Intel & Apple, The American Economic Rollercoaster | Brian Chesky, Josh Reeves, Jonathan Neman, Zal Bilimoria

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Today's Friday, May 8th, 2026. We are live from the TVPN Ultra Dome.

The temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital.

Jordi Hays has some new buttons.

I got some new buttons. That's why we had to be off for a couple days.

Yes. Deep engineering work. The great lock-in continues.

The great lock-in continues.

No, we will go into a review of the last few days, but first we'll give you a review of the next 3 hours, uh, because we have Josh Reeves from Gusto coming on, Jonathan Nieman from Sweetgreen, Zoll from Refactor, and then Brian Chesky from Airbnb coming into the TVTN UltraDome. We're very excited. Uh, lighter schedule. It's Friday. We're having fun. We're gonna be hanging out here on the stream telling you about the American economic roller coaster.

You've heard this story before.

It's just nonstop. Okay, so the American economic—

It's good to be back, we miss you guys.

It's good to be back. Yeah, we got a bunch of stuff going on. So a whole bunch of economic news over the last couple days. Stock market is absolutely ripping, we should be in white suits. Intel's up 20% today, so almost. And there's this split between the AI economy and the real economy, the American economy. And there's a whole bunch of different things that like you need to puzzle together to get a picture picture of what's going on. And then I'm discovering that there are K shapes within the K shapes. Even in the real economy, there is a divide between different companies. And so I wanted to walk through that. So let's start with the Intel news. It's up almost 20% today on the news that they will be making chips for Apple. There's a report in The Wall Street Journal about this. They've released— reached a preliminary chipmaking agreement. It's not completely locked in, but there's a whole bunch of extra context here that we've been tracking for the last 6 months, 12 months, as some of this was expected. Revitalization of Intel was something that a lot of folks were clamoring for. Ben Thompson, myself, a lot of folks, Leopold Aschenbrenner, we're all hoping for something. And then plans are starting to come together. So the talks have been described as intensive, intensive talks between the two companies have been ongoing for more than a year. Apple's been talking to Intel. Interesting. Of course, Intel and Apple have been long-term partners for what, all the '90s, 2000s, up until the Apple Silicon program where they started going, Apple started going direct to TSMC. Can they get them back? It seems like potentially in some form factors, but we're gonna dig into it. So they have hammered out a former deal in recent months, and it's still unclear which exact Apple products Intel would make chips for and manufacture them, both its own designs. So Intel has two main businesses. It's both a design shop and a manufacturer. They have a fab and a, and a design unit. And in its foundry unit, both businesses have been underperforming for years before Liputan came in as the new CEO and was vowing to revitalize them. And so the last summer, the Trump administration struck a deal to convert nearly $9 billion in federal grants into Intel stock, giving the US—

Roughly $20, $21 a share. It's now at $125 a share. Yeah. White House has got to be feeling pretty good.

Yeah, huge. I mean, I'm pretty sure Jensen has made over $1 billion on the $5 billion investment. I mean, just today, if it's up 20%, and he must have seen a big growth in that position since then. So just today, probably a $1 or $2 billion print. And so the reporting here in the Journal says that the Trump administration was actually key in bringing Apple to the table, putting pressure on sort of both sides to say, hey, let's think about the future of American manufacturing resiliency, reducing Taiwanese dependence on a foreign supply chain and giving Intel a real shot at underwriting the next big fad that they wanna build.

Yeah, NVIDIA got in at $23 a share with their $5 billion investment, so up around a 5x.

Not bad. That's not bad at all.

The guy really needed it.

He paid for Groq with that. That's pretty sick.

Oh yeah.

He just paid for Groq. Perfectly.

That's why he wired before they actually closed.

Yeah, he's like, I'm up. I got gains. I need to offset these. So Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has met repeatedly over the last year with high-ranking Apple officials, including CEO Tim Cook, as well as SpaceX chief Elon Musk, Nvidia chief Jensen Huang, to try and convince them to get into business with Intel. There was a discussion about should Nvidia dual-source the Grace CPUs from Intel. SpaceX and Elon's been with Samsung for a lot of Tesla chips, but there's been discussion there. There was that rumor about GlobalFoundries and Elon's always been in and around the fab world and he's obviously going a lot deeper with the long-term TerraFab project. So Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick was trying to convince them to get into business with Intel. Some of the people familiar with the matter said with the Apple deal, Intel has now signed partnerships with all three. So over the last decade, Intel fell badly behind rivals. This is from the Wall Street Journal, such as TSMC and Samsung Electronics after a series of technical mishaps, leadership changes, and failed attempts at consolidation led outside foundry customers to pull or curb their businesses. When Intel hired Tan in March of 2025, wow, just a year ago, I guess a year and 2 months, to replace ousted Chief Executive Pat Gelsinger, President Trump raised concerns that Tan's close ties with China would compromise him and called for his ouster. It was a very, very dramatic moment. Dramatic moment, but Tan won Trump over with a charm offensive. I like that. And the government announced its 10% investment in Intel shortly after. Following the investment, Intel shares price rose sharply on Friday morning. It rose 7.5% to an all-time high of nearly $118 per share. It's up more now. Tan has been reshaping Intel's top leadership ranks in recent months, including hiring former TSMC executive Wei-Jen Lo, a move that prompted a lawsuit from TSMC. So they're not friends anymore. Intel CEO has also, also ousted his head of product and hired new executives to lead the company's data center processor and client computing units, as well as newly formed custom silicon business. He's also invested heavily in Intel's most advanced manufacturing process known as 14A, and that is the node that Intel is hoping that all of the potential customers will jump together and say, hey, we're going to buy from this if you make it. If you build it, we will come. President Trump personally advocated for Intel to Cook in a meeting, which is funny because it sounds like he's advocating for Intel just to cook generally. But he's— no, he's advocating for Intel to Tim Cook in a meeting at the White House. According to people familiar with the matter, Trump said, I like Intel. In January. He said that the government made tens of billions of dollars from Intel deal and that the government's backing of the company had attracted important partners to Intel. As soon as we went in, Apple went in, Nvidia went in, a lot of smart people went in, Trump said. Nvidia, the world's largest chip firm, invested $5 billion in Intel in September, and the two companies announced a partnership under which Intel would build custom data center CPUs, the processing brains for most computer systems for Nvidia. And last month, Elon, of course, announced the TerraFab project. And so Apple relies on TSMC to make chips for iPhones, iPads, Macs, and other devices and is under pressure to find additional chip suppliers. There's also chip shortages, so it could be good to dual source independent of the geopolitical discussion. On Apple's last two earnings conference calls, Cook blamed a lack of availability of advanced chips for Apple's inability to meet customer demands for iPhones. The constraints are expected to continue in the current quarter. Affecting several Mac models, Cook said, quote, we think looking forward that the Mac mini and the Mac Studio may take several months to reach supply-demand balance. And after the earnings call, Apple raised the Mac mini starting price. And so TSMC's manufacturing capacities— capabilities far surpass those of Samsung and Intel. Makers of other kinds of chips for memory and storage, for example, are more competitive with one another, giving Apple multiple sources of supply, although of course they are memory constrained. Apple's been long, long been TSMC's top customer, but skyrocketing demand for its manufacturing capacity from Nvidia and other designers of AI chips means Apple no longer has as much leverage to secure the supplies that it needs. Starting in 2006, Apple used Intel-designed CPUs as its main processor of its personal computers, but switched to its own custom CPUs based on ARM design in 2020. That's the dawn of Apple Silicon. And so, there's been an incredible economic and financial performance concentrated in just a handful of trillion-dollar tech companies. Intel starting to join and starting to perform like that. There's a few memory stocks. I saw one report that referred to it as the MAG-10, and they'd added a few other AI names to that group. But there's just a few companies that are driving the vast majority returns in the stock market. There's a couple slides that we can pull up that show the scope of what they're calling— it is now a bubble.

