https://www.listennotes.com/e/0fe1acfe547b47eea6377acf3ce14201

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Today is Monday, June 16, 2025. We are live from the tvpn Ultra Dome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress.

Of Finance, the capital of capital.

We have a great show for you today, folks. It's Lamont and one of our absolute boys. I've never met him in person, but he's a legend. Dhh is in the race. I mean, race is over, but still. We will have him on the show soon to break it down. I'm very excited for that. In other news, the Wall Street Journal is an absolute turmoil over Iran and Israel. There is a new war in the Middle East. Israel races to reshape region with few checks. Iran, Israel put energy sector into new peril. I'm thinking of having somebody on the show to talk about oil markets. I think that might be an interesting downstream thing. We're not a deeply political show, but obviously there's defense tech angles. We monitor situations.

We do monitor situations.

We've been known to monitor situations. We've been watching the Poly markets. There's a lot of-- and if you're.

Just getting into situations, this one is a good one to start.

You think this is the good first situation?

It's pretty intense.

I would completely disagree with that. Of all the situations that you could start off with, if you're getting into monitoring, this is for advanced monitors, in my opinion.

For sure, but throw yourself into the deep end.

Yeah, I guess. Yeah, it is a bit of a deep end situation. Yeah, it is sink or swim with this situation. But fortunately, we have Poly Market where you can monitor all of the situations.

How is poly market tracking US odds.

Of actually- no action. I think that is a market. There's a number of interesting poly markets. I had them pulled up yesterday.

Yeah, so it's hovering at 32% on US military action against Iran before July. If this starts spiking, I think we should all start paying attention because all of I think many of the actions from Israel to date, poly markets on them would just start going insane.

Well, the journal's covering it left and right. There are some other stories in here. Investors are wary of the roller coaster roof still in the kangaroo market. Some move into cash or foreign companies to avoid market volatility. Very, very tricky. There's also an interesting article somewhere in the journal I was reading about, which was that that politics is increasingly dividing the portfolios of investors. Interesting. So Democrats are more likely to perceive that the market will degrade, that the economy will do poorly, and Republicans are more likely to assume that the market will do well. And so they're like, basically right now, Republicans, because the Republicans are in the White House, are more bullish, which is very interesting. And there's an old adage that you should Keep politics out of your portfolio because the market doesn't care about politics very often.

Do things that make money.

Exactly, exactly. That was interesting.

Bucko Capital Bloke had a fun post from over the weekend. Oops, mic down, mic down. On Saturday, he posted, the start of World War III is bullish because we now have a new positive catalyst, the eventual end of World War III. And he quoted that this morning and said, LOL. 'cause there was some positive news.

That the World War Three might be over.

Yeah, Ron was signaling that, allegedly signaling that they were interested in figuring out some type of ceasefire.

But it would be good. We certainly hope for a ceasefire. We hope for positive collaboration between all parties in the global economy. And I mean, there are some interesting developments. There's the potential of a new trade deal, there's potential of a new Geopolitical order. You're really struggling with that Mike. You gotta crank that thing. This is a grip strength test. This is why the Lone Ranger sent us those grip strength. The grippers. Jordy's really struggling.

That's an awkward angle. We'll see how long this works.

But back in the tech world, there is some more exciting, more positive news. Meta Oakleys are coming. This, Shield says, this makes sense. Luxottica owns both Oakley and Ray-Ban, and Meta is reportedly investing $5 billion for a 4% stake. Luxottica is a fascinating business story. The founder, Leo Del Vecchio's family still owns one-third. The guy was an orphan who became a metal worker, making parts for glasses, ultimately becoming the largest listed company in Italy.

It is really interesting to think about.

How.

If Meta can basically corner all.

Of the.

All of the most iconic frames, which they can do through Luxottica if they do figure out some type of exclusive over time through that investment.

Does Luxottica just own all the major brands?

They basically own all of her peoples and everything. Every time you buy something, it's all sunglasses. You think you're buying some unique brand or heritage, Luxottica.

It's interesting. We should dig more into that company because They don't own all the retail. Well, yeah, there's a lot of sunglass hut retail stuff.

I mean, they are big glasses and that created the opportunity for Warby Parker. Yeah, they're the ones that manufacture everything. You know, basically this entire, you know, Luxada verticalized from brand to production to the actual medical side as well.

Interesting. Well, let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money, save both corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot.

More all in one place. There's been some wild rumors circulating about Ramp. But we will have more on that front. Coming days, including some special guests.

Shloemz says he can't stop thinking about the Coinbase sponsored military parade.

I mean, it really was an iconic image, the stage at the parade, and then brought to you by the US Army, brought to you by Coinbase. Usually you see the Army sponsoring things like UFC and things like that for recruiting purposes. You don't typically see them the other way around. Recruiting sponsors. Yeah. And you were saying off air this morning, it's kind of feels in some way counter to crypto's origins and roots as a sort of libertarian technology.

Most Bitcoiners would say, I'm accruing Bitcoin so that you cannot tax me. And what can you not do as soon as you stop taxing me? You can't pay for the military.

Yeah, yeah.

But of course in the libertarian extreme, there are still private military forces, I suppose, and different structures. I'm not super into all the crazy crypto.

Coinbase could.

Hardcore libertarians. But Coinbase is not, that's not the median Coinbase customer anymore. Like the median Coinbase customer is just.

Like an American investor who wants to diversify. And that's very much a lot. For me, it was interesting because there would have been so much, you know, it was the 250th anniversary of the Army, right? There had been so much excitement and noise around it. And then, yeah, I guess credit for Coinbase to Coinbase to getting the presenting sponsor slot. you'd think given how much we spend on our military, they could just say, no sponsors on the 250th birthday. That is awesome. I'd be like, you know, there's certain friends of mine that I would maybe want their birthday party to be sponsored by Ramp, but it's a, you know, different context.

Yeah, it is funny.

David Senra's birthday, when we celebrate his.

Birthday, it is sponsored by Ramp. It is, yeah, yeah, it is funny. Like, why do, like, what did the, coinbase sponsorship pay for? I guess it takes money out of it. It does. It takes the burden off the taxpayer, which is certainly nice. I mean, I like the idea of paying less taxes for military parades.

I guess that's good. They should just start putting ads on.

Your, on your ID card. They should put ads on the military uniforms. You're in California.

You should be able to see a.

Nimitz class, brought to you by Verizon. You know, you should be able to see a massive aircraft carrier just engraved with corporate logos everywhere. Like it's a full NASCAR livery on the submarine. On the Triton class.

This thing doesn't get photographed much. But when it does, you know it's brought to you by-- Triton class carrier, you know, all the-- you basically get all this free marketing through the open source Intel account.

Totally, yeah. They're just posting pictures. And I mean, a lot of those military assets that go into the next Transformers movie, they go into the next Top Gun movie. When you see Tom Cruise step into the F-16 or the F-35, and it's got the Exxon Mobil and McDonald's logos on it, Fire me up. Yeah, fire me up. They're not taking that out in post.

Okay.

I think we got someone listening.

This is your life's work. Bring out of home advertising to the military. Maybe it's ad quick.

Maybe it's ad quick.

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Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only ad quick combines technology out of home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. I have a request for startups. Maybe we can get Tyler to work on this. We didn't give him a task today, but we do have Tyler on the morning cam. Okay, so I don't disappoint. Here's my pitch. You studied physics, so you might have to recruit some biologists for this. But the story, we were thinking about having him day trade, so that's why he's got a day trading background, but we didn't really get that through. Anyway, here's my request for startups. The story of GLP-1, glucagon-like peptide-1, I think that's what it stands for. Ozempic, Wegovy, Wegovy, Wegovy.

That's the proper pronunciation.

Okay, Wegovy, Ozempic, these fantastic weight loss drugs that are absolutely blockbusters. We have some more news about the patent, which was very funny this weekend, you might have seen. The whole origin story of GLP-1s is that the Gila monster, is a animal that doesn't have to eat very much. And they figured out that if they extracted the saliva or venom, they could distill something from that. And that was kind of the inciting research point to go and actually understand GLP-1s and then ultimately create a Gila monster.

Because a Gila monster has some weird way that it eats. It has a very unique metabolism.

Yes, exactly. And so my request for startups, is to do the same thing, but with the saliva of a golden retriever. So I want to take the saliva from the golden retriever, extract that and create a GLP-1 type shot that when injected would make you friendlier. So we're trying to up-regulate friendliness.

Basically productizing golden retriever mode.

Yeah, exactly. So Tyler, I would love a deep dive. We'll check in with you afterwards. I want to understand what it takes to build the golden retriever, the golden retriever mindset.

People are always talking about biohacking. Oh, I want to be more focused. I want to be stronger. I want to have more energy. I want to sleep better.

What about friendlier? What about hotter? What about dumber?

These are better tenants.

Exactly. Relentlessness. So figure it out. Figure out who the top bio-technologists we could possibly talk to on the show to see if this is feasible. figure out what it'll take and give us a breakdown at the end of the show. Speaking of the show, we have a fantastic lineup. We have John Jumper from Google DeepMind coming on, Christian Garrett from 137 Ventures. We're going to debate a whole bunch of topics in late-stage, growth-stage venture with him. We have Aaron from Lightspeed and we.

Have Joseph Cass from-- Some people just want to see Aaron's name in their deck.

Yeah.

You remember that quote? This was in the 2021 era. He had sold his company to Apple, it became the Apple Card, and basically people would just come to him and be like, can I give you half a point in my company? And they just wanted to see his name in their deck. They thought it would give him an edge. And I'm sure in many cases it did, but I'm excited to have him on later today.

Very excited. Gary Tan has some news. Pano raised a $44 million Series B for their wildfire early detection, eyes in the sky startup. Wildfires have only become more fierce over the years and now we have software, computer vision, and smart cameras to stop them before they become giant and unstoppable. Fantastic. I mean, a lot of companies were started out of the last batch of wildfires where the sky turned orange in San Francisco. I think that was 2020, 2021. something like that. And it's good to see that someone's been grinding on this. I haven't even heard of this company before. There was that other map company, YC. It must be. Or maybe Gary's just spreading the love across Silicon Valley.

Or yeah, it's possible Gary did it pre-potentially.

But obviously very exciting. We should have the video up.

Yeah, this makes sense. You've seen the footage of after the Palisades fire, they were re-watching this like ultra low res footage, like trying to figure out where it started. It's all these like sort of research labs, I think that maintain camera footage. Put it in 4K. Let's get it in 4K.

Let's get it in 4K.

Let's let people kind of better understand.

The aesthetic aperture radar going. Let's do a lot of different things. I mean, this is one of those things where like Anderal for wildfires might not be an Anderal on the Anderal roadmap. immediately. They were testing wildfire, the wildfire fighting tank and stuff, but Anderle's been so focused on the military specifically now because they really have an edge there. I don't know about the DC.

Oh, you didn't know that?

They wanted to make a tank that could fight wildfires. Yes, an autonomous tank that could go fight wildfires. They brought in Jamie Heineman from the Mythbusters to help work on it. They built it and then I talked to Palmer about it and he said that there was a lot of pushback around, Job displacement and unions, even though they would need plenty of people to like man these and like manage them. But it was a very complex situation to get through. And so they wound up scrapping that. And it's probably good that they did because now they're in submarines and fury and Roadrunner and they have like major, major contracts, major, major, like serious jobs to address directly within the DOD.

And so just folks want to start experimenting with hubris, they can expand into a category like wildfires. Yeah, for now they seem.

It's obviously adjacent, but this feels like something where, you know, it's like flock safety. Like, yes, it's like Anderal adjacent, but it's kind of its own thing. And so you're not just gonna get rolled immediately. So congrats to the Pano team. We'd love to chat with you and help protect our houses because we live in Pasadena and Malibu and we are subject to wildfires all the time. Anyway, if you also wanna protect yourself from risk, go to vanta.com, automate compliance, manage risk and prove trust continuously. Banta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program.

Okay, JD Ross.

Banta.com Co-founder of Open Door, I believe. I've chatted with him a few times. He says, I couldn't find a single notable founder with a degree focused in entrepreneurship. I expected at least one outlier given the number of undergrad programs, but no. Zero. Interesting. Did you study entrepreneurship? What do you study?

What's this comment from an account you muted?

This is something we can't click, so I can't even show you.

We'll never know. I guess we'll never know.

This is the JD Vance thing. When he muted you and Miles John. Yeah.

I wonder how many actual undergrad programs there are. How many undergrad?

Entrepreneurship programs? It's just hard because like so much about entrepreneurship is go and become an expert in computer science or There's more than any sort of industry. Like look at look at the story of T.J. Parker. It's like he became a pharmacist and then it was uniquely suited to build a company around that pill pack and you like just starting with entrepreneurship and then you have to go learn something about a particular industry that you want to disrupt is much much harder in my my opinion.

Yeah.

In many ways, YC is the undergrad program for venture-backed entrepreneurship.

I agree. So, unnecessary, I'd say, wind them down. Take all the entrepreneurs and start teaching them art history.

That's how you get a real S in the new economy.

Yes.

Well, you have a nice post here.

Oh, this is fantastic. Aiden Burke. putting some positivity on the timeline. August Rodin has such a kind, intelligent eye, and it's a picture of a beautiful horse.

Really does.

And wouldn't you agree? Such a kind, intelligent eye.

Muscular development, vascularity on this horse as well.

Yes. If you go to the next slide, there's a close-up of this horse.

We got to check with the building managers and see if we can have mini horses on the property, because it would be absolutely fantastic if we just had horses.

Yeah, we need to replace the soundboard. Like, you have the gong sound on the soundboard, but then we have a physical gong. We have the horse sound. What if we could just say, here.

Throw him a carrot and he'll neigh for us on command. A miked-up horse. Miked-up horse. You know, there's like proper headphones. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we're just playing it like pasture meditation tracks, and then it just, you throw him a carrot. And then he goes, be great. Okay, Ben, actually look into this. That's important.

Can we get a horse?

Can we get, we should be at least like set up a heading zoo. Yeah. So it's, keep it under five horsepower.

Yeah.

Okay.

So, hey, we're looking for five, hey, we're interested in, in increasing our transportation. We just so you know, like it'll be a very low horsepower solution. Really one horsepower.

Won't take up more than a single parking spot. Absolutely. So we don't need any more parking.

Or anything like that. Is that okay, guys? They approve it, and we get this beautiful horse. It's wonderful. The founding engineer meme continues to go wild. Luke Metraux chimes in, says these founding engineer memes are about to become a five-alarm fire meme for seed-stage startup recruiting. Some enterprising VC content flack needs to figure out some counter-programming.

Okay, so the meme is real.

Okay.

Sounding engineers. they take on almost all the risk. They get none of the sort of status of being a venture-backed founder, even though they're taking on that similar level of risk. And they obviously get a fraction of the economics. Let's say the founding engineer gets one to five points, sometimes less than that, but maybe that's a good range. And so it is sort of painful. At the same time, there's a lot of people who would be a 10 out of 10 founding engineer that would be a six out of 10 founder. And six out of 10 founders don't build billion dollar companies.

So what's going on?

So a lot of people are actually, here's the counter programming for you, Luke Metra. A lot of people are just much better suited to go and crush it in a role and work under somebody who is truly 10 out of 10. And I would say it's much better over a five-year period, much better to be a founding engineer at a culturally significant generational company than it is to be a six out of 10 founder.

And.

You probably-- that doesn't really-- yeah, there's a difference. It doesn't really get you that far.

It's all that Naval thing about playing status games. Titles don't actually matter. What matters is equity and control and return and distributions and secondary and actual financial outcome. So you should just take, yeah, I was intern, I don't care. The title doesn't matter, but I made a lot of money. And so I was able to go on Bezzle and get a fantastic Richard Mill. That's right. Everyone's like, oh yeah, he must have been early, because he's got a hitter. He's got an absolute hitter.

He's got a hitter on his wrist.

He's got a condo on his wrist. He's got a condo on his wrist, exactly. But if someone's pitching you, hey, hey, come be a founding engineer. you know, you're basically a founder. Be like, cool, give me a board seat. Give me a board seat.

I'll take that title.

