https://www.listennotes.com/e/34e8bba17a8746d3840e35ecb1f74847

You're watching TVPN. Today is Monday, June 23rd, 2025. We are live from the TVPN Ultradome. The temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital.

Capital de capital.

Massive news today over the weekend. Elon Musk announced the Tesla AI Robo taxi launch in Austin, Texas.

This afternoon was the big technology news.

It was of the weekend technology news, of course. We will be covering what's going on in Iran. We have an exclusive interview with Shervin Peshavar. The investor and Iranian entrepreneur who came to America decades ago has been waiting for this moment for 46 years. As he put it to us, we pre recorded an interview with him because he is in Paris. It's very late there, but it was a very fascinating interview. You'll hear that at the end of the stream. We have a great lineup, tons of interviews going on. We're talking to the founder and CEO of Klarna, we're talking to a partner, Khosla Ventures. Tom Mueller from Impulse Space is coming on. Then we have Derek Thompson, the author of Abundance and owner of a new substack as well as we're doing a lightning round with a bunch of founders who have raised money recently. And then we're talking to Yaxin, the ex software engineer of X.

Software engineer at X.

He's an ex ex software engineer, so it'll be fun to talk to him. Anyway, we have someone who's written about the Tesla Cyber Cab in the Robo Taxi in the back of a Robotaxi, hopefully calling in to the show. I sent him the link. We'll see if we can bring him in.

Hey, here he is.

How you doing?

Perfect timing. How's it going, guys?

Can you see the.

What's happening here? Let me see. Can you see it?

Yeah.

Wow.

Wow. Yes.

There you go. Amazing rider right here as well.

Okay.

Got some sick, sick glasses on.

But yeah, we're. We're in the Robo Taxi right now.

This is my fifth ride. I'm also here with Harry from the uk.

Oh, hey, what's going on?

He's a fan of the channel. Yeah. So, yeah, this is my fifth ride.

It's been amazing so far. It really does feel like Tesla has.

Hit this one out of the park.

Truly, the geofence area is definitely much.

Smaller than Waymo's right now, but I.

Think they did that with the thought process of like, hey, we want to.

Make sure we have a really good launch.

We want to make sure that it's going real nice and smooth and.

But so Far, the rides I've taken have all been really, really good. Very smooth. It's very hard to communicate just how.

Smooth the car is unless you're familiar with, with the software, unless you're familiar with FSD and how it operates on, on the Teslas.

It's very, very similar to that experience. It's just, there's just nobody there now.

And that, that's the freaky part is.

That, you know, for, for a lot.

Of people that have been following the company, a lot of us knew this.

Day was going to come where Tesla.

Would pull the trigger and start, you know, getting actual paid driverless cars on the road. But nonetheless, now that it's here, it's.

Kind of like this is, this is wild.

This is wild.

So is that better?

The stock is up 9% today.

9% today. Wow.

Yeah, you're welcome everybody.

I'm kidding. Yeah, give us your other takeaways. We. Well, I saw you posted a good breakdown from your experience. What else do you have to share about the process? Did you need to go through a pre registration to get onboarded? It feels like it's not completely open access just yet.

Yeah.

So yeah, we were invited.

We're a part of like a very.

Limited group of people that were invited.

I think Tesla was just here.

So somebody crossed over the road and it just navigated that, no problem.

Yeah, it's a very small group of people. I think a lot of us that.

Have followed Tesla very closely over the years.

Tesla went out of their way to.

Sort of, you know, get us some.

Early access so we can go out there, test the, test the system, get it out there for people to see how it performs. So far it's very, very limited in its use case and I'm showing you.

Guys here just on the road, hopefully. Does it come across, can you guys.

See the road, how it's driving?

Yeah, very steep. Yeah, I think, I think Tesla very specifically started this very small, but now if you go.

And their zip code.

And their phone number and email address so they can sign up for the.

Service and that's probably a way for Tesla to get some, some idea of how much interest there is for this thing out there.

But so far it's very small. Small geofence area, small group of people.

And I think I, I don't know.

How many cars they have on the.

Road, but I doubt is more than 10.

Right now we're at a four way.

Stop right now and it's navigating that, no problem. But yeah, I think, I think it's very limited on purpose.

But I will tell you that for those of us that are so lucky.

To be able to experience this firsthand, it's just, it feels surreal because it works. It works. It's just crazy. It just takes you around and there's no one there and you're like, it's wild that we got full self driving cars before reliable cell coverage in major cities. You're breaking up a little bit.

I mean, I have one more question. We'll let you go. Yeah. I mean what's remarkable about this is not just that it's a self driving car, but particularly that it looks like a stock $38,000 Model Y. Is there anything, are you seeing anything on the car that looks like it might be aftermarket added to it? Extra cameras, anything?

Nothing. Nothing. I mean there's different software but I mean that's just, that's a software update. Right?

There's nothing that, that I can gather.

That says, oh, this is a specific, like a very uniquely equipped Tesla that.

Has some additional sensors.

This looks to me like the point you made is. Exactly. And this is why this is such so mind blown. Like I just can't believe it's happening. The best selling car in the world where Tesla's making over a million of these per year that costs less than.

$40,000, potentially less than $30,000 to make is driving itself in Austin, Texas with a paid ride.

I paid $4.20 and it's driving me around. The best selling car in the world like that. That is, that's a weird thing to process because it fundamentally breaks the. Like what, how we think about self driving transportation because you think about, oh.

Self driving, a lot of sensors, et cetera, et cetera.

No, that the cost structure for this.

Thing is the, is scale. The scale that Tesla has able, has.

Been able to achieve. That same car is going to drive itself.

Yeah, right.

And that just breaks everything.

As their cost per mile plummets, the method they've taken as far as training the software should allow them to get this thing to scale much faster than Waymo can.

And they have the cars.

Right.

So Tesla makes as many of these.

Cars every five hours that Waymo has on their fleet total.

Right.

And that's the mind blowing piece of it. And Waymo should be celebrated for the work they've done because it's such an incredible, such an incredible technology. And I'm really happy they exist. But the scale piece is the challenge. And it seems like now that Tesla.

Has figured out how to get paid.

Rides going as we come to, to our destination.

That's my cybertruck right there hanging out.

You know, it's like, it's monumental. This is really a monumental thing for.

This is like Disneyland for tech bros. You can just keep taking rides around all day long.

Yeah. Yeah. This is like.

Thank you very much.

Yeah, thank you, brother. Yeah, dude. It's like, you know, sometimes I'm like afraid. I'm like, does my, does my wife.

Think I'm too nerdy?

Like, am I getting too nerdy about this? What's going on?

But it really is like, it's, it's.

It'S, it's just upending. You know, what Tesla has been historically great at is just upending the equation.

Around the technologies that they work in. With the electric vehicle now with self.

Driving, they're going to get into the human or robot space. This is what they do. And so I think this is just.

Another reminder that they're, they're full steam ahead.

And it's, it's very exciting and it's just such an honor to be part of this, this release. Truly, it's an honor.

Historic.

Yeah.

Well, thank you so much for calling in. This was great. Have fun out there.

Bye.

Talk soon.

Thank you, guys. All right, bye.

Bye. Yeah, the scale of this thing, I mean, like, Elon wasn't the first person to put a satellite in space. He's just the first person to figure out how to get the rockets go up and back every single six hours or something like that. And so scale really matters. It's more of like an industrial question than a technology question at this point. And yeah, they seem really set up for it. I love this post by Nick Cruz. He says Elon Musk is back on his main quest focused on the robo taxi. And you'll love to see it. A little bit of side quest going on for the last six months. You know, sometimes you find a little pot of gold at the end of a side quest, but it's not, it's not the main mission.

Pot of gold.

Pot of gold. Anyway, there's some other, there's some other.

Power Bottom dad says time will tell. But my bet is that this signals the death of the Waymo, leaving Google in a $20 billion hole and likely Uber as well. Very dramatic. I'm not, I'm not. I think power powder Power Bottom dad is a very strong poster. And, you know, the competitive dynamic is really heating up. I'm interested to see how quickly Tesla can actually scale this in other cities. Right now. It's Sounds like it's 10ish cars in a very, very small area. But again, they could potentially scale a thousand times faster than Waymo. It's all just going to come down to safety and what's actually going on behind the scenes. George Hotz last week was saying that Waymo is Artela operated. I haven't fact checked this, thankfully. We're not journalists, we don't have to fact check, but he, he said something like 1.7 people per car, 1.2 or something, you know, sort of, you know, overseeing more than a taxi cab.

Because one.

Yeah. So the real question will be, you know, is Tesla doing teleoperation as well? Do they, you know, how long will these companies need to do that? But once things are really working and they're safe, Tesla theoretically could be everywhere all at once.

I think the real question is, what corporate card should you use?

That's right.

Ramp.com, time is money save, both easy to use, corporate cards, bill payments, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. No, it's a good point. And I don't know about Waymo and Google. I think I lean with PBD here saying that they have a lot of explaining to do. Waymo, Google and Uber. It's hard to imagine how you can compete if your product's 10 times the price or if you like the Uber has. The bull case for Uber is that they have the customers. Right. And that everyone has the Uber app installed. But if the only way to hail a cyber cab or a Tesla robo taxi is through the Tesla app, how hard is it going to be to get people to install that app? I think it's going to be very easy because the brand awareness is huge.

Distribution engine.

The brand awareness is huge. It's not like Zoox where it's some, oh, you got to be an insider to know that they're doing tests and that, yeah, they're a major player in the space or whatever.

The virality of seeing Tesla's driving around.

With a driver, that guy's in the Tesla army. Like he's doing the promotion for free and getting a ton of, ton of impressions.

When it comes to Uber, you have to remember that Dara CEO was formerly the CEO of Expedia, which was a booking website.

Yes.

And so they didn't own planes. If Uber can figure it out, it's like, hey, we're just routing demand and we're taking a cut. Yes, but, but we're integrating with multiple different autonomous vehicle providers that actually would.

Be the bull case.

But the question is, does Tesla just.

Say, can that happen?

We got this. We're not going to give up, we're.

Going to let A lot of question depends on the timeline. Because if the robo taxi, so we don't know how much work they did, these might be somewhat teleoperated. They have a safety driver literally in the car. Right. Although it's interesting because the safety driver. Did you see the safety driver? Do they have a pedal? Because if they don't have a brake, what is the safety driver doing? Like, is the safety driver going to reach over or push a button on the screen? Kind of unclear. But the question is, if the robo taxi can't generalize to odd conditions, then you wind up in a situation where if you have the Tesla Robotaxi app and it doesn't work in the snow, or it doesn't work in the rain, or it doesn't work if you need to get to the beach or you don't or we won't go into the mountains, well then all of a sudden you actually do want something. Like the beauty of Expedia is that it can book me a Southwest flight from Burbank to sfo, but then it can also book me a Dubai Airlines first class Emirates air all the way across the world. And so if there is a world where I want a variety of products.

Yeah, I'm benefiting from variety and not the frequency of booking. If you're booking a Tesla Cyber Cab multiple times a week and you can save by going directly to the app, you're just going to do that. Overall, I thought the Robotaxi did incredible job under pressure. Probably the first sort of live show that it's been a part of. And so the fact that it stayed composed, that it didn't make any erratic turns or anything like that, I'm. I'm pretty impressed.

Yeah, yeah, it's very exciting. But you know, you don't always want to be in a self driving car that costs $38,000. Sometimes you want to be a Ferrari driving Harvard Med graduate, AI angel investor. We saw this photo on the timeline.

Incredible.

Loved this. Seems like pure bait for vc congratulating themselves for VC brags AI Harvard Medical School. Is that aroma?

I think so.

Would have hit harder if it was an SP3. You know, like, yeah, okay, you're an AI angel investor, but probably worse. Seed investor in scale, but clearly has done well and enjoys the.

Ben is saying it's an SF90.

That's not an SF90.

I think it's aroma.

I think it's aroma.

I think you're right.

Let us know in the comments. And you know what's missing from this picture? A luxury watch. This person's got to get on Bezel.

I'm sure they have a hitter on. They might even have a racing machine on the wrist.

They might, they might go to getbezel.com, shop. Over 25,000 luxury watches fully authenticated in house by Bezel's team of experts. Trump. This is the news of the day with the Iran cross crisis. Donald Trump says everyone keep oil prices down. I'm watching. You're playing right into the hands of the enemy. Don't do it. You love to see the president talking direct to the market.

Everybody's saying this is ridiculous, but it's never been tried.

People always say, oh, all that matters in oil price is supply and demand. Yeah, well, all you gotta do is say, hey, supply go down. Hey, supply go up and demand go down and then we will have lower prices. I mean there is something to that.

Hasn'T been tried before. It's worth trying something if you do signal.

I mean, there are stories about oil prices going down because Americans got the signal that prices were going to be high and they stopped traveling as much during the summer vacation, for example. Like that does happen every once in a while. But yeah, very, very odd to post. Anyway, back on watches, the watches of espionage account says men who guide the destinies of the world while waiting wear Rolex watches. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff John Dan Razine Cain in situation room during attacks on Iran wearing a Rolex gmt. Well, you need a GMT because you got to know what time it is.

We got to start doing these.

This is a good one. I've seen the Merkel route. I've seen the break cracking your knuckles. But this is special. It's like four points of attack. I mean, I guess they did hit four sites. So you got to point to all of them.

Yeah, that's right.

Interesting.

Well, it's been an eventful morning. Iran attacked US base in Qatar.

Yes, that's the latest.

And people are basically saying that it's bullish because there were no casualties. All of apparently all the missiles were taken out in the air. And this could lead to a de escalation and a return to steady state of tension.

Yeah, this has been my position for a long time. I'm, I'm pretty anti aggression, anti war, but I'm extremely pro domes, iron domes, golden domes. I want to be able to shoot down every missile before. As soon as it leaves, no matter where it's leaving from, let's shoot it down immediately. From space, from land, do whatever you can. But missiles, bombs, nuclear bombs, these things should not be relevant in the future. But Dhruva has a breakdown of this. The strike package that destroyed the Iranian nuclear facility at 4 Dow represents over one year of US production capacity of the GBU 57 bunker buster. Its primary explosive AFX 757 is difficult to produce and we don't have many factories to do it. It's why way more robots are necessary to do everything from production to automating research. I'll also note that China has been very interested in higher throughput production of this very compound for some time now. Very interesting to see. Joe Weisenthal had some Polymarket news. Bombing of the nuclear facility did not push down the market odds of Iran possessing a nuclear weapon in 2025. In fact, it's at the highest level of the day. I wonder what's driving that. Do you think that's more driven by. We didn't actually.

The President comes out and said hey, we might just give them a nuke.

That would be bad.

Which would be bad.

That would be bad.

The other thing that's interesting, the Fordeau nuclear facility destroyed before July Polymarket is only sitting at a 32% chance still on 4 million in volume. So I think people are basically saying, calling that it wasn't actually destroyed, or at least that's what the market is saying. So it was impacted but not destroyed. Even though Trump came out Saturday night and claimed total annihilation.

Well, the crown prince of the opposition party gave a speech in Paris earlier. We talked to Shervin Pishvar about it earlier. You'll hear that interview at 2:30 today. And he launched a website to help recruit defectors. If you're designing a website, you got to get on figma.

That's right.

Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. Go to figma.com Combat Learjet says my buddy was a B2 pilot. He flew one of those extremely long missions several years ago. The mission was two pilots, 36.3 hours of flight time. Missouri to Iraq and back to Missouri. The mission required five air refuelings taking on over 500,000 or 500K kilograms, maybe 500 kilograms of gas total. These pilots are legends. Yeah. That's insane. Oh yes. Pounds 500. 500 pounds. I don't know. Anyway, what, what? What a beast. A 36 hour grind. I never want to hear you complain about, you know, sitting at your desk for 10 hours or coming on the weekend.

Have I ever.

PowerPoint or some Excel? The investment banker, specifically.

Yeah.

Oh, I work so long. No, 36 hours. Get it done.

Yeah. Really wild.

Anyway, Jacob Halberg was celebrating this. Very excited. He has been confirmed, by the way, and he says that he's already shifting the conversation, I think, in a good direction. He says not a single Chinese humanoid robot should be sold on US soil. US Government should preemptively ban Chinese humanoids in the US without delay, in all caps. And Jason Calcana says the fact that you need to tweet. This is crazy.

You realize this was posted a year ago.

Oh, this is a. Whoa. And he just reposted it.

Yeah.

Or he edited it or something.

Yeah. So he was.

Oh, he's way ahead. Yeah.

But now he's part of the admin. Now he can tweak it, actually make some of this stuff happen. So excited to see him. Yeah, we talked about this. Why. Why are we, you know, let's not allow what happened with DJI to happen again. With a new robotic form factor.

Yep. Anyway, there was some news that maybe The Jony I've OpenAI deal might not happen because OpenAI apparently scrubbed everything about Johnny I've and Sam Altman off the website. And YouTube, it's just completely gone. YouTube video, private blog post removed. Everything is gone. I confirmed that. You get a 404 when you go to the original webpage. Mark Gurman. So everyone thought the deal was falling apart. Maybe Jony I've was getting poached by Zuck over at Meta. That would be dramatic. Mark Gurman has the story. He says The Jony Ivan OpenAI deal is on track and has not dissolved or anything of the sort, I'm told. Here's what happened. They were sued over the name IO and there was a restraining order issued by the judge. They had to pull all materials with the name. That's interesting. Also interesting that they didn't. We knew that the name of the company was IO before this acquisition, right?

No, it was Love from. And then they had an internal project called I.O.

But that was not. I thought that. I thought that was. I thought. I thought. I thought that. We knew that the new project was called IO like 6 months or a year ago, but they're suing now. This happens a lot. There's kind of multiple sides. We'll hear both of them. Nick, who I believe is more in the Elon camp, is saying that it's the beginning of the end for Sam Altman and Johnny I've project, he says. A federal Judge has banned OpenAI to use the word IO to brand for their upcoming AI hardware advice device. Little rough language there. The ruling caps a fierce trademark battle sparked by Silicon Valley startup Iyo, similar but slightly different name which spent the past six years developing its voice controlled AI wearable the iO1 court filings revealed an eyebrow raising series of events.

So this is from IO's point of point of view. Yes, I'd say. From 2018 to 2024, IO publicly showcased its ear worn device, investing heavily to carve out its niche. Between 2022 and 2025, Altman's Apollo projects and I've's love from team participated in extensive pitch meetings, factory tours and hands on testing of iOS product. On March 5, 2025, Altman declined investment in IO, disclosing he was working on something competitive which ended up being called IO I O not I yo said. When OpenAI revealed a $6.5 billion venture named IO in May of 2025, IO's fundraising immediately stalled as Sam Altman influenced investors to stop investing in the small startup. Obviously these are all allegations.

Yeah. What's interesting here is like Sam invested in Humane and that project didn't really get to fruition. And so there's this question of like, like it's possible that he was like, okay, idea is good, but team maybe can't deliver at scale or can't deliver as an independent venture. And so for that reason I'm out. And that's kind of clear. You also kind of know if you're pitching an investor that's actively running a huge company that you like, you can go pitch Mark Zuckerberg to be an angel investor, but if you're pitching him like Instagram 2.0, you kind of know. Okay, so the thing that's clear. Letting the fox in the hen house.

Yeah, the thing that's clear here is that it's very possible that the company IYO has great grounds around the trademark. They've been operating for a while and it is confusing, right? Even when we're saying it out.

Yes, yes. Also IO it's not such a good name that like they have to stick with it. I would just change that name immediately.

Yeah, I never, I never thought it was that great.

I thought the name was amazing and I would rather just have it called like the ChatGPT phone or something, you know, or the, or the OpenAI phone or something. Like there are other. They probably couldn't get away with that because it sounds too much like iPhone. But there, there are, there are other brand names that they could spin off of to create a device that's the, the, the open AI device and they don't necessarily need to use that IO keyword. And so backing off of that seems fine. There's also this trend of like when big dollars are changing hands, like 6 billion in this case. Oftentimes there are folks that come out and file lawsuits just because like they, there's a whole bunch of money changing hands. Everyone wants it to change hands quickly. And so if you can show up and say, hey, I'm owed $100 million, a lot of people just settle to make it go away. This happened to Palmer Luckey during the Meta acquisition or the Facebook acquisition of Oculus. There was a guy who came out and said, I invented VR, I have a patent, you have to pay me. Palmer went all the way to court, bought it and won. But it was still, it was still framed in the press for a long time as like Palmer Lucky stole the idea for virtual reality. Which of course is one of those things where it's like okay, like the idea of virtual reality has been around for like decades, if not like 100 years. Yeah. Palmer used, he stood on the shoulders of giants, use some patents and some technology and license some of that stuff. And so you might have a claim, there might be some sort of settlement, there might be all sorts of different things. But at the end of the day like yeah, like it didn't. There was no evidence that Palmer was like literally cheating off his homework. Like looking over there being like.

Let me just say the general idea for virtual reality had been something that had been written about both in venture and in sci fi for decades.

And it's the same thing here. Like yeah, so here's what actually device looks really cool. It's this headphone. But again it's like yeah.

What's interesting here is it's a potentially new type of product that could ultimately be similar to what OpenAI develops with Jony I've and love from.

Sure.

