GPT-5.6 Sol Reactions, Coatue Bets Big on Blue Origin, Cheaper Vision Pro Delayed | Vincent Weisser, Ben Thompson, Rodrigo Liang, Alana Palmedo, Byron Boots, Will Mayer, Tucker Brown

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That's right. It's great to be back.

Yes, the Invest Like the Best hype song really, it really has I don't know, it just burned its way.

Yeah, puts you in an incredible mental state.

100%.

100%. You know who else is in a good mental state? Jeff Bezos, because he's getting a markup on the $25 billion he's put—

he's marking himself up. He's marking himself up alongside Kotu.

Yeah, the news is that Blue Origin is raising outside capital for the first time. He's participating, a fund Kotu, who he has also invested in through his family office, is also participating. But there will be an opportunity for some other true outsiders to get their first slice of Blue Origin. Andrew Ross Sorkin had the scoop in The New York Times today. You have to wonder if this is gossip coming out of Sun Valley. The company is raising $10 billion. This is the first outside fundraise. It's hilarious to think about this 25-year-old company as being previously bootstrapped, but that's technically what it is, basically. One founder's capital, just chipping away at a really hard problem for a quarter century. And now we are here. Bezos has been funding this basically solo on his quest to visit the stars.

He's doubling down.

People can't really complain about the valuation because he's a big part of setting the price.

Yeah, yeah. So he's doubling down. He's putting in $2 billion directly. And Coatue is getting twice as much allocation, $4 billion. There's another interesting Coatue tidbit I alluded to earlier from the New York Times piece. Bezos's family office is a major investor in Coatue's Innovative Strategies Fund, which is focused on emerging technology startups. So I'm not sure if the money's coming out of that fund specifically, but there is a connection there. He's been building a relationship with Coatue for a long time, and they are optimistic about Blue Origin's prospects. The valuation is expected to be $130 billion. Big for a private company. I was listening to Gavin Baker and Travis Kalanick talk about how crazy it was when Gavin was at Fidelity and he wanted to value Uber at $14 billion and everyone thought he was crazy. The valuation turned into an auction, came in at $17 billion, and everyone was like, this is unprecedented. We've never seen a private company this big. And now $17 billion, even $60 billion in the private markets looks quaint by by modern standards in an era where we have several trillion-dollar private companies, many up in the $100 billion-plus range. It's a wild, wild time.

Brian wants us to warm up the gong.

We got to warm up the gong. Warm up the gong for Bezos. Give it a couple warm-up hits just to get it warm. Just to get it warm. Here we go.

Fantastic.

Nice and warm.

Yes.

The Elon bulls are saying, "Oh, SpaceX is underpriced now." Because you have to imagine, I don't know if there's an exact revenue figure that's leaked for Blue Origin, but based on the size of that business, it has to be small. This has to be a very high multiple. But you're not really valuing this company on cash flow or even revenue. You're valuing it on the capability, which is, it's the second company in the world, I believe, to bring a rocket to orbit, land it successfully, prove reusability. They got there before China, which has been trying to copy SpaceX for years. And so lots of really solid progress. Of course, there was that setback with the launchpad that exploded, but they figured out a solution to that and things are chopping along just fine. The company is estimated to burn $5 billion this year. So this looks like a pretty standard 12 to 18 month fundraise at $10 billion.. And it's burned something like $27 billion to date, which, you know, a billion a year on average over 25 years, not too bad for such an ambitious project. Still a lot of money, but a big opportunity. And you have to imagine there are a number of other comps like AST SpaceMobile, as you like to call them. AST SpaceMobile.

Pop on the AST SpaceMobile.

ASTS, Mark Zuckerberg.

$27, $28 billion.

$30 billion company. And I don't believe that they've gotten much to orbit yet. They've done some experiments, some tests. They're still early, but it's a huge market and we've seen how fast—

They have concepts of mass to orbit.

Yeah, and we've seen how fast Rocket Lab and various, it's a big, really, it's a really, really big market. And so when you're going after a big opportunity and you've been working at it a long time and you got Jeff Bezos funding it, lots of reasons to be optimistic. Let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI, own the data platform that powers it.

Another comp investors would certainly look at would be Rocket Lab sitting at just under $50 billion. And, uh, there'll be multiple players in launch. Yeah, that is for sure.

Well, we have some heartbreaking news. Heartbreaking news. Apple has scrapped plans for a cheaper Apple Vision Pro display and is winding down work at Samsung. This is from MacRumors. Really hits me and the other 3 Apple Vision Pro fans particularly hard.

Brutal.

I did, who did I talk to? I talked to somebody who said that they actually are a daily user of the Apple Vision Pro. I thought I was in the top 1%.

Was it the founder that's making—

Yes, that's right.

That, that—

He says he watches it, he watches, he uses it every night or something like that. That's a lot of Apple Vision Pro use. Obviously the product never really found product market fit. Although we have one in the studio, we've been having fun with it. I still think it's an incredible piece of technology, but a little bit of a chicken and egg problem. The developers never showed up and it was very expensive, very heavy, very cumbersome. It requires a lot to put that thing on to watch Lawrence of Arabia. But when you do, it's worth it. It's worth it. What did I watch most recently? I watched Dunkirk in it and I watched Godfather Part II and Master and Commander. Master and Commander. That's a great movie, especially in Vision Pro. Really, you want to be in the cinematic feel, feel like you're on a, on a, on a warship. So Apple has, has reportedly stopped development on a cheaper display for a low, lower cost Vision Pro. This feels like what the industry needs to move forward. The actual display was fantastic. It just needed to be cheaper and lighter so more people could get them. That at least was my thesis. But Apple disagrees with me.

What do I know?

So the supplier Samsung Display expected to formally end the project by September. And if you remember, there were rumors of the crazy hoops that Apple had to jump through to get that incredible display because they really leapfrogged Meta, who had been working with the acquisition of Oculus and they'd been improving the, the display fidelity. They got rid of the screen door effect. They were increasing the resolution per eye. Everything was getting better about that display, but on a very linear trend. And allegedly what Apple did was they went to Samsung and said, we know that you are working on next year's display. You're also working on displays 2 years out, 3 years out, 4 years out. Now, what's the problem with the one that's 4 years out? Well, it's amazing. But it's not ready for manufacturing at scale. It's not on an automated line. It needs a lot of manual work to get it to actually produce, and there's crazy low yield. So in, in, in chips, in displays, yield rules everything. If you run the machine a bunch of times, you want to get 99.9% yield, 90%. In the early days when you're prototyping a new technology, you might be getting just a few percent yield. And Apple said, that's fine, we'll just jack up the price and pay a ton for these cutting-edge displays, jump to the front of the category with the best display technology. We'll charge a fortune for it, but we'll have the best product, and that will be our market entry strategy. And so I was waiting for that display technology to commoditize because it's been a few years. I thought it would just naturally get cheaper. It probably has, but it has not solved the problem of virtual reality, augmented reality. Uh, we haven't seen someone picks up.

Do you think they're just bearish on the near term of people watching movies?

Maybe. Yeah.

In, in, uh, in VR, because I don't— they're certainly not stopping, uh, R&D on their specs and their, and their sort of everyday glasses product.

Yeah.

And so it might just be that, that they studied you and found that you're built different.

Yeah.

You're one of one, the only person on Earth.

Yeah. No, no, I mean truly, like sitting down and watching a full movie is a rare experience today. People aren't reading, they aren't watching movies, they're just scrolling and people seem to be satisfied with their phone. And also the nature of a doom scroll is somewhat interactive, somewhat multiplayer, although obviously people see it as brain rotting and very isolating. There is a game to be played by actively scrolling, which is something that doesn't require virtual reality, certainly not enhanced by virtual reality. But then also sometimes you want to read the comments, sometimes you want to send it to a friend, sometimes you want to fact-check it and ask AI about it or spin off and do something else and go to someone's profile. So I think the number of taps and user interaction experiences in a Doomscroll session are obviously much, much higher than watching a film. Which you just put on and hopefully you don't pause it at all because you're engrossed the entire time from start to finish. And so if that becomes— as scrolling means more and more, maybe the VR experience is less and less relevant. So the cheaper display on the Apple Vision Pro or maybe the Apple Vision Slim or Mini or something, I don't know. They could have used a different name. Pro always left the door open to just the regular Apple Vision at a more approachable price point. But the cheaper display that they were working on would have cut the headset's pixel density roughly in half. That's not what they should do at all. They need to keep that pixel density because that's the best part of the experience. The move likely reflects Apple's broader shift towards smart glasses. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman previously reported that Apple paused work on a lighter, cheaper Vision Air. Yeah, that's the term., in October 2025 to fast-track its Ray-Ban-style glasses effort. This does not mean the Vision Pro itself has been canceled. Apple refreshed the headset in October 2025 with an M5 chip, which does very little, slightly better tracking. I think you can run some applications at slightly higher fidelity, but it is, by all accounts, essentially an identical device. But they are long overdue for a proper refresh if they were taking this seriously and thinking about this as a, as a true growth driver. I think they have recognized that this was an experiment that needs to be put on the back burner for at least a little bit. And so this report only suggests the cheaper display project is no longer moving forward. So the Vision Pro fans have hope. It's not fully canceled. Maybe there's something else going on. Maybe there's more in the works. But anyway, it's, it's, it's interesting. With all the acceleration and AI, I was hoping that we would get some, some, uh, you know, advancements in this since it is an adjacent technology. But, uh, we've been few and far between on the updates. We gotta get an update from the BigScreen VR team because that's right. They have done a great job creating high-fidelity VR that's also lightweight, but it needs to be tethered to a PC. It's a little more prosumer, a little more dev kit styling.

VR really attracts these, like, visionary, visionary chaps, the coolest guys that are willing to go— that, that seem— no, no, I, I'm actually, uh, I could make that joke, but I won't. But just, just people that are willing to just continually look silly for a long time to ride through the hype cycles and just, like, keep building. I think BigScreen is Jordi Hays is an example of that. The founder that we had on that has a very cool glasses demo product. He's, from my understanding, probably using AR and VR more than anyone else on the planet. Like so committed to just like winning. Yeah. And so I really appreciate that about the category.

Yeah. Let's see how Apple's doing on the news. Are they trading up or trading down? I push the button. Will it come up? We'll see next time. Anyway, let me tell you about Figma. Figma agents meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context.

Production teams swearing in the team chat.

Well, uh, here is a crazy story. I mean, it's such a minor story, but, uh, it certainly grinds my gears. I think we're going to dig into it and see what you think, what I think once we dig into it. But, uh, Getty Images, we know and love them from their trove of Silicon Valley titans photographed at Sun Valley, which happening now. If you don't have a Getty Images subscription, sign up now because you're going to be first to know when the new Josh Kushner, uh, paparazzi photo drops. Um, but Getty Images was planning to merge with Shutterstock. These are two essentially stock photo sites. In theory, they should be absolutely decimated by AI image generation. Meta put out a new one, Muse Muse image. Nanobanana Pro has been fantastic. Images 2 from OpenAI has been really good. And like, they're honestly getting to the point where a lot of the example images are just like, okay, that's just a photo. I saw Adam Mosseri posted some on Instagram and I was like, is this AI or did you just take this photo? Like, it's just you. And then he did a couple with filters and hair and crazy hair and those were cool and that breeds creativity. So I think there's a lot of value in the technology. But in terms of just like I'm trying to illustrate, I'm trying to make a point visually, I need a picture of a forest. AI image generation is very, very competitive with the stock image industry. And this should have— this should be a business that's sort of affected like the way, you know.

Yeah, I imagine a lot of, a lot of these businesses, I checked their net new revenue.

Yeah.

Over the last couple of years is just working with labs that need licensing.

Yeah, all sorts of things. So certainly in the face of growing competition, consolidation of an industry is very normal. That makes a lot of sense. This doesn't, this doesn't seem like it should raise any regulatory flags, and yet it did in the United Kingdom. Getty Images has called off the Shutterstock deal after the UK created some barriers around it. So the $3.7 billion deal would have created a visual content company, able to offer a more expansive library to users, says The Wall Street Journal. So on Tuesday, Getty delivered a written notice to Shutterstock terminating their planned tie-up, which was first announced in January of 2025 and, and received clearance from the Justice Department in America in April. So pretty quick turnaround in the United States. Uh, the $3.7 billion deal would have created a visual content company able to deliver a more expansive library to users, helping meet booming demand for licensed images and videos as artificial intelligence disrupts the business of content creation. Getty stock slipped 1.7% in premarket trading. Shares of Shutterstock ticked up 1%. So maybe the Shutterstock shareholders are happy about remaining an independent company. The termination came after Getty last week said that its board voted to not proceed with the deal if it meant selling Shutterstock's editorial business, a condition required by the UK Competition and Markets Authority. So the decision to buy Getty to abandon its merger with Shutterstock was ultimately a commercial choice, said the chair of independent inquiry group that led the CMA's investigation of the deal. The inquiry group found that a loss of competition between the two businesses would reduce choice for UK media outlets and could lead to higher prices. And I would I would assume that this would give them some sort of pricing power in the face of, you know, essentially unlimited free editorial images in the form of AI-generated images. If you want to go with the real thing, you have to pay a little bit more. But that sort of offsets all the pressure of the customers that are leaving and no longer paying because they don't need to pay because they're generating them with generative AI. So this felt like a very logical story. And I'm, I'm a little bit uncertain that this is a good decision for the UK to help these businesses. It feels like it's just going to wind up hurting both of them.

Yeah. Are UK media outlets not allowed to use AI content?

I don't think that there's any broad rule against it. No. So they— you would— it would be a deliberate choice. And I'm sure there's plenty. I imagine that the Financial Times does not use AI images, and that's by choice, and they make that very clear, and there's probably a disclosure. And if they— of course, they will use an AI image if they're talking about the AI image industry. But in terms of what you see on the front page of the Financial Times, it's almost always editorial images.

Yeah, that image.

This is from Reuters, and that is an editorial distribution and something that is licensed. And occasionally they need a photo for— to illustrate something., um, they might use AI.

Okay, so I was trying to figure out why the headline number here was $3.7 billion. Yeah, because it was based on the January 6th, 2025 share prices, not today's prices, which are far, far, far lower. Yeah, Shutterstock is sitting at $329 million market cap. Getty is at $340 million market cap.

Whoa.

So these businesses have been really, really beat up. So over the period since they decided, hey, we should— Yeah, tie up.

Interesting. So is there, is there a potential—

the UK, I think regulators are actually trying to just kick these companies while they're down.

Is that what's happening or is it a situation where Getty— I mean, that is possible. I mean, it could just be like a just a complete mistake. I mean, as you go back to Meta and you think about the, the, the, the UK, uh, the US regulators blocked Meta from buying a VR fitness company that they said would create a monopoly in the VR fitness industry. And of course, like, the VR fitness industry, like, never happened. Like, it's not a, it's not a, not an industry worth monopolizing. And so if you think about, um, you know, the business model of Quest, like, would it have been advantageous? Maybe, but it's worth letting Meta take a shot at that. And see if having a VR fitness company in the portfolio will actually get that product to, you know, to scale. Tyler, what do you have to say?

Another interesting anecdote is the UK blocked Meta from buying Giphy in 2022.

Yes.

So to prevent a monopoly in GIFs, I presume.

Yes.

This could be pretty dangerous.

Yes. Which is also odd. What does Giphy power? The GIFs that you see in iMessage. You know what I'm talking about? When you go to you go to— there's Genmoji, there's stickers, and then there's also hashtag images. And you can find images and you can send, you know, different pictures and GIFs. I wonder if these are from Giphy or—

It's powered by Bing, not Giphy.

Powered by Bing. Okay, so there's competition in this market.

Yeah.

I don't know.

Amanda says Canva doesn't label AI in their stock images. That's so annoying. So yeah, I didn't even know Canva was a player here, but it would make sense to like—

you're in Canva and you want to, you know, have a picture of a forest on your greeting card and you can pick from a library. Some of them will be generated, some of them won't. And they probably also have a generative AI tool where you can generate a new image. But if you're just looking for a generic stock image that's already been described, you can probably pull from whatever libraries out there anyway.

Yeah, Canva partners with Getty Images, but then they're also featuring generated images.

Anyway, let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. There is another interesting article in the Wall Street Journal on the COVID the front page of the main section.

