for those who take it seriously. Multi asset investing industry leading yields trusted by millions. Keep you guessing. Sometimes there's an amazing transition later in the show to an ad, but now, boom. Ad right at the beginning, right in your face. Didn't think, didn't think that was gonna happen. Boom. But the reason I wanna talk about public is because I saw this great post from Mads Capital. Mads says I'm not sure I can hang. I can handle a kangaroo market, bros. Because apparently there's terminology, there's the bull market where it goes up, bear market where it goes down. Kangaroo market bouncing all around, all over the place. But I love it.

It does feel like it's been my entire twenties. Yeah. Like entire adult life. Kangaroo market.

The cycles have felt shorter because we haven't been in it gives you something.

To, you know, hope for, to look forward to.

Yeah.

If, you know, if you're, if you're down bad, you know that a bull. There's always a bull market somewhere.

There's always a bull market somewhere. And what is a kangaroo market if not just a bunch of bulls and bears all crammed together in a stable?

Oh, and kangaroos are cute. Yeah, they're fun. They're always bouncing around, but they're also terrifying.

Yeah, they're vicious when they get all jacked.

If you haven't seen it, go look up.

Everyone's seen it. Everyone's seen the jack kangaroo.

Not everybody's seen it.

Everyone's seen the jacket kangaroo.

Go look up kangaroo fist fights.

I don't know.

And you'll find a ton of content from down under. I'm sure, I'm sure Gabriel, who we just covered, I'm sure he's gotten into his fair share of scuff ups with, you know, with, with the kangaroos. But yeah, they're tough.

Like to have some fun tough. Well, let's, let's highlight arena magazine, Max Meyer's newest drop. We got these in a few days ago. They're fantastic.

We love a lot of people saw.

Our ad before a full page print.

Before the magazine ever actually got out. So we're sorry to front run there, but the actual magazine itself is fantastic. When I read this and when I read Colossus Review to me.

Oh yeah, profile on Kyla Scanlon, good friend of mine. She's amazing. The Gen Z's Capitalist Whisperer. Published a book, very highly reviewed by Tyler Cowan. Highly recommend. Picking it up has really mastered book review, economics, education in the modern era. Everything from TikTok to YouTube videos to newsletters really built like a multimedia empire with. With a very like, sharp. Like there's just so much in. In the whole, like business, econ, content world. There's so much like just fake clickbait. Like, well, BlackRock actually owns everything. Like they're the most powerful company. Like that whole stuff. And she just like stays away from that really well and like actually educates people properly. It's great. United Semiconductors of America. A modest proposal for American industry. I mean, just look at this. It's fantastic.

Amazing.

So highly recommend going and subscribing. You just want this on your coffee table. There's so many good stuff and there's so many good things in here. We'll probably pick an article out of here to do a deep dive on the art of the chain.

Let's have Max call in.

Interesting. Yeah, yeah, we should have him call in. It's great. Who wants to work in a factory? Oh, and look, we're printing tweets. He's printing tweets. Luke Metro got featured. Everybody wants to expand industrial capability, but no one wants to work in a factory. Kicked off an entire entire article.

The only thing is, I agree with Luke on most things, but I would argue that there is entirely. You know, the new generation is actually very excited to be in factories.

Totally. Totally. Yeah. I mean there is a major vibe shift you have guys. That's why we're having Augustus on later today. Because he. He has certainly made sleeping in a factory cool.

Yep.

In. In a very serious way.

And sleeping in truck beds.

Yeah.

When he's out forward deployed.

All of the above. Anyway, we wanted to highlight a post from Gary Tan that I'm sure we'll discuss later. He's coming out at noon for 25% of the winter 2025 batch of Y Combinator. 95% of lines of or LLM generated. That's not a typo. The age of vibe coding are is here.

Fascinating vibe coding.

So I'm sure. I'm sure we'll get more into that. But something to think about as we go through. Anyway, let's move on to Discord. Unusual Whales has the post breaking Discord is an early talks with bankers about an IPO that could come as soon as this year. And I think this was originally broken by the New York Times. They don't have too much information here but we can kind of run through.

It a capital says. Not sure why Discord needs an IPO other than exit liquidity payday.

Because they're profitable. Yeah, that would be the argument I Don't know. I mean Jason Citron is a fascinating entrepreneur. He is. He truly like does not fit the standard mold of entrepreneur. I think he's from Florida and then went to a like a very, very small kind of game development school and was totally off of the like Stanford Ivy League track. Started one company, wind up, wound up selling it and then just built Discord kind of outside of the Silicon Valley realm until it just became a complete monster and now has been very, very profitable. But there's been a bunch of pushback to this. I saw some posts like every major old line media company is now like super anti tech. And so the headline from like IGN was like prepare for Discord to get even worse. Bankers are getting involved. It's like just like, I don't know, that might not be bad but I guess people don't like, like the monetization.

Made Instagram better, right?

I think so, yeah, sure, of course.

Well, the New York Times and yeah they're, you know this all is going to come down to price, right? Yeah, it's possible that, that the Discord, it gets kind of like turned into a bit of a meme briefly. It's possible that people that buy the stock on the first day or the first week or whatever don't end up doing that well. But ultimately this is a robust company with a massive user base. I'm interested to see their actual financial performance. But this is great for all the hard working employees who have spent decade plus now at this point, I don't know when Discord was actually founded, you know, working.

It's pretty fascinating story and they deserve.

Some liquidity at this point.

Jason Citron founded this social gaming platform for mobile games called OpenFeint. And then he sold it to this company called Greed, which is a game development company, like a holdings company, a Japanese social networking service in 2011 for $104 million. And I remember there was something weird about the earnout. I'm not exactly sure what happened. But then he founds Hammer and Chisel which is a game development studio. In 2012 they launched a product, Fates Forever, released in 2014. There's a, there's a crazy old video I wish we could pull up of him pitching it and I think TechCrunch Disrupt and just being like I made this game and you know it's gonna be the. It was basically a Moba, but mobile. So do you, do you know Dota 2 or League of Legends, any of those?

I was a Starcraft guy.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So Moba, but for mobile, but it wasn't successful. During the game development process, he noticed how difficult it was for his team to work out tactics in games like League of Legends using voiceover ip because normally like back when you play a game, you just hop on like a zoom call essentially or Skype call rip. And so then he decided to build a chat service with a focus on user friendliness and minimal impact on performance. So deep integration into the game. The name Discord was. Was chosen because it sounds cool and has to do with talking.

Yeah. How crazy is it that both Discord and Slack, the two most dominant sort of like workplace chat products, both started as games that just built a decent chat functionality and then ended up focusing on that?

Totally.

Really wild.

Yeah, it's like no one wants to just go straight into chat. So. In 2016, Discord raises 20 million from WarnerMedia Time Time Warner and then WarnerMedia was acquired by AT&T in 2018. WarnerMedia Investment Group was shut down in 2019. Selling the equity, Microsoft announced it would provide Discord support for Xbox Live users. They raised 150. Discord raised 150 at 2 billion valuation led by Green Oaks with participation from first Mark Tencent IVP Index, a few others in December of 2018. And then they kind of, kind of kept growing from there and now they will ipo. So that'll be hot. And of course if you want to play the IPL, go to public.com and.

Nikita I'm sure will do well here. Right.

Oh, do you think he still is.

You know, solid position, you know, based on whenever he joined. Hopefully it wasn't priced at 15 billion but 2021.

Yeah, Discord was, was priced at 15 billion but I mean you have to imagine they've grown a ton since then.

Yep.

In recent years Discord has tried to expand.

It's one of those things like how do you. What is. What is. How do you value the earnings of a network versus a SaaS company? Right, yeah, like that. That's going to be the big question here.

Yeah, it is, it is crazy. I mean they've tried when, when Clubhouse came out they Discord like copied the feature pretty quickly. They have like stages so you can be in a Discord group. And then I mean Discord was always like, for a long time I felt like it was more full featured than Slack just as a user and it just had like, it just felt cooler even just like the dark mode by default just felt better. But they also had other integrations. But then, yeah, they launched the Clubhouse Competitor. But the thing that really took off was like, during the AI boom, like the server for MidJourney in 2023 had over 15 million members. And like, that's insane. Like, I just, I don't think Slack is set up for that.

Yeah.

And so they really figured out how to make these like, communities, like 15 million people. Like that, that is a social network by itself and it's a social network on top of a social network. So it's almost like that decision was just criticized constantly. Yeah.

Specifically.

Oh yeah.

Criticizing Mid Journey for making it so.

Difficult, but to not use like a.

Like a regular front end. Yeah. But you have to imagine. Yeah, they got a lot of benefit from that in other ways by having it be centered around the community and shared learning and all these different things.

Yeah. I mean, I noticed we were talking about Sesame, that voice AI app. I tried to use it on my phone on Safari and it wasn't a great experience.

Here's just an interesting comp because I feel like in a lot of this sort of online community activity, we have our corner here. X. There's Reddit, right. Which is interest based. There's Discord, which is also interest based. But, you know, company project, game based. Reddit is trading, traded up to. It's down 20% in the last month. But it, it was peaking at. You pull this up here. It peaked at a $40 billion market cap just a month ago. Exactly. 40 billion for Reddit. 40 billion for Reddit and they are losing. They lost half a billion dollars in the last year.

Wow.

And on 1.3 billion in revenue. So to me, if Discord can come out and actually, you know, who knows? I imagine they've been, you know, heavily focused on profitability. It's very possible that they could be priced beyond their last private market valuation.

Yeah. What's your take on like the post. Like the, the post Mid Journey using Discord? Because I feel like it's still an underrated strategy. Like we were talking about Sesame, that voice. I tried to use it, iOS Safari. It didn't work for me. It was kind of like breaking. And I don't think sesame has an iOS app yet. And one of the amazing things about Mid Journey being on Discord was that it. They instantly on day one had great mobile support on every platform that Discord worked on. And so it's like, yeah, they didn't have their own Mac app, but they had a Discord Mac app that essentially worked perfectly. And of course there were a lot of like, narrow, like, problems, but I Still think it's pretty good. And then also, I mean, the crypto communities have been huge on Discord too. And so I'm sure that's driven a ton of new trial. And then once you're in that ecosystem, you have your Discord username and you're just going to kind of use it for everything. Totally. Yeah. Interesting. It'll be. It'll be fun to see like kind of when the S1 drops and where.

The value can get. GameStop's PE ratio, they will be doing pretty well.

Let's go.

Anyways, what do we got next?

The company debuted an online shop in 2023 where users can pay to enhance the profiles and add custom graphics to the digital avatar.

Yeah, I clearly remember when they decided, hey, we're gonna start monetizing.

Monetizing super hard. Yeah, they got me because I wanted to be able to upload like HD videos sometimes and there were certain files that you couldn't share in a Discord unless it was like you couldn't go over like 50 megs or something unless you were paying. And so I wound up paying and then just like probably forgot about it and probably. I'm still playing anyway. What should Jason Citroen do when he gets liquidity?

Buy a million dollar watch.

Exactly. And where should he go?

Bezel.

So go to Bezel. Jason, if you're listening, go to Bezel.

We have an update. So for the last month, we've been telling people that bezel has 20.

We've been misinformation. Yeah, we have to issue a correction.

Intentional. Sometimes people intentionally spread misinformation. This was unintentional. But they have, they added over 1500 new watches to the platform in the last month. It's fantastic to see. That's 1500 watches that could be yours. Right. If you move quick enough, you could buy all of them.

I think after the Discord ipo, Jason could buy all of them.

Absolutely.

Hopefully. Hopefully he does.

What is the. Actually, I don't know about that.

So they're in 20,500 luxury watches fully.

Authenticated in house by Bezels Tweed, the founder. Co founder. He told me they had, I think they probably have close to a billion dollars of watches listed on the platform right now. So it's really gonna have to pop for Jason to be able to acquire every watch on the platform. But you know, that would just be pulling forward like, you know, a couple years of their revenue and you know, it would. It would hurt other.

You're not. But you're not considering Leverage.

Yeah, that's true.

It's true.

Yeah. And some watches are, you know, basically investment assets.

Yeah. He should sell 100 of his Discord stake, lever up and just buy every.

Literally watch a thousand submariners. Just walk around. Walk around. Just covered. Yeah, I want to. I want to see a submariner around his ankle.

Yes, exactly.

A little ankle. A little ankle watch. That's the next trend for, for bears like him.

For sure. For sure. Well, we'd love to have you on the show, Jason, tell the story of Discord. I'm a huge fan. I've already made a huge. I made a big deep dive on the, on the company and a video about it. It's a fascinating story.

Anyway, let's move on to these companies, go public. By the way, we have to actually buy a big enough position to say, hey, I'm a major shareholder. I would love to have you on the show to discuss. It's like a little, you know, saying, you know, it's a little to more warm invite.

Yeah, yeah. It's like, it's like you should come on this show because I'm extra conflicted.

Yeah.

All the other shows, they're not conflicted.

They're not.

What's the point?

CNBC can't do it. What's the point? Yeah.

Exactly.

That's great.

Anyway, let's go to Andy Jassy over at Amazon. He says excited to be. Excited to be with the team in NYC today, rolling out the new Alexa Plus.

We've been waiting for this.

Everyone's been waiting.

Everybody's been waiting for this.

Across Amazon, we're harnessing the transformative power of generative AI to reimagine the experiences we offer customers. Customers. And Alexa plus is the latest example. She's smarter, more capable and personalized and unlike chatbots, also takes action to help you get things done. Oh, agent. This is an agent which is at the heart of our mission at Amazon to make customers lives better and easier every day. Can't wait to get so weird. The first thing that popped out to me. So they post some ads. The ads are fine, but they're using she, which is a very odd choice. I went to Chachi, Beatty, Grok and Claude. Can you guess what those three LLMs want to be referred to as in terms of pronoun?

The opposite.

All three want to be it.

It.

All three, including Claude.

Interesting.

Says, hey, yeah, like I'm not a person. Don't anthropomorphize me. Got it. Yeah. It was just very odd to hear them it felt very old school. Like there used to be like this idea of, like, Siri is a her.

Yeah.

And. And then we kind of moved away from that and there's been so much talk about, oh, Chachi Beatty isn't that good of a name. But when I heard them say, Alexa, it's a her, and I was like, it's not. It's not.

Well, you know, one of the best investments you could have made.

Yeah.

In the last decade or so was shorting the name Alexa as soon as Amazon introduced it. In 2015, Alexa was the 30 most popular name for girls born in the United States. In 2022, Alexa's name ranked dropped to 536, the lowest it's been since 1985. And in 2023, it's down in the 600s. So really, really rough. Go. Tough to be named Alexa in the year 2014 prior to the launch. But then again, it's becoming more rare, so maybe there's value in that. Right?

Yeah. I would just prefer it if it was just Amazon. Like, hey, Amazon, like, I'm talking to you. You're the company. I want you to order something for me. It's Amazon. It's an it. And I'm happy with that. I don't need this, like, secondary thing. I don't know, it was. It just stuck out to me. It's like this odd, this odd choice that feels more natural. Alexa feels like a better brand name than ChatGPT, which is like a mouthful. Or Claude 3.7 Sonnet or Grok3. Like, these don't sound like names, but when I actually, like sat with it for a second and heard the opposite, I was like, actually, I would much prefer, you know, just to talk to it.

Yeah.

And it's just, it's just less weird. Anyway, let's go to Ben Thompson as Trotecary. He's breaking down this announcement from the Verge. Amazon is finally launching the long awaited generative AI version of Alexa. Alexa plus that, if it all goes well, will make will take away much of the friction that comes with talking to a speaker to control your smart home. We're getting info on the fly. Some of the new abilities include ability to do things for you. You'll be able to ask it to order groceries for you or send event invites to your friends. I feel like the last version of Alexa said that it could do that anyway. It's 20 bucks a month or it's free if you're a Prime member. And prime is $15 a month, so you save $5 by getting both. It's very odd. That comes with access to Alexa website where the company said you can go and do long form work. Amazon also said it created a new Alexa app to go with the new assistant. Alexa will work on almost every Alexa device released so far.