So the IO IYO is a product designed to be an ear worn device. The device uses 16 beam forming microphones to create a quote unquote audio display or an immersive audio environment for both speaking and listening. The io1 achieves this through the use of natural language. The user does not have to learn, know or memorize special commands, words or gestures to cause the device to do what is asked of it. Instead, all the user needs to do is speak to the device naturally as though the user were conversing with a person.

Yeah, I mean like this feels like souped up airpods in some ways or completely disruptive and it ultimately depends on the how great the software is, how great the interaction pattern is, the branding, the design, the go to market. It's not, I don't think that they own the idea of like put a thing near your ear and play sounds like that's not like if OpenAI comes out with something that competes with this, I think we would more likely comp it to AirPods and ask what is Apple doing to respond. How are the AirPods going to be a competitor in this category? I mean it's the same thing with the Meta Quest and the Apple Vision Pro. These are somewhat similar devices, screens on your face. They have slightly different design choices, but they're both in the same category. I wouldn't say oh like Zuck should 100% sue Apple for launching the Apple Vision Pro. Right. Like that is not specific. Like they don't own the idea of screen on your face. And I would say that Apple doesn't necessarily own the idea of audio in your ears. And Jony, I've doesn't necessarily own that idea either. So it's going to be much more nitty gritty.

You might be more quick to come to the defense of IYO if you knew they were funded by both big tech and big defense tech. Lockheed Martin and Alphabet are both are both in the company. They've raised over $20 million venture funding to date.

So yeah, I mean it could be, yeah, it could definitely be a valuable product but I think the game will be won in the execution totally of the, of the software and the hardware. Not strictly the idea of like, of like voice first computing in your ear. That's not enough to win. Just like.

Yeah, in many ways the AirPods have already done some rudimentary and it'll talk.

To you a little bit. It's like they're not actually.

Or you can call your executive assistant and say, hey, can you look this up for me? Hey, can you call this person? Hey, can you schedule this? Hey, can you book me a flight?

Yes.

In many ways they're just trying to recreate a great ea.

Yes. Well, whatever I wio is building, they got to get on Vanta, they got to automate compliance, they got, they got to manage risk and they got to prove trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the 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. But yeah, I mean, these lawsuits are always, are always interesting. Could wind up being a big settlement. I mean, if they can even get $40 million from the $6.5 billion in a settlement, that's a series B for them. They get to keep going, keep building. That's probably a good outcome for them. Maybe they can change the name because I agree with you that the name is crazy.

The most attention, you know, if they spin this and say, hey, the OpenAI team spent years ordering our products, meeting, meeting with the fitting specialists, doing all this stuff because it's so great, maybe.

They'Ll get some, you know, the best thing for everyone in this scenario.

What's that?

We're going to get some emails and discovery that are going to go on big tech history emails, the, the. The X account and you know, we're gonna find some funny back and forth between Jony I've and Salem.

Speaking of lawsuits and emails and discovery, Elon's lawyers are apparently claiming that he doesn't have a computer as part of the lawsuit between OpenAI.

Who doesn't have a computer?

Elon.

Elon doesn't.

He doesn't use a computer.

He doesn't even have a work computer. You posted this earlier today.

I found this out here. I posted, I posted earlier. If your CEO has a quote unquote work computer and a personal computer, it's time to start polishing your resume. And so somebody responded to that with notes to basically claims that.

How does Elon play Diablo?

Well, he probably has a gaming rig.

Oh, it's a rig. It's not a computer.

No, but the Verge posted this.

Your Honor, my client doesn't have a computer. He has a rig. He has a gaming rig.

Oh, you want access to his rig. Rig where he plays games on. You want to see if he's really.

People that would actually definitely want that for sure.

The setup.

Yeah, I don't know. Maybe the second greatest Diablo player of all time will subpoena that information. Be like, I want actual data. How many hours did he log? I need to know the real account information.

So Wired is reporting this morning that the claim appeared in a court filing related to Elon Musk's ongoing lawsuit against Sam Altman and OpenAI. He said that the lawsuit also flags that he has posted about his laptop numerous times in the last year. So people are trying to put him in the truth zone.

That is crazy. So he doesn't have a computer. He doesn't have any apps installed on the computer. He doesn't have Linear installed on his computer.

I'm sure his team does.

His team must, because how would they get anything done without a purpose built tool for planning and building products? Like they need a system for modern software development. How else would they streamline issues, projects and product roadmaps?

How else would they run such a big service with so few people on their team?

It would make no sense.

Unless everyone is just okay, I think.

We'Re going to find the computer and when we find Elon Musk's computer, we're.

Going to find there's going to be one app and it's linear for sure. That's right. Linear app. An anonymous little birdie told me that he does have a massive a gaming PC with an ultra massive screen and indeed does not have a work computer. Lol.

Okay. Anyway, Wealthfront is filing to go public. Very exciting. We've heard about this fintech platform before.

They seems like the window's open, John.

The window is wide open if you're a series D company, Series C company, Series B company. Maybe Clulee gets out who I could.

See clearly getting out with Chamath.

It's possible anything when the window is open. So go for it. If you're a founder, our advice to you just go public. Just take your company public and then go on a generational run. Compounding it. 40% a year stock price for decades. Yeah, a couple decades.

It's all it takes.

And then you'll be in the in the Mag 7.

Yeah. In many ways if you go public earlier, those initial years can be easier because it's such a small base. It's much easier to grow.

The SEC requirements are so difficult. You could be short sellers could attack you. It's like that's just inspiration.

Attack them back harder with putting up incredible quarter over quarter results.

Blow them out. Blow out the shorts.

Speaking of the public markets, Anthony Pompliano posted this morning Today I'm announcing a $1 billion merger to create Pro Cap Financial, a Bitcoin native financial services firm firm. The company will be a publicly traded entity on NASDAQ at the conclusion of the proposed business combination between my private company Pro Cap BTC LLC and Columbus Circle Capital Core Corp. 1, a publicly traded SPAC. The ticker for the publicly traded entity right now is CCCM and he has raised over $750 million. They will focus on acquiring Bitcoin for their balance sheet while also developing products and services to produce revenue and profit from the bitcoin on our balance sheet. Let's give it up.

Some people would say that should be the first goal.

Let's give it up for revenue and profit. Everybody. We love it, love to see try.

To be the Warren Buffett of bitcoin. Buy companies, invest in bitcoin, funnel the bitcoin back in and buying more companies produce more bitcoin. The flywheel continues.

That's right.

That's the goal. Well, whatever company he buys, got to put them on numeralhq.com sales tax on autopilot, spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Should we do some of the, some of the downstream fallout from Cluly? We didn't even know if it's.

Yeah, I just wanted to cover this post from Will Brown first. Zuck hired Alex Wang for a half to 1% equity. He's basically a founding engineer. Thought that was good. When, when the, when the 15 billion number was being thrown around just, just a week ago, everybody was freaking out. But it's barely a point.

Yeah, we, I mean we identified that. It's like through my point, it's like what would, what would it take for Alex Wong to move his market cap 1%? Well, like, I don't know, a great Llama 5 release. That would probably do it, right? Like there's, there's a ton of things. There's a lot of opportunity. If you're just talking about that's being the stakes. It's not that he has to overnight double the company in size. He just has to, he just has to, you know, implement a rational and effective AI strategy. Ben Thompson was talking about this earlier today.

For a multi trillion dollar opportunity.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And there's so many places where AI products can have an impact. Ben Thompson was talking about this, this idea that the researchers are really important. But what Zuck has been on a terror about is hiring actually great managers. When you look at Daniel Gross, Nat Friedman, Alexander Wong, like these guys are everyone. The criticism, like they're not researchers. But that's actually probably the benefit of the strategy because we are in the application war right now. We are in the implementation of these AI tools. And the capabilities of the models are clearly way, way ahead of the actual foundation models, like the actual science that's happened. I was thinking about this just like for, for Instagram during the Dolly moment. I was like, I like, I wonder what would happen if you just took every single person's on Instagram their most recent photo and Ghibli did Studio Ghibli'd it and just sent them to it. Send it to them proactively. It would cost a ton of money to do this in the inference. But you do that, you send it to everyone and you just say like, would you like to post this? I bet you have like the biggest day on Instagram, like ever, right?

Yeah.

Because you're just creating all this like viral fuel for the day. Or what does it take to distill that model down, bake it into just a filter so when you upload a photo, you can just select the studio Ghibli thing and it runs efficiently. And that's almost. That's not really a research task. It's more of like product management. And I'm not even like a product manager at Instagram. Right.

For product managers.

But like those types of, like the volition that it'll take and the will and the incentive alignment that it'll take to actually roll out a product like that and really push the team to be like, no, we want to spend all this money rendering these Ghibli's because we think this is a calculated risk that will put us back in the AI image conversation. Or we want to, you know, spend all this money to distill down images, image generation diffusion to a point where it can just be a filter button on the, on the Instagram app. Like, those are product management, those are cost. Like, it's almost like more of a CFO question than a research question at this point. Like we know that the Ghibli filter is doable and, and it's great. And so how do you actually get it out into the world effectively? And that's more of a manager manager discussion. So he's basically a founding engineer, but I think he's going into more of like a C suite role. So we'll keep tracking it. Anyway, should we keep going into the AI application layer with the rapper of all rappers? Cluly?

Final rapper, the final boss of rappers.

Yeah, we should get Tyler's take on this because the, the question that I think people are digging into is that clearly like the easy, the easy take was like, oh, it's. This is like Theranos and it's like. I don't think it's like Theranos at all. Like the product works like you, you tried it and you would agree that it is a real product.

Yes. Yeah, for sure.

100%. It's.

It does what it advertises.

It does what it advertises. Now there are some questions about like the actual Long term value there or I think the bear case for cluling.

The risk is that the opportunity does not align with the marketing strategy. So like the opportunity for helping students with their homework and this sort of like traditional nature of cheating aligns with the marketing strategy. I think they can dominate there the enterprise opportunity of. Let me intake all the information from every call that you have internally, every sales call that you have, every.

It's a very competitive space.

That's a very competitive space that the labs will probably want to own because it's very valuable data.

Right.

You can imagine OpenAI having a desktop application that's permanently running.

They already do. They already have a. Yeah, but they haven't, they haven't adopted that pattern. And so yeah, the risk is like if the pattern really works and people are like this is what we want. We always want the screen capture and constant, constant responses from LLMs. Like if it's a really big opportunity you're going to face competition from the really big labs. If it's a smaller opportunity, it's hard to kind of scale up. So there's a lot of the.

More. The other pushback was high level. You know, why are we funding these types of businesses that are loud and not, you know, truly sort of bending the world in any type of positive direction? And it has the, the cheating angle which some people. I think that was very intentional.

Yeah.

The pushback I would have. There is like, it seems like. It seems like there is enough venture capital right now. Like if you have a great idea in hard tech, defense tech, manufacturing, et cetera, you will be funded. And it's, you know, it's not like some great, you know, manufacturing American dynamism business is not getting $15 million this week because Cluly got 15 last week. And so it's not zero sum. Yeah, we had some good reactions. Kevin AKA plant daddy was quoting a segment from our interview and said Roy was basically saying like there's not enough viral content which is actually an interesting take. His, his take at a high level is like if you make something like great novel engaging it just will naturally go viral because there's actually a scarcity of like viral content. I think it's an interesting, I think it's an interesting point and I think that he's probably right to some degree. Kevin fired back at a high level and said this is not correct. While it is true that when. Oh and sorry, the last thing Roy was basically saying that consumption has just shifted so dramatically to TikTok which is a new form factor and so that's changed the dynamics. Uh, Kevin is an active creator, I believe, on YouTube and I'm sure he's everywhere. So he was just firing back. He says this is not correct. While it is true that when TikTok blew up in 2020 there was a brief moment where there wasn't enough short form content to satisfy consumption that lasted 12 to 18 months, I remember it well because I was one of the first gardening accounts on TikTok in 2019. It was free back then. Literally any video popped off. Then millions of new creators came onto the scene. Coupled with 10x reduced friction in creating content due to TikTok's native editor filter and cap cut, you saw an explosion of short form video. So both the number of creators and number of videos dramatically increased. Consumption just increased even more because the videos were all 5 to 15 seconds long. So one scrolling session equals 100 videos instead of 50 to 70% of one YouTube video. It's not true that for the next 6 to 12 month anything that you post has a potential to go viral, will go viral. That's only true when there's a paradigm shift and all platforms have to catch up. The phase where IG Meta released reels and YouTube released shorts to catch up to TikTok was truly a free attention grab era and thousands of creators made a fat bag during that era. From 2020 to 2022, I grew epic gardening from 300,000 to something like 8 million across all platforms. It was that free. That time isn't today though, he says. I think what you're seeing right now with Cluli is someone applying a Mr. B style hyperscale influencer content model into something that VCs will salivate over. B2C AI. Whether anything comes of it is another story. But it is somewhat comical to see the tech VC space go crazy for the viral attention grab. And the type of attention they're grabbing as well as the scale of it is dwarfed by Almost any top 1% creator of which there are thousands of.

Yeah, Christian Kyle was pointing out that Cluli is getting millions of views on X but only a few thousand views on YouTube. And so it's very, very platform specific and yeah, but Roy is really fantastic at applying that. The viral playbook that works for X on X and it's been very successful. I think they're successful on other platforms too. But it is interesting.

Yeah, and it's interesting. Slow ventures.

Yeah.

Created a fun. Megan Lightcap over there runs it. We've had her on the show. I Believe right.

We've had, I don't know, we actually.

Should Meghan on But we should basically saying hey, there's all these creators that are getting a massive amount of attention. If they have capital, they can monetize it. So some people are paying attention to this.

It's still like I've been surprised by how much the cheating buzzword has been really controversial. It seemed very clear to me that that was deliberately edgy and just kind of an Edge Lord statement and that it was pretty clear that the tool was, was very much just like embracing the new norm of co pilots happening everywhere and that cheating was deliberately used as a, as a word to kind of spark controversy. But it, but it really is, it really is acting as baggage on Roy. And so Sarah Guo over conviction said we should celebrate hacking, not cheating. Cheating quietly pockets extra Monopoly money, insider trading, plagiarism, inflated metrics. Hacking openly flips the game board, exposing rigged rules and inventing a better game for everyone. Wikipedia replaced Britannica. Airbnb monetized spare rooms. Linux openly challenged Windows. Both break the rules. But hacking doesn't compromise integrity. It reveals the old game wasn't worth playing. Yeah, it's interesting because like he could have totally reframed the Clulee launches as hack everything, hack dating, hack your, you know, your online interviews or whatever. And it probably would or the other position is like much less viral but much less controversial. Yeah, but it's.

The other thing is like give yourself superpowers in any of these domains, right?

Yeah. I mean the copilot thing is like the friendliest framing of all of this, right?

It's like.

Yeah, it's just like something to help you out.

Auto complete saying autocomplete for everything is not nearly as viral and many people.

Have said that over the last year.

And I think this is what Roy is already battling with is he I think generally has good intentions, right? He has his own intentions around. He clearly is excited about being famous in many ways. He already is niche tech celebrity, over 100k followers. But at the same time he does want the respect of insiders. You can tell that from from some of his comments over the weekend and replies. So anyways, he's young, he's going to figure it out.

Well, if he's going to try and sell this into enterprise at some point, he's got to get on Adeo Customer relationship magic Adio is the AI native CRM that builds scales and grows your company to the next level. Lulu continued the conversation saying one thing Cluly got really right is hiring only marketing people who have already buil large followings on their own. Any marketing person that isn't bringing you an audience is just being subsidized by yours. I thought this was a good take. I don't know how it's tricky because many people who have built large followings have their own businesses, but Roy's clearly created some sort of like great relationship with them such that they can come in and earn a paycheck and at some point get paid very highly. Kind of unclear how much is cash and stock, but it's enough to get people to step back from a TikTok account that's 100,000 followers or something like that. But that type of person understands the algorithm and actually can do marketing more effectively. And so I think there is an interesting lesson there in that the new marketing like we transitioned from from resumes to GitHub profiles for hiring programmers. We've seen this with folks that the interns we focused that we've hired where someone will come in and say I built this this weekend. Here's an example of what I can build. Or here's an example of something I built in the past, an open source project. And the equivalent in the marketing world now is building some sort of following and actually understanding content creation at some level. And so it's. Yeah, it's very bullish. Maybe, maybe marketing departments should be doing more proactive outreach to folks that are building large followings but not quite monetizing them just yet and saying hey, you clearly understand Instagram, TikTok. Whatever you're doing, you should come inside the organization and work here in our marketing team, which I think can make sense. Dylan Field had some alternative framing of the Cluly story. He said Cluli isn't just good marketing. Roy hacked the algo feed with an antifragile memetic virus and the more energy you throw at it, the stronger it gets. Well, here we are throwing more energy at the memetic virus, baby. That's what it's all about. We can move on from clearly in a little bit. Teddy Blank says Roy Lee disturbs people because by any measure he should be a successful crypto slash forex influencer course hustler. But Instead he chose B2B SaaS and it feels unnatural. Funny that he's saying B2B SaaS because the previous, the previous post by plant daddy said B2C SaaS and so no.

One even knows they're doing.

They're doing both, I guess. Yeah, they'll Sell to willing buyers at market prices. Also interesting in the open source world, Ian has the story. While Cluley spent that $15 million on marketing videos, this random guy on Reddit built an open source the exact same project. Always interesting to see when these open source projects break through because I remember there was a competitor to Devin, open Devin that was open sourced and everyone was like Devin's cooked. But we saw the data and it seems like Devin's producing tons and tons of GitHub poll requests and has a very different go to market motion in that for a lot of enterprises that are doing replatforming of their.net application to Python they might not want to use an open source product. They might want to have a team there that's actively improving the project on a daily basis. And so the open source did not kill Devon in that case. In fact their more significant competition comes from OpenAI and another in another large enterprise scaled, you know, $100 billion company, not just some random developer. On the flip side we saw Deep Seek and Manus come out with open source projects Manus but, but not quite these like you know I just open sourced and made it free like Deepseek and Manus. Nobody would call it like true side projects so it's unclear how much this will affect at the same time if you are hesitant about sending screen recordings to Gluly maybe open source is the one that you actually want want to run this locally because of a privacy issue but it will be interesting to see whether or not this is a factor in Cluly's rollout. I would be surprised if this is if this is something that makes a difference to them. I would imagine it's much more about.

Yeah they're clearly marketing to people that don't know how to run open source software. The thing that was interesting Gary Tan shared are people building brands ahead of the tech just to try to hold space space right at the moment that the just right models hit somebody named Ethan Ding was highlighting that he was comparing Cluly and Icon both of which have been very controversial. Ethan said I'm surprised no one's connected Roy Lee's Playbook to the Icon ad maker Playbook a couple months back have an unusual product dominate mindshare for potential buyers buy time for the AI to catch up to bail you out. I don't, I don't you know Roily's product is not unusable. We used it on the show Friday. It worked for the use case that that they advertise the most they clearly are dominating mindshare. The question is will AI catching up actually actually enable them to win in the enterprise or these categories? The issue is that the two categories that Cluli is going after being effectively like B2C so like students and B2B enterprise are two categories that ChatGPT is already dominant in. And so the question again is are they going to be able to win head to head with OpenAI even if OpenAI doesn't have as many viral TikToks being produced in house?

Yeah, he calls out the risk of churn here. I think that's very real. I think the bigger question is clearly in very much it is wrapper but at the same time it's not trying to compete on the foundation model level. And so if the models get better clearly should get better. And so you are, you are very much riding the rocket or riding the wave of technological improvement which seems like a good strategy. I guess it just keeps coming down to the question of if this is truly the UI paradigm that people want to interact with ChatGPT through. You would expect the ChatGPT app to launch this but you know, who knows, maybe it gets popular and maybe there's other pockets of opportunity that come through. And there's a bunch of.

In other news, Mark Gurman was reporting over the weekend. He said Apple will need to leave its M and a comfort zone to succeed in AI. Basically calling out that Apple has held various early conversations with different companies like Perplexity and thinking Machines around potential acquisition. People are pressing him saying why Perplexity Mark responded which looks like it's an output from ChatGPT. I don't know.

It's not, it's not.

It's from his wrote this. It's got so many M dash. Look how many EM dashes as it has though. John, wait.

No, no, I think I actually maybe this is from. I don't know. I'm confused. I can't sell anymore. Yeah, this might be from ChatGPT. I thought this was so he says.

A proven consumer ready product. It fills a clear need, a decently sized team and a reasonable valuation at around 14 billion. Perplexity wouldn't break the bank. Yeah and the timing too is interesting. Apple's long running search deal with Google is under threat from a U.S. antitrust suit. This iPhone maker has to prepare for a post Google search world and acquiring Perplexity would allow it to finally launch its own Apple branded search engine.

My question about Perplexity going to Apple is what is Perplexity building on Top of that wouldn't be an issue in an Apple acquisition because I don't think that they trained a foundation model themselves and I don't think they necessarily wrote a massive web scraper. So I feel like they might be sitting on top of a few APIs that might be renegotiated if all of a sudden Apple's the buyer on the other side. So Google Search or Bing. I think Bing also had for a long time an API where you could search the web using Bing and resell that as a product. But if Apple's the buyer, it's going to be a different conversation with Microsoft. Right.