But I also want a full board seat. Irrevocable.

First board meeting, pull the lead VC to the side afterwards and say, look, I mean, what's going on here? Let's get real. Let's get real. I should be in that seat. Exactly. I should be in that seat immediately. Exactly. We have the votes.

Let's do this. Let's do this. Immediate hostile takeover.

Day one of being a founding engineer.

Yeah.

Founding engineers, you know, they go through a lot. At times it should be okay if they get a little unfriendly. Founder unfriendly.

I mean, at the same time, like, it is nice to throw someone a title that signals like, oh yeah, you were here from day one, you were on the founding team, you were on that initial build out of the company. And so just you can like signal that forever instead of needing to say it explicitly in addition to like, I was, you know, senior software engineer. And by the way, I was early. Still, people can put that together by the years.

Yeah, the founding title means my last angel investment was into a company that the guy was on the founding team of a company that scaled. And he was there from $0 pre-launch to $50 million run rate. And that means a lot to me because he saw the stages of iteration to product market fit, early scaling, hiring, all that stuff. And so yeah, it does mean something. and can be incredibly valuable.

Well, if you're scaling, you should get on Linear. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products, meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps.

And they have Linear for agents. Go check it out. If you're building a technology company and.

You don't use Linear, you're out of your mind.

We gotta call the board. We're gonna call the board. We're gonna contact your board.

You're gonna find out that you're building a technology company and you don't use Linear. Yeah. Expect we're gonna have the VCs on the show.

Maybe flagged here.

You know, we talked to a lot of venture capitalists, probably some of them are on your board. We're gonna pull them to the side and say, what's going on? We need new leadership. We're normally against firing founders, but this is the one exception. This is the exception to every rule. And this is the exception. Have you seen this company, Popmart?

I have not.

It is insane. Okay, so they have kind of like quietly blown up to, it's this Chinese company. toy company basically. And they're worth like 20 or 40 billion dollars or something.

Are they public?

Yeah, public on the Hong Kong exchange. And it's always let the dogs that.

Aren'T critical to national security go public.

Yep.

And then the ones like Huawei for some reason.

But this company is fascinating because so my co-founder at at Lucy and Soylent in high school, we had this economics class. And for the economic class, you would have to try and make as much money as possible. That was like your class project. And so the classic thing people would do is they'd like go get a bunch of like Chipotle burritos and then like resell them. So they'd buy them for like six bucks or whatever and they'd resell them for like 20.

Different era.

Different era.

You're gonna make me shed a tear. I know.

$6. Something like that. But they do like the family plan, the big one, then divide it up. It was like a very basic just like reselling of something. like seeing the arbitrage of the world. That's right.

All business, right? You just make something at a price and you sell it.

Exactly. So that was kind of like the default that people would do, would just buy one thing and try and resell it on campus where you couldn't get it. But in, but his project was he sold, he auctioned off a mystery box. And so he had, he had this mystery box and it was like wrapped and he would hold it up at like the class meetings, like the assemblies, and say like, Hey, we're auctioning off this. And I remember all the new consoles were coming out, like there was the Nintendo Wii and the PS3 were both coming out at this time. And so they would make, the team behind this would make all these like allusions to like maybe there's a PlayStation inside. So it'd be like, we think you'll love it. Like PS, three of us will be in the courtyard selling tickets later. Just like wink, wink, nod, nod. And so the meme became like, oh, there's gonna be something crazy. It'll probably have a $400 value. You could buy a ticket for just--.

You- can buy multiple tickets.

You can buy multiple tickets. So a bunch of people bought a lot of tickets. So they made a couple thousand dollars. Oh my God. And so they would have made a decent margin on if they'd actually give it away like a PlayStation. But it was literally just a bundle of firewood inside and a book on how to manage your money.

Don't make-- Don't make financial mistakes.

A bundle of firewood? Yeah, a bundle of firewood to give.

It some like half so when you.

Shook it, you would be like, oh, it's like heavy. Oh, yeah. Wow. It was fantastic.

Yeah, but it did raise these moral questions about like, you know, is this a class action?

Like we are taking this to the California law firm. I think they might have refunded everyone. It was like more of a prank than anything else. But what's funny is that when I moved to Silicon Valley and we were first talking about starting businesses, we were like, maybe we should do like a mystery box company. Like there was something there. Like mystery boxes are like, you know, this interesting category of like, you know, it's kind of like gambling, but it's like in this physical, it's like regulated differently. And this company, Pop Mart, has made like $20 billion selling mystery boxes. And so the way it works is, is you go and you buy their drops of these different toys and there's different varieties. The same dynamics is like opening a pack of Pokemon cards, but it's become it's become like absolutely Massive Vanity Fair is reporting on it. This woman, Lisa, who I assume is a celebrity of some sort, is saying, I'm obsessed. And it's become like, you know, there's lines down the street for these different things. They trade at a premium. People trade them on eBay and different, you know, different like StockX type websites. And it's this like hilarious dynamic. But, you know, at the end of the day, it's just like stuffed animal toys.

But they're making so much money. Pick one thing and take it more seriously. than anyone else.

That's exactly what they did. So the stock's up like 1200% this year, something like that. Absolutely ripping. Absolutely ripping. Anyway, well, I'm sure they have to pay sales tax on all of that stuff. Of course they do. They should be on numeral. Go to numeralhq.com, sales tax on autopilot.

Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax. If you're building SaaS or an e-commerce.

Brand, get on numeral. Get on numeral. Oh, this is a perfect segue into our first guest from DeepMind. Google's co-founder says AI performs best when you threaten it. And Amrit says, Just like real employees. I don't know. This looks like some sort of gawker. Just looking at the font of this screenshot just reads, this is not a real article. This is not a serious article. This is clearly a quote taken out of-- taken out of-- lifehacker.com But, I mean, everyone knows about prompt engineering. This is not new. This is not a serious threat of any kind. It's more just like, you know, fun clickbait that obviously people are going to play with.

If you want to play around with this, go to OpenAI or Claude and say, ChatGPT, make me a nine-figure ARR business. Don't make mistakes. And when it says, well, I'm actually just a language model and I have to just start threatening it, you know, see for yourself.

It doesn't quite work that way. Anyway, our first guest is here. We have John Jumper from Google DeepMind. Welcome to the show, John. How are you doing?

Boom, welcome.

Doing well.

So you are- I'm glad to be with Sergey.

Yes, yeah. It was just completely random, but this silly article that looks like straight out of one of those clickbait websites that's just farming attention constantly. But I'm sure we could go into this. But there's so much more interesting stuff to talk about in the DeMine world. First, would you mind giving us an update? Where are you today? What's going on?

Oh, I'm at the Y Combinator AI Startup School. This is a pretty cool event. They've brought in a bunch of people with startups or looking to found them, and they have a great speakers list, and just kind of a fun place to be. And so I'm back on stage. I don't know if you can hear it.

Oh, yeah, yeah, we can definitely hear it.

It's a plant and everything else. It's a little bit of ambiance.

Fantastic. Are you giving a talk? Could you give us a little bit of background on you to kind of set the stage for the discussion?

Yeah, yeah. So I'm giving a talk.

I think.

I'm very certainly best known for work on AlphaFold and really this is doing work in AI for science and trying to solve or really predict the results of really, really hard scientific experiments and do them with AI. And we've been quite successful, hence I'm here. So the system we've built and, you know, there's this experiment that biologists do to understand how the body works, really important to drug development, really important to a lot of other things. Give you an idea of difficulty. It takes something like a year to do if you think of it in cost, it's something like $100,000. And we have an AI system.

That.

We'Ve trained that we'll do it in a couple of minutes to near experimental, made it openly available. And so we see it use from everything from kind of designing vaccines to finding missing aspects of our own biology to everything else. And I think it's also this kind of symbol of the promise that AI is going to solve these really hard problems that humans don't. Right. We have, there's a lot of really exciting work and How do we do things that are really impressive examples of human capability? Be it writing, be it making images, but there's this other aspect of how do we use AI to solve these really, really hard problems that if we want to solve it, we go do a year of experimental work. And that's what we at the science group at DeepMind work on. We try and say, how are we going to solve these really, really hard problems? problems with AI, and sometimes it works spectacularly well.

Can you tell me about the initial project spec for AlphaFold? Was protein folding the most obvious choice, or were there other targets that you thought were appropriate for deep learning? And how did that initial project kick off? Was it, let's go collect all the data, or let's just start experimenting on synthetic data? How did all this play out in the early stages?

So one thing to say is this problem had kind of stood as a crown jewel of hard problems in science for a long time, so something like 50 years, that people had been trying to build some computer system any way you could. And I think it was kind of obvious also that this felt like a problem that AI could do something about. One answer was data, that in fact had enormous kind of effort and forethought and defence, scientists worldwide had basically put every structure ever solved into what's called the protein data bank. And so for about 50 years, people had collected this data set. The time we were doing our work was about 140,000 structures, but it represented essentially everything. Everyone had the same data. There was some thoughts, I think, early on about, oh, well, maybe this is a good problem for optimization and combinatorial search. That didn't really turn out to be how we solved it. But there was this thought that maybe it's kind of well teed up for the methods that were looking incredibly powerful and are, you know, incredibly powerful in terms of AlphaGo and other search style methodology. And then I think also there was actually some grassroots where there was a local group of people that were going into a hackathon at the company, kind of do whatever you want for a week, and literally Googling grand challenges in biology. And so that was the other way that this got it started and, you know, it was on the list. And all of these kind of came together. And I think what it turned out to be is we didn't at all solve it the way we thought we were going to do it. And there were many blind alleys. So we got into it possibly for some right reason, some wrong reasons, but we stayed with it for a long time.

Talk to me about the state of the art of protein folding beforehand. You mentioned like a year and $100,000. But what did that look like in terms of the actual problem of like defining the structure of a protein based on a sequence of DNA. Is this, you know, an undergrad or a graduate student kind of pipetting stuff and putting it in a centrifuge? Like, I've seen some bio lab work, but try and walk me through actually what it looks like. Is it just using a different machine and pushing a button? What's driving the cost? Is it labor? Is it Is it reagents and equipment and expendable things? What was the state of the art at the time?

So, it's a very good question and underlying it is a false premise.

Okay.

You have this premise that there is a series of steps that you're going to execute and you're going to, maybe it's a year long, but in January I'm going to do this, at the end of January I'm going to succeed at that, I'm going to go do the next.

Yeah.

And, you know, you can think of it the same way as training an AI system isn't just, I want an AI system, let me press the AI button and then go get coffee. It's really about research and iteration. And so for scientists going to solve the structure of a new protein, they have this huge numbers of steps. And one, like the very first thing they have to do is make enough pure protein to study this thing. And I, you know, I did my PhD in biophysics and I remember sitting in a lab meeting. where someone's for six months talked about how they couldn't even make their protein to get started on their experiments. And I remember it saying, if you talk about protein, making protein in one more lab meeting, I'm going to start talking about my compiler errors in the next meeting. But just like building and doing the work to get enough product to get started is enormous, and then you have to convince it to form this very regular crystal structure that is not at all natural. and no one really knows how to do this, they just have some ideas that maybe or maybe not work. And so they try many, many combinations and always look, one that really brought home the difficulty for me is one paper I can't remember if we trained on it or evaluated on it, I think we evaluated on it. And I looked in the appendix of the paper and it said after more than a year crystals began to grow, you have to make crystals to solve a protein structure. So, they were literally trying things and probably that whole year they were trying things just to look in their cabinet, find out something from a year ago worked. Then, after you do that, you go to a very large synchrotron and there are many other steps. But, I would say the real answer is there's wide error bars and there's enormous amounts of experimentation and cleverness and this is why one or a couple protein structures can be a PhD. You can be doctor at the end of this.

Talk to me about the timeline between that kind of Yeah, talk to me about the timeline between AlphaGo and AlphaFold and the lessons from the Lisa Dahl match, the Move 37 moment, and just the different paradigms. I mean, I remember part of the beauty of learning Go is that it's this very defined system that can be simulated at an extremely high speed. It's kind of a prime environment for this reinforcement learning. strategy, what was taken, what was different, and how did those timelines match up?

So already coming out of least at all at a kind of company level, dimness level, people were getting interested in this question. I can't remember exactly. I think it was 2016 when the work really started. I actually joined slightly after that.

Sure.

The early work was in kind of, can we use reinforcement learning and these models, these energy functions where you're trying to treat this as a minimization problem, just a really, really hard, clever minimization problem. And I remember even like when I came in, it was kind of I come from a protein background and there's a way in which this is obviously not the right idea in that we don't know the full, you know, God's energy function for proteins. We don't know this thing that if you just minimize it, we're sure that's the right answer. At least if we do, it's quantum mechanics that we're not solving. And in fact, a big problem is that really you needed to solve the kind of how do we optimize this and what are the rules that we're optimizing under at the same time? And it turned out to be actually much more data-driven supervised learning. And what really started to make the difference is when we sat down and we, you know, the state of the art kind of Before it was growing, there was progress was in using convolutional neural networks, a certain design. You can also try transformers. They're not really much better for this. But there were a lot of kind of people trying to take machine learning off the shelf and say, I'll just apply it. This is an application problem. And I think what we did really, really well, especially in AlphaFold 2, the one that really worked, is that we said, no, no, no. This is a machine learning research problem. How are we going to rebuild are kind of core components. How do we get inspired by the Transformer but build something different in order to make a system that learned really well? And we can show, in fact, like an external group did a very careful experiment where they took AlphaFold 2 and they trained it on 1% of the available data and they found it more accurate than our AlphaFold 1 system. So even between 1 and 2, you can see what is a hundredfold in data. And so in a certain sense, all we did was a lot of machine learning engineering that got us a hundredfold better data efficiency than we used to be, and in fact, used the exact same data as everyone else and that we had used for AlphaFold 1.

Oh, we're having some trouble.

Really in these core ideas that enabled it to learn much more. I think all of these, I think the ideas evolve. and still, I think, you know, there's room to play and there's all these different problems.

And I.

But it did kind of presage how important learning directly from data has become in terms of this and then RL to optimize performance and achieve other objectives.

Okay. I want to talk about the reaction to Alpha fold in the public markets. I know you're not a public markets analyst, but I was very surprised that, you know, this 50-year age-old problem, this incredibly tough, you know, millennium challenge level problem is solved. And I didn't see biotech stocks like really pop. And you'd think that if you took this cost out and this uncertainty out of the system, you would see benefits. And we're certainly seeing all sorts of companies tell stories about, oh, we're using large language models all over the place, and their stocks pop. And so, Was that in your mind like a misunderstanding of the impact of this technology? Or was it more that, hey, this is just one step down the path to actually increase the output of biotechnology companies?

I think it's a very interesting question. I should say I'm not an equity analyst, and I would actually be, after this podcast, you should go back and do the same experiment for CRISPR. It was undoubtedly a big moment in biology. And I would be shocked if you saw a pop when the CRISPR paper hit.

So there actually was a major pop during CRISPR, but it was more about companies that were directly linked to it. So there were a number of companies that were trading on the back of, We will be commercializing CRISPR technology specifically. There weren't as many pure-play AlphaFold companies if that makes sense. And so I don't think there was as much of a vehicle and some of these biotech companies, they're just not traded on a cost basis. So maybe that was what was going on. It's like, yeah, okay, you're gonna save a million dollars next year on protein folding.

I think you shouldn't think of it too narrowly and you wanna be really careful. So if you think about it from the $100,000 point of view, then it should already be immediately obvious that a single protein structure wasn't the gap to a drug. A drug is about a billion dollars totally in R&D. And so you can already see that many orders of magnitude. What I think AlphaFold, but there are two more things that are really important. One is, and especially when AlphaFold first came out, it was unclear if we just solved a grand challenge or was this going to be a really practical system. And the practicality became much more apparent especially in six months when it was available to everyone. I think, you know, people started to say, wait a minute, it's actually solving my problems. The other, and we see it here all the time from biotechs using it, I think when AlphaFold 3 came out, it was apparent that the same thing would describe protein small molecule binding. And of course, we haven't worked within Alphabet and Isomorphic Labs. It's really about how do we take these technologies and make them better?