So they're actually trying to enter the consumer LLM game. Yeah, they're saying we want you to use our hardware, but we're also going to.

I mean they have all the infrastructure for it. It makes sense that they would kind of offer something here, but it's just weird. So Ben Thompson's talking about kind of the meta level of this. There's no video of the event. It's 2025 and they just did a live. Moreover, there was no video put up after the event. Amazon does have a couple of promo videos. Is this pure vaporware? Ben asks. Fortunately, the Verge did come out with a hands on report a couple of days after the event. So apparently Alexa plus does in fact exist in a state that is accessible by non Amazon employees. I was from the report. I was also able to talk to the assistant myself and try out its new ability to follow multiple commands at once without needing to repeat the wake word. Alexa. I dim. I asked it to dim the lights and adjust the thermostat to make it a little warmer. The thermostat adjusted while the lights dimmed and Alexa said I dim the lights in the living room and increase the temperature by 2 degrees. Is there anything else you need? Then I said, can you vacuum the floor? It replied okay. And the Roomba just started the job. Not bad like that. That does seem pretty cool. Of course, this is probably one of those things where you have to be really all in on the whole ecosystem because if you're using a, you know, Google home or you have an Apple tv, all of a sudden it's not going to integrate. But yeah, Ben wanted to give a little bit of a brief history of Alexa that I thought would be kind of interesting. He says. Back to Alexa though, which first launched in 2014. We're a decade into these, like AI assistants and like the chat bar. The chatbot era. The chatbot renaissance was like a thing and people thought chatbots were gonna be all over the place and then took 10 years to get here. But now they are just a few months after the disastrous fire phone, which led to most people dismissing the voice assistant and its associated Echo speaker out of hand. However, Ben says I was immediately intrigued precisely because Alexa and Echo.

He's always got the receipts too.

Yeah, Totally. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a link here. You can prove it actually had a potential market. The home, the one place where you might not have your phone on your body and where it would be the least awkward to rely on voice interaction because you're not out in the world. Hey, good points. I also think Amazon got two big things right with Alexa, particularly as it expanded skills. First, Alexa. It was always very fast, in my experience, very good at understanding what you said. This is a big distinguishing factor from Siri, of course, although Google quickly rivaled Alexa. Second, Amazon didn't attempt to do fancy fuzzy matching when it came to triggering skills. If you wanted to use a device or service, you had to say the words exactly right. So less errors, but you had to be more trained. So it's training the human to get the right thing. The second point may seem counterintuitive, but I think it was a very smart product choice given Alexa's capabilities. Instead of wowing users half the time and frustrating them the other half, with no clear feedback about why a particular command worked or didn't Alexa put the burden on the user. Again, speaking anecdotally, I would blame myself when a voice command didn't work because I didn't say the right words. Alexa, for its part, understood what I said and told me whether it was successful or not, which allowed me to improve. Siri, to take the counterexample, would try to be smart, which actually made it more frustrating. Good point. And so this also gets to why Amazon's announcement of Alexa makes me nervous. It feels way too ambitious. Alexa isn't just going to turn on your lights. It's also going to order you concert tickets and make a reservation at your favorite restaurant and plan a vacation and call the babysitter. Alexa will have a memory and learn and the list goes on. Which is to say that Amazon is promising.

Every AI assistant product uses the same examples, yet nobody has been able to truly get product market fit with those set of examples. Yeah, nobody's getting. Nobody's using an AI assistant today. On average. Like the average consumer in America is not saying, hey, book me a flight to New York, even though that's like, been the default sort of example, right?

Yeah, totally.

Or, hey, can you order some Advil? We're out. Even though it's actually probably good at that, but it's still not actually. It's never had enduring traction. The last time I heard the name Alexa, I was getting a massage and the massage therapist said, hey, turn up the volume.

Really?

Alexa, turn up the volume. And I was like, okay, that makes sense. Like it's.

Yeah.

But I haven't seen or heard of an Alexa in, well, I haven't had one in like probably six, seven years. Haven't seen one in a friend's house in that period of time. I thought that the last time I got value out of the Alexa service was being like, okay, this is a pretty good speaker for like 100 bucks or whatever it was.

Yeah, well, let's, let's finish out with Ben tying it to Apple and what's going on at Siri. He's quoting from Mark Gurman. Apple Inc's long promised overhaul of a Siri digital assistant is facing engineering problems and software bugs threatening to postpone or limit its release, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The company first unveiled plans for a new AI infused Siri at its developers conference last June and has even advertised some of the features to its customers. But Apple is still racing to finish the software, said the people who asked not to be identified. Some features have been postponed to May or later. The Siri makeover is a centerpiece of the Apple intelligence platform, the company's effort to catch up in AI and spur iPhone upgrades. And so his main point here is that Amazon and Apple don't need to be in a rush. Both, both Alexa and Siri have a decade plus head start in terms of integrations with a host of devices and services. Alexa plus and new Siri don't need to have capabilities that exceed even what the frontier AI labs have yet to ship. Simply being better voice assistants for their existing ecosystems will make them more useful. And I should note, is the heavy is a heavy lift in and of itself. Faithfully replicating existing functionality is a hard problem. That's the power of being an ecosystem provider. And I suspect both companies should have a little bit more confidence in their rel relative advantage and be a little more conservative about their ambitions. And so I thought it was kind of interesting that like, you know, we're, we're frustrated that these products aren't better. But once you understand the, the market dynamic, the ecosystem lock in, it's like, yeah, you can.

Yeah, it's one of those things like just because you have an extreme advantage doesn't, doesn't give you permission or nobody's going to give you props when you botch rollouts when you release lackluster products where you're not creating massive sort of forward momentum. These companies have incredible access to talent, capital, every advantage, the ecosystem advantage and the services advantage. And we should hold them to a high standard.

Yeah, that's a good point. I mean, you go back to the launch of the iPhone and I think the R and D number, I mean everything about that project is insane. I think the R and D number is like 1/100th of what Zuck has spent on the metaverse. Something like that. Maybe a thousandth. It was like basically nothing super fast and obviously pulled forward like a bunch of technology that like we didn't really have like the glass screens and phones and all this stuff. But there was no.

Reggie pointed out recently that that was an acquisition. The street. The screen tech.

Oh really?

In the iPhone was a company that the core tech was something that they had bought.

That's cool. Yeah, they. But. But I mean, at the time Apple had like crazy pressure, right?

Yeah.

They didn't have an ecosystem that they could just kind of sit back on. If they didn't do that, someone else would have got for sure. BlackBerry eventually kind of got there and I'm sure Nokia or Microsoft eventually would have tried.

Totally.

Anyway, well, the one piece of smart home tech that should be connected to your Alexa is of course your eighth sleep.

There we go.

Nights that fuel your best days. To get a bed into the ultimate sleeping experience, go to 8sleep.comtbpn Get a bed. Hook it up to your smart home. Tell it.

I actually would use that because you can prompt your bed to start getting ready for bed.

Exactly.

I have it set on an autopilot because it knows I get into bed at 8:30 every night so early.

I love it.

But anyways, I can see they might actually have an Alexa integration, but go to 8sleep.com tbpn it's in our bios everywhere. Check them out. I don't have a sleep score from last night, so this is a good opportunity for you to potentially get a quick win considering I'm at a zero.

You're at a zero? Well, that is brutal.

I'm zeroed out.

Let me see eight sleep. Where are we? Oh, wow. Awful. 36. I've never had a sleep score so low. What happened? Four hours and 30 minutes. That feels like a bug or something. I don't know. I mean, I was up late and I did get up late.

Yeah, you were up late.

I went to dinner with. With some friends and so I was out. I was out pretty late.

Have a drink.

I did actually.

That's it.

I did have some wine.

People, if you love alcohol, you're going to hate eight sleep. Yeah, it just completely exposes how terrible Alcohol is for your sleep, which is common.

I had like two common knowledge. Nothing. It was like nothing.

All right, we got Gary calling in in a second. I'm very excited for this.

Yeah, he's texting me right now. Sounds amazing. Let's. I think he should be hopping on in just a minute. Let's see. In the meantime, we should do a funny post or something. Let's see. Oh, did you see this? Did you see this olive metallic Maybach?

Of course.

It really pops off the page in black and white, but it's this beautiful green. And I thought we could take a moment to make a little announcement to the community that green is now part of our official brand colorway. Yeah. And you might actually. In the lower corner down there, we.

Actually have our legal team working on, you know, patented green. Patenting green.

Sure. You know, there's a guy who owns black or something. Yeah, Banta Black. Have you heard of this?

Interesting.

It's not named after the SoC2 compliance provider. It. But it is a black that is so dark that it's like the darkest black. It doesn't reflect any light. And I think the guy patented it and defends it brutally. It's not very. It's not very reflective anyway.

You should be able to make your own colors and patent them artisanal.

Here's another post. OpenAI will be the first company to offer a 1 million per month subscription plan for AGI. And then someone says source. It's a prediction.

Yeah. Kind of a. We call. Do we call shitposts stuff. Posts.

Kind of a meme post joke posts, having a laugh. All the above.

It's certainly within the realm of possibility. But the challenge is that if you can get an open source model for basically nothing per month, that's nearly as good. What are you going to choose? Right. It's got to be. It's got to be orders of magnitude better.

I think it's. It's. It's like a status symbol, you know, why do you. Why do you pay for a luxury watch? You know, you tell the same time with a. With a quartz $5 watch.

That's true.

But you know, Patek Philippe says something about.

That's going to be the new thing.

Using $1 million model. That could have been. Yeah, it could have been monetized.

That commerce course bros are going to be pulling up, like looking at their exact page of OpenAI.

Exactly.

Nobody's going to be flexing Lambos and things like that.

No.

Andrew Tate will be like, yeah, I don't fly private Anymore.

Yeah, I just have the most expensive agent cranking constantly, servers on fire.

The new, you know, the founders that, you know, develop an ego based on headcount.

Right.

So they're just, like, trying to grow headcount.

Yeah.

You actually are hitting up OpenAI saying, Do you have any more expensive plans? I don't have any employees at this point. I just want to be able to show that I'm really about it.

Yeah. Did you see that HBO has greenlit a unscripted, unfiltered, unhinged reality TV show about the Paul brothers.

Wow.

Logan Paul and Jake Paul now have a. A show on HBO Max.

And is it live already?

No, I think it's. The trailer drops tomorrow. This is on March 4th, and Jake says this company used to make the Sopranos, so not. Not a great. Not a great reception. But, you know, my reaction to this was like, I'm sorry. Like, the market demands what it demands.

Like, this is going to do really well, people. So here's the thing. This is clearly a strategic move from Max to try to get a younger demographic. That's that they can pay more to get the show than Netflix, because Netflix is looking at this and saying all the people that are really going to want to watch this already have access to Netflix accounts. They're on family plans as a younger demo.

Yep.

Whereas Max can potentially pull in some new subscribers. And so the deal. The deal makes sense, and I'm not surprised at all to see it. And it's easy for the brothers, the Paul brothers, that is because they've been recording pretty much every minute of their daily lives for a decade at this point. And, yeah, now they're gonna have to sit down in front of a camera.

It's just not different. I mean, obviously, like, deeply controversial people. Some people, like, love and hate the content. But have you seen the slap that changed my life? Now, it's a YouTube video, but it's like, almost like a documentary about Logan Paul challenging a Russian slap boxer to a slap fight. And it's edited so well. It's edited by this guy, Hayden Hillier Smith, who's like this, like, YouTube mastermind. And it's, like, emotional. Like, it's. It's. It's. It's like art. And it's so ridiculous because you're watching this Logan Paul, like, Like, slap boxing thing, but it takes you on this emotional journey of him, like, wanting to go and do this fight, and it's like, is this too risky? Will he have, like, brain damage from it? And it's It's. It's just really well shot, really well paced, really well edited. It's exciting. It's emotional. You can see some of it here. Jordy, look at this. And he's talking to his mom, and his mom's like, don't do this. Like, if you get hit, you're gonna.

Get one shot at.

You're gonna get one shot at. Exactly. And I mean, look, look, it's. It's. It's rough. Yeah. You can see it over there. And this was the moment I was like, oh, man, this guy's like, He's a good entertainer regardless of what you think of all his products and other content.

Like, the whole slap.

Learn to be like, just a master because he's the whole practice.

So I. We've talked about this. I know we've talked about this offline. I don't know if we've talked about it online, but the whole slap boxing thing. Dana White went on. Went on like, this whole, like, podcast roadshow talking about how power slap is. Is the number one sport in the world. And he says we get more views than NFL, NBA, mlb, you know, all combined. And people are basically saying, I actually just lost power.

Oh, you did. I guess a new battery.

Cool. No, my microphone. Anyways, Dana White goes on this kind of very aggressive roadshow to promote power slap.

Yeah.

And people, obviously, all the data is public, so they immediately start fact checking it. And first of all, they're like, one Dana. This is not actually more popular than the NBA and the MLB and all these different things.

Yeah.

And apparently it's actually been really underperforming from a rating standpoint where it has this sort of shock value that people are drawn to on social media because you see this guy about to slap this other guy, it stands out. People stop. They watch it.

Yeah.

But then the comments are almost universally negative. The act actually how people feel about.

Yeah.

And so. So anyways, we'll. We'll see kind of what happens there.

But there was just a great profile on Dana White, I think, in Forbes. I think he did the COVID And so we should. We should read that on the show. It'd be great.

Oh, we should.

Then we should have him call in.

Yeah. No. And then again, the challenge is doing combat sports that involve somebody being completely defenseless.

Yeah.

Is. Is much harder to watch.

Hey, we got Gary here.

Hey, how's it going?

It's great. How you doing?

Good, good.

There he is, y' all.

Fantastic.

Amazing to have you on.

We. We wanted to have you on for a Bunch of reasons. I mean, thank you so much. It's fantastic to talk to you anytime, but it seems like YC is completely transformed by LLMs writing code. So break it down.

Okay. I mean, I think we're just at the dawn of this technology and it's the people who already know how to code who are taking the best advantage of it. And you know, I'm seeing the haters on the Internet coming at us, but that's fine. Come at me, bro. What's happening is that like, you know, 100% of YC companies these days have technical co founders and then you're stupid not to use it. Like, basically why would you subject yourself to, you know, spending a lot of hours on things that you don't have to do and being able to go all the way to ground and debug the thing and you know, basically a prerequisite of using these tools well, is that you don't need the tools.

Yeah, that makes sense. How long do you think the, do you think the sort of advantage that technical founders have in AI right now is going to be perpetual or do you see a world in five years where the playing field has been completely leveled?

I still think like it's, it's not like product doesn't matter or design doesn't matter. If anything, what it is is, it matters even more. Yeah, the bar was lower before. The bar is much higher now. Like back then if you go back like 10 or 15 years for startups, period. You know, when I first worked at YC in 2011, almost anything that had really technical co founders and a real problem, like you were gonna be, you know, at least a series a company like, you know, and then I don't think that that's. I think that's become less and less true even today. Like, you know, there are perfectly good, very technical teams that have all the skills and you know, are in pretty big problem spaces and then there's competition. Like the bar is just so much higher. So I think the way to think about it is if you're not using it, you're actually leaving time and attention that could be used for all the other things that you're going to need in a perfect competitive world. And so it's, you know, all the people who are like, you know, f vibe coders or you know, all that, it's just like, it's cope. The world just changed. We're just trying to help you. And you live in that old world where you're sitting there writing your own manual tests and Banging your head into the code. Or you can embrace the future and get that alpha, get that edge.