So they use a number of different. They have their sonar family of models. Those are perplexities in house models, probably fine tuned on large 1776 which was a deep seq. Then they have a bunch of different third party models that they use OpenAI anthropic XAI. So they're routing to a bunch of different. But they say the default model is optimized for speed and web browsing, delivering fast, relevant answers. So yeah, complexity has been solid. I use it once a day. I don't know if I. Oh, you do? At least once a day. I don't think. I don't know if I'd use it if I wasn't running the show. But I get value from it day to day.

Yep. I'm not sure if it'll happen. I mean it certainly makes sense. I posted over the, over the weekend that Siri was an acquisition. And so even though Apple has this culture of let's never, let's never acquire anything or let's never, let's build everything in house, everything needs the Apple polish. They do have a lineage of acquisition, although Siri was a much smaller acquisition much earlier.

200 million.

200 million. And I think Siri had been around for like a couple years kind of similar. And if you think about what a.

I mean it's with inflation, 200 million.

In 2010, it's 100 times as expensive. It is, it is a big, big deal. But still it's, you know, it could, it could happen.

Well, in more important news, the All In all in podcast released their new Tequila brand over this weekend in la. There was quite a lot of pushback, but I thought the bottle was quite unique and I would be down stack.

Of chips, I would want to sample it as well. Also people were saying, oh this is so out of character but Elon Musk has Tesla tequila and Donald Trump has Trump Tequila apparently. And so or liquor brands I guess Trump has a liquor brand and so this is, this is a proven, proven strategy. Anyway, we have our first guest of the show. Our second guest, technically, since we already had that call in, the CEO of Klarna. Welcome to the stream. How are you?

What's going on? Welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me. I just realized the light in here is very, very odd. But I hope this is fun.

I think you look great.

You're good, you're good.

Thank you so much. I imagine you had to stay up late for this, so we always appreciate it when someone can do that. Would you mind getting last man in the office?

It looks like leading by example.

Exactly.

This is what your team said.

More people here than me.

Yeah. No, your team said this about you. They said that you're obsessed with artificial intelligence right now. Obsessed with digging in, the wee, tinkering with stuff. Probably goes back to the early history of the company. Maybe that'd be a good place to start. How did you actually, like, what was the inciting element or the inciting incident that led you to start the company?

Wow. Well, so as you may know, I've been at this for longer than many others, so I'm at the 20th year of this venture.

An overnight success.

Overnight success.

We love an overnight success. It's been easy.

But I was 23 back then, so I'm not that old yet.

23.

But did you ever have a real job?

What? Did you ever have a real job or did you go straight into entrepreneurs?

I had many jobs. I have many jobs. I, you know, I started working when I was a 15 year old at Burger King.

Nice.

Flipping burgers.

That's great.

Were you any good?

Ever since. What?

Were you?

Were you any good flipping burgers? Yeah, I think we actually had a competition for like making Whoppers really fast. With quality. With quality. I think I scored pretty well. Good.

History of greatness.

So 15, you're flipping burgers. 23, you're starting a massive tech company that would go on a 20 year run. What happened in between?

Very shortly. Well, first look, for whatever reason, I always dreamt to be an entrepreneur. Kind of odd thing to do as a kid. My father really wanted me to be a doctor, but I was inspired by Richard Branson and Ingva Campra, the founder of Ikea and stuff. And I went to business school. Bad idea. I should have learned to code the first thing I did, but that was a bad idea. But anyways. And then after a few years of just testing a lot of different jobs, I ended up By a very odd story. Going around the world without flying. Coming back too late to continue my university studies and as a consequence ending up as a sales guy at a factoring firm that was doing account receivables. Last thing in the world I ever thought I would work with. And at that point in time realized there was a lot of these very small newcomer E commerce companies that were selling stuff online and they needed a better payment solution because their customers didn't trust them, didn't trust that they would ship. So they preferred the idea of buy now, pay later, where you would first receive the product and then kind of pay for it once you had it. And that was pretty much the beginning of Klona.

That makes Amazing. Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah. Walk me through the more recent developments. How big is the company today?

So we're about 100 million users worldwide. We do about $100 billion worth of payments volume annually. There's about half a million merchants, but a lot of them are really large. So there's like Nike, Macy's, Sephora, Walmart nowadays and. Yeah. What else? On number of employees? About 3,000 people.

Yeah, well, yeah. What was the initial go to market? I seem to remember there were specific dynamics in Europe around cash on delivery being a unique kind of vector into growth. Can you walk me through kind of like what the early go to market was and how. And it seems like you almost leapfrogged the technology curve a little bit.

Well, the truth is, funny enough, even in the US if you look at the beginning of credit bureaus, they actually a lot of them started as mail order companies where the first credit was provided actually by you shipping a product and asking for cash on delivery. And then the third time you ship to that same address, you would say, well, this customer seems to have money every time I ship to them. So I'm going to provide them a small credit credit line that was actually the beginning of a lot of credit bureaus even in the US back in the early 20th century. So I kind of same thing happened across Europe, across the U.S. so the idea of doing like cash on delivery and then turning that into a credit line based on the performance of that customer always having cash at hand when they were buying those products or paying for those products that they ordered at that point in time. Mail order, catalog orders. Right. That that actually worked. So in the end, to us, when online came along, most people were offering debit card payments. And the problem with debit card payments is the customer ships money and then maybe receives what was on that picture that they ordered. And so basically offering credit not necessarily for the lend for purpose of lending, but more for that kind of security of getting and touching the product before you paid for it made a lot of sense, especially in markets where credit cards were not as prevalent as they were in the U.S. right.

Yeah. What was the like as you were looking at the global map of expansion? What, what, what informed, like where you go next? Like, like walk me through the different markets that you, that you had at the top of the list and how you chose to kind of rank those as you expanded the.

How soon did you know the American consumer was undefeated? And you had to be, you had to have, you had to be here.

That took a long year.

We like stuff. We like stuff.

Yeah, we like to buy.

Exactly. Funny enough, took a lot of years before we realized you. I mean, first and foremost, like when we started, you have to remember at that point of time there was one, one globally successful European tech startup, and that was Skype. That was it. Like Skype was the thing. Everything else had been launched out of Silicon Valley. There was no real European tech success of that size that had like global consumer recognition. Right. And hence to us, it was like, okay, where are we going to go from Sweden? Let's go to the massive market called Finland that is half the size of Sweden because it's very close and you kind of know what it means. Right. So we kind of started with expansion in the Nordics, then went to like Germany, which was a huge thing for us, figured that out, and then went to uk and we always thought that we never like figured out how are we going to come into the US Market because credit cards are so prevalent. But the funny thing that we hadn't realized was due to the financial crisis in 07, there was a lot of regulation introduced that made it much harder to get a credit card. One thing that kind of sounds sane is that credit card companies couldn't advertise in campuses anymore, which is one of their most common places to sign up credit card holders, really. And so there was a lot of that regulation. So it meant that between 2010 and 20, debit cards in the US grew like a credit card volume grew about 2x, debit card volume grew 10x. And so actually, rather than us figuring out how to be successful in the US it was the other way around. The US market became more like the European markets with much higher debit card penetration, where buy now, pay later and the kind of products that we offered became much more relevant suddenly for these new Consumers that didn't have credit cards to the same extent or didn't have as much credit limit as they used to have historically.

Right, yeah. What was the rollout like in Finland, Germany, the US From a regulatory perspective, do you have to get banking licenses? Is there approval? Is it mostly regulatory or are you more focused on the engineering challenges, setting up servers, localization, all of them, all.

Of it, all of the above. But I think from a regulatory perspective we quickly identified that it would be a benefit to be fully licensed over time. About 10 years ago we did get our bank license and we were fortunate that EU had implemented legislation that meant that you could take your Swedish bank license and passport it across all the European countries. Right. So we run on the, on the Swedish bank license, but it's applicable for all and it included UK up until Brexit. Right. So yeah, so that worked for a long period of time, but obviously technology was an important challenge for us as well.

What are the knock on effects of having a bank license? I talk to fintech founders all the time where it feels like they're in the money moving business, but then you find out they have all this float and they're making a ton of money on treasury bills or something like that. Is there an aspect of your business where you can actually drive more profit and bottom line on the basis of having that bank license or is that less relevant? And then I want to go from there into stablecoins and what's going on and how that might be changing the market.

So I think that the, in our case what you're referencing is kind of funny enough, something we have underutilized the klana, which is the ability to generate the deposits and kind of earn interest of those deposits.

Right?

Yeah, funny enough, and that's something we're addressing right now, where we're introducing more products and services in that area, but where the big advantage for us was, if you look at the history over those 20 years of a lot of fintechs who were credit providers, a lot of them offloaded their balance sheet and did so effectively up until at some point in time something went wrong in the underwriting model and it turned out that the losses were higher than they expected. At which point of time the people that had taken on their balance sheets realized that they wanted to shift the liability back to the fintech, but the fintech was not capital wise equipped to take that on, meaning that their valuations either collapsed or the whole thing went bankrupt. And it's happened over and over again. If you look at A lot of the FinTechs over the last 20 years, in our case, the benefit of having deposits is we are a bank, we're fairly capitalized as a bank, we need to hold the same capital that any large bank needs to do in comparison to our balance sheet. And it means that we're much better equipped. Like, even if our losses go up and down or whatever, it doesn't change the sentiment of our balance sheet, doesn't mean that we can dry up funding. We're not dependent on the funding in the market. The whole thing that went down in 07. Right. Which was the problem where basically we only have deposits that are insured by the government and so forth. Right. So it gives us a much more stable way of funding the bank basically.

Then on stablecoins, is there any benefit to you there? We've heard stories about lower fees and faster payments and obviously there's a massive. The frequency of payments across the Klarna network is massive. Are you looking at it? Have you already looked at it? What's your takeaway on stablecoins or the genius act that seems on the.

We've had fintech CEOs on the show that have said actually traditional banking Rails can be pretty awesome if you utilize them properly. So curious what you read.

I think that the. I have been one of the crypto skeptics for a long period of time and, and the reason for that is when I started playing around this stuff 10 years ago, I felt that I always ask myself, how is this technology going to make my mom's life better? How is it going to make our products and our customers experience better? And I didn't really see any benefits of the technology apart from the fact people have been speculating that it's an interesting asset, an alternative asset to hold like Bitcoin or whatever. But then I gave it a second chance, a second look now about a year ago, started looking at next generation of stablecoin implications and implementations. And I very much agree with the fact that like now the technology is showing strong promise both in its speed, in its cost, et cetera, et cetera, versus the traditional bank rates, especially obviously in international transfers in corridors that are more like, you know, you're moving money from like UK to us, you're probably not going to make that big of a difference. But if you're moving money from, you know, Brazil to, let's say, Greece. Oh, sorry, that was a euro country. Stupid idea, stupid suggestion. But another one which, with a smaller currency you're going to have a very real benefit of it. Right. So I think that stablecoins definitely are going to be a major thing. I think also like crypto is here to stay and the bitcoins of the world are here to stay as assets. Right. That people find are interesting assets in their portfolio. So I don't think that's going to change either anytime soon.

Yeah, I'm always interested in where the value will accrue with these technological shifts. Specifically, like with stablecoins, you can imagine if you're going from two day settlement to instant settlement. Well, if the customer would accept one day settlement, all of a sudden you have one day afloat that's going to sit there that you could kind of keep as your own margin and maybe put in T bills and maybe it gets to be a big number. And so I've been, I've been kind of trying to understand their, like when their time is money and when, you know, when time decreases and systems get faster, you can pass all of that along, you can pass half of it along. And there's different things that different companies can do based on the consumer.

I think you're totally right. But that also means that in some degree, which is something I tell my investors, it's a race to the bottom. This payments industry has had a combined revenue globally addressable market of $2 trillion or whatever. It's not going to stay that way. There's no, there's no real good reason why it's more costly to send money than send an email. Right. There's a little bit more risk involved, there's a little bit more like, you know, security involved. But in essence you're just like shifting data between two accounts. And so like in some, to some degree that, like that those kind of solutions will drive. And that also means that the revenue generated from these services will be significantly lower than it is today. Right.

Yeah.

What's your broad. Not, not to go too broad, but what's, I'm curious to get your broad market outlook right now. You have this interest view into consumers, companies all over the world. It's a very interesting time right now. We have geopolitical instability, we have effectively war, we have tariffs, trade wars all happening at once. Yet at the same time we've seen Circle went public and is now trading higher, I guess higher than Coinbase. So it seems like the general excitement.

Around capital marches on.

Yeah, capital is marching on. But yeah. How are you thinking about markets broadly from your view?

To me, from my perspective, because of kind of the deep interest that I've taken into AI and try to understand the implications on how to apply the technology. I am very much convinced that it will have implications on white collar jobs. Effectively you can have like economical swings that you know, recession, non recession, it may, you know, higher inflation, higher cost pressure and so forth may have some implications for consumers sentiment of spending. You know, like I'm going to spend a bit more, I'm going to spend a little bit less and so forth. But, but the true life changing moment that affects people's true ability to pay back, right. Is to a large degree loss of jobs. Right. If you, if you lose your job then it severely impacts your ability to do so. I think that the key question now is to what degree we're going to see an acceleration of loss of jobs among white collar people which in itself then potentially leads to a recession and less spending in that group of people, which is obviously a group of people that have had a lot of money. So I think that's the area that I'm like mostly because the tariffs so far obviously have been announced and kind of changed and then announced again and change and so forth. And now it almost feels like if I look at our merchants when the first tariffs were announced on Labor Day, they really did adjust their marketing spending. We saw changes in the transaction volumes. We saw, for example, some of the larger Chinese companies that we work with would shift their marketing spend from US to Europe and would try to offset more of their inventory in the European market as opposed to the US market, et cetera. But as now also there's been more and more turbulence around these things. People start also discounting it, say like yeah, it was announced this week, but who knows what's going to happen next week. And so we're not going to draw too early conclusions from this. We're not going to change, you know, the business of what we're doing until we know it's for real. Right. And until it's actually going to happen. So I don't actually see currently in the trends the direct implications of the tariffs themselves in our business. But and I'm more just like trying to second guess if I'm going to see a major change in the in job.

And what are you trying to do?

The other thing is you're kind of hedged in some way and that I think people would be more likely to use Klarna if they in some ways have reduced spending capacity or more likely to leverage a product. I'm curious, just getting more specific around this. What is your updated hiring strategy throughout the rest of this year and next year, what are you hiring? What areas are you hiring in or kind of shifting away from?

So we about almost now, two years ago, after experimenting with ChatGPT and so forth for a few months, our conclusion was that this will lead. This will change our ability to get more done with less people, and that we believed that in an AI world, revenue per employee will be a very key metric because the higher revenue you have per employee, the more profit you make. Per employee means that you can spend more on marketing, means you can acquire more customers, which you can scale more. So if you have a low revenue per customer, you'll be less competitive, basically. And so for us, the question then was, how do we catch those efficiency gains? And so we decided to stop hiring about two years ago. @ that point in time, we were about 5,500 people. And since then we shrank to about 3,000 employees that we are currently, which is basically through natural attrition because, you know, in a tech company, about 20% will leave on an annual basis voluntarily because they're going for other jobs, other opportunities. And so by just being very strict in not rehiring, we have been able to shrink down the company and continue to do so. Now we've hired a little bit, doesn't mean that we haven't hired at all. We've hired in some areas and so forth. But if you look at the net, you can see that we've shrank from about 5,500 to 3,000. And then what we also done is internally, we've been very honest and open about this and we've communicated to our employees that what's going to happen is the gains. Because obviously this means our labor costs are shrinking while our revenue actually has been growing. Right. So revenue, as a consequence of that, our revenue per MP went from about 400k to about over a million now, which is kind of equivalent to where Goldman fact is now. Next. Yeah, thanks. Next step is kind of, you know, Apple, Netflix being at $2 million. I sometimes joke because, like, OnlyFans is at like $30 million.

Yeah, don't go there.

Yeah. Or don't look at Tether. Don't look at Tether will have you looking at net income per employee.

Yeah, exactly. So I'm not sure that's a great. The comparison you want to have. But the thing is that, like the. Anyway, so we are continuing down that path. And the point is that what we've communicated internally, however, is that as the total labor cost shrinks, we are reinvesting that in an acceleration of compensation for our existing employees. So as they participate in the efficiency gains, we have been able to accelerate both equity and cash compensation at Klarna to our existing employees more than we had in previous years. And that's kind of a way for them to share the benefits with the shareholders of the efficiency gains that this creates.

So if you're a new grad and you want to get a job at Klarna and make a career out of it, maybe be there for 20 years and earn a lot of stock and cash over, come for your job. Maybe come for your job. What should a new grad do? Should they learn prompt engineering? Should they learn to vibe code or program? Or should they be focused all on networking and management skills and people skills and the things that the robots seem to be mediocre at?

I think very clearly there's one area where we have not reduced number of people at all, and that's sales in our case, I mean like B2B enterprise sales. So we have people locally, on the ground, across the world, in over 50 offices. You know, whether they sit in, in China next to to Sheen and Tick tock and so forth, or whether they sit in Portland next to Nike, or whether they are in, you know, somewhere on the east coast or in parts of Europe and those obviously there's no like immediate expectations that those are in affected by this, right? Rather the opposite. Like that human connection in customer relationship is super important.

I've never seen a chatgpt have a power lunch and a steak dinner.

Exactly.

It's impossible till we get better humanoids.

But on the rest of jobs actually it's been quite interesting because for a period of time now we said okay, let's stop hiring all other competences then engineering. So if you look at that, 5,500 of them, 1,500 were engineers today. Of the 3,1500 are engineers. So actually the number of engineers have kept the same. While it's all the other like marketing, analytics, whatever it might be, that shrank now with that said, however, in the last months because of the acceleration of Claude code and cursor and all these tools, what you're seeing is now is a group internally at Klarna who are like a few hundred business people that in the last two years have learned how to code. Not necessarily like the most complex things, but inspect code, understand code, interact with code, but doing so with having all the business knowledge, understanding what the customer wants, understanding a lot of things that engineers sometimes have struggled with, like they can't articulate why we're building the product, for what purpose, for how it's going to solve customer needs and so forth. And they've been maybe sometimes more focused on just like, like latency or technical implications or you know, et cetera. So I kind of see a convergence now of the truly kind of renaissance people that are kind of, you know, both on both sides, that can understand the code but can also understand the business. Those are the ones that are now truly becoming the most productive, in my opinion.

What is your framework for buying AI tools versus building AI tools internally?

Right. So we have been fairly vocal about the fact that. But as part of acceleration of AI, Klarna, one of the first thing that we concluded, Remember ChatGPT came along, there was this like, hey, I can now connect all my PDFs to ChatGPT, you know, and like. And people were like, oh, that's awesome. The only problem with that is that like the truth in data modeling and data science has always been like shit in, shit out, right? So if you feed it tons of like internal stuff that is contradicting, inconsequential, not truthful, whatever, it's just going to get lost, right? Just like some of our employees get lost when they start navigating the internal workings of Klarna. So the first thing that we realized is we can't silo the data anymore. We have to have a common data model. And that meant that we started removing software as a service providers. So we closed down Salesforce Workday. I think the next big one that would go is Atlassian, Jira and so forth. But then there's also like a long amount of smaller software as a service vendors that we have utilized. So actually if you kind of count it in total, there's over 1,500 that we have closed down in the last two years. Now obviously some of them are like super small, like some plugin to Jira or whatever. Like it's not like every one of them is like a tremendously big software as a service application. And then we've kind of harmonized and standardized our data layers so that we have one data that we can then let the LLM interpret and run on top of allowing us to do more with less. Right. So currently there are a few things like we will use 11 labs for voice. We will use specific people that are really proficient. We use a company called fullstory, that's fantastic, to kind of catch user interactions. So there's some places where we just found like this software is so strong that there's really no meaning in trying to replace it. But a lot of traditional SaaS may have just been a database with some nice UI and some data and some process logic on top of. And that is easier to replicate today. And it's not easy, but it's easier. And the problem is if it's spread out, it's inconsistent and we need it to be consistent for both humans and LLM to make sense out of it.

Well, this is fantastic. This is super interesting. I feel like we should talk regularly about the situation with white collar workers and just the advance of AI tooling. There's so many interesting things where you have a unique insight because of your position in the industry.

Last question for me before we jump. Do you think cookies hurt conversion rates across Europe.

Policies?

Yeah, just. Just the fact, just generally. Well, generally half an hour. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we could spend half an hour. But no, but generally like the more clicks you need on a website to get to the eventual purchase, you know, the worst the conversion rate.

And maybe that's why the American consumer is outperforming.

Yeah, just purely technicality.