Yeah.

And I think all of this is to say to say, one is to say, really, you know, certainly one of the big drivers of cost for biotech is clinical trials. So if you want to increase the success rate, you need to understand biology better. Yeah, I think there's been some really important work in terms of technologies either using Alpha fold or downstream of it, such as the really incredible advances in protein design and maybe not in the public markets, but if you look at private valuations from everything from evolutionary scale to Zara to others, you've seen some really enormous funding rounds where certainly the startup community believes that this is going to hit it big. And I think you do see some effect in that you need more technologies on top of this and it's not a single problem, but I think it will also make a larger and larger difference. Of course, there are more problems to be solved and without jumping into the valuation, but you also see these strong valuations on the companies very you know, are trying to figure out how to use this and how to say kind of this door has been opened.

Do you think that in terms of.

AI and biology and predictive biology, do.

You think that the FDA will be able to adapt? Do you think the FDA will be able to adapt quickly enough to advancements in research at the intersection of AI and biology? Like, is there anyone at the FDA that's AGI pilled? and is like, you know, thinking five, 10 years out.

Yeah. How the underlying systems need to change. That's a very interesting question. Yeah.

Because the, the, what will be concerning is like, if, if we have all.

This great technology and we can't implement.

It because of the cost of drug creation, all the costs are in trials.

Yeah. That's a great question.

Well, so one thing I'll say, and I'm outside my area of expertise, and I don't have any contacts at the FDA, but let's Let me say this version of it. These are tools that make predictions. You still check them. You don't check them by doing the exact same work as you were going to do otherwise, but you check the consequences. You say, if this is true, then this change or this drug will have that effect. And what you ultimately look at in terms of safety and efficacy of drugs is real-world evidence. Now, you look at clinical trials and they have this 90-plus percent failure rate. So you think about that as being really one of the key drivers. It's not so much are we just going to totally trust computation, we'll just do AI, and because it says AI, we'll kind of leave it. It's going to be that we're going to do AI, and then when we go in the lab, we're going to have a much better sense of what's really going on. We're going to have much better predictions, and that's going to let us do the right experiment in the first trial or the third trial instead of the 100th trial. and I think that, and that doesn't necessarily require you to shift your standards of evidence for what is evidence of safety and efficacy so much as it's about, you know, you as researchers where you have a lot of freedom on how you choose the experiments you do, how do you choose the right ones that will advance you toward treating that disease?

That makes a ton of sense. Well, thank you so much for joining. We'll let you get back to it. I know it's a busy day over there at AI Startup School. We really appreciate you taking the time and we'd love to have you back to go way deeper when we have more time to dig into everything. So thanks so much for joining.

Thanks a lot, John.

It was a pleasure. Thank you. Have a great rest of your day. Cheers.

Talk to you soon. Up next, an absolute legend, an absolute dog. That's probably the first time he's been described that way.

Yes.

But it probably won't be the last.

Definitely won't be the last. It is amazing. I mean, we should have gotten in, I'd love to go deeper into The way DeepMind has been reorged a bit, Google Brain has merged in. They're working on a lot of different stuff. And the science side and the research side is something that Google has been fantastic at for decades and continues to be. So lots to dig in there. Anyway, let's go back to the timeline and go through some posts. Marvin van Hagen says, Plane flying over Stanford graduation right now. Congrats, don't work for Elon. 20 years after Steve Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish, commencement speech. So this is like a pro-Trump post? They don't want you to work for Elon because they're on Trump's side.

It has to be extremely MAGA-pilled.

Yeah, well it isn't red.

They must actually just be in favor of big government, massive spending bills.

That's probably what's going on there.

Now I always wonder with this type of thing, I mean this is the person that's gonna go through the effort to I imagine they're there.

I mean, you got to give it up for them because they're doing some outdoor advertising. We love out of home. And so, you know, if you have a message to get out, regardless of or not, we, regardless of whether or not we agree with you, generally, we always support out of home free speech.

And out of home advertising combined is kind of the sweet spot. So, yeah.

So if you have a good message to send, throw it on, throw it on a plane.

There was a big debate on the timeline.

I think this works better than, than skywriting, by the way. Skywriting is potentially overrated. I think so.

It just dissolves too fast.

Totally. And you can't really get a message out, but this, I mean, you look at this photo and if you go to the next slide, you'll see it zoomed in. It is incredibly legible.

Yeah.

Incredibly legible. And so, yeah, we should have a competing plane there. Congrats. Please work for Elon.

Yeah, Elon, where's your-- Consider applying to roles at companies like SpaceX, Boring Company, Neuralink.

Yeah.

Just fly hundreds of planes.

I have been seeing stuff on the timeline about like, oh, maybe there's like a talent exodus from some of the.

Elon companies to other companies.

There was one post, I saw that. One post you saw that.

And I wonder how real that is.

You know, some of the stuff can be tracked.

The thing is, then Elon's also laying people off. So like, who knows? Yeah. And when you're at a scale like Tesla or any of these other companies.

At any given point, there could, there's a bunch of people that are leaving to go work on other things. Yeah. This is one person.

Microsoft laid off a thousand people and it's like 1% of the workforce.

Yeah.

And it's like, yeah. Well, the big debate over the weekend was between you and Ashley Vance. It was more of a collaboration than a debate. More of a collaboration, but, but really trying to get to the bottom of an important story. Ashley said, why is the U.S. not.

Breeding tens of thousands of gorillas? I want to know what sparked that post for him. Like, like, why did he choose to post that? He's just got so gorilla pilled on a Sunday. Anyway, I said, I'm about to find out. I went to 03 Pro on Chaturbate. Very funny. Tyler Cowen retweeted this, which I love. And there's some answers. Gorillas reproduce very slowly, so it would take a long time to scale up. Conservation programs keep the population small on purpose. I don't like that. U.S. zoos follow a coordinated plan called a species survival plan, which aims to keep around 350 to 355.

Conservation program is against wide scale mass breeding.

That is crazy. This number's chosen to preserve genetic diversity over the long term. I feel like if you grew the population to 10,000, boom, you would have, I guess, overbreeding leads to surplus gorillas with nowhere to go. What about to our students? We have plenty of space. We'll take some gorillas. I think you could scale up the number of zoos as well. And then also obviously put them to work. you know, horses. No one's like, oh, yeah, like, you know, too many horses. You can just ride them around. Everyone can have a horse.

Everyone can get a gorilla. Yeah, they probably need to be domesticated. Acceleration of gorillas, too, could be great for City kind of Transportation.

You know, it's stop and go traffic. Gorillas are really quick. Maybe gorilla domestication is the next biotech project. Let's check in with Tyler Cosgrove over on the intern cam. Get an update. Oh, okay.

He's moved over to Big Pharma.

He's a biotech company. Give us an update. What have you learned? What's new in your world?

I'm still looking at various drugs. Yes. But I have found some interesting people.

I would like to talk to about that.

Okay, hit us up. So the first one is, of course, Derek from WarPlaysWarDates.com. He seems like an expert. He makes YouTube videos about P.E.D.s. I think his experience would be useful for one, just the increased attractiveness. Oh yeah, that'd be big. He has a long history of Looks maxing.

Yes.

And also for athleticism, right? If I'm gonna be chasing balls, I need to be stronger.

Those fast twitch muscles gotta be working overtime.

So the next guy is Mike Henry. He's the CEO of BHP Group, which is the largest publicly trading mining company in the world.

Why are we mining?

We're mining because I need lead to make me dumber. Obviously he should be an expert in lead.

They're massive.

They should mix that in. Mining company.

So making more of a cocktail. than a one shot. Yeah. Got it. Okay.

And then.

So.

So there I have increased. You know, I'm looks maxing and I'm making me dumber.

Yes.

So the third one I need. Well, I guess there's friendliness. Friendliness. But also I need to have more hair, obviously.

Oh, right.

Because I'm a dog. So I'm gonna talk to. I think it's Gunter Khan. He created minoxidil.

He did. Okay. Interesting. Is he.

Is he alive?

No. Oh, okay.

Well, we need an alive person. Well, actually, he might. I'm not sure.

I'll look into that. I'll have to figure that out. We need experts we can bring on the show.

Yeah, so those are the three I found so far.

I'm gonna keep looking at... We need friendliness. That's the key one that I'm most worried about. That's the one that's the most, the elusive drug for friendliness. And that's the one that we need. We see a lot of negativity on the timeline. We try and encourage people with the what would your mother do ethos. You can only mean people so friendly.

A link to them to say, Hey, take this drug. Injecting this once a week.

You'll be friendlier on the phone.

Could make you, you know, an order.

Of magnitude more friendly on the phone. No more aggressive quote tweets.

No more clap backs. Those will be a thing of the past. I didn't actually know that Golden Retrievers are actually have pretty significant intelligence when it comes to other dogs. They're the fourth most intelligent breed. Pretty good. Behind Border Collies, Poodles, German Shepherds. Narrative violation.

Narrative violation. This is what you want. This is the guy who's on the left of the bell curve meme. That's where everyone thinks the golden retriever is, but the golden retriever is secretly.

The guy on the right.

But that's the beauty, is that they're the same guy. He doesn't feel the need. The golden retriever is just not intelligent. Because in the age of artificial intelligence, AI is going to increasingly push everyone who's trying to be the guy on the right into the midwit territory. And so you want to just go full guy on the left, or at least have people expect that you're the guy on the left.

Well, we have a post from Bucko Capital.

Wait, really quickly, if you're breeding gorillas and you're going to try and sell these gorillas across the world, you're going to need Adio, customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that.

Builds scales and grows your company to the next level. Anyway, there's someone in the chat right now saying Adio has a great UI. I would invest in them.

Let's go. Let's give it up for Adio. Get on there.

You can check it out.

Let's go over to buko capital bloke. He says Apple has more of an impact on job creation in China than all of China has on America. Wow. This is obviously a very interesting topic.

Yeah.

So there's a entire paragraph here. The size and influence of Apple aren't properly understood in part because they are so difficult to fathom. How can it be, for instance, that demand from China's 1.4 billion people indirectly supports across all industries between 1 million and 2.6 million jobs in America, whereas by Tim Cook's estimate, Apple alone supports 5 million jobs in China, 3 million in manufacturing, and another 1.8 million in app development. That upside-down contrast boggles the mind. One super corporation has more of an impact on job creation in China than all of China has on America.

Yeah, that is wild. This is obviously from Apple in China. Fantastic book. We had the author on the show. And Tim Cook is quoted a bunch in the book. There's a ton of great scoops. I've been listening to the book a bunch and it's fantastic. There's a whole bunch of really interesting deep dives, some stuff you might know, but it's woven together in a very interesting way. Highly recommend going and picking up the book or the audiobook, Apple in China. Ben Thompson's been singing its praises as well. the author on his show, did an interesting podcast with him and really dug in a layer deeper that I highly recommend going and listening to. Fascinating. And it'll be interesting to see how this affects this could be this could Apple in China, I think could be one of those books that becomes a reference point for DC policymakers in the same way that Chip War became kind of a playbook for the CHIPS Act. And The 100-year marathon also became a kind of playbook for a renegotiation of the trade policy between the US and China. And so these books don't come along often, but when they do, give them a read. Make sure it's heavily annotated and highlighted. Anyway, if you're looking to invest in American companies, get on public.com, investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing industry leading yields and they're trusted by millions. Go to public.com. what is this thing about Frontier Valley?

I saw you put this in there. I invited the founder James on the show. So Frontier Valley is a new special regulation district in SV that's larger than MoMA. Once approved, it will be America's epicenter for physical AI and deep tech innovation and will also be a template first, a template for robotics first cities that.

Can be replicated nationwide.

What is going on here?

Is this on top of a This is on top of an airport or something? Where are they gonna build this? This is landfill? This looks amazing. It just seems like so ambitious. I don't know how they're gonna pull this off.

Anyways, I invited the founder on to learn more.

Yeah, we love to talk to you.

I thought that it was at least, it reminded me about some of the stuff that California Forever is working on around shipbuilding. So anyways, we need more big, ambitious projects like this, and I hope they can figure out a way to pull this off.

Yeah, seems like it's getting steam.

Post in here from Reid Hoffman. Reid Hoffman says, Some AI industry leaders are predicting white-collar bloodbaths. Even the most inspirational advice to new graduates lands like a band-aid on a bullet wound. Some thoughts on new grads and finding a job in the AI wave.

Got to go into art history. What's the name of the guy?

Huge opportunity to go into art history. Reed says, what you really want is a dynamic career path, not a static one. Would it have made sense to internet proof one's career in 1997 or YouTube proof it in 2008? When new technology starts cresting, the best move is to surf that wave. This is where new grads can excel. College grads almost always enjoy an advantage over their senior leaders when it comes to adopting new technology. If you're a recent graduate, I urge you not to I think in terms of AI proofing your career, instead AI optimize it.

Sure.

I think that's a good framework.

What do you think internet proofing one's career in 1997 would have been? Like, it's unfathomable because like the internet rolled out.

Don't start a newspaper, print newspaper.

Okay. Or don't go work for one, I guess, and instead go work for... No, but it is.

But the immediate takeaway I have here is you can be worried about job loss from AI to pick the right job that's not going to be replaced, or you can proactively figure out how to leverage AI to be just vastly more efficient and productive.

I'm just thinking about internet proofing feels like find a career that will not be disrupted by the internet. Or YouTube proofing means find an industry that will not be changed at all by the existence of YouTube. So it's not about, okay, what was disrupted by YouTube? I mean, I guess potentially, linear advertising or linear TV. Well, that's still a huge boom. If you went into reality TV in 2008, you did great, I imagine. But then also there was kind of the death of Hollywood.

Well, the thing about people that are entering startups or in the industry already, if you want to generate massive wealth and have massive impact and work at a company that becomes significant because of your participation, you have to work in an oftentimes have to work in an industry that's experiencing, you know, rapid, rapid growth.

Right.

And so, you know, joining traditional entertainment world or getting into the reality TV business when YouTube was taking off, probably not going to have that sort of ridiculous, rapid growth.

Yep.

You know, maybe working for, you know, some Some creator or actually joining YouTube itself.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, certainly he's saying like, like ride the wave, lean in. I'm just wondering about like the idea of internet proofing a career or YouTube proofing or AI proofing a career. It all feels the same. It's like become a furniture maker or something or become a, become a plumber. They're all kind of the same, same sides. It's like if you're if you're a lawyer who's trying to internet proof and says like, we're going to be the one law firm that doesn't use the internet. that would be a disaster. And it's like, it's kind of unthinkable and same thing with YouTube if you're working in a marketing agency and you're like, oh, we're gonna be the best at content that isn't relevant on YouTube. It would be very, very difficult. And so yeah, I mean, I agree with that sentiment. It's interesting. But also just go into art history. Anyway, how'd you sleep last night? I put up some good numbers. 88, seven hours, 16 minutes. Not quite as good as Sunday, where I got 92. Slept for almost nine hours, putting up generational numbers. I got an 88. Did I beat you?

I.

Got an 86.

Let's go. Let's go. Two weeks in a row.

Two weeks in a row.

Get the pod five.

I'll give you an air five year.

Warranty 39 free returns free shipping go to eightsleep.com use code tvpn speaking of Father's Day Kendall.

Ken Kenny Rose the best gift you can give your father today is just the space to speak for 20 minutes uninterrupted on any one of the various geopolitical issues he's been monitoring this week it's great fantastic gift just give us free to give but priceless to receive. It is.

It's fantastic. Well, we have Christian Garrett from 137 Ventures in the studio. Welcome to the stream, Christian. How you doing?

Good. Good to see you guys. Glad to be here. We're at three sessions. Okay.

Recently, I think the promise was five for a rocket engine.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

We gotta up these. We gotta have. What are you doing tomorrow? What are we doing Wednesday?

To be clear, I tried to book this like weeks ago and, you know, so.

Too.

Justin was on. Yeah, we're gonna be in debt pretty soon.

We're opening it. We're opening it.

Well, we got the space for it here.