The—

what do they actually call the main section? There's the business and finance section. Is this just world news? I don't know. Anyway, on the COVID of the Wall Street Journal, "It's the world's creepiest office and people won't stay away." This is the New York complex vacated by IBM has become a magnet for urban explorers. We have a video of this place. And if you're a scrappy startup looking to expand, this might be the key to success. The ultimate lock-in factory. In sort of rural New York, I think. We'll get into it. So this is in Somers, New York. I don't know exactly how far away that is from Manhattan. Yeah.

So if you were like a Neo Lab and your name was like Ominous Intelligence.

Yeah.

This could be a great sort of HQ, potentially, you know, your first little micro data center. Very James Bond villain sort of vibe. And yeah, looks like you could make it, you know, really, really homey.

How far is it from Manhattan? Let's see. Okay. It is 1 hour. You can be in the city in an hour. That's not too far.

And imagine walking these halls late at night after a long day at work.

Yes.

It wouldn't be creepy at all.

Yes. Robert Carlton was getting the mail one day in April when he saw a group group of teenage boys sprinting away from nearby woods. He cut them off at the road and raised his arms. I just said, 'Stop, it's over,' the 62-year-old retired engineer recalled. Soon, he said, 3 pursuing New York State Police troopers emerged from the tree line and arrested 7 juveniles. The criminal charge: trespassing on the former IBM campus here, disrespecting International Business Machines Don't do it, folks. The long vacant site has become a magnet for so-called urban explorers who prowl abandoned malls, hospitals, power plants, amusement parks, factories, and any other unused, uh, disused— All right, you can breach—

Enough of the graffiti.

Yeah, do you think—

Put it—

How dare they in here?

We got to figure out how much—

Dare they write all over the former office? Yeah, exactly.

What was the IBM AI Watson? Watson, the machine intelligence—

What do you mean was?

Was probably birthed here.

Still at the frontier.

Still at the frontier. It was super intelligent at Jeopardy. The global Urbex, which is short for urban exploration phenomenon, Urbex isn't new, but it's been turbocharged by artsy videos on Instagram and TikTok that spur others to create their own posts, luring more curiosity seekers. Police in Livingston, New Jersey recently warned people to stay out of the closed Livingston Mall property. Jacksonville Beach, Florida police issued a similar caution in April about the shuttered Adventure Landing amusement park. Going into an abandoned amusement park, that is thrill-seeking at its best. We are aware of a TikTok challenge to explore the property. Who's doing these TikTok challenges? And should they, should they be allowed to post those? This is, this is dangerous for some people. I mean, seriously, you go in there, there's a lot of broken glass, and, and, you know, who knows about the structural integrity of a building that hasn't been inhabited in years or decades? Could be very—

is it on the market?

Uh, well, we have some news about that. I don't know if it's actually on the market, but I imagine if you make them an offer they can't refuse, this property could be yours. Uh, so So Sebastian Capital, the Manhattan company that manages the 723-acre site, that's a lot of size, says it has beefed up security and appreciates help from police.

So I'm shocked by the YouTube comments.

Yes.

That are wholly coming to the defense of this building. They're saying, I hate there's a class of people who see something like this and feel compelled to start breaking things. Why do people vandalize these kinds of places?

Interesting.

I can't believe— these are all the top comments. I can't believe people go in there busting up the place.

That's crazy. I would have sort of expected people to be on the side of the urban explorers, on the side of the TikTok challenge challengers. Andrew Proto, a defense lawyer, said a 15-second clip isn't worth a criminal record. Don't do it. If you've already been arrested, you're not the first call we've taken this month, and you won't be the last. Proto says he has represented or advised several minors arrested arrested on the campus. The Somers Town Court clerk said some defendants received a 6-month adjournment in contemplation of dismissal, meaning charges will be dropped and their arrest will be sealed if they avoid trouble. Some explorers who have posted about the IBM site say they follow an observe and preserve ethos and reject vandalism. They say they're driven by curiosity, the thrill of roaming forbidden spaces, and a zeal to document discoveries and that they're careful and know their limits. "It actually gives me hope when I hear that kids are out there getting into trouble," said Bradley Garrett, a cultural photographer and author of the book "Explore Everything: Place Hacking the City" about his own urbex adventures. He sees urban exploration as a gateway drug in a good way, sometimes into intellectual curiosity about history and culture. So, you go, you break into this abandoned building, and then next thing you know, you're an IBM consultant driving enterprise value for S&P 500 companies, traveling, businessman. Could happen. Who knows?

Could happen.

Raghav wants to turn it into an Aman.

Aman would be good. Data center seems obvious depending on power.

What about the first Aman with a data center? With some local AI?

Both. So quickly, you asked about the price. In 26 2016, IBM sold the property for $31.75 million, and it's owned by an LLC that shares a Fifth Avenue address with Sebastian Capital. So everyone suspects Sebastian's in on the deal. A plan to convert it to a private school foundered during COVID and Sebastian said it is— yeah, foundering is like failing, but yes, uh, foundered. So, floundered would be another appropriate term for what happened. But it was not successfully converted into a private school, obviously. But if you want to take a wild swing, go pick it up, make Sebastian Capital an offer. Let's see, I wonder what it would trade for today. Lots of work to be done.

Car and driver.

Quickly, Tyler had something on the IBM complex.

Yeah, so, okay, planning to go 1.1 million square feet.

Okay.

Historically, you'd see like, I think, something like around 10 watts per square feet.

Okay.

Maybe it's a little bit higher tech, right? This is IBM.

Okay.

It is an estimate I think is reasonable, is around 20 megawatts.

20 megawatts?

Yeah. So you're looking at a small data center.

Is there any natural gas in the ground? Can we frack? Can we put solar panels on the roof? Can we build a a nuclear reactor there. What are our options if we want to get this thing churning out tokens? We want to turn it into a token machine. Um, interesting. We should go check it out. Anyway, let's move on to the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Just do it.

And Jordi Hays, Car and Driver says 2026 Lucid Gravity available with no interest due to no interest. What? Several months after launching the 2027 Gravity, Lucid still has plenty of 2026 models, so it's offering customers an interest-free loan incentive.

Okay.

I wonder how long there's no interest on the loan. That seems like a good deal. The Lucid is a very well-reviewed car, very luxurious interior, very polished product for some of the higher, more performance-oriented trims. Incredible 0 to 60 times, incredible range. I think Larry David has one. They're, they're, they're well-reviewed cars, but it's an electric vehicle which has high depreciation, and then you're signing up to work with a company that a lot of people think might not be around forever. So what does the maintenance and repair and flow of products and new parts look like in decade. And so that is a risk factor for a lot of people. But the Lucid Air Gravity, I think it looks sort of cool. It's sort of like a— it's a little bit like it wants to be a minivan. It's trying to do the job of a minivan, but they didn't just lean into the sliding doors. At least the Model X realized that what makes the minivan great is the accessibility of the doors, and they made them cool doors by making making them gullwing or butterfly doors.

Yeah, the problem here is that when I looked up Lucid Gravity for sale, I'm seeing a 2026 with just 3,000 miles that's selling for $125,000.

That's a lot of money.

Dollars. That's a lot of dollars. And even if you're paying no interest, it's probably losing, you know, it's depreciating thousands of dollars a quarter.. And so it's still going to be a rough ownership experience.

Yeah. Yeah. It will be interesting to see where they end up. I know they already have some big investors and potentially some corporate partners. It could eventually be rolled into another organization as sort of the EV strategy of a larger automotive group. Who knows? Did you want to— did you— did you want to look at end of stay? Did you see this? We got to pull up this video because we were talking about exactly this. The 964 Cabriolet Junior is a Porsche 964 that has been shrunk, actually shrunk, exactly what you said. Look at this video. This is what— this is what you asked for. Fully customizable. And look at this, it looks normal size, but wait until this guy gets in it. This is amazing. So it is a go-kart that has the bodywork of a Porsche. And so you can get one of these. They go like 60 miles an hour or something like that.

Like, they're pretty fast.

Seems very safe. Yes. So I think if you put a governor on this vehicle, you'd have what you want, which is the vehicle for the kid that is fun, engaging, and highly stylized. And made with precision. The group behind this is called End of Stay, S-T-A-Y, has periods after it, so I imagine it's some sort of acronym. But what a wild—

Wow, they did it.

Yes.

They did it.

They did it.

I'm interested.

You can see the YouTube video here, the preview of the 964 Turbo Junior high-performance version. It's an absolutely crazy, crazy video that I got organically served to me. And I was like, this is what we've been looking for for sure. This is exactly what we were talking about.

I need one.

I think you do.

I need one anyway.

GPT-5, GPT Live, a new generation of voice models for natural human interaction launched today from OpenAI, rolling out to ChatGPT starting today, taking shots shots at that guy on Instagram who's unsatisfied with legacy voice models. It's a lot smarter.

I have a feeling he's going to find a way to keep using the old models.

Oh, maybe. Or he'll just become— who's Pliny the Liberator? He's sort of the Pliny the Liberator of voice models in that I know he's taking shots and he's like very unhappy with the quality of the voice models, but at the same time, he does a great job of actually exposing and finding limitations, not necessarily jailbreaks, but he— by watching those videos, you can very clearly understand, "Okay, I understand what's going on here. It's not— it doesn't have tool use, so it can't count. It can't set a timer. It doesn't have, you know, long-running context window that can stay with you for a long time, so it gets lost. They can't talk to each other." There's a whole bunch of different ways. And once you have all of those documented by just a He's basically like a white hat hacker. He's—

He found a bunch of benchmarks.

Oh, wait, what?

He found a bunch of like good benchmarks.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Basically benchmarks, like if you can satisfy his videos and run those experiments again in a satisfying way, you probably have a better product at the end of the day. So, I don't know. I think it's cool. I'm excited.

Very—

Yeah, I'm super excited for this one. I wonder if the— Yeah, the real-time nature unlocks unlocks almost like a new kind of like real-time podcast format where you can just actually have a conversation about a topic, right?

Yeah, we should have it sitting right here. It has a full duplex architecture, which means that it can listen and speak at the same time so it can jump in appropriately.

And it can also route certain questions to smarter models to run in the background. You can still have a conversation.

Yes.

Very cool.

Which is great because my default flow, like if I'm driving, which I don't think I should be doing, but I will tap the record button, not the voice mode, and I will dictate a really long prompt and then I will click send and then I will wait for it to cook and then I will have it read that back to me. And that's all just like a couple extra clicks, a couple extra steps to get what I really want, which is a conversation. I was interested about the idea of of where this goes, like, is there a world where you are talking to a model and you can have sort of multiple threads of conversations going within one conversation? So you can say, hey, I need you to go and do a deep research report on, you know, IBM Watson. And it goes and cooks on that. And then while it's doing that, you're still talking to it and you're still having a conversation. But then you also might say, "Well, catch me up on the latest news," and it has that at the fingertips so it can talk to you about the latest news. And then you can go back and it can say, "Hey, by the way, I'm done with the report," or, "I'm done with the code that I wrote, but you're talking to me about other problems in your organization, other decisions, other research projects that you have." And it's all done in one continuous conversation, like, you know, me interacting with you. Like, you know, we might, you might delegate something and then continue the conversation and then move on. Oh, I got to text this person. Okay, I'll text them. They'll do that. They'll come back to me in 20 minutes with a revision to the thing that we're working on. But in the meantime, let's talk about whatever else we got going on today. So interesting to see where this goes. In other OpenAI news, GPT-5.6 Sol along with Terra and Luna will launch publicly this Thursday. Preview access is expanding globally. Lots of people are having fun with this. Some people got early access, other people were joking about clearly not getting early access but wanting early access. But a lot of people are having fun.

Tyler Cowen? What did John Palmer say? What'd he say?

He's in here?

No, he had a—

He has one. He says, "It seems I'm allowed to talk about 5.6 now. I wasn't one of the testers, but I heard it's really good." Again, I haven't used it yet, but this will probably be my default model from here on when I get access. It's a good one. People are having a lot of fun. Kit Langton says, I can finally talk about GPT-5.6. I've been using it for many months, if not decades. And what is glaringly obvious to me now as I look back on my life is that you did not have access to it. Oh, it's very fun. People are very happy with it. Interesting. There's a little bit of a fork around like when, how the vibe around 5.6 is different than Fable 5, when, how interactive it is versus, somebody said like Fable is like light speed across the galaxy and Sol is like a Porsche on the Nürburgring, more engaging. I don't know. It seems like we're entering some fragmentation in like the right tool for the job.

Yeah, Ethan says, my big takeaway is that both SOL, Ethan had access, so he says, both SOL and Fable represent jumps over previous models and have opened a large gap with the next best AIs. People will have preferences for one or the other, but if you're doing any work where better intelligence matter, those two models are your only choices. Dean says, I think for me, the main takeaway with SOL and Fable is that I can't remember a time when the leading models were A, be so decidedly ahead of everything else and be so distinct from one another. So, yeah, a lot of people are talking about how they're using the models together.

It's probably a function of just tighter, tighter distillation protocols. Like there's less pollution. Like also, like not everyone's training on the exact same data anymore because it used to just be everyone just trains on the entire web corpus and now each company has different data sets, different data brokers, different usage patterns that they can train on, and then different sort of research tastes. So go give it a try.

Theo says, I forgot to mention this, GPT-5.6 solves world-leading in computer use. It made me use it 100x more when we lost access to 5.6. I quickly started to go insane without it. So yeah, people in the early access program obviously lost access for a couple weeks.

Sure.

Due to the DC action. But yeah, I saw some people saying, like, what are some good uses for computer use? And it's like, anything on your computer. What do you use your computer for? They're not all going to be great uses, but I'm curious.

I still think it's worth— it's always worth popularizing those genuinely useful patterns I mean, like, Deep Research was that in many ways, just a very, like, it gave you a 20-page PDF report on the topic that you were asking for and it did a lot of the work for you. And I still think the come up with a good prompt idea, find the right reason to use AI is a problem for a ton of people. There are plenty of people that adopt it drop the latest AI tools, immediately find what the model's good at, how to use it, how to use it profitably, effectively, not waste tokens, not waste their time. But other people need ideas. They need to know that there's a new capability. You see this with the chat app. You see this with the voice mode where people are like, you know, like judging a model based on hallucinations that disappeared a year ago or judging a model based on,— some, "Oh, it has a cutoff window," and then that hasn't been a thing for a year, but it still burned its— burned its way into like the memes of the online culture and thus, people need to be updated on that. And so, I'm in favor of coming up with good computer use demos. The real one is just, "Can it play Counter-Strike effectively?" That's the real computer use test. Can it rank me up to global elite? Can it downrank me so I can smurf a little bit? This is, this is the future. This is what I want. Anyway, let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent and to deploy web app servers, databases, and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. I'm extremely excited to welcome our next guest to the show. We have Vincent Weisser from Prime Intellect. He's the co-founder and CEO, and he has some amazing news for us. Tell us what happened, then we'll dig into the news, the market, the story, the company. But first, give us the news because Jordi's already warming up over here.

Amazing.

Yeah. So we've announced that we've raised $130 million at a billion with Prime Intellect.

Wow.

To build the open superintelligence stack.

It's fantastic. Congratulations.

Yeah. What we were talking about before the show is, is the, the, the ratio between dollars raised to run rate. Yeah, absolutely incredible.

Yeah.

Right.

How much did you raise before this round?

Just $20 million in total. So I think we've actually got to this run rate on like less than $20 million in spend.

That's crazy.

Which is north of, which is north of 100.

Yes.

That's amazing.

Yeah, we doubled it, I think, since we actually closed the fundraise. Yeah, 200. So basically, yeah, on track to grow much more from here on.

Okay. So reset me on the latest and greatest in the actual product offering. What customers are coming to you? Is it, I have used the Frontier model to I want to, you know, figure out that AI can in fact do some agentic workload within my organization. I want to cut cost and you're going to RL an open source model for me, fine tune it. And then am I paying you for tokens? Am I, are you getting me GPUs? What is the full suite of products that you offer customers these days?