The concentration?

Yeah, the concentration.

Yeah, we went through— we had 3 sort of beautiful weeks where pretty much everyone started saying, there's no way it's a bubble. Yeah, look at the revenue growth. There's no way it's a bubble. But now, people, Steve over at Bloomberg, we can pull this chart up since you mentioned it.

Which one is this?

This is the concentration.

Sure. Yeah, I've seen this.

In the market, you can see the AI Big Ten.

So Mag Seven plus AMD, Broadcom, and one other. Who is that? Micron— now make up 40% of the market. Railroads, for reference, during 1835 to 1910 were 63% of the market. And he comps it to Japan, the Nifty 50, tech and telecom throughout various periods of time. And yeah, it's an interesting dynamic. I was reading this post by, or this piece by Greg Ip in The Wall Street Journal, and he was trying to disentangle what's happening in the overall American economy from the AI economy. What's, where is the growth coming from? He sort of back of the envelope did. He said the AI economy grew 31% while the non-AI economy just 0.1%. And he cites a few economic statistics that are recent. Personal consumption, the biggest component of GDP, grew a relatively muted 1.6%. Investment fell in housing, business structures. I think we're building— we're spending more on data centers than housing now, or office buildings, I guess. I think it eclipsed office buildings and factories and transportation equipment like trucks and aircraft. Meanwhile, investments soared 43% in tech equipment. Obviously, that's chips and GPUs, 23% in software. Surprising, and 22%—

SaaS had a pretty meaningful bounce back.

Certainly on the revenue side.

Datadog, Atlassian, there's been some acceleration.

It really was extremely widespread where you had, I mean, you had like DoorDash and companies with strong network effects where the software was not their moat. They still had to go and answer to the market. And some of them got in and out of that in, week or a month, and some of them, it took a quarter or two to show that there's resiliency. Some of them are still beaten down. But overall, software is still doing very well. And so on the flip side, there's another headline that hit the Journal yesterday. US adds 115,000 jobs in April with solid hiring across sectors— retail, transportation, warehousing, and healthcare. All short. All showed strong growth and led to expectation-beating jobs growth. And so this is the weird dynamic that, you know, you're seeing all of this growth in the, in the AI economy and yet the overall employment is still chugging along. We can pull up the chart from The Wall Street Journal, but the US job market blew past expectations in April, buoyed by gains in in industries including retail, transportation, warehousing, healthcare. Not completely unexpected given that those are not particularly AI-targeted areas, whereas you might see, you know, the layoffs in the tech community. But that doesn't— it's just not enough because the US employs over 100 million people. And so a layoff of 4,000 people at some tech company just doesn't really move the needle when you're talking breaking news from Gabe in the chat.

Texas Roadhouse is up.

What? Why?

It says 20%. I'm seeing 15%.

Either way, is it up so high?

Uh, he says you're not bullish enough on Texas Roadhouse. I have never been.

Maybe they beat, uh, yeah, yeah, everyone says this is a Kuriaku, uh, filter. It really, it really is.

It's crazy how, how viral that, that meme format has gone. I thought that was just like a thing that I I sent to you because I'd be dying laughing about it.

Yeah, yeah. No, no, it's quite popular. Broken containment fully. So the American economy added 115,000 jobs in April. This was down from a net gain of 185,000 jobs in March, but it was much better than what expectations were for April. Analysts polled by The Wall Street Journal were expecting 55,000 jobs. And the real number came in more than twice that, which is like, it just breaks the narrative a lot. And it's this, there's this disconnect between like the AI economy and the real economy. I was talking to Sagar about this. It's like, in some ways it's like AI is, NVIDIA earnings is holding up the global economy and it's holding up the global stock market. It's not actually holding up the economy if you view the economy as all of the different jobs and activities that happen, even if there isn't, incredible growth there, there's actually a surprising amount of strength and resiliency. So the unemployment rate stayed—

Personally, I'm waiting to hit the gong until we see what the revisions come in at.

We haven't seen any revisions from March this time.

I don't know, maybe— Yeah, no, it comes like over 6 months later.

