Google I/O Reactions, Large IPOs Incoming, Figma's AI Assistant | Dylan Field, Brian Chesky, Feross Aboukhadijeh, Tae Kim, Immad Akhund, Marcus Milione

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Little preview there for you. It's Wednesday, May 20th, 2026. We are live from the TVPN Altarum, Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the capital of capital. We're both in suits today. I like it. It looks good. Some people— people have been saying they can't tell us apart. Is that what you're saying?

That—

okay.

Anyway, but people have been saying I need something like a swear jar.

Okay.

When I don't wear a suit.

Oh, okay.

I'd like that. So, so yeah, something, something to consider. Yeah, it should probably be a pretty big jar.

$20 to the OpenAI nonprofit. That's what you got to do. No, we were in UnHerd. We, I mean, we can pull up the full, the full post later in the show, but it was funny. I mean, it's a good, good analysis of like, you know, what we've taken from ESPN, what works about live streaming. This is from Alice Key. My latest for UnHerd is on why tech shows like TVPN are rerunning the sports media playbook invented by ESPN and why it's working. And they said, where is it? They're hard to tell apart in their matching suits and floppy haircuts. I don't know if that's good or bad, but we don't always have matching suits. Usually Jordi's the casual one, but yesterday we were both casual. Today we're both in suits.

We do. We do still get the brother. Thing a lot.

But I think it's a term of endearment. I think it's positive. Anyway, we have to react to Google I/O, of course. There's a whole bunch of announcements, some really exciting stuff, some stuff that people are having mixed reactions to. We'll take you through it all. But first, we need to watch this video about— Humanoid robot. Ramp? Why is ramp?

No, I'm kidding.

Sung Drip Woo says, "I'm crying." watch this video.

Let's get some stuff.

You got to go to the beginning. You're spoiling it. You got to go to the beginning. Doing pretty well. Moving pretty quickly. Little bit of a— oh, catches itself. Catches itself. Not bad. Not bad. Okay. Seems like a full recovery. Seems like you're ready to go. Another one. I'm liking it.

Yeah!

And then— Not good. And then I wonder what it's thinking because you would think that there would be some programming. Oh, they got to cut the music.

They gotta cut the music. Don't let the music keep playing while your boy's down.

He just gets carried off like this. It's so crazy to just carry it off like this. Like this seems solvable. This seems solvable.

Kinda doing the moonwalk.

Do teleoperation takeover in that case, or even just have like a, if on the ground, reset yourself by like doing a pushup. Like you could sort of hardcode that, I would think. Like that was a weird, I understand that he can't dance and walk upstairs. Like that is tricky. I understand why it, fell down, but I don't understand why it couldn't get back up after it fell down. Anyway, Singularity Delayed.

Yeah, it's possible that the robot died from embarrassment.

Yeah, or maybe it was damaged. It's possible that like as it hit the ground, it was just actually taken out. But I'm fascinated by this. I wonder how many— like this video was taken clearly in like the third row of an auditorium. Are people going to see robot dance shows? Was this an introduction to a tech conference? Like, I need so much more context here to really understand what's going on. Aaron Chen posted the full— the first video, Aaron Chen AI. They had the chance to stop this when the robot almost fell, but then it really fell. But the show must go on. So who will dance on the floor in the round? Beware. Well, certainly solvable with enough time, but not quite there yet. If you're thinking of shelling out big dollars for a robot dance show. Maybe make sure there's a refund policy in case the robot absolutely collapses. That would not be good. Anyway, Google I/O, bunch of different announcements. Brandon Garel on our team posted on the TVPN newsletter some reactions, sort of bucketed it into 4 key areas. Intelligent eyewear, this is an interesting one. I want to go into this. Gemini Omni, we talked about the videos. We played a little bit of that yesterday. Upgrades to Gemini LLM. LLMs. Those have been mixed reactions from developers. We'll go through that. And then anti-gravity, which is an interesting place with an interesting history. So let's start with intelligent eyewear. If you had to pick Warby Parker, Gentle Monster, have you heard of Gentle Monster before? I've heard of Warby Parker. I know the story. I'm a fan of it, of the business story.

I'm super familiar.

I haven't worn glasses in a very long time, so I'm not really in the market. But the Warby Parkers, I've always, I've always enjoyed the way they thought about the brand. And I've also been impressed by the way they built that business. They were early to the D2C boom. And then didn't some of the founders move over to Harry's? Is that the same team, or is that a different—

Maybe.

—I'm thinking of?

They were certainly— when I think of D2C, I think of Warby. Yeah. I think of Allbirds. Yeah.

I think of Everlane. Yes. But when you think of the last 2 out of those 3, the market caps are sub-$100 million. Allbirds was trading at, what, $20 million or something, and then spiked because of the AI thing. But Allbirds, Everlane, not really sustainable businesses. Warby Parker, on the other hand, current market—

Allbirds has pretty much been down only since the pump, the AI pump. NeoCloud, no surprises there.

Well, have they given us an update on how they are rolling out Kubernetes, how it's going, building their NeoCloud? Did they get allocation? Are they racking Cerebras? Are they racking GB200s, what are they racking and how fast are they getting power?

It would be funny if Jensen ends up having to talk about Allbirds on the earnings call today. Didn't they? Yeah.

Didn't they also like fully rebrand the name? It was going to be like Bird AI or All AI?

Like, yes, they were moving. Allbirds still exists. Okay. But they basically kept the public entity. Yeah. And that's what they're building. The Neo Cloud there.

So fun. Well, lots of fun. Warby Parker, resilient. I mean, in 2021 it was a $6 billion company. Now it's a $3 billion company. Not the best scenario, but surprisingly resilient, I think, in a time when a lot of people wrote off a lot of the standalone direct-to-consumer. It was like either get rolled into a bigger company or go or like face the fate of the public markets. But Warby Parker has a deal with Google and Samsung. Google says, we're partnering with Samsung, Gentle Monster, and Warby Parker on new intelligent eyewear. Here's a sneak peek at two designs from this fall's upcoming collections. And people are— this is— I like future nomics from Sam. Kind of crazy that you can wear your favorite Mag 7 on your face now. You can. The Gentle Monster one does a really good job of hiding the camera. I imagine that it will have a light to tell you if it's recording. But if someone wore these from a distance— also, Meta Ray-Bans have done sort of the hard work of becoming the first face computer. So when you see Ray-Bans and they're a little thick, you start immediately thinking, oh, should I be looking for a camera lens? Am I being recorded? But the Gentle Monster design, that silhouette doesn't scream technology. It doesn't scream wearable face camera. And so these are going to be a little bit more stealthy. Warby Parkers look nice, but the camera bump on this— you see it on the Warby Parkers one.

You know, it makes a lot of sense that the Googles and the Metas have to go and partner on different silhouettes. Yeah. My expectation, my uninformed expectation, is that Apple will just make Apple glasses, right? They will probably I, it's hard to see them taking the route, at least early on, of partnering and allowing another company to influence the design language. But it makes a lot of sense that, that Meta would partner with Luxottica. Okay.

First, look, look at the camera bump on this. If you zoom in as far as you can, I don't know if we can zoom in any further, but the, the camera is actually not flush with the frames. It's actually protruding a little bit. Yeah, you can see it right there. Interesting design choice. I wonder how that will catch the light, how that will reflect in the real world. Is that true about Apple? I thought that they had a partnership. I thought someone— I saw this on the timeline that Apple would be partnering with someone on Frames. Maybe that was just a rumor. I don't know where it went. Okay. So, yes. I— oh, Apple has Carl Zeiss? Which I guess is like a glass manufacturer? I don't know. Do they make glasses? Glasses?

Carl Zeiss AG, German manufacturer of optical systems. Oh, they make eyewear.

They have an eyewear collection.

Founded in Germany in 1846. OK, so— By optician Carl Zeiss.

The Zeiss eyewear collection. I don't know. But this was all from a joke from Abdu, who says, OK, so Apple has Carl Zeiss, Meta has Ray-Bans and Oakley, Google has Gentle Monster and Warby Parker. Boring. Which company is going to be bold enough to slap wearable technology into some 3M safety glasses. Would you rock these, Jordi Hays? I like those. 3M safety glasses. You know what I'm talking about, right? You're working with a buzz saw. I do know.

Dust in your eyes. But these look cool. These are sporty. I'm much more likely to just commit to the bit.

Just go full clanker.

Rather than be wearing a face computer.

Full cyberpunk.

Full clank. Yeah, full cy— you'd clank out. Full cyberpunk. I think that might be the move. I don't know. For some company, a challenger company could potentially do that. Maybe Friend or something. Anyway, what else? So Warby Parker traded down on the news, which Sheel Monat was surprised by. Why is Warby Parker down 14%? They announced a partnership at Google I/O that's been in the works for a while. Is it because they aren't available yet? And our friend Rat King, Mike Isaac, says, OK, Google AI glasses with Warby Parker are officially coming for Meta Ray-Bans. Google also said it would bring Gemini 2 glasses this fall with Samsung Electronics and the eyewear companies Warby Parker and Gentle Monster. The glasses, which work— Similarly to Meta, Ray-Ban smart glasses come with a camera, microphone.

Yeah, at what point does Google just buy Warby Parker, right? It's a $3 billion company. It's actually done quite well over the last 6 months. It's up 43% in the last 6 months, although it's been almost flat this year. I would say I expect that smart glasses are gonna have product market fit among people that need to wear glasses first, right? If you already have to wear glasses all day long, for your vision, why not throw some smart features in there? It's going to be harder to get someone that doesn't need glasses to add a new device to their rotation, right? And so Warby Parker's done quite well and has been surprisingly resilient, but they have incredible distribution, and I wouldn't be surprised if they get sniped at some point.

I mean, deeper integration into a traditional, I don't know, like workflow. A lot of the Google I/O, we'll get into this, but was talking about Spark, the personal AI assistant. And when I think about—

It's in Spark. It's an AI.

I know, I know. Oh, just look in Omni. Yeah, there's a lot of names. It's Google. There's a lot of products. You're referring to, of course, Nathan Clark's post. It's in Gemini. Just created an AI studio. "Oh, it's for your personal Google account. For workspace, you need Gemini Business." "No, not Gemini Advanced. That's AI Pro now, unless you need AI Ultra." "Oh, agents? You do that in Spark actually." "No, not Gemini API Managed." And it's the typical meme. But the interesting thing is that I do think Meta Ray-Bans, like it was always like, okay, you have a deep integration with WhatsApp, you have a deep integration with Instagram DMs, maybe Facebook Messenger. Some people are still using that. But in terms of like wiring into to your life. There are way more people that see Google Docs, Gmail as like the central node in their personal life. Like, people think of like my— all the stuff I have saved on my— the desktop of my MacBook is like my core repository. A lot of people think, "Okay, for the important stuff, I'll put it in Google Docs or Google Drive and then most things flow through Gmail, most things flow through iMessage." There are some people that just are like, "Yeah, WhatsApp is the number one Screen time for me, that's where I really organize things. But Meta doesn't really have this like knock-on effect of like, oh yes, you've, you're, it's not necessarily an enterprise-level productivity suite, but there are people who are like, yeah, I'm using Apple Mail, iMessage, I save my files in Apple Files, Apple, you know, the cloud storage I use, my camera roll, super important. So an AI agent running through the Apple ecosystem can be valuable. And an AI agent running through the Google ecosystem can be valuable. The Meta smart glasses, it's a little bit trickier to go and do anything because you're just like sort of bumping up against the walled gardens, right? Yeah. But investor Nick doesn't like them for aesthetic reasons. He says these Google X Warby Parker glasses are horrific looking compared to these Meta Ray-Bans. Someone is probably going to lose their job over this. I don't know that they look that much worse. I don't know. Ray-Bans are a very iconic silhouette and they do look good. So we'll see. We'll see how the response goes. I think from a product perspective, there's obviously fertile ground. On the flip side, the Wayfarer is just such an iconic— it's more iconic than anything Warby Parker has produced. And that's just sort of the reality of brand building over a decade. Versus a century or something like that, however long Ray-Ban's been around, a long time, right? Anyway, Genie 3, you can now simulate real places by grounding Genie 3 experiences with Street View imagery. Google is sitting on a motherlode of real-world data. I was always thinking YouTube was going to be so valuable for Omni and VO3, VO4 maybe in the future. I hadn't considered Street View as a trove of data. Demis seems very data-pilled. He seems— a lot of the Mag Seven CEOs seem very data-pilled. There's that story about Mark Zuckerberg screen recording or logging all the computer use from all the Meta employees. These important troves of data are increasing in value and Street View certainly seems like it's one of them. This is cool. I wonder how interactive this will be, how this actually instantiates into a game. It's a great demo.

What does it take to build games on this? Yeah, or do they allow people to build games on top of this?

Yeah, I just think about— I don't know. I mean, Demis has a background in games and he was sort of alluding to the fact that he might go back into games at some point or at least be able to like scratch that itch again. Famously, he wrote a programmatic code to generate vomit in a roller coaster simulator, very fun story. But again, when I think about RollerCoaster Tycoon, which was not— I think— I don't think he was actually working on that game. It was a similar theme park simulator, but we are moving back into the simulator world. But the mechanic is what is so enticing to gamers often. When I think about the games that I've spent a long time with, some of them have incredible graphics, AAA graphics. Some of them have 2D graphics, but the mechanic is great. And so, that is what gets me to keep coming back.

The legend Bobby Chipman in the X chat says, "Can't wait for smart glasses." devices to fully replace my monitors.

Yeah, maybe you'll need augmented reality or something. Meta Ray-Ban display, certainly going that direction. The Orion. I've been surprised, uh, wasn't the first episode we ever did we were talking about Orion, uh, and they still haven't shipped it, right? I mean, they ship the smaller version, the Meta Ray-Ban displays, which have sort of the Call of Duty HUD. It's not full augmented reality. I was expecting I was expecting, we demoed the Orion headset and it has a bit of a narrow field of view, but it really can put a screen right in front of you. And I assumed that, you know, everyone was saying it's really expensive, it's clunky, it's not ready for primetime. But, you know, look at how fast things are going. In a year, maybe two, we'll get it. And maybe that's coming at the next Meta Connect. Maybe this summer we'll see it, but haven't been that many rumbles on it. And then obviously the massive pitch shift to AI CapEx might have taken a backseat. I don't know. Very hopeful. I'd like AR and VR. I think we're overdue for a new fun product. I'm still waiting for the next Apple Vision Pro. Apple Vision Air, something just lighter. That's all I want. Cheaper maybe, but lighter and same screen. Screen was great. Anyway. We know, John. Gemini Flash 3.5 looks pretty neat according to Tenebris and extremely fast, but still largely the sort of incremental progress we've come to expect from Google. Generally a pretty disappointing I/O. Now, what's interesting is that Gemini 3 felt like a new base pre-train, felt like it had some of that big model smell, felt like it was, you know, really delightful to talk to. And I think a lot of people were expecting Gemini 4 here. We're still waiting for the next iteration here.

And also, yeah, we're still waiting for Pro.