Talk to us about how the bar has been raised. From a metric standpoint YC has always been about. You have three months to make a tremendous amount of progress. It's really around preparing for demo day. The bar is, you know, anytime you take hundreds of super, super talented people and put them under that pressure, they're going to produce amazing results. From a revenue standpoint, from attraction standpoint, you know, it seems like the bar has jumped dramatically, but would love some more color there.

Yeah, I guess. Like, why see these? Like, we've been really intentional about trying to go back to founders who are actually at right at the beginning. So, you know, these numbers fluctuate, but pretty much every time, 70 to 80% of the companies have no revenue. And, you know, probably 70 to 80% generally are unlaunched. So it's really during those 10 weeks, like, can you go from zero to, say, 100,000 or several hundred thousand dollars a year revenue? But even that is like, you know, sort of secondary. Like the funniest thing when you really think about it, you think about a company that actually does make it to 100 million or a billion dollars a year in revenue. Like, are you really going to look at the first 10 weeks and say, well, you went to, you know, well, that company went to 50k ARR. And that other company went to 150k ARR. It's like if you, like, play it all the way out, like, it's all these other factors. So, you know, I think basically, if you can't get revenue or customers during the 10 weeks of YC, like, man, that was the wrong idea or you don't got the skills. And even then, like, you can't count teams out. Like, there are tons of teams that deferred demo day, had nothing, had. You know, they took their money and basically nose to the grindstone, like, stayed in the idea maze. And then they went on to create things like retool and, you know, these are things that everyone uses now. So. Yeah, I don't know. It's wild.

Yeah.

My, my, my favorite joke on the show is that, like, the way to outperform as an LP is to travel back in time and just give John as much money as possible to invest in his early first and second yc.

I remember, Yeah, I remember being at, you know, demo day with retool and being like, that company looks cool, but I don't even know what I would say to them because I didn't realize you could just, like. Yeah, just invest. Anyway, we've had this thesis, obviously, like, you know, yc, anything successful attracts, like, haters. We've had this thesis that YC is like, entering like a renaissance, like, with the AI stuff. Like, this is the best time to be running, like, the YC business model. But can you talk a little bit about specifically, like, do you think about yourself running YC in Founder mode? And can you talk about what that means and what you're doing and what's changing and how you want to take it to, like, the next level?

Of course, man. I mean, you know, some of it is like, I'm trying to do Founder mode, but, you know, shout out to the original goat, Paul Graham, like, and Jessica Livingston and, you know, Robert Morris and Trevor Blackwell. You know, like, I'm sure I. It turns out, you know, you don't have to be the founder to try to run the Founder mode playbook. And Brian Chesky himself is on my board. And when I came back to yc, the first thing he said was, all right, well, if you were the founder, what's zero based accounting? Like, what are you going to do? And, you know, there are shades of that in what Elon's doing with the U.S. government. Like, you know, I think I just stepped in it by bringing that up. But hey, like, you know what, this is actually how you should be a leader. Like, you actually have to think about things from first principles, from zero based accounting. Like, if, knowing what we know now, would we do that thing that we're doing? And you know, the enemy of every bureaucracy is, you know, thinking.

Yeah. So what are the big thinking?

Decision making, like, do, you know, doing the right thing. So I think YC was always the, like, center, the sort of like tree of prosperity. You know, I. I left and spent seven years in my seven years in the wilderness running Initialized. And I, you know, feel I built an amazing team. Those guys are doing awesome.

Yeah.

I realized that actually if I stayed at Initialized and didn't come back and heed the call of Paul and Jessica to write the ship at yc.

I.

Would be out of a business. I, you know, I had initialized, would have been out of business if YC itself was not going in the right direction. And here we are. Like, I think that we're doing it and we're going to keep doing it. And the biggest thing that, you know, it's just funny that Founder Mode was the meme that was born at the Alumni Top Alumni conference. And you know, Brian Chesky didn't even, he wasn't even like scheduled to appear. And I just kept texting him because he would always come to the YC batch and give his. You know, it's funny for him, he's like, yeah, I'm gonna tell the, the selling cereal story. And he's so generous with his time. He does that every single time. But I remember seeing him extremely animated, telling his. Not his zero to one story but his like save the company pre IPO story where he had to. Nobody believed in him. Covid was happening, you know, and then he just buckled up. He's like, look, I made a lot. You know, he admits like he made a bunch of different mistakes that you know, the reason why at the top alumni event that he spoke at that was such a like pivotal moment. I think that we brought together about 200 of all of our top founders. You know, There are about 60 or 70 unicorns represented and I think that we unlocked, you know, easily 10 to $100 billion in new market cap like that very night. Because there are just people who, you know, there is a machine in Silicon Valley and it's not unintentional, it's not malicious. Like you know our, our corporate governance and Delaware C Corp or design boards are like designed to maximize shareholder value. But the, there's a bunch of advice that people along the way tell you that like are self serving that cause you to do the wrong things. Like you hire people who did it at a big company before and then you're supposed to do it that way. And it's like no, no, like, well maybe like you know, there are some things like maybe finance and accounting that you shouldn't innovate on. Right. Innovate a little bit too much there and you go to jail.

Yeah.

But then podcasting and keeping what's about you, you know, be founder mode.

Yeah. Yeah. Jordy, what you got?

What do you say to people that want to put YC in a box? Right. You guys have had some high profile hard tech, deep tech launches recently that seem like amazing companies and there's pushback from people that, that almost want to say, you know, you guys are. It's like obviously completely BS because there's a long history and the guy who's.

Running the place was at Palantir. Like you shouldn't be surprised that there's defense tech coming out of this thing once Gary takes over. I don't know, I don't want to.

Answer you, but five eyes.

Yeah, yeah. So I mean we have strong opinions here around why this is great. Because if you're a super bright, you know, engineer, technologist, you and you want to build something, YC can teach you how to build a company. You have to build your product and sort of own your market. But yeah, what do you say to people that want to put YC in a box and say, stick with SaaS, stick with software?

Oh man. I mean, YC was never just SaaS, you know, I mean, boom is. Astronis is right across the street. They're like getting satellites up there. Albedo Labs, like, I mean, Albedo is super hardcore because they basically have made spy satellites. But you know, they're, they're better than what the US government can do. And you know, they might just replace, replace that market for that nuts. Like, you know, this is a small team out of Colorado, you know, putting satellites up that are better than like the entire, you know, government waste machine. It's like not, I guess, you know, in some, in some respects, like it's not that surprising actually.

So OKLO go through their nuclear company.

Yeah, we got nuclear companies. We got, you know, helium diffusion company. I get it. You know what? Like, I think that we're. It's a weird thing to sort of deal with for me because I always think of myself as the little guy, but you know, I gotta realize like, hey, I get it. Like, we're gon take the arrows and it's fine. We're just going to keep helping founders. And the reality is like, hey, you know, actually like it's. I want to shout out the Gundo bros. I want to be like, you know what? Like you guys keep doing your thing, like you're always welcome at yc, like, you know, but I know there was like a little bit of X beef, but there shouldn't be, you know, like.

You know, I think like the challenge with YC is for every, you know, 200 founders you let in, you got to reject a bunch of people, right? Because there's just not enough space and not everybody's sort of qualified or it's not the right sort of moment. But the ultimate evidence of the value of YC is that you have highly, highly successful founders that go back for a second time. Right. And so whenever I see drama on the timeline about yc, it's never coming from people that have experienced the product, right? It's always coming from, you know, people that just really aren't live players. Right? Like people that aren't really in the conversation. So, yeah.

So yeah, be a. Be A player character, man. And if your player character is just like, you don't gotta be like that.

Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about just long term trends in making hardware a viable startup at the 500k investment level? I mean when I went through, I see there was this whole like, hardware is hard. It was always like, oh, it's going to be so capital intensive. And yet I think we're seeing people do the YC model and yeah, you're probably not going to be shipping a million units of you know, whatever boat you're building on demo day. Like you could serve a million customers if you're building a social networking app.

I mean the reason why hard tech at YC can happen is like, I mean, kind of even going back to what we were talking about earlier. Like it's not necessarily just about, you know, SaaS. Did you grow 10 week on week? Like did you hit 100k ARR? Like that's you know, sort of weak, like spreadsheet thinking. And the hard tech companies that do super well, they show up with like, you know, if you had a super crack team that was the team to do this, what would they be able to get done in 10 weeks? And sometimes it's a prototype, sometimes it's a demo. Like the other thing is I have more than $1 billion a year in capital that's basically just like hard allocated to YC companies. Not from us, from like, you know, hundreds of PCs who now are all coming back to demo day in droves. And you know, name me another place that has that actually like, and they're not necessarily just like doing the plug and chug. Like, you know, they are actually meeting the founders, they're actually making up their own minds. They are, you know, and they're funding hard tech. You know, I think we're about 90% AI and you know, the age of intelligence is here, dude. Like the machines are. You're able to do all knowledge work. Like that's, you know, insane. And then simultaneous to that, like I'm really excited about our hard tech stuff because that's, I mean that's, that's the built world. Like how do we actually create prosperity and abundance for one another? And you know, God knows in America we need it, you know, like we don't even have, we can't even make screws for ourselves. It's nuts, right? You know, I just saw biology in December in Singapore and he like super black pilled me on, you know, American manufacturing. We need, you know, a thousand X what we have right now. And, you know, it's not, it's not that we're missing capital. It's not even that we're missing, you know, intelligence or people. Right? Like, it's the will. Like, we have to have the will to do it. And, you know, so my message to everyone watching is like, if you're thinking about it, like, YC is a great place to be. It's not the only place, right? But like, we think we're trying to build, you know, one of the best places. And, you know, it is, it is for AI, it's for software, it's for all kinds of technology. We are, you know, building abundance from here and we want to find the people who believe that stuff. It's like, let's leave all, all the political crap on the side. Like, that's not what's important. What's important is we're at the dawn of just like unbelievable innovation. And, you know, all the world's like, you know, being rewritten by, by code and atoms and, you know, what, what brushstroke, what line of code? You know, what. What will you bring? What you know. Yeah. What hardware will you build?

Talk to. Talk to us about happenstance. You've. I've seen probably like 10 or 20 posts from you about the company. It seems to be a personal favorite. Like, I'd love to. I'd love to hear the pitch from, you know, from you directly.

Yeah, I mean, I, I just use it a lot personally. I mean, I get hit up for, you know, I was thinking about how Sam Altman, when he had my role here at YC, he used to have like, basically a team of EAs. And his email wasn't. I think it wasn't even Sama, it was SA router. And it was sort of a nod to basically what I feel like I am now. Like, I get, you know, dozens of requests every day from all kinds of YC founders and, you know, people I've run across. And that's pretty cool. I mean, you know, I, I relish the ability to be like a shelling point for people who believe in tech. And then the best thing I can do is like, oh, yeah. Know how like capital, like you, it's human capital. All these things. Like, people are recruiting, they're trying to sell. Like, if I think they are legit, I can basically. It's the purest form of creating value from information. Right. And so happenstance just happens to be that thing for me, you know, the world is way too big. Like my world now. Is. I think my. I have like 11,000 contacts in my phone or something. It's like always hit the. I always break Apple, like Apple. My. My iPhone cannot support 11,000 contacts.

Are you. Are you an inbox zero guy, or do you just give up and try.

To make sure you just give up.

It's a river.

So if someone's waiting for an email from me. Right. You know, I don't know. You might have to.

I'm sorry.

You might have to.

He's on tvpn.

Yeah.

Come ask the question in the chat. One more question for you. You put out a, you know, YC's, you know, famous for your request for startups list. Wanted to highlight one specifically that you had called out, which was a secure AI app store. We want a new kind of a app store, an OS layer that sits on your computer or phone. It should protect user data, offer one shared memory, help users find the best AI apps and help developers build and handle payments. Talk a little bit more about that. Are you seeing teams in that space yet that you're excited about, or is this coming down the pipeline? Hopefully?

I think it's coming down the pipeline, yeah. In full transparency. I don't know if I found one that really quite fit on my end yet. It also might just be too early. The tricky thing is it's pretty clear that OpenAI, Anthropic and Windows, Apple iOS, Android. This is sort of how the OS almost inevitably will work, assuming that people still make software and it's more like a thought exercise. I think it is possible for someone to do this right now and we'll see if it happens. We're on the lookout.

Fantastic. Well, speaking of Gundo Bros, you wanted to give a shout out to the Gundo Bros. We got Augustus joining next.

Great to see you, brother.

It's a party on this show. One person after another. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Gary. We'll have to have you back. Talk more soon. It's always a pleasure chatting and hopefully we'll see you at YC demo day.

All right. Look out for application tvpn.com yes.

Yeah, you do. Media creators.

We're in there.

Yeah. Fantastic.

Thanks, Gary.

Yeah, Have a great day, Gary. We'll talk to you soon. Let's bring in Augustus. How you doing, Augustus? What's new?

I'm blessed, dude. I'm back in Gundo for a spell, rather than the near east or the mountains of the Rockies. So it's been a vibe, it's been sunny and warm, which has been different for rainmakers the last four months.

That's great.

Wherever you guys go, it gets cold, it starts snowing, raining. It's a. It's a tough life.

Yeah. I mean, this looks kind of like. I haven't watched the SBF prison interview, but you kind of have a prison vibe going on behind you. But I like it. Maybe we get some drywall behind you on the next one. Yeah, but we were talking about you earlier because Luke Metro's in Arena magazine talking about how everyone wants to re industrialize America, but nobody wants to work in a factory. And I feel like you've made working in a factory cool. Can you break down your current factory stack? Where are you sleeping? Can we get you on an 8? Sleep soon, dude.

It's so funny you say that. We. We decided like a month ago, okay, we're big enough now. We're hiring, like serious scientists. We're bringing government people through. No more bunk beds in the factory. So the room that I'm in now used to have four bunk beds in it. The room over there used to have two bunk beds in it. A lot of the dropouts and engineers were living here. We had a tradition for a bit where if you moved from across the country, you either had to live in your car, in the parking lot or in one of the bunk beds. So that was well lasted.

The peanut gallery on X is going to start saying, oh, it's time to short Rainmaker. They don't sleep in the office anymore. They have too many government officials coming in to try to get their bit, you know, to try to work with them.

Yeah. But at the very least, we're staying in Gundo like some other unnamed Gundo companies.

A little bit of drama, scoop drama. No, we don't need a. I always thought that Gundo was like the place that you could eventually graduate out of, because once you need 100,000 square feet, like, it's just not. It's just. It is a small city. So, you know, I'm rooting for the. For the Gundo incubations that go on to do greater things and eventually need to expand and eventually rename whole cities in Texas. You know, that's. That's what I hope for you. But can you give me the quick, like the latest pitch on how you're describing Rainmaker? I know it's evolved a little bit. What's the. What's the core product that you're selling right now?

Yeah. So Rainmaker is making Earth habitable by making it precipitate more. More Rain and more snow in environments so farms that don't have enough water, ecosystems that need to be restored, and cities in arid regions that need water. We're making that happen with advanced remote sensing. So radar, lidar, satellite data. We're using open source stuff and some own. Some things of our own that we're going to tease a little bit later in the month. Our own radar to find the right clouds to seed. And then fly our own severe weather resistant and anti icing capable drones into those clouds, spraying a mineral called silver iodide that freezes the liquid in the cloud into big enough snowflakes so that they fall and stay as snow, or if it's warm beneath the cloud, melt back into rain.

How many drones have you crashed?

Between you, me, and not the Federal Aviation Administration? No, we've crashed dozens of drones. We have one corporate value at Rainmaker, and it's that we like the taste of blood in our mouth. And that's sort of an extension of, like, you know, the Elon thing about chewing glass. It's kind of just a bummer, right? And like, building a deep tech company is especially hard, but if you pavlov yourself into loving interfacing with reality in such a way that you get, like, good feedback, you learn how you failed, you learn what to do better next time, you end up with a bunch of people kind of like rocky, you know, that, like, just fight harder and do better the more they get punched in the face. And so we've crashed a lot of drones on snowy, wet, cold mountaintops, and everyone's better for it.