Yeah, but that's why I wanted to have Josh from Gusto on today, because I think that Gusto has data on hiring that is very different from what the Labor Department, what's going on at the Labor Department. It's just a completely different dynamic. And you can look at like what's actually going on in small businesses. We've talked to folks at Stripe about this. And there are a lot of other data sources, the ADP payrolls and stuff. There's plenty of like pretty standardized formats for reporting. And while there might be revisions to some government stats, it feels like there's there's plenty of places to get data. And it's all pointing in the same direction, which is not, oh, yeah, they said they beat twice, they delivered twice as many jobs as were projected, and it was actually down. No one's really suggesting that. So the April report coming in after strong job gains in March shows how the labor market is holding up better this year than last. While healthcare is still leading the way in job gains, other sectors now appear to be picking up. Businesses are seeing conditions stabilizing, and they have weathered the tariffs, so many are hiring. It's looking somewhat better than it did last year. In the first 4 months of the year, monthly payrolls have averaged $76,000, up from an average of $42,000 during the same period last year. Still, the US has shed jobs over the past 6 months, and many companies are reluctant to bring on new workers en masse. Companies grappling with changes in everything from trade to immigration to tax policy, have for the most part held off on large-scale hiring and firing. But it does seem like the chaos of the tariffs and all of the early, like, EOs, like, that creates a lot of business uncertainty. That settles eventually, and then you get back to, okay, there were a bunch of changes, but at least we know that there aren't wild changes coming in the future, at least that are expected. So Diane Swonk, chief economist at KPMG, says, It's still a high-anxiety job market. Those who have a job are clearly clinging on while those who are looking for a job are feeling frozen out. And so I was digging into, you know, where is their strength within the real economy? Once you go outside of AI, what is going on? And there were two recent earnings reports that were sort of disconnected, showed a little bit of the picture of what's going on. So it was Whirlpool and Six Flags both had very different reports. So Whirlpool, you probably know from refrigeration and washing machines, dryers, that type of appliance. They've been making appliances for over 100 years. And they've also been paying a dividend since the 1950s consistently. They've never suspended their dividend, even through all the Great Recession, the dot-com crash, Every year they've been able to pay that dividend. They just cut their dividend, which is a really, really big deal for this company since it's a dividend stock. The stock traded down on the news. And the stock is down 80% over the past 5 years. And they're in some financial trouble. They have a lot of debt. And they have a lot of competition. But you could play that as, OK, the real economy is completely chugging to a halt. At the same time, you had Six Flags, which should be the thing that is the most discretionary, like, do you go to the roller coaster theme park or not? And Six Flags just reported higher first quarter revenue. They're growing, and they're growing attendance and customer spending. And so, uh, now Six Flags, it's not exactly a juggernaut of business. It's only worth $2.3 billion, uh, and the stock is down over over the past 2 years, about 50%. But the business is growing, and you wouldn't expect that during a time of deep economic weakness. There's something odd going on there, where, as you think of refrigeration as extremely necessary, roller coasters as the ultimate— you can definitely skip it if you are cash-strapped. But the actual dynamics of the market are very different. Whirlpool sells big-ticket necessities. Necessities, these refrigerators, but they are deferrable. So you can put off getting a new refrigerator. You can repair an old refrigerator if money is tight, but your kids are only really rollercoaster age for a limited time. And Whirlpool also faces brutal global competition, and existing home sales are down 3% month over month. And so all of that drives fewer appliance upgrades, and they are not— and they are not necessarily a beneficiary of all the international competition that they face from LG and Samsung and other international players. And so I've sort of—

Quick correction, Six Flags, or new information. Six Flags has been up since around November. It sort of bottomed. Yeah. I remember I was thinking of this because, one, they have the ticker FUN, which is fantastic. The stock has not been having fun, but Travis Kelce and a group put in $200 million.

That's right, we talked about that.

The stock traded down pretty substantially.

Yeah, I remember that.

After the investment, but it's basically recovered to where it was. Yeah. And it's—

Well, it's still down over the past like 5 years. Yeah, yeah. 2 years ago, it was like a $5 billion company.

Yeah, down big.

But, but, but, but, but, What's interesting is that at this time of like economic uncertainty and all these questions about hiring, questions about economic resilience, they are increasing revenues, increasing attendance, increasing customer spend, and that's what's driving the stock today. And so there's this, I was looking at these two companies and I was like, they sort of fit into this barbell thesis of the AI future, which I've been seeing pop up more and more. and the two examples that I always give are one, the Ellison family is both like long slop and long anti-slop. They have a ton of infrastructure investments in AI through Oracle, and then they own legacy media like Batman, Superman through Warner Brothers. And then Josh Kushner's doing a similar thing with OpenAI and the San Francisco Giants, like two completely opposite ends of the spectrum. And so you can think of roller coasters as potentially like anti-slop, because you can't vibe code Space Mountain. But it's interesting to sort of like dig into the weeds of what's going on in the global economy, in the American economy, and seeing like where the unsuspecting winners are. Ryan Peterson shared a post from the— or chart from the Financial Times that perfectly illustrates our possible futures. This is so funny that this This is in the Financial Times, but they fully embraced what happens in the human extinction tech singularity and the end of scarcity tech singularity. In the bull case, real GDP per capita goes north of $1 million, and in the human extinction scenario, it goes to zero, of course, but the AI boosted growth path is a steady trend upwards. And that is the goal that I think everyone should be working for, potentially the end of scarcity outcome as well. But it is fascinating. And I think this chart that Ryan shares is sort of, I think, why there's anxiety in the market, because there's this, like, you know, the whole, like, you're not prepared if it's not a bubble. Bubble concept, but there's like a dual anxiety where like if AI gets too good, there's mass unemployment, everyone's worried about that. But if AI is a bubble and it collapses, you go into a recession and everyone loses their job and like you're in a similar scenario of like economic anxiety for both the, not necessarily the true doomers. I mean, obviously they face a similar, you know, opinion, but, Even if you're just in the it's overheated camp, there's real risk to the stability. I think that's where a lot of the bubble concerns come from, although we're certainly not seeing very many signs of the bubble. Obviously, the valuations are high, but so are the revenue growth charts. We can go through some of the folks that are arguing.

[Speaker:TREY_LOCKERBIE] Before we do that, are you more of a back of the envelope an envelope guy or a napkin math guy?

Oh, that's interesting. I have a napkin here from Wonder Co. from the event I brought in.

Oh, would you look at that? Yeah, a little souvenir.

Um, I like, uh, I like a napkin. I like a napkin. Actually, now that I'm thinking about it, napkin math is insane. It's extremely hard to write on a napkin. Totally. It's way easier to write on the back of an envelope. Yeah, you get a big envelope, you can get an envelope It's 8.5 by— it's effectively a spreadsheet.

An envelope is sophisticated. An envelope is kind of a core business utility. Napkins can be used for anything.

If you're in napkin math, you've got to pivot.

I will say I'm much more of a napkin math guy.

Why?

I can't— I mean, just—

The phrase that you pulled?

Spiritually, and the phrase that I pulled. But if I can't get excited about an opportunity based on what can fit on a napkin, then I'm never going to get excited about it, right? There's usually like—

So you think a napkin is definitionally smaller? It's a less amount of math?

Totally. It's a lesser vehicle than an envelope.

Yeah, because a big envelope you could do a full spreadsheet on. Totally. You could write out comps and have multiple cells.

No. In practice, I'm a napkin math guy. But if something was really serious, I would probably pull out the envelope.

Yeah, we've been doing too much napkin math around here. Time to pull out the big guns. Let's get out the envelope.