Yeah, Pro isn't out, but people are speculating that 3.5 Pro won't necessarily be a new pre-train. And so it seems like it's there's a little bit of, you know, research being at odds with like the product cadence. Like Google I/O is scheduled probably like 2 years in advance. And whether or not the training run finishes on time is a little bit harder to package up and nail on a specific time. We see this with the independent labs or the OpenAI, Anthropic, the other labs, XAI, like they're launching models very much like when they're done. And then they will like instantiate like something that looks like a conference around it or maybe a video or a blog post, a model card. But if you're grinding towards a specific date and the specific model isn't quite ready, you come out with something that looks a little bit more incremental. People were really honing in on the fact that the cutoff date was January of 2025. Was that the date or was it December of 2025? Either way. January. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know how much cutoff dates matter because all these models can query the web and get up-to-date information.

Yeah, overall reactions from developers across the board were not good. Not good at all.

Yeah, Prakash here has it underwhelming.

Cursor. Ranked it on CursorBench. Uh, it is below Composer 2.

Is that, is that a fair thing? I mean, I'd like to see you rank another, another live stream on TVPN Bench. It doesn't match up.

Yeah, it's like, no, I mean, they have, they have, I guess, all the other, they have all the other Frontier models, and some of them are ahead of Cursor's own models on CursorBench.

It's just one, it's just one data point. But yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

But here's, here's the other thing. It's 4 times It costs 4 times— it underperforms Composer 2 even though it's roughly 4 times more expensive.

Interesting, interesting. Uh, yeah, I feel like for a long time Google's positioning was, you know, frontier or near frontier but best possible pricing, and this marks sort of a shift in the strategy perhaps.

Yeah, overall starting to make more and more and more sense why Google has put so much capital and resources behind Anthropic.

Yeah, right. Prakash says, seems to indicate that DeepMind is constrained by data rather than compute for what they intend to do, hence the TPU sales. Rest of Google now shipping their org chart. Ben Thompson talked about that a little bit. And there was some context on like, you know, we were asking the question like, will there be AI fatigue from stuffing AI in every product surface area? Allie K. Miller shares one of the loudest applauses in the entire Google keynote. Nishtha put on the Gentle Monster plus Gemini glasses, tapped the side to summon Gemini, and all in one prompt said, take a photo and put a cartoon blimp in the sky that says Google I/O 2026. And within seconds, the preview of the edited photo from Nana Banana appeared on her watch. I want to spend less time on screens. AI is really coming everywhere, and so much is driven by voice AI as the interaction mode. Very cool demo, impressive technology, but Greg's Gadgets says, "These companies truly have no idea what regular people want." Because, yeah, that is a little bit of a niche use case. You need to be more creative with it for when you would actually use that because this is a very— it's a perfect demo of the product and the functionality, but it lacks that, like, creative spark of, like, "Yes, I did want a picture of that on my wrist at that key moment in time." Like, if you're not doing a demo, I don't think— his point is that regular people would not be excited about that particular feature, right? Anyway, you want to move on to something? Where do you want to go?

What next? IPOs?

SpaceX IPO, we're getting more details by the day. Oh, the other thing.

The other thing that is— was going pretty viral, the last thing on I/O was that the Google Anti-Gravity team flashed a Codex folder in their actual demo video. Gurgly says, I had to do a double take in the second minute of the launch video for Antigravity. You can see people use Codex on the Antigravity team. Did no one double-check the launch video at the very least? Not a huge surprise. Obviously, Antigravity looks— a lot of people were saying it looks quite like Codex. So clearly— More than Winsurf. I feel like it would be—

like they would have just rebuilt Windsurf. I don't know. We'll have to see.

No. So, but anyways, this isn't a huge surprise, right? Google's been using a bunch of Anthropic models. Clearly they're using a ton of different models and products internally.

What was that drama with Steve Yeagy going back and forth with Demis about like what teams are using what models and stuff? There was a big back and forth, big dust up on the timeline and like like a month ago about like whether or not Google's employees were deploying AI efficiently or broadly. Some of them aren't and some of them are. And Demis chimed in and said like, this is just complete wrong and everyone's using AI. I don't know, goes back and forth. There's also, people are benchmarking Omni Flash, which looked amazing when we saw the videos. There were a few like little quirks. Some people in the chat were saying that the firing order of the V8 was not correct. Maybe it was only a V6. Yeah, it was missing 2 cylinders. It was missing 2 cylinders. But it looked good to me, I don't know. But now people are actually comping it to CDance 2.0, which obviously has much looser content restrictions because I guess just like Hollywood can't file a lawsuit in China? I'm not exactly sure how that works because CDance seems to be available in America. It seems like maybe—

Oh, I think Chinese businesses have been relatively immune to U.S. copyright law for A very, very, very long time.

And it also might just take like years to file a lawsuit, do discovery, actually go through and litigate.

Oh yeah, you can just go like there's malls in China where you can go to a Nike store. Yeah. And Nike has nothing to do with it. And yet all the products—

They've been selling Swatch APs over there for decades. Yeah.

Yeah. Just ask Rolex and Patek how they're—

Sure, sure. Yeah. I've heard fake cars too. Like, you can get a full replica of like a G-Wagon that's just made in a factory, and then you could buy it, bring it over here, and you take it to a Mercedes dealership, and they're just like, this is not a Mercedes, but it looks like one, like, like, you know, to the millimeter from the outside. Internally, it's just, it's just frauding. Uh, anyway, uh, cDance 2.0 looks great. OmniFlash looks great as well. These are both like super useful. We'll see how they actually play out and how they get implemented, how they get used. The interesting thing will be like, like at what point, like it still takes a long time to generate videos, very hard to get them right. The last 90, like we're at 99% fidelity, but when you click in, you start noticing little details. When will we be in a paradigm where you ask a question and you actually get an explainer video, 6 minutes, 10 minutes like you would on YouTube? Very computationally expensive. Very difficult to maintain the logic. Like, what is the deep research report of OmniFlash? These 8-second, 10-second, 20-second videos are impressive, but not perfectly substitutable for a 20-minute YouTube video because of the time and the level of detail that you can go into. Some people that are looking for information about a V8 engine, they want a breakdown that lasts 20 minutes. And so that's the next benchmark. We got to move the goalposts. Anyway, SpaceX IPO, the prospectus is incoming according to ZeroHedge as soon as May 20th. That's today. We will see. Goldman lead left. This was a surprise. Michael Grimes has worked with Elon for a long time at Morgan Stanley. There was some back and forth. He went back to Morgan Stanley. There's a question about whether or not there would even be a lead left because it's such a big IPO. Maybe they all share equally. Obviously, they're all going to make a ton of money off of this. So good news from start to finish. But it is interesting that Goldman was selected. Do you have a soundboard cue you wanna play?

I'm always ready, Jon.

Okay. Katie Roof has a scoop. Uh, the scoop athlete of the century, Katie Roof. Has a scoop on the biggest venture returns ever. Founders Fund and Valor are set to make more than $60 billion in gains on the SpaceX IPO. Sequoia, more than $20 billion.

Yeah, was this somewhat of a reaction to D1 getting a lot of credit earlier in the week, right? They're set to generate roughly $20 billion in returns, and maybe some of these other funds thought to put their hand up and say—

I think that at this scale, like, there are so many LPs in these funds that are getting updates, and they've known the numbers for a long time. They've known the ownership, the holdings. and you do some back of the envelope and you get some pretty huge numbers. Will be very interesting. Huge for Sean Maguire, huge for Luke Nosek and a lot of other folks over at Founders Fund and Antonio Gracios at Valor and all the other Founders Fund folks. Really— Yeah, look, Sequoia, Founders Fund.

They needed a win. They needed a win.

They needed a win. I mean, you go back, like, you know, these investments were made like 2004, 2010. Like, it was not obvious. Certainly there was no Starlink narrative when these, were made. There was no space data center narrative. This was a rocket company that was blowing up rockets left and right, and not quite getting to, uh, you know, massive business. So you really had to be a believer, and they were.

So they benefit. Uh, Paki was having some fun on the timeline.

He said, "Megafunds are too big to generate returns. They're basically just fee collectors." And of course, they're printing.

Yes, they are printing.

Well, we have a very special guest joining us today, the CEO, the founder of Figma, Dylan Field, in the waiting room. Let's bring him into the TVP and welcome him. Dylan, great to see you.

Hey, great to see you.

Thanks for having me back. Too long. Great to see you.

First question, are you alive or are you dead?

Ah, very alive. Very alive.

Thank you very much, NR2.

Yes. Yes. It is such a white pill. Why? I mean, how have you processed all this? I guess we can go into the business and the product and the financials, but I'm more interested in just like the mindset, the emotional journey. Like, how do you stay sane? Is it an advantage to have been building this business for so long that you can draw on other experiences? Like, what has the process of going through all of this been like for you?

I mean, what's the quote? When in the age of AI, those who stay sane win. Oh, I like that. I think that that's pretty accurate.

And yeah, you should own that.

I'm going to attribute that to you.

Yeah, we're going to attribute that to you.

Not mine. But really, I think it's super important. You have to have an even mind about it. And I know that you guys know this, but social media, not reality.

It is, it is not reality. We see this all the time. Yeah. All the time.

But yeah, and the thing that I've been thinking about this week is how AI-generated design is seemingly becoming as easy to clock as AI text.

It's not this, it's that.

This Then That, right? Yeah. I feel like people kind of like, Right now, I mean, the entire market is just going through like rolling stages of AI psychosis and everyone's having it in different ways, right? So like if you do like equity research, you're obviously gonna go through a period of AI psychosis because you can just like type in a few words and get like what looks like, you know, days, weeks of, you know, really, really great work. And sometimes it is great work. And if you're a designer, web designer, and you can type in a few words and get what looks like a great website instantly, you're also gonna go through that period. And you can just see these sort of like pockets of AI psychosis all around the industry broadly. But it does sort of like fade at some point. And then if you're able to stay sane, you know, through those periods and not let yourself succumb to it, get excited about the potential and benefit from it, but not lose your mind in the process. And I think like we were seeing that with, you know, early on with ChatGPT and like writing, right? Before it was super obvious to clock. And then we were seeing that with design specifically where, yeah, when you can just go and just generate stuff, design that looks like good design. I'm not saying it is good design, And I think we're kind of coming out of that now where you can just instantly clock when something was generated. And sometimes for a specific type of asset or use case, it's totally the right move to just generate something quickly. But I think we're already in a period right now where if I go to a startup's website and it's clear that it was just like a one-shot prompt, Like that says something about the company. Could be good, could be bad. We don't know.

Jordi, I think you're absolutely right. But seriously, I mean, it's just the balance. Oh, thank you. I think it's the balance we had to strike with the Figma Design Assistant— Design Agent launch today. And what we tried to do was make it so that we can really help you bring the context from your file into the agent's context window. And with that, two things that maybe are what will be most helpful for the designer in the moment— spawn agents to do explorations, variations, do the sort of rote tasks that are more boring. So things like design system maintenance, for example, How do we make it so that you're able to do that way faster with Figma's Design Agent than you would if you're just manually clicking on all these variable names, uh, or, or manually change a bunch of components, uh, or text translation or, uh, any number of things. And so, you know, it's been really fun to kind of explore how does the Design Agent work and where can we make it better? Because there's so much more we can do to handle more of these tasks that designers are able to elevate themselves and work at a greater level to actually push aesthetic past AI slop, to actually push past the clichés and get to real innovation, solve real UX problems for users rather than making it so that you just have to go do these boring tasks to just get through and unblock people. Or unblock your team. And I think that the Design Agent will really help there and bring more of it into the canvas where then you can share and collaborate with your team or with other agents. So I'm excited for where it goes. And I think today's really big, and kudos to the team because they've been working really hard making it so that we're able to take all the advances with models and LLMs and apply them to design. Getting these models to speak design well has been non-trivial. Very cool. That's awesome.

I feel like a lot of software engineers who are interacting with coding agents are experiencing incredible amounts of bloat in the code. And there's questions about are you introducing— are you laying really shoddy foundation that will come back to bite you later? And a lot of people say the answer to slop is just more slop. But in the design context, are you feeling pain from Figma users where design systems Or are you at least designing the agentic design tool in a way that is aware of that potential pitfall in advance? Because there is a world where, you know, "Oh, the drudgery is taking my website and, you know, doing design iterations for every single possible viewport or device." And if that gets out of sync, that can be very complex. At the same time, if you wind up instantiating all that and then it doesn't tie together, you could wind up with some sort of misalignment and it could be very difficult to manage in the long term and you could wind up with bloat.

Yeah. I mean, look, I think that it's different context for sure when you're in a sort of codebase and you're using Claude and it's overclaiming and making stuff up. Or you're using OpenAI's ChatGPT models. 5.5 is amazing, but definitely overcomplexifies things. And these teams will deal with the problems that are being identified, and they'll fix them and figure them out. But overall, I think it's a different class of problem than when you're in a design file and really part of your mode is exploration. If we can help you with that exploration, that can be useful for the user. And in terms of semantics, I mean, the way that you represent a component or the way you apply auto layout even, these are all examples of things that we've had to get more rigorous around how we build evals for this to make sure that we're doing things in a way that is both clear and opinionated, but also doesn't get in the way of the user. And I think the word of the year for us has been evals. Probably for the industry. And so there's so much on the eval side that, you know, we have to always be improving on. And part of the feedback that we'll get from this beta will be towards where have we missed the mark and what do we need to do better. And I think there's lots of room to grow there. Also to say that I think that when you look at products like Weave, there's so much potential to not have necessarily this pylon effect, but rather to to explore more with AI. The outputs of the models are like clay you can mold. And it's like, how do you take stuff coming that might be a one-shot slop that's generated, but then actually apply it across multiple models in a pipeline in order to actually figure out a way to make it into what you want? And sometimes the best way to do that is to get on a canvas and use your hands. Sometimes the best way to do that is through a workflow you define. Other times it's by going back and forth with an agent. I think you have to be very smart about what you do when, and it's our responsibility as a tool creator to give you all the options. Mm-hmm. Jordi?

What are you excited about in terms of using AI to help augment the creative process? Because when I think of, part of what I think is exciting about this moment is like, I don't, Right now it's hard. Like a human still has to have like the fundamental kind of idea, right? And we know that 'cause you have to like type it into a box, right? You need to do the typing still. So we're still necessary there. But when I think about like iconic startup brands, I think of Linear, I think of some of what like Cursor has done over the last couple years. I think of like Figma's brand where there's so much work that went into just like coming up with that, coming up with like the concept and the look and feel of the brand. And then like way, way, way more work in terms of like instantiating that brand across every possible surface area. And part of what I think is exciting about this moment is like we're potentially entering into a world where you can spend more time from just doing that heavy creative work, coming up with a concept that can stand out. And then once you create a system, then you can much more rapidly scale it across, again, all these different surface areas, whether it's digital products, web, email, ads, et cetera. How are you thinking about augmenting and giving creative superpowers on that brand-building process when you're kind of coming up coming up with the idea.