What's the balance like now for you in the field? Doing the engineering work, building the actual product selling and then government stuff. You're in a suit, you're testifying, you're, you know, there's. You're shaking your head when someone's, you know, espousing a conspiracy theory about you. We've seen the viral clips. How do you balance those two things?

Yeah, I'm going back to Tennessee this year because they're actually trying to elevate the punishment for weather modification to a criminal offense. And in addition to that, I'm gonna go to Florida.

Rainmaker's legal now, but if you want to make it rain, yeah, we're putting you in.

I mean, I think you'd be just as productive in prison. Like, you're already kind of in prison. You'd be more locked in. It'd be a minor setback if they lock you up. I'm sure the rest of your bros would like Break you out in some heroic scheme.

Or you can make calls like a don from the prison.

Right, exactly, exactly.

Yeah. I guess going off of that big question for me is whether modification is so charged. You're in this beautiful situation where you piss off both. You piss off people in the center, sometimes you piss off people on the left, people on the right. People on the, on the right might say, you know, that's, you know, it's just wrong to be changing the weather or have some concerns there. People on the left are just, you know, maybe anti science sometimes. How has it been trying to thread the needle? Obviously you're not trying to make everybody happy, but you need to get people generally bought into what you're doing to make things happen.

Dude, water's a nonpartisan issue. Whether you want ecosystems restored or you want more water for your farm, or you want, you want urban development in your city, we want to bring you water. We can bring water more cost effectively than even desalination. And then when it comes to like the real fringe edges, because everybody in the middle is bought into that mission of abundance. Right. For whatever their particular issue is. I personally believe that like Genesis 1:26, it's the first commission that God gives man at the beginning of time, is to steward the earth that sees in the skies. Rainmaker is trying to embody that value set and be good stewards of the world as we take dominion over the skies. And so that plays to some extent with the more tinfoil hat conspiracy theorists on the right. And when it comes to the left, some people think that like, you know, anytime you modify anything on the planet, humans always make it worse. And that's just like, not true. But even if you believe it to be the case, like we've. We've messed up the planet so badly already, we might as well take deliberate action to try to repair it. And so people on the far left are generally more game with that.

Yeah, that makes sense.

Has. What are some of the most ambitious projects and places? Obviously we went out to. What was that place out in the desert? We went to?

Salton Sea.

The Salton Sea. That was a really cool case study. Are there other kind of like long term projects that you think are kind of on the bucket list that you want to make amazing thing one day?

Yeah. The Great Salt Lake is in a deficit of about 500,000 acre feet of water per year. The Bear river is the primary tributary into the Great Salt Lake. And it has mountains with lots of juicy clouds from Utah to Wyoming to Idaho. All that flow into it. I think that restoring the Great Salt Lake is like, an American priority and a must. And even more interestingly than that, something in the distant future for Rainmaker is the Winter Olympics in 2034 are going to be held in Salt Lake. And China in 2008 had this whole big show and dance where they made it rain before the parades. So it didn't on the Olympic Games. We want to show a force a decade from now to make more fresh.

Pow.

For all the Olympic Games in Seoul.

Nice. Speaking of China, the first. I think the first time I ever met you, you mentioned you came in just like, completely, just aggressively telling me that China was reforesting the Gobi Desert by planting a bunch of trees. That's obviously not your business, but, like, is anyone working on that? That feels important. If you're really thinking about, like, terraforming certain parts of America and, like, reclaiming and just improving different biomes, like, how does that play in? Is that just a different startup? Do we need another company to build that? Is that something that you would eventually expand into? How does that all play into this, like, whole plan?

Yeah.

Rainmaker long term is the terraforming company.

Right.

We want to take any ecosystem and make it both symbiotically flourishing for humankind and the environment. There's no companies that I know of doing reforestation, although there's a bunch of university labs that are spraying seeds from drones. Really cool, weird, clever thing where when the seed hits water, it unravels and sort of acts as like, a little natural drill to drill the seed into the ground. That's pretty cool. I haven't seen it commercialized yet. And someday I do want Rainmaker in the business of all sorts of different terraforming stuff like planting trees. Literally boiling the ocean. By the way, if you boil enough of the ocean, then you can create more clouds. So we'll hear it here first.

This is boiling the ocean.

Boiling the ocean.

Eventually, we'll talk to you in 20.

Years when you're still grinding at this, like, yeah, I'm still trying to boil the ocean.

Yeah. One, I just have to say, you know, I feel like I've seen pretty much the entire Augustus arc. Obviously met you right after you're graduating in New York. You were fixated on this problem from our very first conversation. I always, you know, and it's been amazing to watch and be a small investor. You have found the. You've shown the perfect ability to balance attention and progress. Right. So many people would have said Augustus is so good at getting Attention that it's almost bearish. Right. Because founders can get on this sort of negative feedback or sort of positive feedback loop that becomes negative, where they're so good at posting and they're so good at the Internet that they just get sort of fixated on that, and then that becomes their sort of dimension of progress. How have you balanced sort of yapping and building? And, you know, I want to give you credit for not being at a lot of the popular events over the last year. Right. There's, you know, multiple of the events that we went to were places that I know you got an invite and I know you turned down. What does the next two, three years look like for you in terms of balancing yapping, knowing that you need to be making massive forward progress on the.

Business as well to give credit where credit is due. It was in no small part Coogan's shot that was called, where he said, listen, you guys are going to get out over your skis and seem like even more of a bunch of goofballs than you actually, in fact, are. And so we deliberately decided about the middle of last year just to kind of go like, media blackout. And I've talked to a bunch of my employees that have said, like, yeah, I worked at other companies where the founder was a really big yapper, and yes, you need to be an evangelist. But then the founder doesn't know some fundamental crux of the tech problem, and the company blows up because of that. And so we were talking about our publication strategy and some media stuff, and we gave it to our PR people and they were like, hey, can you dumb it down and make this less technical? And the funny part about that was our science team already told us, like, you guys are going to make us seem like idiots. And so we have. We've done extraordinary things, particularly in the last five months, and I'm so proud to work with the people that I do. And, you know, not to be like a coming soon guy, but in the end of this month, in April, we're going to start to unveil the products and the progress that we've made across the entire western United States. And then I've alluded to online the Middle East a little bit. We've done some stuff there.

Nice.

The progress, the Fox Business pod was taken from a mountaintop in the Middle east, and I didn't share that live.

That's amazing. When I read your last investor update, I genuinely was shocked because people don't have any. I don't think the average person has any Sense of how much you guys. How much progress you guys, you know, have made in the. In the last year and a half. It's. It's really incredible.

Yeah. Narrative violation.

Not for. Not for Augustus.

Not for Augustus, but. Yeah. I mean, for the.

For the peanut gallery.

Yeah, the peanut gallery. But we're. That's why the show exists. To.

What? I want to get back some gallery. I want to get into some of the bigger sort of more important questions. What. What are you benching these days? I imagine it's going to be like the last time I lifted. Like, you bring an intensity to weightlifting that is inspirational. I don't even know if we've. I don't. Have you ever gotten a proper lift with August?

I haven't.

He's going in there.

I've seen the rack in the office.

He's bringing the same intensity that he brings to building to every single set.

But it's hard when you're traveling. It's always hard to get in the gym when you're traveling, so break it down. How's it going, dude?

So, yeah, like I said, this is a medium. I'm like 37 pounds lighter than when I started Rainmaker. Um, and that's mostly muscle. Um, so I. I don't think my 1 rep maxes are what they used to be, but we still have the smelling salts on the rack downstairs.

So I was telling John. John woke up Monday like deathly ill, and I. And I was saying we need to get smelling salts just here on the set so that if we need a really.

We need a podcast with the same intensity that Augustus builds. You know, hard tack.

Exactly.

Of course, I would.

I would rip. Lucy. Smelling salt.

We. We actually got some in the office back in, like, 2016, 2017, when we were building the company. And it's a wild ride. If you haven't done the smelling salts, it's intense.

What area of the broader hard tech industry are you most excited about? Obviously, you're 100% locked in, but, yeah, I'd be curious. What is the space that. When you're sort of looking left or right, what's most exciting? I know that on a long enough time horizon, and I'm sure you plan to enter many of those spaces, but in the near term, what are you excited about?

Fission. Fission. Fission. Fission. You might not be very surprised, but my dear friend Isaiah Taylor is absolutely kicking ass when it comes to nuclear, and I think blowing the lid off a lot of people's expectations about how long it takes to build a reactor to get power positive. I also think, like, a really important point when you brought up before how you do publicity, how you do media, the Valor Atomics Ward Zero unveiling was an incredible event and the aesthetics were off the charts. And like, a lot of people said, oh, look at the facade, like, that's so over the top. But also, if hard tech isn't cool, I think something that people don't understand about the Gundo is like, it's been a very deliberately engineered aesthetic effort to make hard tech sick. Because if it's not, then everybody's going to end up in finance again. The next generation, the lower class of zoomers, they're going to end up doing software engineering. So making things incredible and cool, I think is really important. And then having the technical chops to back it up and unveil a spectacular thermal thermal prototype like that is. Is really sweet. And I'm excited to go hang out with the tailors in the Philippines to see Ward 1 come on.

It's the. The future should look like the future. And bringing those aesthetics to bear can. Can have a benefit as long as you're also delivering the real thing and it's not vaporware. Right. Is there a new class of Gundo startups that are coming in? Because you built this universe, this cinematic universe that was kind of around you and whenever there'd be a profile, Isaiah would be there, a couple other guys would be there, the Neros crew, the Picogrid crew, a couple other folks, Dirac. Right. But is there a new addition that we need, an update on Gundo, or is there just like a whole separate crew that you're not even overseeing as the Godfather of the Gundo dude?

Yeah. So the Gundo Book club is a lot of these dudes, rather than being like, I don't know, 23 through 27, they're like 19 through 2023. Totally different cohort. A lot of cool companies. Teddy Cohort from Durbin finally made it to the Gundo from Georgia. That was really cool. Aries is sick. Chris, what's his last name? Ottoman.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He is building subsea vehicles. There's a whole new click and we're almost out of touch with us. You know, part of what made Gundo possible and like the initial vibe, real possible, was we were all running like pre seed companies, so we had a lot of time on our hands and kind of just like go around and get to know these guys as well. But they're a super tight click. Like the original founding group of Gundo Bros. That's cool.

What are you thinking about supply chain? There's been a lot of debate over, you know, Chinese drone motors and how hard it is. I mean, I've talked to Anduril guys who are like, yeah, like there's all sorts of pieces that are just hard to get. I was hearing, I think you were at that talk where someone was highlighting that there's only like one tin smelting factory in America now. And. And like, it's just like there's all these weird things where like you just can't get American made tin or you can't get American made. So I'm sure you're thinking about that. But also, you know, early stage, it's not super critical immediately to be completely clean supply chain. But what are you seeing as the supply chain develops? And are there any other Gundo companies that you've been able to like kind of build on top of? I know at one point you were saying that like, oh yeah, you just walked across the street. There was a drone company that was helping you build the drones. Can you talk about the supply chain chain a little bit?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it is definitely still tough. Rainmaker has the luxury of not being a defense company. So the government requirements that we have are definitely different. I'm still a nationalist and a patriot though. So in any circumstance where we can buy American or from an American colony like Taiwan, I'm pro when it comes to like immediate supply chain in Gundo. I think everybody has or has already or is having a part made by range view from Cameron Shiller's company. And so like having an investment casting foundry right there is pretty sweet how you get someone to innovate and like winding motors. Not totally sure, but like boards. I think actually we are going to see if not just because of SoftBank's hundred billion dollars that they maybe do or don't have. We will see a lot more of in the United States soon.

Yeah, that's cool. There's one American drone company that does small motors. I think they're up in Seattle and I think they, I think they might have got. They might have been family owned, they got bought by private equity and then they shipped off to China. And so my dream is like someone goes in and does the PE and brings it back because like they clearly had some talent and some kind of core, core competency here. But I'm sure lots of people are working on it. Jordy, you got another question? Should we let Augustus go?

No big questions. I know you got to get back to Work. What are you hiring for right now? Now how can we help you find them? Who's the most critical next hire?

Thanks. Before even I answer that question, I briefly lived in South Lake Texas, which is where Quinn, yours is from. So yes, actually the QB of UT Austin I was mistaken for multiple times I saw that reply.

Oh yeah, yeah, that's right.

And so I don't know, that was pretty funny. But who am I hiring for? Go to makerain.com careers what we're interested in most now are radar scientists. So if you have either worked at the low level on board testing qualification or meteorological weather radar. So that's more of like a university grad student position that never thought they'd be able to get into industry because nobody's ever cared about the weather in the private sector. Those are the people that we want most. After that, though, I would say aerosol chemists. So if you've worked at Juul, if you've worked at large industrial facilities that are making a lot of smoke, that's of interest. And then government affairs, if you're a seasoned yapper from the Hill, then we'd love to talk to you.

Fantastic.

Amazing.

Well, thanks so much for joining, Gustus. You're always welcome on the show. Whenever you.

Man, we need one of those quarter zips there. They look fantastic.

Send them over to the studio.

Wear them special episodes. Whenever it's raining, we'll wear them.

Yeah, that's good. Well, have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon.

You're the man.

Stay safe out there. Get some rest. Awesome.

Should we get into some timeline?

We should. We should. We should do a bunch of timeline. We have what, an hour and a half, something like that until the next call in. Oh no, we got like 45 minutes. Okay, perfect. So did you hear that Italy has soured on Starlink? I have some reports here.

What's their.

Italy doesn't want to do business. And I had Grok rewrite it in a comically Italian accent and I'll read some to you. D' Italian governor Desa half having some bigger doubts about finishing this 1.6 billion deal with Elon Musk. Starlink, eh, Bloomberg, she said mamma mia. People whispering that the worries come from the US pulling back like a scared of Linguini from the promises to keep Europe safe by the bing bada boom. Starlink, he's a God of some competition, capiche? They're talking about satellite communications right here in Italy. It's like known as secret pasta recipe. The Report she say Elon Musk, he's, he's taking a big risk hanging out too close with the Trump administration. Forget about it already the stats in Europe, they show Tesla sales dropping faster than a meatball off the plate. Bloomberg she say a Wednesday that Tesla shares in China audio MIA down 49. That's a no good, like overcooked spaghetti. But a wait. Musk might have picked up some extra business in the US at least for Starling. Salute. Word on the street, they say the Federal Aviation Administration might ditch a Verizon, like a bad batch of risotto and go with Starlink instead. That's a spicy meatball.

Amazing.

So thank you to Grok.

That's the first like belly laugh that an LLM has provided. That might be a world first.

First. Yes. Grok. Grok is undefeated. Humor. I really, I really enjoyed that. Anyway, yeah, so the news, Italy does not want to do business with Elon Musk because he's close to Trump and Trump is not supporting, I guess Europe.

Grok actually followed this up, by the way, and said, how's a dad, eh? You want me to cook at the pizza Next. A ridiculous character.

I love it.

You know. You know, funny story. So the domain party round.

Yeah.

Was a domain owned by a, A catering company in Milan. And I had my buddy who lives in Milan negotiate for the deal.

Yeah.

And we ended up, you know, settling on a fair price. But it's thought it was hilarious, that party, you know, party round. The sort of word that was, you know, such a part of Silicon Valley lore was being, you know, operating a cave. A pizza company. Fantastic party round.

Speaking of party round, did you see. Do you know Andrew Edinger?

Of course.

Okay. So did you see this breakdown? He did, yeah. You're the stuff of thread guy lore now.

Well, so. And Andrew worked.

Oh, he worked there.

He worked.