Yes. So basically it is kind of like the full stack to do training, deployment, and continuous improvement of models. I think customers basically come to us for anything ranging from compute to inference to the full RL and post-training stack to train models. And I would say it's like we've had customers coming from different buckets and categories. A lot of them are like the AI natives who are basically starting out and oftentimes also like being multi-model, right? Like they use like the frontier models, they use open models. For different use cases. Like good examples like, uh, RAM, for example, as one customer, um, more in this like AI-native bucket, um, and a lot of the big AI-native startups. But then we've also increasingly, um, been able to attract a lot of the, uh, new AI labs, like a lot of the Neo Labs. So, um, a lot of those are using our full stack from like large-scale clusters to our pre-training and post-training and RL stack. Um, but then also increasingly like traditional enterprises and even sovereigns coming to us, um, who want to have their own end-to-end stack that they can run like on-prem. So how I see this is to some extent it's like there's just increasingly, I think, like a demand for having your own like sovereign AI stack, right? It's like your own open end-to-end stack. But I think this is almost like complementing in many cases like the other like frontier like models and stacks.

And you're using sovereign in not just the geopolitical sense, but also if you're a Fortune 500 company money, you want to own your stack from start to finish potentially.

Exactly. Yeah, I think there was a lot of recent talk about this, obviously, like folks like Satya and Alex Karp were also making those points and arguments over the last few weeks. And I think it's increasingly something I think where a lot of enterprises want to basically build this compounding data mode and flywheel where ultimately I think the future that we are starting to see is a lot of these companies want to build basically self-improving agents. And the way to do this, I think, is generally you have an RL environment for use case, you scale on it, and then you ultimately deploy that into production and then continuously improve with the user interacting with that agent. It's almost like the Tesla autonomy levels, but for knowledge worker agents. So I think the Rambag example, I think, was one that people really resonated with. For basically them being able to, within a week and less than $50K of training spend, outcompete Frontier model at automating spreadsheets and finance at a fraction of the cost of running the cheapest models. Basically, they were able to outperform Opus at a fraction of the cost of Haiku and like 30% faster, like much more tailored to the use case. So I think in many ways, like these, like specialized agentic use cases are a big unlock. And I think in many ways you still need the godlike big mega model to do the orchestration or planning. But then I think oftentimes execution, I think, happens— can happen with these specialized agents. So I think, yeah, those have been extremely, I think, like fruitful and useful for a lot of the companies adopting and training their own agents. Then I think the other big trend is just like an explosion in new entrants that are like taking model training seriously. Obviously, hundreds of new labs really got set up in the last 12 to 24 months. So we started powering a lot of those like with our full stack, including with also large compute clusters. So like NVIDIA also joined us as part of the round and we've been like, we've since day one basically operated large clusters and this is in large part why we need so much money, right? It's like to basically be standing up more and more GPUs. Like right now we run like 15,000 GPUs and scaling to like over 30,000. And so this is like a lot of the capital needs even.

And walk me through when you're pressing the huge cluster button. Is that because there's broad demand for specific models that you need to inference at scale? And so there's just a lot of inference demand, or is it that for the level of training that you're doing, you need to be cluster scale to even kick off the training run.

Yeah.

So basically it's like for all the needs, like from training to inference, you need obviously compute. And in a lot of ways, like our customers like are doing a lot of these like large-scale training runs with us, like leveraging our full stack, including our compute, right? So it's like pre-training for a billion parameter models, like for what we did with RC. Like Q4 last year, or really large also post-training runs, NREL runs, right? So it's like increasingly basically we abstract all that info away. So basically people can just like hit a button to do a post-training run without having to like log into GPU cluster and managing the bare metal GPUs. So we basically abstract a lot of this like GPU complexity away for, but yeah, like for that we basically also ramping up our own clusters to basically just like like several hundreds and thousands of customers like in parallel on those.

Yeah, so what you're saying is like there might be a situation where I have a $50K budget like you gave with the RAMP example. I have a $50K budget to do some post-training and I need to deploy that $50K into like thousands of GPUs, but only for a short amount of time. And so the budget's actually going to be relatively small, even though if I were to buy all of that, it would be way more than $50K, millions and millions of dollars. So you sort of absorb some of that cost, orchestrate it, abstract it away, and then you can deliver for the customers just a slice.

Yeah. So basically, I think this is also a big unlock, also on the inference side, where customers don't need to frontload hundreds of millions in CapEx expense for large data center commitments. So we basically also increasingly serve a lot of inference. So it really is the full stack. And I think a lot of the compute, we have quite a clear visibility into the demand just because people come with us with large requests or large contracts to basically do larger training runs and deployment. So we basically just need to secure the compute to be able to fulfill all of those. And I think right now we would probably be at many orders of magnitude more compute, like compute, but also revenue if compute wouldn't be as constrained as it is right now. So it's like right now I think like in the current environment, it's like basically GPUs are pretty sold out for the next few months and for almost like the rest of the year, especially if you want to like stand up data centers in the US. So I think this is actually like, I think the main bottleneck to scale right now for anyone in AI. And this is, I think, what we've been able to really scale through extremely well because we've basically partnered with almost every data center out there since like over 2 years. So basically able to stand up like data centers in different geographies and orchestrate them globally.

Yeah.

Any predictions, forecasts for American open source over the next 6 months?

Yes. No, really great question. We joined also like NVIDIA to help them train Nemotron. So they're doing the Nemotron Alliance and Coalition and So we were one of like, I think, 10 or so partners. So it's like, so like, I can't speak about like all the things there, but I think like in general, both on that front and other things, we won't tell anyone.

We won't tell anyone.

Exactly.

Anything just between us, between us, just the three of us.

So basically, I think like, like in some ways, like the leading American efforts actually are NemoTron and actually like RC with the Trinity model. So both of those we're very deeply involved in. And so I think those will continue to lead with American open source. We have some of our own models cooking and then we help a ton of customers over there. So I think there will actually be a huge resurgence of frontier open models coming out of the US, also led by players like NVIDIA itself. And a lot of our customers and partners. So yeah, I think in general, I think the interesting geopolitical question is actually what happens with Chinese open models, right? It's like, obviously we've seen news that like China might consider like export restricting them, like, and like there might be policy interventions on both the Chinese and the US side, right? So it's like, I think this is, I think actually in some ways like the motivation to build a stack and to also push American open source forward. Is to have like less reliance on models that might get banned any day, be it open or closed. Right. It's like I think this is something increasingly like a lot of enterprises are starting to realize that like there's actually huge dependence in a sense on like mainly from the policy side. So this is something I think where we want to just like enable everyone to have like their own end-to-end frontier open stack to be able to create their own models. And ultimately, I think like there will be like, there's obviously a lot of like now, like also NeoLabs and a lot of them are actually like thinking about things quite in a quite open way. So I think we'll be surprised that this may be one of the hot takes is to see more NeoLabs release open models. Like a good example that we also partnered with recently was Poolside, for example, and people were expecting them to be closed, but they actually opened up their models. So I think there will be more of those, especially given there are like hundreds of well-funded neo labs now. Yeah, I think there will be huge resurgence just like of like the age of research in terms of like these, these neo labs like pursuing truly novel directions, right? It's like going where like the big labs almost can't go necessarily, taking big, like bold bets that also might not pay off all of them. But like if you have 100 shots on goal, like some of them will probably pay off and result in interesting outcomes. So I think this is like really also I think what we empowering, right? It's kind of like helping these new nail labs and big AI natives and enterprises to move much faster and not have to basically all build the same stack each by themselves in-house, because almost a lot of them are like tiny teams of like tens of people instead of like thousands. So we're able to like help them move much faster basically by them adopting our stack.

When you hear of a you know, major American tech company, let's say someone in the Mag Seven that has extra capacity, do you reach out to them? Do you, do you ping them? Are you at the scale yet that, that a deal would be interesting to them, or are they really searching for these, you know, $10 billion-plus opportunities?

For sure. Like, We already are sourcing pretty large clusters, sometimes up to 5,000 to 10,000 GPUs. So it's like we're basically looking at every source and pocket of supply that we can find. We've literally turned every stone to find the last GPU available on Earth. And we've been quite good at that. So in some ways, I think we're like— that has been one of the core tenets almost since the beginning is that we really wanted to orchestrate the global compute supply efficiently. So we did a lot of optimization for tolerance and distributed training even in the early days to train across distributed compute. So it's definitely, I think to this question, I think it's something that we're definitely considering. If there's anyone with some spare GPUs here, you can always hit us up.

That's great. Back on China, do you Do you agree with my perception that if there is some sort of lockdown on Chinese open source export controls, that would not affect—

Yeah, are they mad that American companies are distilling on or post-training their open source models?

I thought it was by design. I thought it was goal of the project. But what I'm interested about is, Would they try and claw back access to KIMI or GLM, any of those models that have already been deployed? Because there's an element of like once the weights have been downloaded, it's sort of just out there. Of course, you could go and try and like sue every company, but that's very hard if you're in an American jurisdiction and you're a Chinese company. But how would you see that playing out? Would it just be going forward, no more open source and that's it? That's the CCP telling Chinese companies or some other shape of, of, of like restriction?

Yeah, I think it's really hard to know. I think like a good example was like even to some extent, like the most popular Chinese malls already has been closed for a number, which is Kuin, right? Like, it's almost like they've actually like changed their licensing, stopped outsourcing. So I think there will be both like companies changing their policies. Right. But then also, I think like probably like state intervention, right? It's like in different shapes or form. So I think basically one can't rely on the steady stream of frontier open, like releases out of China in many ways. But it's like from different perspectives. And I think similarly, a lot of other sovereigns, like obviously including the US, also doesn't want to build on necessarily Chinese open models. So it's like I think a lot of American enterprises, obviously also like sovereign use cases, like need American open models. But I think similar for other continents, right? It's like I think there's been a lot of of work, obviously, and we're collaborating with people also across Europe, across India, across other geos. So it's like, I think we'll see a much more multipolar, I think, open ecosystem of open front-end models. So I think that's a healthy balancing away from just relying on Chinese open models, even though they've obviously been a great accelerant of open source progress. I think I think it's also unhealthy to rely just on that ecosystem. And yeah, like I think we'll be like, there will be, I think, a bunch of like quite unpredictable changes similar to like the last few months have been quite unpredictable, I think, to everyone involved. So I think this will continue to be the case in the sense that it will be like quite dicey policy, like AI policy landscape for the next few years.

Last question. Data centers are— data center construction, new data center construction, deeply unpopular in America domestically. Simultaneously. The workloads that are being done in AI data centers are basically— latency is basically irrelevant for training. Certainly for most inference tasks, if you're waiting a couple minutes for a result, an extra 500 milliseconds to get across the world isn't going to matter. This feels like a recipe for global competition, for aggressive data center expansion in a country that does see it favorably, that does see an economic boom from it or does have a lot of energy. What is the state of the non-domestic, non-U.S. data center buildout?

Yes. So we're certainly like building a lot of data centers and partnering with a lot of them like outside of the U.S. as well. But I think there's still a lot of demand actually for data centers in the U.S. I think like even from a data perspective, like there's a lot of now like the financial industries and highly regulated industries like also adopting obviously more and more agents and compute. I do think inference still matters, like speed, in a sense, like maybe not for like long-running agents, but like for a lot of use cases, people I think still really care about like having extremely snappy like responses. But I think like there's definitely, I think like a general boom in data center buildouts outside of the US as well. I think there's just like a limited set of countries who are like strong like allies with like ample amounts of like geopolitical stability, but then also like, like energy and green, like, like greenfields and enough space.

Yeah, the US has unique access to natural gas, which is, if you're trying to bring energy online super quickly, it's hard to beat.

Yes. And I think like we're seeing this across Europe even where like there's specific regions, right, like that are like much more active in data center buildouts than others. And those are generally the ones that like have their own money to invest in them and cheap energy and a lot of also local support for it. So I think in general, from what we're seeing, I think there's like— there is new entrants almost like to the data center buildouts, but it's like even places like Australia and New Zealand, like, and like a small, much smaller place, right? Like Armenia, Kazakhstan and others who like have a huge amount of energy and huge— like, and making huge bets also on data centers, but while also being like allies of the US.. So I think those are the countries I think generally which will see the biggest boom in data centers. I think at the same time, like, I think we'll also continue to see a boom in US data centers. But yeah, there's definitely— it's definitely harder to get data centers in the US than outside of the US. And so it's something I think we'll see both continuously expand. And then I think there might also be obviously, like to your point, like a policy, like, like updating for like with upcoming elections and midterms, I think of, I think, like this, this whole almost like populism in the US around like data centers and like a lot of the kind of, I think, public sentiment as potentially also like sovereign influences and other things like from other nation states who are trying to harm almost like the US data center buildout.

Yeah.

So I think there's like a lot of things at stake for the US, right? It's like to, to not pull back on, on their data center buildout. But I think there will also be specific states or like leaning in much more heavily than others.

Right.

Like, I think this is already what we're seeing where— Texas. Exactly. So it's like there's specific states in the US that are just like much more well suited to really ramp up data centers from here. And yeah, and I think we'll see them ramp up globally and hopefully also outside of like beyond Earth. And I think, yeah, like I think this is the only way to really probably scale.

I love it. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Incredible progress. Incredible progress.

We love seeing you and the team win. Yeah, it's fantastic.

Fantastic. Have a great rest of your day. Say hello to Will for us and we'll talk to you later. Cheers. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era unlocks seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. Our next guest is Ben Thompson, the founder of Stratequery. He's been on an absolute absolute tear during a slow news cycle. Does it feel like a slow news cycle to you?

I don't know. It— and the summer is always slow. Um, I, you know, I take a couple days, or I slow down a little bit myself.

I feel like you've done a good job of like providing really insightful and interesting pieces during a slow time where I didn't know that I wanted to say—

I'm doing you a favor.

Yeah, you are.

Is that what I'm hearing?

Yeah.

I didn't know I wanted you to adopt the voice of Mark Zuckerberg for 20 minutes and go on a tear. But it's not like that was driven by like a specific, okay, there's a Wall Street Journal article where like, or Bloomberg has a scoop and like we need to know this. It's more just like resetting on the Meta narrative. I want to talk about the Meta narrative, but can we start with Xbox?

Sure.

I want to know first, let's go back in time a little bit. And I want you to reality check me on the story I tell myself about how Microsoft wound up in the situation it wound up in with Xbox. And I think it stems with DirectX.

The—

it's the graphics layer that allowed games to be run on multiple graphics cards. So that was a Microsoft-licensed piece of property. So this is why we don't have the Chromebox.

You want to go—

You want to go really far back, like, because we did, we didn't get an Amazon gaming console. We didn't get a Google gaming console, right?

Right.

Like, why?

Why?

That's interesting. So you, we go back way back. I mean, we can go really far back.

Please.

I mean, back in the day, the main technology for doing 3D was coming along was OpenGL, and OpenGL had various pluses or minuses., it was, you know, we're way back in history, but this is the origin of the NVIDIA story, making cards to do 3D graphics. Uh, you had like the Riva, the 128, then you had the TNT, then you had the GeForce. And like we're talking back in the '90s when I was, you know, your guys' age or whatever it was, uh, in college. And, um, you know, making, uh, the first, you know, Quake comes out, like the real first 3D game, you know, there was actually a really interesting Twitter back back and forth with the old id people talking about Quake and how basically they obliterated the company by burning everyone out by launching it. But super fun, super fun back and forth. But Microsoft comes out with Direct3D as an alternative to OpenGL that was, I think, and this is a little out of my area of expertise, but I think it was a little easier to use, had more niceties, was more tied into the platform. But this is all sort of PC gaming. Yeah, the Xbox, the way I think about it, and a lot of gamers kind of get annoyed when I write about the gaming stuff because I don't really care about the gaming part of it. I'm more interested in like the strategy and how that fits in the overall company.

What is your review?

Yeah, can we get a GTA 6 review?

No.

Well, I feel, I feel compelled. Number one, I feel Rockstar, I think, is charging way too little for this game. They're charging what, $80?

Yes, like, you're gonna get canceled for this. This is a nuclear take.

No, they should be charging like $200.

I know, I know.

GTA 6 is like the last great game. Yeah, like, you think about everything— it was mostly all made pre-AI. Yeah, like, it is the pinnacle of this craft. Yeah, craftsmanship. Years and years and years of blood and sweat and tears to extent where you have like the Twitter analysts like counting cigarette butts outside of the offices to see like how much crunch are they in right now.

I don't even think he's trading the stock. I think he just wants to know what GTA is like. The love of the game. Literally the game.