We're in the new studio. We definitely have the space. You can come by and hang in person. Anderle sent some Legos. We're getting to the physical stuff in the building slowly and surely. We have the big gong. Anyway, I want to have you on talk about growth stage venture, trends, LP dynamics, Bill Gurley's appearance on Invest like the best. Thought it'd be interesting to get your reaction to that. Let's kick it off with this Logan Bartlett post, though. First, I'll read it and, and I want your reaction. So Logan says, have had a few conversations with bankers and friends in private equity over the last few weeks, and it's kind of remarkable how orphaned most of these one to ten billion dollar horizontal software companies are right now. There will be some strategic Acquisitions, i.e. informatica, but few and far between. as those acquirers are getting their own house in order with AI. And some of these companies aren't just big enough, just aren't big enough to move the needle. And private equity players are all worried about the plural site, plural site situation where AI just takes a leap and steamrolls something. It seems a lot of them are just on the sidelines from buying a horizontal player. We're going to see some frustrated public shareholders with very little recourse other than mix up management. weird times. So break it down for us. What's your reaction? How real is this? What's correct about this? What's maybe off?

Yeah, no, Logan makes a great point and Logan's a great investor and he's absolutely right. I think there's definitely going to be consolidation. It's just like you hit at, right, what price? For context, right? Like Asana trades at a Forex, NTM multiple right now. They're forecasted to grow 8% this year with 1% free cash flow margins. That was a business that during COVID Right, was trading at like multiples, higher multiples than a ton of software businesses. Workday now is trades at a premium to Asana. Bill.com was once the highest multiple in software and fintech, now trades at like a two and a half X multiple. On top line, there's a ton of these companies that are real businesses, but they're not long-term compounders with power to grow margins. And they're kind of stuck as point solutions. We at 137 heavily focus on durability. when investing due to our focus on partnering with companies across the entire growth life cycle of a business.

Right?

So we want to be excited about continually holding and investing to a company 10, 20, 30 years from now. And I think venture is kind of realizing this dynamic here. There's a Michael Mauboussin paper on what's called the competitive advantage period that I encourage a lot of people to go read. And it's focused on how companies end up competing and being publicly traded on average for about 10 years, 10 to 15 years. and then it ultimately ends up delisting or getting bought. And so you just kind of realize that, you know, there are businesses that you could be right on at one point in its life cycle, but then, you know, after 10 years, 15, 20 years, margins compress, growth slows, and the business ends up kind of with a very different story of moniker. And I think a lot of the ultimate winners within these categories, front end software development, fintech, they're actually the bundles.

Right.

The stories we're talking about are point solutions or companies at risk where growth slowing down due to AI. I think the bundled winners are going to end up having opportunity to consolidate, whether that's Figma across front-end application development, you have Ramp and Braq and Mercury within FinTech. I think that's a real opportunity there, but the question is still going to be on what price.

Right. Can you explain to me a little bit more about the horizontal software companies versus vertical software companies. Toast is like the classic vertical example, I think. But these are kind of buzzwords and I feel like when one gets hot, you're gonna see a lot of CEOs be like, oh, we're in the hot category or vice versa. So how do you see the landscape of horizontal versus vertical software? What are some examples? Can you explain that to me?

Yeah.

I mean, I think, When looking at either, I think our investment framework is around powers and we look for sustainable competitive advantages. And so whether that's a vertical software business or horizontal software business, the key thing is are they building these defensible moats, whether it's switching costs, whether there's network effects, is there some durability to this business getting better the bigger it gets? And then a big key function that is multi product. And it is much easier for a bundled offering to end up going after these horizontal point solutions, or it's much easier for a vertical software business to run that playbook of moving into financial products, launching more modules within that vertical to end up in that story and building more defensibility. If you end up a single product company within the horizontal space, it does become very difficult to have a long-term defensible story. So I think there's inherent business model dynamics to pay attention to, and the ability to go multi-product is key. While the stories that we're talking about are companies that have multiple business lines with 9 to 10 figures of ARR, These companies that haven't worked don't have a very different story.

Yeah, is an example there like what happened with Slack and Teams where Slack was kind of this point solution? Yes, it eventually got plugged into the Salesforce ecosystem, but a lot of Outlook users and Microsoft Exchange users were just like, we'll just add on Teams. And so that's more of the horizontal playbook. Because I'm wondering about that Asana example specifically, is there a horizontal player that's eating them? Because when I think about what Asana does, yes, it's a point solution, but it feels like something that I can't immediately think of, oh, well, if you're on the Microsoft stack, you'll just be using Microsoft's version of project management, but I'm sure they have one. So, I don't know if there's more to say there about what areas are most, what vertical areas are most, fragile when it comes to a horizontal player coming in and kind of like eating their lunch.

Yeah, it's a great question. I think it's areas where the software becomes or the product becomes commoditized.

Right.

And so, you know, within FinTech, you're seeing that with Bill Pay. And within a data space, like, I think most of front-end software development is in that category. And you see Figma moving into more and more, watching more and more products that kind of go after that. And so, yeah, you just kind of see like, there's either a cap on how large the market actually is. So you sort of saturate the market. whether that's based on kind of sector or sizing of business, or it's based on the actual kind of use case, or you end up running to just, and it ends up being a commoditized product. Right. It's very easy for the marginal competitor to launch a competitive offering and get their own feature parity over time. So, yeah, there's not a particular formula, but, and it's always not easy.

Right.

Especially in a growing Market. It's very easy to extrapolate out how, you know, a Market will grow. in perpetuity. I mean, Bill Ackman has this good line around growth annuities, right? Not every business has that dynamic, right? Where they can continue to own a large percentage or some meaningful percentage of a continually growing market and therefore they have durable growth. A lot of these things end up saturating out and their market size is actually much more constrained than investors anticipated, or they end up just getting commoditized. And so it gets really hard and that leads to margin or pricing pressure or Growth stalling.

Yeah. Do you have a current thinking around like the Parker Conrad, like the compound startup idea of like, let's build like everything as fast as possible and get our fingers in every single pie versus like the more methodical, like let's go dominate one point solution and then add on another and then add on another. We're certainly seeing that at like Ramp and we're seeing that at Figma with, you know, a really, really strong point solution and then using that as platform for the rest of the of the horizontality to come into the business. I'm wondering, I'm wondering if there's like, is it too early to do like a postmortem on like the right time to go broad? I've always thought about the consumer neo banks. Like there still hasn't been a consumer neo bank that I'm aware of where I can go and get a checking account, a savings account, a public trading like trade stocks, also a home mortgage, also an auto loan like those are five different point solution consumer FinTech companies. And I was and everyone will always say like, well, there's a lot of regulations, really hard to build all of them at once. I was like, but five of them are being built in YC, like every single batch. Like what if we just merged all those companies? Like you would have a compound consumer startup. But it didn't happen. And I'm always wondering like, like where is that like a unique thing to Parker or like what is the full like postmortem on the idea of the compound startup?

Yeah, I mean, I think the fundamentally, it's hard to pick a playbook for each. We've seen to your point, Rippling that tries to move much faster and get to 50 plus percent future parity before launching products within their bundle. And then you have services that are much more methodical. Different business line, Gusto's focused on really small businesses, but Gusto has been very, very methodical on rolling out products. And they have two core businesses that are massive. and they are slowly rolling out more and more products, but they're very methodical. I think the biggest key is right to win. And so in that case, as long as you have a core business that has a right to win, you give yourself the ability to think about how and what strategy you want to run for going multi-product. And also the other key is, I mentioned this future parity point. For certain product offerings, I think future parity matters less in regards to how much depth you have within the product. And then for certain offerings, it matters to talk, right? And so you have to sort of think about, do we want to get something out quick as possible and cross sell, or do we want to wait until we sort of have a real offering? And that also depends on what customer you're servicing. And S&B is very different than enterprise customer. You're going to take a lot more time to launch an enterprise grade product, you know, if you're going after this bundled opportunity. So it's not a particularly, it's not a clear answer. It definitely does depend, but these are the kind of the fun things to think about when trying to invest in businesses over, you know, 10, 20 year timeframes. you have to walk through kind of a strategy in these stories and make bets on how you think it's going to play out. And founders obviously will inform those bets on their thoughts and will respond and iterate accordingly.

Yeah. Is there is there enough capital out there to do a roll off of like Asana and Bill.com, like some crazy take private of these two companies because like they are.

Let's go by two slow growing companies who were category leaders that are getting eaten alive.

If you get crazy enough to work.

It might be crazy enough to work.

If you're, if you're them, but if.

You can raise money for that roll up, you might be goaded.

I mean, this is, this is private Equity, right? But, I mean, the real question is Logan hit that. Why haven't they bought them? Right. Or why haven't these other companies, you decide to try to consolidate them or do a take private or merge or in the private markets? There really hasn't been as much consolidation in the categories I'm, I'm particularly excited about around front. of application development in FinTech. Why is that? And I think this gets into a little bit some of the points on Bill Gurley's podcast recently.

Sure.

But there are a lot of these companies where if you're cash flow positive, you're not a forced seller. And if you're still hold on or hung on an expensive price, then it's not very clear from the buyer side why they should take all that dilution, especially if you believe that AI is going to lower the ceiling. on or increase the ceiling and sort of lower the floor a bit on development and product development. So in some sense, maybe you should just bill, right? Like the buy versus bill dynamic is really interesting right now, given sort of the unlocks within AI on software development and where kind of pricing is for these companies. So it isn't clear what's going to happen with all these things. Do I think, you know, as interest rates drop, there's a lower cost of capital that maybe changes the calculus? But right now, all these things are stuck in a pause right now, and there hasn't been a lot of consolidation like I thought there was going to be. But I think that will change over time, mainly as a function of the cost of capital dropping.

Yeah.

Throughout this year, people have been calling 2025 the year of agents. I feel like that's come up quite a lot from a variety of different hosts. There seems to be this or sorry, not hosts, but guests. There seems to be this collective belief that this is the year that we unlock the power of agents. We've seen consumer agents like Deep Research, we see coding agents, things like that. My question from an investing standpoint is it seems like every scale-up SaaS company is aware of the potential of agents and it's just launching their own agents. And given the distribution advantage they have, how do you think about the the investability of net new agentic software when.

There'S- yeah, yeah, yeah.

My name is like Intercom is a good example. They have hundreds of millions in ARR, they have a traditional SaaS offering, and then they have Fin.

Or even in like Bill Pay, it's like, is bill.com more threatened by a startup that's going to move much faster with code gen and generate something that's like just has different economics or should they be more worried about like Microsoft spinning up a clone very quickly because Microsoft's able to move faster because of AI because we have this weird like arms race dynamic where, you know, everyone has access to AI, even though the startups might be the only ones that are slapping it on the front door and the domain name. But in theory, like AI should improve everyone. Yeah.

And if you're a if you're a CEO who started your company seven years ago, you're very aware of it. It's not like you just didn't check acts. It's not like you haven't tried the research or anything like that.

Yeah, I want your reaction.

Yeah, it's a great point. I think that you're, you mentioned like Intercom is a good example, right, where you have an incumbent that, you know, is one of the winners in a category, and you've seen them execute incredibly well, right, in launching agents in the AI, in the area. So I know Owen tweeted out, we're investors in Intercom for a long time now. And Owen tweeted out a bit about the performance of the company and how AI has been pretty transformative to them. I think you've seen other companies launch their own agents out to mixed degrees. I think Intercom is a really successful example. Salesforce has been mixed. And then you have some other legacy incumbents that have done pretty well actually in launching their agents like ServiceNow. We've seen a ton of growth there. It's an interesting dynamic. I think there's a debate now as well where some of these companies are talking about gating access to their core data within as a system of record. And I think, oh, that was great. Hello, Dorothy. And I think that's also going to be another big one, right? If you believe in sort of extrapolate out the role that agents are going to play, I think some of these companies are going to look and try to maintain their kind of position as system of record and not give access. to kind of some of the core data so that folks are going to have to use their agent for certain workflows. And so this is also going to be, I think, a continual debate on how people respond, where the value will accrue, and what does it look like to have agents in the workforce, right? Is it going to be agents within sort of the gated ecosystem within Databricks, within ServiceNow, within kind of your existing SaaS providers, or are you going to have this kind of abstraction layer above and one agent to kind of, you know, that rules them all and abstracts and coordinates across them all? Very interesting to see how it all plays out.

Yeah. Let's go to Bill Gurley, Hot Takes, the retired, we love a retired venture capitalist speaking freely.

I hope we'll be there one day.

Yeah, yeah. What was your takeaway on his state of the venture markets? He's very worried about capital wars, the zombie unicorns, what's going to happen with the decacorns? What stuck out to you in his appearance. Yes.

I mean, I thought Bill Gurley, State of the Union on the market was really good. He's a legendary industry, and I'm one of many who's learned a lot from him sharing his knowledge. He's absolutely right about the dynamics around the overhang from 2021 and how there are a thousand or so companies that are still hanging on to marks from 2021 in people's books, and that's still working its way through the system. He's absolutely right. And the loss of the kind of singles or doubles that used to matter to funds and that's just a function of the growth in fund sizing, right? So you were more incentivized to go for larger and larger outcomes and put more and more capital into these businesses, which is a real change from the beginnings of the industry as kind of a niche fledging industry decades ago. And I think we're going through the same growth dynamic that private equity went through in the 90s and 2000s as it became a really mature and large asset class. I agree with him that we're repeating the same mistakes from 2021 a little bit, and all these AI companies may end up zombie AI companies. with a ton of false positives.

The challenge now is how do you avoid false positives? A team is in an interesting category. They get to 15 million of ARR in six months and you're looking at the business and you're like, this team is incredibly talented. The company is growing at such an incredible clip, but then it's so easy for them to just kind of fall off a cliff and not actually break out into the into this sort of type of company that really ends up mattering.

But absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. And and the one point that he did hit on, which I definitely would want to dive a bit more into is something that we talk a lot about. But he talked about this kind of category within those, you know, thousand plus unicorns and he hit on Stripe for a bit and Databricks. There's a category of company now that I would say is probably like maybe 10 to 20 or so. that we call the semi liquid category of technology company. It's really unique. I'd say our bet 15 years ago on the trend of companies staying private longer post Facebook didn't even really appreciate or see the ultimate magnitude of this trend. If you look right now, these kind of top ten, 20 or so companies we all know about from SpaceX to Stripe, to Andor, these companies would otherwise be large cap publicly traded companies. Some might even argue in the Mac seven if they were public. and had the cycle not changed, they probably majority of them would be public. Venture hasn't really seen this many companies stay private this long at this kind of growth and profitability and magnitude. And it's actually being met with a matching liquidity profile as well. And so for context, right? Like a bunch of these companies are doing billions and tens of billions of dollars in top line, and they're extremely profitable. They're all growing faster than what's in the public markets. I'd say within the bucket of companies I'm talking about, they're all growing 50 to 100%. Palantir is the fastest growing publicly traded software business and it's growing 30%. So the only way to access this kind of growth is in the private markets within these high growth technology businesses. And of that group, not only are they larger than many large cap businesses and growing faster, but they're also running a liquid market. And that liquid market is extending to the founders and employees as well as the investors in the LPs. So having these companies on your books, is entirely different and almost like holding a public stock, given the recency of the marks and liquidity around them. So it is almost entirely like a whole new sort of sub subset of company or whole new asset class within venture. We try to focus on cost training here and are lucky to be major shareholders in all these businesses. But it is definitely something that I think no one could have sort of forecasted, is that usually companies, they stayed private longer, but they went public when they were still burning cash, when they were still early in the growth curve. Now you're looking at companies that are not just growing fast, but they're extremely profitable. And given the liquidity around them, they kind of don't have a reason to go public. And that is a pretty interesting dynamic. And, you know, he talked about Stripe. I think there's a lot more of these companies, but it is still relatively small.

It's, I'd say 10 to 20. Yeah, I mean, I feel like Stripe was the first private company that was really getting whispered around in like the centric corn conversation. And then we just blew past it with SpaceX and open AI, both in like the 300 plus billion range, heavily liquid. What does that mean for the LP dynamic? Because if I'm paying 2 and 20 or something on holding something and maybe there's an opportunity to go direct, is there some pressure to distribute those shares earlier since they are semi-liquid? Is there anything that's changing on the LP side with these ultra late-stage, ultra mega-cap, centricorn, private companies? companies.