Speaking of envelopes, so this morning, I was telling Tyler, I'm incredibly overwhelmed with Slacks, emails, DMs on every platform. LinkedIn DMs, Instagram DMs, X DMs, all the different messaging apps. And I was thinking, how cool would it be if there was a service where you connected all your inboxes to, and then every day they would print out all of the different messages and then bring them to you, and you could put, um, like a box.

Yeah, put—

you could put a box outside of your house and they would just put them in there, and then at a specific time —maybe in a roughly 2-hour window, you could go out and grab all the printed out messages and sort of like leaf through them, decide what you need to respond to. You would potentially— because you're only getting messages once a day, you would probably be a lot more intentional about what you wrote back and forth. And I think that could be—

It's sort of the opposite of EarthClassMail, those virtual mailboxes. Because they'll take your physical mail still. No, but I want everything.

I want everything coming in this box. You want everything printed. Box outside of my house that people put, um, and I think there's something there.

Yeah, Trump— I mean, Trump literally does this.

He does that, right?

Yeah, he gets emails printed out and then he'll, he'll write with a big marker his response, and then his assistant will scan it and then email it back.

Yeah, uh, more, more on, uh, Sea Fry says a napkin is more available than an envelope. Very true. Yeah, often the best business meetings were not scheduled as a business meeting.

So there aren't envelopes around, there's napkins.

There's no envelopes around, but there's plenty of napkins.

Yeah, also, I mean, you're saying napkins are smaller, but if you're at a restaurant and you have like a fabric napkin and you unfold that, those can be pretty big.

So you're, but I feel like it's bad form to be at a restaurant, like you're not supposed to ruin the napkins. Or do you carry a pen that has washable ink?

You have the crayons for the kids, right? People are— The chat is saying—

They don't ask you to— Chat is saying I could call my service The United States Postal Service. Yeah, that's a good name. Thank you, Alex, that's a great name.

That's sort of like the San Francisco artificial intelligence company or something like that, or the browser company of New York. It would be inspired by that, yeah. I think that even with the—

He uses a Cran, closed-fisted grip, right on the tablecloth.

Right on the tablecloth, okay. Yeah, I feel like if you're getting If you're given crayons, you are expected to maintain that the child uses the crayons only on the children's menu, which is typically made out of paper, very disposable. If you see the child using the crayons on a cloth napkin, you are expected as a patron to intervene.

Jackson says digitize this service and call it email. There we go. We gotta get, we gotta establish the mailbox first.

We got an idea.

But then we can go there. But I like where you're going.

I got an idea. Well, there's some other posts about the markets. Justin Spittler says, "Be careful buying semis here." Obviously the market's very, very overheated.

Let's pull up this video. Travis Pastrana.

Let's play this video. Oh, this is Travis Pastrana? Yes. That's amazing. Nitro Circus, we mentioned many times on the show. Is he drinking a Red Bull?

Yeah, no parachute. No.

Oh, no parachute.

Yeah, so he jumps out of the plane, no parachute. That's crazy. Drinking a Red Bull. That's actually— and then he connects. He's got to do some tricks.

He's really taking his time here. The tension is building, building, building. And so he connects with someone who wraps him up, and then do they pull the parachute?

Connect to each other? Or do they— they, they, they strap him to them.

Oh, okay. There is a strap. Strap themselves to them. Because it seems sort of crazy just to bear hug and hope for the best. I don't think you're bear hugging.

I don't know.

It's Red Bull. Anything could happen. I would expect him to be delivered a full parachute, his own parachute that he then dons. But he made it. Wow. Well, that's what it's like investing in semiconductors right now, I guess. Anyway, How was your last 2 days, Tyler? What'd you get up to?

It was sick. I was at the, I went to the trial. You went to the trial? OpenAI Elon trial.

Okay, walk me through it. You left the studio on Tuesday.

Yes, wait, wait, wait, before this, the chat is still going. They said if Gary Tan gets ahold of this service, he's gonna call it Gmail.

Gmail is good. There's something there. Gmail. If he vibe codes the full Gmail replacement. Anything's possible. So you leave the office at 2:00 after we wrapped the show on Tuesday. You went straight to the airport? I did. OK. And then what time did you go to bed? Because you woke up really early, right?

Yeah. So I got to the trial. So it's in Oakland. I got to the courthouse at, I think, like something around like 5:30. 5:30. Yeah, because you've got to get in line. So basically, it's a public— because it's like a federal case. There like has to be some room for the public. But there's only like, I think the number is somewhere like 20 or 30, 'cause I think it's closer to 20 because I think part of the 30 is reserved just for media.

Okay, and when you got there at 5:30, were there already people standing in line?

Yeah, so there were, I think there were like 3 or 4 people there already. Okay. In line.

Early bird getting the worm.

But yeah, well, 'cause I didn't wanna be late, honestly. Yeah, yeah, of course. Did you talk to those people? Uh, a few of them.

So were you there before Mike Isaac?

I was there before Mike Isaac, but he has a media pass. So yeah, because last time when Mike Isaac came on the show, he said that because each like news—

yeah, New York Times got one pass and he was splitting it with Cade Metz. And so they were sort of going back and forth, and I guess he had a media pass that day.

Yeah, so that day he had a media pass. Yeah, he got there pretty late. He got there like 7:30 or 8.

Okay, so you're there from 5:30 So he gets there at 8:00. What time does the trial actually start?

I think around 8:30. 8:30? Okay. Yeah. So basically, I'm just posting up for like 3 hours. Okay.

And then this is Wednesday. So walk us through like what are you seeing? There's these opening remarks from the judge. They sort of welcome everyone in. Yeah. Jury comes in.

Okay. So there are basically 3 main like segments. So basically, I'll say it starts 8:30, ends at I think 2:00 PM. There's, uh, 2 breaks, 2 20-minute breaks. Okay. Um, so starts off and we, we watch like the deposition of Mir Maradi. So this is all live streamed, right? The audio is live. The audio is live.

So you're seeing a video. We're watching the video of her deposition.

Okay. Um, it's mostly covering the, the ousting, the timeline of the ousting. And, and this is where, this is where all the, the texts came out.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, and did, were they showing you the actual text, were they playing a video, or were they playing the AI reenactment of the text? 'Cause we have this, someone turned Sam Altman's text to Mira Murati into a 2011 style emo teenage heartthrob anthem. Did this make it into the courtroom or no? Let's play this. We have the audio.

Can you indicate directionally good or bad?

Good motion graphics too. Whoever made this, talented. What is this, Suno? Can you put in text into Suno and get a full song?