The, the gamers are insane. So I always tread in this water like very, very carefully. But, uh, no, so I feel compelled to buy GTA 6 just in honor of it existing.

I like that.

Even if I don't know if I'm ever going to play it. So I'm definitely going to do that. And I'd be happy to pay.

Yes.

$200. Like $80 is ridiculous. They should charge more. Anyhow.

Yeah. We had one of the youngest person on our team was commenting on people online complaining about the price and said something like, you didn't have— you had 10 years. You couldn't save up $80.

I know.

Seriously.

It's like, whoever you are, like, I know kids that do lemonade stands and they clear like $100.

Yeah.

You know?

Oh, absolutely. I want, you know, the old $20, I'll keep the change. Nothing will make a kid's day better than that. Although unfortunately with inflation, I think now it's sort of like expected. It's unbelievable how expensive things are these days. But, um, so anyhow, I don't know how I got to GTA 6, but we're back. Oh, so the console, the console era. So the way I think about Xbox is you go back to Microsoft and Microsoft had this whole whole thing, this is pre-iPhone. This is idea of their corporate strategy was 3 screens in the cloud. And the idea that we're going to, we already own the desk via the PC. We're going to own the pocket via the phone. And people always used to say Microsoft missed mobile. Microsoft did not miss mobile. They like, they came out with a Windows CE in like 1999. Like they were in mobile. They just had the totally wrong conceptual model because they were basing it around you know, as an extension of the PC.

Yeah.

But then the third screen was the living room. How do we get in the living room? Well, people have consoles plugged in their TVs. If we can get in and own the console, we can own sort of the gateway to the living room and we need to earn permission to be in the living room. We will do that by creating the Xbox, the game console. And what's interesting about this is this is a strategy that totally failed and It failed for a kind of an obvious reason in retrospect, which is first and foremost, people buy consoles to play games, not to have a portal to the internet in their living room. And so you're selling a multi-hundred dollar sort of console to people who want to play games, but people who don't want to play games aren't going to randomly start buying consoles. What actually ended up taking that over was things like the Fire Stick. Or, you know, Apple TV beta played this. I still think it's like probably the, the best solution, but it's way too expensive now. The Apple TV's poor price got jacked to the moon with this recent memory increase. Uh, but the Fire Stick is probably a big one. You had the Chromecast, you had Roku TV, uh, you had, you know, these, which ended up being— it's not that— it's a classic Microsoft thing. They were actually right. There was this new front page to online services to be built.

Built.

They just took totally the wrong approach with Xbox. And what's funny is that this approach actually became this uber-ose of self-mutilation, mutilation, because the Xbox didn't succeed in achieving this because the games console is way too expensive to achieve this. But then also they killed the Xbox where Xbox 360 was pretty competitive. And it's— that generation is actually the most interesting console generation. I'm happy to expound on that if you want to. But they come out after that with the Xbox One, I think.

Yes.

Which was super expensive because it had the Kinect built in.

Yeah.

That sort of like wave your hands around sort of thing. And it had all much more like restrictive DRM things. It was gonna be more digital. It was basically that console was designed around, we're gonna realize our vision and own the living room. And gamers hated it. So they rejected it. So their vision, which they did didn't achieve also killed their console. And so, and the, so my, I wrote over a decade ago and the whole Xbox saga is filled with regrets, I think first and foremost for Microsoft, but also for me because I, from the beginning is like, they need to kill this program or they need to spin it out or get rid of it. The stated goals, which made made sense from a corporate perspective were not achieved. And it is continuing to exist because it exists.

Yeah.

And I was actually sympathetic to that. I worked at Microsoft from, from 2011 to 2013 when Microsoft was in the dumps and, you know, they were still had a great business, but their stock had been like $40 for like a decade. And, and the one thing the employees has like, well, we still have Xbox, all the cool kids over there. Like it was such a, important thing to corporate culture to have Xbox, even though this was a totally failed division in terms of achieving corporate goals and also was sort of self-immolating because it was trying to achieve corporate goals that it was not going to achieve.

Yeah. What do you think the naming scheme says about that project? I always found it very odd that they went from Xbox to Xbox 360. That sounds like the third, it's actually the second. Then Xbox One is the third. But it's One. And then now they're on Series X, which feels like the 10th, but it's the 4th. And then they have a bunch of subnames. It feels like they just didn't— they never leaned into just like Xbox Two, Xbox Three, Xbox Four.

Yeah, um, well, you're asking— I mean, maybe it shows I worked at Microsoft. You're asking the wrong guy about naming things, I think. Um, but, uh, yeah, total mess. They called it the 360 because it was coming out the same generation as the PlayStation 3, and they wanted it. So they wanted to— what they wanted to be on the same level.

Like we both have sort of a 3 in our name. Yeah.

So what's interesting about the PlayStation 3 is the PlayStation 3 was Sony's big misstep in terms of the whole PlayStation era. What they had, this crazy processor called the Cell processor that had all these capabilities. And they had, up to that point, consoles were differentiated by hardware. And so Sony famously helped One of the reasons they beat Nintendo was they had discs so they could have much larger like media and things along those lines. And whereas Nintendo was sticking with cartridges and there was like other, like they were much more favorable to third-party developers just in general. They had sort of taken over in PlayStation 1 and 2. PlayStation 3 comes along, they produce this, oh, they wanted to get Blu-ray off the ground.

Blu-ray.

That's another example of consoles getting screwed up by trying to attempt to to other corporate priorities. They— it worked.

Yeah.

Wait, didn't they win? And didn't Xbox go with HD DVD and they lost?

They did. But at the end of the day, what happened was the PlayStation 3 was way too expensive. I think it ran super hot if I remember.

Yeah.

And all these extra capabilities were not used. And the reason they weren't used is that was the first HD generation. And you had this shift to 3D games and high-definition graphics. And what happened was it used to be games differentiate themselves by how well they wrote the game. Like how did it perform on your Super Nintendo, on your Nintendo? Now we move to a world of actually all the actual game was offloaded to engines, game engines. Uh, like, you know, it had one, Unreal, obviously this where Epic got super big with the Unreal Engine. And so you no longer did that. What a game company did was actually design the game and then asset creation and asset creation. At HD was way more difficult, way more expensive than it was for, for standard definition TVs. And so the economic imperative for developers came, we can't just be on PlayStation, we need to be on everything. And so that was the ultimate generation and almost every game was made to run everywhere, run on PS3, run on Xbox 360, and run it on the PC. And that was also the Xbox 360's best, best generation. That was the one they were most competitive on because they had all the games, because all developers were making them sort of run everywhere. They had a very simple to develop for architecture. The 360 was very PC-like, even more so than the one sort of previously. And that was their best generation. And then they come back the next generation shoving Kinect down people's throats. We're going to own the TV. And meanwhile, Sony learned their lesson. They're like, okay, We can't differentiate on hardware. We need to create sort of generic hardware that is easy to develop for. And the way we will differentiate is through exclusives. They bought a bunch of small studios in contrast, like buying Activision.

Yeah.

Which we can get to a little bit. They bought a bunch of small studios and pushed all those studios to developing killer games for the upcoming PS4. And so you got things like, like the Spider-Man, like, uh, That was a huge game.

Naughty Dog, Last of Us, that type of stuff.

Exactly.

Yeah.

I mean, and so the PS4 was an unbelievable generation.

Yeah.

And a lot of the reasons it was unbelievable was because it had these exclusive games and they just crushed Microsoft because for all the cross-platform games, the Call of Duties, the Maddens, things like that, those always ran everywhere. And so what you do is you limit the economic potential of your studios because you're only building for your platform., and you make it back by all the licensing fees you get off the EAs of the world and the Activisions of the world, because 80% of gamers are on your console, not on the other guy's console. And so they just wiped out Microsoft in that generation. Um, and that really just continued to the PS5. Uh, and this is where we sort of get to the, the Game Pass disaster.

Okay. Yes. So, uh, yeah, I want to, Yeah, let's just jump forward to that.

I didn't want to ramble too long. That's going to be a chance.

No, we love it.

We love it.

Yeah.

I have a bunch of other questions not related to gaming, but I like, I love this history.

Oh, I think the console, the console history is fascinating. It's really interesting how sort of, because it tracks technological change to such a large extent and it totally shifted sort of strategies.

So, and yeah, I think you can draw, I think you can draw a lot of real parallels, even just model releases over the last couple of years, how how, you know, certain decisions around one model sets you back a certain number. You know, they're iterating a lot faster, but I'm seeing parallels.

Yeah, the sort of development of— yeah, it's interesting. You can always just sort of draw lessons. So you get to Microsoft at this point. Again, I think I wrote at the time, oh wait, time to give up. I wrote multiple times through the years they should give up on Xbox.

And at this point, Microsoft's top team is like— was there ever an option after they bought Activision just to make Call of Duty a console exclusive, or would that have been an FTC problem?

Well, we'll get to that. That's part of the story here. So Microsoft decides, okay, what we— we're going to actually try a new business model. It's true, Xbox sort of selling a console, selling, you know, licensing it. We kind of do that, but we're actually moving to being a services company. The stock's doing much better now. You know, like we have Azure, all these things. What we need to do and the way we compete with Sony is we need to have the exact opposite of the Sony strategy and we need to lean into services, lean into subscriptions. We're going to do Xbox Game Pass. And the idea of Xbox Game Pass is instead of buying every individual game for $60, $70, $80— gaming pricing, by the way, really has stayed suppressed probably far longer than it should have been, particularly for these AAA games. But we already got to that with Rockstar. So they're like, you pay one price per month and you get access to all the games in Game Pass. Well, of course, no publisher wants to partake in this because they make all their money upfront by selling games to their biggest fans. You know, it's kind of like the movie model. You make a bunch of money upfront. And yet in the long run—

Were they looking at like at what happened to the music industry as an example of saying like, like, yeah, it's cool to make your product more accessible. You get, you know, more listeners by bundling your streaming.

But that was the bet. You had to make it up in volume, right? And so this, this why the Series S came about. There's the Series X and the Series S. The Series S was a more underpowered but much cheaper model. I think it launched at $300 versus the X was, I think, $600 or maybe $500. And that was also a problem because your kind of neutering the X because developers build to the lowest common denominator, not sort of the highest one. So that was one problem. But the idea was we're going to expand the market and they have these package deals where you get an S and you get Game Pass for a year and it's this sort of thing and we will make it up. And the problem is no, no independent developer is going to go for that. So they had some of their own games, but they went out and started buying a bunch of developers. So they bought Bethesda, which included, I think, id at that point and ZeniMax. I don't know the—

Yeah, they have a bunch of like great IP libraries, but those developers just aren't releasing like incredible titles annually except for Activision, which does have a new release schedule.

Exactly. And so the issue with buying these companies is what you're paying for is you're paying for their existing business plus the premium. And their existing business was selling single copies of games to all platforms. And what they were saying is we're going to basically force all these studios to take a bath, to lose a ton of money by putting all their games on Game Pass. We'll still sell on PlayStation because we have to, because that's a lot of money. It'd be massively economically destructive perspective, not to, but what we think is going to happen is gamers are going to realize I could be paying $70 a pop on PlayStation, or I could go to Xbox and I could pay $20 a month and I can get all these games and that's it. What a better deal. And by the way, we'll get new gamers. People are going to come in and realize, wow, I get all these games for $20 a month. None of that happened. All they did was cannibalize their existing business. They didn't expand the market for console gamers. All they did was have gamers who would have paid way more to play these games pay way less to play these games. And Microsoft ate it. And they, I think the, you know, the recent reporting was they expected to have 75 million Game Pass subscribers by this year. They have like 30 million. And that number is actually decreasing. It's not going up. And so it's just been, And so that's sort of the context of what's happened here. Phil Spencer got retired, which if you retire at that level of a company, you're probably canned, probably too late. The whole strategy was a disaster. They brought in new leadership and now there's sort of like a reset going on there. They're laying off a few thousand people. They, they say all games production to continue. But there's a real sort of critical decision here. What do we do? Because we ended up getting stuck in the middle, like, and we're just— this doesn't work.

What, uh, what did you read into their approach of laying off 1,600 people now and keeping a 1,600-person RIF?

I mean, it's a terrible idea. Like, everyone there for the rest of the year is terrible.

Like, like Every VC would tell you to like, just cut hard, cut deep, and then move forward with the team.

If you're on the ship, we're going to Valhalla together.

I think I do have some sympathy because the reality is I appreciated the note because they are in big trouble. And there's an aspect of just stating it clearly. We're not sugarcoating it. And if they laid out how much trouble they were in and then only cut 1,600 people, then everyone kind of knows they're going to be cutting more people. Right. So I think they're just in a bad spot. So of course it's not great. It's going to destroy morale. It's going to destroy everything for the next year because everyone's waiting to get fired. But there's a bit of— they did, I think, tear the Band-Aid off to the extent they could. And now there's just a— now they can be very overt. They can go through and actually talk to them employees about what are you working on? Why should you still be here? And it's a reflection of the employment climate. Like, people in general are more— they're just not going to bail. Microsoft, you know, they're going to want to keep their job. And so they can probably, hopefully, fingers crossed, do better cuts by virtue of doing them in the open. But I don't know. I mean, I don't envy— I don't envy Xbox's leadership at all. It's going to be a very tough thing, but I can totally understand how they are where they are.

Probability of a spinout?

I mean, I think it, I think it needs to happen. Like, I, but, you know, this is again, the regret is this was my take for years and years and years. I'm like, okay, fine. Xbox Game Pass, that kind of seems kind of interesting.

Let's go for it.

I should have stuck to my guns. So like, no, stop. This is going to be a disaster. I think, yeah, I don't, I don't get it. I just don't— I didn't see it before. The thing that got me to say, okay, let's give it a chance, didn't work. I don't see it now. I mean, I think it does give me pause. They hired Matthew Ball, who I've had on Stratégie multiple times, uh, as their chief strategy officer. I have a lot of respect for, you know, his takes. So I'm curious what he's thinking about. Yeah, this gets to the question before: is there a bit where they just write off these acquisitions and say, actually, all this stuff's gonna be exclusive now. We're like, Call of Duty, buy an Xbox. Like, basically giving in to the FTC's worst fears, which— but those fears didn't make sense at the time in the context, because it's— by writing off— what's funny is now we lost billions and billions of dollars.

Yeah, and it would, it would test— it would be a good pricing test for the power of of a AAA game to say, okay, you can only get Call of Duty on Xbox now. And you would see like how, like how many incremental Xbox sales do you get? Because that means the real value of the game is actually in the hundreds of dollars. If people have a PlayStation and then they'll try something new. Switching gears a little bit, we keep having this experience where there's a company, you know, an AI company, let's say an application layer company that is or lab that is, you know, hot, but then you don't hear very much for a few months and you write them off and then they come out and they've like added hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue and are doing a crazy up round. And it's this weird thing where like even, you know, historically, you know, there's power laws everywhere. But I feel like in this moment we're seeing more and more examples where like the 10th best company in the category is still having the financial performance cost that a company that would have been the leading company in their category 5 years ago. What do you make it? What do you make of that?

This is just a thing in tech in general that, that is always sort of stuck out at me. I mean, I, I think I—

has it been though?

But like, like CRM, for example, like if you go back to like 2000 and 2015, was like the 10th best CRM company, like actually—

no, no, the, the example I always go back to is, I think it was 2014 or so when Apple bought Beats and they bought Beats for $3 billion and everyone's going, the tech press is going crazy. Everyone's writing thought pieces about it. And I'm like, you know, of course writing about it. I'm like, $3 billion. Like Apple is a $500 billion company. What does $3 billion matter? And what's funny about that take is number one, it was right. Who cares about $3 billion? That's in our couch cushions. Like people were spun up off of it. Matter. Number 2, Apple is only a $500 billion company. Like, the astronomical increase in valuation and numbers around this is absolutely crazy. So to your point, yeah, a 2019 CRM company, number 1, there probably wasn't a number 10 even then. But yeah, the numbers are not even remotely tied to like any— I just sort of let them go and be like, I write down the numbers and they don't really mean anything to me. But it's very hard to keep track of like the inflation in tech numbers specifically. You know, you think that— what was I complaining about pricing before? Oh, yeah. Lemonade stands are bad. Silicon Valley lemonade stand inflation is absolutely the worst in the world.