I think the challenge of gdpr, which is the legislation that led to those that cookie, sorry to say, some shit show, is that the problem was it came from a very good principle and idea and that is that we as users should own and control our data, not the companies. Right. If you think about it, a few years ago WhatsApp there was some rumors that they have updated the terms of use and now there was so much more privacy infringing and everyone should shift. Right now how many people really shifted to Telegram or whatever? Not enough. Right. Why? Because at the center, the way it should have worked is you should have been able to go to WhatsApp with a click of a button, extract all the data, all your contacts, all your messages and be able to then feed them into Telegram or Signal or whatever your choice of preference would have been. That would have been true customer mobility. And that was the purpose of gdpr, is to allow that customer mobility. But because the legislation wasn't implemented thoughtfully enough, that hasn't materialized. Because in that world where you had 100% customer mobility. The point is, if you lost trust in WhatsApp as a provider of your primary chat messages, you would have instantly been able to move to something else. And the fear of losing all your users in such a very mobile world where everyone could move would have forced WhatsApp to be concerned about privacy and not just speak that they are concerned about privacy. Right. So like I think that and that was the original intent, but then it was implemented with these cookies, which actually creates the opposite, which is that like, we're just tired of accepting cookies. So I don't want to go to new website because then I have to click again on 55. Like the people that, the people that wanted these kind of laws had the right intentions, but the implementations are horrendous and actually cause the opposite, which is less customer mobility, people less willing to shift services and try different things. And funny enough, are hence playing into the hands of the same companies that they were annoyed with for infringing on our privacy. Because as that creates, just like the bigger success of these big tech companies, full customer mobility, they're being able to take your data with you and go wherever you want is the key to creating a better competitive Internet where companies actually have to compete on creating more value for you as a customer rather than locking you up and locking your data up and then, you know, creating models that just forces you to use the same thing.

Makes tons of sense.

Makes sense. Thank you for joining.

It's fantastic.

Thank you for an amazing pod.

Yeah, we'll talk to you soon.

We'll talk soon.

Bye. Sebastian, let me tell you about public.com investing for those who take it seriously. Multi asset investing, industry leading yields. They're trusted by millions, folks. And they're the sponsor of Aston Martin F1.

That's right. Public.com head over.

We have our next guest in the.

Studio already we have John Chu.

How you doing?

Coastal Ventures. What's going on? Welcome to the show. Good to be here. It's great to have you. I. We didn't. We didn't prepare at all, which is part of the beauty of our show. You just come in, you're live. And we will do it live. The showbiz. It's great to have you. I've got a bunch of questions. You're always getting spicy on the timeline. We'll talk through a bunch, but why don't you introduce yourself? Quick background what you're doing at cosa, all that good stuff.

Yeah. So I'm John.

I'm one of the partners here at kv.

I do a lot of technical things, so basically anything I've really written code on in the past. So, like data infrastructure, dev tools, a.

Lot of AI stuff from foundation models in the app layer, if I really.

Understand what it does.

Right.

Yeah.

Awesome. Let's get right into it. What are you reading into the news around dg? Potentially going to meta and all that. Was that a surprise to you? What can you talk about there? Yeah.

So it was a big surprise. I actually say the funny thought that came to mind when I first heard the rumor was like, should I be buying Meta options? Because does that mean Zuck got Ilia?

Right.

And then that gets announced and Meta just jumps. But look, it's pretty obvious what's going on here is that there's a giant.

Market in AI, right?

OpenAI proves that the pie is huge.

And Zuck has a shot on goal.

And Zuck is not someone that likes to lose shots on goals. So if he has to pay up to get the best talent that he.

Thinks that can actually compete, he doesn't.

Even have to win.

You don't have to beat OpenAI.

You just have to be number two.

If he can get there, billions of.

Dollars is worth it, right? So all of this makes sense when you think of it through the lens of Facebook is a giant company. A billion dollars, five billion dollars.

That's a drop in the bucket if.

You take on this new market that ends up dominating.

The last thing he wants to be is, like, Microsoft and miss phones.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. What do you think about the phone story? At one point, Facebook was working on a phone, and maybe the lesson that Zuck learned is that he should have put more resources into that instead of not try to do it at all. I'm wondering, because there's all these different stories VR. He's investing way ahead of adoption reels. He was a little bit behind, but wound up rolling out a product that I believe produces tons of profit. And so it was totally worth investing in and taking the shot at building out all those data centers to do the recommendation algorithms. So, yeah, I mean, what other examples do you think we should be pulling from the meta history or do you think that might be relevant here?

Well, I mean, there's basically two things to know about Meta, right?

One is that they are fantastic fast followers.

They either buy or they copy. I think, like, Snapchat is a fantastic.

Example of that, where, like, the stories, literally, like, that was a team that just copied stories and just executed better.

So, like, if anything, Facebook is an.

Execution machine, and they are able to pull that off. And then the second takeaway is Zuck is willing to date bets. So, like, I think Oculus, the acquisition, and the whole metaverse is a great example of that. And you don't win all of them. Right.

But I think on the upside, he's.

Won more of them in terms of, call it shareholder value than he's lost. So this is just another One of those, and this one, I think he has extremely strong conviction behind. More so than you. The fact that AI is already doing real things in the real world that actually are impacting enterprises and impacting real people gives you a significantly higher confidence bar than the Metaverse bet to have.

Significantly more confidence here.

I was talking to a guy at.

Windsurf who runs their field engineering team.

And he was like, oh, I talked.

To these enterprise and they're like, we're.

Going to buy 2,500 windsurf licenses because this was fantastic. And those guys, he's like, why don't you buy 5,000? Because you have 5,000 engineers.

And he's like, yeah, we're not going to have 5,000 engineers because of windsurf.

We're having 2,500 engineers.

It's actually doing real things.

Yeah.

How can Meta benefit broadly from AI, not just in the foundation model game or image generation or things like that. We've talked about just getting slightly better at AI across the entire organization can have tremendous benefits on just improving delivery of ads and these sort of like basic things. You were working on ML at Facebook back in the day, so I'm sure you have some, some strong insights.

Well, so I think like there's a few layers here. If you start from the product level.

The obvious is that there's new products that are going to be built, right?

There's the whole like Joni I've and OpenAI thing, right. And that's some kind of hardware thing. We're all guessing that's probably a new product.

And if you just take the lens of if this technology in five years gets significantly better.

I have a bunch of hardware products inside of Meta. I can add more.

I have a great research team that knows how to build great hardware.

I know how to handle the supply chain. What can I build?

There's random upside there in products.

If you go back to the current Facebook suite, there's Meta.

AI is already doing a lot of this.

But you have chat apps, you have.

Messenger, you have WhatsApp, right? Like you can already do chatting in there, you have a great llama model. If you have ChatGPT in there, you.

Can just pull them into conversations and already add value.

That increases engagement, that increases ads views, Right.

That's automatic money there.

And then if you go back to where I worked, like in ads models, you're seeing less of it with generative AI today, mainly because everything is doing.

Attention on sequences and ads like ranking.

Models are a little bit different, but people are already Applying research to different.

Layers of the ads models.

And like, if you have a 1%.

Uptick in ad score, that's like a billion dollars. Actually.

It's like a percentage increase in revenue. So like a billion dollars today, in the future, 1% is going to be like $10 billion. Right.

If Facebook goes tax.

And there's some really interesting research there.

Like, I have a Portco that I invested in actually was a distinguished Ange.

At Facebook or at Meta, and he's kind of got some technology that's a foundation model for ranking, where you really just don't need any feature engineering.

And I saw another company this morning.

Which is the same that rips out.

Giant pieces of infrastructure, has automatic increase.

In ad score ranking, and you can fire all your ML engineers. You probably don't want to do that, but you can fire most of the.

ML engineers at Facebook.

That's gigantic.

That kind of stuff is going to happen. The timescale is a question, but it's going to happen over time.

Do you think that the UI paradigm around AI's interface with social networking is defined enough? I'm thinking of the example of Snapchat and Instagram Stories. It was very clear that Evan Spiegel at Snapchat did enough of the experimentation to define how vertical disappearing video and images would be distributed on social networks. And then Facebook was able to adapt that and adopt that and bake it into Instagram. When I think of what big tech companies, which of the Mag 7 is most closely cheating off of ChatGPT's homework? It feels like it's Gemini. And the Gemini app feels much more directly competitive to the ChatGPT app. I would be surprised if Facebook or Meta or Instagram tries to stuff an entire ChatGPT experience into the fifth panel on the hamburger menu. So I'm wondering, like, is. Is there. Is the story of Meta's AI rollout really just about ad optimization, or are we actually going to see it instantiated in different UI and like, interaction paradigms?

You're going to see it everywhere. Ads is just an obvious place. You get a win, right?

Yeah, but like you're, you're going to see it.

Actually, someone might stick it in a tab somewhere.

If, if I know anything about Facebook.

Having been there, like, if the number.

Goes up and to the right, they'll do it.

So, like that, that might happen.

But like in, like I said, inside of messenger and WhatsApp, I think there's.

Going to be lots and lots of usage there.

And if you think about it, like.

People Ask this question. I was actually a little confused at first.

They're like, why did you pay 15 billion for what? It sounds like just Alex Wong.

Right? Like, that's one guy.

And then you think about it for a bit and you're like, okay, well.

What makes OpenAI OpenAI? You're like, yes, there's great tech, but.

Actually runs that thing and Sam makes it successful.

And then if you ask anyone and.

Why, even Paul Graham is like, okay.

If you had to pick someone again, that's like a top founder inside the YC network, that's not Sam, who would you pick? Even Paul Graham says, alex.

So if you're looking at products inside.

Of Facebook or even outside of Facebook.

Pick the guy, right?

Yep. Yeah. I mean, it feels like a really strong total reset of Meta's AI strategy. Bring in three absolute hitters and turn them loose on whatever the next phase is. Yann Lecun was there for kind of the research, like Journey and the research part of the AI story. Now we're in the application story and so go get the managers. Right.

How much should people read into? Again, this is all alleged. I don't think it's been confirmed that DG is joining Meta yet, but rumored. How much should should people be reading into the CEO of SSI leaving to work at Meta and using that to inform their general timelines. If we were on the cusp of developing superintelligence in two years, maybe you wouldn't leave billions of dollars on the table at a company that had the potential of cracking that. Even getting a billion dollars ish liquid at Meta. It's great. But still, I think it's hard not to read into the move if it happens. I have no knowledge here.

I don't know Dan well enough to know what his kind of thoughts behind.

This are and what drove the decision. Right. But I can say, honestly for myself, working with Ilya would be an amazing dream, and it's kind of amazing to.

Do at the same time. SSI is a pure research lab.

So it's not like OpenAI, where SAM is over here trying to build products. It's a pure research lab.

And I don't know if that's what.

Dan actually finds fun and also what.

He actually excels at.

Versus Meta also has a giant research lab, tons of opportunity and unlimited GPUs and money.

Right.

And distribution to scale products.

And get data to feed them back into the models. Yeah, it's huge.

Like distribution, everyone underweights that.

All these gems that come out of Facebook and Pitch me. The thing they always miss is like.

No, distribution is not trivial.

It was trivial for you at Facebook, but it's like not real world.

Yeah, yeah. Oh, you got a billion people to, you know, click on your new button. It's like, that'll be a lot harder when you're starting from zero.

Do you think about Apple? Yeah, I was going to say, do you think Apple will make a big bet here? They're were conversations reporting over.

You're talking about Tim Cook going to Meta to get a pay bump.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Because he's barely scraping at Apple. He's 75 under. 75.

Under 75 a year.

He could probably double that if he went over to Meta.

Yeah, something there. But do you expect Apple to make a big bet here? There was rumors over the weekend of reporting that they had spoken to perplexity and thinking machines. Do you think that they're willing to make a big, big investment? You know, Siri, over 10 years ago was 200 million. That's like a seat an AI seed round for ants these days. So I'm curious, man, seed rounds are so expensive. You're like, don't remind me, dude. I've been priced out of almost every.

Round in AI research I've tried to do this year.

There've been a few exceptions, but, like.

It'S not like I'm priced out by a small amount.

It's like 2x my price or whatnot.

How are you even underwriting an AI research bet these days? Are you pulling out a spreadsheet and building the market size or is it just like based on the vibe of this founder? I'd pay 50, but the price came back at 100.

Like I get in the future and.

Then I figure out if it's actually going to work.

Yep, yeah, that's good.

It's basically you got to underwrite the.

Team and then the opportunity size.

Right.

That's really all you can do. I mean, that's basically what we did.

When we did Sakana.

Yeah. I was going to ask about Sakana, the Japanese.

Yeah. Language model, very cool company.

But that, like today, it's even worse.

Is like, that's really all you can do.

Yeah.

And then part of it's like if the price is just not there, given the confidence interval, then like, you got to step back.

Right?

Yeah. At the same time, I mean, the, the, the SSI deal, the scale AI deal, like, it feels like it's potentially easier than ever to get taken care of as an investor if even if you Overpaid and did a seed at 300. Like the Mag 7 has money to spend on multi billion dollar acquisitions. Like a lot of these crazy looking deals might get rolled up but I don't know how many of these there will be. Like you have to be, you have to be backing a founder like an Alex Wong or like Nat and Dan to even have that on the table.

Yeah, if you back a generational entrepreneur you'll have a little bit of a safety net. But they have to be. Yeah. It's funny, we don't typically underwrite to acquisitions.

We only underwrite to can this company ipo. And I think most investors do that.

If you think about it too, there's.

Like seven of the seven.

So shots on goal is not really an investment. You're going to put like 200 mil post on, right?

Yeah.

That being said, I made this, it.

Was a half joke when we were looking at one of these hot rounds.

In the seed round. I was like, you know what we should do? We should just invest now and then sell it. The next round it'd be like the.

Best buyer on the planet.

And Vinod looks at me dead and.

He'S part of me.

He looks at me dead and he's just like, you'd be a great hedge fund manager.

We don't do that here.

I think it's a good strategy for angels to be honest. Angels are the only. The check sizes are lower, you can get a quick 10x and sell in three months.

What are your billion dollar SPAC or a $14 billion aqua hire on your ROI again too? I got, I pitched a SPAC recently. Oh really? Wait, why are they pitching you a spac?

They're like hey, got any port codes?

And then he wanted us in the pipe and I was like, wow, spacs.

Now they're coming back.

Wow.

What's your updated thinking on memory as a lock in and a moat for different model providers? App layer companies? You had been, it sounds like you've been pitched by a bunch of like plaid for memory type companies. You've been posting about this. What's your kind of framework there?

I, I still don't have a clear.

View to be honest.

I, I think it is a mode.

So you look at all of the, the model providers, they need different ways.

To keep their customers coming back to.

Them versus going to other model providers.

And memory is one way to do it. If you have enough history on the.

Person, you can, can tailor recommendations, tailor responses, et cetera, et cetera. Right. You've seen this Play isn't like the first time someone's done this.

I think the best example of a.

Data mode is effectively Google and search. It's literally like, oh, I get so much search data that I can do better ads and make a better product, and then no one on the planet can get more search data than me.

Because I am the best.

You all come to me and you give me more data.

So it's kind of the same play at the same time. I see why users want this memory.

Thing of like, oh, I can shift memory from OpenAI over to anthropic. But then I have the same question of, well, why would OpenAI let you do that? Why is Google going to let you.

Take their data and give it to Bing?

It's just not going to happen. So I still don't see what the outside function is where an anthropic or an OpenAI would be game for that.

Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, that seems like the entire dynamic is that it's a good idea, but customers won't demand it. It's the same dynamic as, you know, should I be able to. We were having this discussion back in like 2010 about like Google's walled garden, like, can I export all my Google data or all my Facebook data and just give it to Google to get better ads like that Potentially. But no one's demanding that from the customer side and so it'll never happen from the B2B side.

Yeah. Are you worried in general about there's been a bunch of different app layer companies that are kind of B2B players, that are building products that ultimately will just potentially be built into things like the Google Suite. Right. And happen where you can get sort of these sort of fast revenue ramps, something like a calendly, but then ultimately just get added as a functionality to core Google workspace or teams functionality. Yeah. So this is kind of funny.

This is like one of those questions.

That keeps coming up is like, started with like GPT wrappers where it's like, oh, my startup is going to die. Now it's like, all right, what's inside the space of these model companies? And the answer is like, you need.

Some story for defensibility. And I actually don't understand why this.

Is so hard for people to grok.

Because, like, this has been the history of technology forever. Is like, yes, there's tech.

Tech eventually gets eroded.

What stays along that gives you defensibility? Is it community?

Is it some kind of open source thing?

Is it workflow lock in? There's these Moats that have existed forever.

That everyone knows about. And for some reason, because the word AI is here, entrepreneurs and VCs just.

Forget about the existing moats.

They're like, yeah, this is something different and new. And it's like, no, it's not. It's just like technology like before.

Right. So that's really. The story is like, yes, things will.

Get eaten and yes, you're already. I've seen plenty of companies get killed that are shallow GPT wrappers and I'm seeing some actually deep technical notes getting overrun by OpenAI and anthropic.

And you just need the story on like, okay, how do I get to.

Something defensible and can I get there in time?

What do you think about these new generation of startups? Some of them are in AI where it seems like the efforts of the team are like 90% marketing and they're really, really good at getting a ton of attention. And they're being very noisy. And Gary Tan was kind of framing it as like, maybe they're trying to win in distribution and then kind of hold on to the attention until the AI models pick up. It feels like it's almost like a necessary evil of, of the current market and how fast things move that if you want to accelerate revenue and kind of live up to the standards of the day, you have to be very, very noisy online. But do you see it as like a counter signal or do you think that there's something where maybe this is around to stay?

It's not necessarily a counter signal.

It's the same as when we pick companies.

If you're too early, you're wrong. Right. Same thing for founders. Here is like, some of these founders are fantastic, especially these younger founders are fantastic at getting attention. And I think historically with any company, any movie, any pop star, any type of hits, eventually the attention wanes.

Right.

So really it's a timing thing of.

Like, I need the attention to translate.

Into customers and if my product's not.

There, I'm going to see churn. So how long can I capture attention?

Does that overlap before my product actually doesn't have churn? If I have enough timeline in the.

Middle and I timed it right, then I win, then I lose.

Right?

Yep.

It's like pretty much that simple. It's simple to say it's not an.

Easy game to play, but if you play it correctly, you have a giant company.

Yeah, yeah. The organic attention getting, it seems like a, a really great go to market or like early beachhead, but it doesn't feel Like a sustainable flywheel versus some of the other permanent go to market motions or like viral loops that drive meta to beat earnings every year for decades or something like that.

It can get you into one, right?

Exactly.

Yeah.

It's an opportunity. Yeah. It gets you the shot on goal where as a lot of entrepreneurs that are maybe those PMs that say I'm going to get distribution and they just, just put out a, you know, press release and they're like, where did all the customers go? I don't have any clicks on my, on my button. So yeah, it, it is kind of a necessary thing.

There was a, there was a market map a while back showing all the different venture funds investing in all the different labs. You, you guys at Khosla are OpenAI purists. So passed on, I'm sure had the opportunity to invest in all the different, you know, anthropic Xai cohere. All these different, different players talk about kind of that. Was that always an intentional decision? Is it let's stick to ventures roots and have our bet or was it sort of a lucky ability to just be in the breakout winner that's the lab and the consumer app and so talk through that decision making process and maybe kind of insights from different partner meetings. I don't know if we've ever like discuss this intentionally until we kind of came to the like OpenAI it thing. But I, I think it happens kind of organically where you, you work with a founder, you work with a team, you have giant breakthroughs and giant wins. You own enough of a company where.

Like their success is basically your success.

And.

It kind of looks like.

They'Re.

Going to win it anyways.

We had this back and forth on Twitter. I know, but Keith was kind of like, yeah, I don't think another Transformers.

Based or another foundation model company is.

Going to be a great VC return outside of acquisitions.

And it's kind of like, yeah, how.

Are you going to be at OpenAI?

It's quite hard. They have distribution, they have marketing brand.

They can have a shittier product and.

They probably still win this. Right? So.

And they have money. Money is actually very important in this game because of GPUs. So it's both the like, we bet on this horse.

We love this team.

We work very great with them, very closely with them. There's like symbiotic value here and also like they're probably going to win this. Yeah, yeah, we'd love to have you. What are you. Last question. What are you expecting out of. Are you expecting to see ads in various LLMs consumer apps this year? I'm sure you've been pitched. People saying, I'm going to build an ad network for LLMs. I'm sure you have opinions on that as well. But what are you expecting to see out of the next year? A big question I have is, will the average American pay for their favorite LLM three years from now? I've been trying to figure that out. Or will it just sort of go closer and closer to free over time?

I don't actually know.

What do you mean? You're a vc. You know everything. You should have a crystal ball on your desk. I like technology and I think there's.

Many ways to monetize this and people will try all of them.

So are there going to be ads? Yes, people will try it. I mean, like Arvind over at Perplexity already said he was going to try it.

Right?

So we're going to see that at some point. Is it going to be the model that works?

Who knows? But it is like a nice, tried.

And true model, Right? So there's a good probability that it.

Does work for some set of products.

I saw somebody had a pretty viral post last week saying, I'm so sick of being asked to sign up for different services across the whole Internet. And then what's his name at Antonio at Coinbase was like, I'll tell you a model for this, but you're not gonna like it. It's ads. Anyways, thank you for joining, appreciate all the insights and welcome back anytime.

Yeah, this was fun. We'll talk to you soon.

Thanks guys. This was fun.

Have a good one.

Cheers, John.

Bye. Until you can buy ads in ChatGPT, you gotta stick to ads out of home.

Out of the home.

Out of the home. Using Adquick.com advertising made easy and measurable. 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. We have our next guest in the studio, Tom Mueller from Impulse Space.

I'll be right back.