Yeah, I think there's so much we can explore and do there. And using design systems effectively is hard. We certainly have not perfectly nailed that. I think we've done much more on the maintenance side. And we have a lot more coming on the execution side of how do you put the design system you've created together so you can fully productionize that. And it's one of the things that we are looking at from so many angles. It is critical context to be able to figure out across code, across design, how do you use this effectively? But brand, I think, is, I mean, where on the Weave side we see even more exploration with these workflows and people being able to define workflows that are more canonical and then branch out from them. And I think we'll see the same with Assistant and with the Figma Design Agent as well. And the— I also think that this idea bank, content bank, can be established and added to over time and by more people. And what we're seeing with the last quarter results that we announced is that more people are starting to use Figma in the organization. Thank you. They're fantastic results. Thank you. But the breadth, I think, of the usage expanding is a huge part of that. And the more that you can get it to a point where people can come in with their ideas, contribute to the conversation on a canvas, collaborate with others to refine— doesn't mean that these non-designers who don't know all the conversations that are being had about the UX or the brand are going to be the ones that are bringing the idea— that's the idea you're going to ship— to the table right away. But I do think that bringing more voices into that conversation, more viewpoints only helps.

How do you think about the concept of Gelman amnesia in the context of staying sane in the age of AI? 'Cause there's probably non-designers who use GenAI tool and are like, "Oh wow, designers are cooked." And then there's real designers who use a GenAI tool and say, "Oh, there's, you know, yes." It's maybe 99% of the way there, but the battle is to get to 99.999, maybe 100% of what you can do. And it feels like, yeah, this is staying sane.

All outputs, right? If you ask AI to generate you something around a topic you know really, really well, it's a different feeling than a topic that you're just learning about.

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think that basically folks are, are in a place where they learn by comparative cases. And the more that they see great examples next to output that's not as good and they can learn why, that's ultimately where you see folks then push further. And they can then take it on to do more in an area and evolve their skills and their judgment and their taste, or not. But I do think it's really important to have those conversational loops going and also get your arms around, as a design leader, what is happening in your organization. Because what we're seeing is more people prototype things. And then there's this latent fear of, oh, no, what are we going to ship? And is it the thing that is sort of like a random exploration that someone thought was real, or is it something that is gone through our cycle and is ready to go and is very well thought out. And in general, the other thing that I'd mention is it feels like there's a lot of tunnel vision right now. I think that there's certain models that kind of went, oh, let's learn from Foro and are sort of sycophantic in doing that, especially for engineers. Get very latched onto an idea and then it's kind of like the AI psychosis sets in and you're like, this is the best idea ever and you're fully tunnel vision towards creating it and you can show massive progress, but like, are you going the right direction? Yeah. And I think it's really important to steer and to actually be building what you need to build and to think, not just wear a thinking cap. So that is something that I think is critical right now.

Yeah, I completely agree. Yeah, there's been a bunch of great takes about that. Help me, if I meet someone and they have the next great app idea, and help me pitch them starting with Figma as the front door to the experience. If they're a non-designer, but they're also non-technical, and they're hearing about Codex and Cloud Code and those like code gen tools versus starting with a design, starting and having the design be the place where the idea person sort of instantiates their app or their product. And then yes, there are agents and they might use different tools for spinning up backends and doing other things. Why should Figma be the front door to building?

Yeah, I think that as you're exploring an idea, part of it is thinking it through. And actually understanding what is it that I want to build. And you should not just start in Figma, you should go talk to users. You should go think about like, what is it that I'm trying to build? What are my goals and the problems I'm trying to solve? So that might look like starting a sketchbook or a doc or in live conversation.

I think there's a lot of people that have not asked that question to the LLMs and jump straight to, oh, I spent, 7 nights staying up all night, I'm coding this thing and are in for a world of hurt. It's addictive.

It's fun. It's addictive. There's a box effect of like, will it get right this time or not?

And that's a variable reward. Yeah, variable reward.

It's a spinner's box. And so, but then I think going from there to being intentional about, okay, I know what problems I'm trying to solve. Let me think through the solution. Figma provides an excellent spot to do that with in conjunction with brainstorming tools like FigJam. Or document editing, spec editing. From there, I think when you've got your direction, you know what you want to build, it's a great time to use our MCP. Go bring into code or go bring into Make. Make itself, you'll see a ton of evolution on surface ahead. We've already had a lot that we've improved and you'll see even more in the weeks and months coming. Then I think that's a great spot where you can go back and forth because Sometimes as you build it out, you realize that actually there's more to explore and define on the design side. Yeah. So use the best tool for the job, but I think don't be tunnel vision about there's one direction and that's the only thing that can work. That's where you'll fall into traps.

Yeah. Last question for me. Huge revenue growth, massive success on the financial side. I'm interested in going a click deeper and trying to understand what is working the most? Because it seems like there's great retention among big clients and customers that are using Figma at scale across a huge organization. There's also new entrepreneurs that are a team of one and they might be using Figma.

There's almost like consumer use cases. Yeah, it's notable that the heaviest users of coding agents are, heavily using Figma. Because they're making more software.

And they need to add stuff to it. I look at some of the stuff we've vibe-coded and I'm like, okay, it's time to level up and have Figma in the flow if it's not already. Even because you don't want some— even like the dashboards, these things need to be designed at some point as they grow and scale. The first most basic thing, it could just be a CLI, but as soon as we start building UIs and multiple users, it gets more complicated. But what is driving the growth? Is it both? Is one more of an opportunity for you over the next few years? Like, what are you most excited about?

I mean, I think we're seeing growth kind of across the board right now, and we're very thankful for that. But our eyes are always in the future. And, you know, the same things that I've said when I've been here in the past, and I think have become their own memes around design being the differentiator and design as the layer above code. As code commoditizes more and more, design is, I think, increasingly the battleground. This is where everyone is going to really duke it out to figure out what the direction is that they should explore and what they should go build. And we need to build for that world, a world where design representations, code representations can live together, and a world where you don't have to make these false trade-offs between direct manipulation and AI, or, you know, being able to explore broadly or make fast progress. Like, both is the answer. And so that's what we're really building for right now.

Exciting. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show. Have a great rest of your week. Great to see you. Good to see you all.

Thanks for having me.

And we'll talk to you soon.

Talk to you soon. Goodbye. See ya. Up next, we have Firas from Socket back on the show to discuss us on Series C by none other than Thrive Capital. We'll bring in Firas from Sockett from the waiting room to the TVP and Ultradome. Get that gong ready. Welcome to the show. How you doing? What's up? Good to see you. How's it going, guys?

Thanks for having me back on.

I think last time you were on Jordi Hays, we'll see you soon. And here you are.

Give us the news first. What happened? Yeah. So Sockett announced its $60 million Series C at a billion dollar valuation.

Hit it again. Hit it again.

Led by Thrive Capital. Congrats. And it's a big day for us. Absolutely massive.

Is what you do important right now?

Yeah. You know, you couldn't have really asked for a better, you know, perfect storm. You know, you have just the confluence of, you know, AI, cybersecurity and all the different attacks we've been seeing. And we kind of built the perfect product for this moment. And it's been something that we've been building towards for You know, it seems like it's okay, you know, we just, we have the right thing right now, but the reality is, you know, we've been building towards this for, you know, 4 years plus. And so, you know, it's an overnight success that took 4 years, right? Overnight success.

There we go. I love it. Yeah, what was the key unlock for the new round? Growth, needed the capital for specific expansion, just the broad tailwinds of the industry, people looking forward to more demand?

What's, what's changed in the business? So the business is just inflecting. You know, every year I feel like, you know, okay, this is great. You know, certainly we're going to get like a regression to the mean or something, but it just keeps accelerating. So over the last while, we've had 500% plus ARR growth over the last 12-month period. And it was just— it keeps going. So I think it's kind of— we're seeing kind of three forces converging. All at once here. We have this kind of like perfect storm between, you know, AI generating more code than ever before. You got developers and increasingly non-developers too that are pulling in open source dependencies and third-party code at like an unprecedented velocity. And you have more code being written than ever before, both by humans and AI agents. And the kind of maybe counterintuitive thing is it actually brings in a lot of third-party code. And that code is really vetted less than it's ever been before. And And that's kind of like the first thing. The other thing is you got the frontier AI models like Mythos that are finding thousands of high-severity vulnerabilities across every major operating system and open-source library. And so the total volume of vulnerabilities in code is exploding right now. And it's going to keep going as we start to throw these models against this backlog of code that's been out there for a long time and has a lot of vulnerabilities. And then kind of the third piece is that the— attackers have really started kind of realizing that they can exploit the software supply chain to get into companies. So they're not really like coming in through, you know, finding vulnerabilities, but they're actually kind of realizing if we go into an open source component, that's actually an easy way to get into an organization and not just one, but usually thousands of organizations that all use that same component. So it's this like perfect storm of, of all these factors right now.

So walk me through how your business model interacts with the open source community, because when we see things like Mythos finding a bunch of bugs in open source repos, you know, we hope that everyone will just submit bug reports early for the good of the world, but I'm interested in like the economics of patching open source. If there's a really important package out there that maybe doesn't have a Linux Foundation behind it, How, at some point, like at the very least, there's inference costs. Who's paying to patch all of the open source software that so many different companies rely on? If you go to a big company, they pay you, they might patch like their dependencies, but how does this all flow together into an actually safer internet?

Yeah, well, I've been in open source for, I think over 15 years now, and I maintain a bunch of open source packages and, you know, have a real soft spot for the open source community. And so let me tell you, they were suffering under an enormous burden even before the current, you know, AI trends have kind of made it even worse. You know, they don't get much support, whether financial or just in terms of, you know, the number of people working on this really critical infrastructure is super low for how critical it is. And so, you know, we started seeing a lot of AI tools being used to create these slop PRs, slop issues. And that was already kind of causing a burden. And then now you have the various frontier labs that are finding with their models, they're finding a lot of vulnerabilities that were there, were always there, but the community didn't know about. And I will say they're doing a good job of providing a patch along with it. The bug that they've identified. So they're doing a lot of the work for the maintainer, but it still takes effort to review the PR. And the thing that people don't realize is when you accept a pull request as a maintainer, you're not just kind of, it's not this one-time cost. You're actually accepting the burden kind of indefinitely into the future to maintain that code and make sure that that code is secure and is kept up to date with all the other changes. And so I think what we're gonna see, and we're already starting to see is, Despite the kind of best efforts of the Frontier Labs, and they are making good effort, maintainers are going to fail to actually accept these patches. And so we're gonna see a lot of libraries that may have a vulnerability in them that literally have effectively code sitting on GitHub that anyone can look at and use to generate an exploit against that vulnerability. And there's not gonna be an easy path for companies for, you know, developer teams to go and actually patch their libraries because there's no version they can upgrade to because the maintainer is just sort of sitting there on that patch and hasn't, hasn't accepted it. So it's just creating this real risk where, um, you know, um, like there's more vulns than ever before and there's not really like easy paths. And so this is actually something we try to solve. Um, so we built a, um, a solution to this called Certified Patches. And what this is is basically kind of a deterministic way to, in kind of one click, make your vulnerabilities in your open source code go away. So we use, we use a whole bunch of AI and kind of produce these patches that make the vuln go away without any work on the part of the developer. There's no kind of burden of upgrading packages. You just sort of, in a click, the vuln is gone from your dependencies and you can kind of keep the rest of your code in your application the same. And so it's really a kind of a quick fix to the problem that we hope is gonna be part of the solution. And by the way, we're giving away all the critical patches to the community for free. So we can try to disseminate this widely to as many people as possible.

Are you finding any companies that are completely asleep at the wheel or is everyone like giving this an S tier? Who should I hack today? No, I just want, like, I imagine like part of why the business is growing so quickly is this is like a hair on fire problem. Concern every single day, right? You're seeing these vulnerabilities or issues pop up. And so I would have to imagine that every software company online where the technical leadership there uses the internet, which I would imagine is all software companies, are pretty leaning into this problem. But do you ever— I'm curious even from an outbound sales marketing standpoint, are there people that are like, ah, this is like not that important for us right now, or would like a no be like, we have a solution, it's with someone else?

We've met one company that has literally no software. They produce toilet paper and they didn't have any software.

Christopher, no one of business. No smart guy.

I think Yeah, I think that it's become a universal problem. When we started, it was kind of this like maybe more niche problem where people said, OK, you know, I got a lot of other problems that are more important than this. And we initially had a really good uptake of the product in the cryptocurrency community because they have a lot of software supply chain risk. And when, when these hacks happen, it's kind of an irreversible thing for them where they like lose all their, their funds. And then I would say kind of the AI labs were the next to pick it up and sort of, you know, SF tech companies realized that the kind of people that are ahead of the curve. And now it's become— I mean, it's like a top— I'd say top 1 or top 2 concern at like nearly every company we talk to. It's a board-level concern a lot of the times now. And CISOs and heads of engineering are being asked to figure out like, what is our solution to make sure the next time one of these things happens, were protected. And the next time is probably going to be like, you know, tomorrow. It's become so— it's literally like, you know— Yeah, every day. Yeah, literally our end of quarter was, you know, the end of last month. We already were super busy, and then there were 3 major software supply chain attacks that happened that same day. It's wild. It's like more than we've ever seen, and it's totally unprecedented.

Was the GitHub issue that I saw a supply chain attack, or was that something else? I saw like a couple posts, but I didn't get to dig into it?

So I don't think they've released that information yet. Yeah, there's definitely been some speculation. I mean, the timing right now, every time a company gets popped or their source code leaks, it's, it's, it's the first question that people think of now. And the group I believe that claimed responsibility is this Team PCP group that has been responsible for a lot of the attacks. And so, you know, I wouldn't be surprised if that's what we learn. But I don't think that's something that we know right now. And I wouldn't want to speculate.

Yeah, I wonder if there will be movements to find the compute infrastructure for Team PCP at some point, or like the hackers, because at a certain point you would imagine that they're ready.

Well, they don't— I mean, some of this, a lot of this is still social engineering, right? So it doesn't— they don't necessarily need a country of geniuses data center. They could just—

A couple dudes with phones. Who knows? Well, congratulations on the progress. Thanks so much for coming on the show.

Thanks for keeping keeping us all safe.

We'll talk to you soon. Cool. Thanks, guys. Have a good one. Goodbye. Up next, we have Tae Kim from KeyContext, the hottest Substack on the internet. We have Tae Kim in the waiting room. Let's bring him into the TVGN Ultra Room. Tae, how are you doing? Hey, guys. Awesome. Funky. Here we go. Kicking it off strong. Ooh, good, good fit. You know what we need to do? We need to figure out how to do a like real-time recognition of the face, face tracking, and then land the glasses on the correct face.

For next appearance, for next AI appearance.

Yes. And maybe before we get into AI and different companies, I'd love to just know how KeyContext is going, how, like, what it's been like since we last checked in. How is life? Uh, it's much better.