On mergers and acquisitions, there's this news today about Getty Images calling off Shutterstock deal after UK regulators said that they would have to sell the editorial business for the merger to be approved.. And it seemed very odd to me that a merger would be blocked by a regulator when that industry that is consolidating and is maybe becoming more monopolistic is under such insane attack from generative AI. I can't imagine a better defensive move than putting Getty Images and Shutterstock together.

This happens.

This is—

this happens every single time. Like the natural response to your overall category being threatened by an external force is consolidation. Like, it's the only way to defend yourself to sort of, you know, you get synergies. Like, you know, like all these companies are pretty established, so it's actually fairly easy to price. You know exactly what things are. It's a much like if you have growing companies, you want to merge them or acquire them. It's really unclear because how do you sort of price out the future? These companies are declining. So it's very easy. Well, you can do a discounted cash flow and understand exactly how much they're worth. It's a very straightforward negotiation. It makes total sense for them to consolidate. But precisely because they're knowable and understandable, it's very easy for regulators to block them. And you see this happen again and again. You see like pushback on— you saw this with TV and like, like different networks getting together and the various pushbacks after that, or in telecoms, like the this happens, this is a natural pattern. The moment that a company, an industry wants to consolidate, needs to consolidate, is the moment regulators are most likely to stop them consolidating. And whereas the actual time when action would matter, like when it, when it's growing and a company is making the right acquisitions to take over an industry, regulators don't do anything and also rightly don't do anything because you're dealing with the future and it's unknown. You don't want to screw it up. Up. It raises the question of what use do regulators sort of do anyway? In broad, broad strokes, I used to be— I've sort of, you know, I think that they probably do more harm than good as far as a lot of these sort of blocking mergers and things go. But I don't know, I'm the one that just said maybe Microsoft should take Call of Duty exclusive. So, so who knows? Maybe I'll add—

Yeah, we had a funny moment because we were looking, it's a $3.7 billion deal, but I'm like, how is this— a $3.7 billion deal. Both these are two $300 million-ish market cap companies. And it was because they— the deal was like priced back in January of 2025. And so both companies had declined so much combined market cap over the last 18 months.

And so maybe they should do the deal anyway. I don't know.

I mean, it could be worse. You could be Netflix and have the stock market sort of like make a bid for Warner Brothers that the stock market hates, abandon the deal. But they already decided you did the deal because you're desperate. You're screwed anyway.

So, yeah.

And you don't even get what you bid for. So, uh, maybe that's what happened here. I don't know.

Oh well. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Have a, uh, have a great summer, uh, enjoy the break, and we'll see you soon.

Yeah, good luck with the lemonade stands. Yes, try to make it through the summer.

You're gonna run up on a kid that has clarinet, raise some money. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, clarinet at a lemonade stand.

5 easy payments, interest-free. Interest-free. It might. Well, thank you so much and have a great rest.

Great to see you.

We'll talk to you soon.

Talk to you later.

Have a good one. Let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in-store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. And our next guest is Rodrigo Leão from Samba Nova. The co-founder and CEO is here with us in the TV van. Rodrigo, how are you doing?

I'm doing good. How are you guys?

We're doing fantastically, but it sounds like you're doing better. Give us the news. What happened?

Well, you know, we're super excited. We did a big, uh, big funding announcement today with a billion-dollar, uh, round that we did a first close on at an $11 billion valuation. So super excited about announcing that.

Incredible. There we go.

This is reminding me, there was somebody posted like a couple weeks ago something to the effect of like every day there's a new billion-dollar deal in chips from some company you've never heard of. And, uh, market, I guess the trend, uh, the trend continues. Yeah, talk about it.

Yeah, uh, yeah, is this an overnight success? When did you start the company? How long has this been overdue?

It's an overnight 9-year success. You know, I've been, I've been, I've been building chips for 30 years, high-performance products, and we started this company in 2017. So, no, but it's been, it's been a great journey. It's just, you know, again, so noisy. So there's so many companies out there doing also all sorts of awesome things. But look, then, you know, inference, inference is now right in front of us. It's kind of broken everything open. It's what we do and it's been what we've done for a long time. And so it's the new training run. And so people that have kind of been thinking about building chips for training, well, now it's the time for inference. And this is where we shine and we shine, you know, and investors are putting all their money behind that. And so we're excited about that.

How—

how— walk me through the phases of— I mean, you have some of the biggest companies in the world you're working with, JPMorgan Chase, selected you for secure on-prem AI inference. And I'm interested in the thought process that large Fortune 500 companies, Fortune 100 companies are going through right now. I imagine that there's a lot of explore with frontier models, very expensive, they're token maxing. Then they shift to, okay, this agentic workflow is working, let's use an open-source model for it that is Either the open source frontier is caught up and can do this particular task. Maybe there's a fine-tune or some RL on some private data that makes the system perform better. When is the conversation shifting to actually optimizing the inference stack, the hardware? What's the conversation like there? What are the savings that people are focused on?

Well, I think what people are starting to realize after they start using ChatGPT and Anthropic, the frontier models, is, look, there's a bunch of things I can do there and it's great. You know, we'll use it and it's going to be part of their business for a long, long time.

Right.

And hyperscalers are offering all sorts of different services with different GPUs and GPUs and training chips. They're offering different things there again on the cloud. What, what's happening now is this next phase of production is people starting to realize, okay, what happens to the stuff that I'm not comfortable releasing to these models, like my private data, my security, the stuff that I don't want your models to learn and then somehow become part of the global knowledge, right? And so what happens with that, right? And so I don't know if I have, you know, my client's banking information, you know, I have, you know, some very regulated information. What do I do with that, right? And so people are starting to realize, okay, there is a whole another class of workloads, whole another class of, you know, of applications that you gotta go and do private. And so, uh, with someone like JP Morgan, which is fantastic, you know, I mean, they are the top of the top when it comes to enterprise and IT, right? And so, and technology, and so fantastic partner. So they selected us as the ones that can come in and go into an environment like JP Morgan, do full on-prem secure private. They can bring their open source models, they can fine-tune into it, they can deploy that privately, securely, and control the models and control it forever, right? So, so I think, I think we're starting to see the landscape start to steady, right? There's some things you use the Anthropic for, there's some things that you're going to use the hyperscale clouds for, and there's some things you're going to say, hey, let me run on-prem and let me control the outcome. And especially since I don't know how the regulatory environment is going to settle, let me just be secure for that. Let me just be safe and just run those things on my own models in my own environment with my own security around it and then be done.

Yeah, you can think, you know, pharma company being like, I would love for all the other large pharma companies to share their data with a frontier lab.

Totally.

But I'll pass.

What does partnership with you look like for a large organization? If I have, you know, a large IT footprint already, I probably have data centers, but they might be, more CPU-based workloads. Maybe I have some GPUs, but I'm not doing, you know, frontier inference. I'm not fully scaled up, but I have some. Are you consulting with them at the level of like where they should be buying land for their next data center, how they set up a powered shell, who they should partner with? Like how deep in the stack will you go with a company that you're working with?

Well, look, you know, I mean, if you look at the AI ecosystem, systems up today. We've been really focused on hyperscale clouds, the neo clouds, the frontier models. We're really focused on building those out, gigawatts here, megawatts there. I mean, just this large-scale deployment. And then what you're still thinking about is, well, how do I get as many tokens out per megawatt, per kilowatt, megawatt, and gigawatt that I have?

Right.

So that's kind of— we're very focused on that. Some of the play into that are really, really efficient models. We run the big models really fast. That's really what we're known for, huge models, right? You know, the battleground for power and data center and all that is about huge models. It's not about the little models, it's about the trillion, multi-trillion parameter models. That's what we focus on and run that faster than anybody else in the world. So, but then you flip it over to the enterprise and for them it's not as much about how many thousands of racks are going to fit into an environment. It's about data privacy. Privacy. It's about security. It's about having the capacity when I want it. It's about low latency. It's about these things that, again, you go back to traditional computing, it's what they've always wanted, right? They always wanted low latency, high performance, all security and privacy. They've always wanted that. And so what we can open up is that because our rack— our rack's a 10-kilowatt air-cooled rack compared to what traditional GPUs are, 140 kilowatts per rack, right? We're 10-kilowatt air-cooled rack producing state-of-the-art AI. Sure. Now you can go into your existing data centers. You don't need to go buy new data. You already have data centers. Roll out the old gear, bring in the new gear, off we go. Right. And you're running the latest and greatest models at great performance. So that's kind of what's exciting about it. And there are first, first and foremost, our customer, you know, they're buying racks and deploying them. But then broadly, they're really also a co-developer when it comes to enterprise new secure AI for enterprise, right? Because they are the most knowledgeable when it comes to deploying these types of applications and they're just so smart about this stuff. And so we can partner with them and figure out how to bring the enterprise on board, which again, you know, if we all think about it, there's 3 classes of AI clients. You got the model makers, right? You got the clouds. And people forget enterprise is just waking up. And historically they've been a massive amount of spend. Yeah, massive. Right. And so they're just waking up. And you see JPMorgan, some of the banks and some of the other retailers starting to come on board. And I think that's going to be a part of the ecosystem. I think it's going to be something that's going to be around.

Yeah. Last question for me, Jordi. You can take whatever after, but walk me through the pre-ChatGPT era for your company. I imagine that since 2022, 2023, it's been on fire and demand has been through the roof. But how did the company survive from 2017 to 2022? What were you doing? Who were the customers? Did you have revenue? Like, what was it? Was it all R&D and venture funding? Like, what was the, what was the early history of the company? Because that felt, that feels like a very potentially rough period. But how did you get through that, that, that time?

Well, look, I mean, I've been in chip design for a long time. Well, and I always know that this is a long-term investment. And so, I mean, back in 2017, we're still trying to recognize cats and dogs on the web, right? Is a cat or a dog, right? That's what we're doing, right? We're trying to figure out, you know, what do we do with this thing, right? And so, um, and we're building recommender models, all sorts of different things for people. But the reality is this— the pre— what, what, what OpenAI did, it just flushed out all of that noise pre-OpenAI.

Yeah.

And focus all the value around let's start here. It doesn't mean that images aren't important. Doesn't mean voice. All these other things are important. But what it did is focused us as a global market to say, let's start here. Let's just start with language. And it's a very good place to start. And that allowed us to actually go— all of us can come together, say hardware, software models, everybody start focusing in on language as the use case. And now you've got so much production traction and now you can focus on other things like We're doing great in voice and we're doing great in, in, in video. And these are things that are also coming, but the ability to sequence these things in production so that you can actually see value is incredibly important.

Love it.

On, on that note, going forward, how are you thinking about, you know, reacting to customer needs like this partnership with, with JPM and some of your other, you know, new customers feels like reacting to this like real-time need of like, okay, we understand the potential, we're willing to invest a lot here, but we have certain kind of criteria around how we want to roll these products out versus skating to where the puck is going and trying to make predictions around R&D that you do today that will pay dividends, you know, 3, 4, 5 years out.

Yeah, well, you know, when your chip design, as you guys know, right, you know, it takes you 2 years to design and you got to go through TSMC, you got to build these wafers and you got to build the systems. I mean, that's a 3 or 4 year cycle, right? And so you're always, it's a, blend between engineering and fortune-telling, right? And so you're kind of mixing those. But, but the reality, the reality is you're always doing that. But here's the difference when it comes to enterprise. And we not only have JPMorgan, but last month we announced a huge partnership with Vista Equity, which has 93 portfolio companies building all these applications. And so what is the biggest thing that we run out with is we don't have optics, we don't have optics. And so Now what you're seeing is the JPMorgans of the world, the Empresas of the world, the Vistas of the world, all these applications, all turning SaaS companies into AI-first companies. And you're seeing the demand pull through. And so what we're excited about this is not only do we have the chips and you got connected with the data center that they're— oh, the next thing is connected with the end user, the end of-taker that applies AI into something that's useful to new businesses. And so, so we're super excited about the JPMorgan, the Vista, all of these That's our, that's our mentality is what are people using it for? Solve that problem. Everything underneath follows.

Thank you so much for coming on the show. Congratulations on the massive round.

9-year overnight success.

Can't wait to talk to you again soon. Have a great rest of your week. Talk to you soon. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Public.com, investing for those who take it seriously. They got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, trade purchases and more with great customer service. Our next guest is Alana Palmito from Paradigm.

Hey guys, what's up?

What's up? Welcome to the show. Our last guest raised $1 billion. You had to one-up them. You had to two-up them with $1.2. Tell us about the new fund.

Oh man, thanks for having me, guys. Really great to be here. Um, we're super excited about it. We, uh, we raised $1.2 billion to go after the new opportunity set Frontier Tech.

Thanks for warming that up for me. It sounds nice and warm. Fantastic.

So I continue.

Continue.

$1.2 billion for investment.

All right, guys, we're going big. We're going after all Frontier Tech. We're really excited about it. Obviously, you guys know we got our start in crypto back in 2018. This is our fourth fund. Yeah, pretty, pretty excited about it.

But I feel like— I don't know, this is being somewhat positioned as like an expansion of the vision or the thesis, but I feel like Paradigm's been investing in broader frontier themes for years now. Like, can you talk about some of the history of expanding beyond crypto and, and the key moments in the fund's history that sort of woke you up to broadening the thesis?

Yeah, well, I think in 2018, crypto was the most interesting frontier to be investing into. And like, that really was the heart of how we started building the firm. And it was the— it was the thesis behind being the sort of researchers, builders first. How do you get really close to the tech to be able to understand and underwrite these things from first principles? And then I think over time, it's, it's become pretty obvious that it's not the only frontier and really hard to ignore what's happening in AI. But actually, like, I would say it's more than that. It's like the world itself has started to blend together and drawing these concrete lines is like no longer applicable. I think that like even something that called itself a crypto project years ago today, like things that are right on the periphery, tech is just all touching each other. And when you think about trying to separate it, it just doesn't work that way.

How are you thinking about the early stage? There's been some chatter on the timeline about, oh, like every VC just wants to pile more money into the biggest private companies, the trillion-dollar private companies. Why would I waste money or time talking to an early-stage founder? How are you thinking about opportunities at early stage, mid-stage, late stage? What even is mid-stage now? Is that 10— a mere $50 billion company?

Early stage?

Early stage at this point. Who knows?

Yeah, I think—

well, I think stages is a hard thing to define because, like, what are we really talking about? Are we talking about the stage of the company, the valuation? Like, um, I think it's, it's impossible to, to not be backing some of the earliest founders and folks who are, you know, coming out with new great ideas. And so for us, it's like talent-led, I would say. Like, you find great people, oftentimes they're in their early 20s, So I don't think you can ignore the early stage, but you also can't ignore the dynamic that you're describing, which is like the power law of what's happening with these larger, later-stage companies and how much they're able to capture and the compound rate of growth. So I think it's, I think it's like you have to do both.

From an actual product standpoint, are you breaking out the fund? Is there some amount, you know, segmented for the early stage, some for growth, some for incubation? How should founders be thinking about the new vehicle?

It'll be truly stage agnostic. So we're going to invest in everything from super early seed stage, even pre-seed in some cases, all the way into growth markets. We also, you know, we have a core flagship fund which is an open-ended vehicle. And so we invest into public markets too.

Oh, interesting. Very cool. What is the effect of this year's IPOs? What have been the internal learnings from the the, the height of the opening of the, of the IPO window? It feels like it's sort of open, but maybe not fully wide open. We've got a lot of exciting IPOs that have done well. But how is that affecting the fund and your, your feeling around the market right now?

That's a good question. I think it's a hard thing to answer. One of the, one of the interesting dynamics happening in IPOs is like hyper liquid and and some of the, some of the trading activity we've seen in advance of the IPOs. It's been pretty fun to see, like, the 24/7, 365 markets really come alive, which has been a long-term thesis that the crypto markets have had. And I think Jeff Lowe at Hyperliquid has just done an incredible job pulling it off. And, and Jeff Lowe at Trade.xyz and Jeff Yon at Hyperliquid.

Yeah.

And so, like, the Cerebras IPO, SpaceX IPO, like all of is now like we had all of this trading activity going into those. And so there was a lot more transparency on pricing in advance of the IPO event itself.

Yeah. How, how accurate was the like on-chain pricing relative to what these IPOs actually opened at? And do you feel like—

surprisingly accurate?

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, surprisingly like quite accurate, actually.