Back I will to handle the intro. Tom, how are you doing? We are bringing him in in just a second. To give you more background on Impulse, I met Tom. Oh, it must have been two and a half years ago. Legend in the space community. Worked at SpaceX. Also a car aficionado who engaged with my post about the Coogan test, which of course is the challenge to have a humanoid robot step into a Dodge Viper ACR and lap the Nurburgring in under seven minutes. It's been done by a human in seven minutes and one second and a few milliseconds. It's an extremely difficult challenge, requiring physical endurance of the G forces, but also a bunch of dexterity and obviously image processing. And I was talking to a bunch of AI folks about how long it will be until humanoids are actually at that level where they could do something like that. And it took, I think the consensus was around 2045, something like that. Anyway, Tom, great to meet you.

I don't think it'll take that long. Was it.

How long do you think it'll take? This is a great question.

When you take fear out.

Yeah, yeah, maybe that's a big one. I don't know. You've done a lot more laps than I have, so. Please don't.

They have. They haven't already shown that fighter aircraft can beat a human and, you know, in dogfight. So.

Yes. So the difference there is that I, I'm adding the challenge of the. The Dodge Viper ACR must be stock and so the humanoid must operate three pedals and the stick shift and the steering wheel. And that's a lot more challenging than just plugging into the steering column and, you know, controlling it like you do in a Tesla or Waymo. And so I think that adds a wrinkle. But I don't know, 2045, 2035. It's clearly going to happen. But that's, that's a good way to say that you're bullish about humanoid robotics.

Yeah.

Do you anticipate that humanoid robotics will have an impact on your business in the next decade in terms of maybe manufacturing or something even more narrow scope?

Certainly manufacturing, I think, I think for manufacturing, robotics are nailpig fast. But I think, you know, I think humans should explore space. But. But it's really expensive and dangerous to put humans in space. So if you really want to, like, you know, use the economies of space, I think it's going to take a lot of robotics. So I'm bullish about robotics.

We got to put a Nurburgring on Mars and then ship, which I'm all about.

Yeah, I would love a taxpayer dollars to put a racetrack on Mars.

I would love that. Anyway, sorry, we jumped straight into it. Would you mind kicking us off with an introduction for both of you and a little bit about the company?

Yeah, sure, yeah. I'm Tom Mueller. I'm the CEO and founder of Impulse Space. I was one of the founding members of SpaceX where I led the development of the propulsion Systems for Falcon 9 and Dragon and a little bit into starship and left there in 2020 and started Impulse in 2021. And we have our four year anniversary here coming up next month.

Congratulations, that's great to hear. That's amazing.

And it's been doing great.

And Eric, would you mind introducing yourself? Yeah, sure.

I am Eric Romo.

I'm the president of the company.

I've been with the company for the last two years. I've known Tom for better part of God, Tom, 22 years I want to say now. So I was an early propulsion engineer at SpaceX in the very early days and then went and did a bunch of non space, non propulsion stuff for.

A long time and found my way.

Back to Tom a couple of years ago.

Amazing. Yeah, I mean, as I describe it in kind of layman's terms or in terms even a venture capitalist could understand, you can get to LEO pretty easily, but you need impulse to get to higher orbits. Is that still kind of the bread and butter of the business? Am I describing it even remotely accurately?

Yeah, you know, at SpaceX we, I think we really made LEO very accessible, lowered the cost, made it, you know, you get, you know, flights going there, you know, every other day. So I want to do the same for, for everything beyond leo. So get, make it much easier to get to high energy orbits, to get to the moon, to get to Mars, get to outer planets, anywhere in space. Like, let's make it much easier, much more affordable and you know, really start the true space age.

Yeah. When you were at SpaceX, did you have an idea of how valuable LEO would be? I think a lot of folks, Starlink took them by surprise basically in terms of not just how awesome that service is if you've been on a plane and used it, but also the business that was to be built there. Did that take you by surprise? And then is there something that you can use as a concrete example of what is exciting about the higher orbits?

Well, yeah, I'm old enough to remember the first time we tried to do LEO constellations, you know, back in the late 90s and, and actually worked with some companies that tried to do it and you know, it wasn't the right time. Technology has improved a lot, especially low cost launch, you know, better bandwidth, easier to manufacture spacecraft, all the things. So I kind of realized it was the right time. When it was, you know, when, when SpaceX first started talking about it, it really clicked. I'm like, yeah, we need to do this.

Yeah. And so in terms of the higher orbits, what are, I mean, obviously going to the moon is very concrete. Are there specific obvious business cases or anything that would be, you know, inspiring or immediately relevant that somebody would.

Geostationary orbit is still probably the most important orbit because it's the 24 hour orbit over the equator. So you, you, you just point your dish at that and, and it's always there in the sky or your antenna or you can cover the whole, you can cover the whole earth with, with three satellites.

Wow.

So making access much more affordable to that I think is a huge help. But then I'm, I'm, you know, I've always said I'm really all about a lunar economy starting and even mining asteroids and things like that. So those are the, those are the things I'm most excited about.

Question. I'm sure you guys have gotten asked in every single pitch meeting, so I'll ask it. Why do you think this is on SpaceX's roadmap? Are you guys partnered with them already? Do you expect them to want to prioritize this in the future or what does that partnership or competitive dynamic look like?

Lenny, you cover that one, Eric? Yeah, I mean they're pretty busy, right?

And so this is the equivalent of.

The Silicon Valley startup question of like.

Why doesn't Google just do that or.

Facebook just do that or. Right. They could, they could do anything.

All right. They're technically amazing company that show they.

Can execute on pretty much anything they sink their teeth into. I think the question is will they and what, where would this be on the priority stack? So you know, one of our products, Helios, is really good at getting large payloads to hydroge orbits like medium earth orbit and, and geostationary orbit. SpaceX can certainly do that with a Falcon Heavy, but they've been super vocal about the fact that they would prefer not to. And there's operational reasons for that, cost reasons for that. But so this is a space where we think that we can actually help them, other launch providers get to a thing that they're to some degree ignoring right now. And then on the small spacecraft side of things, we make a small highly maneuverable vehicle called mira, which is largely usable for space force. So we announced some contracts with them late last year and a partnership with.

Anduril to go to market with Mira.

And that's a thing that's pretty far afield from anything that SpaceX is working on today. Starlink is awesome, but it kind of just sits there right as a constellation, whereas MIRA is designed to move very.

Quickly as its core competency.

Can you talk about the lunar economy and how you imagine that developing. Does it start with tourism or scientific exploration? Do we need an ISS like base that's kind of taxpayer funded on the moon first or do we go straight to mining or helium 3? I remember the movie Moon. But what, what are like, what are the, what is the tech tree look like as we build out the moon as a capability?

Possibly all of the above. Like mining helium 3 certainly could be a good starting point because it's even right now on Earth if you don't flood the market. It's on the order of $20 million a kilogram. So you can certainly, if you can get it on them. I don't know how the part of getting it like you got to mine apparently millions of tons of regal it to get it.

Okay.

But if you have it there, transporting it back is like 1, 500 to that cost. So it's definitely, it's economically doable assuming that you have, you have you know, a can of it. But I think if, if, if you're doing mega structures or, or, or massive manufacturing in LEO pretty fast you'll figure out that it's 23 times roughly more efficient to bring mass from the surface of the moon than from the surface of the Earth. Just because the gravity well is so much lower.

Yep.

And I think that's, that's when the real use of the resources of the moon will happen just to get, to get material to low Earth orbit.

Yeah, yeah. I've always thought that the Moon was also just a great staging ground for Mars. You imagine if you're up there, the moon's always facing Earth so something goes wrong. You know the Sci Fi version, oh, there's a crack in your, in your suit, you can just dive in an escape pod and you're aiming in the right direction. Whereas Mars, you have to deal with the transfer window. It's a whole different, different problem. And if we can get really good at living on the Moon, we're probably going to be able to get good at living on, on Mars. I am interested in kind of these questions about when the one of the great stories about SpaceX is that it feels like it's a relatively smooth handoff of capability in terms of launch capacity from NASA to SpaceX, from the taxpayer to the private sector. At the same time, I love that NASA put a helicopter on Mars because I can't imagine that would ever happen. No matter how crazy the VCs are, I don't see that happening. And being underwritten against any sort of 10 year, 20 year, you know, life cycle of return on investment. And so my question for you is like, what type of space projects should we be pushing into the, you know, the NASA world, the government funded world, the even the nonprofit world versus what is commercializable today? And do you see both as important going forward that we, that we kind of have this, you know, taxpayer funded R and D, the really fringe scientific experiments and then we commercialize things when they're ready?

Well, I think two things really that I'd like to see from, from NASA mainly is, is answering the big science questions like is there other life out there? And, and also let's explore what's out there. Like I just posted a picture this morning from the, the new Vera Rubin Observatory. Amazing, you know, just amazing stuff that you could continue to do things like that. And, but I think as far as develop, they should develop technology that's, that that takes a lot of money to develop that maybe commercial companies aren't going to invest in now. Like I think the next thing, you know, Jared Isaacman was talking about is NEP on. I, I'm always touting that too as the next step in propulsion. So rather than, than build a giant rocket that competes against people that already build giant rockets, why don't they go develop the next thing, you know, the next, the next technology? I think that's probably the best use of taxpayer money through NASA is to advance science.

How do you think about. Oh, sorry, yeah, I was just gonna.

Say fundamentally I think NASA needs to figure out if it's a jobs program.

Or if it has goals.

Right.

I mean, I think that's a, that's a thing like SLS made no sense in the commercial rocket economy. Maybe it did when it started planning 20 years ago or whatever, but for the last decade or more it's made zero sense.

But yet it's still kind of hanging on because Congress wants to fund jobs.

In Alabama, which is maybe a noble purpose. But is that the purpose of NASA?

I think is the thing that they.

Need to figure out.

Yeah. How do you think about extraterrestrial life? Do you ascribe to the dark forest theory or like do you think it's promising? Do you think, you know, we will have an answer to this in a few years? Do you think we're getting closer? What is your take overall?

Yeah, we need, we need to get, we need more information. Definitely. I hope it's just life is extremely rare and it's not, you know, some great filter that's still ahead of us.

Yeah, yeah, that'd be a good.

What are the kind of upcoming events in the next one to two years in commercial space that you think can be major catalysts for the industry overall that maybe you guys are working on or that you want to see from the industry broadly?

Well, something that we're not working on, but something that SpaceX is developing is Starship. I really started this company realizing that Starship and other reusable rockets are going to be bringing massive amounts of cargo to Leo and it needs to go other places. So that was the premise of his company. So, so I'm excited about Starship finishing development and becoming a commercial, you know, commercially viable spacecraft. And then, well, we have really, you know, we have the mirror that, that Eric talked about earlier and energy is really for, for government and defense. And then we have Helios coming on online here next year. We're developing it right now, which is basically adding a third stage to Falcon 9 and other mid sized rockets. And that's what it can allow us to get, you know, more easily to high energy orbits. So those are the two big things for us right now. Super excited about. Lunar landers, Mars landers, all kinds of cool stuff.

It's gonna be awesome.

I was just gonna tack on, I.

Think you're seeing one big trend is that space force, the rhetoric of counter space or space defense activities has really ramped up in the last six months. In the public sphere there's not been a lot of investment in, you know, sort of space on space defense, but in privately space Source has been talking.

About that a lot more.

And then they started about six months ago, really publicly, not coincidentally with the change in administration. And so the, the question I think for companies like ours is, you know, do dollars follow that rhetoric? You know, is there increased investment in.

That sort of thing?

And then on the commercial side, I think you have an awful lot of operators who are trying to figure out how do they carve out a niche and survive in a post Starlink world.

How do they figure out, you know.

What their space is as a commercial compsat operator that, you know, once you have the dominant Starlink player in the market.

I'm interested to hear about the challenges of developing rocketry or engines at different scales. I've heard this story that one of the reasons the Raptor engine was so successful was that it wasn't a mega project in the sense that you didn't need to bring in a crane necessarily to work on it. There were more smaller modular pieces. Is that true? And then I'd love to know about the challenges of scaling up and making bigger rockets. It I was tracking, obviously I want Starship to work as soon as possible. It feels like it's a really, really tough challenge and it feels like it's a harder challenge than the Falcon 1 or the Falcon 9, which you know, went, it did, it did crash several times, exploded several times. But you know, SpaceX is a much more mature of kind company and so you would expect that it's not just, you know, the first time that they're doing it. It's actually something fundamental about the larger scale engineering that's going on there. So can you share anything about that?

Well, we've become a lot better at developing rocket engines, you know, over the last 20 years. Certainly when we started SpaceX there wasn't really, it wasn't like startups would do rocket engines. That's why I had such a hard time hiring people in the early days because nobody believed in it. And now there's, there's many teams all over the world that are developing liquid rocket engines. And it's, it's never easy, it's not, but, but it's, it's doable and modern. You know, modern tools are affordable and available and certainly modern manufacturing techniques like 3D printing is, is almost cheat code for, for rocket engines. But when you're doing something like Raptor, which is extremely high pressure, full flow stage combustion, very advanced engine, the most advanced engine ever. It's just, it takes the difficulty to 11. So not surprising that there have been setbacks. Also one of the hardest things to do in, in launch vehicle recovery is getting back in upper stage. You know, you saw, we had pretty good success with Falcon 9 getting back to first stage and certainly the flying the boosters back and land that awesome landing. But second upper stages are coming in with a lot of energy. So really hard they're gonna solve it.

It's, it's just a matter of time.

Yeah. This time.

Well, it is rocket science after all.

You know, I'm saying people don't, people don't use that phrase.

It's not rock.

You know, this isn't rocket science anymore because we've gotten really good at.

There's a lot of stuff that is rocket science.

How many times I heard that? Come on, Tom. It's not rocket science.

It is rocket science. Well, I'm sure you have a lot of rocket science to do. We'll let you get back to it. We really appreciate, appreciate you taking the time to Chat with us. This is a lot of fun.

Yeah, thanks.

Have a great rest of your day. Next up, we have Derek Thompson.

Some breaking news from Truth Social where news breaks, news breaks. Apparently Trump says Iran has officially responded to our obliteration of their nuclear facilities with a very weak response, which we expected and have very effectively countered. There have been 14 missiles fired, 13 were knocked down and one was set free because it was headed in a non threat threatening direction. I am pleased to report that no Americans were harmed and hardly any damage was done. Most importantly, if they've gotten it all out of their system and there will hopefully be no further hate, I want to thank Iran for giving us early notice which made it possible for no lives to be lost and nobody to be injured. Perhaps Iran can now proceed to peace and harmony in the region and I will enthusiastically encourage Israel to do the same. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

That'd be good.

It's a good way to. It's a strong way to end your post. Now if you want to come across presidential, just bolt on. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

That's great. Well, we have our next guest, Derek Thompson, the author of Abundance in the Studio. Welcome.

Great to be here.

Thanks, guys.

Congratulations on the move. Being a businessman now you're a businessman now?

I'm a businessman. I'm an entrepreneur. I'm a CEO. I mean, I'm everything you name, whatever piece, wearing hats, corporate suite that you want to name. I guess I am that. I'm cto. I'm coo.

Here we go.

He's about to become a hyper capitalist vibe shift.

Yeah, yeah. Talk to us about the move. I mean, we're going to go into a bunch of stuff, but maybe just start with a little bit of background and then the decision to move.

Yeah, sure. So I've been running for the Atlantic for 17 years, which is honestly like freaking disgusting to even contemplate.

Wait, how old were you when you joined?

I want to say four. I mean, much better. About myself, the answer is 22. So I joined in September of 2008.

Wow.

After graduating from college, I was like a comms intern for a while. I'm currently the comms intern for my substack. So right back to that opposition. And I wrote for 16, 16.75 years at the Atlantic and it was great. And the truth is, like, like I've always had like a little bit of wanderlust. I've always felt like I had a bit of an entrepreneurial bone on my body. There was Never a great time to leave because the Atlantic is really a wonderful place to work. They let you write about in my position, in my case, about whatever I wanted, tech, science, economics, social mysteries and conundrums. And finally I just thought, you know, abundance. The book has become a lot of things. It's certainly become something almost like something that could be a full time job. Like if I just wanted to replace reply to and engage with the political feedback, that would be its own job. And part of this was like, this is an opportunity to do something on my own, to do something that's really independent, not put the Atlantic in a position where they're like a non political organization with a writer who's doing some things that are explicitly political. But also I just kind of wanted to know, and this is what I said, I think in my original essay. Maybe you guys felt like this when you started this show. What does my mind feel like when I wake up in the morning with a new job, a new task for it, right? Like you work at like a made like a vc, right? Or you work at maybe a private equity firm and like you wake up and like, how do you process the world? You process the world the way it's most remunerative to you at that private equity firm or at that vc. And when you change your job, you change your mind, right? New tasks, new questions, new mysteries are unlocked. And I wanted to do that for myself. I wanted to like wake up with a new set of questions. And so that's what I'm doing right, right now.

Was there a price that could have kept you at the Atlantic? Many people say everyone has a price, but it feels like legacy media is not set up to retain superstars. And I imagine no, look, the Atlantic.

Paid me well and the book paid me well. I'm really lucky from that standpoint. There's not really a number, right? Like $1 billion. Okay, now suddenly you're talking about something completely silly. But like, like I wanted the freedom, the freedom to say, all right, like I'm 39 years old, right? If I stay for another 11 years, I'm 50 years old. Like now I'm basically on the other side of the hill. At some point you want to like be in your sort of in your, your electric prime, be like, what, what is my mind like? What is my life like when I give myself an entirely new task of starting my own company, of thinking about the world from perspective of I'm writing for myself, not writing for this august institution. So no, I don't think There was a number. And I also think it's important to say, like, the Atlantic is one of these places that as much as independent media is growing, and obviously, I think that's great, there are a couple empires that are going too. The Times is growing like crazy. The Atlantic is hiring like crazy. They pay their writers overall, I think quite well. So this was not really about money at all. This was about being in a fortunate position to take a risk that had nothing to do with money.

Money, yeah. If you just cared about money, you'd become an AI researcher and you join Meta, get 100 million.

Well, we got to pitch him on private equity because he sounds like he doesn't want to be a private equity guy, but I think scale the substack, start acquiring, rolling up other, Other independent journalism.

Could happen.

Could happen. I do want to talk about advice from Ezra about this. Obviously, you wrote the book with him. He's been at the New York Times. He's been. Started his own thing. What was his advice to you as you kind of stepped into. Out in this next. Next era?

That's an interesting question. No, no one's asked me that question before. So I told Ezra three days before the book came out, we had just done Here, I'll set the scene for you. We had just done Freed Zakaria show, and it was one of the first interviews that we did together. And we were in the Hut. You guys are based in San Francisco?

We're in la. Hollywood.

Okay, cool. So in New York, Hudson Yards is that, like, enormous, like, skyscraper mall.

Right.

And we go, like, get some food. We get some lunch, and we sit down and I say, hey, by the way, just so you know, I'm starting to think a little bit about doing something independent. This was before abundance became what it was. This is before a single book had been officially sold. I said, I kind of think I want to do something on my own. And he said, you know why? Like, the Atlantic's a wonderful perch. And I honestly told him. I told him what I told you. I was like, the job of, like, being a content creator. Right. It's a weird and wonderful job. Your job is to wake up in the morning and think, what do other people want from me that lives in here that I can put out here and give to them? It's a really weird and wonderful job. And I feel like that work requires a certain amount of churn and experimentation if you're stuck somewhere. And I didn't feel stuck at the Atlantic, but I was there for 17 years. If you were in one place for 17 years. There's a certain amount of experimentation that you're essentially choosing to block yourself out of. Right. And so I told him, like, I really wanted to. To experience, like, you know, what. What different kinds of questions, what different kinds of writing styles and podcasting styles. Maybe eventually, like, you know, video podcasting styles would. Would eventually be unlocked by going independent. I think that's a lot of the. The appeal of Substack for appeal for people in a certain place or, or Beehive or some of these other places. Patreon is really getting into the game here as well. It's this opportunity to be like, all right, what does it feel like to be a content creator for myself? I'm not answering anybody else, and I'm taking on all of the responsibility and the stress that comes with being my own boss. I feel like that's an experiment that more people should run on themselves.

What about the timing of the launch? You always hear about the big bump that comes from a big podcast appearance or something like that. Is the. Is there a world where you think you should have been doing email capture in the lead up to the book? So when you did the interviews for the book, people could just go subscribe immediately? Is this the ideal time? It seems like it's really well timed because the book has really, really done extremely well, and so you're in this capturing moment. It would have been probably much riskier to launch this a year from now, but did that factor into it? Did you think about doing it before or later? How'd you land on this time?

Look, here's, here's. Here's a framework that I. That I thought about. It's not like the only framework that, in my head, except for one. Obviously, having a number one New York Times bestselling book is a good opportunity to do something new because a certain number of people are already paying attention to you. Like, there's a certain amount of obviousness there that I don't want to be, like, cynical or conceited or vain, but I think it's just flatly true. And there was a certain calculation that was like, if I do want to do this in the next 10 years, does it really make sense to think, am I going to have another number one bestselling book in five years? Almost certainly not. In ten years? Almost certainly not. It is an incredibly fortunate and frankly, just strange thing. I mean, I don't think there's no reason for you to know this. Our book did not hit number one on week one. It didn't hit number one on week two or three or four. It hit number one in week five. Like, a discourse built around the book allowed it to sort of like, hover in the two to three range and then spike to number one in a way that my book agent said she's never seen this before. Like, no book. She said. She said, I've had a lot of books hit number one, none for the first time in week five. So it was a really original. Not original, really maybe unique experience in terms of the way that it hit the discourse. Was that a directly popularity of the Democrats?