It's going great. I think the last time we talked was March 30th and the market was right at the bottom. Yeah, that's right. Really? Everything was going terrible. Yeah. You never worried though? I did not. I trust her. Tripled, quadrupled down on here and said CPU shortage. Yeah. Buy memory stock. Yeah. All those, uh, ideas are up 50 to 150%. I said, uh, I think 13 out of our 14 ideas are solidly in the green. I, I joke that like Shohei Ohtani numbers with like 3, 4 games, it's not gonna last, but, uh, it, it worked out. I mean, we trusted in the action.

He would love memory stocks. Yeah, right. I think he would.

I'm sure he's— his, uh, his financial advisor's long HBM stocks, I'm sure. Uh, yeah, yeah.

I read some, I read some report that in, in South Korea there's folks who liquidating insurance plans to go long SK Hynix. It's a huge, huge moment over there in South Korea.

And everyone's making fun of these Koreans for being long memory stocks. But I mean, we're talking single-digit P/E multiples, probably going to last 2 to 3 more years, triple-digit growth. I mean, I quoted this Michael Dell thing where he spoke to a Wall Street conference. He says 25-25. That's the thing you need to know about memory stocks. AI accelerators gonna have 25 times more— like AI GPUs from NVIDIA 2 years from now gonna have 25 times more memory per GPU. And there's gonna be a need for 25 times more GPUs. Wow. So he said multiply 25 by 25, you get 625 more revenue, etc. And you layer on to the fact that 4 years ago, So all these memory companies saw their revenue, you know, get cut in half. So they didn't expand capacity. It takes 3 to 4 years to expand capacity. So we're going to see like mega pricing power like we haven't seen anything yet. Yeah, these stocks are going to go keep going higher and their revenue, revenue rates are going to be astronomical. So everyone makes fun of these Koreans for piling into single-digit PE stocks growing at triple digits. And this cycle is different because there are only 3 companies that can make the HBM memory. Yeah. Don't make fun of the Koreans.

They're right. Don't. Is the pullback that you pushed to— that you mentioned, like when they were beaten up, was that the post-crypto slump when semiconductor equipment and GPUs were being used to mine crypto? And then there was a pullback there. Is that what you're referring to? Like, what is the prehistory? Why were these stocks beaten up?

So in 2022, like, we had a kind of like a tech recession. Like, everyone's— all these tech companies were laying off people. Even Intel and Nvidia had these 50% drawdowns. Yeah, uh, the whole, you know, everything was— it's almost like the, the post, uh, COVID, uh, kind of overhang. Yeah, where people bought too many digital computers, electronics.

Yeah, and, uh, there was too much overcapacity. And so what was Nvidia doing, uh, during that 50% drawdown? Were they buying the stock back?

Uh, not, not really. Nvidia, if they buy a little bit of stock back, but not, not really. And back then, this is a different Nvidia where like, yeah, data center is 10% of the revenue and gaming is 80-90%. Now it's split, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Where data center is nearly everything. Yeah. Uh, what happened with Nvidia back then is, uh, everyone's buying their GPUs to mine Ethereum, and then Ethereum did the whole proof-of-stake, proof-of-work thing, so demand for GPUs collapsed. NVIDIA had like a terrible quarter where they missed by like $2 billion, which was a big number back then. Now that's a rounding error. Back then it was 20% of their revenue and the stock got hit hard.

Yeah. So what are you looking forward to from NVIDIA this quarter, this year? What are you watching?

So we had like two unbelievable quarters the last two quarters, and I expect another great, amazing quarter. I mean, Jensen is out there. Saying GPU consumption is through the roof. On Monday, he said AI demand is far exceeding supply and capacity. So I think the numbers are going to be great, and this is without even China. So I mean, the absolute scale of these numbers are mind-blowing. We're talking like 80% growth on $80 billion number, $79 or $80 billion. Just think about it, in 3 months, right? Yeah. So the absolute scale, and the stock is like almost as cheap as it's ever been. Like, it's trading at 19 times forward, below the S&P 500, which is growing at like 10%. NVIDIA is growing 80%. So this, this dichotomy where NVIDIA is becoming more and more undervalued, and we could talk about why.

Yeah, yeah, I'd love to know. Is that just because they're the largest company, $5 trillion? It's hard to wrap your mind around a $10 trillion company?

Every year we go through this cycle, um, The last 3 years during this whole upswing up, everyone says peak is here, right? NVIDIA can't grow anymore. And then NVIDIA keeps growing at some ridiculous growth rate. So the skepticism, the only reason why it's trading at below market multiple is that the AI skeptics believe that the peak year is near, right?

There's going to be a no— is it AI skeptics or is it TPU and Trainium enjoyers? That too.

They believe competition is coming and they're going to gain market share. Yeah, I kind of laugh at that. And the numbers that people, you know, put out there for the competition, it's like a rounding error. It's like a small single, low single-digit number compared to what NVIDIA is going to grow the next few years. And what people keep forgetting is like, if you actually look at the numbers, I mean, NVIDIA has $1 trillion in orders, right? They're the ones that have locked down all the memory. Like I met someone, a guy at GTC, he's the optical startup and NVIDIA locked up all the capacity for lasers and optical, right? So NVIDIA has the supply components with memory, wafers, optical. So they're pretty much the only game in town if you want to actually buy AI GPU capacity. Like TPU gets headlines, but I mean, $5 billion, like it's nothing when you're comparing it to a trillion dollars. So they had the volume, they have the great power per watt numbers and metrics that basically if you're doing inference, NVIDIA GPUs, even they cost a lot more upfront, when you actually do the inference, performance per watt is excellent when these are—

Yeah, how did you grapple with the question of whether or not NVIDIA is a car? There are competitors, you said low single-digit percentage, of the market, but AMD is getting its act together. Intel's maybe back in the game in a few years. You have Trainium and TPU. Competition is rarely a good thing. Is NVIDIA a car or not?

Okay, obviously it's not a car. I would have loved to—

I would have loved to be in the room with you while you saw that segment. You just like taking your computer, smashing it. I think I was tweeting about it.

I think I wrote a piece on it. I wrote like, you know, 400 or 500 words about that. Sure. I don't know if we want to go into that on that, but, you know, they're going to be 80, 90% of the market. Maybe they'll lose 10% of the market share in 2, 3 years. But 80, 90% of a market that is growing, you know, 50, 70% a year. Yeah. The hyperscaler CapEx numbers went up huge. There's like $780 billion going to $1 trillion next year. Like the market believes with Nvidia's valuation that Nvidia is going to stop growing within the next year or two. But the overall market, I think, is going to keep growing at 50% at least. If it grows 50% in the next 2 or 3 years, Nvidia is going to grow at— even if they like maintain market share, or— and I don't believe that's true. I think they're actually going to maintain or even increase market share. But even if market share goes down 10%, I mean, the numbers are just insane. And I don't think Nvidia is going to trade at like 10, 12 times earnings when they're growing at 50%. I mean, that doesn't make sense to me. So I think it's going to re-rate higher. And the key thing here is the stock, stock buybacks, because that's like— if you guys remember during the whole iPhone, like when, when the iPhone, uh, 5 and 6 came out, when they actually had the large screen iPhone, Apple was trading at a P/E of 7, like ex-cash. Like, yeah, people thought Android was gonna almost look the same thing, like Android's come in and destroyed the iPhone market share. When iPhone went on this generational run with the large screen iPhones. Right. But a big thing that Apple did was they started buying back stock and that's when their multiple started going from single digits to 15 to 20 to 30 times. And I think what— and they already kind of hinted at it, but I think Nvidia is going to start buying stock buyback in size. They, they said 50% of their free cash flow in the next 12 months. They're a little bit cryptic on if that was after or before prepaid. The prepayments they have for the inventory and suppliers. But I think we're going to get some more clarity tonight. And if they actually put numbers, maybe it's this quarter or next quarter, if they actually put the actual, you know, we're going to buy X hundreds of billions of stock, you know, in the next 12 months, I think the PE is going to re-rate much higher. Yeah. So, you know, as soon as we get visibility that next year is going to keep growing at 40%, 50%, or higher, I think it's going to be higher. And the year after that, you know, stock, that stock should go on top of the rerating from the capital returns.

Gavin Baker was on our friend Patrick's show this morning. He was making the point that it's possible that TSMC, TSMC could prevent a bubble just given that they are not investing in CapEx as aggressively as as let's say Jensen might want them to. He said, you know, basically said what you're saying, which is NVIDIA could sell $1 trillion of GPUs, you know, pretty much immediately if they had the supply. What's your read on that? Do you think that TSMC is competing?

Well, so I think I've been, I mean, I've been following chip industry for, you know, 30, 40 years. So, you know, I'm very good at reading I'm very good at reading the tea leaves, and I've noticed that Jensen and what TSMC, what the CEOs have been kind of hinting at, that their tone has changed in the last 2, 3 months. Yeah. So TSMC just reported their Q1 earnings. And, you know, if you read the transcript, it's pretty obvious that they're just going to raise CapEx on a different order of magnitude for the next year and the year after. They said their CapEx is going to be much higher over the next 3 years than it was the last 3 years. And basically, and all the stuff they're saying, you know, they're saying, and Jensen's been going out there during these speeches and Q&As, he's confidently saying the supply issues in 2, 3 years are going to be on a different level. Like, even with memory, he's saying all these component issues that we have now, in 2, 3 years, I think he even said that on the Dwarkesh podcast interview, 2, 3 years, this all will be like massive issue. So I'm confident that TSMC memory might be a little problematic, but TSMC wafer-wise, you know, it's going to be dramatically higher over the next 2, 3 years.

But even if they raise capex, it feels like there might be like a, I don't know, a speed bump essentially, because if they triple capacity and that takes 2 years, but everyone's sort of pricing in or expecting 10x a year or half an oom a year, there's a mismatch there. That's what I'm saying.

Right now, right now, the NVIDIA valuation is trading like it's growing at 10— it's going to grow at 10% the next year or two, right? They grow at 50% the next 2 years. Yeah, I mean, that's definitely, you know, like TSFC is going to raise our CapEx. Yeah, yeah. So it's like the numbers are way off.

Yeah, yeah. I'm more just thinking from a—

yeah, I mean, we're not looking at the market perspective.

The 10x is is not going to happen.

Yeah, but, you know, 50 to 75% the next 3 years, I think that can happen. Yeah, and stocks will go much higher if that happens.

Yeah, yeah, no, that makes sense.

That 10x is, you know— yeah, it's not software. I mean, this, you know, you have to actually move physical items.

Yeah, that makes sense. Uh, how do you, how do you think NVIDIA will be positioning, uh, China exposure, China opportunity? Uh, that was an interesting point of debate on the DoorCash episode.

Yeah, I mean, I've given up on China. I mean, at GTC Jensen said, you know, he got approvals on both sides and then weeks later, like that, you know, fell through again. Like, it's— forget China. It probably isn't going to happen. There's also another report that gaming GPUs were incrementally banned in China. Like, I, I just think, like, you can't rely— temper your expectations. I don't think China is going to happen.

Not relevant to the business case or the valuation, but potentially important to like the geopolitical story?

Um, I think it's just gonna be the status quo where Nvidia is not going to be able to sell to China, and anything that happens is incremental upside, but it's not going to be a huge number anymore. Even the stuff that is allowed is, is a limited number. The way the U.S. has, you know, approved the licenses, it's China is the one that's saying no, we're not going to let you sell right now. Like, it's been going back and forth between China and the that's, you know, who bans what and whatever. But even the incremental numbers, even if China starts approving it, it's not a huge number the way it was in the past. So I would temper expectations on China. It's just, it's been so back and forth and unreliable the last couple years.

What was your reaction to Google I/O?

I'm actually pretty negative on Google right now. And they're, you know, They're basically nonexistent in the whole coding agent stuff, which is like the one that's growing exponentially right now in terms of coding agents. And everyone's paying tens of billions of dollars to Anthropic and now Codex for OpenAI. They're adding a million users every few weeks. Google Anti-Gravity is nowhere to be found. No one's talking about it on Twitter. Anyone that talks about it says they don't like it. Market. So the hottest thing, which is coding agents, that's gonna, you know, that's gonna automate things and do actual work for an enterprise, is the biggest market that's taking off like a rocket. Google isn't there. So I mean, Google Cloud is doing great, you know.

Yeah, did, uh, seeing yesterday, did it start to make more sense to you why Google had been committing so much, so many resources to Anthropic? Like, do you feel like that's— Yeah, yeah. So I think they see Anthropic— Because at the time, at the time, everyone was like, wow, I wonder how Demis feels about this. Of course, Demis is an angel in Anthropic and obviously thinks they're a great company and they have a good relationship. But at the time, it was like, wow, they have this new model incoming. They have this massive compute advantage. They have this massive distribution advantage. They have massive data advantage. They have every single advantage. They had this huge head start. Invent the transformer. And they can just vend it in everywhere on all these platforms from Google Workspace, which is like a massively underrated distribution point to the Google Docs and Sheets and basically everywhere, like every single possible advantage and an incredibly talented team and exponential demand for tokens. And it was still, you know, somewhat surprising to see them, you know, invest that much in a competitive lab.

And they are benefiting, you know, with Google Cloud at getting that business. But I think long-term strategically, I think Google has to be very careful. And I think Microsoft's exactly is experiencing this with OpenAI, is once the value accrues to Anthropic and OpenAI, um, they're going to be the power players, you know, 4 or 5 years from now and be able to push people around. I mean, we saw that when, uh, Yahoo literally used Google as their search engine, right? Google was nobody. Oh yeah. And Yahoo put it on their, on their homepage and powered their search engine, and then Google became the power player in a few years, right? Same thing with Netscape and Yahoo. I mean, this is like history repeating itself. Itself. Netscape was— everyone used Netscape. I don't know if you guys were around then, but Netscape was the browser, right? And the reason Yahoo became powerful is because what you clicked on that little thing on the right on the home page and it drove people to Yahoo, the portal. Then Google, you know, took off because they started using Google, the Google search engine, inside yahoo.com. So I think all these companies have to be careful, like if if you help OpenAI and Anthropic become super powerful and they have the best models and, you know, this thing is all a flywheel, right? The more people that use it, the more people that use, uh, Claude code, you know, Anthropic's gonna get smarter and make the better version of Claude code. Same thing with ChatGPT. And if you let Gemini kind of like lose the market right now, yeah, like, and Anthropic gets all the business and all the revenue, like Google starts losing power in the whole tech ecosystem.

Yeah, it's almost like the whole industry is on a merry-go-round, but they're, you know, it's like a Spider-Man meme with like, you know, guns. Everyone's kind of just like going around.

Yeah, very— what are your expectations for the SpaceX IPO? What does that do to the market? They sort of jump straight into the Mag Seven in terms of valuation.

Are they going to suck up liquidity?

Well, it's It's really tough to tell without the S1. Yeah, we'll see the person, you know, all we have is like these spot leaks and yeah, you know, Starlink and that now with the, you know, selling the, the AI compute Colossus, uh, to Anthropic. Um, I mean, the valuation is extremely, extremely high. Even, even, uh, the D1 Capital guy who, who's up, you know, Yeah, he was interviewed on O'Shaughnessy's show. And you could tell if you just read his body language, he's like, wow, this is a really high multiple. I mean, go back and listen to it. Even he, even though he's going to benefit from it, like, he's like, wow, this is really high. Yeah.