Interesting.

And have you heard of any institutions like starting to, you know, bigger like firms on Wall Street that you think will, if they're planning to invest in the IPO or trade it after it opens, actually start their activity on-chain? Is that something that you see happening in the future as we get sort of more evidence that on-chain trading tracks, you know, real life after these IPOs actually happen?

Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, if I were them, I would be doing that. I don't know what what the rules are and what the playbook is for them today and like what the liquidity and depth of those books looks like. But I mean, I think that's the thesis for what 24/7, 365 markets look like in the future is you're going to have a lot more institutional activity. Certainly we're seeing that in perps as a derivative product themselves. Like, I think they're just a much more efficient pure-play product for big hedge funds to come in. And I would even say like the same thing can be true in prediction markets.

Markets.

Like what we're seeing is, you know, some people are relating to prediction markets as an institutional product for getting exposure to things and bets that they want to place that is much more precise than we've had in the future— or excuse me, in the past. And so the future, I think, holds like still a lot of white space in terms of how these markets are going to evolve. But we continue to be really excited about it.

What do your internal meetings look like? Do you have like a meeting once a month where you guys pitch new frontiers that you're kind of kicking around? Like, at what point, like, what is forming a thesis look like? Is it all partner-driven or is it more collective? You guys have kind of a general idea of a category that you're excited about and then you work together?

Well, it's a top-down, like thematically we're investing into areas where that are structurally long AGI. First and foremost. Um, so what are the things that are going to have a natural tailwind to come out of that? We don't run like necessarily a top-down process though, down to an investment and say like, let's go do a deep dive or a particular theme. Um, I think that oftentimes you try to gain conviction, um, and do sprints on individual areas in the market, um, that were maybe like there's a particular founder that we are excited about. But the process, yeah, I would say it's more organic. Like each individual partner may have a different thing that they're excited about and, and digging in on. I do think like, you know, fundamental to our thesis is like we have to be close to the tech. And so we ourselves have to be able to go really deep and like understand these things down to, you know, lines of code. And a lot of folks on the team are computer scientists or physics about down to the metal.

You guys have down to the metal. You guys have a little data center in the office just humming away.

No data center in the office. Yeah, I mean, like orbital data centers, are they the future? I don't know. What do you guys think?

I don't know. I think you guys should, should get some— get on, get on the next SpaceX rocket and run a little experiment.

I think it's all just— yeah, I'm on the Elon Elon timelines, which is take whatever he says and multiply it by 3, and that's probably true, which is still going to happen, but just not next year.

Yeah, I think, I think Elon will will things into existence.

Yes. With enough time, he will get there. Yeah, almost always.

Absolutely.

But it takes time. Anyway, thank you for taking the time to come chat with us and congratulations on the new fund.

Yeah, I'm excited to meet all the new founders joining the portfolio.

Portfolio. Yeah, yeah, we got some great folks there.

I love ZipLine.

Evan Rogers, Keller is amazing at ZipLine.

Yeah, yeah, fantastic.

Super excited.

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

Great to have you on, Alana.

Cheers. Bye-bye. Let me tell you about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents, whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows. Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish our next—

Next up is Byron Boots.

We got boots on the ground.

Boots on the ground.

Let's bring in Byron Boots from Overland AI. Welcome to the show. How are you doing?

Oh, great. Thanks for having me on, guys. It's really exciting to be here.

Yes.

Great to have you.

We're very excited. Can you reintroduce the product and then take us through the latest news and the contract that you just signed?

Yeah, sure. So good news is I'm working here out of our factory in Seattle, so you can actually see the product that we have, right? So we're building autonomous ground vehicles for defense. Basically, you think about that as like robots for the battlefield.

Yeah.

So do you guys want to see it?

Absolutely. Give us a tour.

So here's one of them. This is our Ultra product. You can kind of see the top part of it. Yeah, it's a large off-road ground vehicle. You've got sensors in the front, so there's stereo cameras and LiDAR. You've got these big, big wheels. Here and long travel suspension. Down here is a payload deck, so you can think about putting, you know, big payloads on the vehicle right in here. There's onboard power, there's compute down below the deck, comms in the back. So that gives you just a brief overview of one of the things that we're building. And then, you know, you asked about the contract, and we're super excited. So we're the first ground autonomy provider to to get a production contract with the US military, um, $20 million contract with the US Marine Corps.

Oh, it's fantastic. That— I— you're thinking what I'm thinking, that truck needs a gun on it. What, what does the payload look like on there? It seems very modular. It seems like you can put a lot of different equipment on that. Is that something that's delegated to the Marine Corps? They decide, they Do you partner with other primes or do you have like other relationships where you can bring the configuration to them?

So we've put 30 payloads, 30 different payloads on these vehicles. It's designed to be modular. You can see that there's L-track down here that makes it really easy to attach things.

Sure.

So this is everything from kinetic payloads, like remote weapon stations, drones, EW.

Sure.

So it depends on what the customer needs. Customer wants. We can help them integrate anything onto this vehicle.

Dogs as a form factor. There's been a bunch of sort of—

Robot dogs?

Robot dogs.

Or actual dogs?

Well, we should get into real dogs. But there's been a bunch of videos circulating recently. There was one maybe a week ago of a robotic dog, and it seemed like they had solved like some of the recoil challenges. Do you think Is that a, like, how are you thinking about that form factor? Obviously you guys are focused on something else, but I'm sure you understand the trade-offs of both. I can imagine like your product is much better for high range, you know, situations where you need a lot of range, but how do you think about it?

Yeah, so one of the reasons why we love this form factor is that it's first of all, large enough to put a serious payload on it. 1,000 to 2,000 pounds depending on what the configuration is. It's got wheels, so, you know, it has really good use of energy. You can drive it 100 miles. So robot dogs are really cool too. So before I started Overland AI, I was a professor running a lab where we worked on machine learning and robotics, and we had a bunch of robotic dogs in the lab, and they're fun to work on. But I think wheeled vehicles are really the place where we can get, you know, the most—

You're saying the wheel is underrated and it doesn't need to be reinvented. That's what I'm hearing.

Which is crazy. Yeah, I mean, so not only do you not need to reinvent the wheel, I mean, if you have squishy tires, you can do things like drive up and down stairs and do all sorts of stuff.

I never thought about how simple that is. You can just drive up the stairs if your tires are big enough. How big are the tires on that truck?

I think these are like 38-inch. So it's a pretty big—

38. That's fantastic. I love it. What does the actual manufacturing process look like? Obviously, you're a very well-funded company, $100 million round recently. At the same time, there's probably a lot of experimentation, a lot of putting different parts of the supply chain together, a lot of modularity. So how hand-built are these? What does the automation story over the future look like?

So the Ultra Vehicle like this one is actually based on a Polaris RZR chassis and drivetrain.

Okay.

So, we get that from Polaris and then we upgrade the suspension. You can actually see a great view of that here.

Got it.

We pull out the seats. We just add this flat payload deck.

Yeah.

And, you know, we do all the work to add the compute and the sensors and wiring power, all of that kind of stuff. So, we pull all that together in our factory here. We're also very field forward. So, we test test these out in the fields all the time. You know, we're in the field every single day working on the, you know, the software, the autonomy. And I think one thing which is really, really important about these systems is that this is a completely autonomous robotic system, right? Like, it has sensors that allow it to perceive the environment, plan through the environment, control it so that a user can just tell it where it wants it to go, what payload to execute. It's not, you know, it doesn't have to be teleoperated. You know, a single user can control multiple vehicles. It's one of the things which is really cool about this tech.

I imagine there's like very high demand for both teleop and full autonomous mode though, right? People want to be able to port in for a particular mission and then also be able to just try and draw waypoints on a map.

So one of the things that I think we see is when people people first start to use a vehicle like this, they're like, oh, like, I want to teleop it and be able to precisely control where it goes. But they quickly realize that you can actually just tell it where to go on the map, tell it, you know, what orientation you want it to be in, and it will just go there and do it. And so it's actually safer, more efficient, and allows you to get, like, much more force multiplication if the operator just relies on the autonomy to get it there. And so What we've seen is warfighters really embracing that and starting to experiment much more with that. So we think autonomy really is the future.

Any plans to make a dual-use version for Malibu? If you got a bunch of surfboards, you want to get them down to the beach, you load them up and say, "Hey, I'll meet you there in 5 minutes." Some natural light. Some natural light.

I mean, it sounds awesome. We are actually dual-use. We are using using this for things like wildland firefighting and other things. So who knows, I mean, maybe, maybe pretty soon, uh, we'll be able to, to, you know, get you guys one.

Yeah, the day party market, the iman taking around the hotel property.

Uh, well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Uh, fantastic news, congratulations, and we'll talk to you soon.

Incredible.

We appreciate it.

Yeah, thank you so much, really appreciate it.

Have a great week, we'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Kong Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. Uh, there's a scoop, there's a scoop on the timeline. Perplexity is quietly building an AI coding tool that takes on Claude Code and Cursor and Codex potentially. Uh, it's meant to build software end-to-end. The tool is being internally used for now under the codename Teammate. Perplexity has been sort of bouncing around from different— so Steve Hu here says, what happened to the Bloomberg Terminal killer? They were working on that for a while. Then they launched Bloomberg Computer, which was sort of a computer use agent and, and saw incredible growth. Like you saw the ARR numbers went way up. It feels like one of those examples of a company that people were sort of like, yeah, I think one of the challenges— and then all of a sudden there's some new good news.

Perplexity has a ton of revenue. Yeah, they're taking a ton of shots on goal. Yeah, just like every other company, to be clear. But I think the difference is that Perplexity doesn't have a product that's being used heavily by tech insiders. And so people just see them as like running around with like, uh, they— it feels like they don't have something like that's a hit in enterprise that they can fall back on while they keep taking shots at some of these more enterprisey products. And so, yeah, it's interesting. It feels like it's going to—

Do you think it's on Prince? Remember, they fired up the Perplexity Investment Fund investing in other startups.

I don't know what they invested in.

I don't know what they invested in, but he has good access. It's possible everything in that fund is just on fire because the market is doing so well, so many companies are getting marked up, that could be a pretty interesting portfolio to get into at some point.

I think that this is more— this teammate makes me think that it's maybe something else, but I could see them seeing Lovables growth and having a lot of overlap in audiences and Replit and saying like, hey, we want to make, you know, we, yeah, we want to make a more consumer-leaning product. I think it'll be hard to really get a foothold.

They are more adjacent than you think. I think you go to Perplexity to look up some information. You get nice UI design on the responses.

Yeah, they have the Joe Rogan partnership, which seems like it's crushing.

Lewis Hamilton.

And Joe can be like, hey, Jamie, build me a new CRM during the show.

I don't think Joe Rogan has any interest in a CRM. I don't think he's in the market. I think he does everything over text message, and you have to be invited. So you know if you're going to be on the show.

Before we have our next guest, Grok45, that's right, is out, is out. Uh, some reviews, looking good on the benchmark goes.

Uh, I wonder, how does Michael Truel have a SpaceX AI badge yet? Is the Cursor team involved in this heavily? Because I know they were doing some consulting work while the deal closed. Of course, the deal was announced, but they still have to go through post-merger integration. I wonder how deep that was integrated, but excited to check it out.

I think they're still gonna be running under the Cursor umbrella for a long time. Sure, sure. I think it's much easier to sell Cursor through the enterprise than Groq.

Yeah, and they have Composer, separate model, but Groq's strong.

Cursor did say that we've partnered with SpaceX AI to train Groq for a while.

To train, okay, so.

So I think that there was a lot of collaboration.

I really wonder if there'll be any gap in capabilities, like in the spiky intelligence sense of Groq will be good at a particular thing, writing or, or something that's a little bit more X-native, Twitter-native, news, social media, like that's been the advantage there potentially. And then Cursor will be more data code driven and there'll actually be sort of a bifurcation in the models or will we just see a consolidation where both models wind up offering like basically the same spiky frontier as every other model? Anyway, excited to dig into that. Always love a new model launch, but we have our next guest in the waiting room. We have Will Mayer from Cult Holdings. Welcome to the show. How you doing, Will?

I'm doing well.

How are you guys? Thank you so much for taking the time.

Great to have you on the show.

Great to have you on the show.

What do we got in the background here? Is that real?

That is real. Yeah, that's like various artifacts from the past.

So yeah, very cool.

Uh, Webby Awards, I think the spring— isn't that a Webby Award?

That is a— that is Webby Award.

Congratulations. Uh, give us a little background. Give us tell us a little bit of the journey. Introduce yourself for those who are watching who might not be familiar with your work.

Yeah, of course. I am Will Mayer. I'm the co-founder and high priest at Cold Holdings. Uh, background came from making skateboard films at a young age when I was like 14 for companies like Vans. Became deeply obsessed with brands and what they represented.

Yeah.

Moved from there into advertising, working with brands like Nike and Netflix, and then, uh, started working more more with startups, incubating companies, and fell in love with cults and religions and believe that many of the best brands are some form of a religion.

I remember, I remember early in Silicon Valley, I was working on a company and people were saying like, oh, like you don't want your product to have a cult-like following. And I was looking at Cult of Mac, like the website that tracks Mac. They refer to it as a cult. Cult. It's a great way to think about things. Obviously, so—

What was the case against not wanting a cult?

Oh, just that like, you know, cults are bad. They often lead to like terrible outcomes in the literal sense. And also, you probably don't want like psychos following you. You want just like normal customers in reality. And that's what Apple wound up getting. They got a huge amount of just normal consumers, but they do have a cult-like fan base.

Yeah, they needed the cult. To get them through to the truly hit consumer product.

Yeah, I mean, before the like 1970s, the word cult was actually neutral. It just meant a new fringe group. There was a period in like the '60s and '70s people referred to as the Fourth Great Awakening. It's like huge boom in spirituality, things like Amish and Rikio, Children of God, but also brands like Blue Ribbon Sports, which became Nike, or Apple from Jobs. In that period, the word cult went from being a neutral word to a negative. And conservatives started to use it to demarcate and delegitimize new movements. So today sociologists mostly refer to cults as NRMs, or New Religious Movements.

Okay, got it. Interesting. But you're, you're reclaiming it, you're taking it back. Uh, talk to us about— I mean, you have a couple different, uh, a couple different things going on in your world, but I'm interested particularly in, in advertising video production. Like, what does it look like to work with you? How long are you on on a particular project. The Polymarket ad went very viral, and I'm wondering, like, what does that process look like from start to finish?

It really depends on the type of folks we work with. With Polymarket, we've been working with them since January in like a bunch of different capacities. The team and I have been working on strategy, a bunch of the brand work and out-of-home stuff. That campaign came together in an insane timeline and was driven a lot in partnership with their internal team.

Sure.

I got a call like 3 weeks before the World Cup. And if you guys know, like, people now are working on Super Bowl ads.

Yep.

It's like a 6-month process. Normally that whole thing from like concept to production to post to being online and routed for TV was like 3, 3 and a half weeks.

Wow.

So it was insane.

Yeah.

What—

how did you process all the different reactions? I think I saw the Ruben ad like while watching UFC. Yeah, I watched it too. And I was like, like, whoa, Rick Rubin. Yeah, Prediction Market ad. Yeah, uh, the ad was obviously very cool. A lot of people were surprised by that. I brought it up to you, you were like, Rick Rubin came out of the rap game, why is it surprising that he would do like a Prediction Market on UFC? So yeah, I feel like it was very, very mixed reactions to it, even, you know, not, not on the creative. I think that was universally like creative was awesome, but how did you process people's reaction to it?

I mean, I feel like a lot of the best campaigns are pretty controversial. I mean, in our time with Equinox, we like banned membership sales on January 1st, and that became like the most heated moment that business has ever had, but also the most successful campaign in history for them. So I think with someone like Rick, what was great is there's nobody that represents questions better than him for those who feel like they're the creative actor or anything else. So we felt like a great fit.

Yeah, I've been feeling over, you know, we're sort of at like peak marketing content and yet like it feels like advertising has never been in a worse place. I don't know if you feel the same way. The campaign with Polymarket is like, it is a campaign. It feels like the craft of advertising. And that's why I think it broke through as much as like, again, the actual creative was good. Do you feel the same way? Do you have of launch video fatigue. It used to be like, you know, maybe a company would come out with a video, but they were really just hoping for like a TechCrunch article. Now it's like, well, we're definitely doing a video and it'll look exactly the same as every other video. And then yeah, maybe we get a TechCrunch article, but it feels like people are trying to create their own artifacts.