Yeah. Was that a product of, like, the podcast appearance strategy? I saw as were going and both of you guys going on, like, a really wide swath of podcasts and. And bringing the message to places. And I think a lot of authors, when they launch, they think, like, I'm gonna do like, five big things on week one, and then, like, you know, I'm done. But it felt like you were kind of taking the message to all these different pockets of the Internet and really capitalizing on it over a long time. And it didn't feel like it was necessarily like, okay, you got 50% of the audience in week one, and then 10% and then 10%, and then 10%. It felt more like you're having different frames on the same conversation again and again and actually building that momentum.

Yes. So if we were doing, like, book publishing, economics 101.

Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. The book publisher controls very little distribution themselves.

Right.

There's very few channels of exposure. The book publisher controls themselves.

Right.

Even if you love reading nonfiction, my guess is that you aren't going to randomhouse.com to check out their nonfiction titles every Tuesday when the new nonfiction titles come out.

Right.

What do you check? The New York Times Book Review podcasts that you listen to other sites that review books. Right. TV interviews. Those are the channels of exposure. When you're a book author, you're basically in a position of begging. You go to Fried Zakara and you say, please, please, can you talk to me about this book? And you go to Barry Weiss and you say, please, can you talk to me? And you go to the far left podcast. You say, please, and you go to the right wing podcast and you say, ben Shapiro, please. You're asking please, please, please, of everybody and their assistants. And the assistants. Producers. And the producers. Assistants. You're begging the entire world. And almost every author is doing that. Every author is in this position of begging because often other people control channels of distribution that they don't now, in Ezra's case, he arguably has with the Ezra Klein show, the medium of exposure that is most successful for launching books. So that's a unique experience for me and my co author. That said two things. One, I would guess that if you really looked into the numbers, what sold this book early on, despite the impression that you gave that this book was on a lot of different podcasts, what sells books is still television. And the reason why is not because television is bigger than podcasts in a weird way, it's because television is shorter and it's a worse product. But a worse product gives you a better amuse bouche for the book. If I talk to Lex Friedman for four hours about abundance, that makes sense. Exactly how many more hours do you want to spend inside of abundance?

That's a great point.

That's a great point, Zakaria, for 10 minutes about the book. It's this little amuz bouche that makes enough people think, ooh, that sounds like exactly what I want. The future Democratic Party, the future of liberalism. So my feeling is that while podcasts are important because in a weird way, the product of a book is even more the conversation about the book than the product than the book itself. The best way to sell a book, weirdly, even in this, like, podcast heavy moment, is still television. That's my unempirical vibey bet.

Right.

It.

That's fascinating. Yeah, I love that. Yeah. I mean, I noticed that with, I mean, Ezra on his, I believe it's his own branded podcast channel, put out a 20 minute video essay outlining the thesis for the book. It also, that video did very well. I believe it went viral and got maybe millions of views. That. That feels like number one bestseller on, on that week. But I think that happened on week one, not on week five, which is interesting.

Which is weird.

Yeah.

I mean, so what happened was John Green, the author of the Fault in Our Stars, who's become a nonfiction writer, wrote a book called Everything is Tuberculosis. And that book, I don't think I can share the inside numbers that I have.

But he smoked you.

We did great week one. That book kicked our ass. We weren't even close. Like, I don't think that's what kind of sports fans you guys are. Like, that book was like the Miami Heat. That book was the Cleveland Cavaliers. We were the Miami Heat. Like, every single blowout, it destroyed it. So, like, we weren't even close. Number one.

Number one.

And that does go to show that that with book selling, it's all about channels of exposure and is already a celebrity owns their channel of exposure. And so the book publisher, by giving them a lot of money is essentially buying their channel of exposure. And that's partly what they're paying for. But yeah, the strategy, beyond strategy, there's this question of how do you sell a book? Then there's also this question of I don't mean to get weird, existential, but what's the job of a book? What's its job? And I think the job of a nonfiction book is to get people talking about it. Of course you want people to buy.

It or start your presidential run or.

Start your presidential one.

Honestly, you should do it the other.

Way around because the best way to get attention for yourself, like if you dudes, if you guys run for president as a ticket.

Yeah.

You'll get a ton of media exposure.

Ticket. We haven't even thought about that. That's hilarious.

Then you'll build, then you'll then be. Will buy our book totally free. It's totally free media. All these people, the New York Times.

Is like have to talk to you.

Guys doing in the Washington Post. What are these guys doing?

Right?

You get all the stream media exposure, then everyone knows your name, then you go to a book publisher, then they give you a lot of money and then you have this, this platform that's been co constructed by media organizations that were media industrial, even though they didn't even mean to. So you should not write the book, then go for president. You should do it the other way around. But the product is the conversation. And so the reason to go on podcast, the reason to go on shows like this, because you want these ideas to get out in the ether. No one should write a book if they don't want to talk about it for 50,000 hours. Because that is the experience of writing a book. You finish it and then if you're lucky, you talk about it for the rest of your life.

Okay, well, talking about things actually in the book, this has been fascinating so far. I really enjoyed this. But one of the narratives that I keep coming back to is the story of California high speed rail. I grew up in California. Friends and family members who have worked on that project actually. And I think for a lot of technologists in California, the comparison between SpaceX and the California high speed rail story really draw a very clear conclusion in people's mind, which is that the private sector is more efficient than the public sector. And I'm wondering how you do you think that that narrative of, you know, one was literally rocket science, but at the Same time we had put things up into space, it was, wasn't entirely a new capability. The other was a train, which, you know, we've had trains for generations and we tried to build a train and we tried to build capability to get to low Earth orbit. One feels very successful and the other feels like we didn't get anything out of it. And I think for a lot of people, the takeaway is let's not have the government even try and do things. Let's let the private sector do as much as possible. And, and that trade off between if there is an economic feedback or there is a profit motive or a payback that will act as a better incentive to actually get the result that people want, which is transportation or the ability to get to space. How have you grappled with that anecdote? Specifically?

I'm a liberal who believes in a large role for private sector innovation. There's no question that SpaceX is an extraordinary company that has done things for rocket technology and especially for rocket efficiency that no other company in the world has done, no other individual in the world has done.

Yeah.

How many people has it moved to space?

A lot.

How many? Like dozens, a thousand?

Hundreds? I don't know. It's just the ISS people are in California.

This is our Iranian population question.

Yeah, this is our, we're getting 50 million, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

In California, to build infrastructure that is a public good for 50 million people is a different challenge than building technology whose proof point requires several dozen. These are entirely different challenges. And that's why we need, Yeah, I.

Would say like SpaceX has provided Internet infrastructure for billions of lights, kind of.

Count as the people in this case, like, because that's the, that's the benefit that people really want.

The public benefit is that people in Iran right now can get satellites, you.

Know, and I think the value of Starlink is sensational. But when you're talking about, I mean, when you think about like broadband technology, broadband technology is already being built by a lot of private companies. Right. So it's not as if the creation of Starlink is taking away what has historically been a public service and is creating a private company out of it. Like broadband companies exist, like Charter exists, Comcast exists. So I think it's great that there are private companies that are working on that. When we're talking about questions like public goods, when we're talking about roads and bridges, things that are frankly quite difficult to monetize, and it's not entirely clear that we want to like directly monetize like do we want to charge poor people a certain fee every time they use a road or a bridge? Or does it make sense to live in a rich society with a progressive tax structure such that we can tax the rich a little bit more than the low income and use that money to create a set of public goods that makes life better for everybody, that allows frankly, low income people to use those roads to drive into areas where they can provide services for high income people such that everyone turns out better off. I, I see a large, large role for the federal government and for state and local governments to look out for public goods. And to me, when I say public goods and you look at the actual budgets, the federal, local, state governments, overwhelmingly what we're talking about is health care, subsidized healthcare, we're talking about education and we're talking about infrastructure and transportation, things like roads, things like bridges. I think there's a huge role for government to play with you. I like having both. I like having a mixed economy, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Muscular government. And also even more I would like to see in the book is probably about this even more purposeful pro tech, pro science strategy. Because the truth is, if you look at what SpaceX did for rocketry, why haven't we done that for Alzheimer's? Why isn't there like a SpaceX for chronic inflammation or SpaceX for carbon capture technology? So I see a huge role for both of these things. I don't think that the success of government in some places proves that the private sector can't do certain things very well, or the success of SpaceX means that the government should get out of the business of building bridges.

Yeah, yeah, I agree with you on the roads and bridges thing. I guess my worry is like the free market solution to how do I. The real problem that you're solving is like, how do you get people from LA LA to San Francisco, how do you move people around California? And the free market Solution is a one hour Southwest flight that costs 100 bucks or a Camry that drives you there and maybe costs $20 in gas or something like that. And so the free markets kind of solve like if you have six hours you can do it in 20 bucks, or if you have one hour, you can do it for 100 bucks. And you kind of choose those. And we kind of came in with like, we want something that's cheap, cheaper for two hours. But there wasn't this like massive market pull. And so it was more like the decision to create that interim solution just never really happened. But I mean, we just stop there.

I love Southwest, I love flying on airlines. At no point in my life am I like, what we need to do is like nationalize United States.

But.

Who built lax? Totally right. You need public infrastructure or infrastructure that is partly publicly financed in order to create a kind of platform technology, a platform for the private sector to succeed in this way. If you look at the history of Elon Musk's companies, what is the total number of government contracts and loan guarantees that SpaceX and Tesla have benefited from in order to become the companies that they are? I'm pretty sure it numbers in the billions, especially when you count all the NASA contracts.

Yeah. So I guess the question is like.

Should a huge opportunity for a public private partnership to give us the outcomes that we're most proud of.

Yeah. With the California high speed rail example, the question I guess is was it a mistake for the government to pick high speed rail as an important project? Like was it a misranking, should have spent more money on roads and. Or was it just the execution?

I mean, billions of dollars are spent on a rail system. I mean, $33 billion were essentially tacitly approved by a bond that was voted on by the public. Several million dollars were actually spent constructing rail that isn't connecting anything to anything right now. So clearly if you were looking back, like the total number of man hours spent and dollars allocated on high street rail has not been worth it for people who live in California. I don't want that failure to indict the good that the public sector can do any more than I think you would say that the failure of one SpaceX launch proves that SpaceX is in fact totally overrated. Like how much.

Switching gears a little bit. How much are you digging into general research funding? We had Andrew Huberman on the show last week talking about his concerns around nih.

Tell me, tell me his concerns. Can you actually, I didn't see that.

Can you say, yeah, so he had a, he had a long interview with Jay Bhattacharya and essentially the proposal is to cut government funding to university labs and research and scientific research labs by something like 40%. And that's a pretty significant chunk. He was very worried about this. There are some unnecessary costs potentially that he highlighted. But in general, this is the research that cannot be underwritten by the president private sector, because it does not. If you're just doing research on how do, how do we fall asleep? Or like how do we, how does the brain work at a very abstract. Or what is the, what is DNA. You can't patent DNA as soon as you discover it. And yet as soon as you've discovered it, boom. There's a huge, huge, you know, massive boom in, in, in biotechnology. But it won't be captured by a single patent holder on the underlying. Yep.

Yeah. So that just feels like an area that you could really dig and dive into in an area where it's okay to be kind of skeptical of this hyper capitalist viewpoint. And you know, venture backed companies can solve everything when the smartest people in the world are.

It's broad, it's a ton of funding of a whole bunch of different research areas. They all can't be underwritten by the private sector in any way. Versus being very prescriptive. We need to train from here to here and we are going to hire the people to build it. That feels like much, much harder for the government to get right.

I agree with the way you guys are thinking about this and maybe it means. I agree with the way that Andrew's thinking about it as well. I think what's happening at the NIH right now under HHS is horrendous. I think if what you wanted to do was to reduce America's annual deficit by $18 billion, which is what we're cutting from NIH, you could either cut NIH, the, the fountain of scientific discovery for not just the US but the entire world, you cut NIH by 40%, or you could cut the corporate income tax cut by 0.4%. Why not just kind of reduce the size of the corporate income tax cut by a microscopic percent and still fund scientists to discover the basis of Alzheimer's and chronic inflammation and multiple sclerosis and pancreatic cancer. You said it really well. Knowledge can't be patented, period. Like when the first scientists who looked inside the Gila monster's mouth discovered that there was a little hormone there that seemed to suppress its appetite and regulate its insulin. You can't patent a lizard's tongue. But our knowledge, our subsidized knowledge of the liquid on top of the lizard's tongue gave us GLP1 drugs, which now appear to be something like a miracle drug for every everything. I mean, they don't just help people lose weight. They don't just help people reduce inflammation. They literally seem to. There's a study going on right now that they might reduce rates of Alzheimer's because Alzheimer's might be caused in part by inflammation in the brain. And if GLP1 drugs work by not only reducing obesity, but also reducing chronic inflammation, they might Ironically or incidentally, be a neurodegenerative drug that works through the gut brain interface. That's fucking crazy. By looking at a lizard. And no smart VC like Mark Andreessen's brilliant, but he would be an idiot if he told scientists. If he gave scientists tens of millions of dollars to just look in the mouths of a bunch of reptiles. That's dumb. That sounds really dumb. But it's really wonderful to have a publicly funded organization that asks scientists who simply discover the truths of the universe with the hope that if it's true, someone along the line can find a way to make a product with it that makes money and saves people's lives. So I think we need a really aggressively funded NIH and nsf. I think what's happening right now in the Trump administration is really, really sad. And Jay Bhattacharya, if you're out there, I would love to talk to you about what's happening at nih, because I know you a little bit. We've talked a little bit. I know you don't want this deep down. And I would love to talk about how we could amend NIH policy to truly make Americans healthy again and make America great again. Because cutting NIH by 40% ain't it?

Yeah. I think the frustration from Andrew was seeing the increased spending and trying to reckon with the two decisions there. Let's switch to something less politically charged. Can you give us the highlights of your conversation with Mom? Donnie? You released that this morning right before we got on the air. So we haven't had a chance to listen, but I'm sure it'll be entertaining.

Look, let me give you my reaction as a person and then as a political thinker, he's unbelievably charming and engaging and thoughtful. You know, when you're talking to someone who's listening or who at least is very good at performing the act of making you think you're listening to them. Like, I only know this guy for 37 minutes, but I loved our conversation. I really, really loved it. I think he's wrong about a lot. I think rent freezes are a terrible idea to increase housing supply. I think fundamentally you cannot try to cap the price of something whose supply you're trying to increase. The way I put it in the podcast, that was like, like you want grocery stores in New York to be better. If you passed a law that capped receipts at grocery stores at $50, what do you think grocery stores would start doing? They would stop stocking the shelves because you can't make Money selling nice stuff to people if it's illegal to make $51 on the receipt. So in the same way, if you cap the price of a good and you're trying to increase its supply, you're tying the hand behind your back that you're trying to use. He was respectful, but we disagreed about that point. We disagreed about the fact that. I think I'm persuaded that while I'm not against public sector unions in the big picture, if you look at why New York City subways have among the highest transit construction costs in the world on a per mile basis, one part of it is that their union staffing levels are four times higher than the international average. You cannot build, you cannot build anything efficiently if the first rule of your company is your staffing levels have to be four times higher than all your competitors. It just doesn't work. So I asked him whether he was interested in talking to public sector unions, which are a democratic ally, of course, if he was interested in building public transit efficiently and increasing public excellence. Again, he disagreed. That said, I was really impressed by his insistence that he wanted to be a politician who was outcomes first and process second. And there was a certain amount of ambivalence that he seemed to communicate to me. Again, maybe he's lying. I don't know him that well. He's a nice guy on the phone. But there's a certain amount of sort of procedural ambivalence that I really like in a politician. Like if Jai Bhattacharya came on your show.

Show, right.

Or if RFK Jr came on your show or whoever else in tech policy, someone who's doing AI policy, and they told you that the outcomes that they wanted were the outcomes that you wanted. They were ambivalent about what process it took to get those outcomes, but they were going to try their damnedest to make sure that when they left office, those were the outcomes that everybody could agree about. Right. There's something that's like very refreshing and non ideological about that perspective. And I heard a little bit of it that said, you know, I'm.

Is that, is that tying into changing his mind around how police should be funded? Where he.

We talked about him changing his mind on two things. One, he told the New York Times he's changed his mind in the role of private developers in housing. I think he used to be more on the side of like, the government should build up the houses. I'm more on the side of the government should fund some of the housing construction. But like, we've got private Companies that are really good at building housing. Let's not do what the private sector is already doing too much. But the other thing he changed his mind about, as you said, is defund the police. He talked four years ago, five years ago about defund the police being a slogan that he believed in. And now he really, his policy is fund the police. He thinks that police don't solve crimes fast enough and that in many cases they're forced. And this is clearly true, to act as social workers rather than police officers. And so if you've got a police officer or say 100 police officers who have to basically be, you know, street therapists and social workers all day long, how are they going to solve crimes? How are they going to stop crime? And so he said he's changed his mind there a little bit as he talked to more police officers. And the end of our conversation was, I thought, a really refreshing point that he made that he thinks that his job, he sees his job as surrounding himself with people who aren't too fast to say yes to all of his ideas. He likes being around people who challenge his ideas. And I think that's a useful thing for really, I mean anybody, any politician or executive. And so there were many things in the conversation that I was impressed by. But you know, also fundamentally, I think it's just important to say there are very big differences between socialism and liberalism. And he's a socialist and I'm a liberal. So we're not going to agree about everything, but you have to be able to talk to people you don't agree with.

What are you hoping to see out of tech? The intersection of tech and Washington in a post elon White House world?

You know, we got to get beyond this insanity where the administration attacks on progressive thought become attacks on the kind of talent America needs to train and attract and retain to keep our dominance and to keep the really valuable information clusters that we have here. If we attack Harvard because we're pissed off at them and force all of the international students to leave, or if we encourage some of the smartest people around the world who deep down want to be at Caltech, want to be at Harvard, want to be at Duke, we push them to be in London and Beijing and Shanghai. We are losing so many great ideas, so much agglomeration, the interaction effects that happen when you put a lot of smart people together in America. It's important that Silicon Valley is in California and not in Brazil or France or Poland. There is a special sauce to America. I think you want to attract and retain these people. I want us to rationalize our talent and immigration policy and not have it be a kind of unfortunately, like, assassinated bystander in this war between the Trump administration and a progressive movement that they think has gone too far. I think we really need to get back down to a reasonable basis on immigration policy in particular. And then I would like us to add back the funding to NIH and nsf. I'm sure Andrew talks about this a little bit like, is it possible that there are so called indirect costs, money that I work at Harvard? Let's say you're nih. You gave me some money for my Alzheimer's study. You also give me money for Harvard. Is it possible that Harvard money, those indirect costs are too high? Yeah, sure. Let's have a public debate about that. Let's have public testimony. Let's not cut NIH by $18 billion and say, well, hopefully we're only cutting the fat and none of the muscle. So better immigration policy and better science policy. Number one, I wish I had a good answer on AI. I don't know what the hell the next five years look like. I feel like the smart people that I follow change their mind every six months. Sometimes they accelerate, sometimes they decelerate. I wish I had this sort of crystal ball that could tell me what optimal AI policy coming out of Washington looked like. Right now, I don't, but hopefully in the substack, I'll be able to get some answers there.

Well, we're excited to follow along.

That was great.

Thank you for joining. This was great.

Thank you so much. Yeah, we'd love to have you back. We could talk all day.

All right, great. I'll do it.

Have a good one. I'll see you soon.

Later.

Bye.

Sorry, I went way over. I thought we were five minutes over. We are 11.

We have a light system in the studio, but the golden retriever does not concern himself. The lion does not concern himself with who's in the waiting room. We have our next guest from Juniper Square. Thank you for waiting. Great to talk to you. And we got some news.

We got news. We got some news.

What do we got to be here, guys?

What do we got?

We got two things. We got a $130 million Series D.

Congratulations. I've been waiting to do that all day.

Glad we got it out. Yeah.

And then we launched our AI product that we call Juni AI.

Congratulations.

That's our second okay, news.

Now that we got the important stuff out of the way, who are you? What do you do?

Yeah, yeah, well I'm, I've become a.

Fan of what you guys are doing.

I'm glad to be on the show.

It's really interesting.

So keep it up. But yeah, yeah.

So my name's Alex.

I'm the co founder, CEO of Juniper Square.

Nice.

And Juniper Square is an 11 year old technology and services company. All of our customers are private markets. Gps.

Sure.

So venture capital firms, private equity firms.

Real estate investors, crypto, private credit, you name it. If they raise an outside fund, then we help them with fund administration, we help them with technology to manage that fund. Reporting, basically everything is not the investing. And we've got close to 2,500 customers now. Trillion dollars that were responsible for stewarding and about 750 employees.

2500 customers. Is that, is that not all of them? How many investors are there? I feel like I saw that number on your website. You need to update it by the way. It says 2000 on your website. You're 2500.

Yeah, we gotta get that, get those numbers out.