I like to show, play this for an AI skeptic. Yeah. And see what their reaction is because—

How do you see this and not want to build? I've seen these before and I've always really enjoyed them, but with most of the AI music tools, I've never found a great way to put in a full script that I've written to get the results, but does he know how to do that?

So the author said his steps to make this. So first, he OCR'd the images and turned them into plain text. Images of the actual text messages, and then removed the names from the dialogue, pasted into Suno, and iterated like 20 to 30 times. And then finally thought this one was catchy. Okay. Yeah. So I think it's still like, this is still Suno, but I think you still have to iterate about it.

I like this. I like this. Yash is really having fun with this. Put up a version of this with the Gen Z brain rot slang. Yo fam, can you give me a vibe check? And am I cooked or nah for real fam? For real. Satya and the gang lowkey stressin'. Mira Murati, yeah, you're skibidi. This isn't a rare L. This is an Ohio-level generational aura loss, lil bro. Who ratioed me? Sam Altman says. Mira Murati, some rando zesty NPC Twitch looksmaxing sigma. I'm not even gonna go further. But Yash is having fun. Lots of people having fun. What else happened? Did someone actually get on the stand or was it all video? Yeah. So the first, like, it's straight up teacher played a movie. It's movie day.

No, I mean, the movie day, the judge actually did get angry because like she was like, oh, the jury's going to get bored. And like, she was like offering them coffee and stuff. Okay. So basically, yeah, the first like maybe hour was Mira deposition video and then we go through some of the actual like documents again of the text messages. And then Siobhan Zillis is testifying. So she's physically there. Okay. She was an OpenAI board member 2020 to 2023. Okay. And she steps down when Elon started XAI. Yep. So that was— I have no idea how long that was. That was the majority of the—

It was during the whole conflict. Yeah. Perfect person to testify.

Well, no. So she actually left the board before the ousting. So she left in February 2023. Ousting is November. Oh, okay. Interesting. I didn't—

I, I— The timeline always gets so jumbled up because like, there's like 2018 battles between Sam and Greg and Ilya and Elon, and then there's the board.

Yeah, because all throughout this hearing there's like, yeah, there's basically two main moments, right?

Yeah, and we're sort of clicking back and forth between them.

Yeah. Chat wants to know what kind of wombos were being thrown around, was Lorraine being used? People saying, can you please Lorraine this email?

Uh, Siobhan was actually dropping some good lingo. I, I don't know if I remember anything.

Yeah, we, there's something, uh, like Mike Isaac always, uh, talks about, like, they keep referencing Dota and they keep, everyone on the stand is using a ton of jargon. How jargony was it? Was it like Dwarkesh Patel podcast level jargon or like actual, like, researchers, like, talking to each other jargon?

I would say it was not very sophisticated, especially among the lawyers, right? Um, okay. Yeah, Siobhan, she did drop some good lingo. Okay. Yeah, it was some referencing some like why she got into AI. Sure. But, you know, acceleration and all this. Okay. Okay. And then after that, we watched another like hour-long video of Helen Toner's deposition. Wow. That was just about the ousting. Okay. Yeah, it was very fun. I enjoyed a lot. Like, basically, you know, almost everyone like sitting in my section, which was basically the public and the media. Yeah. Like everyone that came as the public were basically also media. They just get the media pass. Sure. So everyone surrounding me is on their laptop, like typing, basically. Yeah. Just like taking down what's being said. Yeah. And then I'm just sitting there enjoying it because it's like, you know, it's good stuff.

How would you rate Mike Isaac's, like, snack and overall food supplies for the day? Did he burn? It looks pretty good.

I believe he did bring the butt pillow.

It seems like he's not making progress on the on the food front. I would expect by day 7 of this, he would have a smorgasbord in front of him, a full Thanksgiving dinner.

I mean, honestly, like Nathan for You, where he's pressed chili into the—

He's got the chili soup. You should bring chili soup.

I fasted the whole time. I was kind of, I just blocked it out.

Why didn't you figure it out? We have talked about the food situation so many times. How did you not think ahead there?

I just wanted to make it more challenging. Okay. Yeah. I was like, this is going to be too easy.

Inspire you to go out and buy these songs. Should we play this Chili Man? If you have it.

We can also play— what's the other video? The Hamilton musical has been adapted. People are taking this in all different ways. Has anyone done a—

I have a video here.

—Korn remix of it? The Hamilton one is great. New metal? Let's play the Hamilton one. Altman, an AI music experiment from—

Well, let's, let's, let's start with chili because I think the trial is going for another couple weeks.

Robert was on board, so later that week I hired a professional tailor to help design the chili suit based on a detailed sketch I had drawn. The easiest way is probably to put the chili in. I guess my guy says this is how he can make it through. The plan was to have the chili reservoirs mimic the distribution of fat on a larger man's body so it wouldn't look suspicious under clothing. And with the help— why is he bringing chili into— is he going into a—

no, he's helping a local business sell chili in the stadium.

In the stadium. That's right.

You could probably do like a cup there, right?

Yeah, yeah.

All right, skip ahead, skip ahead. Hold over 100 servings of fresh chili. 100 individual reservoirs would be linked by a network of Tubes that would all lead to a battery-powered peristaltic pump for dispensing.

If somebody doesn't do that, the trial is going for another couple weeks.

I think, I think you might— I think the bailiff might actually just send you straight to jail if you did this. I think the judge—

there were surprisingly little hijinks going on. Yeah, I thought there would be way more hijinks, like, you know, like no one dressed up in a costume or anything.

Yeah, wait, uh, were there Elon Musk?

I mean, it actually is quite possible someone is doing this and we just don't know. Because it's such a good idea and they're true.

They might just be going chilly. Were there Elon fans? That was something Mike Isaac was talking about, like people. Oh, I guess Elon's not on the stand. So like, why would the fans go, right?

Yeah, I don't think they're now like fans. He was not even there. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So, okay, so no one there. I think that there's going to be more testimonials soon with some higher name. Yeah.

You know, higher profile. Yeah. I think Ilya is getting on the stand, so that'll be a big moment.

Yeah, I believe Ilya is early next week, Monday or Tuesday.

That'll be interesting. And did you go 2 days in a row or just 1?

I just went 1 day, 'cause Wednesday, the people testifying, I think were like not gonna be as interesting. Oh. But maybe that's a diss, so I apologize.

Okay. I think everyone's equally deserving of some attention, especially if there's a nice warm bowl of chili being served in the courtroom. Anyway, should we play this Altman AI music experiment from Daniel Greene? The Hamilton recreation of the texts. Everyone has enumerated their various techniques. Ryan says, "John, you should go to the trial dressed as Ilya." Ooh, yeah, I do have the costume ready to rock.