I mean, dude, I don't want to point it back at you, but you guys created like the OG launch video, I feel like, for TBI. I remember like That was my first experience with TVPN, was like you guys on a helicopter or something.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So I'd say—

No, and we— you'll appreciate, we had 20 other videos planned, and then it just started this sort of snowball where everyone was launching videos, and we were like, this is no longer a good way to actually break through and get attention. So we just switched to strategy.

We literally had the whole production team here, like geared up for like weekly video shoots with ideas and different songs we were going to play on, and then it just got so tired.

Saturated.

We're like, ah, okay, let's not do that.

Yeah, we should have, we should have made 10.

We should have made at least one day at a time or something like that. But I don't know, what do you think about like the, the, the oversaturation of things, like how fast the internet moves, when you want to jump on something, when you want to bring back something from the archive that hasn't been touched in years?

It's tricky, man. I mean, again, like not to throw it back to the '70s again, but the average American, I think, then saw like 500 ads a day and now it's more than 5,000. And who knows what it'll be in like a few years from now.

Wow.

I— we get hit up like every day for like countless launch videos.

Sure.

I'm not sure how long the trend's going to last. I think just like it's cliché to say, but like taste and a contrarian point of view will cut through. The approach I would give to people to try is I think the Polymarket work resonated because we took somebody who would the whole team, like from creatives on internally there to the photographer, to the talent normally wouldn't be a part of a prediction market campaign. When you think of like Equinox, every photographer we ever hired for Equinox had never shot fitness before. They only shot fashion. All of our design team came from museums that we would poach. So I think like hiring people out of category, you have enough subject matter experts in the business. So bring in people who don't know the category and can bring new things to it.

Yeah.

When you have a campaign that hits, where do you— do you think the value is primarily coming from a great idea or the execution?

I think a lot. It's hard to say.

Equinox, the Equinox, a great— the great idea is like, let's make it impossible to sign up for membership on January 1st, right? Like, that's the idea. And that's what sticks with people. I don't even remember, like, a lot of the visuals, but to me, that that's what made it a great campaign.

Yeah, I think that we spent less than 1% of what we would normally spend on a January campaign that year for what we launched, which was We Don't Speak January. It was just black and white text, which is why you don't remember it.

Mm-hmm.

But like brand actions, I think cut through more than anything now. Yeah. Especially with like, I feel like AI is gonna democratize creativity and skill.

Yeah.

So many people that there'll be such an abundance of beautiful visuals over the next few years that like the concept and what the company actually does will probably be the most important thing.

Interesting.

Yeah. What action are you willing to take?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Actions speak louder than words and maybe slop as well. How did you— how is working with Bryan Johnson different? Because it feels like Polymarket, it's sort of like a standard playbook. You have a celebrity, you have a video, it's going in the World Cup. It's like, it's like standard inventory, obviously executed very well. But with Bryan Johnson, it's like this massive owned media media influencer-driven individual. He's huge on Twitter. It just feels like a different company. How did you approach that? What'd you wind up working with him on?

It's massive. Him and Kate hit us up like probably late 2024, early '25, because they heard we were focused on like building religions.

Yeah.

And the brief was basically like build a religion for Don't Die.

That makes sense.

Um, so we spent a lot of last year, we had to like to basically collaborate with them on what the doctrine of Don't Die became.

Yeah.

A lot of the rituals around it. There's like a, I don't know, like 5 core tenets of like how to build a cult brand. And I think Brian's like done all of those completely naturally, authentically on his own.

Do you know, were you, were you responsible for getting him on the, uh, cigarette box? You know about this?

I was not responsible for that.

In, in France, they have pictures of, uh, I think cancer patients on the, on the boxes of cigarettes. And one of them looks exactly like Brian Johnson.

Hold this up.

It's very funny. Yeah, we can share it with you and you can see. I'm interested to know the 5 key tenets of building a cult brand. But first, we'll show you the image of the Brian Johnson on the cigarette box. Can we zoom in there? It looks just like him to me. This one.

This would have been good guerrilla marketing.

Yeah.

You should have claimed credit.

Yeah, I'm honestly surprised it's not. But yeah, respect.

But yeah, walk us through the 5 tenets. How did they apply to blueprint and beyond?

Yeah, I think it, it comes down to like 5 core things. Uh, the first being doctrine. So having like identity before features.

Okay.

Which is like, what is the sacred text that everybody abides by? Most brands have a tagline, but what can actually be like truly enforced and felt by the community? Brian's done this incredibly well. Um, think of things like most, uh, religions have commandments or tenets. Mm-hmm. Brands have like think different or, um, just do it. You have longer forms of doctrine like the Technological Republic by Alex Karp or like Zero to One. Brian used to write under the moniker Zero all the time, so he's been primed for that. Uh, the second is ritual, which like, again, Brian through the dinner series for Don't Die Dinners did such a beautiful job at. You guys have a ritual here every day, 5 days a week.

Yeah.

Uh, but like, what are the initiations into your brand or into your community?

Yeah.

Uh, and it's basically forming like a ritual that becomes a habit, that becomes identity over time. So like you buy a pair of shoes, you join a run club, you are a runner. The third one is symbols and language. So like how can you take elements to create in-groups versus out-groups? What are the key features that signal people who are insiders versus outsiders to your brand? CrossFit has like— it's not a workout, it's the WOD. With Equinox, we never said gyms, we would say clubs.

Yeah.

So elements like that are super important. The Catholic Church used stained glass windows to educate an overwhelmingly illiterate population in the 12th century to indoctrinate them into the church. Um, that's like another form of symbols for that. The fourth is a charismatic leader, which again, you have in Brian, you have in folks like Palmer Luckey, where you almost icon yourself. So like Palmer, goatee, Hawaiian shirts, flip-flops, things like that are so incredibly important. Uh, and then the fifth one is an enemy. I think like every brand needs a nemesis. A lot of people use like competitors. Apple started as IBM, yeah, with the like 1984 campaign. But over time it evolved to the concept of conformity, because when you get bigger than your competition, that enemy loses power. But if it's like an overwhelming thought that can never truly be defeated, the enemy always keeps power.

If you were doing a brand for the dog breed you needed to figure out an enemy for the golden retriever, what would— let's workshop something.

The tennis ball.

No, it's not the tennis ball.

It's not the tennis ball.

Because that's your friend. That's the thing that you want to— that's the thing that you want to— that you're desperately trying to find and get.

It's hunger. I don't know. What do you think?

It could be hunger. For my Australian shepherd, it's like every single loud car. So, I would say like the opposite of peace. And then defining your enemy, you define yourself.

Yeah.

So like, I'd be interested, who's your enemy? Who's like the nemesis of TBPN right now? Ooh.

We've actually— Yeah, we mapped this all out.

We actually did this experience. And I mean, it was geopolitical, near-peer rivals, who you can guess. And then we had a bunch of like more satirical ones, like—

Like our allies.

People who block data centers. We love data centers, that whole thing.

I mean, yeah, that was early on, but we would do— things more like who were our allies? Like if someone would mention private equity, we would just like, you know, clap. Yeah, yeah. That was like, no one ever is like standing up for private equity.

Short sellers, we hate short sellers, that type of thing, you know?

Of course.

Yeah. Yeah, we have a sheet, the terms and memes.

How do you think about scaling what you're doing? You know, in a craft business, it's been done, Scale has been done in the creative field with, with, with agencies, but oftentimes it's at odds with great work. But how do you think about it?

I think the point of view, the way we work is different than most agencies. Like, I have no desire to scale the agency much larger than it is today. The way in which we work was like, you can either grow an agency really large, try to sell for a pretty shit multiple down the road, or what we started doing like 5 years ago was incubating startups. So only a third of our clients pay us in cash. The other two-thirds pay us in some form of equity. We helped create a credit card company that is called Built Rewards, which you might have heard of. Yeah, this guy Ankur Jain, and I've done a bunch of stuff like that. So we're working on a ton of those with firms like Index and other venture firms.

I found our actual—

yeah, actual list of enemies.

Did you?

HVAC repairmen. I don't know why they're on there. DJI drones, TikTok. Xiaoping, under-monetized podcasts, podcasts that don't have enough advertising, which we solved. Leaf blowers.

Yeah.

Fantasy football. Why did we put that on there? What's wrong with fantasy football?

This is from the original printout of the TVPN. So we, when we were doing the show early on, we would have these bits.

Yeah.

And if we had a good bit, we would write it down and we would have the sheet that we would update and I would just keep it here and it would just remind me of like the kind of the core tenets as we were establishing the brand.

In allies, we had job creators and bubbles. Very good. Very good. Yeah, it was a lot of fun. Yeah. Good exercise for any brand. But of course, everyone should call you first because clearly much better than most people. But fantastic progress. Thank you so much for coming on the show, breaking it down for us.

Jordi, anything else?

Yeah.

Next time one of your founders is coming on, flag it to us. Yeah, excited to meet them.

Yeah, we'll talk about it soon.

Awesome.

Sounds good.

Have a good one, guys.

Cheers.

Have a good one. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Oh, the old term sheet, the size gong, timeline, some personnel news. We haven't done one of those in a while. We don't really do the trade deals. The trading cards really took the place of the trade deals. But speaking of advertising, I want to watch this SK Hynix advertisement that Tyler dug up. Let's play this because I want your reaction, Jordi Hays, to this ad for SK Hynix. Okay. Don't wait for it. So we're also being extorted.

Exported.

Exported. Time went by. He's dressed up as the chip, as the HPM. He's dressed up as the memory. Can't you just be cool? How have you been doing? Why is he frozen?

Some prop comedy.

I I like it.

Wow.

We don't know what that means, but I love SK Hynix.

Yeah, we don't know how to make—

I think that ad has like 80 million views.

Wow. For good reason. It's a good ad. Makes me want HBM. Well, our next guest is live in the TVP at Ultradome with us. We have Tucker Brown from Compound Creative Holdings. He's the managing partner, friend of Paki McCormick. And we're very excited to have him here on the show.

We're back.

We're back.

This is quite a set.

Yes. Welcome. How was the rest of your trip to France?

France was hot.

Okay.

It was— it was productive, though. I think, you know, you guys probably saw the energy that there was.

Yeah.

And were you doing deals?

I was trying to do deals.

Okay.

But I'm always—

when you do the deal, are you a back-of-the-envelope guy or a napkin math guy? Which one are you pulling out?

You got to kind of combine, I guess, both.

Oh, you're doing a DCF and it gets so big you might have spread and comps on different tabs.

I mean, yes, I'm sure you understand, you know, the category that we're in.

Yeah.

Um, you got to be creative with the deals. Yeah.

So, okay, so, uh, take us back.

What was your first Cannes?

What was my first Cannes?

Yeah, when did you go for the first?

It was this year. Oh, I've been to film festivals.

You waited until it was like actually going to be productive for you. Yeah, exactly. Okay.

Okay. Make it worth the, you know, the money you got to spend to get there.

But yeah, take us back early in your career. How'd you get here?

So I've been at CAA for 15 years. You know, the talent agency that represents biggest entertainers in the world, athletes and all of that. I was at Evolution, which is our investment bank, working on large-scale M&A capital raising transactions across, you know, different categories. So that for a long time, I like the applause on that.

For capital raising. Yes.

Yes. Worked with pro sports teams, worked with entertainment companies, TV, you know, TV studios, production companies.

When does that get tapped in for a transaction? So like, yeah, like I can imagine if a sports team is going to transact or, or an emerging league or an athlete has a business that they want to sell? Like, am I, am I in the right area?

Yeah, it's sort of— it depends, right? I mean, we're— we don't work on tiny deals. We like to focus on larger-scale transactions. So in sports, it's probably going to be something $50 million plus. So if you're putting a check into a team and you got some money to spend and want to buy a piece of a sports team, we'll facilitate that transaction. We'll work on, you know, team sales too. So entire teams that trade. One of the earliest deals that we did we did was the sale of the Sacramento Kings to Vivek Runway in 2011.

And how much—

he was traded, by the way, for $500 million.

So how much does that organization look like a standard investment bank?

A lot like— I mean, that's the service that we provide. I think the difference is we sit within CAA. So we have the strategic connectivity, the knowledge that might be a little different than other investment banks have.

And probably less public markets coverage.

Yeah, we don't have capital markets coverage.

Okay.

Yeah, we don't do public markets. Yeah, generally. Got it. So probably a little bit smaller. Our team is only about 20 people. So kind of $50 to $500 million is our sweet spot. Sports is going to be a lot larger than that. But I'd say for other deals, it's really in that kind of range.

Okay.

So, you know, I was there for a long time and it came to, you know, how we've gotten to Compound and what we just launched. Yeah, I started working around creator deals a couple of years ago. Um, kind of just by chance, you stumble across deals and companies that are interesting, that make sense. You want to lean in and figure something out. And that was the case with, uh, Dude Perfect.

Yeah.

Uh, you know, a creator business that been scaling really nicely for a long time.

Probably 20 years.

Yeah, 16 years at the time.

16 years at the time.

Yes. Um, so they were ancient in YouTube, you know, land.

But consistent in their performance the whole time.

Like, I think they were growing been at a 50% CAGR for that entire time.

And no matter when you did— a lot of people dip in and out of Dude Perfect content. Of course, you go through some binge watching, you watch a bunch of the archive, then you come back years later and you see that, okay, everything's evolved and all the great pieces are still the same, but they've added on a bunch more capability.

Yeah. And their audience, I mean, they, they sort of 8 to 16-year-old boys, I'd say, is the core of their audience, but they also grew up with them. So these guys are— they're 38 now. They have a big audience, you know.

Oh, wow.

Yeah, people in their 30s that grew up watching the content. So it's great. I didn't know much about it other than what I'd seen on YouTube. Yeah, they built a big live entertainment business. They go on tour, they sell at NBA, you know, size arenas.

Yeah. Um, so what's unique about that deal? Because they're— they have multiple revenue streams at this point. They're doing advertisements, partnerships. They only have a partnership with Nerf and like a bunch of other deals in the works, tours. And then they were also talking building like a Disneyland, basically.

Dude Perfect World.

Dude Perfect World. Incredible.

There was a big mockup of that when I first went to visit their office in Texas.

Yeah, insane.

You know, amusement park to make a pilgrimage. So, yeah, listen, they wanted to build— and we've heard this a lot from creators, but, you know, kind of a next-generation Disney-type business.

Yeah.

For a specific audience around, you know, sports, kids, comedy, family, very family-friendly business. And yeah, so I sort of got to know the guys, saw their business diversified across a bunch of different categories. It wasn't just a YouTube business. It was a real media company.

Yeah.

So we took that to market and executed a pretty large-scale private equity transaction. It wasn't easy. I was naive in the sense that I thought it would be because the financial profile was so attractive.

Why was it not legible to—

It just— it's a new category, I think, generally for transacting. That's the opportunity that I see at this point in time.

You don't have decades of case studies and Harvard Business.

There isn't a single comp or precedent. I looked at media company comps for it, I guess. And you're dealing with talent. You're dealing with key man risk in a way that's sort of unnerving to some private equity investors.

Platform risk.

Platform risk. I mean, with them, it was a little bit less contingent on the platform itself, which was an advantage. You know, their YouTube revenue was a small percentage of the overall business at that point in time. Um, but sure, you know, investors get spooked by algorithms, what could happen if it goes up or down or changes, and how that impacts the business. Um, so it took, it took a while. And by the way, you have to find the right partner too. And for, you know, for Talon and for their business, they built it over 16 years. They owned it outright. They cared about what, you know, what the future looked like with their partners. So finding the right, you know, not just the right deal, but the right people behind the deal to transact with, I'd say in this category, in the creator world, is more important than in others.

And so you came out of that feeling like you had a greater sort of understanding of these businesses, as well as like an appreciation for their potential and their quirks. And so you decided to become the buyer. Is that the right way to think?