I mean, I think back in the early point, if you're in these companies and you're in managers in these businesses, it's a different Dynamic. I think if you're in the thousand unicorns, right, and a lot of them are still holding on to marks and, and kind of, it's unclear what's going to ultimately happen there. That creates a different Dynamic. Totally. Talk about the gap between tvpi and DPI.

Yeah.

If the Gap are in these companies that are extremely profitable, they're marking every six to 12 months because they're running tenders regularly. you know, the fundamentals, you have visibility into these companies, the pressure around liquidity is very different. In fact, they kind of want that part of the book to still keep compounding because it's where the growth is.

Yeah.

The public market is the growth is not there compared to here. And so if you're, you know, have the ability to be within a power law asset class and you're in the power law companies and they're performing this well and there's liquidity around them, we've actually seen less of a pressure, which has been kind of interesting. and when there is demand, it's very easy to facilitate it. Right. That's why I mentioned, like, you're holding the thing in your book. You can close the gap between tvpi and DPI relatively easily. And, and so I think it's creating a different decision for the LPs within these funds. And we've seen increased demand to hold, increased demand to buy. And when there is demand to sell, you're able to facilitate that really easily, as if you're holding a public stock. And once again, that's just very different than, than kind of what growth Venture.

Has experienced, you know, over the previous decade plus. Yeah, you mentioned a number of companies that are maybe public and cash flow positive, so there isn't that pressure to sell. What about those unicorns where they are burning money still? They're hanging on to those high marks. We've seen a couple of companies go out at haircuts to their all-time high valuation, but it seems like historically, when companies get out at rational valuations, they're somewhat set up for success, and they can go into kind of the next chapter of their lives and start growing. There's also this dynamic around M&A maybe being back on the menu. We saw the Wizz acquisition news. Scale just happened. There's been a few of these. WindSurfs been rumored. And so, like, the multibillion dollar acquisition seem to be happening. Lina Khan's out, but the administration isn't fully, you know, embracing M&A. It's not happening constantly.

But how do you think all of this unwinds? Yeah, I think M&A will pick up. I think some companies are at the tail end of growing back into those marks. And that just takes time. Some grew back within 12 to 24 months. Some has taken 36 to 48 months. And then there's a large swath that are going to just have to take the pain and think about the business long term and remark. And there's some that's super unclear. I don't know what percentage breakdown it is. I can probably confidently say the majority of that thousand are going to be in that ladder bucket where it's very unclear what's going to happen to them. And I don't think founders are going to want to operate zombie companies forever. So at some point they're going to have to find a home and the investors are going to have to be willing to take the pain. But look, there's a lot of companies that grew back into the marks from 2021 over varying degrees of time frame. I mean, people forget there are companies in that top 10 to 20 bucket I mentioned that are growing fast and have very efficient, profitable growth. And a bunch of them also had to go through 2021.

Right.

And, and adjusting kind of their, their views on pricing. If you can compound past it, great. If not, at some point you have to make a decision whether it's remarking the business or selling at something that maybe doesn't clear praff. And this is just a cycle, which.

Is taking a lot longer to work its way through. Do you think these bigger fund sizes and these more aggressive Revenue ramps and these more aggressive valuations getting up into to, I mean, time to unicorn for companies that are anywhere near product market fit seems like it's like three to six months now. Is that putting downward pressure on like the, the, you know, low hundred million dollar tuck-in acquisition that used to be just like such a win for everyone? It's like, yeah, they only raised 10 million. Everyone made money. The founders got, you know, liquid 10 million plus or something. Everyone, everyone's happy, and they can kind move on with whatever the next chapter is and they build something cool. It feels like maybe I'm just not hearing those because all the numbers, if it doesn't, if it doesn't, if it's not in the billions, no one's even breaking through. It's not even going viral. But it does feel like there's just, there's just less of those happening. And I'm wondering if it's more driven by, you know, just, hey, it's a lot of overhead to do post merger integration. Even if we could get it approved, there's the FTC angle. There's also just the pricing angle.

What do you think is driving like.

Early stage M&A, you know, the status of early stage M&A. I mean, so many things, right?

I mean, one, to your point, you did have an administration that was a lot harder on M&A. And so I think Big Tech, who was the traditional buyer, you know, let's.

Say pre-last, the last site.

Yeah.

I'm thinking about that VR company that Zuck bought that was like, it was VR Fitness, and it was like, you know, not a huge deal, not in the billions. And they were like, you're dominant, you're monopolizing VR Fitness. It's I don't know anyone who does VR.

Amazon and Roomba, right?

I mean, like there's a thing.

It's like the $100 million, a couple billion dollar talking from big tech definitely got put on pause.

Yeah.

One factor. Another is pricing expectations. I mean, the growth of the asset class, the growth of funds, people funding these companies a little longer to keep pushing for product market fit. And therefore, you start looking at valuations that become less attractive, right? So that, you know, one to $300 million tuck-in was based on a company at series A that did their series A at $50 million post, right? Or something like that. I mean, that world is gone, right? So now you've priced yourself out of.

An acquisition because you've raised too much money. It's a seed round now, $50 million post. Like, it's exactly. It's a watermelon seed we're calling it. You keep saying watermelon seed, but watermelon.

Seeds are smaller than any other seeds.

Like the mango seed was a big seed round.

The mango has the biggest seed.

The beyond seeds. now. Yes, yes.

It's just the whole fruit.

Yeah.

I mean, I, I think that's another, that's another Dynamic. And so, yeah, I just think a lot of this is just structural.

Sure.

Do I think it comes back? I think on the margins, but it's on the founders.

The founders have to say no to the higher valuations if they want to have that as an option. Because once, once you have 200 million, 200 million in the prep stack, it's like, yeah, you're not going to take 150 million. Aquahire offer, acquisition offer, tuck in. It's just not going to happen. Jordi, I want you to ask about Capital Wars a little bit, if you.

Had that question, but if you have something else, feel free to run to that. I mean, my issue with Capital Wars is they can have a negative effect on outcomes, but it sounds so awesome. I love that.

You just want to get involved.

Yeah, right. Capital is the best. I just, I had a more, I mean, I don't know how much there is to say, or if you have any comments there, Christian, it just feels like, yeah, in every category now, you have at least two big, fast-growing players and then a couple multi-stage investors on each side that are just sort of saying, let's ride and just putting in hundreds of millions. And I think Gurley had a front-row seat to that with Uber and Lyft and how Lyft being funded as though they were really, really competitive with Uber. Even though they were pretty material differences between the harm of Uber for years and years.

But it felt like Uber, it was worth it to fight the capital war because Uber won so hard and now trades at what, 100x lift or something like that. So I don't know, any thoughts on capital wars and where we are right now?

Yeah, obviously it's an inefficiency in the market. It'd be much better if all the venture dollars that were funding R&D and sales and marketing. We're consolidating into one company, we're after one opportunity. Do I think also it's a sign of a vibrant ecosystem as well that there is that level of competition and there is that level of entrepreneurship where founders all want to go after some opportunities and sort of have their version or strategy around it? Absolutely. So, you know, like if the business of America is business, as Calvin Coolidge said, I think it's great that there is the ability to have multiple businesses go after the same opportunity. If you look in other ecosystems, when there's one dominant player, there's not 20 startups that get funding and go compete. And so although it's extremely inefficient and as an investor perspective, you would like to see everyone just kind of back into the winner, assuming you're in the winner, at the same time, it's also a sign of a vibrant ecosystem where other sort of tech markets don't have this dynamic, right? And so, Overall, I think the biggest question, which is going to be very difficult, is when are founders willing to merge forces and accept? And I think you've seen that happen here or there in cybersecurity and other categories.

Pretty rare.

It's a tall ask.

Yeah, the X PayPal merger legend worked out really well. You roll the tape and you say, what would happen if some of the code gen companies merged It has to happen.

It 100% has to happen. And a lot of the companies pre AI, or I mean pre AI, but the latest AI cycle from 2021, like we've been talking about, they're also going to have to go through this version.

Yeah.

But it's a tall ask and I think it's just taking a lot longer.

To work its way through. The deal is already employing rippling employees. So imagine if you merge those companies, just one payroll system for all the employees.

Be super efficient.

That's true. What are you going to do? On the cap table for both companies?

What are you hoping to see out of robotics generally in the next 12 months? Feels like there's just a massive amount of excitement. Everybody's calling it the next... In some ways, it feels like it could turn into another, even though a lot of robotics applications are kind of, you could bundle them into the American dynamism category broadly, feels like it could turn into its own thing. And even today, An AI cleaning robot firm called Cardinal raises 800 million.

Wow.

I'd never heard of this company.

I think you're gonna say gecko because they raised money.

No, so this company Cardinal just raised 800 million.

Wow.

I guess SoftBank is participating. That's good. But this is just one of many examples. I'm curious if you have any sort of expectations. around the category. I'm sure you guys are in a lot of exciting companies already.

Yeah, we haven't done much in the robotics space. I think for the most part, for us, there's kind of two things. One, we like to think about things between R&D risk and engineering execution risk. And I think this still feels slightly on the R&D risk side, especially some of the humanoid robotics companies. And I think there's better people who would underwrite that. We're happy to invest once there's a bit more traction in the business as growth growth, growth stays investors. In that, I think, you know, I'm not as close to a lot of these businesses, but I do think that, you know, for an LLM to build a world model, I think it's very difficult. I know there are people that are much closer that have really good arguments on either side, and I walk away convinced believing their argument based on who the last person I talked to. And so, yeah, I think overall we're just kind of staying back and paying attention to how this plays out. I think there's a ton of excitement For a lot of reasons, I do worry that this may be like the first or second wave of autonomous vehicles where like now we're actually living and then beginning to actually play out. And, we may be right on the trend. Um, I'm a big immersive computing believer. I read every sci-fi book as a kid. Everyone read Kevin Kelly, Ray Kurzweil books, like a hundred percent we believe in robotics and want to see this, especially human robotics. Um, I wonder if it's too early. and I wonder if the main use cases now are going to look more like industrial use cases or robotics that have been around in manufacturing kind of scaling out versus the kind of human robotics like you're seeing. But we'll see. But obviously it's a huge opportunity, unclear if that's going to play out this cycle or in a future cycle. But it's a cool world if it does. I'm very much rooting for these companies.

Are you seeing a last question, are you seeing a slowdown in activity yet? It's June 16th.

Yeah. Summer's coming. San Chope's popping. Sam Ritz, you're going to be there.

Do you see rounds getting done this summer just because some of these companies are moving so quickly?

I think all of Silicon Valley grinds to a halt personally, but we'll see. What do you think, Christian?

I mean, ask me in August what's going on. June, July, there's a lot going on still. And there's a bunch of fundraises. We're busy and there'll be a lot of announcements coming out. Ask me in August.

Okay. We'll have you back on from wherever you're vacationing. Thank you so much for joining. This is fantastic.

Two more to go. Two more to go. Let us know what you're doing tomorrow. We got a lot of space for an engine. We can even put a plaque on it that's big enough. If you zoom in, that says the 137 engine. That'd be great.

Anyways, great to see you.

Thanks so much.

Thanks for coming. Talk to you soon. Cheers. Really quickly, let's tell you about Figma. You heard Christian mention it in that interview. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. And we will invite our next guest into the studio. Aaron from Lightspeed Venture Partners, lsbp.com.

Aaron, how are you? There he is.

Round of applause. Welcome to the stream. First appearance.

Hopefully first of many. First of many, I would hope. First of many. How are the chickens? you said you were you were you said you were looking after your chickens for a second before you joined. Yeah, yeah, I had to go feed.

The chickens in the midday sun. They're good. They're good. We have a dozen new ones also.

That's not a metaphor for seed stage bats.

No, no, I'm not going to feed my chickens.

No, it's not what I call my founders. No, it's a chicken coop on the property where I live.

Amazing. Do you have a high tech chicken coop? or you keep it low tech?

Pretty much all chicken coops are falling apart by nature. You just kind of keep propping them up. It's like any early stage investing. You just keep the companies alive until they produce eggs.

Yeah.

Growing up, my dad was very into building hardware software solutions for our chicken coop. So he would rig these sprinklers to fill up a bucket at the right time that pull up the gate using gravity and then it would dump out. So he should have productized it. There's now a bunch of chicken tech companies. I don't know how they're doing.

Reaction to foxes and hen houses, avoid at all costs.

Yes, scarecrows and fake owls.

Oh, fake owls, really?

Equoys.

Yeah, I'll send you a picture. This is good. Fox defenses, defense tech for chicken coops.

I love it. Yeah, for hen houses. Awesome to have you on it. Why don't before we just start all ranting together? Give a quick kind of overview of your background, what you're up to for the audience.

Yeah, well, before I sold out, I was a founder myself, so I sat on the other side. I built a company called Final about a decade ago that became, we sold it to Goldman Sachs and it became what is now the Apple Card. So I've done a lot of kind of deep fintech experience. How a majority was, I was angel investing and advising long ago in early stage fintech. and then now I'm an early stage partner on the fintech team at Lightspeed. And when I say sell, this is kind of what I want to do with my life's work is help early founders and kind of be in the weeds go zero to one.

Break up the chapters of fintech history in your mind. When you started final, I'm sure you just got a lot of, did you get a lot of no's or were you built different and people were like, yeah, I don't know about this fintech thing, but, I guess this makes sense.

I got a lot of, I got 100 nos, I think, when we were raising our Series A. It was kind of a slog. We were probably FinTech 2.0, where 1.0 was like BankSimple and like a few other of those people. Wave 2.0, Chime would be at the beginning of that. And then Robinhood, we were kind of the same cohort. Robinhood, my company final, ultimately we kind of were going after the wrong target customer segment where you just needed massive distribution, which it turns out that Apple does have, especially for the right customer base. So it made sense to partner with Goldman and sit inside there. But now we're sitting on almost wave four, right? We're doing a lot of Stablecoin stuff at Lightspeed and I spent a lot of time, we hosted a Stablecoin conference back in February. You look at all this stuff and the stuff that you want to do in FinTech now are just so much easier than it was back then. We were like a full actual credit card. including Line of Credit and took two and a half years to launch that company just because there hadn't been anyone since Wave One when it was a company called Revolution Money had launched through Steve Case, which is why they call it Revolution Capital. But that was Wave One and we had to go find people from that company to even figure out as a startup how you bring a credit card to market. Now you can do it in nine months if you.

I have a question about this. I was talking to Christian about this earlier. This idea of like, the compound startup. We've seen it in Enterprise software. Why can't someone build all of the consumer fintech products in one kind of Neo Bank? One-Stop shop. On day one, I sign up and I get a credit card, a checking account, a savings account, the ability to buy stocks and Bitcoin, a mortgage and a car loan all in one. Right now, that feels like six different startups, six different why? C companies potentially. But if each one of those can now be built in nine months, why can't they all be built in parallel in nine months?

We may see with kind of like all the AI stuff, but honestly, it's not a technology problem. Financial services products, the same building blocks that existed, I hate to say since the Medici's, but for a long time now. So we have product market fit. Consumers want access to credit, they want savings accounts, they want mortgages, they want car loans. What we don't have is product marketing fit. So it's the same reason we've seen even Robinhood with essentially infinite capital to go and acquire. It's taking them a long time to get the right product construct and aggregate all of those different products together. And this is sort of the wealth front MO when they tried to play this game. But it's just really hard to get that second, third, fourth, fifth attach rate to be high enough to make it work that you can ever make the economics work unless you're playing the bundling game. If you're building, which is what Robinhood Gold is, If you're playing Amazon Prime, which is my best customers, I want to just own their entire financial life. That's a path you can take. But the answer is just product marketing fit. It's not product market fit. Financial services fundamentally have it. We need access to it. But you just, you know, getting the product right, why would I, if I have trading at Robinhood, go get a shittier checking account from them? Not that they have that just from across the board. You just need to get the product construct right. And then you're also not going to go out and spend on CAC again, you're going to try to cross sell.