Oh, that's cool.

He was on the team running a bunch of brand stuff.

So.

Yeah. Do you have that pulled up?

Yeah, Yeah. I thought this is a cool post.

I feel like my, I'm concerned that my, my version of the deck is out of order.

You want the, you want the hard posts?

I'll take some hard posts.

Here. You're gonna have to skip through to find the, the Andrew Edinger post. It's towards.

Oh, I found it.

You found it. Okay. It says Capital was founded on the premise that.

Yeah, some backstory. Andrew Ettinger is a good buddy. Joined the. Join my team in 2022, I want to say. And so he was breaking down a lot of the work that that went into as we transition from Party Round to Capital xyz, he's breaking it down. So he says Capital was founded on the premise that banking is commoditized and a great brand can win. Early signs pointed towards that hypothesis being true. Capital was an evolution from the cult followed fundraising app Party Round. Known for an all out assault on Twitter and appointment viewing. Dropped quote from Paki. But after a year and a half of built, I gotta say with Paki. Yeah, Paki almost every single day for over a year straight would, would repost our stuff. It was an unbelievable ask. Most people would have folded.

Yeah.

But we had Josh on our team that would just message him and say packy please. And he would basically guilt trip him.

Into it every time.

Pack, he always delivered. And that was when Repost still actually carried a little bit of weight.

Yeah, totally.

He says. But after a year and a half of building that brand, Party Round was evolved into capital positioning as a bank for founders. Raise, hold, spend, send and send funds all in one place. And Andrew highlights here. We launched this founder series which is still available. Capital XYZ store.

Very rare footage of Will Menitis in that series.

Yeah, that's actually the only video of.

Him online I think.

So it actually might be. Anyway, so the idea for that campaign was whenever you thought of financial institutions making video content it was always about some small business owner or things like that. I wanted to make this sort of chef's table of highlighting founders. And so we made this series that highlighted Wilmanitis and a number of other early stage founders ended up getting nominated for a shorty award which was cool. I don't think we won. I was annoyed about that. That and then we had a couple sort of rough instances. We had FTX collapse and we had a bunch of crypto related sort of customers. We also had stablecoin functionality in our product and we were building a hybrid Fiat and stablecoin bank. And so when FTX collapsed, the entire sort of legacy finance world went really, really sort of bearish against crypto for obvious reasons. And so we had to shut down all the stablecoin functionality and come out as sort of a more commodity neobank. And then a few months later SVB collapsed and we did, we only had, we only had 250k of FDIC coverage and our, you know, our most important customers had millions of dollars in deposits because they were obviously, you know, venture backed startups. And so they, they looked at us, they looked at our underlying banking partner. We're which Their Stock dropped like 80, 90% because there was this sort of regional run on the bank and ended up doing a deal with RO very quickly to move our customers over there. But anyways, cool story. I'm really proud of the work that we did there and then I've worked with Andrew since then. Andrew was heavily involved in Rora and now does a bunch of other great work for companies and the whole team.

Went on to do. I didn't realize the team that you like, we keep seeing these people in like the Geordie cinematic universe. It's like the Gundo Bros. But seriously, it's like, you know, we're talking to.

Yeah. So Brandon. So Brandon Jacoby first ever hired Jacoby. He's at X now dominating timelines and.

It'S so, so helpful to have someone at the company that you're like building the stream on. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We can just text Brian Armstrong.

Brian Armstrong, our CTO is over doing Meta AI stuff at Meta now.

That's awesome.

Dylan, our head of marketing started a company with two other engineers on our team, sold it to Uniswap. That's so you can play it today. They have this whole like online Survivor game. That's cool. You know we have another one of our designers is at Ramp now.

Yep.

That, that went viral recently because he sort of like fixed something, you know, in an hour as they tend to do so. And then you have Spencer who's over one of the founding engineers at Delphi. So. So I'm very proud of the team that we built and yeah, they're all doing fantastic things.

Well, I have some breaking news. Elon Musk replied to one of our clips.

No way.

Yeah, very cool. It's about Sean McGuire. Sean McGuire was talking AGI plus robot. Tesla lets you do unlimited work in the real world. Foundational model at XAI lets you do unlimited knowledge work and Neuralink lets you merge. We really enjoyed talking to Sean yesterday and Elon Musk says pretty much I'm open to the other ideas, but it seems like that's what's going to happen. So thanks for engaging Elon. We'd love to have you on the show.

I appreciate it.

Anyway, let's, let's keep going.

What do you got?

Wander sponsor Wander, of course. Of course.

Wait, wait. One, two, three.

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I mean, you gotta follow, follow at Wander, follow John Andrew, the founder, but follow Kyle Tibbets. He's our dear friend and every single day he is just racking up the impressions. He is a CMO over at Wander, but he's also delivering, totally delivering, you know, impressions himself.

So get inspired. He's posting some time to book a summer vacation.

Look at this, look at this house in Cape Cod.

Fantastic. Fantastic.

Unbelievable.

Yeah, we gotta have Chris Williamson on the show at some point. But Chris has this fantastic philosophy about the. It's like the vacation dividend or something like that. It's like this funny mental framework where basically if you book, like, if you just spontaneously go on a vacation or you go, go to the super bowl, you get all the joy from that. And then you also get the joy from thinking back to like your super bowl experience or your stay in a fantastic wonder. But he thinks that you should book a trip that's like two years out. So basically you're looking forward to it for two years years. Or like, you know, you should always have, you should always have a vacation booked like a year or two years out. And also, not only is it like, obviously cheaper and easier to book and there's more inventory when you book far out, but your schedule's clear. And then you'll be like, I've had this book for two years. I'm not going to pass this up. I'm gonna, I'm gonna stick with it. As opposed to. It's very easy when you're in the flow of things to just be like, I'm never doing it. I'm never doing a birthday weekend or something. And so, yeah, get on Wander, set those dates far out and book something with you, your friends, your family, your company. Do something to reward yourself, treat yourself. Vittorio. Yeah, we gotta have him on the show to explain all this because it's a bunch of scientific mumbo jumbo. I don't understand. Yeah, but Vittorio says it's here.

You gotta get him on the show and say, okay, break down this news like you're explaining something to a podcast.

Exactly. Yeah, yeah, I know you already broke it down for like the X user and like, and like X, like tech.

Twitter about somebody that, that talks.

Exactly. Who like basically can't read and just talks the whole time. Anyway.

We have a friend who's very smart. He can't read. But yeah, fantastic intelligence is it's kind.

Of a separate thing, you know. Literacy is not for everyone. You can still do great things. Vittorio says it's here. Cortical Labs just launched the first commercial biological computer. Human neurons directly integrated into silicon chips. Programmable and adaptive living Computational synthetic biological intelligence Traditional silicon based AI has a fundamental limit. Huge energy demands, rigid structures and limited adaptability. AI today consumes massive computational resources yet still struggles to mimic human intelligence. Biological intelligence bi he's coining it Coogan's law says doesn't have these limitations. Real neurons inherently adapt and learn have high efficiency, around 30 watts per unit natural self organization and have more flexibility perfected over billions of years and so congratulations to Vittorio on the launch. If you want to learn more he has a wonderful thread here that goes on for 20 posts.

Does he work for this company? I'm confused actually don't know. He's just sharing.

He's just posting maybe. I don't know. I think it's his thing. But he's got a million views on it and that's what we really care about here. He got 8k likes on this.

That's really what matters.

So Vittorio call into the show break it down for us. Us Congratulations. And if you need to promote it to an even broader audience, why don't you go buy a billboard on ad quick Ad Quick delivers out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only Adquick combines technology, out of home experience and data to enable efficient seamless ad buying across the globe. So congratulations. We're going to have.

I really think that Jeremy, we've joked about this a few times but Jeremy Giffon needs to do the one on one billboard ad campaign.

We mocked it up for him. So if you didn't listen to the show yesterday Jeremy Gafon has a fund that is buying specializes in.

He specializes in buying companies that are good businesses that have been over capitalized.

Exactly. Have extreme rebuilding the cap table re incentivizing the management team, the founders figuring out who can actually get the most value out of this company and making sure that the VCs can move on to another kind of home run swing.

And so our idea was to do personal entry style ads where it says accident.

You know call cap table accident. Call Jeremy Guiffon.

John's amazing copy was cap table accident Cap table accident.

It happens. It happens all too frequently. We have some personnel news.

Let's go.

Kristen McDonald is thrilled to share that she has joined Eniac Ventures. She says I moved to Venture because I wanted to work and with and enable bold entrepreneurs who are willing to are pushing the boundary of technology forward. When I met the ENIAC team, it was obvious they shared that vision. The firm was built from the ground up to be a trusted ally and support system to founders at the earliest stages. I'm honored to continue working alongside Hadley and the rest of the team. As you may know, they are some of the best people you could ever have in your corner. And I have a funny story because I'm not super close with ENIAC or Hadley, but in college I internally interned at a startup that was about Series B called Vlingo. It was a competitor to Siri. Siri was originally an independent project.

Sounds like a company name from Silicon Valley. The show.

Totally, totally. And so Siri came out of the Stanford Research Institute. Sri. That's where they got the name Siri. Siri and Vlingo started. There's Nuance is a voice recognition company company. They make Dragon naturally speaking, one of the first voice recognition companies. And they had some of the smart kind of AI ML engineers had. Had left. Nuance started this company, Vlingo Stanford. So these guys were like MIT guys or out in like we were in like Harvard Square, Cambridge Square, something like that. And then Siri was out in Stanford. Apple buys Siri pretty early. And so we were basically cut off from the iPhones. The whole business plan was like get on Android and get on BlackBerry and you want to be installed as a default app. And it was just like a very fascinating thing. They were doing all these cool things. They actually ran a billboard campaign. This is hilarious. I'm not doing another ad read, but they did a billboard ad campaign, but they did it outside of RIM's headquarters. Who makes BlackBerry in Canada? Specifically to get the attention of BlackBerry executives because it was a consumer app. It was anything that you could download. I think they had like a $20 version, a $5 version, a free version, et cetera. It was something that you buy and you use and then you could. And then you could use a voice mode just like Siri on your BlackBerry. But they wanted to be installed by default and they wanted a big deal done with BlackBerry. So they bought billboards outside to make it look like they were like a big company, you know. Right.

I was like.

And then all the, the, all the, the, the executives at BlackBerry would like drive in and be like, oh, flingo. Like they're, they're a good company. Like I gotta do business with them. And Hadley worked there as this like, kind of business development, MBA type. And I just remember him coming in and he was super young and. And during like the all hands meeting, he would stand up and kind of break down what the business was doing. And I was just like, this guy's the man. Cause I was like a kid. I was an intern at the time. And the CEO, the founders were like these MIT scientists, but they brought in kind of corporate CEO who was a. He'd been in war, basically. He'd been in Iraq deploying like mobile technology, basically, like cell phone towers. And he was so, like, hardcore. He had bullets on his desk with like the names of the rival companies on them. It was a really. It was a really crazy, like, experience. But it was really cool because like a series A, series B company, 50 people building a tech product, growing, like, it's just a unique thing to be in. It wound up being like an okay outcome. They sold the company. I think everyone did pretty well. It wasn't like a generational company or anything, but it was just cool to see, like, okay, this is what a startup looks like at this scale. And it was really cool. And. And I remember that we did some deal and Hadley, like, got like bottle service and he let me come and drink at his table. And that was huge to me as a college kid. Amazing. It was great.

Yeah. Congratulations to Kristen McDonald. This is huge. The title partner has been diluted over time, but getting partner at a fund like ENIAC really means something. And it's awesome to see.

It's great. Should we go to Evan Armstrong?

Let's do it.

Evan Armstrong says people are not ready for what's coming. Anthropic published a post today that casually announced announced the upending of the social order by 2027. If LLMs can do all listed below. The vast majority of American labor is automatable. We are entering an economically, politically and emotionally dangerous period. Buckle up. And the. And the quote is from this blog post. As our CEO Dario writes, in Machines of Loving Grace, we expect powerful title. By the way, it's a reference to All Watched over by Machines of Loving Grace, which is a Heinlein book. I think we expect powerful AI systems will emerge in late 2026 to early 2027. Powerful AI systems will have the following intellectual capabilities matching or exceeding that of Nobel Prize winners across most disciplines, including biology, computer science, mathematics or engineering. The ability to navigate all interfaces available to a human doing digital work today, including the ability to process and generate text, audio and video and the ability to autonomously control technology. Instruments. Like mice and keyboard. Like mice and keyboards. And the ability to access and browse the Internet. The ability to autonomously reason through complex tasks over extended periods, hours, days, or even weeks, seeking clarification and feedback when needed, much like a highly capable employee would. The ability to interface with the physical world, controlling laboratory equipment, robotic systems and manufacturing tools through digital connections. What do you think, 2027? Is it over?

We're just getting started.

Just getting started.

No, I mean, no mention of comedy.

Interesting. The final eval.

I think that anthropic is crushing software engineering.

Yep.

Struggling on the comedy side.

Yeah.

And that's okay. Not everybody has to be funny.

Yeah. You read this and you're like, oh, massive job displacement. But the question is like, is there just a thousand times more work to be done? And when I think about Mars and when I think about Dyson spheres and when I think about like all the crazy things that we want to do as humans, I'm thinking like, yeah, yes. And like, let's have every human piloting a thousand AIs, and let's all work together. And let's all work.

Going back to Friedberg had a really great point which we covered last week around, you know, if you have these incredible, incredibly powerful AI systems, what are the sort of massive, you know, incredibly daunting, sort of large scale projects that could be accomplished by just having a lot more intelligence?

Yeah.

So anyways, I don't think, I think we need to go into this with, you know, generally with optimism. And then still, I think I still personally reference people like Tyler Cowan who I think are less directly conflicted on these things because he's not out there trying to sustain, you know, you know, evaluation. Evaluation. Right. He's just sort of focused on what he believes is. Is the truth and making predictions based on that. So we'll see. But it's certainly the most. I would never. I wouldn't have wanted to be born at a different time.

No, totally.

It's truly incredible.

Yeah.

It'll be very interesting this morning. Completely unrelated. Pretty soon we're gonna see people joining X. Not pretty soon. But isn't it funny to see somebody in 10 years when people are like, why do these boomers call everything tweets?

Yeah.

And quote tweets? Like, what are they talking about? Because, like, they will not have. They wouldn't have ever experienced Twitter.

Yeah.

It'll just be like the most obvious way to out yourself as, as a boomer.

Yeah.

Or maybe an LLM that's just trained on a bunch of Content from, you know, the early 2000s.

Yeah, yeah, that's funny. Well, regardless of whether or not AI takes every job, you're going to need to to use AI and use software to close your books. Using Ramp time is money save, both easy to use, corporate cards, bill payments, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place.

I actually have a cool post from AR Khorazian who we've talked about. He's an economist over at Ramp. So he looked at the top SaaS vendors on ramp for March so far and I'll run down the list here. So by new customer count, OpenAI topped the list. LinkedIn was second, cursor was third, Canva was fourth and then fifth was anthropic. Bainu card spend was elastic, LinkedIn, HubSpot, ZoomInfo and Salesforce. So that was interesting to see. I'm going to read out some of the standouts. So Elastic was a standout. They were the top vendor by New cardspend is an AI search company that builds software for businesses to build their own AI driven search platform like personalized E commerce searches for consumers or AI searches for customer help centers. They're a public company, so their stock recently surged following an earnings beat. So narrative violation. AI company with earnings that's public. Let's go wild to see. I'm looking it up at looking it up on public right now. But jumping back to the post, they also XAI was a standout out and so they seem to be pretty doing pretty well. Had a surge of signups in February and then the Claude 3.7 Sonnet launch also drove quite a lot of new volume and they can see here so Ramp data shows that as of February 2025 only 4.7% of US businesses have adopted Anthropic's model compared to 19% for OpenAI. So kind of like doesn't seem super surprising. I'm actually surprised that Anthropic has that much adoption.