I, I, though there were many times during that Assist, and there were a couple others I did after where I was, um, yeah, I, I would just wish I was the buyer in that situation. I feel like I was doing the work to structure the deals that made sense. I understood, you know, the talent behind the deals in a way that maybe others, other buyers couldn't. And I came from the world of the agency at CAA where we had a whole suite of services and things we could provide for these creators in a way that, you know, typical buyer wouldn't be able to do. Um, so we pretty quickly started to think about what we could put together to basically be that unique buyer that we didn't see in the marketplace, or we didn't see many of, didn't see really at scale, didn't see sophistication from, and started to iterate, you know, what that would look like and how it would come together. And do we do it through the agency proper? Do we set up something independently, which is what we did? I think it's important to be independent in the way that it's structured and raised, you know, a good amount of money and looking to do, you know, a lot of deals in the category and really become the first of its kind, you know, kind of permanent buyer in this category. So yeah, excited.

For creators or media businesses that wind up with the Disney-style business, the flywheel of multiple properties, multiple revenue streams, do you find that those businesses are are sort of organically grown by garden, like a garden, or built brick by brick? Like, how often do creators have the idea of where they want to go and they execute one step at a time? Because I always think of that Disney flywheel and it's a beautiful napkin sketch.

Yeah.

And it's so cool. And you understand how the business works. But when he drew that, it was like 2 years before he died. Like, it was very much a reflection on a life's work.

Yeah, listen, the best creators really are creative geniuses, but there's not always cohesion with how they think about the future and what they're doing. So oftentimes I may see the whiteboard over there in the studio. You walk into their offices the same way, you know, I walked into Dude Perfect's office in Texas and you see a whiteboard scattered with ideas.

Yeah.

And it's all brilliant. It's not necessarily put together and structured in a way that, um, that provides again, a lot of cohesion, but there's a lot of opportunity. They see. And I think first and foremost, what they've all done successfully is they focus on, um, building a pretty rabid audience and, and building engagement with that audience. And then once you have that and you have that captive audience, um, it really expands and opens up the world of opportunity beyond whatever that core product or offering might be. So for them, it was trick shots on, on YouTube. And then, you know, you build an audience there— kids, family, comedy— and you can extend that into live events into products, into things they probably, you know, certainly in 2009 when they started, didn't think they'd have a line of products in Walmart, necessarily, right? But then you start to dream bigger once you realize that what you're doing is actually working and resonating with the audience.

Yeah. So the fund that you've built, how permanent is the capital? Are you thinking about a certain fund life cycle? Is there a world where, maybe not today, but in 10 years We are talking about capital markets, public markets, creators going public. There's been rumors about MrBeast. Yeah, I could see that happening, but that might be like an exception that proves the rule. But is there a world where in a decade we're looking at like, yeah, like the top 20 YouTubers and podcasts are public?

Yeah, certainly possible. I mean, it's the, you know, it's the fastest growing segment of entertainment. People want exposure to that. Yeah, it's going to start with private capital. I think it will probably move into the public markets. So yeah, I think we're moving in that direction. For us, I think permanent capital is an important part of our strategy. We want to— we don't want to be forced into an unnatural lifecycle where we're forced to sell quickly. Creators don't, you know, feedback.

Yeah, they're like, hey, you're doing your life's work, but also we're going to try to just change up who you're partnered with in a decade. Whereas like a CPG business or software company, yeah, like the management team might be fully turned over. Over the fund lifecycle.

So we try to— again, in structuring this, we try to solve for what we heard was important to creators in the transactions I've been around.

Yeah.

And some permanence of the partnership or permanent capital is part of it. You know, letting creativity sit and remain with the creators even in a control transaction. So there's no interference in the creativity of what they've built. That's really important, even if you're selling equity control.

Yeah, to me, I look at it and I can see over time this just being a more and more and more important part of CAA strategy because the challenge right now is you have creators. Historically, there was maybe, I don't, you know, you'll know much more about the history, but my feeling is that historically there was like maybe 500 stars that matter. And then now in media, there's like 50,000 stars that matter across every single vertical. It was maybe easier to run a business when you had, you know, you could just focus on like a smaller number of like really, really big stars who were running their own, you know, basically they had their own individual businesses. But when you have 50,000 creators in all these sub-niches, you can't like— it seems like there's probably a limit. Like you can't scale the CAA team 10, 20x and expect to be running the same.

Too many agents.

Yeah, exactly.

Cover it all.

And so— as a sort of new strategy saying, like, hey, we're going to try to service as much of that market as we can, but we're also going to try to find the best talent and businesses across all these different categories and then be a long-term partner to those and actually participate in their overall business.

Yeah, you go deep with the ones you believe matter most and are positioned to scale the most, right? So we're not—, you know, trying to transact with hundreds or thousands of creators. It really is to pick the businesses we believe in and categories that we think are exciting and scalable and go deep with them across the board on the capital side of things. Then, you know, yeah.

How do you think about stages in a creator's life cycle? There's people that are going to be incredibly talented from a just pure talent standpoint. Right? There's people out there that are like not even good at making videos but have incredibly engaging content because they're so good. And then usually they graduate into having, you know, better and better teams and eventually maybe they get into products. But like, how do you look at the different stages? What's, what's too early? Yeah. When are you seeing an individual who's like showing all the potential but is too early for maybe a transaction?

Yeah, we don't like to be hyper-prescriptive with, with how we look at it. I mean, there's certain things we do look for to assess whether it's the right stage for us to get involved. If it's an individual without a business, it's tough for us. There's a lot of work to do, probably to pull it together and make it transactable. So we look for it to be an actual business that's been built and scaled to some capacity.

Right now, like multiple revenue lines, not dependent entirely on platform revenue, like those kind of things.

Yeah, maybe an operator. Diversified to some extent.

Maybe an operator, not essential. I mean, there was no operator at Dooperf when we did that deal. Wow. Wait, they do everything themselves? I mean, there was, I think, 20 employees. The oldest outside of them was 24.

Yeah, but they didn't have like a business guy who would do like admin?

No, not a single business guy.

I love that. That's awesome. Yeah, it's a different business.

Yeah, it's 80 employees now. Yeah, yeah, of course. So you look for some sense of a business, achieve diversification in some— it doesn't need to be massive, but yeah, some off-platform monetization is, you know, is attractive. And then, yeah, scale of revenue, profitability. We really only like businesses that are profitable. And that's, that's not— I don't want to say it's not hard to do, but in this category it is. You're used to seeing margins that are not common in traditional media. Yeah, right. 50% plus margins. Sure. For a creator business. The business is actually relatively standard. So yeah, look for profitability growth, and again, categories that we think are positioned to scale, and where we can be valuable and add additional value. So bring certain—

When you're underwriting a deal, how do you think about it? How do you think about a business where you know there's a ceiling? And I imagine there's certain situations where you're totally is like there's certain creators. I would say that we've always said that if you, if you asked us to make content for 100 million people, we would just wouldn't enjoy doing it because we'd be covering topics that are not interesting, right? To us at least. And there's, I think, a lot of creator businesses where there's sort of like some TAM on from a, from an audience standpoint in the category.

You don't think we can get 100 million views on an SK Hynix advertisement reaction video, Jordi? Have some faith.

Have some faith. We're talking about South Korean memory chip company advertising.

Um, come on.

But I can imagine you're talking with a creator and saying like, hey, I think that you're, you're a $5 million business today. I think that you can get to $40 million, and, uh, and that's going to be enough for it to be a home run for you and us. Like, Is that a conversation that you have or is it always like, yeah, I need to see the path to superstardom and, you know, 9 figures of revenue?

I think, listen, there's a difference between how we might underwrite the deal and think about where there's a ceiling and how you communicate that to a creator. If you're trying to justify, you know, value, maybe that's part of the conversation. But really, they, you know, the best creators won't really cap their potential. Yeah. So, you know, even if it's a $10 million business today, they probably think this is a billion-dollar business if we do it right. Yeah, we sort of serve the audience in the way that we can. Yeah. And so honestly, any of the businesses we look to transact with now, probably we ourselves believe could be billion-dollar-plus businesses. And if we don't believe that, we're probably not betting in the right categories with the right creators. It's early to maybe make that kind of call, you know, in this space. But But to the earlier comment about public markets, you know, potential, I think we'll see many of these businesses scale to that billion-plus-dollar mark, potentially go public. And yeah, it's just there's a lot I think that's left to—

would it end up— is a more likely or one of the more likely paths where you end up with effectively an index of a bunch of top creators? Because to me, like, creator business is like, I don't know that many creators, even like look at the most sophisticated operations like a MrBeast, right? You have these like 9-figure Amazon deals. You have these consumer packaged goods businesses. You have, you know, royalty streams effectively. But him running, him running his business, being like, I got to make sure that next quarter is good, otherwise we're going to nuke. Like, that feels challenging. Whereas if you took a basket of, of, you know, 200 top creators that were trading, you could see that being like stable and growing, you know, you're looking for sort of like a manosphere ETF for you.

You can have exposure to Rovicular and routine in one ticker.

I did listen. That's, that's partially what we're trying to do, right? I saw the difficulty from institutional capital partners to transact— single creator business or single asset. They're all eager to get into the category. They want to put money to work. They talk about it all the time. You bring them a deal that's attractive, and they're like, ah, we can't do this. There's too much risk. If you bring a basket, though, right, I think it's a lot more attractive.

And in some ways, Dude Perfect is a little bit of a basket. There's a number of on-camera talent. It's not single person, single name. And same thing with Midas Touch. They have a team. Number of products in their portfolio and number of hosts and whatnot.

The more, the more layers to diversification you can achieve, of course, it's going to be easier, right? So the business itself. Yeah. The talent maybe that's involved. Yeah. And for us, the portfolio that we built. Yeah.

How are you, how are you building out your pipeline of opportunities? Are you going— I'm at, you know, you're in Cannes, you're meeting a bunch of creators, but I imagine you're like like, probably, like, the beauty of creator businesses, they're out in the open. Yeah, like an invisible creator business is not one. Yeah, yeah. Whereas like some of the best deals in, you know, traditional private equity are like, you would have to like live in the town and know that this, you know, a certain business was, was printing.

Yeah, they're out in the open, um, but some of the flashiest ones don't always have the numbers you might expect that they would. Yeah, that you don't think about as much, a little quieter, building actually really significant businesses in a different way. So you don't always know everything, even if it is quite visible. You know, I've had the benefit of living in the category for a little while, so I've seen a lot and have a good sense of what, you know, the immediate attractive targets might be. You know, we again have the relationship with the agency at CA. We've got, I think, 308 creator clients. Not all of those would make sense for us, but a lot of them are are growing and are looking to potentially think about capital partners. So there's a built-in pipeline there. And, you know, we're open for business. I've gotten a lot of great inbound opportunities that have come our way since we announced. That's great. So yeah, it's— there's a lot, a lot of activity and a lot, I think, for us to do.

How much time are you going to be spending in New York versus L.A.? L.A.? Yeah.

So I've been back and forth. Over the last decade plus quite a bit. I spend the winter out here usually. Smart to do. February in New York is not always the most fun. So I'm usually here about twice a month. We'll have a headquarters probably in both, you know, both locations. Yeah. And then, you know, creators are kind of everywhere too. So New York and L.A. have been the hubs of entertainment, London a bit internationally, but we see that much more dispersed with creators that are all over the place.

So yeah. How, how is the influencer creator industry evolved in China? Hmm. Is it similar? How does it— how is it similar versus how does it differ from the US? Yeah, it's like they were big and early in like live shopping, for example.

Yeah. I mean, you have a sort of massive, you know, massive population. All the numbers you see with businesses over there are pretty crazy from an audience perspective. Listen, transacting with China—

Yeah, I can't imagine you could do deals there, but I'm saying like, when you look at that market, is there anything that you see that allows you to feel like you're seeing into the future?

It's tricky, right? Because if you do take that as a learning and you try to apply it to a different territory, it probably won't necessarily translate in the same way.

Yeah, like live shopping has taken off in the US, but in It's a lot of like functionally gambling, not like buying oranges. Yeah. Oh, like a lot of these like live shopping platforms are like people live breaking open packs of cards. Yeah.

Unboxings and stuff.

It's not like they're like shopping for apparel in the same way that in China, like a lot of these live shopping platforms, they would start with like, you could literally go and buy new kiwis and you can just see the kiwis and then you're just hitting.

Apparently China doesn't have a Joe Rogan. Like, they don't have a really dominant just public commentator who just gives his random opinions about everything.

Well, I think somebody like Joe Rogan that's commenting on that many things, like, it's a little risky politically, actually.

So yeah, yeah. What about Hollywood? What's your— been your update on the creator economy's, uh, interaction with Hollywood post the trifecta of creator-led movies? So Obsession, Backroom,— iron lung. Yeah. 3, born on YouTube, crossed over. This was predicted like a decade ago. It's finally here. Is it? It feels like very high status, but maybe not actually moving the needle for some businesses. Not something reliable, like something low status, like ads and merch, which might actually drive a business forward.

Tough to— yeah, again, tough to rely on that and bet on that. Yeah. As a business model in and of itself. Yeah. It's a component that's pretty interesting for creator businesses. I mean, it was a big kind of narrative early on in podcasting, using podcasts as a cheap sort of IP development mechanism. Oh, sure. From content. Yeah. You know, same thing with YouTube, right? A cheaper way to test and see if you've got an audience. Yeah. And then use that to sort of monetize in long form. So it's a, it's a great trend. I think that we're seeing more and more of that. It'll continue.

Yeah. We were talking to Alex Hormozi about this yesterday and— and it was interesting thinking about, like, he was saying that he just doesn't reach the same audience as a— Ramsey. —as a Dave Ramsey, who just has syndication on so many radio shows. And if he were able to crack into that, it's not that that deal would make him that much money. It's that it would expose his overall portfolio, his overall business to a new tranche of clients and potential like customers, but also audience members. And so there's an interesting world where you could underwrite the, you know, high risk. Maybe this person does the next Obsession, or you could say this person's on a track where they are going to crack distribution on radio or TV at some point, and they're going to be on that channel, and that's going to be a halo for the overall business. But obviously hard to predict. Yeah, it's that—

that's why it's hard to underwrite. Against that, right? I mean, it's a— that moonshot outcome could drive upside, but probably not going to be a base case underwriting situation. That makes sense.

What about Substack and potential new platforms?

Hmm. Yeah, Substack, you know, you've seen some really nice businesses built and monetized on that platform. Um, so in the same way that YouTube can be a core that you build off of in other areas, you could take YouTube build into Substack. The same thing, I think we're seeing migration from Substack into video and other, you know, other platforms. So, um, it's one of the, the kind of top platforms that we're actually looking at to evaluate if there are things for us to, to invest in there and again, migrate that audience into other mediums. Um, so yeah, there's, there's a lot, you know, to do in that category.

I think. Yeah. I was thinking like, why is there no Substack for video? You know, like, like a platform platform that was less algorithmic. And of course, the Substack for video will almost certainly be Substack. Yeah, yeah, probably.

You just got to get the right people on there or something. It's hard because like, as soon as you make a video, you're like, well, this wants to be replicated everywhere on the internet, so let me throw it up on every channel.

Timeline to first deal announcement, any prediction?

Are you gonna hold me to it? I don't know, it's always hard. Are we gonna—

I mean, but, but we know we, we have, you know, friends with funds funds that have a unique strategy, and sometimes they don't do a deal for 18 months after closing a fund.

So, like— I think we benefit from a bit of a running start because we have been in conversation with creators. We've had this, you know, in the works for a little while. Sure. We have relationships that are warm. So, you know, we're looking to move fast but also want to be thoughtful. We know those first couple deals are going to be really important for setting us up for longer-term success. Love to think we get something done by the end of this calendar year. Oh, cool. These deals, at least the ones I've been around historically, they do take time. Yeah. There's a relationship element to it that involves a real-time commitment. You want to make sure it's, again, obviously structured the right way. So we're ready to go. Just want to be thoughtful about making sure that we're picking the right partners and setting up the right deal for ourselves.

Makes sense. Amazing. Let's hit the gong. For the fund itself. No, I want Tucker to hit it. Look at this guy, he's a gigachad. You can have at it as hard as you want. It's warmed up, it's warm, it's warmed up.

Break it, break it. There we go. Well, thank you for coming on the show. Thanks for coming on down. We can wrap the show there.

Can't wait to do this with, uh, your first deal.

Yeah, we're excited for that. Leave us 5 stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for newsletter, tbpn.com, and we'll see you— going flashback— tomorrow. Goodbye. Cheers. Love you.