But I mean I feel like there's, I mean we try and talk to. I thought we talked to all the VCs we've had, we've done hundreds of interviews. I thought we talked to them all. Apparently there are more. How big is this market? It feels like like, you know, you talk about private markets, investing, that feels like a small market. Yet series D is at a billion point one. Like you're building a big business. How big is this market?

Right.

So the, you have to kind of.

Take it by asset class.

Right.

Because VC is relatively small.

Sure.

As an asset class, both in terms of the capital that it manages and the number of GPs or investment firms that are out there there. Private equity and real estate are respectively probably five times as big as venture. So there's thousands and thousands of, you know, just think of all the middle market private equity kind of LBO growth focused firms out there. Or think of all the different real estate investors focused on, you know, apartment buildings or retail or whatever. There's probably about 20,000 GPS globally. That matter.

Was ZURB crash hard for you? Was that a slower growth period for your business? Because it seemed like it was really rough for all the VCs and a lot of investors pulled back. But it's not as like they really shut down their funds.

Yeah, it's more like net new fund creation slow.

So yeah. Was that a real driver or are you just going after the existing players and so the new ones don't necessarily matter as much?

No, we definitely felt it and you're right that what we're sensitized to is.

In a given quarter, a given year, how many new funds were created, our market share so low that we still can sell to existing funds and people switch their providers all the time, but it's always easiest to get the new funds that's raised. So we had the double whammy of a big focus for us is commercial real estate. So when Covid hit in spring of 2020, it just took out retail, it took out hospitality and hotels, and commercial real estate was, it was really tough sledding from like 2020, you know, really until 2022. And then the rate hike started and commercial real estate's, you know, heavily capex intensive. It's super rate sensitive. And then we had the big bust in, you know, public markets. Correction. We had the big overhang of everyone investing at, you know, 100x revenue multiples in 2021, 2022.

We're going to bring those back. Yeah, we're working on it, we're working on it here.

The sober, the sober days of 100x revenue multiple, which we're kind of back to now.

How did you get through all those times?

It's recovering, it's coming back.

How'd you get through the tough times? Did you have to do layoffs or change the direction of the business? Were there any pivots in the story?

Kind of specific meditation track?

Okay, cool. Yeah, break it down.

Yeah, all of the above, you guys. We had to do some layoffs for sure. Like everybody.

I mean, we were going into, you.

Know, the Fed started hiking rates in like late 21, but by spring of 22 is when we had that huge correction.

Yeah. In the public markets.

And by that summer it was clear.

That companies like us and pretty much.

Every high growth, late stage tech company was spending too much. Right. We were all investing for revenue growth.

And we all had to pivot to.

Invest for growth efficiency. So we did a round of layoffs then like a lot of people did. It was the first time I ever do that as an entrepreneur.

It's not fun by any means, but it was necessary. But then the big thing for us.

Is, you know, we started out as.

A technology company, but then we added.

In 2019, we moved into the world of fund administration and we became a full service fund administrator. And fund administration is like a really critical market for private capital. There's probably 30, $40 trillion of private capital out there in the world and.

Almost all of it needs a third party administrator. So we kind of moved into this.

Market that was like 50 times the TAM of our previous market concurrent with this big correction happening. And so those forces ended up working.

Out that the company did really well and we continued.

We've grown really quickly through a really challenging market period.

So it wasn't without its bumps and bruises, but overall it's been really well.

Yeah.

What talk about the new AI products. I imagine it's a difficult one to build. You can't really like LPs and investors can't really tolerate hallucinations. I can imagine a product that works.

I don't mind if you leak my fund returns to my direct competitor. No problem.

Well, less of that. But if you're trying to understand fund performance and things like that, that or reporting, you can't like, oh, I'm sorry, I misreported tvpi.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that is the crux of the challenge.

I mean, as you guys know, you.

Talk about it a lot on the show. You know, generative AI is probabilistic, right? So next token prediction is probabilistic in its nature. And the kind of work that we do of reporting on financial assets is deterministic, right?

Like one plus one always has to equal two.

It can never equal, you know, one.

Or three or anything like that.

And so the real trick is, and as if you guys ever know if you've ever like taken a pile of invoices or something and uploaded them to chat, GPT or any LLM and been like, hey, tell me the, you know, invoice amount for invoice number eight. It's, it's terrible at financial data extraction. And so the big hole that we have in the market that we're filling for our customers is if you're an asset manager, if you're a financial services.

Firm, like a venture capitalist or a.

Real estate investor or whatever, one of.

The key things you have to do.

Is you have to report to your regulators, you have to report to your LPs.

That reporting is like, you know, you're.

Putting your brand and reputation and your ability to raise more money in the.

Future and everything behind it being accurate and correct.

And so the trick is, how do.

You leverage all of the power of generative AI?

This, like all these summation use cases.

Document extraction, the chat interface that we've all become so accustomed to, how do.

You fuse that with a set of.

Deterministic tools that do all the precision stuff, the precision math, so that you're.

Calling functions in Python to run some.

Code to answer a question, you're not trying to have a next token prediction.

Be the answer of that.

And that's basically what this platform is. It's multimodal.

We have a bunch of different models.

Running inside of it.

And the idea is think of it as like a model orchestration layer where if you're a private markets gp, there's a lot of work you got to get done.

You want agents for different things, different models fit, different use cases, and you.

Need a way of orchestrating all of that work, ensuring it's compliant, ensuring it's accurate. And that's what this layer does.

Anything else?

This is great.

Yeah, we got to have you back on. We're running behind today, as you saw, but we really appreciate you still stopping by.

Yeah. Congratulations on making it through the fire and come back on when you have more news.

Yeah, we'll talk soon. Happy to be here, guys.

Congrats to you and the team. Cheers, Alex.

Bye. Really quickly, how'd you sleep last night?

I'm hoping, I'm hopeful.

I'm on a run. 94, let's hear from last night.

I'm gonna be streaming 86.

Oh, let's go for John.

It's crazy. Ever since I got sick, I've been trailing you by like 10 points off your game.

Well, but I'm coming back from Decagon in the studio. He's certainly been on his game. How you doing, Jesse?

What's going on? Welcome.

Welcome to the stream.

Good to see you. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, thanks for hopping on. Give us the news. What does the company do and what's the breaking news with you?

Yeah.

Hey, everyone watching. I'm Jesse. I'm one of the co founders of Decagon. If you don't know about us, we're.

Essentially an AI customer service agent.

And so what this means is imagine next time you're booking a hotel room or something, there's an AI agent that's there that you can call or chat with live and it knows everything about you. It can book rooms for you, it can upgrade, it can answer questions about your loyalty points and so on. And so essentially what we do is we work with these large, usually consumer businesses that have a lot of of customers and a lot of contact center volume. And we're there to both drive a ton of efficiency for them because now their human agents don't have to deal with these more mundane issues. But also we are able to give a better customer experience for the actual customers. So that's what we do. And then today we're very Excited to announce our series C co led by a 16Z and Excel at a 1.5. Let's go give it a bigger hit. John. There we go.

Talk to me about the early, the early beachhead for the company. I feel like LLMs are so generalizable and yet Go to Market is so specific. Every vertical industry has slightly different customer service needs. Whether it's a Shopify store that needs access to an inventory management system or refunds or structures Stripe versus a SaaS product. What has been most interesting to you? Where has adoption been the strongest early on?

Yeah, it's a good question. So I would say that with most of the use cases out there, the ones that have the most impact from AI has been ones where there is a little bit of complexity where you need the AI to go and take actions for you or look up data for you. And it's kind of adding this extra layer beyond what traditional chatbots have been able to do. Because I'm sure both of you have used chatbots in the past and usually.

It'S a pretty frustrating experience because it's hot.

It's horrible. Yesterday I was trying to cancel. I was trying to cancel Spectrum Internet at my. At our old office.

Good luck, John.

And couldn't do it on the website. This is 100 deliberate by them, by the way. Couldn't do it on the website. Of course. Like, you know, this is a crud app. I should be able to click a button and update the.

You have to wonder if it's intentional.

Oh, it's 100 intentional. They broke one password so I couldn't log in. Finally they say, hey, text us. And I'm texting with their chatbot. It texts me natural language but then asks me to click a drop down for two different options every single time. Finally get through all that flow and they're like, you need to call us. And by the way, we're closed today. It was awful.

Yeah. Is that some maybe friction in the sales process where people are like, I get it that you want to make this more frictionless for our customers, but you're going to increase our churn 10%.

Are there actually trade offs there? I'm super interested.

Yeah, no, that is one use case.

Right. So to your question, what use cases are good? It is where you need a little.

Bit of complexity because in the old days, the reason why you can't do.

That today is because it's really easy to game that system.

Oh sure, they made a decision tree.

Then someone would make a Reddit post about, hey, here's how you actually cancel easily and everyone will just do it.

Immediately and it impacts their revenue.

Right. So the nice thing about LLMs now.

And the thing that it really unlocks is this level of nuance.

You're able to create much more complex flows and sort of situations that are tailored to specific users. And because of that you're able to.

Cover way more ground.

Right. So we have customers, for example, that use us to process refunds. We have customers that use us to.

Either book flights or reorder of credit card or things like that. And that's really powerful because it just wasn't possible before.

Right. Before you're kind of in this more dumb decision tree that you have to get forced down a certain path and maybe that path is kind of what you want, but you want something slightly different and you're just forced to go down the path. You get stuck and you get escalated. Right. So that's one of the main benefits of these LLMs.

Last question from my side. I know we're going crazy on the timing, but in my previous jobs when I've hired a really all star customer service agent, the thing that's always impressed me is when they're able to expand out of their role as just customer service, just doing specific flows and actually turn into sort of a salesperson and actually turn an interaction into customer education or upselling or cross selling or, you know, hey, yes, you said you wanted to cancel, but I think you want to cancel for a reason that we could actually alleviate by switching you around or giving you a discount or doing something like that. Some of that can be deterministic. We've seen this with like, are you sure you want to cancel? We'll give you 20% off. But the real best customer service agents tend to do it with more touch. Is that something that you're seeing already being able to be handled by LLMs? Do you think that's coming with more agent workflows? How do you see the role of the customer service agent or human evolving over the next couple of years.

We work with our customers a lot.

On that exact concept.

Which is what is the definition of.

Customer experience over time? Because when you start you're generally working on the low hanging fruit like processing.

Transactions or looking up information, even faq.

Right, right, exactly.

But if you end up having a really, really good AI experience and if you just think about it with the products in your life, right. You're just going to interact with it more. Like it's not that you're going to. It's like, oh, I'm done with this. If it's a good experience, you're going.

To interact with it a lot more. And that opens up a much broader surface area for what customer experience means.

You can start being proactive instead of just reactive. You can start looking at revenue generating use cases like you just mentioned.

Right.

And it doesn't just have to be.

A cost center, which is what a.

Lot of enterprises look at customer service.

Right.

It's like, oh, it's this thing that's not really strategic to us. Us, we're just going to put it.

Off to the side and try to save as much money as possible. AI is changing a lot of that and a lot of the customers that use Decagon are super excited by this.

Concept that, hey, if you have a good system there, it almost becomes essentially.

A concierge for your product. It becomes a new UI that customers.

Can use to interact with you. Because if it's really good and it can do everything. Yeah, maybe people are just chatting with it instead of using an app or kind of going through a bunch of of drop downs and stuff like that.

So yeah.

What's happening in the call. Sorry to interrupt. What's happening in the call center BPO market right now? Or is there already pretty massive impact from companies like Decagon, Intercom, Sierra, et cetera? Yeah, the call center market is definitely thinking about this space a lot. As you can see, right when AI first came out, a lot of their.

Stocks went down by quite a bit because it's one of the most obvious.

Use cases for AI. I would say the best BPOs out there are really figuring out how to become AI native and either partnering with solutions like us or spending a lot of effort in building their own.

I think partnership will probably be the.

Realistic path because.

When end customers buy.

These services, they usually kind of see BPOs as a service provider. So there is room for partnership, but.

That'S typically the way it will happen.

Yeah, I mean, just the advent of software as a service or just websites in some ways reduced the amount of humans in a sales interaction because you could go through the Shopify checkout by yourself and yet there was still a role for the human. So I'm sure that will be evolving, but it's exciting stuff. Thank you so much for stopping by.

Congrats on the round. Congrats on picking up Max Skarnecchia a couple months ago. Star sales leader. I went to, I went to college with Max. He's an absolute chad. He's telling me about you earlier.

Yeah.

So shout out to Max. Anyways, thanks for coming on.

We'll talk to you soon.

Yeah, cheers.

Have a good rest of your day. Next up we have Yapsin Welcome.

Chat has been waiting.

Yaxine, how are you doing?

What's going on?

You are on mute.

No audio yet.

I do love. We got the video, we got the.

Weight set up in a. Is that a weight rack or.

Looks like it.

Hello? Test.

Yeah, we can hear you.

Testing.

How you doing?

Testing.

Good. I haven't set up my DAC yet, so.

No, you're good, you're good. What's happening?

Let me just ask. Let me just check, like, let me just look at something on.

Sure, yeah. We'll give the basic background on you for the audience while you figure that out.

The poster who needs no introduction.

He needs no introduction. Founder of Ding Board A. What are the base of the hosts.

Of John and Jordy?

John and Jordy. Hey, how's it going? Nice to meet you guys. My name is Yasin. Apologies.

Good to meet you.

Hello. Thanks for. Thanks for the introduction. I appreciate your time as well. And I'm like, actually like a huge fan of you guys. Like someone. Someone I. Someone I used to work with introduced me to guys, so I like found a lot of enjoyment.

That's great.

It's great to have you on. How have the last few days been.

A little bit stressful? To be honest, I've slept three hours every single night because posting on Twitter has been so fun and unfortunately for.

Fun or stressful?

Yeah, so both fun and stressful because I can't stop posting and that's not good for me. But I will basically just not stop posting.

But if you keep posting the way you have been, could you potentially repl place your salary you were making in the seven figure mark? You got to really ramp it up a little bit.

I used to go on 4chan and these like people would be like, yeah, I'm like making like a million, like a mil. 2 mil at these AI companies. I'd be like, no way. There's no way you guys are making 2 million of these AI companies. And I started making like 7 digits at an AI company. I was like, wait, like these guys weren't actually lying. Like you actually make that much money at these AI companies? And it's like pretty fun work too as well. So yeah, I didn't work on AI. I worked on like bugs that really annoyed me on the app and that's why I joined actually. So I joined X because there were A lot of bugs that really annoyed me. I fixed quite a lot of them. So I'm pretty happy, like, with the work I've done.

X. X is the product I use that I find the most bugs yet. Am not just. I don't abandon the product. Like, that's how addicted it is.

Interesting. That's a super interesting thing. And it's because there's, like, when it's a very large app, right? So the scale is huge. And you guys are like, right. Tail users, right? Like, you guys are famous. Like, you know the podcast of the tech bro podcast. Sorry, the host of the tech Pro podcast. You guys are famous.

This.

So the amount of notifications you guys get, the amount of replies you guys get, the amount of DMs that you guys get is an insane amount. You guys are so far into the right tail. But, like, how many people are there like you? That's why it feels buggy for you.

Sure.

For most people, like an engineer who's like, creating a test account and, like, clicking around, it's not. It's not going to be buggy for them. And for what it's worth, this is true across all the apps. Power users will always experience a lot of bugs unless they have someone to, like, really, like, you know, talk to them and, like, understand what their pain points are. And. And for what it's worth, X does a really great job. Like, I mean, it's actually remarkable how well X is run as a company. And, like, just working there, I got to learn a lot about, like, how to get engineers motivated and, like, really, like, get shit done. Like, it was awesome work there. It was super fun.

How do you wish you had the opportunity? You were working remotely the entire time, and that was maybe counter to the broader X culture. Do you think it's the type of organization where if you're going to work there, you should just 100% be in the office, or do you think you. Yeah.

So the person who hired me, like, was like, dude, like, like, let me tell you, you're gonna have to get to the office. My wife. So at the time I got the offer, in between I was interviewing, I found out that my wife was pregnant. So I let them know. And congratulations, because. Yeah, so. So kid is born now, he's seven months old. So that's. By the time I joined, I was like, okay, well, we're gonna. I'm gonna work remotely for a bit and then see if I can move. But as the kid got older, my priorities started changing a bit and I was Kind of like considering and talking to my wife about, like, different ways I could come to politics. I could totally work remotely, like, and be productive. I think after the X&Xai merger, the information attractor got so strong, and the talent at xai, they were like, ship. They're ships so much. Like, I used to be able to read every commit. Like, I used to actually just, like, sit there on my email and, like, click archive over and over again and read every single commit that went into the code base. But after the X AI people joined, it was just like, literally no way. And, I mean, I told one of the XAI guys this. It was like, you know when you have, like, dinosaur and, you know, which was the Twitter code base, and you get extreme pressure, which is XAI talent.

Get diamond.

You get diamonds. That's how you get diamonds. Like, I was so bullish after that. Like. Like, they're really, like, they're really pushing on it. It's, like, really awesome.

I want.

And I. And honestly, I really wanted to be there. Like, I wanted to go. I think it was, like, probably I was talking to my manager at the time. I was like, can I, like, maybe come, like, twice every quarter or something? And he was like, super. I mean, Frozworth, by the way. Like, my manager was reading between the lines, totally surprised. Totally surprised. He looked super depressed in the meeting. I felt so bad for him. But if you're watching this, it's okay, dude. Don't worry about it. Seriously. Some people, probably the best thing I think working at X is I got to work with these engineers who've worked at Twitter for so long. And when I joined, I was like, oh, these guys are onboarded onto everything. But that wasn't the case. My manager literally could just figure anything out. It felt like he was already onboard onto everything, but he could actually just like, read the code, look the logs, and figure out what the problem was within 30 minutes. And it didn't matter what it was. I was like, this guy must have been here for years. No, he's, like, actually just that good. So, I mean, I really loved working with him. He was, like, a really awesome guy. I think he was surprised. I guess I kind of. Kind of guess what happened, to be honest. But it doesn't really matter. But anyways, like, it's been really great working there. So I was going to go to visit. Actually, we were planning to visit Palo Alto. My wife is going on a trip with her mom and the baby. And I was like, okay. Like, that's one week. I Know I'm not your mom. I don't want to go on the trip because I had work to do. Not anymore. So I'm probably gonna go and it's gonna be pretty fun. But like, I was gonna. I was planning for that week to go to Pal. Pal Alto. But also my manager was like, can you come like next week? And I told my wife and she's like, literally like, you know, baby in her arm, like, you know, trying to like scarf food in her mouth for like the few seconds that she had. She's like literally dying. So first time parents, right? So we're kind of getting used to it.

But yeah, no, it's a crazy. It's a crazy change. What. Why don't you give some background on what you were doing prior to X Dingboard and then I want to talk about the future. Is that the.

Okay, sure. So you guys can. I'm probably going to like work a bit more on Dingboard. There's a bunch of bugs that I want to fix. I just didn't have the time with my full time job.

So.

Dingboard.com is the best app ever. Dingboard.com if you want to make a meme in seconds, 15 seconds.

Meme.

I was a paid user.

Something happens.

I was a paid user. I loved it.

Thank you very much for paying me.

Actually very, very good.

You know, like your money actually helped pay for this. Like, this is gon Coogan.

No way.

2% of this is John Coogan, right?

No, it was.

And you should give him naming rights. It is naming rights. Sell the naming rights.

Crazy that, that mobile meme making is so in the dark ages and I feel like you just pulled it forward. I used to have an app called like Photoshop Mix or something and it was pretty good. And then they just completely deprecated it and then they put ads in it, which was I was dealing with. And then they just shut it down. And it was pretty good at dropping out the backgrounds and doing it wasn't great, but it was okay. And then they forced you to go over to Photoshop Express and Lightroom. And so I'm using two different apps and neither of them are good anywhere near what you need. And so I was always, I was always a fan of Dingboard, but I.

Was actually like in the process when I joined them, I was in process of rewriting it so that I could deploy on web, like applications. Sorry. On iOS and Android it's actually like if you guys, if you guys are in. There's something called Sokol Okay. Sokol is made by this Swedish guy. I think he's retired kind of. He works three days a week, and on the four days that he has, he's working on this cross platform GL graphics library, like, I guess like Transpiler. So you Write in one GL language. It'll produce the metal version for iOS and it'll produce the version for Android and it'll produce the version for web. So I can use the same code and the code can be basically like. It can basically be the same code. Basically space deploy to all apps and then John Coogan and Jordy can make memes in seconds and get more followers on X.

So ready? This is the future I was promised.

Yeah, it feels like incredible Founder market fit for you to make a tool that helps posters make memes.

I mean, like, the reason was because I was like making memes on my software engineering diagramming tool, and then they, like, started adding a watermark and I was like this. Yeah, fucking ruin my meme making tool. I am going to war.

Yeah. And then I remember, I remember you had. You had, had sponsors. This is. I love this. There were sponsors. When you would open a new ding board file, it would just have a semi analysis ad from Dylan.

Still there, still there.

Oh, it's still there.

Still there. Semi analysis. Dylan Patel.

You should.

Guys should go check out his substack. He sponsored me for three months and he stopped sponsoring me and I was too lazy to remove it.

Oh, he's not a. But he's actually. He's on Passport with Ben Thompson. But anyway, he's the man and we love him. And. But the. But the big question is, like, dingboard, you're super popular online. Why didn't you go and raise like $15 million from a gross.