Yeah.

But I think it's the developer usage that's driving that.

Yep. I, I was thinking last night about the question of like acceleration because we're not seeing it yet in certainly gdp but like to the, to the satya Nadella point. But also so there's a very interesting abstraction layer for like the progress of humanity just around the amount of energy that we're generating. This idea of like Kardashev1 which is I believe 10,000, we're at 0.6 right now. I think it's 18 terawatts of electrical capacity globally and if you, you. It's hard to find a time in human history when we were generating 10,000 times less. So if you forecast how long will it take to get to 10,000 times more, where we would be essentially consuming every, every amount. All the energy that's coming to the Earth from the sun essentially is like Kardashev 1 and then Kardashev 2, I believe is like the Dyson sphere on the. And where you're, where you're capturing all the energy from the sun in every direction. Right, yeah. And if you, and if you forecast it out based on the base rate, which I believe is 2.7% growth pre 1970 stagnation, it takes like 500 years to get there, which feels like forever, especially given, like, I think that this anthropic post is maybe a little aggressive, but it does feel like we're on the cusp of something, like we're going to be able to do more things. And so my base case is maybe like we go back to 2.7% growth, whereas we've been at around 2% energy growth for the last five decades. But even if we grow at 2.7% for the next 20 years, by 2020, by 2045 will only be double the total energy capacity, which will be a lot. It'll be 38 terawatts or something like that. But it's, but it's interesting to see if that becomes the main bottleneck for all of this is like doing things in the physical world. Nat Friedman has this take that's like, yes, the AIs will be super intelligent, but they won't be gods in the sense that they still have to obey the laws of physics. So no time travel, no teleportation, all of these things don't happen. So at a certain point when they want to build a new nuclear reactor, like, they do need to dig things out of the ground and move them. And there's like a physical cost to that. And so we like, it's, you know, there's that whole.

Humans yearn for the minds. Yeah, we can help the AIs.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's the whole meme of like, feel the whole. And I feel the acceleration in the LLM progress arena a little bit. Although over the past few years it felt like we were really accelerating, going from GPT 3.5 to 4. And now it feels like we're kind of tailing off, off and hitting some sort of local. Yeah, we need some major breakthrough.

Doesn't care about benchmarks.

And then we need to build a lot more capacity because I think even if we have the super PhD researchers, like we don't have enough servers, we don't have enough data centers, there's still just more to do as humanity to really like unlock something that feels dramatically different in terms of like, oh, this world is like true post industrial revolution, post second industrial revolution or whatever. Anyway, let's move on to something completely unrelated. Conor McDonald over at Ridge, Connor McDonnell.

He says direct to consumer. Cut out the middleman and replaced it with an endless labyrinth of deteriorating ad channels and organic reach. And I'll give some backstory here. So I. My career sort of came online during the height of the DC sort of boom. I remember I actually had a college class that was about D2C and that almost basically the professor was fixated on what was happening over at Wharton and how all these big consumer brands were coming out of Wharton. The MBA program there. I think Warby is a good example. I think maybe some Harry's or the shaving, like something was happening at Wharton to generate these companies. And there was this sense like Facebook ads were very cheap at the time in comparison. They basically got generally more expensive year over year. And people were realizing, working with distributors, you know this from Lucy, working at distributors is a nightmare for every company, right? They sort of sit between you and the retailer. The retailer sits between the distributor and the end customer. And so there's these layers and there's this idea of if you could sell products online, Facebook ended up being the best distribution channel for products probably in history. You could scale brands tremendously fast overnight. And a lot of these businesses ended up just raising just obscene amounts of capital on the idea that basically if ad rates didn't go, prices for ads didn't go up a lot. You would have been able to just print money. It was like a money machine where spend $100 on Facebook, get $500 back. You could just use that perpetually. So I became close friends with Conor at the time and we helped him out with Ridge and then got to work out of their office for a while. And Connor's daily life was just finding, basically navigating the labyrinth, which he describes here, of optimizing existing ad channels, trying to test and find new ones. Even the Conner and the Ridge guys were smart early on to not put a huge emphasis on organic social. It was never sort of a huge priority for the company. And that ended up being the right decision because all these brands that had built big businesses off of organic social media, Facebook at One point was just like, yeah, like you don't. This is not, this reach isn't real. Your reach is not reach. You know, we're basically going to take this away. And from, and from that point on there was a period where organic, social almost didn't matter at all.

And.

So anyways, if when I see, you know, I'm invested in a number of different sort of consumer product companies, people like Packy's brother Dan McCormick, who's intensely good at this similar architect as Connor, he's just sort of constantly focused on optimizing paid acquisition. The Rohr CEO Brian Keller, my business partner, is world class at this too. And so the brands that are doing well right now are ones that are hyper fixated on performance optimization. And it really is this scientific process of experimentation and balancing these sort of super, super complicated tasks where like the idea of E commerce is so simple. You make a product, you put it online, you run ads against it. But then the reality is like this constant stressful labyrinth of trying to make the equation of E commerce work. You got two, that means you should shotgun one. John's got a couple Celsius.

I mean we really got to do the deep dive on Celsius because born in the DTC era and yet not a DTC play at all. And I think that's kind of the next. I mean Ridge is certainly still heavily E commerce focused and they've developed a fantastic team around that. But they are going into retail and growing that category. And I think more and more teams are realizing that Omnichannel early makes a lot of sense, but it's a very different skill set. It's very, very hard and it's, it's just a completely different culture motion. I mean I remember reading this book by Mark Rampolla, the high hanging fruit. This guy started Vita Coco, this coconut water company that he sold I think to Pepsi for a lot of money. He did very, very well. And he was telling the story of how he got a distributor network in New Jersey on board and he went to the distributor and was just like showed up with an F150. Whichever one of you guys sells the most coconut water this week gets this F150. And that was like the best money he ever spent.

That's wild.

And that is just so different from. Let me look at the spreadsheet and see what was our roas to CAC and click through ratio on this ad and what was the 2 second retention on this video ad and how do we get more UGC like the D2C playbook is just completely different from like oh, you know, a guy, you know, which is the very much like the retail old school. So blending those together, really difficult. But when you get it right, the company can really, really rip. Anyway, should we move on to Erewhon this, Erewhon that? My grocery store has a stolen phone laundering laundering machine and lets me open carry post from Sam Austin. You're a big Erwan guy. Are you going to be switching?

I might. I need to find out where this is.

This is wild. I don't understand this stolen phone laundering. I guess it's a, it's a machine and it says safely and securely an iPhone XR could net you up to $65. You just dump the phone in there and it immediately gets you instant cash. Pretty crazy business model. I wonder who's behind this.

I wonder if it has any way to figure out if the iPhone's actually unlocked or factory reset. You would hope that they require you to have a factory reset.

Yeah. I wonder if this is. I wonder how much. I mean obviously they're joking that oh this is about laundering stolen phones. But clearly stolen phones would be an issue with a system like this. And I wonder what safeguards the company has in place for that. But I thought this was funny because they're taking shots at Erewhon. I just wanted to highlight it.

Defend Erewhon.

Anyway, back to tech, back to business, back to the serious stuff. On the timeline. Epirus announced a $250 million Series D fundraise to hyperscale Leonidas production capacity. Leonidas is a solid state software defined high energy, high power microwave technology that delivers unmatched counter electronics capabilities. Tested and proven as a scalable counter swarm solution. Another, another answer to those drone swarms that we keep seeing on the timeline. Very cool defense tech company. A Joe Lonsdale project I believe and yeah, yeah.

And so there's a lot of reasons why this company is important. There's been, there's been some naysayers around this tech. Right. So this is non kinetic which means it's entirely using energy directed towards these sort of swarms. The reason that this is so important is there's a lot of places in the world that need to be secured against drones that you can't shoot bullets into the air. So picture at a, you know, so Allen Control Systems makes a ton of sense on a battlefield.

Right.

So sort of turret that you, you know, can put on a truck or a tank or you know, stationary gun.

On a truck, bomb on a Truck.

But the challenge is you can't put that on top of a NFL stadium.

Exactly.

Because it would just involve firing bullets into the air, you know, into a city. Right. Yeah, completely. Doesn't work. So if we're going to have effective defenses against drone swarms in these sort of non battlefield field environments, also there's a volume, there's like a volume problem too. Right. If you have a drone swarm of 100, are you going to be able to reliably hit, you know, 100 of these? And so we need both kinetic and non kinetic solutions. And huge vote of confidence for Epirus. And I believe this is an 8 VC company. Joe Lonsdale had a post. He said directed EMP is becoming a critical part of warfare and deterrence duty. Bases, ships, vehicles, planes, satellites and other defense systems will all use these capabilities to dominate the battlefield and to protect war fighters and civilians in various contexts. So cool. Both wartime and civilian applications.

That's great. Let's go to Sha. She says your fear of being cringe is limiting your, the ceiling of your potential.

Well said.

Yeah, yeah.

Everything you want is on the other side of cringe.

And a phone call that you don't want to make, which is, which is a form of cringe, like cringing. Thinking about making that phone call in the Jeremy Giffon parlance.

Yeah.

I see Julian Weitzer is commenting here saying we're killing cringe. Yeah, let's just stop. Everybody just let's put a year long pause on cringing. Both the act, the.

And using the word. The word did get played out very quickly. Right. But yeah, you got to put yourself out there, take risks. I mean, the beauty is that, I mean, I, I felt this very deeply when I started the YouTube channel during, during COVID because it's so awkward to be on camera the first time and.

Being a, you being an adult man, saying, I'm gonna be a YouTuber, there's.

A million things that are wrong with it. Right. So I just didn't tell anyone and I just put it out on YouTube and then the bad ones didn't go viral, so. Yeah, but no one saw them.

The Shweta's argument here is that you should have just been promoting them aggressively.

I guess. I guess. But there is something to like at least on YouTube, like letting the algorithm sort it out and figure it out and just getting the reps in and stuff. And yeah, maybe, I don't know, maybe I should have been.

You'd be at 10 million by now.

Yeah, maybe, maybe. Who knows? But yeah, I mean, the beauty is that you have to be really, really bad to get to go viral in a negative way. Most of the time, if you do something that's received as cringe or negative or dumb, it just doesn't get views, and so it doesn't matter. So put yourself out there. Let's go to Robin. Robin says when SF realizes their Waterloo pipeline is actually just a pipeline from, like, four high schools in Canada, they're gonna go nuts.

Yeah. To be honest, John, the smartest VCs I know are actually going even further. They're offering to fund the middle school leader schools that go to those high schools. So they're going to these. These, you know, middle schools and saying 100k uncapped note. Just take it now. And we just want to look. Once you get through Waterloo, once you're starting your company.

Yeah. You know, people have. People have copied so much of, like, Peter Thiel's stuff. No one's. No one's done the more aggressive Thiel fellowship of, like, drop out of middle school, drop out of lower school. Like, stop everything.

Yeah.

We'll give you $200 to skip third grade and try and build a company. I wouldn't be surprised, but, yeah, probably. Stay in school, kids.

I think kids are listening to this.

I think you can wait. I think you can wait until you graduate high school, at least to start.

Dad, I saw the episode.

Yeah.

Back in 2025, you said that there could be some potential in dropping out of middle school. I want to make the leap.

Yep. Did you see the MCP meme going on yesterday?

I didn't see the meme.

I mean, people are just posting about it. But Greg here says benchmark idea. You fund a model, an AI model with $200 in a stripe account, and you give it access to the Internet and a large list of MCPs. Measure increase in balance at 14, 30, 90, 180, and 360 days. No developer intervention. Most models wouldn't even be able to spend their first dollar. This is the universal or not universal basic income. It's the. What is it? Artificial economic intelligence. Just once the model can make money, then we're in business. Because that's very quantifiable. It's a new. It's a new benchmark. Yeah. And I like this.

Yeah. It's. It's. It's going to be very funny when there's just, like, online activity that does not make sense to humans.

Yep.

Or it's like some equivalent of these sort of Nigerian, like, prince scams or Some of these, like, you know, you get DMs from NFT projects saying, hi, boss, I'd like to, you know, promote, you know, whatever, this sort of spam. There's gonna be this sort of AI slop, money making sort of programs running that, that you're just gonna see as a human and you're just like, like, come on. But then it works like one out of every 10,000 times. And so that then it becomes a sort of viable economic model. So.

Oh man, I saw a great AI scam. I got a breakdown for you. It's a 30 minute AI generated deep faked lip sync video of like a priest. And then a number of different pitchmen and celebrities telling you about a special prayer. And if you say this prayer, wealth will come to you. But they just keep talking to you for 30 minutes, telling you all about this prayer and how valuable it is and how it will transform your life. And then at the very end, after 30 minutes of watching this AI slop that's very clearly like the mouth isn't aligned properly, but it's like close. There's like a add to cart button and the add to cart button is just like, you pay them and then you get like this prayer that you can say. And it's so funny because they walk through the pitch and they're like, like, oh yeah, like I saw this in a corridor crew video. Like, oh yeah, like, you know, like we, we have to, we have to pay for like our servers and stuff to host this prayer. And so you have to pay a little bit. How much? I can't just give it to you for free. I don't know, it's probably 20 bucks or something. But the corridor crews have been doing great videos. They're VFX artists, but they also work with all the frontier AI visual tools. And so they highlight a bunch of these AI scams. One of them that was really funny that I saw was they AI generate an image of a sweater. It's like a cable knit sweater. And it looks all like, like Irish and like regal. Like you're out in like the forest or something. And it's on this like, you know, blonde model. And they run an ad on that. And then when you go to buy it, what they ship you is not a sweater. It's a T shirt with a sweater printed on it. No, because they clearly have the machinery not to make the sweaters, but just to print anything on a T shirt. No way. And so you get the AI design that they sold you, but it's just printed on a T shirt. It's so funny. But at the same time the corridor crew guys were talking about, hey, they're actually going to do some like AI generated camo T shirts.

We are the only.

They're disclosing this. Hello. Do we have someone joining? Perfect. Perfect timing. Welcome to the show. Let's go. I'm Tom.

Oh, what is it? Nikki? Wiki.

Oh my God, Rory. I can kill him.

I think we've mispronounced your name so many times. Is it Wiskoff?

Wish off.

Wish off. I'm sorry. Well, now we'll know. So anyway, thank you for joining. Give us a little kickoff. Introduce yourself, tell us about your fund. Tell us about why you're here today.

Oh my gosh. Yeah. So one, thank you so much for having me. Huge OG fan. So Nicole Wishoff Solo gp. I run Wishoff Ventures which is a fund focused on pre seed and seed stage companies, North America and super unsexy businesses which happy to unpack. Started in 2021, have three funds and about 80 million in assets and just trying to fricking build this thing as I fly it.

So how'd you raise the first fund?

First one was 5 million. I was still operating so that's my background and I had met a ton of VCs, raised a few hundred million at on the startup side of the world and learned about VC fund funds. So Bain, Thrive foundation, all of those guys want access to great companies early and so got a call from a VC friend that was like you should raise a fund. Your angel investing let us give you like half a million bucks and the rest is history. So I raised 5 million pretty quickly. I think like 20ish LPs was doing it on the side, decided I loved it and then in 22 raised 20 last year raised 50 so it's like it's actually happening.

Such a narrative violation. One Solo GP that didn't have a Twitter account before you. The fund came before the Twitter account which is rare. Two started in 2021 and have delivered from all the data that, that I've seen phenomenal performance and so it's just. No, it's been amazing to see. How did you. So many people never find their voice online. It felt like you did quickly and it just was natural. And you know, we know people that spend five hours a day to try to produce X content that just completely flops. Yet it seems like you have this effortless ability to just think you treat it like, like a personal like notes to self almost. But it just resonates.