So I mean, a lot of SpaceX investors were happy with, you know, investing that $60 billion when it was doing $10 billion in revenue and had great margins. And it's a completely different business.

Both of the valuations— to them, they saw stuff that— no, I mean, like, it, you know, the launch costs going down, it's— and Starlink coming out of nowhere and adding billions of, you know, unbelievable telecom business total. Yeah, that's a market, great. But like $1.5, $1.75 trillion off those Starlink revenues?

What was this from Gavin Baker? He was saying like, uh, Elon has just always delivered for shareholders, and that means that he can marshal unlimited capital at all times. And it just continues.

You know, I'm just hesitant, like, you know, at those extreme valuations, that's less upside for a retail investor.

Oh, sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hard to imagine, like, the Tesla scenario.

Yeah. The passive indexes, if they go in at that price, that valuation, yeah, like, on the next downturn, it's just I just, I just wish Anthropic went out first. Sure, right? Because the numbers are dramatically real. I mean, OpenAI probably is accelerating right now with Codex too. Yeah, and you know, that, that will help things a lot better than, you know, you know, than SpaceX.

Oh sure, sure, sure.

Yeah, it's an interesting thing right now looking at the valuations of the Mag 7, and then you add SpaceX in there, and then you add, you know, Anthropic and OpenAI. And Nasdaq will look potentially make Anthropic and OpenAI look cheap on just like a revenue multiple potentially. But then it still looks very expensive versus let's say like a Meta, right? Yeah. Sitting at $1.5 trillion. Yeah. With, with one of the best businesses of all time. Yeah, I did. I did want to ask you about Meta, your kind of updated mental model. They obviously had a big painful round of layoffs today to be able to afford their inference bill. I'm joking there, but it does seem like, you know, they're effectively whatever they're saving on, on comp, they're just sort of reinvesting into AI, AI, both CapEx, but also their, their inference bills. How are you? Yes.

Ask me the same question, you know, 6, 7 weeks ago. And, you know, I think they, they reported an unbelievable quarter. I mean, they're growing at 33%, like crazy amounts of profits. Like, um, there's market skepticism that they could do well in AI models, but, you know, there's also the plan B. Like, you could say the same thing about what happened with Elon and XAI. Like, they were able to— there's so much demand in this megatrend hypercycle that even if they falter a bit, they sell compute capacity to, to the highest bidder that's out there. So I wouldn't count Meta out. I actually think, like I said, their core advertising, digital advertising business is more durable than the Google search engine right now, which if you go, it's filled with ads everywhere. It's not, it's not a great experience. And a lot of that, a lot of that traffic is going to shift over to AI chatbots. So if you actually look at the numbers, Meta is— their core business is very durable, has competitive advantage. It's growing, still growing like a weed.

I just wouldn't count them out. Yeah, basically as soon as they either have an AI breakthrough or they pull back on AI, the stock has to rerate, right?

Yes. I mean, that's the same thing happened with with, with the metaverse stuff. Yeah, they start cutting back spending, you re-rate higher because all those losses don't, don't hit the income statement.

They look tiny now. Yeah, be so— it'd be so wild to think about what Meta's stock would be doing right now if the metaverse debacle had never happened, because the metaverse was like this high conviction bet on a category that was just way too early, and yet AI doesn't feel— and yet they feel late on AI. I think Mark felt late, or at least clearly felt behind enough to sort of 10x the seriousness. So I think it would be—

Yeah, I think they're a little more skeptical because of what happened with the metaverse, where they spent tens of billions of dollars that has pretty much gone.

Yeah, yeah, becoming a neocloud is a weird outcome for a hyperscaler that that could totally have a cloud platform, but has not historically. And you would imagine that there's a whole bunch of hard-won lessons that Azure, GCP, AWS went through, organizational decisions, structures, just key people in place. It feels hard to spin up immediately. At the same time, there's neo clouds that are scaling revenue extremely quickly every day. So I agree with you that it is a possibility, but a whole set of new challenges if that's the direction.

That's the worst case scenario, right? Like, they, they want to use the AI compute capacity to make their internal businesses better with all the ad personalization and monetization and create this stuff. And actually, I've been, uh, playing, uh, playing around with OpenClaw, you know, for the first time a few weeks ago. And, uh, yeah, I've been using WhatsApp, and that's the future. Everyone's gonna have a digital assistant. It's like so amazing. I ask to give me the top 20 stories is powered by the latest version of Codex. Yeah, it goes out there, searches every day for me, and emails me the top 20 stories I should read. And it's really smart. Yeah, um, you guys should try it. It's actually amazing. And, and the thing I'm thinking is like, why can't Meta do this? I mean, they have this Meta AI, but you know, having this little channel for my little Taybot— I call it T-Bot— um, and and all you do is WhatsApp it and say, do this, do this, find this for me, find this. Everyone's gonna have this. Yeah, yeah. That's the basic thing. Yeah, yeah. And I'm using WhatsApp.

I mean, the big headline token number from Google was that they 7x token production across all of their services. That actually seemed a little low to me given how broad the surfaces are and how crazy the models have gotten in the last year. But I would expect to start seeing that out of Meta because, Now, when you go to Instagram and you search, it gives you a little AI overview. And obviously they have the Meta AI app. And I would imagine that there's more AI hydration happening across the ecosystem.

Anyway, this digital assistant thing is going to be like Open Claw. Like, I was skeptical until I tried it. I'm like, oh my gosh. So Meta should be all over this because it's on there.

And probably with the Ray-Bans, they'll do it. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Always great hanging out. Great to see you, Tay. What do you do for NVIDIA earnings? Do you do you just like turn off all the lights in the room and, and, uh, like just like sit, case of beer, nachos, big screen TV? Is it more like a Super Bowl or like, uh, I, I wish, like, we should bring back those bar crawls.

Like, they did it once and then it stopped. Like, we should bring that back.

Too much of a top signal.

It's gonna be the number one most valuable company for a long time. Yeah, like, sorry, Alphabet, it's not gonna Yeah, we should bring those, those bar earnings parties back.

That sounds great. Well, we will talk to you soon. Have a great day. See you. All right.

Thanks, guys. Good to see you again.

Before we bring in our next guest, I want to actually pull up this Wall Street Journal article, see how SpaceX is about to eclipse every other blockbuster IPO. Scroll down on this because they have a beautiful visualization of IPOs over time. You can see the first graph. These are IPOs over the last 7 years. Ranging from $0 billion raised, probably $10 million, $100 million, all the way up to $2 billion. Continue to scroll down and you'll see what happens as the blockbuster IPOs start stacking up. You get Airbnb, who we're talking to the founder of just in a few minutes, ARM, Cerebris, Uber, and Porsche. And then as you keep going, Saudi Aramco comes in at $25 billion if you keep scrolling down, and then eventually SpaceX comes in to dwarf them all at $80 billion, to make everything else look like a flat line on the chart. Absolutely blockbuster IPO and should make for a ton of great takes and analysis. And it'll be a fun, fun day on the timeline when SpaceX goes public soon. We're getting the S-1 any day now. Well, our next guest, Ahmad from Mercury, is here with a big funding announcement. So we'll bring him in. From the waiting room into the TVP and Ultradrama Mod. How are you doing?

Yeah, great to be here. Am I not going to get the gong?

Oh, you'll get the gong, but you got to give us the news. Tell us what happened.

You got to give us what happened.

All right, there we go. How much did you raise? Yeah, we just raised $200 million, uh, $550 million valuation. There we go. TCB is leading, uh, so excited about that answer today.

That's fantastic. What was the traction that unlocked this new fundraising round? What was the catalyst?

You know, we've just been kind of grinding away for the last— what is it, 7 years since we launched? Overnight success. Seen a lot of growth in Q1, especially about 2.5x our Q1 last year in terms of applications. I don't know if you've seen the stats, but there's been a lot of new business formation. Yeah, a lot of, you know, companies being built using AI. So obviously we, we hear about like the these big startups in AI, but there's also just normal businesses being built with AI being a big catalyst. And we saw, yeah, big increase, 2.5x over last year, which— and last year was a big year for us.

How are you reaching those customers? What are the key funnels that draw in these new businesses? Because they don't exist. It's hard to reach out to them before. You have to be very aware.

The other crazy thing for us is most of our growth is organic, but even the percentage organic has been growing for us. So even though we're growing We're getting more and more organic, which is unexpected. And the other big channel for us is LLM recommendations. So if you go into your favorite LLM and you say, what bank should I use for my startup? Mercury is often the recommendation. So that's the, yeah, we try to deliver the best customer experience possible. And because people really love Mercury, they tell their friends about it. And that's like an unstoppable for us.

What is, Is like 90% of the reason that you guys are recommended so highly by LLMs is just because people recommend Mercury so highly? Like, I can't be— I'm just trying to get at, is it like your team was like, hey, we should really optimize this, or it was just— Yeah, I think it's really hard.

Like, there's a whole thing called GEO, which is like all about optimizing for LLMs. But at the end of the day, you know, if it's on Reddit, it's on X, like if all the content is recommending Mercury, then that feeds feeds into the algorithm.

Yeah, it helps to have been doing press for years. There's a huge advantage to being in business 7 years, not so long that you're the, the articles are about the downfall or like the, how you're a dinosaur. All the coverage is that it's new and interesting and valuable and worth checking out. And so that surfaces. How are you thinking about going deeper in those LLM recommendations and sort of like the agentic commerce of actually opening an account? Is that something that's on your roadmap? Horizon to integrate our solutions?

It's kind of interesting thinking about like the LLMs using Mercury. So we actually launched Mercury CLI. We launched, that was a month or so ago and we launched an MCP actually in December. And our growth on like those is like through the roof. So tons of people are using Claude Code or Cowork or ChatGPT to connect to Mercury. And then, yeah, I think the, well, not for everyone, but for a lot of people, they kind of running their whole business and their life in AI now. And, you know, if you can pull in creating an invoice or like approving a payment and it's all done within your existing workflows, that's really powerful. And I think if you— there's a flywheel between like if you build great tools that AI can use, it actually recommends those tools even more. I mean, that's partly why like, you know, people like Supabase and like those kind of tools.

Yeah. Then how do you deal with the tension of like you could build a dashboard visualizing payments that are made into a bank account over a period of time. You could also expose an API that allows me to suck out all the data and vibe code my own dashboard the way I like it. There's probably demand for both. Do you just have to do both? Do you pick a lane?

I think for us it's like, do both. So we're building both kind of the CLI, and we have a whole team that's improving all the features available via the API and those services. But we also have another team that's working on, and we just launched Mercury Insights, which summarizes your transactions, gives you like kind of AI insights on end, lets you talk to your transactions. And then later this year, we're launching Mercury Command where you can do kind of complex workflows like, hey, I just hired someone, set them up in payroll and create a card and do all of that without me having to kind of click around all of the kind of Mercury surfaces. And I think number one, I don't know exactly where the world's going to go, right? Like maybe everyone's going to be using AI assistants to do everything, or it's going to be a combination. So we want to service both of it. And B, you know, if you think about like the gap between us and kind of these incumbent banks, yeah, even whether it's like a mobile app or like searching for all your transactions, whatever is, you know, Mercury's been far ahead. But if AI keeps changing the world and like, yeah, people's expectation of interfaces and things like that changes, we want to be at the forefront of that. And that's going to increase the spread between what people get from Mercury versus what they get from the incumbents.

Yeah, I was reading an article in The Economist a couple of weeks ago about stablecoins going through a boom last year and then going through a bit of a winter or maybe just stable volumes through the earlier part part of this year. What are you seeing in terms of demand or tickets or usage of stablecoin-related features in fintech broadly?

Yeah, I think it's a lot more important on like a global basis. So I think if you're in the US and you're sending money to a US business or US consumer, you know, wires, ACH, all of the cards, all of that works pretty smoothly. If you're paying money internationally or you know, you're not in the US, and you want to have like a stable currency. That's where USDC and these other stablecoins are doing really well. So, you know, we don't currently support it natively, but lots of our customers use, you know, some of these kind of stablecoin services. And we'll probably have kind of at least payment features that are based on stablecoin, especially for those kind of international payments where it is particularly useful. So I don't necessarily see it as a replacement for the US banking system in the US. I think it's more of like this kind of global connectivity layer.

Is— oh, sorry, Jordi. Why was this year the right time to get into payroll?

You know, we've been expanding our services. So obviously we're known best for banking, but we've had a corporate credit card for 3 years and that's growing really fast. We have a bill pay and invoicing solution. And, you know, over time I really want Mercury to be the place that you do most of your business finances, right? It's kind of annoying. Like if the money's here and your users are here and your finance team is here, you want to have all of that kind of in one place. So yeah, we made an acquisition in payroll. We acquired a company called Central. They're running, we're continuing to run them and we're going to over time make it more like a fully integrated Mercury payroll solution. But yeah, payroll is like a big category. You know, it's kind of annoying right now when you're using a payroll provider, you have to send money. It kind of sits around for 4 days before it shows up on your employees. And Central has done a really good job with kind of AI first. Like they have this whole interface where you can do a ton of things in Slack. And we're kind of taking some of that learning and putting in our own kind of command launch.

Yeah. Is the AI boom helping you sort of rethink product roadmap, expansion differently than a few years ago? Like when I think about neobanks, fintech, modern technology-enabled banks, I think like you could eventually do auto loans, mortgages, consumer, you could do all sorts of the insurance. There's so many different products in the financial technology world. I know that there's incredible value to focus. At the same time, there's this foundational unlock block in being able to move very quickly into new markets. How are you wrestling with that tension?

You know, I think number one, we want to talk to our customers and see what they really want. I don't want to like invent things that they might want kind of thing. It's definitely accelerating. You know, I think the two vectors are like, it accelerates software development. It doesn't necessarily make like kind of the more financial, like it doesn't make lending that much better, faster or whatever. Maybe you could underwrite a little better, there's still like kind of limitations, but you can build software, especially new software, much quicker. So definitely thinking about that, and like we're already seeing an acceleration in, in kind of new software launches we're doing. I think the other thing that's kind of interesting is, you know, interfaces tend to get cluttered over time, but AI has a decluttering effect. Like you can kind of personalize it to someone's need, and like, yeah, I really think the future is people will are not trying to do a specific thing, but they kind of just talk about a problem. They're like, hey, I just need to make payroll, help me think it through kind of thing. So you can go a level above, solve the problem rather than be a feature, which I think has a decluttering effect to interfaces. That's good.

Yeah, it's so amazing. I just think back to 10 years ago at this point, starting to build companies and just seeing how many things I expected to be intuitive. Like, I expected my bank to be able to help me pay my employees, because, like, the function of a bank is to, like, hold money and let you do things with it. And yet, obviously, you know, it took some time for you guys to enter payroll, and then all these other things, like, just the concept of getting an invoice, wanting to pay it, like, you really should be as simple as, like, dragging it get somewhere, and then that's it, right? And so there's all these things that, like, right in this moment, there's going to be an entire generation of entrepreneurs that only knows this completely frictionless business finance, and I'm very happy for them. And I'm happy for all of us that had to go through, do it the hard way for so long.