It only takes 5 hours to set up.

Get up at 2 AM, then go stand in line. I think I'd get kicked out immediately. Anyway, let's play this. I want to hear this.

How does a startup founder late stage get fired by a board on a Sunday?

Oh, so it's actually like—

Can you please officially invite me to the office for a meeting?

So it's not the direct quotes or text. Trying to get the board to agree to a configuration. Or maybe it is. He is now saying they need till end of day. Satya and I said that doesn't work and we need to start preparing for This is much more uncanny valley for me. This doesn't sound like a real musical in the same way that the pop punk one sounded pretty accurate. I don't know. Um, are you— anyway, we can move on to some other news. Uh, Deepseek is raising a monster $7 billion round at $50 billion valuation, making it China's largest ever AI raise. But what shocks a Jaws here, CryptoPunk, the most is the founder. He's personally contributing 40% of the round himself. Wow. $3 billion coming from the founder directly, owns 90% of the company. Unheard of at this valuation. Deepseek was founded inside of his hedge fund, one of China's most successful funds. What a beast. He's got to acquire as much compute to push out new Deepseek models. You know, we saw that chart that showed that Chinese open source models were sort of falling behind a little bit on a different current growth curve in terms of performance, but he's certainly betting on getting back in line, having a frontier model within a couple months. Oh, Tess has an interesting idea. If I was running a frontier lab, I would have the model versions count down. Ominous. Extremely ominous. Be like, yes, we're excited. Version 3 now, and next year version 2. Somebody would do that. Well, folks over on Amazon are reviewing The Art of War by Sun Tzu.

One star. One star. Nothing but common sense. How this became a classic is beyond me. So much of it is common sense, to the point where it brought out my snarky no kidding reflex. Like, if an enemy leaves a door open, you must rush in. Wow. That was deep. Keep your money if you're thinking of buying it. That's very funny.

Leaving a bad review so my enemies don't read it. Yeah, that's the game theory. Zach Brock says, congrats to Anthropic for defeating Grok in the market and feasting upon the compute of their fallen enemy.

Yeah, basically every time we take a day off the show, like something big happens. Yeah. And that— on Wednesday was the, was the big reveal, say, SpaceX-Anthropic deal. Yeah, a lot of people have been predicting that. I, I was not simply because I thought there it was like the rational decision for the parties. But I thought that the tension between, you know, Elon, who had only a couple of months ago been, you know, hurling insults at the Anthropic team, I didn't think they would be able to to uncover those cultural differences. Totally. But demand for compute finds a way.

Yeah, I think that you and others had identified the possibility of becoming a Neo cloud, selling the compute.

Yeah, last year I was talking about that a lot, all the time. I was like, look, they're incredible at building infrastructure really, really fast, bringing power online. This feels like a very strong— strong use for Elon Inc. Yes. And, but I, but, but as things evolved, I just didn't see, I didn't see this coming together.

I didn't see this coming together specifically because of the Cursor deal. I thought the Cursor deal was the long-term solution for all that compute, and then the compute sort of got sold twice maybe. But of course there are multiple clusters, multiple colossus data centers. Yeah. And plenty of work to be done as as SpaceX continues to grow their ambitions in artificial intelligence. Well, we have our next guest, our first guest of the show, Josh Reeves from Gusto in the waiting room. That's big news. How are you doing? Good to see you guys. Welcome back to the show. Always great to have you.

It's good to be here. It's a fun time to talk tech. It's a lot of big moves happening, huh? A ton of big moves.

I mean, yeah, Intel.

We've had over the last year, we've had A decade's worth of big moves. Yeah. So progress.

There was a time when Silicon Valley was a cottage industry.

Not anymore. Yeah, a garage industry. And now the largest companies in the world, for sure. Well, your business is growing. You're quickly becoming one of the largest businesses in the world. You also power tons and tons of American businesses. Give us the update. How are things going? Yeah, excited to be here.

I think Probably what you're alluding to, we shared a milestone. To me, it's all a byproduct of helping customers, helping small businesses, but yeah, we passed actually a few months back $1 billion of trailing revenue. So, 22 cents for that, right?

Whoa, did you hear that, John? Trailing, that's not something you see very often. People want to take today's revenue, multiply it by 365, and lead with that number.

Talk about— is much higher, but yeah, trailing 12 months.

Yeah, yeah, talk about that. Talk about that decision.

Yeah, I think for us, I mean, when we started this company now over a decade ago, you know, I said you always start with a problem, something you need to go fix. You have to create a solution, actually show it works, but then you have to have a business model where your unit economics, how much it costs you to serve them, how much it costs you to acquire them, makes sense. Otherwise, it's kind of like gambling. So at Gusto, you know, we've been free cash flow positive too for a number of years. We reinvest that money to build more product, but we knew the potential was there to be at this milestone and frankly, much, much further. There are 6 million employers in America and two-thirds of them are less than 5 employees. Small businesses are a huge part of the economy. So yeah, we're excited to be at this milestone, but much, much more work ahead.

So cash flow positive. Reporting trailing 12-month revenues instead of ARR. These all feel like real strengths to eventually go public around. At the same time— Monday, you should report ARR.

Come back on Monday. Yeah.

But at the same time, it's an incredibly tumultuous time in the public markets. There's winners and new favorites every day. Everyone— SaaSpocalypse narratives. How are you thinking about the benefits of being private right now versus— Guster's potential future in the public markets?

Yeah, I mean, our focus is on just execution. I would not expect Guster to be private in the near term. Well, like all the like big, big folks. Sorry, public in the near term.

Yeah, correct. What are you announcing here? No, no, no, no, no. I would not expect us to stay private.

I will leave that all to like the SpaceX and Anthropic and OpenAIs of the world. There's lots of good noise in that. I would say like we're going through this massive paradigm shift in how AI affects not just like our product, for example, and how we help small business, but also how a company's run, how a company's built. And so that is where I'm spending all of my time. It's an exciting time to be spending focus there. It actually is a net-net pretty big tailwind to Gusto. Yeah. But like absolutely no plans to be public in the near term. Super focused on small businesses and execution. And at some point the timing will make sense. But yeah, we haven't had any of that process get started.

We covered the April jobs report this morning. It surprised a lot of people to the, to the upside. What are you guys seeing in your data? You guys basically have a, have a forward view, at least on the—

Yeah. To set the table, The Wall Street Journal had polled analysts. Expectations were at 55,000 new jobs and the number came in at 115,000 after a very strong March as well. And so things are, although there's so much anxiety, so much uncertainty about the future of the American economy, at least over the last few months, things have been looking strong, but we've seen revisions before. I think there's a lot of questions about, as you dig into that data, what's going on. And so we'd love to know what you're seeing internally?