Yeah.

How long did it take you to kind of find that voice?

I. I would say it was from the start, though. It wasn't intentional. And I, to this day, don't have any drafts. Like, I could, I think, but maybe I have four in there from, like, drinking too much and like, you know, like, maybe I should wait until tomorrow. I have rules. I tell my LPs. I have three rules for Twitter. Uh, I can go through those, but. So I was in a group chat with, like, Alex Cohen, who, like, shit posts and like, you guys know Alex and. And Aaron Frank, who's now an investor at Lightspeed. Aaron, don't kill me. And we're in this group chat was never on Twitter, not even as, like a. I'm scrolling just to see what, like, lurking. So I actually didn't know how insane people are to each other on it. So I came in and I was like, cool. This is like a cool app in 21. Because Aaron was like, Nicole, you're a VC now. You have to, like, use Twitter. And so I hard launched with a $5 million fine. I have like, my first viral tweet probably like a week later. And it was something like. I don't know if you guys are even know who I was. This was like, through a couple years ago. And I said something like, can confirm that it is 10x easier to raise a $5 million fund than to get 500 Twitter followers on X. Like, for now, X. And Alex Cohen retweets it and is like, you guys, you're a Nicole of bone. Like, she's a loser. And anyway, like, totally takes off. So I always say, like, the first thousand was tough. And since then, honestly, like, I think. I think a few things. One, I keep them super short. I try to never say, like, start them with I. And I'm like, hey, you know, had a thought last night, blah, blah, blah, and then have an opinion on whatever I'm talking about. And then the shorter they are, the more they rip. And so I've stuck to that. I try to just say what I think it is. Absolutely backfired if I don't have one once a quarter that, like, doesn't, like, bury me alive and VC Braggs is like, taking it to the moon, then I'm not doing it right. And so I just have to, like, I just lean into it. But that's like kind of the motion that I've. That's been happening.

What do you advise your portfolio founders around using X? Because there's no Perfect way to use it. There's downsides to everything. I'm sure a lot of your top of funnel deal flow, I'm sure is through your network, but I'm sure a similar amount is through X. And so I'm sure you, you invest in companies and they're like, okay, Nicole, teach me how to sort of unlock the platform. How often are you advising them to just focus on your business and just ignore the platform versus when are you telling them, them, you know, hey, you can get some value here.

So honestly, because I'm doing pre seed seed and it's so early, there's so much other crap to figure out that like, if they're focusing on getting like, you know, 10 followers a day, which you guys know, you're building this thing too. Like in the beginning it's slow and then it's not. But like, it takes a commitment. It's daily. They could be doing so many other things to de risk the business for the first at least two years. So I typically don't want to have that conversation until honestly, Series A, Series B, um, they've got like more of a team and I've, by the way, I've advised plenty of companies and try to get it going and like, it just. There is no time for it. There's no consistency. So I think it's largely a distraction, though we'll caveat this with. Some people are just naturals. I think you have it or you don't. I don't think it's like this learned skill. Like, look at Nikita. Like, ask him if he ever got help with like tweets. You know, it's just that he's just a natural at saying what he thinks and having thick skin and it just works. So if my founders are asking me for help on building a Twitter strategy, it usually means they should to be doing it. And that's most people, generally not even my founders.

How sharp are your elbows? Your pre seed seed, I'm assuming you're trying to get 10% ownership. I'm sure there's some flexibility there you put out. Wouldn't say you don't have an aggressive Persona, but we can tell you're really an athlete when you're competing for rounds. Are you trying to take as much as you possibly can, or do you take a more collaborative approach these days?

I. I'm a firm believer that it takes a village to get a company off the ground. So I would argue something totally different. If you're a series A, take the whole round. You're Adding like strategic value, you have a platform and like one fund can do that. So if my founders are like, hey, one fund wants to take the whole A, I'm like, go for it. I think if your series, like if you're Pre Seed Seed, you want all the strategic angels. They're like one call away from an intro to Walmart or like a huge brand that you want or like those little things that people like do for you early on. Like actually I think do help the business. First customers, first hires. So I always try to take, let's say for fun too is I wanted to get 5% typical dilution of pre seed seeds, like 20%, maybe 15. And so I'm never usually having issues like getting that. By the way, I hate hot deals. They never were. I've done all the deals. All the multi stage funds at Pre Seed, see, they're like my worst. Like it's, I shouldn't say they're, it's, they're still in business and it's going well but like they're not standing out and shining any brighter than other companies. Like this is super hard. And also I paid 2x what I should have. Um, and so I hate noise. If there's a ton of funds running in one direction, I just run the other. So like sharp elbows. No, but I try to be super realistic about rounds and structures.

Yeah.

And, and really collaborative is the short answer.

Where have you made investments that you're, you're still excited about, that you're done investing sort of broadly in the category, so.

Well, I feel like I'm dipping my toes back in even though I left for two years. I think, look, lending is really hard in a high interest rate environment. Right. Like your facilities are so expensive that like your burn is like through the roof. So for a lot of companies that were trying to build insure, tax or lending businesses, they got, and they only had maybe 2 million in the bank. They just never raised another round. Or I was looking at those businesses thinking like, if I even see this, you're not going to be in the clear for at least two to three years or another fund is comfortable underwriting this type of business. And so, I mean, I got my mba. I feel like right when I started my venture journey on like great markets and horrible markets because fun one is 20, 21. And I was like, oh my God, I'm so good at this. And then like 23, I was like, I am so bad at this. And then 24, I was like, you know what, I'm going To stick around and like, you know, figure this thing out. So I think lending's dicey, but now I'm getting excited about it again.

So. Yeah, what's the vision for the fund going forward? I saw you just hired two people, is that right? Is that how big the firm is?

Yes. So there are three of us full time and then like outsourced agency for some of this social stuff and all of that, which is really expensive actually. And so yeah, I want to keep the team super small. I want to stay scrappy. I think you start to get lazy when you start building layers the team. Like I want to be fresh, I want to be on calls. Like I want to be in the ground like just doing the work with companies longer term. Look, I want to be the fund in North America and the categories we invest in that like pre seed and seed stage founders like want to work with first above anybody else and that takes time. Like that's a lot of that's brand. Like how do we build this repeatable motion of like everyone knows who I am and everyone wants to work with me and I reference well because I like do the work.

So what about super long term private equity arm?

Oh my gosh.

Wealth manager going public.

Catalyst, you know, why not you?

I think I had a tweet once that was like, listen, may I be so successful in venture that I have like a PE arm, I have a growth arm. I'm doing like roll ups. I have a fund of funds and.

I think the last time high frequency.

Yeah, I was like, I have every single thing that absolutely no one knows how they're performing because we like no one can manage it all. Like which I would say are a lot of these, these platforms. Like no one could tell you how their funded funds are doing. Like maybe, you know, honestly, like I, I, I'm a big fan of small and nimble. Like I think if you realistically if you want to put up great returns and I think USV has been amazing at this. Like if you ask them and they're doing series A and their funds are sub 300 like they that keeps them up at night and like 50 million that doesn't quite keep me up at night. I'm excited. But I think like going over 150 and you can guys can pull this up when I hopefully if I don't ever do it but if you I do and be like Nicole, but we'll.

Have you on for the news and then we'll pull up this, this, this.

Clip and we'll say Like Nicole did everything wrong. No, but look, I think there's value, a lot of value. And if we want to say that we can legitimately, ideally more than 3x. I always try to aim for let's say 5x plus which by the way not even $10 million funds 3x ever. It's just really hard. Then we need to stay nimble and it's all portfolio construction. So just follow the math. That and then. Yeah.

Well, we have five minutes. I want to hear about the company. What's going on?

Oh my gosh, you guys. So I was not planning to do this but I was like John, I might just like hard launch a company I just co founded.

Do it.

So this is the exclusive. This is like no joke. So raise money for it. No one knows about it except the person that funded it and like my LPs. So I have been investing in just like to TV this up in software companies serving data centers. I think if you follow the power you and the infrastructure you'll know where AI is going. So and then my partner was simultaneously consulting data center, a guy building data centers in Waterloo. So we're both like wait, there's something here. So we co founded a business called Kratos, which I think is a good name but you know, Kratos AI and we are building next gen AI data centers. Not great venture bets. So there's founder shares in the funds but no check from the fund. In it though we've raised money from strategic family offices. More of like a private credit think like 75% debt, 25% equity. And we're making the case that there's tons of capital going towards hyperscalers. If you're a hyperscaler you're saying look, we're going to own the market and there's only going to be a few of us and everyone's going to use our data centers. And we totally disagree. I think if you're for training it makes a lot of sense for inference. You need, you don't a need high latency. So we could be like 100 miles or less from like the tier 2, tier 3 cities and still have solid latency for inference. So if you start asking around and hopefully people are listening in like I had a founder tell me in like the YC like alumni channel. All these companies like are like hey, like who has data center like colocation capacity for us? Like we want to like like save costs from hyperscalers. Like where can we go from here? I don't think there's a huge Market for these like 10 to 25 million megawatt data center. So working on our first location. 20 megawatts. You guys, this is like the craziest thing I've ever done. I don't have an active role because like the funds of the baby, but I can certainly help with distribution and fundraising. And the last thing I'll say is these are really expensive projects. So These are a 20 megawatt facility, net like brand new constructions, around 100 million and so. And again, we don't want to give up too much on the equity side, but there's something here and we're going for it.

So I like it too, because even if it's not a traditional venture bet, if there's common shares in the fund or however you structured it, you could return your fund, I imagine, off of just this one company, which is amazing. You've done the last question I have. You've done. You do a bunch of stuff in supply chain. You're a venture capitalist, so obviously you're also a geopolitical expert. Comes with the territory. How are you? Do you think these sort of trade wars are good for a number of your portfolio companies specifically focused on supply chain management? Just because there's going to be suddenly it's sort of the thing to talk about. It's sort of this pressing issue. And more broadly, what advice are you giving to those companies in your portfolio?

Yeah, I'd say that there's really like one or two that it could directly impact. Significant. Secondly, one, being a company that's like literally in logistics between Mexico and the United States. So like, part of me is like, holy crap, like, what's the impact there? Look, ultimately we have to show dominance. So, like, I'm very pro. Every, every type of flex that the administration is putting on both Canada and Mexico, which are most relevant to what I do. And so let's can go. Honestly, like, I think ultimately I'm hoping that we're bluffing to get what we want. So my bet is like, oh my God, keep delaying. I think I just saw the headlines of Canada like, like Trump's delaying it, like 30 days or I don't know what it is. So anyway, I love the flex. I hope it's only a flex, but it would impact what's going on at least for, for a couple of our companies. So I'm like keeping my fingers and toes crossed. But again, we have to exert dominance. So I'm happy with the administration and.

I love the energy. Augustus Dorica was on the show earlier and he called Taiwan an American colony.

Yeah.

So you guys are both in the same. Nicole, it's so great to have you. Congrats on the congratulations. We would love to have you on. Whenever you have portfolio news, whenever you have fun news, you're always welcome on the show. You are a brother to us, technology.

You guys, thank you so much for having me. Yeah, thanks so much.

Bye. Now we have Billy, are you there?

Billy, how's it going?

It's going great. I'm going to read your post and then you'll kick it off. Enter the seaglider era. The world's first. First sea glider has hit the water. Room for 12 passengers and 100% battery powered. The test vehicle is human, crewed from day one. 65 foot, wingspan £15,000. Trials are underway. You're in the back of a car. Break it down. What'd you launch? How's it going?

And to be clear, this has always been John's vision for the show is that you could just. Basically anywhere you are in the world, you just pull up your phone and you're on the show. So welcome to the show.

Thank you so much for coming. Is.

No, thank you, guys. You know, the. The startup grind for sure. So we're, we're hustling right now, but awesome week for Regent. So we're. We're four years old as a company building sea gliders, which are all electric flying boats for regional transportation, dual use. Uh, so we're doing regional routes. Imagine, like Manhattan to the Hamptons and under an hour for 60 bucks going Miami out to the Bahamas or Key west all around. Around the world. So this is the first prototype vehicle. This summer, when we fly it, it'll be the largest electric flying machine in history. £15,000 for now. First big milestone was just getting it on the water and starting some testing.

That's amazing. Can you talk about the advantages of being regulated? I believe it's regulated as a boat, but you still get the speed of something much faster than a boat. And that seems to be maybe the key insight here that allows you just move faster, bring this to market. Market and deliver kind of a flying car almost, or a new plane, new mode of transportation in a way that's just so much easier and faster and more like a startup pace. Break that down.

Yeah, that's exactly right. My background was in the aviation space and so I was engineering in sort of the beginning of the Evtol hype cycle, which I think we're still very much in. We're starting to see some Consolidation there. But, you know, I drank the Kool Aid, we're building those vehicles. We've inflamed, flew a few. But the sort of, the thing I kept hitting my head against the wall was the limited range of an electric aircraft. Flying on batteries can't really go that far. And also this billion dollars, decade long certification pathway. And so we realized that if we sort of brought this electric aviation technology and put it in the maritime domain, we actually saw both problems. The first is that as long as we stay within a wingspan of the surface of the water and stay over the water, there's actually a special class of vehicle called a wing and ground effect vehicle. We made up the word seaglider because wing and ground, or wig, is very difficult to google. You don't get vehicles when you Google wigs. And so but there's this regulatory regime where they stay under the Coast Guard jurisdiction because operationally you're in the waterways anyway. So you're not going into airspace or deconflicting with air traffic. And then on the other side, flying low altitude on this cushion of air like birds are flying over the water. Water, you're actually really aerodynamically efficient. So we can go much longer range than any other electric flying machine. So we solve both problems.

That's cool. Can you break down some of the advantages of going electric? I remember when we talked, it's not just about saving the planet and avoiding emissions. It's also about efficiency and actually being maintenance and less parts. Can you break all that down for me?

That's exactly what I told Bellian in our first pitch meeting. It was, it was exactly that. Right? It's, you know, we need to build this business around sustainability of the business model. Not necessarily sustainability from an emissions perspective of the product. So the driving cost in short haul aviation, if you think of how an airplane ages, it's actually the maintenance costs, the age by the cycles you take off and land and you're impacting your landing gear, you're expanding and contracting your fuselage. When you pressurize it, you're heating up and cooling your engine. So the driving cost on the short haul is actually maintenance. And the shorter the route, the more cycles you do, the more you age it. So it's sort of this runaway effect. If you switch to an all electric system now, you have very few moving parts, they age by the hour, there's not a lot of heat generated. And so for short haul, electrification makes a ton of sense. And that's actually where the range sort of buys you with electrification. I Don't need to cross the ocean. I'm trying to connect people to the metropolitan center. And there's this huge hole in the market because we're talking about routes on the order of 100 to 200 miles today that can get up to 3 to 400 miles with better batteries. So these are routes where it's too far to drive anyways. You get caught in traffic. We don't really have high speed rail in America or even around the world. But it's too short to fly because you're sitting in the airport longer than you're in the airplane itself.

Yeah, I've never seen a plane with 10 propellers on it. Why 10, not two big ones?

Yeah, so. So we had our quarter scale prototype that had the eight propellers on the wing. Our full scale now has 12 propellers across the wing. So what we're doing, this configuration is called a blown wing. It's not that clever a name. We blow the wing with the propeller wash coming off the props. And so we're basically tricking the wing into generating high lift at low speeds because the wing sees fast moving air even when the vehicle's moving so slowly. And sort of the whole unlock of the sea gliders, if you're like, you know, this isn't that new. We have seaplanes. Why are we doing this? You know, the whole point is that seaplanes and flying boats in the past have these planing holes. And so if you've gone over like 10 miles an hour on a boat in any sea state, you'll know how bumpy that ride gets. So sort of in the best case scenario, it's bumpy and uncomfortable. Worst case scenario, you can't take off at all. That's why seaplanes have never really scaled and they're sort of restricted to lakes and rivers. So we needed to solve the wave tolerance problem. We do that with hydrofoils. So if you're familiar with, you know, America's cup, sail gp, the E Foil.