Yeah, when I started Mercury, that's actually what got me excited, that after you build a bank account, there's so much more to do after that. I really didn't want to— this is my fourth company, so I really didn't want to do this thing where you build a thing, and then all you do is incrementally improve it a little bit over a decade. I really wanted to do something where the start is just the start, and it's kind of a platform to build a lot. So I'm excited that we're finally getting to build that kind of multi-product strategy.

Last question, deployment pace for angel investing. Are you accelerating it? Are you decelerating? What are you doing on the angel investing side?

Maybe I'm a little old school, but like when I think when the valuations are the highest and the hype is the highest, you should like not accelerate. You should like, you know, we saw 2021, like I'm trying to keep like a continuous pace. Like I think it's total—

Don't you know this time is different?

Yeah, I think that like there's a reason for the hype and there's really exciting companies being built, but I think it's gonna be even more fun when the valuations come down after the hype dies down. And you can like then deploy it, you know? It was crazy no one was deploying in 2022 and 2023 when like it was the same companies at like a massive discount.

Yeah, yeah, no, I mean the smart funds were and a lot of great companies made it through, grew even bigger and are bigger than they've ever been as you are. So congratulations on all the progress. Thank you for coming on the show. We will talk to you soon. Yeah, have a good rest of your day. Goodbye. There have been a number of AI images hitting the type— Timeline 1 was of Peter Thiel eating ice cream in Buenos Aires. He has been spotted at a chess match. I think that image was not AI. This one is AI generated by Cat McGee, but it still sparked a bunch of funny reactions. One of them, the question you need to be asking is what delicious ice cream is almost nobody eating?

Of course, the Thielian question. Mint chip. Is mint chip properly rated or underrated?

Mint chip might be underrated. I think it gets thrown in with the chocolate category. It's sort of second fiddle to the vanilla, strawberry, chocolate.

I was always a mint chip kid.

I like mint chip. I was always strawberry. I like strawberry ice cream.

Mint chip's good.

But I think as you zoom in on this AI image, you can tell that it's AI. It's just too crystal clear, too well-lit for someone to snap a picture unnoticed. In Buenos Aires at an ice cream parlor. This would be, this would require professional lighting to get something like this out of a camera on the fly if you saw someone. Zero to yum is what they say. Anyway.

Question, John, that I was asking you this morning. Yeah. Do you think it's better to rest on your laurels or sleep at the wheel? I think I have my answer, but I want to hear yours.

I think in the modern era, sleeping at the wheel is increasingly safe because of self-driving cars. You can be sleeping in a Waymo. You could be sitting in the front seat. I don't know. Do they let you sit in the front seat of a Waymo?

I don't think so. Maybe if there's a fourth. Yeah. Can you? Not behind the wheel.

Not behind the wheel. But what if I'm in the back and I wiggle my body through the front two seats, sit in the front, it'll stop the car? They're gonna come on the phone. They will? Stop. Okay, well, then it seems like it's increasingly difficult to sleep at the wheel, and so perhaps resting on your laurels would be the better option.

I think so, because it allows you to— one, it's obviously comfortable. Yes. Quite relaxing. Yes. But just because you're resting doesn't mean you can't get back in the game.

Yeah, also resting on your laurels implies that you have you have laurels to begin with, whereas sleeping at the wheel, you just have a car. Yeah, it could be—

it might not even be your car. It's also very Lindy, right? People have been doing this for thousands of years.

You can imagine a Roman emperor resting on— resting on their laurels, but they weren't sleeping at the wheel. They hadn't invented the wheel. They barely invented the wheel. I think they had the wheel. Well, they would ride on top of wheels. They were— they were planning to reinvent the wheel, but no one had a wagon that had a wheel that would steer the wagon. You had reins. They would take the horse by the reins. Isn't that the phrase? Take the bull by the horns? What's the reins idiom? There's some sort of reins idiom. Anyway.

Yeah, no, I think personally—

Resting on your laurels implies that you have laurels to rest on. Sleeping at the wheel means that you just got behind the wheel.

You could be in a sudden death situation. Yes, much riskier. High risk, low reward. Almost, very, very.

Plenty of people rest on their laurels and just fade into obscurity. They aren't met with true downfall if they're resting on their laurels.

But sometimes you just rest, recharge, get back in the game.

But ideally you avoid both. Ideally you avoid both sleeping at the wheel and resting on your laurels.

Imagine just a bunch of laurels in your driver's seat and you're just sitting.

You could be doing both at the same time. You could be doing both.

That is the riskiest possible scenario. 'Cause you're gonna be the most relaxed. Highest likelihood of careening off the road.

You wanna avoid both. You wanna avoid both. What do you think of this desk? Herman Miller launched a gaming desk. People are saying it's tasteful. A tasteful gaming setup for once. They thought it was impossible.

You personally find pretty much all gaming setups tasteful. Extremely tasteful. It's a big part of your culture.

I love a gaming desk. I don't know. The thing is that I don't know this, watching this video of the Coyle gaming desk, it doesn't scream that tasteful to me. It seems like a minor upgrade, probably the best gaming desk out there. Seems very functional. I also, I don't know why there's a back panel there. I don't know what that's for. Is that for passing wires through perhaps? But how would you rate this gaming desk? Is it tasteful?

I like it. I like the red coil. I like a pop of color. Okay, a little color in there. I love that. That color red is one of my favorite colors.

Maybe it's—

yeah, I think I have a, uh, I have a, uh—

what is the coil for? Oh, it takes the cable down so you can plug it in because it's adjustable. Almost certainly power. I feel like they could just thread that through the leg and it wouldn't even be there. but I guess it adds a pop of color.

Chad is saying overdesigned. Overdesigned, we'll see.

Herman Miller, Herman Miller has a whole gaming division, I suppose. Anyway, you gotta remember, this is from Will DePugh, you gotta remember that there's some guy out there who's the Michael Jordan of steel processing. He's on a generational run right now. Everyone sees their niche as the center of the world. So many greats you'll never hear of. The Michael Jordan of steel processing. I was saying, we gotta find him, dig him up, get him on the show. We've had the Michael Jordan of acquiring rare parcels of land in Montana on the show. You gotta have him back on. That was fantastic.

He's gotta be pretty excited for this upcoming round of IPOs. Data center buildouts?

A lot of, I don't know. Anyway.

A lot of those IPO.

We can come back to the land, the land strategies, because we have our next guest here, Brian Chesky from Airbnb, back on the show. Show. Only a few weeks since we talked to you last. Welcome back. Thank you so much for taking the time. How are you doing?

Hey guys, how you doing?

Good to be here again. Great to see you. We're not in— I'd be better if we were in a blimp.

It'd be better if we were in a blimp, but we're running soon. Show closer to hanging out on a blimp together. Uh, give us the update. What's going on in Airbnb world? So we announced a few things.

Uh, the first thing we announced is a whole bunch of new services, um, probably starting with grocery delivery. Uh, a lot of people love that Airbnbs have kitchens. So now when You book an Airbnb, you can have groceries waiting for you in the Airbnb. A number of people tell us that if you go to Rome, it's hard to get an Uber. So now there's going to be someone that can welcome you at the airport and pick you up and take you to Airbnb. We also announced finally car rentals. A long time coming. And so now you can get a car rental on Airbnb. And we also announced that we have now boutique and independent hotels. If you book a boutique or independent hotel, we are creating a price match guarantee. So if you see a lower price anywhere else, we will give you the difference back in Airbnb credit and we'll give you another 15% towards the next booking of anything on Airbnb. So those are just a few of the things that we announced. Really, the basic idea is just continue to listen to customers, continue to listen to our guests, listen to our hosts, and just keep expanding and perfecting the service and trying to make Airbnb a bit of an ecosystem of other developers and other apps.

Yeah, this feels like the— the fruition coming to reality of like a lot of the pitch that you gave last year. What was involved in actually getting to this point? How much of this is predicated on new software development, new product initiatives versus partnerships with existing areas? Like a lot of these feel like they touch the real world. So it's not just an extra line of code or an extra panel or button in the app.

Yeah, it's a good question. That's a good, a good question, guys. The app that most people see is maybe something like, call it 20% of Airbnb. There's also a host app. But again, most of the work of Airbnb is what happens in the real world. And I think I said last time that we spent a lot of time— imagine like you're living in a one-story house and then suddenly a bunch of people want to move into your house and you have to add like a second, third, fourth floor. Yeah, but you didn't build the foundation for a four-story building. And so we had to do over the last few years is kind of rebuild the foundation. It really was only built for homes. It was not built to do other things. Amazon had this problem in the late '90s. They were built on ISBNs for books and they had to basically take their website and turn it into a bunch of primitives. So we basically already done that work. To give you an example, it took us 16 years to finally expand beyond homes. It took us 2 years to develop service experiences. It took us 8 months to develop groceries, and it took us only 2 months to develop Luggage storage, airport pickups, and car rentals. So basically looking at the time to launch from conception to launch, we can now have an idea and put it into a market sometimes within like a couple of weeks to a month. And what that should mean is instead of announcing 1 or 2 things a year, eventually we can announce dozens of things a year. Yeah. So cars, why?

Obviously a hard thing to do, but I'm sure people have been asking this for, for, you know, a decade now. —why did you choose at some point not to maybe listen to your customers? Why are you making those— why was now the right time? Because it just feels like such an obvious thing. I'm booking a trip somewhere, give me one click to add a car. Obviously, there's more that needs to happen on the back end, but why?

Yeah, another great question. And I ask myself that, like, why didn't we do certain things sooner? And if I could, I would have. You know, I remember that one of my early investors said starting a company is like jumping off a cliff and assembling the airplane on the way down. I never realized when I started a company that— I never realized. I thought if you hire thousands of people, suddenly you'd have all these extra people to do all these extra things. Yeah, but when you're— when we were in hypergrowth, we basically just had most of the people just trying to keep the lights on. And we really struggled in the 2000s. 2010s during our hottest moment to really expand beyond our core business. We tried in 2012, didn't really work. Tried in 2016, didn't really work. We finally thought we cracked it in 2019, and then suddenly the pandemic hit. We lost 80% of our business in 8 weeks, and we said, oh man, we don't have time to do this right now. We got to go back to our core business. So we've kind of had 3 different starts, and we tried it before. We just never really were able to stick the landing. I think this time we finally can. So yeah, people have been asking for this for more than a decade. In fact, 15 years. 2011, we began thinking about it. And now, I hope— I'm happy to say that hopefully going forward, we won't have to wait 15 years for another service. It will be— they'll be coming really fast now. Yeah.

And, and, uh, how, how is it working under the hood? Are you partnering? Like, is this a, uh, also kind of like sharing economy player? Are you partnering with car rental services or both? I imagine you want to—

Yeah, it's going to be a mix of things. There's not really a lot of global providers. So we're gonna be working with a number of different partners, um, that be able to, that can fulfill this. Um, some of the services like Bounce, like we don't do luggage storage. They have 15,000 locations, almost as many that are Starbucks. So that's more like an app store integration. And then sometimes we have to build the services first party with our own host because they don't offer it. With car rentals, we're basically able to partner with a bunch of companies. Um, no one company covers every geography in the world. We're in more than Coca-Cola. So you have to patch a bunch of things together.

I think over time we'll probably get a little more countries than Coca-Cola.

I think that we were at least last time we checked.

What is, what is, what is Coca-Cola doing? They're asleep at the wheel. I know.

Come on, we need to go founder mode.

I think we're in every country but North Korea. Yeah. Iran. Yeah. Syria, Russia, Belarus. Maybe there's one other. So we're just about every other country.

Yeah. The other thing with cars that and as I was just, like, thinking about that, as kind of Turo came on the map, the— one of the— and I love cars, so I was always— I thought very briefly of, well, maybe I should get a bunch of cars that I like and maybe turn it into a little business. I quickly realized that, like, it's, like, fundamentally a wildly different business, because if I have a property and I put it on Airbnb, even if people are staying in it 365 days a year, If I buy at the right price and in a great market, it will continue to appreciate. Cars are the exact opposite, and it's just like a wildly different financial equation. And so it made— that always made sense to me just from that lens where the supply side is like incurring some like heavy, heavy costs associated with actually like supplying, you know, providing that supply versus on the Airbnb side. You know, again, you can get a bunch of rental income and not incur any, you know, significant losses associated with the asset.

Yeah, I mean, I think that's a really, really good point. And usually people's second biggest asset after their home is their car. Sure. And so I think now we have people's time, we have their homes, we have their cars. We would like to move to a lot of different other categories over time. I think you'll see a couple dozen other categories coming over the next the next year or two on Airbnb, essentially building this entire ecosystem of services. But you're right. I mean, I think maybe one way to think about Airbnb is like just getting more capacity utilization out of assets. You know, anything that's empty, it could be further monetized and the world could be a bit more efficient. It could be cheaper to own a car. It could be cheaper to own a house if you could defer the cost by sharing with other people. That was basically how it started. I couldn't afford to pay rent, but that doesn't limit itself to homes, as you mentioned. It could be anything, cars, it could be boats, it could be equipment you have laying around, it could be kind of anything.

How do you think about the previous services that have tied into Airbnb? Was there ever a power law distribution in those, any few services? We've talked about, you know, fitness trainers when you're in a town, or private chefs, or anything that can add to an experience. A kayaking tour, a hiking tour. Was there a power law distribution in those? Are you seeing breakout successes in those? Like what's the shape of that side of the business these days?

Yeah, so basically we learned two things with these services. I'll talk about services and experiences. There are three services, we launch at 10, three breakout hits. The three breakout hits are photography. A lot of people want photos on their vacation. And obviously if you're a family of four, like one of you is not in the photo or you're giving your camera to someone else and you know you want to remember these trips. So having a professional photographer take your photos for 30 minutes, it's a pretty reasonable cost. That's very popular. Chefs, chefs are not as popular in very urban areas, but like let's say you go to Lake Tahoe, you have a big kitchen, maybe you have groceries, maybe you don't want to cook. A chef could come over. There's not a lot of restaurants there. And then the third one's massage, especially again in vacation rental or villa destinations. Massages are very popular. Other than that, it's really geography by geography. So we see like in Sayulita, it's a different kind of experience than, say, in like the Caribbean. So it really depends geography by geography. Mm-hmm. With regards to experiences, we're seeing a couple things. Number one, no surprise landmarks. People, the first time you go to a city, you wanna see a landmark. But the thing we learned is the second time you go to a city, you don't wanna see a landmark. You wanna experience food. And the third time you experience a city, now you want to get inside access. So a big thing we learned is, is this your first, second, or third time to the city, or do you live there? And depending upon the answer to the question depends on the type of experience we offer you. This was a nuance that we didn't really appreciate the first time around, and now we do. And I think my prediction is the thing that will make service experiences really big is people will start booking them in their own city. That's when the TAM goes by, you know, by a factor of 10. And not to say it'll be every day, but it just makes it a lot bigger, Tam.