Dude, man, that sounds so lame, man. Oh, like raising money with managing people. I'm so not down. I'm so not down. Like, literally, dude, like this. I have two plugged in right now, and I don't have enough power going to my house to, like, plug this one in, which is why it's unplugged.

Yeah.

But, like, I could serve literally a million people.

Okay, so we're gonna blow your mind. We're gonna blow your mind with this. But sometimes you can raise 15 million and you can do what's called a secondary transaction where some of the money goes directly into your pocket. You don't have to hire that many people.

Yeah. So you could raise like 50 on 500.

Exactly.

And it's, you know, take take 40 yeah, yeah.

Just. Just to kind of set yourself up. A cushion. They call it a cushion safety.

Like, I feel like you want the opposite of that. I would never interest a founder who asked for that example.

No, he's just, he's joking. He's joking.

Yeah, I'm joking. Never happens.

You don't, you don't want to found her with money. You want a founder with no options. You want to found her like Roy Lee from Cluey.

New Dad. New dad or, or New Dad. Got to figure it out. Got to figure it out.

I've got to figure. I, I need, I need a 2 acre lawn and a zero turn tractor. That's what I need. I. This is, I need this. I will get it no matter what. Maybe the next 10 years. But like Roy Lee, for example, CEO. I think of Cluly. Yeah, he got, you know, kicked out of his university. Be a disgraced tartan feather. He has no choice. I wish I got an allocation. I even know he was racing. I would have written I, I need the money. Right. Like, I got a kid. I would have written a check without even thinking. I don't even care what the he's doing.

Yeah, you're. You're a Roy Lee defender.

Okay. Okay. I want a number for Dingboard. Like, how many users did you get? How much money were you making? Give us some sort of number so we can ring the door for you.

The peak MRR was like, like, I, I mean, I don't remember, I don't remember not raising and I don't want funds.

Probably 10k developer. Let's hit the gong for you.

Let's fucking go.

Let's go.

Honestly, Honestly, reading that for your fans too, because you're, yes, you, you genuinely, you're. You're an Internet celebrity and you have real fans. The question, the question I have for you is because you're a Roy Lee defender, what's your line between balancing, you know, engagement, sort of like rage baiting versus, you know, you sound like much more even keeled, you know, on the show right now.

All my rage baits. Here's what makes people so mad.

Sure.

That I actually believe what I say. I'm not saying it pisses people off. I really believe it. Like, I actually really mean it when I say it, which makes them even more angry. Makes them just like. And, but like when you're honest, like, I mean, like, you know, I'm a big believer in like honesty and stuff like that. And like, like when you're honest, like, you kind of like also the Same amount of haters that you gain, gain. You kind of gain twice as much as, like, people who, like, are fans of you. And I think that's what really matters. And sometimes the haters can kind of drown it out. So, like, I mean, the reason I'm. I'm a big fan of Roy Lee is because he posted that video right around the time I got fired. I got like an email which was a bunch of like, really scary legal words like non disparagement. I had like, to like, Google what this meant. Like, I didn't even know what disparagement meant. I was like, okay, wait, I'm not gonna sign anything. I'll wait for a lawyer. And. And then Roy Lee did this thing and I realized, like, you know what? Like, Roy Lee's a fucking legend. He's got skin. In the king game, like, Royal Lee has to win. So you know what? I'm just gonna be. I'm gonna be a. I'm gonna be a online, and I'm going to have to win, and then I'm going to. I'm obviously capable of winning, but if I have like, you know, like, the one thing I don't understand about people like Elon who like, work super hard, like, super smart, and like, you know, Elon's done. He's got like, compounds. He's got like, you know, tons of children he could spend all day, all day with. Like, he's got all the toys he could possibly want to play with, all the engineers he could talk to. Like, like, if I was him, I would just like, goof around with fun toys. But, like, he's actually trying to get to Mars. Like, you know, like, I feel like. I feel like sometimes it's like. So I think about being Elon. I could never be him because I would give up. At 20 mil, I'll be like, all right, I'm done, dude. Like, this is me. Like, I did my part. Like, I'm gonna chill with my zero turn tractor and my two acre lawn.

So got to know what you want.

Yeah, yeah, exactly, right?

So.

But like, I think that's what happens to a lot of founders. They get enough money. Like Palmer Lucky. Palmer Lucky. It was like a chip on his shoulder. He was like, like, he was like, jason, Cal. I'm gonna get that guy. Like, I'm so pissed. I'm gonna do it again. And he did it again. He 100% did it again. By the way, I love Jason. I love Jason. I love Palmer. I love both of them. And you know what? Jason is like the. It's like. It's like you can't have Batman without the Joker, right? You can't have Palmer Lucky without Jason.

He's the Joker of Jack, okay?

He's the Joker for Palmer. Lucky for me, the Joker would be the middle manager who I pissed off by complaining about Android Bug.

Okay, we're getting into the story where we're learning what actually happened, unraveling it.

Don't worry about it.

I never said anything about my don't worry about it.

Yeah. What's next?

Yeah, I mean. Yeah. So what's. What's next? All in on Dingboard building out the team.

Okay, so Dingboard is doing great. I'm going to, you know, keep on growing it and, like, try to get more money because I need some land. And here's why I need some land. I've been building things. This is the Ding Bot.

The Ding Bot.

The Ding Bot.

See this?

What does it do?

I 3D printed this.

This. What does it do?

This? This is an ARM ESP32 attached to A. A motor driver. Attached to a stepper driver. Sorry, sorry. Stepper motor. Some 3D printed things that I made with Ding CAD. By the way, Ding CAD dot com. It's currently down because I had no time to. To work on it, but I have, like, a local host version.

Ding CAD is coming back.

Breaking news sticks. No offense.

Oh, here's. Here's the genius of it. Okay.

It is possible.

I need cash flow. You know, hardware is hard because you buy an iPhone and, like, you have an iPhone, it's, like, good for, like, 30 years. Right?

Right?

Yep.

But with popsicle stick robots, they'll break in a month. You have to buy a new one. Oh, there we go.

There we go.

Get them in the board room.

And you know what it's like? You have a Dobby the Elf robot that's, like, cleaning the house. And, like, you know, it cost you 30 bucks and it makes a mistake, you just go in and just yeet it. You, like, kick it across the room because it's like, 30 bucks. You can just buy another one.

It's like.

It's like, that's the feature.

You're not worried about. You're not. You're not worried about, you know, getting paperclips by abusing your dobby robot because it'll come back to get you at some point.

Oh, no. You just program it to be happy that it gets kicked. You know, it's like, Dobby's like, you know, please. You know, please, sir. You just programming it, right. Like, oh, this is like a soft problem, by the way. Like, the. No, we're not gonna get run away. I think the real problem with, like, AI and stuff is, like, YouTube shorts. Have you seen these kids? All, like. Like, I saw a kid, like, so he. Dinner so with my family. This kid was like, at the. Trying to get to the bathroom. He's 12 years old and he was on his YouTube shorts and he was like, trying to, like, find the. The doorknob, like, clicking, like. Like not clicking around, but like. Like reaching around. Actually kind of. Kind of brutal, but like that. I think that's like the real AI risk for what's worth, like, YouTube shorts specifically.

So you're in retirement. Is there anything that could get you to come out of retirement? Could you.

There's anything about retirement. I was coding yesterday.

I was. $300 million offer. I mean, to get you back. Back into a mega corporation. Yeah, it's going to take 80 million, 100 million, 120 million. What gets you to take the job for?

I think, like, I probably, like, find it really hard to say no. That's like 2.5 probably, like, but I don't think, like, the companies I would work for have that kind of liquidity hanging out. I'm thinking they do.

Well, what are those kind of companies? What are those kind of companies? We can run a process.

So I know you don't want to work there, but there has to be a number. What's the number?

All right, I'm going to just start doing an auction. Here I go. Hey. Okay, I got a message for 500. 500. Do I have 600? 600. All right, 700.

Our internal goal was to get you hired on this stream or at least get you to raise 15 million. With 5 million in secondary, I could.

Raise money, like, super easily. And, like, I could also get a job super easy. I mean, I have friends. The thing is, like, I'm a very honest, hard worker. Like, yeah, the places I've worked at, I could go back. Like, I have, like, a really strong network, so I don't really need a job. And I mean, I'm not worried about getting a job job, but if I wanted to join in terms, like, for me, mission alignment is super important. Like, I really need to, like, use the product to actually enjoy it.

Sure.

So I sell. Sold some dingboard T shirts on Shopify and I'm, like, aligned with, like, Toby's. Awesome.

Yeah.

And then Cohere, I think, is, like, a really interesting place to work. For. Because they're on the come up. But mostly like, I mean, he's in Canada.

Hold on. Yeah. Break down cohere. That, that is not the common narrative. I mean I love Aiden and I, I, I think it's incredible. Founder. But, but, but, but it does seem like, you know, there's got to be some sort of like geopolitical strategy there for that company to really play out.

I think, I just think they're based, dude.

Like I just.

Yeah, I just think based.

Yeah. So it's just pure, pure culture. They'll figure it out.

Yeah.

Just like find an opportunity.

I mean, like, you know, like it's, it's, it's a lot closer than Palo Alto or like California, Canada. And I think they're cool.

Like, they kind of. They need a poster in residence. You could basically, you could a thousand X there their impression.

Do you listen to Death Grips?

Oh, yeah, yeah, it goes, it goes, it goes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because Aiden's a big Death Grips guy.

That just bumps cohere on top of Shopify.

Yep, yep, yep. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. He did a, he did an interview in a Death Grips T shirt. I saw it and I was like, that's amazing. This guy's a killer.

But what, what's, what's wrong with just becoming a full time poster? Getting a substack set up, getting a nice.

I think I'm gonna try to become like an actual billionaire. The dingbot thing is not a joke. I'm actually, actually going to actually do it.

That's cool.

And I'm not going to raise. I think I can do it. I probably can find people to do this for. There's a lot of things I'm really interested on the way, which is like doing like reinforcement learning for like control of robots, certain types of robots. I think I figured something out after listening to a popular lucky podcast about don't solve for things in hardware when you can solve them for them in software. And I'm pretty good at software and I'm sure hardware isn't that hard. Clearly it's not hard enough to start.

And I feel like it's, it's easy actually.

You prove it proved with that.

That it's easy. Yeah. Explain that. With the reinforcement learning for robotics, are you thinking like you're going to do stuff in simulation and then transfer the now the knowledge back with reinforcement learning? Are you doing the thing that Dylan Patel was posting about with like the robots on the, you know, on the harnesses trying to walk and then reusing that as reinforcement Learning data. Like, what are you actually thinking in terms of reinforcement?

So I don't think, like, humanoid robots is what I would do. I think I would do robots for things that annoy me. For example, dandelions on my lawn. And I would do whatever is possible. Like talk. I have a pretty good solid network. Like, talk to some of the guys from ETH Zurich.

Sure.

I don't know how to pronounce it.

Yeah, yeah.

And just be like, hey, like, just give me. Feed me the papers and like, some shitty python code. I'll clean up and make good. Sorry researchers, you guys. Extremely.

Nat. Friedman code coded. He's out of the game. Someone's got to build the robot that picks up the.

Yeah, no, exactly. Exactly what now? Because it's like I'm sick of like, like going outside and just, you know, just like poking out all these dandelions.

I'm.

I'm so sick and tired of it. And it's so easy to build this. It's like literally 3D printer. Like, you could you even 3D print the wheels? Like, you can get like five bucks off of AliExpress. And ESP32 costs like three bucks. I just impulse buy them. I like, get my X ad revenue payout and I just, like, spend the whole thing on AliExpress. My. My house, like, constantly has like, these random AliExpress packages and it's like, maybe build like a Minecraft sorting system in real life.

Like, yeah, I feel like. I feel like if you could build it, you could sell it at Home depot for like 300 bucks, you know, kind of new.

I can also sell it for 25 bucks on subscription and you get a new one every month.

Oh, there we go. There you go. Yes.

People are kicking their dobbies. Yeah.

Subscription.

It's like, if it breaks, it's like I literally will tell the users, hey, I'm just, you know, a dude and can. And there's a CNC shop here that does wood. So, like, they do wood cnc. So I'm going to make the robot chassis out out of maple wood, because there's a lot of maple here in Ottawa. And I'm gonna laser, you know, laser on, like, made in Ottawa on it. Except, you know, modulo the, the motors inside that will be made in China until I figure out how to make motors, which shouldn't be that hard. But I guess, like, the, the. The core insight I have after doing Dingboard and like, honestly working for a lot of these big tech companies is like, there's a lot of little Businesses on the way to something. Like, I'm going to try to do this. I'm going to realize, like, holy shit. Like, all the CAD software fucking sucks. And I'm going to build it because I can. And, like, you know, with Gemini 2.5 Pro, just, like, ripping on my credit card.

What about Grok?

Gemini 2.5 Pro is the best model to use for coding if you write your own coding frameworks because it's cheaper, it's faster, and it's good enough. Like, I'm not, like, giving all of my work away. So I don't need a PhD level intelligence because I'm not a PhD level guy. I'm trying to write react. Like, it's not that hard to write react. I need a model that can listen to me and understand what I mean and kind of, like, doesn't avoid using too many if statements. Stop. Just stop using if statements. And like, like.

Yeah, yeah.

So.

Okay, okay, so.

But.

But here's the thing you need.

You're. You want to build a bunch of stuff. You need some cash flow. Why not set up. Why not set up, you know, some type of subscription? You have a lot of fans, a lot of people want to give you $10 a month so you can have.

I mean, honestly, that was the Dingboard subscription that I signed up for. It was like, support this guy who's doing something cool.

Yeah. The issue is Dingboard is so hard to sign up for. How do I even sign up for Dingboard right now?

Okay, first of all, Jordan, never doubt my conversion levels ever again. I am a conversion. I can convert anything to anything. I am, I am. I am a conversion. God. Okay, go to dingboard.com.

You'Re so good. You're so good. You don't have a buy button because you want to inspire yourself to grind harder.

Go to dingboard.com.

Okay, I'm here. I'm here. Sign in first. Do I have to sign in?

I don't even have to tell you what to do.

Legend.

Legend.

All right, I'm signing in. Okay, I'm here. What do I ding scribe? There we go. 12.99 per month. You got to get your numbers up, dude.

I actually don't have the code. It's like, on my server, you got.

To do what Google does. It's 500amonth, but they give you six months at half price. And then it just auto converts up. Yeah, that's interesting. That's the real ticket.

Or I could just double the price.

Yeah, yeah, but the price should be cheap. Cheap on day one and they just get more and more. It should go up by 10 every month.

Dude, I'm not doing that. That's some YouTube shorts surprise some kids brain.

All right, I. I'm a Ding Pro subscriber.

Subscriber.

No, dude, you have to get that.

Dude.

Jordy, never get that wrong again. You're a ding scriber. You're part of the crew.

I'm ding maxing.

Okay, talk about the rest of your stack. Gemini 2.5 Pro. Are you cursor guy? GitHub co pilot cursor. What do you say?

Never.

No, never say curse.

Okay. I have a custom framework I've written for neovim. So basically what it is is I have a server that creates a facade for all the LLMs that I have. So Claude and before Gemini was good. Claude and OpenAI's models, they go down all the time. Like infrastructure is hard to serve at scale. Like I don't blame them. It's like that's a hard problem to solve. So I have like always, I always have a model available. Like even if both of them are down, like I can hit deep seek over open router. Right? Like it's a facade.

Can't you do that in cursor by just switching the model router switching.

Was there a hockey. So for me it's like I have a weird. I mean, let me, let me, let me flex on you guys a bit. So this is my keyboard.

Flex. Flex away. There we go.

Nice nano by the way.

I got a.

Got a homie from. From China of built to make it for me. Basically. Space. Was it space? I don't remember. It's all space. I is LLM provider, so that's Gemini 2.5 Pro. Space K is Gemini Flash. And it all renders in a single markdown file. And I've created commands for these models. So basically depending on the fence. So three apostrophes and then there's going to be the command name. So like edit file. I can basically give it a syntax to edit a file for for me. And then I actually manually.

Is this open source? Like, you know, people put their dot files up like, like, can I install your. Your setup?

So no, it's not open source mostly because people are going to start posting issues and I'm just not interested in fixing them.

Okay.

So I'm just gonna do it for myself. I'm like, I'm pulling up the ladder behind me. Like I'm, you know, I know how much this is.

If it's not open Source you gotta raise for it. It sounds like we got ourselves a real cursor competitor here.

It is a cursor competitor and it's probably going to kill Cursor if I open source it. But I'm not going to sell for money. I think what's going to naturally happen is like when people see me do use it, they're going to have ideas of their own and then they're going to build it for themselves. The whole point of. So it's a neovim plugin kind of. It's also a server and it plugs into a bunch of. I'm good at software. So part of the problems with so Neo VIM is great because the software is configurable as a feature. So the best software you can get is software you can read and understand and actually change. The best software for you is software you've written yourself because if something annoys you, you can actually go change it. And that's why I really like to write my own frameworks. Cursor I'm sure is a great product, but I'm just so particular about certain things. For example, I want to implement tree sitter across multiple files and automate adding files to my context. So I have a file which has a bunch of file paths and those get added to my context based on the workspace that I'm in. And I manage it manually by literally going to the file and deleting the lines. And what I want is to automatically create an ast, so an abstract syntax tree to be able to jump around with an LLM or like train a model to actually go through the ast. And this is all super obvious to me. It's like, man, like, what about you're.

Gonna make any products in the parenting space?

Oh yeah. So actually I have an idea. I had an idea. So I use an ink display. By the way, before you try to hack this, I never update the software and I never write anything private on it. So go It's. It's. I'm gonna put it public. So I have an ENC reader slash like tablet it. And what I wanted to make is to teach my kid to write instead of texting him. I want to make like a kind of like a radio E ink display, kind of like an etch and sketch which you can write on, but it synced to your parents Etch and Sketch. So my wife, I will have one, I will have one and my kid will have one and he'll learn how to write because we'll write to each other over. Over distances.

Right, Right.

I think that's like, a really cool idea. So I'm probably going to build that. If you wanted to make like a gajillion dollars, it's so easy. Just look around and, like, come up with good ideas and actually just. Just believe that you can do it. Like, literally just go do it. Like, it's not that hard. It's actually not. Get a 3D printer. Watch some YouTube videos. YouTube is great products. I would love it if they stopped putting shorts because there's so many great videos where you can learn. Stop with the shorts.

Stop. Get ready. This is going to be a YouTube short. We're going to edit this. This will be on Tik Tok. Maybe we got to get the Minecraft.

Yeah, Minecraft Speed Run.

And we'll put surfers over you. Anything, any AI slob.

How many kids do you want to have?

So as much as God allows us to have. So just leaving it up to God, and. Yeah, that's how many kids.

Good answer.

That's great.

What else. What else do you have to say to the people while you're here?

Thanks for doing this podcast, guys. I know how hard. I know how hard it is to run a podcast and all the tech behind it. Let's just say that. And like, doing live and stuff, like, it's. It's a pain in the ass. So keep it up, guys. I know, like, thank you. And the live. The live, the video team at X are like generational talents. Like, super, super good people. Like, so, like, just like, find someone to like, like find a way to reach out to them so when you have any issues and like, actually talk.

Yeah. I didn't fully realize that you were the bug guy until you posted over the last few days. Otherwise we would have been hammering you with messages every single day. But this has been great. Come, come back on whenever you want to talk about your project.

I'd love to just hang out and chat.

Yeah, thanks. I really appreciate you guys. And yeah, so keep it up. Thanks.

Yeah, we're excited and I'm excited to be ding maxing. Just offer. Offer a premium tier, like, I don't know, like 10 grand a month or something like that. And maybe we become, you know.

Oh, I mean, if you guys want to space, I'll sell you right now, like, spit handshake if you want to put an ad on Dingboard, your podcast. Let's say 12 grand.

12 grand. Okay, we'll talk to our. We'll talk to our cfo.

All right. All Right. All right.

And our cfo. Our CFO will talk to yourself.

But can we get the semi analysis deal where it's perpetual? It's 12 grand once and we get it forever. Because what if you.

Yeah. Is it a one time? Is it a one time or.

It's a great option. There's a lot of upside here.

It depends on how good your podcast is.

Yeah.

Okay. Okay.

Well, we're going to keep working on it. Hopefully Dingboard keeps growing for the next decade and we can be massive together.

Yeah, absolutely. All right.

We're excited to follow.

Talk to you soon.

Godspeed.

Have a good one. Bye. Next up, we have to talk to you about Wander.

Find your happy place. Find your happy place.

Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel grade amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, and a 247 concierge service.

Yes.

Scene should get a wander.

He should. He's going to be traveling around interviewing at all the top companies. Wander would be a great choice for him. We have had a great show. We were going to play you an interview that we did earlier today with Shervin Pisham our. But there are some security issues, unfortunately, and so we're working to potentially blur the background and we will get you that interview as soon as we possibly can. But security comes first. It comes first. And so we will obviously relay some of the key takeaways. And honestly, it's such a developing story. I feel like already the story has moved and we should just have him back on again soon from a more secure location and make sure that everything is above board. But thank you so much for watching. Thanks for tuning in and we will talk to you tomorrow. Have a good day. Bye.