We were looking at going sail GP here in Adela.

Have you gone?

I haven't yet.

We're thinking about going. It seems awesome.

You need to go. It's so. It's like you. And you will intimately understand how the wave tolerance of the hydrofoil works because it just lifts you off and it's like a magic carpet it. And it's kind of surreal. So it also makes you appreciate what our flight control system is doing because balancing yourself takes a little while and you fall a lot. But the point is we get wave tolerance up to five feet on this vehicle. So the model is if your commercial airplanes are flying, the sea gliders are going too. We can take off in five foot seas. Hydrofoils have a limited top speed because of the drag of the water. And so we needed to lower the takeoff speed to overlap with that hydrogen hydrofoil machine. With this design, we slow down the takeoff speed enough to take off from the hydrofoil. So that was actually the other reason why we electrified again. The, the sustainability is a nice benefit, but it's secondary. We electrified because it's economical and we electrified because it's a pretty good way of distributing propulsion on, on a wing rather than a bunch of different engines or gearboxes.

Yeah, yeah, that makes sense.

Long term, are you planning to own the entire traveler experience from booking to operating the routes to obviously making the aircraft? I can imagine this as kind of a JSX that actually owns and, you know, develops certainly.

Can you hear us?

Yeah, we definitely thought about it.

Yeah.

Do you got me?

Yeah, we're good on the road.

You still got me?

Yeah, we're good.

Cool. We definitely thought about it in the early stage. The evtol companies are sort of doing that end to end thing for us. We said like, this is a brand new mode of transportation. People are going to need to build trust on it. And what better way for both passengers to build up trust and candidly, investors to build up trust in this wacky electricity, electric flying boat company than to have sort of established brands with already existing operations be our customers. So our customers are airlines, our customers are ferry companies, our customer is the Marine Corps and the high speed logistics mission. But those are the entities that are buying Seagliders and operating it. We're the Boeing or Airbus here. When we founded, I said we're the Boeing of Seagliders. That's become a little taboo. So now I say we're the Airbus of Seagliders, which makes me hurt as an American, but here we are.

Oh, well, that's amazing.

Can you give us a little background on where the company is, how big you guys are, what you've raised, where you're going next, who you're hiring, that type of stuff?

Yeah. We are based in the Silicon Valley of the East.

Yes.

Of Rhode Island.

Yes.

So, you know, it's actually a growing technology anduril's moving into town. There's a few drone boat companies and underwater companies. So we're really seeing a growth in Rhode Island. You know, you see Ocean State, awesome test environment for us. Some of the best boat builders in the world. Newport, Rhode island, home of the Americas Cup. So it was a really great place for us to set up. We're about 100 people now. We actually just broke ground on a 255,000 square foot manufacturing facility also in Rhode Island. So we're going to be building sea gliders here. We're going to be scaling to another. Another few hundred employees as we spool up our manufacturing. Expect to open that facility in early 26 and deliver sea gliders and enter service probably starting in Hawaii or Miami are some of the top two that our early customer wants to go to. And that entry to service like late 26, early 27.

That's fantastic.

Amazing.

Jordy, you have anything else?

We gotta host the show in one of these bad boys as soon as we can. It's been a dream of ours to do it from the air.

I want to take it out to California. Definitely.

Some summer in Rhode island gotta come out.

Yeah, yeah, we gotta go out there. Well, I mean, thank you so much for calling in, giving us the update firsthand. We'll share the video and repost the clip. It's fascinating stuff and we really appreciate everything you're doing. So thanks for calling in and we'll talk to you soon. Give us a call back when there's more news. You got it.

I'll see you in roadie. We'll go out on Seaglider.

Fantastic.

See you in roadie.

We'll see you. That's great.

That's wild.

Yeah. I don't know, I don't know if you can pull up that video, Ben, but they have some video of the, of the plane and it's. Yeah, I mean, it's, it's remarkable. Like, it just feels like, I mean, we talked about this with Gary, like the, the pace of play and it's maybe just like the capital markets are more mature or something, but like it just seems more doable to get a, you know, like tens 20 million, 50 million together and then go and build, build a big, you know, prototype and actually fly it around. And people are figuring out how to do the right lobbying, how to do the right. Yeah, all the regulatory stuff and finding the regulatory arbitrage. That's my favorite thing about Regent. Like, I think that the tech is cool, obviously, but it's so fascinating that they were able to build something that operates in the maritime domain and just accelerate everything that they do. So I love that. As soon as I heard that, I was like, oh, this is like, this is something that I really want to.

Follow and it is such a futuristic feeling craft that is perfectly practical.

Yeah, yeah, you can take a look at it here. I mean, it's pretty. It's pretty sick.

The biggest people on Apple podcasts are having a bad time.

Yeah, they're having a bad time. Well, we will describe it. It's a cool plane. And do you see, they christened it with champagne. And they didn't have to use one of those terrible machines they used in Europe. America, undefeated. I love it. But, Yeah, I mean, 12, I guess, three engines on each wing and it just coasts along the surface. And we had a friend of the show asking us, when are the billionaires going to start building hydrofoil yachts? I think this is the beginning of that trend. We've talked about the land yacht that can dig with a massive drill earth and. Yeah, this. This is the next evolution. Anyway.

Amazing.

Let's go back to the timeline.

We love to see it.

And then close out the show.

That's our first time having a guest call in while in the back of a. An Uber.

Yeah.

And it worked.

It worked.

We had a brief moment, but he's.

Yeah, no, I mean, that, that, that is my goal for the show. Someone post something, they're announcing it, you know, you'd go on, you know, you want to amplify it. Just come and talk about it on the show. Show. And so I'm sure we'll do a lot more of those. I love this post by Alexander Wang over at scale AI. He says, Reminder of American exceptionalism. US companies make up 74% of global market cap. Returns of the S and P since 2008 are 297% versus the rest of the world at negative 4%. It's pretty ridiculous. And it's funny because, like, hit the gong, John. Yeah, hit the gong for America. I mean, it's funny because, like, the. The narrative in, in so much of the media is like, things are more chaotic than ever. We're so divided. Everything's terrible. And it's like, you know, the. When. When the right wing's in power, the left wing says it's all terrible. And when the left wing's in power, the right wing's in terrible. But when you zoom out, even just, you know, 15 years, you can see that America's doing pretty well. Pretty well. And I. I remain extremely bullish on America, but there's not much more to say about that.

All of our guests today have been extremely long. America exactly as they should as Americans.

There was some bad news about the American economy. There was a big miss on ADP payrolls. You saw this from Joe Weisenthal, right?

Yeah.

They expected 140,000 new jobs added. It came in at 77,000. This is just one economic indicator. But if you've been following the markets and kind of of the back and forth. The kangaroo market. Right. That's what it's called. Right. Bouncing around. This is one of the data points that people have been pointing to. We don't go too deep into the economic data, but everyone's worried about job prospects and job growth. But let's go to Jeff Lewis. He says, overheard at Blue Bottle Technology brother A. I love that he's using that term. Hadn't heard anything from Mock since that hit piece. Thought they were dead. Technology brother B says, naw, dog.

It's called show don't tell Mach. A reference to he had a new Mach. Had a new video drop. I think it was Tuesday.

Yep.

Very, very cool. They seem to have made a bunch of progress. And you never let a hit piece get you down.

Just keep building.

They're not giving in to the negativity. So love to see it. Jeff was an early investor in Mock, and he has. Is building a reputation for sticking with founders when the media has turned on them. And I think that that is one of the most important reputations that you can build because it's easy for an investor to be your best friend when everything's going great, but to double, you know, double down on supporting somebody when they're in this sort of darkest period of their company is what is what really?

Totally, totally, very cool.

And I and I talking with Jeff's team right now about having him come on the show very soon. So excited for that.

Yeah. I hope he's wearing a tank top, looking absolutely shredded and absolutely diced.

Jeff's always known that it's underpriced to be diced.

He is.

And open. We want. We would host a temp check weekly.

For Jeff segment on the show.

A weekly segment.

We need temp check segment a week.

Jeff, you don't have to do any production.

Well, I mean, you do have to continue working out.

Yeah, that's.

That's the key thing. You gotta.

But you could do the temp check while working out.

You gotta spam the delts and get the shoulders popping and get the bicep because, yeah, we don't want a scrawny Jeff Lewis on the show. Oh, that's unacceptable. But you know, as long as the takes are hot and he's sporting founders, positive. Great. Yeah. I hung out with Ethan, I want to say like a year or two ago. And I mean, obviously the company's been like up and down. There's been this hit piece that everyone's mentioning, but he just seems like someone who's like really, really driven and is going to do something at some point. Very cool. And it's just like a good person to have on the America team.

Yeah. And I think they're iterating on product too.

Yeah, totally.

And they also, to be clear, they announced a U.S. army contract and that they're building a weapons factory.

It's great. Yeah, we need more people building more cool stuff. So, you know, I'm excited to see Ethan get through the, the, the rise and fall and rise again. And I hope that he's successful. Let's go to David. VCs are living out again. Vibe shift.

I didn't put that in.

You didn't put this in?

I. I don't. We don't talk about politics.

I don't know who they're talking about.

But it is hilarious clear that if you wanted to be contrarian, you had to VCs for Kamala. Yeah, that. That was contrarian move was to sign the list.

Even though although Gavin Newsom, people are saying like he's completely vibe shifted his way and went on some Charlie Kirk show. Do you see?

No, that was him having Charlie Kirk on his show.

Wait, Gavin Newsom has a podcast?

He has a podcast?

No way. Really? Okay, interesting. Well, I mean, clearly there's going to be a. There's going to be a vibe here shift and. But. But everyone's lost on this. Everyone's like, I don't see it elaborate. Like nature is healing, people are having fun with it. Who knows? Anyway, Flock Safety is raising. Katie Roof has a scoop. Andreessen's leading around Jeff Lewis company. Yeah, it is. We should have him on to talk about it when the, when the funding finally breaks. 7.5 billion for flock Safety. They make cameras that sell to police department and a bunch of other equipment. Kind of the palantir of local governments. That's been like a big question is like, is that possible? It's such a different sales motion because you're not just going lobbying in D.C. you have to go district by district. But when you get in and when you're installed, it's very, very sticky, very low churn. And so they're doing it. Great finances, great, great cohorts, great company, interesting team. And I want to get to know them more because it seems like a really cool company. And it seems like a very important task, obviously. Anyway, let's move on to Autism Capital. They say if Steve Jobs were still alive, he would issue a letter to all stockholders saying he's about to dump all of Apple's extra cash into perfecting augmented reality. Because we have an imperative as the steward of innovation to drive humanity forward and build the tools of tomorrow. Interesting. Rare, like, hard post. I feel like this account mostly posts like news and clips and stuff. But yeah, breaking. Also his post on X would be fire. He'd be arguing and calling people the R word all day long. I don't know if that'd be that good.

But here's the main thing is that Steve Jobs wouldn't need all of Apple's extra cash, which is an incredible amount. You talked about this earlier.

I think they have 60 right now. 60 billion. But they have returned over a trillion over the past, like 15 years.

Yeah. Apple spent an estimated 150 million over 30 months to develop the first iPhone.

Million. Oh, million.

150 million. So Steve would have seen what's possible. You know, obviously there's been inflation and, you know, whatever. You could come up with a bunch of excuses, but you have to imagine that he would be running it like a startup internally and saying, you know, and sort of going founder mode. Yeah, yeah.

It seems like the algorithm would probably be just, you know, make. Make like crazy aggressive decisions and compromises until you find something that actually has product market fit with yourself. Like, do you believe that Tim Cook Daily drives an Apple Vision Pro, or do you think he's churned from it Churn?

For sure.

I think everyone kind of churned.

Yeah.

Except for that one guy. I forget there was one writer who mentioned that he was still using it. I have a friend who still uses it every once in a while and I want to be using it. It's so close to being good, but it's not quite there. What else should we close the show out with? Oh, this is a great one from Matt Lasky. Wife just taught me the professional way to say told you so. Is. Is this was identified early on as a likely outcome. Going to be using this a lot. I love this one. I just thought it was funny.

Yeah, I put this one in.

You put this one in.

We got to start. We wouldn't honestly use that because our corporate culture is. Well, no. Our culture internally is we try to make.

You don't take a victory lap on I told you so.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But.

But if you're working and you're trying to take the job of your CEO. This is a great line. This was identified early as a likely outcome. And really take the victory lap on a poor outcome.

Yes. Where else should we end up? There's some other news. Apple unveiled Mac Studio with M4 Max M3 Ultra. Every time I see one of these, I'm like, eh. It's like nothing but. But then I'm like, I want one. I always just want the latest thing. Even though Paki was making fun of them for the new iPad that looked exactly the same. I was like, that would make me happy. For five minutes. For five minutes exactly. Unboxing an Apple still feels good. And then you're like, oh, okay. It's just like, I'm not using it. I don't notice once I open up the Chrome tab. And the other news is Alexis Ohanian is Now bidding for TikTok with a blockchain integration platform planned.

Yep. So we.

He's coming on the show.

He's coming on the show tomorrow to talk about it. He also is relaunching. Dig. I love that rose.

Which is.

Which is awesome. I actually got a. Reminds me. I got to email back his team. Yep, yep. We're going to be on. He's going to be coming on at 12:30 tomorrow.

Fantastic.

To talk about everything he's cooking on. He was going to come on today, but he was traveling. I said, he's got this amazing home studio. I told him, wait. Wait till you're back home. Okay, come on then. So I'm excited to have him back on. I say we saved some of these posts. Let's end on a joke from Bass, who's been an early listener of the show. We invested by following him when he had 200 something followers.

Yeah. It was like buying Bitcoin in the 90s.

Yeah, exactly. Or Solana in the. In the early 2000s.

Yeah.

Base Baron says I love Ramp so much that I broke up with my ex girlfriend because she used someone else for expense management. Call that my Brex.

I've read this and it's still funny when you read it.

It's still funny.

Silly.

Good one. Anyways, great show today. I thought our guests were fantastic.

I thought it was a lot of fun. Good mix. I think we're dialing in the format. Little news, little timeline.

We got to put in the invites for the guests that you might join and you might be interrupting another guest. But think of it more as you walk into a house. House party.

Yeah. I don't know if we want to Keep the house party vibe going. Or maybe we want to use the waiting room, which is like a feature on Zoom, but we'll keep dialing it in. Stay tuned for more. We're never satisfied. We're going to keep changing it up. Keep you guessing. This was just two weeks ago. We'd never had a guest and we'd done something like 60 episodes, and now we've had more guests than most people have in a year of podcasting. I think we had like, what, 15 already this week or something like that.

Oh, wow. Anyway, by the way, we got some breaking news. We got breaking news from the chat Rory shared that Intuitive Machines Athena lunar lander landed on the moon this afternoon, but the company has no idea where it is.

What?

Oh, and this is live. I'm on the New York Times. Famed technology publication, New York Times. It says Intuitive Machines, a Houston company aiming to repeat a 2020, 24 landing, said its spacecraft, Athena, has power and is communicating but may not be upright. It's unclear how that might impact the mission. Imagine going all the way to the moon and then kind of botching the landing and then you're on your, you know, your rovers turned to the side. That is. That is rough. So this story is unfolding.

Well, good luck to them. If you need somebody to go up there in a space and tip it over, I'm happy to do that. I'm fully expecting.

John. Six, eight.

By the way, I'm fully expecting to go to the moon within my lifetime.

Yep.

That's something I'm very confident of.

Yep.

It's going to happen.

Yep.

Anyway, that's our show. Thanks for watching.

Thank you.

Stay tuned for the next one. We'll see you tomorrow.