Yeah, yeah, just clicked for me that, you know, one of the challenges of all the marketplaces like photography, chef marketplaces, massage, all of them, we don't, I can't even really think of their names, even though there was like venture-funded companies in those categories, because the second you hire a chef, they're literally preparing you food. You immediately develop like trust and a relationship, and so, in, if you book, find a chef in your hometown— You're talking about disintermediation. You're going to have this massive disintermediation.

And also, like, there's economies of scale. If you're just the private chef booking company, very hard to support the entire operation, the back office. But Airbnb is a big company. This can be one of many features in the— the features that you build can be flexible. Yeah, but when you're—

with travel, it's like, yeah, I want a photographer here. I want a chef here. Yeah, yeah.

So— You bring up two points. 2 points. I'll, I'll run both points. So one thing is most services, there's not even one app in the world. Yeah. So if you want to get a massage in the United States, you might use an app like Zeel. But if you want to get a massage in Korea, I don't even know the app. It's probably a Korean company. And if you want to go to Brazil, it's going to be a different company. So it's not even possible for most people to know which app to use in which country. And so being able to aggregate all that demand is great. And these apps, these developers love it because is we basically are their international expansion strategy. Another— much of these companies, the hardest challenge they have is growing internationally. And we say, well, we can introduce your brand to a global audience. Well, now let's talk about locals. Yes, I don't— if you're going to do a repeat service, we don't want to charge 15-20%. We're going to have to decide a business model, and maybe there is no commission, or it's a very, very low commission, and maybe the value there is just we make your life easy easier. And I don't— I think this brings up a larger point, which is we don't need to monetize every experience on Airbnb. The best thing is have a great relationship, add value, and know that there's enough high-value assets we can make money on. And we don't need to try to get every last dollar. We just really want people to love our service. And as you know, you know, we generate quite a bit of free cash flow. So, you know, we're one of the more profitable companies as a free— thank you— as a free cash flow standpoint. So we are able to pass a lot of value onto customers.

Yeah, I think, you know, that framing as like a concierge for the world where like if you're staying at a hotel, like the concierge is not always thinking like, okay, this person wants something to do today. How do I get the maximum amount of value out of them in this moment, right? 'Cause then you'd always send them to, well, why don't you eat at this restaurant on the property? Or why don't you do this thing on the property? But just like actually taking a positive-sum view and just know that like you want to be core to someone's experience wherever they are in the world, I think is—

I like concierge for the world, by the way. That's like a very good slogan, actually.

Coinage. I love it.

It's all yours.

So maybe this is a random pivot, but the total solar eclipse is happening August 12th, 2026. Oh, I want to know. It feels like it's driving a lot of travel broadly. And I wanna know, like, do these special events—

I gotta say, first of all, like, I feel like every time there's like one of these things, it's like, this will never happen again for 600 years. And then it happens in like 2 years.

No, no, no, no, no.

It's a very specific thing that happens every 600 years, but there's a lot of things.

Yeah, so a couple years ago it happened in Texas, and this time it's happening in Greenland, Iceland, Portugal, and Spain. And so there is a lot of travel And I've heard stats from other companies. And I'm just wondering about these like big events. First, like how much do they show up in the data? How much do you see them? And then second, like what are you doing to like amplify and get the most out of these? Let your customers know because you frame this as like sometimes the best experience is like when you know it's the first time visiting a place, second time, third time. But at the same time, as a user, there's this tension between I love it when a company me knows something about me before I have to fill out a form. But also it gets a little creepy if they know too much about me. And this like this weird tension where I want you to know, but I don't want you to tell me that, you know, and I don't want to fill out the form, but I don't want you to spy on me, but I sort of do want you to spy on me. So walk me through all of that.

Okay. So yeah, two parts. I'll do the solar eclipse and then we'll talk about actually personalization without being creepy. Maybe it's the point. Yeah. Okay. So on the solar eclipse in 2024, I think it was the spring or I don't know when it was. In 2024, we were able to see a heat map. So yes, you saw in the data and we were able to see a heat map of the exact path of the solar eclipse. And you can look at a heat map of all of our bookings and anyone that was in that line of the eclipse, you saw a massive increase in bookings. When the Taylor Swift Eras Tour came out, you can literally follow the tour from the data on Airbnb. When the World Cup came in Paris— sorry, the Olympics came in Paris. 7,000 people stayed in Airbnb. That's like 8, 9 Olympic stadiums worth of people. In Milan, 200,000 people stayed in Milan and Cortina for the Olympics earlier this year. The World Cup's coming up in Mexico, US, Canada. We're expecting that to be the biggest event in Airbnb history. You're actually hitting on a really key point. Maybe the reason Airbnb exists is this weird phenomenon where people list their homes for an event. Most people have only intention of listing one time, but about 50% of the people continue hosting. Yeah. And so it's kind of a hook. And a lot of people like, I don't want to host, but they do it once, they make a bunch of money, they realize it's not weird, and they keep doing it. If it wasn't for this phenomenon, there may not have been an Airbnb. We used events to grow. So that is basically a core part of our strategy, whether it's Coachella or Lollapalooza.

Airbnb future. I should be able to go buy, I should be able to go see events that I know are gonna happen, Olympics, World Cup, and basically buy and then resell. No, I'm kidding.

Oh, and then I wanna answer the second part of, I think, John's question, which is personalization without being creepy. So right now, I think most websites and most apps don't really ask you questions. They infer things, right? They think that if you ask somebody a question, That's friction. And so for 25 years, this is Amazon, this is Instagram, this is basically every app, including Airbnb. We're mostly just looking at what you click on, what you book, your prior behavior, and we try to infer based on that what you want in the future. I think going forward, we're going to go beyond that. We're going to do two things. The first thing we're going to do is we're going to ask you questions. That's what an agent does. An agent asks you questions. So you're concierge for the world. The world should ask you questions. You went to a travel concierge, but they, they didn't ask you a question. That'd be pretty weird. So I think that's the social contract of the app is more conversational. We're going to get more information. But the other thing is designing preferences. We found that people are fine giving us their information if they know why, where it's going, that it's vaulted and what we're going to do with it. So we're going to develop a preferences panel like we announced today. One of the things I'm most proud of is the design of our privacy page. Most people, they either don't care about the privacy page and like the people that it's like their entry-level work or they make it sometimes, sometimes they even make it purposely hard. But then I ultimately that erodes trust. So we're making preferences. I want to basically build a preferences library where we show you here's all the stuff we know about you. Do you want to edit anything? Do you want to add it? And here's what we're going to show to whom. And you can say show this to the host. This is only available to an agent. This no human can see, it's vaulted, but the app can see it, and eventually maybe it's encrypted.

So that's kind of where we want to go. Mm-hmm. 2034 total solar eclipse in Egypt. You can stand at the pyramids and watch it. Book your Airbnb futures.

I'm going to go— I'm going to go and offer cash today.

You should start buying property all over Egypt.

I love it. Last question. What's the last— What's the last major fitness or health unlock that you've had?

And then we'll let you go. Oh, very good question. Fitness or health unlock.

Could be a habit, could be a supplement, could be anything. Great question. Sleep protocol. Actually, okay.

If you're sleep deprived, I've been taking creatine, 5 grams since I was like 17. But I read that they did some studies that if you didn't get a good night's sleep, you can take up to 20 grams of creatine and you are nearly as alert as if you got a full night's sleep. And I don't know, it seems to work. And so if you don't get a good night's sleep, instead of taking a normal dose of creatine, yeah, take a much higher dose. Um, the only other thing I'd say is, um, for those listening, I'm a big fan of compound movements. I think the most important exercise, if you only do one, is the squat.

Um, and I, uh, sorry, Brian, I don't mean to laugh you, we have these sound effects.

So John, talk— it makes it sound like this. Can you push it? It makes my voice sound like this. And Jordi was doing it to you during that last bit, and it sounds ridiculous. Yeah, I really like compound lifts. Compound lifts. That's, that's good.

That's exactly how I'd want to be able to say it when I'm talking about squash. By the way, before we go, I just want to tell you something. Please. Are you guys still interested interested in doing the Blimp experience?

Absolutely, yes, 100%. We're ready, we're ready.

We packed our bags.

We've been talking to brands, we've been talking to people, and I want you to know that we're going to make this happen.

I'm very excited. We're going to make it happen. The team is pumped up right now. Everyone's fired up.

We're fired up. Congrats to the whole team on all the new releases. Thank you very much, guys. Great progress. Always fun.

Have a great rest of your day. Congratulations. Goodbye.

First chat guest. The first chat guest, very fitting. Yes. So unfortunately the chat effect, the guest cannot hear it. Only you can and the two of us, but we're going to keep using it strategically.

It's a really good effect. I was so skeptical when you launched these buttons. I was like, can we get the comedic timing to work? Will it hit? Turns out we can. Yes, it's working beautifully. Well, our next guest, get that button ready because I think we're going to be using it again. It's Marcus Malone from Minted, New York. Did I say your last name correctly or did I mispronounce that? Bodge. It's Milioni. Milioni. I'm sorry.

Yeah, I've been getting Malone my whole life, so it's fine.

I'm used to it. It was written sort of tiny on my sheet, but dude, it's incredible.

It's an honor to be on the show. Way, way overdue. I've been following your journey for a long time now. You've been absolutely on a tear and yeah, we're excited to have you. Since it's your first time.

Yeah, zoom out for us.

Zoom out for us. You know, all that stuff.

All right, so I don't know how far back you want me to go.

Let's go all the way to the LAX days at least.

All right, so I played lacrosse in college.

I played at St. Joe's University in Philly. From there, moved to New York. After I graduated, I was working at a smaller regional bank doing commercial real estate debt. Yeah. Until like a year or a few months into COVID. As COVID started, Minted kind of spawned after I was posting on social media, Instagram, TikTok. Were you just doing your own accounts first?

Or were you thinking like, I'm gonna build something, or was it experimental? Like, what was the actual flow? Well, I was a little bored during COVID I was at my parents' house.

I thought I was gonna be there for a while.

What, you didn't love regional banking? What's— Yeah. We love regional banking here.

Yeah, so I thought I was taking a long weekend at my parents' house and COVID would like blow over over a long weekend. So I just started posting about things I liked, mainly around like fashion and fitness on Instagram and TikTok, and then the brand kind of spawned out of that.

Yeah. What was the first format? Direct to camera, like scripted, unscripted? Yeah, like yapping, get ready with me.

Phone in front of my face, yapping. I guess that was mainly TikTok, and then Instagram was more just like outfit photos. Okay. Like I liked putting outfits together. Yeah, yeah.

And then what was growth like, linear? Was there a key turning point? A lot of times, like with my YouTube, I started a YouTube channel during COVID very similar story. And for the first year it was like 1,000 views. And then I cracked the code on one video, correct structure, and it started, it went, I think it got 60,000 views, which was like an insane takeoff by comparison to the 1,000 views that I was averaging. And I credit that a lot to, I had the editing dialed, I had the script out, but I really got like the structure and the title and the thumbnail all like packaged up so it like could fly. And I'm wondering like what the process was like for growing on TikTok and Instagram.

I mean, I kind of viewed it as a reps game. Yeah. I told myself at least on like the short-form video stuff, since I had no background in it, I was like, I'll just do 3 videos a day for 365 straight days. Yeah. And by that point, point, you know, you start to see— you get feedback from like the analytics. And so after a certain point, you're like, okay, well, this did well here, let me like, you know, try some variation of this next time. Um, but really, yeah, it was just like a reps game. I would try any sort of video style, but a lot of it was just talking. And I think at that time there was a lot of like— it was still a dancing app, right? Like people were just doing dances, and I wasn't doing dances, I was trying to just provide some form of value to the viewer. And you see it a lot more now, but at that time, it was kind of like not as prevalent. So I think—

yeah, I think of you— I mean, I think of you as like the, the— a new generation of like founder-led company, which there was like, you know, great companies have almost always been, uh, well, every company started by founder. But you're like the first generation that was just like hyper online. You're in public. You're—

You're building your personal brand.

You're building your personal brand as well as like people are following along building the company, also like your own journey as like an athlete and doing those things together and just having this like hyper presence where historically a founder, even if they were pretty online, they might pop up and do like an interview every few months and people would be able to tune in there. They might post like, post a little, you know, somewhat actively on Instagram, but it wasn't like 3 video, 3 like medium-form videos a day for a year kind of thing. And I just feel like that built so much momentum because there was like multiple things to latch on. People could latch on to like, how are you? How's your, how's your actual running going? Like, I, I, you know, remember video after video where you're like pushing yourself super, super hard. And then there's also like some people can latch on to the business side, which you're like giving people behind the scenes and really making people feel like a part of building that, which has ultimately led to where you're at right now. You had this, uh, drop this week that, uh, I hit you up yesterday. Must have been extremely, uh, chaotic. You guys sold out, uh, so quickly that you were going back through, like trying to identify like bot, like people that were botting it to resell. Yeah. Yeah, take us through a bunch. But yeah, take us through, but like before we get there, like kind of the key moments along the journey, you start out, you're just making videos. At what point were you like, oh, I can quit, like when did you quit your job?

I gotta make some money off this.

Yeah, so it was like month 8 of kind of after we started, started January of 2021. And then by month 8, we had kind of had 4 large releases under, under my belt, and it was starting to become too much to try to juggle between real work and not like letting anything like slack there, because obviously that paid the bills. But I remember talking to my dad and trying to figure out, okay, what's, you know, a good exit plan? And so we came up with like a revenue number that we would hit over the next 3 months, and if we hit that, then you know what, we're going to take the jump and quit our job.

And so, the very next release, we hit it in like 5 minutes, and I remember being at home and being like, "Well, I guess we're just going to—" Well, that was part of what must have been nerve-wracking quitting, right, because it was a drops-based approach, and so you have super spiky revenue, so it's So you're thinking like, okay, well, if this drop goes well, and this drop goes well, and this drop goes well—

It doesn't feel like a paycheck every 2 weeks.

Yeah, it doesn't feel like it's streaming in.

No, I mean, you're also betting the farm the entire time. Every single drop, I would just run the bank account to $0 on production, and hope that it went well. I guess at any point, it could have blown up in my face and gone to zero.

Yeah. So that happens. when you're looking back, what was the next significant moment? You're like, okay, this seems like a real business, people like what we're doing here.

I would say that following Christmas, like that December, so 12 months in, we had the largest release of the company's history. It was going into Christmas season and holiday season, and we released, and I remember being so blown away by the number on the screen, but then also, realizing like, okay, all this inventory is in my parents' garage and we have to ship all this out as fast as possible. Yeah, so I need all hands on deck. I've got like, I've got my, my brother, my sister, my mom, my dad, like everybody is there packing. And I'm like, this is gonna take us 2 days, it's like no problem. And it took us like 6 days of packing every day, like through Christmas might have ruined Christmas, I'm not even sure, but it was so new, everyone was so excited that like, I mean, obviously toward the end we were definitely getting on each other, but it was so new and exciting for everybody that yeah, it kind of just, it was a blur.