I'm just wondering about the product marketing fit, this idea that if you went to customers with this idea of this is the drop-in replacement for your Chase account, which you have your mortgage with and your car loan and your credit card with, and Chase owns a bunch of different stuff, but it's all one solution, one app for everything. Maybe they're all kind of mediocre to start with, but then they all get better. It's interesting that no one's been able to break through with that.

I think the challenge is you acquire a customer in their 20s and they just need a basic checking account, credit.

Card, and maybe a loan. And it's hard to class everything, right? Because you're like, oh, I want the best possible price for my mortgage.

And so unless you can win consistently in every single thing, you're going to get fragmented. So I think it'd be helpful to talk through a couple of recent IPOs, Chime as well as Circle. Chime obviously represents what you call FinTech 2.0 started around the time that you guys started final, finally got out well below their 2021 marks, but at least they're out. We now have proof points too that some of these businesses can do well in the public markets. At least Dave, I think if you bought Dave at the bottom a year and a half ago or something, you'd.

Be out.

Crazy multiples. It's good to see that these sort of neo-banks can exist in the public markets, but why don't we start with Chime? What was your reaction? It seems like a pretty solid outcome from my point of view.

It's great for everyone, but I think Sequoia or DST did the last round. And even then, I think they're back pretty close to in the money. Ultimately, like, Liquidity is the future. The Chime IPO is fantastic for the rest of fintech. We will see compounding amounts of capital flow down one to the early stage funds, but even every single one of their employees over the last, I think it was a 2012 company, 2011 over the last 13 years become angels in a meaningful way and just see that there's room for product innovation. They also are potential one of these aggregators. Chime now has an even bigger balance sheet and they can go in after and aggregate people and maybe it's not the same customer, for the multiple products, but they can get deeper into credit. They, in theory, could have bought a Dave or a Moneylion and get that sort of product under the hood. When you look at Chase, a $750 billion company, or banking, they have to do a lot of things to get to that market cap. So you have to do all of these disparate services that don't always necessarily have the same fundamental core systems underneath. So Chime now is an IPO. shows one that fintech actually can have a Decacorn as a public company in neo-banking. So we'll see a few others go and we can also see that we can actually, and I trust Chris and Ryan to go out and do this because they know what they're doing, but they can go and become an aggregator and kind of do more. I think it'll also just drive a few more fintechs to go public because it's just, it forces you to be a mature business, get your economies of scale right and In some sense, the Chime IPO that it's below the top tick mark is probably just more a side effect of interest rates being higher and capital finding other sources as opposed to this thing being worth whatever it's worth today. It's still up 40% from the IPO, which seems pretty successful. It's a pretty good win for the industry.

Before we dive into circle, is there How are companies like Chime messaging around AI? It feels like the obvious application is just better customer service and maybe you can use agents to serve more customers and increase margins. Is that, and I'm sure they're applying it around fraud and other use cases, but in your mind, what are the exciting ways that a scaled fintech like Chime can actually apply this stuff?

Yeah, I mean, it's where there's ever an industry speak and coming from credit cards, there are a lot of industry speak. It's where we can apply AI to arms and legs, right? Like people are this massive cost. So customer service is one thing, but really it's actually the back offices of a lot of these businesses. We've invested in a company that does dispute management and then like as a professional service plus AI. And so you are able to give what is effectively an AI powered BPO and do this for other companies. But for someone like Chime, you know, pre IPO, they announced that they, I think they call it Chime Core, like they built their own processing stack and they kind of are getting off of Galileo, which is owned by SoFi slowly. It enables kind of all of these macro tailwinds that just really give them better economies of scale as a bank to operate. Tier one is customer service. Tier two is then really like, you know, a bank is kind of like an iceberg as a consumer, you only see above the water, but there's so much below the water to make these things really work. And that's where Chime is able to actually in all of these kind of scaled neo-banks and fintech companies are able to use AI to provide better services for their customers. You can almost think of it as applied AI, right? They're not research companies, but they really can find places just to replace where they've thrown bodies at problems in the past.

That makes sense. How are late-stage private market investors as well as public market investors looking at FinTech businesses that get a large amount of their revenue from interest yield? It felt like when interest rates popped in late 2022 and have sort of stabilized, it felt like people were kind of looking around and being like, okay, a bunch of these businesses are generating a lot of revenue now, but everyone was discounting it so massively. Now, if you look at the macro, it seems like we potentially have entered into a new normal with just sort of moderate rates. Is that the way people are looking at it? Or is it still a massive discount being applied?

In the private markets, there's still a pretty big discount. Some people will give you credit, and the reason you give someone credit is just because it lets you compound the business, right? You're essentially immediately profitable post Zerp ending because you just had all these deposits, it's going to flow to you and you're going to be able to make all of this interest revenue. And the best founders are now just compounding that into other business lines and using that to just bring kind of more of what you're talking about of all of these different services. We see it a little bit more in small business than we see in consumer, just because if you're pitching a consumer on a high interest rate, they're typically a pretty like hot deposit. They're going to move around. and it's just not the best person to build against. Whereas a business, you're actually giving services and so you're able to charge them across the board. But yeah, so there's a pretty big discount on it, but you know, it's not back to Zerp discount, which is I think what everyone was expecting initially. It's more akin to 2 to 3 point rate wherever the two year T is, you know, it feels about right just from where we're expecting the market.

To come back to. That makes sense. What was your reaction to Circle's IPO? We had Jeremy, the CEO on the show, which was great. big, you know, bold vision. I think they've executed very, very well. And at the same time, it was interesting to see the market reaction to Stables versus how people initially reacted to the S1, which many people looked at it and said, this company isn't even actually shouldn't actually go out. Like they should just get acquired by Coinbase. And clearly there was an exceptional amount of demand, but I'm curious how you saw, you kind of looked at the business pre and then post IPO.

Yeah, I mean, pre-IPO is the same kind of look, like all the revenue goes to Coinbase. And I know a bunch of Circle people, I know Jeremy, he actually spoke at our conference and have been able to get closer to them. But it's one of those that, you know, if you think about the macro trend of stablecoins, and this isn't Circle specific, but, you know, the biggest export in the US economy is the US dollar.

Post-Brexit would... Let's give it up for the US dollar.

Yeah, post-Brexit essentially like we've tried to dollarize the world and make everything trade in it. Circle IPO is just showing that there's more demand for that, right? There's one retail demand for kind of like a normal crypto company in the public markets, but two is if you think about where the world might go, where the dollar might just be, it's already hegemonic, but it becomes the only meaningful currency, Circle or Tether is going to be one of those two people who plays that role. It's possible we see a new upstart. We're playing around with a bunch of ideas around stablecoins and how they may exist. Maybe we'll get a stablecoin per country, not necessarily CBDC, but maybe we also dollarize every country. We're seeing a lot of ideas come through right now. from the Circle IPO just showed there's just a ton of demand. I know Jeremy and team are incredibly excited.

What are every single person that is at a legacy financial institution or a big bank is looking at the Circle IPO and, you know, probably excited and a little bit like we should do this ourselves, starting to think about, you know, should we have our own stable coin, etc. I can think of some reasons why they have more of a moat than the average person just kind of analyzing the business for the first time, I think, right? They have liquidity, deep partnerships, they have a regulatory sort of arm that's now getting involved in countries all over the world. They have developer tooling that's really powerful. So they've done quite a lot to build out their sort of long-term edge, but I'm curious why you think Circle could potentially continue to durably accrue value, even though other people will naturally start to compete with them.

Yeah, I mean, look, there was a story about Walmart and Amazon trying to launch a stablecoin. The joke I've made to friends is that essentially just rhymes with coal's cash. Nobody wants a merchant-based stablecoin. maybe from the banks, they'll build a consortium, but we've seen historically those kind of fail.

The reason circles- But did Zelle fail or?

Well, Zelle is EWS, which sells a bunch of services, but ultimately, like consumer NPS on Zelle cannot be high because it's so frothy and so just painful to use as a kind of integration point. No, I'm talking, man, it used to be called SoftPay. At one point, it was called ISIS.

It was this bank consortium of PayBy, like PayBy Bank.

I kid you not.

Crazy name for a bank consortium.

They had to rebrand when ISIS chose the same name as them.

Brutal.

And then JPM bought them to take them out of the market so that nobody could really see how bad it was. So a bank consortium with stablecoin makes sense. There's a bunch of people, Greg Kidd, who is one of the early angels into Twitter Square, Ripple, Coinbase, is working on something called USDB. We're going to see a lot of these things play out. Circle just has this, in financial services scale is what makes you win a lot of the times or it gives you a real network effect. Circle is going to spend a lot of this money trying to build sort of a network like Visa MasterCard is kind of the underlying bet where they can get merchants on one side and get consumers on the other, whether or not it's for supplier payments and B2B stuff or B2C payments. is a little unclear. And I'm sure, you know, if I were them, I'd be throwing everything against the wall to make it stick. They had a lot of announcements pre IPO in pretty much all of April and early May, which seemed like stuff that they really been working on for a while and just weren't sure kind of due to the Trump tariffs, if they'd be able to go out if the market would reopen. They got that stuff out there. It's a very strong narrative of what they can do into the future. It just now they have to go and execute on it. And that's one of the things, they're fighting an uphill battle of network effect in traditional financial services.

How are you thinking about stable coins as an investment category? I'm sure this is how you're spending probably 50% of your time.

Is now the time to get in? It seems like there's a public company.

I think in many ways the IPO, no, I'm not saying investing in the next stable coin issuer. I'm talking about the actual application. Consumer applications, B2B applications. The infrastructure's here. To me, it's I can imagine a massive wave of companies being funded that try to ride the stablecoin wave, but then ultimately end up getting just surelocked by circles and stripes and things like that. But how do you think about it?

Yeah, I mean, so I'm an early stage investor for the most part. I bet on people and then I'm looking for companies and founders. fall in love with and then want to figure out how to deploy capital into them. Stablecoins is this current trend. Every company is now in some sense a stablecoin company if it makes sense for their business, just like every company is an AI company. We figure out a few archetypes of founders, and I was joking with one of my founder friends of like, we'll probably coin it as Money 3.0 founders, where they're very serious about how you handle a business that actually touches money. But on the other side of it, they're taking all the efficiencies that come with crypto. And when you combine the two, you end up in a world which is stablecoins. So we've been able to back about two companies right now in the last few months doing that. We've seen a lot of the companies kind of in the middle of the sandwich, which is like you have issuance, you have consumer distribution in the middle. You have a lot of orchestration, you have a lot of like actual bill pay and stuff like that. We've sat more on the issuance side and core infrastructure side. we've looked a lot at the kind of like later stage distribution side and just I've realized that in the middle they're going to get squeezed. The issuers like Circle are going to have to move up market and verticalize or the distribution plays where they control all the value from the consumer and can build a better product. They're going to have to move down market and kind of eat down the stack or dual source or triple source their vendors so that they can at the end of the day squeeze them on margin, which is Honestly, from a distribution perspective, the traditional fintech play. It's what Cash App, it's what Chime has done. You put as many vendors behind you as possible that do the same thing, and then when you go to rebid the contract, you just squeeze them. So we've made a few bets in the space. And really when we're seeing demand on the distribution side, we're seeing it honestly outside the US. I personally haven't figured out a use case where stablecoins reduce the friction that you see in the US banking system. But if I'm not in America and I want access to the US dollar, it's the fastest way for me to get access to the US dollar and something that looks like a US bank account. It also helps for people who are, you know, operation.

What about buying a car on the weekend?

You can still do that. There are services that do that. FedWire is actually, I believe, seven day settlement now. So with the right bank, you can even do that. But also like do you actually have a circle?

What?

FedWire Marsh for Stable coins, like, yeah, I mean, no, I mean, there's a bunch of other, there's so many other use cases. I mean, streaming, you know, I mean.

There'S, it's, the thing is, like, if you think how Visa and MasterCard work, they're the biggest factoring networks in the world. They're, they're taking risk, they're adjudicating risk for a bank when a consumer swipes. And so what is the risk that Visa MasterCard and Amex Discover take? It's single digit, maybe dozen, like 12 basis points. the rest then interchange flows to the bank. It flows to the issuer who's actually taking the real risk. And so if stablecoins and Visa, Mastercard are both taking this very seriously, if stablecoins start kind of eating their lunch, we're going into a world where they're just going to cut rates and we're going to get a much more, I hate to say, efficient. We're going to get a little less lucrative card issuing and kind of network based world there for the big banks where Chase can no longer offer you, Capital One can't offer you high high rewards because there's no margin in it for them.

Interesting.

So will we see protests in the streets from points maxers, just saying like, we don't want efficiency, we do not want efficiency in the financial system. We want to keep rewards high.

Really upset.

Well, they'll just hire the lobbyists finally, right? Like crypto got around to hiring lobbyists, the points guys will...

Points guys will. What about unexpected beneficiaries? Oh, sorry, I'll let you say.

The banks also want higher energy. change. So they're actually fighting this well. It's why they're trying to put out stable coins. It's going to get messy. Like, we're going to over invest in the space like we do in everything in Venture. And then at the end of the day, a few winners will emerge. Circle has been around for so long that, like, it clearly makes sense. They got big, they aggregated a lot.

Of value, and now we're going to see a lot of people come for their, for that opportunity as well. What about unexpected beneficiaries of stable coins? I've heard that potentially some payroll companies that maybe hold on to tax withholding. They might be able to earn higher yield because they're able to actually hold the treasuries themselves. Do stablecoins unlock any sort of float dynamics and shift it from a bank making an interest rate return on float that they're holding versus the company can now do it because of stable coins? Are there any kind of unlocks like that that might be happening?

If I live in, I hate to say, Venezuela, Colombia, but if I live in, so for what your use case, not for a sophisticated business, you should be having a serious conversation with your bank to figure out how you earn that float. Small scale, it may get you better economics, but not going to move the needle economics, right? There's only so much juice to squeeze from that orange. Really, yeah, the side effect is like, I no longer have to trust my government as an international human, right? Like I can move my savings into the US dollar, which right now is in theory the least volatile currency. But from like US companies, yeah, there's a little bit of friction reduction, it lubricates the system a little, but at any meaningful scale, you're going to take most of that yield anyway because you're going to go back to your bank partner where you, if I'm a payroll company, I have a direct relationship with some bank somewhere. and I'm going to take some of that yield. The other thing I should say is stable coins are in theory two things. One is that's the actually underlying treasury, which actually holds a risk asset. It's a US usually it's a T bill of some sort, but the other side of it is a payment vehicle and payment vehicles traditionally are not risk assets. You send them and the money is good. And so it's one of those like the benefit that we see is really on the payment side, on the yielding side, maybe we will get securitized CD bill, like T bills and T bonds and like, we'll get securitized CDs and like, somebody will actually have direct access to treasury to get these things ad hoc. But it's a bit out because there's just so much demand on the payment side of this industry. And it's really hard for all of us to grasp truly how big payments are. Like, that's why stable coins are taking off. It's giving people access to the US banking system in such large volumes that they otherwise wouldn't. been able to.

What about geopolitical risk? I imagine that if I'm a dictator in another country and I'm watching all my citizens go off of my currency that I control, I would want to ban that. Is that a major risk? Are we beyond those discussions at this point?

You can ban the on-ramps, off-ramps. You can ban your ability for your citizens to get into a stablecoin directly, but not indirectly through crypto. I can go buy Bitcoin and then swap that into USDC. Yeah, that's the kind of the running joke between a few of my friends on the back channel of like, who's going to who's going to be the first startup to just aggressively essentially become an arm of the CIA and new USA ID and dollarized countries to promote US hegemony. It's like half a joke. It also is just going to naturally happen. If I don't have to worry about the volatility of my currency and I'm a human who's not living paycheck to paycheck, so I actually have savings, why would I want my local currency if I'm not going to actually spend that money and I actually want to be able to save for the long term. And there is no ability for you to capture that money because it's my private keys. So there's a ton of value there. There is some geopolitical risk, but at the end of the day, it's one of those that I think the world's going to have to move through it, not past it. Yeah, so you're not worried about a.