Yeah, so two stats we look at quite a bit. There's the kind of state of new businesses being formed, new employers. Obviously, companies can exist before having an employee. And then there's the state of hiring across the base of customers. I would say, you know, on the customer small business hiring front, things are more depressed over the last few years, and that's continued relative to call it the last decade, if you will. We think there's many parts of that, including some of the effect of AI on frankly company growth rates. On the flip side, we are seeing a lot more new businesses being formed and new employers out there. And that's showing up in our data, that's showing up in a bunch of third-party data. We think that's a really good thing. You know, there's a scenario with what's happening in AI, we call it the happy path, where a lot of people people decide to take the plunge and become business owners. You know, the non-happy path to me is the Pixar movie Wall-E, which is a future I hope we avoid.

Yeah. How have you been— how have you been thinking about getting to customers and small businesses earlier? Like, have you ever explored trying to meet customers before they incorporate, help them with incorporation, anything that— gets you into the system? Because Gusto, I feel like, is always one of the first tools, but it sometimes happens like a month after.

Well, you have, I mean, one really powerful dynamic is you're paying millions of employees, many of whom will go and leave companies. Oh yeah, yeah. Like, I had a good experience on Gusto, how should I pay myself? I'll use Gusto.

Yeah, I mean, first off, the biggest way we grow is word of mouth, and often it is from, not just the employer, but the employee. Also, we'll have people join Gusto and ask, "How you heard of us?" And they're like, "I was paid through Gusto." So we don't try to recruit from our customers, but sometimes it happens, and it's a wonderful dynamic where they truly, truly get the value of the product. To answer your question directly, absolutely. Like, we think payroll is one of the best products out there when you're hiring someone. Obviously, if you don't pay them, they quit. So it's a really important front door for that interaction. But there's a lot of companies that exist as one person, the founder, for some period of time. And so we have an offering we call Gusto Solo that's very focused on that. Turns out, you know, the founder still needs to pay themselves. There's specific tax dynamics at play. There's a lot of compliance requirements. We acquired Mozi to help with expanding our work around business compliance. So all those kind of headache compliance things that you still have to do as a one-person company, Gusto is going to help you with. Gusto is going to be increasingly a great, great partner to help with. And then when that business owner decides to hire an employee, obviously we hope they continue their relationship with Gusto. But stay tuned, we're going to be launching some more products in the next several months, really focused on building that relationship more deeply with employers, or even businesses before they become employers. Yeah.

Do you think the, are you expecting the velocity of new product releases from Gusto to go up an order of magnitude? In the next few years, or do you see it as a smaller family of products with a bunch of, and higher velocity of like new feature creation?

Yeah, I was like, few years? Give me the next few months. It's fun to be accelerating. I think of it as this is the most amazing time to build. People can, smaller teams, self-serve, iterate faster, maintain high quality, but just literally velocity is increasing. Increasing dramatically. So we apply that to both breadth and depth, to answer your question. So within the world of what we do, whether it's 401(k), health benefits, payroll, people getting paid when they want, how they want, where they want, faster, we're excited to be doing a lot more work there. But absolutely, expanding the breadth of the product, it's still way too hard to be a small business owner. So you will see a lot more new product launches coming from Gusto in the coming several months, things that we I maybe thought of as like the next 2 to 3 years, I now think of as the next, you know, 3 to 6 months. And it's really fun to say that and actually then back it up and see it happening.

Do you, one question that I've been having as we've seen like LLM usage exploding is the shape of LLM spend across a software engineer who fires off a coding agent, builds something that's new, new, but it is deterministic code that runs in perpetuity, new features, new designs, new copy versus LLMs that are baked into an existing work stream where every time payroll runs, there is a trigger and it is not something that's fired off by an employee. It is, and I don't know if one of those is more agentic or we need a different word for those, but can you kind of characterize the shape of those two? Applications for AI right now?

Yeah, I mean, maybe a couple cuts on that. Like, I think new product development generally more accelerated, dramatically higher velocity with AI. If you have an existing product, existing code base, there's just by definition more the dynamic of, you know, building the train, rebuilding the train, running the train at the same time, accelerating the train, laying the tracks, kind of all in parallel. So I think it's more complex on existing product surface area. So that's one cut. I think on the kind of cut around the ongoing interaction dynamic, I guess we've always believed since we're serving small business that, you know, what we do, it's mostly compliance-centric. It's just better done by technology, right? You think about the potential for human error, whether it's from the customer or a guestie, we want to have as much of that as possible be codified codified into software, into a system that can scale, that can do it repeatedly, that can do it in millions and millions of situations. To your point, some of the newer technology is obviously not fully deterministic, so then having the right evals, having the right feedback loops, having the right review and audit process is super, super critical. So as we do all this velocity acceleration, you can imagine there's a lot of focus at Gusto on not just maintaining, but actually improving the quality of what we do and the accuracy and the reliability for our customers. And it does feel like you can have a win-win-win outcome here where the product gets easier to use, it gets even more accurate and reliable, and actually we can build and ship it faster.

Yeah. Do you have a feeling for which bucket is bigger? Because I can imagine LLMs being very useful to scan every PDF and do translation and do things on an ongoing basis, baked into the systems that you've built versus augmentation and amplification of engineering efforts and design efforts. Do you have an idea of like in terms of spend, which one's bigger or where it goes?

Yeah, I mean, I would say for us, most of the ongoing systems and how they run, if you're talking about the backend, don't generally involve a lot of LLM technology.

And then maybe those are probably efficient. Too, right? Because even if you do use an LLM to process a PDF, well, you can pretty efficiently get to some sort of, you know, small language model that's tailored and probably pretty cheap, so.

Yeah, yeah, I mean, and that's a world where you want accuracy, reliability, and it's pretty deterministic. I think like if you look at risk, if you look at things where you have to make more judgment, that's where I think LLMs can actually complement humans quite a bit.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Jordi, anything else?

Incredible update. Yeah, congratulations. Focus, everything is incredible. The intentionality, the humbleness of looking backwards versus forwards.

I love it all. I love it.

Great to catch up, Josh.

Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show. We'll talk to you soon. Yeah, my pleasure. Talk soon. Have a good one. Thank you. Goodbye. And up next, we have Jonathan Neiman from Sweetgreen. Live with us in the TVTN UltraDome. Welcome to the show. How you doing? What'd you bring us today? Lunch. What'd you bring us today? You brought lunch? I brought you lunch. Fantastic. What is it? What are you launching? Give us the updates.