And then this whole time like running is blowing up, running got cool. You clearly thought it was cool before you started the brand, but I think a lot of people realized that maybe it was cool was cool, uh, you know, around 2022. Is that like when it— when you felt like it was really becoming part of popular culture in a bigger way? It was.

I mean, yeah, it was really becoming part of my life then too. I think I probably started in '21 and then really picked up and wanted to start racing.

What were you running from?

Honestly, a lot of different things. Probably now that I think about it, but yeah, I mean, like, it started like everybody else. You sign up for a half marathon, you're like, okay, I gotta train, and I'm gonna give myself a time goal. And then, like anything else, it's a sickness, and then it just gets worse and worse.

Did you start— do you still feel pressure? Were you feeling pressure to be the best runner out of your customer base? Like, I mean, like, I feel like you're you're kind of running two races, you're building a business, and then I can imagine it really gets in your head because you start sharing some times that you're running and then you're competitive and you wanna improve. Walk us through that journey.

Yeah, I mean, the beauty of posting on the internet is that you get to hear commentary from everybody on the internet. So I always approached it as if we're gonna make I better have some half-respectable times. I'll never be elite. I may never be sub-elite, but I at least put in the time and effort and try to run fast. Yes.

And then at what point did you start getting approached to do big partnerships like this drop this week? Because these type of things are typically, Brands need to meet in the middle. The best partnership, right, is like a win for, you know, it sort of legitimizes the rising brand and then makes maybe the more legacy brand cooler and more relevant. But timing matters a lot for these things.

Yeah, I think it was toward the end of 2022. So we, you know, coming to the end of our second year, I got an email from Jason over at Saucony who kind of heads their— it's called Energy— but partnerships, and it was really cool. I mean, the email started out just lifestyle because at this point the brand wasn't as heavily focused on the performance running piece, and it was a lot more menswear and jewelry and stuff like that. So he wanted us to work on a lifestyle shoe that kind of fit into that world. And then when they brought us up to Boston, I kind of pitched the idea of, well, we should do a running shoe too because we run and we're also making performance apparel. And so it was lifestyle first, then the running shoe came, and then now we've had two running shoes.

And then, and then how are you thinking about beyond, beyond running? Like, are there other categories that you're particularly excited about, or do you want it to be a brand that can exist anywhere that your kind of like idealized customer goes?

Yeah, I look at, I mean, an athlete spends a lot of time outside of sport. And so I think that being able to provide products, like as I call them, off court, is important. Important, but from like a performance sporting side of things, I think we're really focused on running right now, but I'm interested in a lot of the endurance sports. Cycling is very interesting, but for right now, just the running piece.

How are you thinking about growing the business? It's such an interesting origin story because it's not, okay, I was in business school, I raised money, went to a design firm and set up an eDTC website. Like, that era existed. And there were a couple of companies that made it through. A lot of companies that we've talked about that didn't quite make it or wound up selling off at a discount. And it feels like, at some point, if you're not already there, there might be, like, a crossroads of, like, are you going to take a run at being, you know, the next Nike, raise as much money as possible, retail footprint all over the world and like go crazy, or, you know, more, you know, family business compound slowly, grow, grow, grow, do things tastefully. And there's obviously like a whole, you know, a whole gradient of pathways in between, but what feels natural to you?

It's hard to say. I mean, like we're bootstrapped now in year 5, and obviously like— Take it all the way.

What's that, the gong? Take it all the way. We're hitting the gong for that.

They're going for the anti-fundraiser. You love to see it.

So obviously, like, you know, it caps what you can do and how big you can do certain things. But I mean, in my mind, I want the brand to be as big as possible on like a global scale. I don't think when you're trying to build something like that, going slow and building a really strong foundation is a bad thing, you know. I don't think us being almost handicapped in the bootstrap way from a money standpoint, is it that?

Yeah, look at the last month. You had Airbnb pivot to being— or sorry, Allbirds pivot to a Neo cloud. You have Everlane sell to Shein. Examples of high growth. If you're doing anything cool in apparel, and you're executing well, you're going to grow quickly. But high growth appears to be entirely at odds with building a lasting consumer lifestyle brand.

Yeah, I mean, I think there's a playbook where you just turn on the Meta ads faucet and just throw money at it, right? But I mean, we do very, very, very little advertising at all. I mean, we're really just, I would say, 99.5% organic. And that feels like a really nice strong foundation where if we want to turn on the paid advertising, it just makes our life a little bit easier because we're building a brand that people know and you're not just like getting fed ads all the time and then you end up buying it and you're not, you have no real like affiliation with the brand.

Yeah, and the worst CPMs you'll ever have are when you're, you know, there's no brand awareness. Like every year you delay that, it gets the economics probably get stronger and the TAM gets even bigger. How are you thinking about bots? What is a do not buy decoy listing? Explain to me like how all this fits together in the modern era.

Yeah, so I mean, when their shoe is anticipated in that way, like we saw it with the Speed 4, which was the first shoe we released, we got slammed with the bots, and, It's people submitting orders for 30 pairs, they want to resell them a lot of the time. And so this time, I took to Twitter before the release and called upon people who have either like bought it in the past or are current botters to try to get a little focus group together to figure out how I could jam up the bots. So I'll give you the sauce on what I did. I had those two decoy listings on there, because I guess, you know, the bots don't look at the screen, they're just going right to checkout. And so I had those be the correct listing, naming structure, everything. And then the real listing, the one with the green border, had none of the real terminology associated with the shoe on the listing or in the kind of like the metadata. And it seemed to work. I would say like 99% of the orders were manual. Some people did bought it, but it was very easy to catch and then go ahead and cancel those orders.

Wait, what was on the decoy pages though? You should have sold like sand for like $1,000, you know, like $200 a pound.

We had it so that the shoes were like 10,000 pounds. You couldn't get a shipping rate 'cause they were so heavy. Oh, interesting. So you would get to checkout and then the whole thing would break.

Oh. That is brilliant.

That's really clever. I feel like this cat and mouse game's gonna go on Yeah, it's such a—

yeah, having like hype and way more demand than supply is like the— you know, it is a blessing for a brand, but it is such an interesting challenge because you want to get your product— you don't benefit at all from shoes selling at 2, 3 times whatever it is in the secondary market. And so like your entire focus has to be on like, how do you get the shoes to the actual people that are a part of building this brand with you. And it's, um, there's probably like a pro— has anybody built like software to help with this? It's a pretty niche problem because most brands are like, we'd be happy to sell out with bots immediately. But it feels like there's like a software product there.

You can go the raffle route, um, where like, you know, you can collect entries and like pre-charge cards a dollar, and then if they win the raffle I think like people like the idea of first come, first serve. And if you get in there, you enter your card information, you get past the age CAPTCHA, like you are rewarded with the shoe and the rat— the raffles. I've— I, in talking to a bunch of people who buy sneakers and are a part of that stuff, they— it just takes a lot of the fun away from releases like that. So try to keep it as pure as possible.

How are you thinking about Nvidia earnings? John, John, you, you're, you're laughing, but Marcus has a dedicated account where he just talks about markets.

Yeah, but he's been live with us while the earnings dropped.

I know. Does anyone have any numbers?

Uh, yes, top line and bottom line EPS of $187. Revenue came in at $81.6 billion. Double beat, and the stock's down 2.4%. No, it's popped back up. I don't know.

It's jumping around. Just as Tay Kim predicted.

Plantruster over there. NVIDIA earnings live. Are there any IRL events that are small right now that you think have the seeds or are showing promise of becoming the next, you know, run club? Like we went through like the padel and pickleball booms. And I'm wondering if you're tracking anything that feels like could be a source of communities in cities, something outdoors, or I don't know, anything in that realm that's like run club shaped, that's really small right now, but shows like, oh, there's some deep interest there that might go somewhere. I don't know where, but it's at least showing, popping up on your radar now.

You know, I don't know if I'm like the best answer to answer that question. I'm not too sure. Stick to running. Yeah, I see people go on group bike rides. Okay, seem like a lot of fun, you know. You go on a 50-mile ride, you stop halfway, get a coffee and like a donut with your friends, and then you bike back, and it's like, you know, you're exercising, you're out in nature. That— I don't have a bike, so I can't participate, but if I were to do another group activity outside, it would probably be that.

Jordi's been getting really into the LARPing, the live-action role-playing, where you dress up. Okay. Suit of armor and you just thrash on each other with swords and nails.

I haven't been getting into it personally, but I've been sending you videos of— there's some, I'll send you after this. There's, um, there's a— yeah, John has a helmet. He's ready to LARP. Uh, there's this account where they have like, uh, LARPing, like pretty high, uh, pretty high skill LARPing going on where they're hitting each other legitimately. So hard. I'm like, you're gonna give each other concussions, but it seems like it's fair play.

Not with this helmet on, I'm good to go.

I think I've seen some of that stuff. That might be a good, maybe we get like a little tech version of that going.

How big's the team these days? 3 people.

And then my sister's part-time. That's a lot. She does the customer service and she's the GOAT. But yeah, 3 full-time.

That's amazing. 3 full-time and all in-house, like in office in New York. How are you thinking about supply chain? Like, you're making some stuff in New York from what I recall, but I imagine you're making it all over.

Yeah, a lot of the performance stuff is made over in China. You know, the shoes were Indonesia. That's a Saucony factory, so that's not us. Jewelry, Italy. I mean, we're kind of spread out. But we have a lot of good manufacturing partners. I would like to bring some more of those pieces here to the US. I think it's just, we're not super agile, you know, as a company. So switching a factory overnight isn't really possible. And there's a whole like resampling and reproducing process that would need to go into that. So we're focused on like catching up to the fashion calendar right now, 'cause right now we've been behind since day one, we've been behind and we kind of like release when we can, but we're— Got it. This year we will catch up to the calendar and be, you know, releasing products in the proper weather. Is that a double-edged sword?

Yeah, yeah. That'd be good. It's like, hey, we have a winter coat in our— Oh, we've done it.

I've done hoodies in the middle of August.

August. Yeah. Wait, but is that a double-edged sword where like, if you're the only hoodie that's going on sale in the summer, like at least it's like not a noisy time and you're not getting crowded out. And so maybe there's a benefit or silver lining.

No, it feels bad. It feels bad. It feels bad. Yeah. Yeah, you don't wanna do that.

You don't wanna do that. That's funny. When you say like the calendar, are you just talking about the seasons or are there specific specific moments where all the brands, you know, sort of coalesce around like, this is the day, or this is the week when like fall collections go on sale, or like how precise are we being? Because I know that there's a whole fashion runway show circuit, but I'm not tapped in enough to know if there's a real cycle to it or a logic to it.

Yeah, I don't think it's that crazy for like the performance stuff. I think you wanna hit like spring, summer, fall, winter. Yeah. And even that is a little bit like, more relaxed. Like, you can kind of do it based off when people start training for certain things, or how the weather is shifting. But, you know, there are times, uh, if you want to do stuff around the, the World Marathon Majors, then you kind of have to like prep for that. And a lot of those start, you know, November, October, November. Uh, so yeah, I mean, depending on what you want to hit from like an event standpoint, that kind of shifts, uh, shifts stuff because it does get cooler then, but you're still really leasing, you know, obviously tanks and stuff that you're running in to stay cool. But yeah, I mean, spring, summer, fall, winter, for the most part, is good enough. Yeah, that makes sense.

Are you a nominative determinism guy? The chat thinks you're basically a millionaire. They say millionaire.

Marcus millionaire. Yeah, I don't know. I guess on paper, yeah, the company would be worth—

worth— yeah. That's fantastic. Well, congratulations.

All the progress. Yeah. Great to finally have you on the show. And yeah, just congrats to your team of 3 on accomplishing what would be difficult for even a team of 300. It's super impressive. Yeah. Thank you.

I appreciate both of you. Thanks for having me on.

Yeah, great to see you.

Thanks for hopping on.

Talk soon, dude. Talk soon. Congrats again.

Yep. Yeah! Jensen Huang talked about the quarter that NVIDIA just had. The buildout of AI factories. Boo! The largest infrastructure expansion in human history. Yay! Is accelerating at extraordinary speed. Yay! Not a fan of the AI factory terminology, but good that there is progress being made. Agentic AI has arrived, he says, doing productive work. True. Generating real value. True. And scaling rapidly across companies and industries. Also true. Lots of good stuff. Nvidia net income, uh, it rose to $42.96 billion. They almost hit $43 billion. Um, not too bad. Um, a year earlier they were doing just $18.8 billion in net income. Huge, huge increase. Really wild. Really wild. Printing. Definition of printing. All good news. Uh, the NVIDIA stock is sort of up and down, basically flat, but NVIDIA revenue jumped 85% to $81.62 billion from $44 billion last year, the company said. Shocking. Yeah, great stuff. In the timeline, you know who— I mean, Steve Wozniak crushed his commencement speech. We have to debate this to see Was he actually a good communicator? Is he setting the tone correctly? But we should still play the clip of Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple at Grand Valley State University because he talked about AI and unlike Eric Schmidt, he did not get booed off stage. He actually got cheered for his comments. Wait, this was—

who was it Tyler? Steve Wash-niac? No!

Oh no, oh shots fired.

I'm a big fan of Steve Wozniak. Wozniak.

I love the Woz.

Shots fired.

Let's play the clip from Grand Valley State University on Instagram here. Can we play this from the beginning? It might loop back, but he's doing bits, he's getting laughs. You all have AI. You all have AI, actual intelligence. Oh, mic drop, knee slap. Knee slapper. Hey, playing to the crowd.

You're gonna need a bigger mic.

He knows the audience. He knows the audience. We're trying to figure out how to make a brain— software, hardware, synapse chips. And I was at a company where the engineers figured out how to make a brain.

Takes 9 months.

Um, yeah, knee slapper. But he knows the audience. He's delivering the right thing. Is he AGI-pilled? Is he super intelligent? Is it a legends build? Probably not, but it is regardless, I think it's potentially the right framing for the crowd. It's knowing the audience and that is a way to bridge to a broader conversation about AI, a broader conversation about how humans fit into a post-AGI world. I don't know, we'll have to go watch the full clip eventually.

Let's close it out with— I have this video from Tyler that we can pull up.

Okay, what is this?

This is the video I was referencing with Marcus. I'm very concerned about these gentlemen and what they're doing. Pull it up. Pull it up.

What's happening?

Let's get to that. Like, this is insane contact. I mean, the helmet is getting dented.

I think this is breaking. Not an issue. Skill issue. They really hitting that, aren't they?

Run it, run it back one more time. One more time. You just— this is just wrong. They're taking it too far. I don't, I don't see how you leave this without A concussion. Mm-hmm. But we'll try it out after we leave.

We have the gong mallet. Yeah. Gong. That seems like it would do some damage.

Thank you for tuning in with us today, folks. It has been the honor of our lifetimes to podcast with you today. We hope you have an incredible evening. Leave us 5 stars on Apple Podcasts.

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Goodbye, dears.

Bye!