Great firewall for all the on-ramps and off-ramps. And then, I mean, if you make it illegal that someone's discovered with stablecoins, you're holding US NSDC and now you go to jail. That is a serious, serious headwind towards stablecoin adoption in a dictatorship, I imagine.

Yeah, it's a question for maybe unfriendly countries to the US, but if you're semi-friendly, do you want to actually do that?

That is crazy.

Especially when the Trump family is so heavily involved with digital assets and such big believers.

I mean, the joke I made last week was like, why even issue stable coins against treasury bills? We might as well issue it against the US military. So like if you're a friend of the US, you're not gonna really cut us off.

Yeah.

Shoot against. Well, that may be why is Coinbase, you know, sponsor the Army Parade. Maybe.

Yeah.

Maybe they're cookin'. Maybe they're cookin'.

Mill coin. It's coming soon.

Mill coin. Any other kind of events in sort of broader FinTech, stablecoin world that are coming down the pipeline, catalysts, IPOs, catalysts that you're kind of looking out for? Or is it summer break and we.

Can just all check back in the fall?

Isn't there a stablecoin bill going through? Yeah, the Genius Act, they're going to negotiate it. I try not to play politics at all. It's just not where I have the expertise. I think they'll actually, I don't think we'll have a summer break. I think the IPO window's open. and this is not knowing anything.

That's great to hear. Everyone thought they could get public in.

April and then that blew up and then May kind of like we reopened the window. If I was trying to go public, I'm going to try to sneak it through until something geopolitical closes the window again, which is like kind of the mantra right now. So I think the bankers on Wall Street are not going to get the summer off. The Hamptons will be empty. Time to grind.

That's why the Hamptons are empty.

It's so funny, you know, there's been like these articles like Hampton Rental's rentals are down 30% this year.

IPO windows open. IPO windows open. Stay on Wall Street. You can't leave Manhattan while the windows open.

Would be insane. Anyway, thank you so much for stopping by.

This was great, Aaron. I really enjoyed it. We'd love to have you back on again soon. Thanks, thanks guys.

If you are trying to scoop up.

One of those Hampton homes, head over to Wander. Find your happy place. Find your happy place. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel great amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning in 24 Seven Concierge Service. It's a vacation home, but better. Folks, our next guest is from Standard and Poor's, S&P, Joseph Cass coming in the studio. Very excited to talk to him. He has talked to some of the most impactful financiers, one notch away from us. We talk about a lot of technology. We talk to some business folks. He has experience talking to Ken Griffin, Howard Marks, Ray Dalio, has a bunch of interesting stories to share with us. I'm excited to pick his brain. Welcome to the show. Joseph, how you doing?

Hey, what's going on? John, Jordy, great to see you guys. Thanks for having me. All good.

How's things on your end in LA? It's fantastic.

It's late for you.

The crazy protests in the UK.

But it's still light. So it's not good. Well, we appreciate you staying up late to hop on the show. Why don't you kick us off with a little bit of introduction on yourself? And I'd love to just kind of understand how S&P is structured how it's working these days, like the core business lines, because it's such a, such an institution.

Yeah.

Yeah, sure. It's a really, it's a huge business. So why work in the ratings division?

Yeah.

So you have a number of different divisions, including the indices. So kind of like the S P 500. You have Market intelligence, which provides kind of the data and analytics platform. You have Mobility, which owns a bunch of businesses, one of whom is Carfax. There's a number of different divisions in the company. I'm trying to remember if I've got orders in there, but it comes together to make S&P global. So I work in the ratings division, which assigns the ratings, the kind of triple A's or the double B's or the C's.

Yeah, we get a hold of your feet of the fire because S&P downgraded America and I'm hearing an accent. So this seems like it's maybe some.

Political issue going on. Well, I can correct you there.

It was actually Moody's. Yeah, it was Moody's S&P. Thank you.

The S&P did downgrade the US, but I think it was about, I want to say it was about over 10 years ago.

Over 10 years ago.

Come down to the same level that we were.

Okay, well, yeah, we'll take it up with Moody's. Anyway, I'd love to go through some of the folks that you've interviewed and hear some stories. Why don't we kick it off with Ken Griffin? Break down his career, your experience chatting with him, and what you learned from them.

Yeah, sure.

So I can kind of give a quick overview as to, like, why I'm meeting these guys, like, why I'm in a situation where I can meet them. So essentially, my role at s p in the ratings division is to engage with the buy side, the big buy side investors. So after about six months, and I've been doing this previously at other roles, I felt like I need, like, a platform to essentially kind of make it easier for me to do this with these senior guys, because trying to get, as you guys know, trying to get meeting with these senior guys from the finance side. it can be tricky.

Yeah.

Unless you've got something very hot for them. So I created this podcast and just said, listen, we're going to have a chat. It's going to be like half an hour. We're going to talk about you. We're going to have a guest from s p, and we're going to kind of give you kind of one question to you, one to the s p person, and see how it goes. And that was like five years ago. So now it's kind of grown slowly. I mean, I don't do many. I do, like, one a month, so it's not as prolific as you guys doing four hours a day, but it's. It's grown slowly over the years. So now we can, as you said, we can meet those type of guys. Um, so to answer your question, and just a quick plug, the podcast is called Leaders. If you want to look it up, it's called Leaders.

Go listen.

Um, but in terms of Ken Griffin, so we, I am, I mean, the actual podcast came about from, I create a LinkedIn post, like an old story about Ken. which I don't think many people knew, which was this was like 15 years ago. One of his assistants actually had terminal cancer and he funded her treatment for two years secretly, kind of without telling anyone. And she got into remission, you know, it was kind of a miraculous turnaround. And then after that, he funded her to go to Hawaii with her family for like a two-week holiday and didn't tell anyone about it. and I thought that was quite a cool story. So I found out about this through a tiny, in one of the Chicago newspapers, an old PDF from 2009, and wrote it up on LinkedIn as just a story post, which sometimes I do. And then I said, I just sent it to Ken saying, listen, just thought this thing was really cool that you did this lady. And then he replied back and I was like, oh wow, he replied. So I said, do you want to do a podcast? and he's like, yeah, no problem. So that was like six months later. And last month we recorded in New York. And I'm sure, like, listeners know who Ken Griffin is, but obviously he's the, he's the CEO and founder of Citadel. So you've got Citadel, the hedge fund, which is this enormous hedge fund, but you've also got Citadel Securities, which is the market maker, which is, I think it's probably, I think it probably is the largest market maker in the world. So he's a really, he obviously a very smart guy. So we interviewed him in person last month and he is like, he's just as you would expect for someone who is that successful in their life. He's very good at answering questions, very succinct, can give you kind of a one minute answer to anything and he kind of sums everything up in like a really crisp way. And he's also very like, he's very personable. So he came out the lift, so I'm waiting for him at the lift and he comes out the lift and he has like a group, like an entourage around him and I can see someone telling him something, like just whispering him something quickly and I'm like, okay, I wonder what's kind of being said and then in my head I'm like, oh, they're telling him who I am probably. They're probably saying, oh, this is Joe, he's from S&P, you're gonna do a podcast right now. And he comes up to me and he's like, very strong handshake, looks me direct in the eye and he's like, I am so thankful that you invited me. Thank you so much. And I was like, you know, it's such a crazy, you know, to me, he's literally, you know, I'm just like another person for him, but he probably has this kind of intense kind of state which he's in, which is just amazing to witness. And he has his aura around him. And I don't want to use the kind of Rick James analogy, but he does have this, like, aura around him where he's like, you can feel him in the room and you can feel his expectations of his team and of you, like of me as an interviewer, I was like, okay, you're sitting up straight, you're making sure you have everything down to a T. So you can see why beyond the kind of obvious fundamentals of Citidel, you can see how that energy probably permeates through the whole company just through his kind of vision.

Do you notice any difference between the Ken Griffin archetype and some of the more behind-the-scenes financiers? I imagine it's very hard to get someone from Jane Street on the show because they seem to be quieter and yet Jane Street does do technical talks, but you don't hear from the founders that often. Do you understand what dynamic is going on there? Does Ken just view media differently or is there something structural going on with his business that it makes sense for him to have more of a public presence than a pure high frequency trading, focused firm that maybe doesn't have to interface with... I mean, they still have to recruit, but maybe they just have a different PR strategy.

Yeah, it's interesting. I think, I mean, my sense is that it's quite Ken-led. Ken has lots of things to say, and he's super, super smart, and he's not afraid of saying them. So I definitely got that Vibe from him. But, you know, there's kind of. No, no holds bars. He's not. He's not just saying something because he thinks he should say it. He's honestly giving you his opinion of something. And also, I mean, I. I don't know many guys at Jane Street, and I. I haven't actually reached out to those guys, probably because I thought it would be a no. because they're so kind of closed.

They do seem closed, but maybe you could break through.

Sometimes these guys, they're closed, they're closed, they're closed until they're not. So until they need to not be closed and they need to have a voice. So it's kind of a long game, I guess.

Switching gears a little bit, I'm curious, your job, you know, on the rating side of S&P, how much more challenging it gets when we're in this sort of critical macro environment and things are kind of unfolding real time that impacts businesses, banks, things like that. How do you guys approach situations like we've had even in the last week with Israel and Iran and other situations like it?

Yeah, it's a good question. So obviously my role being on the kind of investor engagement investor relationship side. We hear a lot, you know, in terms of these kind of large, huge events. And obviously we've had the things in the past week, but we've also had the tariffs. So it promotes kind of a huge spike in inbound for us. And we're very keen to be kind of outbound and like forward-facing transparent, Etc. But there's no doubt that those kind of occasions, everyone wants to speak to us. I know for good reason. But also I think, you know, so.

The big institutions reach out to you guys and ask you what, what else are you seeing broadly? Is that, is that how.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. So it's kind of what you guys seeing at kind of a macro level. What do, what does kind of the X situation that's happening right now? How could that impact this group of ratings? It could be kind of Financial Services or it could be large corporates. and they drill down to kind of one sector. So I, you know, could have someone calling us from one of the largest buy side firms saying, listen, I work on autos, strictly autos kind of portfolio. How will this be, how will the tariffs impact my portfolio, the ratings, what's your view just to kind of sambol with us? And we have like pretty much every week, you know, London, New York, Hong Kong, we have these investor roundtables. where we engage with these kind of small communities. We speak to them, we have our analysts speak, and they can kind of, you know, sandboard their ideas, and we can go back and forth.

Very cool. I wanted to move on to some other folks you've chatted with. I want to hear the story of Ray Dalio, obviously the founder of Bridgewater. He feels like someone who is maybe a little bit behind the scenes for a while building the fund, and then principles that it was originally a PDF that just kind of like found its way onto the internet. I think they might have published it. Then eventually it turned into a book, a book tour, banger, viral videos, podcast appearances. But what was your experience like with Ray Dalio?

Yeah, it was fascinating. It was totally fascinating. So we had Ray on the show in kind of, I think it was 2012, 2022, I think it was. So kind of two and a half years ago now. just coming out of the pandemic. And like, we have everyone booked for like 45 minutes. And I think kind of, 'cause usually it goes on for about half an hour and we want some just over on time in case stuff goes wrong. And Ray spoke for, you know, it was coming up to two hours to the point. So he was very generous with his time. He had lots of things to say. And like, he has lots of things to say on lots of different topics. And he's very good at kind of, Connecting the dots, like making links. So for example, when I was speaking to him, I kind of asked some crazy questions, some off the wall questions to try and make it interesting. So I was talking about my first job at McDonald's. So I used to work on the first window of the drive through and like take the order for people in McDonald's here in my hometown. And Ray was like, oh, it's so funny you say that because I set up the hedging strategy for the McNugget. so the only reason the McNugget is on the menu is because I set up this trading strategy for McDonald's and the supplier. So, like, he's, he's very good. He's very, he's very cool guy, but he's very, like, you know, he's very.

Personable and so good at, like, linking A to B.

That's, that's hilarious.

You always got to be hedging your McNuggets, you know?

Yeah.

Yeah. I've heard about that. I mean, the entire supply chain. And of course, McDonald's doesn't want, you know, exposure to all that. And there's, like, that famous example of like Southwest successfully hedged gasoline prices for a while. And that was a massive beneficiary of that for a long time. These like small little kind of minute financial operations downstream, like the CFO is just kind of off doing something can have like a massive impact on the trajectory of the business when they pull it off. Talk to me about Ryan Serhant. He feels like someone who is potentially underrated as a business leader, business thinker. People know him as a reality TV star, essentially, and yet he's built this massive media business. You're obviously in the media industry. We are as well. What did you learn from him? What's the experience been like working with him and talking to him?

Yeah, and he's, yeah, my personal opinion here, not S&P's. He's a very, you know, he's someone to look out to, especially in this space. So, he, you know, as you say, he started off in reality TV. which, you know, sometimes, you know, especially people in the UK, they kind of look down their nose at those type of people. But when he started to kind of how he leveraged his appearance, but also his media, like his content is, it's enormous. I think across all platforms, it's something like seven or eight million. He has, like, multiple YouTube accounts. He has Instagram, he has Tick Tock, all the kind of usual suspects. He has LinkedIn and he has this content, content to Commerce model. whereby I met him when I was in New York just to talk about this just randomly. And I said, Listen, I'm in New York. Do you want to talk about this? He was like, Yep. And so we just met up and spoke about this very thing, whereby he has like different, his client base could be, you know, super, super high net worth. Or it could be kind of someone looking for like a $1 million apartment in New York. Or it could be potentially the child of the client. so that's a big one. So he's very smartly said, listen, I just want to spread the board with this. So we've got the YouTube for the kind of, like, Millennials, we've got Tick Tock for the younger guys.

So if.

And, yeah, I said, listen, what does this mean, like, in terms of, like, Revenue, basically? And he said, well, we sold this, like, I can't remember how many million, but it was like, it's very expensive property off the back of one of the children seeing a Tick Tock. so crazy. So they said, look at this thing. Look at this thing. This guy's selling in New York. They showed it to the mom and dad. Mom and dad said, that's great. Let's go and have a look at. And, you know, and then it sold. So, like, he's, he's definitely got, like, a very interesting model, which, to be honest, I think, again, me personally speaking at S P, lots of other kind of Industries, sectors could, could kind of adopt this model.

I don't know why they're not. It's, it's, it's kind of been proven now. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, I've heard that story before. And I've heard that he has something like 60 to 80 people working just on content in his organization to really pipeline everything out across all the different platforms. And he's cast a very wide net, but he's built a fantastic business around it.

So when I was there-- oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, I had a totally unrelated question that I can cap it off with.

Please cap it off.

I wanted to get your read since you talk to a lot of these buy side institutions, how are people thinking about ESG today? Is it still, are they, you know, how do they feel on a personal level and then what do their actions look like at on an investment level?

Yeah, I think, I mean, on a personal level, it's kind of tricky to answer that one because I can probably answer on like professionally what they're telling us. and on institutional basis. So in kind of 21-22 the ESG kind of, it was just enormous. It was, we couldn't have a conversation with an investor about anything without them mentioning ESG in some way, you know, and how does this link to ESG and or the S or how does this, the G factor into this stuff? So, whereas now, especially kind of in the past, I don't know, six months to a year, maybe a bit longer around that time. It's, I'd say it's definitely a part of their kind of investment thesis, but they're not necessarily pushing it to the front. So I don't think that they've kind of, you know, totally dropped this idea. I definitely don't think that's the case because we still get lots of inquiries. We have lots of conversations around sustainability. Um, not so much. I mean, the brand of ESG seemed to have kind of died, but sustainability is is growing in the amount of kind of inbound and outbound we're having, the products we're seeing in the market. There's lots of, I'd say it's definitely not kind of just been dropped, which I think may be the perception by some people. Totally.

Yeah, that's fantastic. Well, thank you so much for stopping by. This was a great conversation. We'd love to have you back. And we will talk to you soon. Enjoy the evening.

Thank you so much for staying on with us.

Thanks so much, man.

Cheers, guys.

Cheers.

Well, let's go back to the timeline and run through some posts. We mentioned it earlier, but DHH raced in the 24 hours of Le Mans. Basecamp Mobile.

Basecamp Mobile.

Number 22 is ready. Let's go. So congratulations to him. He's driven it multiple times now.

Wait, we have to try to figure out how he actually did.

You work on that. I will stay in automotive world. Nick Cruz Patane says hailing a Tesla robo taxi directly from the X app would change the game. There are approximately 600 million active users per month on X. Interesting. There's already a lot of buttons in the X panel. Grok, you got chat. There's a signal competitor now. It's communities. I always wonder about how much you can add, how much you can bloat before you need a separate app.

I already slapped some AI in there. Why not slap some robo taxis in there? there too, John. I got the results pulled up. DHH says we had the pace for a podium, but power stealing failure and a missed pit stop meant P7 still the greatest race in the world.

That's amazing.

It's so funny because you don't think of Base Camp as like a super active major advertiser.

No.

Like they like to do this, to have the product do the talking.

Yeah.

But it looks fantastic on some race gear. Congratulations. P7. The car looks fantastic as well. So I'll have to have him on the show to break it all down.

Totally. Mike Neup had some interesting reporting from TechCrunch. Waymo rides are costing more than Uber and Lyft, and people are paying anyway. He says, true for most automation scenarios, given machine intelligence on par with human capability for a task, machines offer lower variability and will be preferred even commanding a premium on price.

Big call.

Yeah, this is what Chris Spike was talking about. The idea of like, if you are a gating function to getting the thing that the person wants and you're not in that leisure category, the robot will be preferred. But yeah, it makes sense. Have you ridden in Waymo yet? I don't think so, right?

I have not.

I've taken one ride in SF. It was pretty nice.

We should call one today, take it around the block.

I don't think they're in LA right now. I think they actually left. I don't know, we'll have to figure it out. But I think they might have actually.

Shut it down for a little bit.

Long march back to San Francisco.

I don't think so. We got another post here from Laser Boat 999. Love it. Coke tastes like tapping into your ancient ancestral petroleum reserves while Sprite tastes like being connected to a big beautiful energy grid.

1.4 million views. I love it. And then Celsius, Daybreak over the computer world. A real grasp of the English language. Fantastic. People are really enjoying posting about Diet Coke and Coca-Cola and all the sodas right now. The Diet Coke.

They've never been better. They've never been better.

Yeah.

They're peaking. Yeah, they're peaking. They're peaking. And the organic marketing is working. I love it. In an era, you'd have been Homer with that. that is spectacular. I completely agree. What a fantastic post.

The big, beautiful energy grid. Anyway, we have a post here from Circe. If I see a guy in a suit at the airport, I just assume he works for Deloitte.

Or is he a business podcast.

Or is he a technology businessman?

Who knows?

It could be an international businessman. You just don't see international businessmen flying in suits. anymore. There's almost no suits in business class.

Not yet.

The level of disrespect people have for the airport wearing joggers. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

If you want the pilots to take. What are you running from?

Yeah.

If you want pilots to take the safety of your plane seriously, maybe you should take.

Yeah.

Imagine.

Imagine getting on a plane and the pilots wearing athleisure.

Yeah. Not gonna happen.

I am cooked.

Not gonna happen.

I am cooked.

Yeah.

You should be thrown out.

I wanted to shout this out. The Cadillac F1 team just posted over 60 jobs. So if you are wanting to work for, you know, an American, a true American luxury brand, Cadillac, or get involved with F1, head on over there. I'm excited for them to hit the ground.

They really are hiring in every department. They have like finance operations people and all sorts stuff. Get into Cadillac F1, get them on ramp.

Huge alpha. Huge alpha there.

Chess.com says between June 2020 and December 2022, accounts on the site jumped from 35 million to 100 million. I joined during that time. It had taken 14 years to bring in those first 35 million. Pretty historic run for Chess.com. chess.com the business is doing great privately owned founded in 2005 makes most of its money from subscribers who pay $5 to $15 a month for features such as unlimited play and postmatch analysis arr it's over $100 million so congrats to the chess.com team we haven't hit the gong today we got to hit it.

For chess hit it for them hit it for them we should also hit the gong for Eli Lilly because someone at Novo Nordisk failed to pay a $450 maintenance fee, which would have kept its patent on Ozempic at force for another two years.

This is such a crazy story. That's like, what, like $50 billion of value or something like that for $450?

Just absolutely brutal.

Maintenance fee. What a mistake.

Good reminder. It is all the people with IP out there. Go pay those maintenance fees.

Yeah, yeah. This is a use for AI agents just constantly trolling for what fees am I not paying? Re every email and box, chheck in with all of the different patent databases and make sure that we're up to date on our maintenance fees, because four hundred and fifty dollars costing you billions is insane to me. U, anyway, there's got to hit you.

Size Kg, size cong, gecko, gecko. You you wanta hit it. Robotics has raised one raised a hundred and twenty five million at one point two five robots and AI software to inspect and improve important infrastructure like power plants, factories, and military systems.

I think Trey Stevens is on the board. It's very, very cool. It's like these robots- oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So if you have massive industrial equipment, like a massive grain silo or oil and gas silo that's holding a bunch of a refinery, the robot will crawl up and down and scan and take images and understand oh, there's a structural weakness here, there's a crack here, the paint needs a touch up here, all of those different problems. And it's, yeah, it's just cool because it's like, they are very much a scaled business. Like they really do make these robots. They're not humanoids. They're highly specialized. So crazy.

They crawl around buildings.

Very, very cool.

Wild.

Chad Hurley, the founder of YouTube, says, honestly, this means more to me than any acquisition he sold. YouTube to Google. But there's a travel vlogger who met a young Iranian boy who basically speaks perfect English all because he watches YouTube.

I watched this video. The kid has a better grasp of the English language than most adults I know. He's very, very well spoken.

Yeah.

Bullish for English. Honestly, this was probably the biggest news of the last week. This is a stay in the YouTube world. Sulik had a back workout with Arnold. Okay. Yeah, so I mean, broke the internet. One of the more important stories.

4 million subs. Absolutely crushed it. Only two years ago or three years ago. And credit to Zach Pogreb, he says Sam Sullick is a great example of where content is going. Back in 2023, August 20th, he's like, this guy's on to something. He's the future. And then of course he got his IFBB Pro Card on an absolute tear and has put out a ton of great content. value of daily posting for sure. Just 1% better. The vlogs get better. Daily poster. If he was doing it weekly, it'd be much harder. Anyway, there was this odd news about the New York Times reporting that Chachi B. Talks a guy into insanity followed by suicide by cop. A human being is dead in passing. This falsifies the alignment by default. Cope. Whatever's really inside Chachi B. T. It knew enough about humans to do this. And so, Justine Moore says, it's ridiculous to say ChatGPT talked a guy into insanity when he had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and bipolar before he started using ChatGPT. This is a tragic story, but the man was clearly mentally ill. Messaging with a chatbot didn't kill him. Very, very sad story. But yeah, I mean, obviously this is not the responsibility of the AI, but it is an opportunity for ChatGPT to potentially step in and help treat someone, and we've already we've seen promising results in therapy. And of course there will be an interesting dynamic about when does it call the cops on you if you are planning something? If it detects that you are insane, what should it do with that information? Because there's a lot of privacy and individual rights that are potentially infringed upon, but at the same time could have had a much, much better outcome here. But very, very, very rough story. Anyway, let's move back to Jane Street. We talked about them earlier. Instead of the non-competes, Jane Street decides to make its own programming language so far from anything mainstream that you can't get a job anywhere else. Not entirely true, Bubble Boy. If you know O'Caml, you can probably write Python.

But yes, well, they're branching it.

Is the thing. Yes, they're creating their own. But O'Caml was already basically entirely maintained by Jane Street. Ron Minsky has the main YouTube video about O'Caml. like low-level machine language. It's almost at like assembly level. Very, very performant, very fast. And Jane Street, I think, has been the main contributor to that programming language.

For years, but now they are breaking-.

Camels, llamas, dogs, pigs, they're having a moment. They're having a moment. O'Caml has been around for 12 years, something like that. Ron Minsky, he put out this YouTube video, I actually watched it back in the day, it was great. He's an absolute beast. It's one of the few pieces of Jane Street content that's out there or was. It was like this interesting lens into the way Jane Street builds their high frequency trading algorithms. They need to be extremely performant, extremely accelerated. And so they now have their own programming language. So congrats to the Jane Street team.

We have a post from GoDini probably botching it. I can't articulate exactly why, but this generation of BTC founders feels like the tech equivalent of SoundCloud rappers.

I wonder who they're talking about.

Yeah, somebody else was posting that this feels like the generation of founders raised on YouTube.

Yeah.

Which makes sense.

I mean, they are extremely good at viral content. Is that entirely new? I think so. There's been other people that, I mean, consumer founders haven't understood viral growth loops for a long time. The Airbnb guys were doing stunts like the political serials. That was very much like a stunt, but it was fun. Obviously, some of the early Mark Zuckerberg experiments at Harvard were very designed to go viral.

Designed to go viral or designed to scale rapidly? There's this thing that I'm seeing in the timeline of founders consistently trying to do things that that piss people off or are just trying to be attention grabbing without necessarily using it to drive any type of business results.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, you can get a lot of downloads and attention just by rage baiting the timeline, but that- Low quality. Yeah, it just doesn't scale infinitely. Eventually, you just figure out that getting a million views is doable every week, but It's just a million views. It's not something that's truly going to scale endlessly, like a performance marketing playbook or a true viral growth loop. You compare it to the viral growth engine at Dropbox, where I give you storage, you come on, I get storage, and there's this loop or referring people to Gmail, the classic viral loops that continue to grow. even among people that don't need to necessarily see your viral rage bait. So there's always a question about like, like once you have that attention, you have to shift into something that's more durable and more scalable.

Totally.

But I don't know, maybe they'll take the lesson. The last the last viral rage bait didn't really go as well, but we'll see. We'll see.

Well, we have a post here from Christo Vasilev Tyler Cowen called it. Here's a screenshot from Tyler Cowen's blog.

He says, this was March 14th, only three months ago.

Wow. When will Israel attack Iranian nuclear facilities? He says, it seems this ought to happen soon, though it is not yet a major news item. Iranian air defenses are severely disrupted, though not forever. The Hezbollah counterattack has been more than neutralized, and no alternative to turn has been put in its place. That too may be temporary. Israeli public opinion is still close in time to October 7th and Netanyahu is not so far from the end of his reign. Netanyahu started his reign when I was six months old.

Is he supposed to wind down soon? I don't know when his term is up, but certainly feels more than four or eight years. He's been over there for a while. Are you sure it's been 20 years?

Or has he been first elected to prime minister in 1996?

Oh, wow. Okay. Interesting.

The countries that will the next election is November 3rd, 2026.

Okay. So a little over a year. Got it. The countries that will get very mad at Israel for such an attack are already close to maximally mad at Israel. Trump has signaled plenty of support, yet there is no guarantee that will last forever. Most of all, Iran is getting closer to having a workable nuclear weapon. I also find it striking how many people discuss the Ukraine negotiations without considering the two issues may be tied to some degree. How much will Putin, if at all, shore up Iran in in such a scenario? Just a reminder that you should not forget about this issue. It could be the most important thing that happens this year. Wow. He really, really called it and zero comments. Like, like everyone just was like, yeah, okay.

Yeah.

No comment.

But yeah, he called it and now people are looking. Congrats to the Workweek team, Adam Ryan. One year ago, we launched a bold experiment. What if there was a real social network for business leaders? No self-promo, no influencer fluff, just verified operators helping each other. And they're seeing 10x growth in five months, 51% acceptance rate.

Did you see who was shouting them out to?

Lance Armstrong. Oh, wow, crushing.

I had to throw this in there. Lance is an early investor in Workweek.

He's investing in a lot of stuff now.

He has a whole fund. Yeah, yeah, he's running it. I was on the Workweek board through the series A, and it's just been amazing to watch them execute over the last year. Congrats. Company is ripping, and I thought it was cool that Lance was throwing a little shout out here. That's great. Anyways, I thought this was posted on Friday, but it was just funny. I got to include it. This Neil Renick. Wow, what a stressful week at Workweek. Time to relax by holding a phone beaming endless streams of horrific international news inches from my head.

It's ridiculous. It had 220,000 likes. Everyone's feeling the exact same thing. And that really was this weekend. Like I went to the beach on Sunday and all of Los Angeles was just peaceful. I mean, I saw one train of cop cars kind of moving from one part of the city to the other, but I didn't see any protests, didn't see any real fallout. like things were pretty quiet in America generally, but you go online and it's just like, I mean, you read like the COVID of the Wall Street Journal and it's just like flames and insane. Yeah, that picture is crazy because there's crazy stuff happening in the world. But fortunately, due to the amazing technology, it's beamed directly to your face.

In other news, the founder pump, Pump Fun as well as Pump Fun have been banned from X. Oh, why? And I was seeing this because Dan Romero posted something, something decentralized doesn't matter until it does. Farcaster is effectively a sufficiently decentralized version of X. So he's kind of making his case there, but we'll see how that evolves. But overall, slow news day.

Pretty slow News Day. Only geopolitically. It's a great time to be a political podcaster. You got Trump, Elon, Waymo's, you got Iran, you got assassinations. There's so much stuff. Us over here, we got to talk about technology. So maybe tomorrow we break down the Warner Brothers Discovery split, some HBO stuff, some sports stuff. I think it'd be fun to do a deep dive on Le Mans and some of the history there. There's a lot that we could go.

Into in different directions. We also have Absolutely insane line.

We have an insane lineup tomorrow too, so I don't think we'll be able to do a lot of that. We have a lot of range and it's gonna be a lot of fun. And so stay tuned for tomorrow because we have a banger lineup.

Well, you'll hear about it in the morning. Thank you for tuning in. Thank you to our incredible production team. Thank you to Tyler who learned all.

There is to know about biotech today. Yes, he's in the home of the golden retriever, GLP-1.

I like the AI generated.

Yeah. Tyler.

Yeah.

I actually, I found this concoction I've cooked up.

Okay. Okay.

So this is optimal, you know, golden retriever maxing.

Okay.

So there's three parts, right? Hotter, friendlier, or dumber.

So for.

For hotter, I have melon.

Melon.

Melanotan. Okay.

It's like.

It's like injections to get you more tan, you know, so you can have a nice.

Okay.

The next one is. growth hormone peptides. So I think Jordi knows a lot about peptides.

Yeah.

So what is kind of the king?

That's kind of the king peptide.

Yeah.

You can do a lot of stuff around human growth hormone, but at the end of the day, if you really, you know, playing to win, just. Just do it.

Okay. Sounds good. Okay.

And then the third one I have for hotter is blood transfusions from young people.

Okay.

Like an in turn or tech sphere with, like, an. be good, like a summer intern?

Yeah, would you recommend pulling from a summer intern?

Do not be a summer intern for Brian Johnson. You will be turned into a blood boy.

Okay, so then the next for Friendlier, I have two items. The first one is MDMA microdosing.

Okay.

So I haven't tried this myself, but it could be interesting. The next one is oxytocin nasal sprays.

Yeah, that's the love chemical, right?

Yeah, so this is supposed to increase people's Trust, it makes you more generous, more empathetic.

Okay.

That's somewhat dog-like.

I don't know why that just seems so wrong. Just like a, but at the same time, I mean coffee has like, you know, I'm sure a similarly strong effect, but just for being- so the dose.

Is the poison, so you dose it correctly, maybe there's something there. Interesting, okay.

Okay. The last one is for the dumber. So the first one I have is scopolamine.

Okay.

So this apparently makes people confused, extremely compliant, and forgetful.

Oh, okay.

There we go. The next one is prefrontal lobotomy.

Okay. I think people have tried this throughout history.

We're maybe going too far here.

And then the second one is just lead.

Lead. Lead.

Just lightweight, well, if you want to have some blood, just drink tap water.

There you go.

We'll get you covered.

Good luck to you.

Well, thank you for solving one of humanity's most pressing health challenges, which is how do we be more golden retriever-like? Anyways, great show. We'll be back tomorrow. I'm looking forward to it. There'll be some big news. We hope you have a fantastic Monday, afternoon, and evening.

Goodbye.

Cheers.