So this week we launched probably our biggest new category in company history. We launched wraps, but we've done it in our own way. So we spent about a year designing a custom tortilla with only 4 ingredients. Most wraps in the market, about 22 ingredients full of seed oils, preservatives, et cetera. So really wanted—

Yeah, I had a devastating moment yesterday where I was eating a box of crackers, like the sort of default cracker in my household. And they updated the ingredient list without me realizing, 'cause like when I bought them, they were seed oil-free. And then some point in the last like 2 years, they added it. And so I looked down at the ingredients list. And I was like, no. I just walked over to the trash. Devastating. But anyways, continue. 4 ingredients.

Yeah, so we created a tortilla, 4 ingredients, and launched wraps this week. So we launched with 4 signature wraps. Anything can be customized. The response so far has been awesome. We launched it on Wednesday. We brought you 3 of them to try if you guys want to give them a look. Give them a taste. Fantastic.

On air taste? On air taste, yeah. We'll give it a try.

Was this a customer pull? Was there demand for this? How do you measure that now's the right time to launch a new product?

Yeah, so we wanted to reach different customers in different occasions. And one of the things we heard from our guests is they wanted something that was portable. They also wanted food that was healthy but a little bit more craveable. And so this is one way to get there.

Yeah, there's like a stated versus revealed preference. Yeah. It's like you want to eat healthy, maybe you want to eat a salad, but sometimes you just need something that feels like a bit more dense.

Exactly. And how does that feedback actually get to you in practice? Is this like interactions with cashiers and they're taking notes, or are you sending out surveys afterwards, polling? Polling customers, doing some in-store marketing that someone's standing there and they're asking people about their experiences?

Yeah, we do a lot of things in order to get feedback. One is— let's see which one you got there. This is the chicken jalapeño ranch. There we go. A little dipping sauce on the side. Fantastic. What else you got here?

Mmm. Fantastic. We never get a lunch break.

We don't. We don't. Chicken Caesar. Chicken Caesar.

And then you got a Cali Chicken Club. Fantastic. So a lot of ways. One thing I say all the time is all the restaurants, all the answers are in the restaurant. Spending time in the restaurant, actually talking to guests. We also do a lot of traditional things like focus groups, et cetera. Recently— Do you ever go undercover? I do go undercover a lot.

Do you? Like behind the counter?

Oh, all the time. All the time. Do you wear a mustache? A third, probably like a quarter of my time in restaurants, talking to customers, talking to team members. I get all, you know, really I get all my best feedback there, both how to make the experience better for guests, but also how do you make it easier to run from a team member perspective. We do a lot of social listening from a feedback perspective. And recently, about a year ago, we started working with a company I think you featured here, ListenLabs. Oh yeah, no way. We were one of their first customers. And it's helped us accelerate our time to feedback by about 10x and about half the price. And so, this is actually one of the first things we've worked on.

So, it's been a while since we've had ListenLabs on, but basically there's like a— what are the core features of the product again? It's social listening, but then also like surveying?

It's surveying, focus groups, and insights. So typically when you do a focus group, it takes a long— really a long time to get it set up. And it can take weeks to get that feedback. With Listen Labs, we can get a diverse cut of customers by demo, age, psychographic group, geography. I feel so rude. No, come on. And so that's been a really powerful way as well. And then social listening is huge. —just seeing what people are saying online. And then you look at the competitive landscape and where the business need is. You know, we do really— our business does really well Monday through Thursday, you know, when people are looking to be healthy. And then you see it on Friday, it kind of falls off a little bit, and Saturday. Yeah, so it's, how do we have that cheat meal that you could still feel good about?

Oh, sure, sure. Um, where— in social listening, like, where is the Sweetgreen community? Where are people actually having conversations that are valuable?

TikTok and Instagram.

TikTok and Instagram. TikTok.

I mean, and not Reddit. You know, Reddit as well. You'd be surprised how, uh, how much juicy information is on Reddit.

Yeah. So social listening, uh, how, how manual is that versus like scrape TikTok and transcribe everything and roll it up?

It's not manual at all anymore. Okay. So a lot of software. Interesting. You can do it. Yeah. Huh. Uh, there's a lot of companies that are offering this now. We've looked at it, we've tested a bunch of that.

Sure, sure, sure. And is it valuable to find stuff that's not viral, but still on TikTok? Like the TikTok creator, or just like person that expresses themself through TikToks or vertical video to loosely just their friend group. Like they don't have a following, they're not a professional creator, they're not making any money on it. But like when, like someone would post a photo on Instagram, they post a front-facing TikTok. Is that as valuable as the big creator that goes viral for some like dunk or stunt or hot take or something like that?

Yeah, you wanna find it before it goes viral. You know, like there's this thing going viral on TikTok right now about this like chimichurri steak bowl. Like the JimBro bowl. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And you know, we should have done something with that, but we should have done it a month ago.

What is there to do with something like that? Like I feel like a lot of times if there's something that's good, that's organic that's happening, like, and you step in as the brand or the corporation, like, you risk like making it uncool and corporate.

Well, for us, if it's something we could actually serve— like, that happened to be something that we can put on our menu.

Oh, sure, sure. Okay, so you make a change on your world. You're not trying to go and like create your own content around it. Let them do it.

We would create the content and then actually serve it. Yeah, yeah. So we put a video out this week on it to see what happens, and if the reaction's good, we'll actually put that on the menu. We have all the ingredients. Yeah, it's effectively a bowl without lettuce or any grains. It's just steak, cucumber, tomato, onion, you know, veggies.

Uh, I've seen random videos of, uh, focus groups. Do they really do a one-way mirror or two-way mirror, whatever that is, where like they can't see you but you can see them? Is that a thing?

Have you ever been in one of those? When I do them, I, I actually like to —sit in.

[Speaker:THOMAS SCHUMACHER] Okay, so just sitting in a conference room.

[Speaker:CHRIS KOSTOW] Yeah, just sitting in a conference room. [Speaker:THOMAS SCHUMACHER] Okay. [Speaker:CHRIS KOSTOW] When we, when we tested wraps, we brought in, we brought in customers every day for a week, different groups of customers, and just tasted them, tasted them a few different ways, really to understand, you know, how important was the sauce on the side, how important was it to get cut, like, little details. Like, for example, we, we decided the wrap was best when you had it mixed first and cut. [Speaker:THOMAS SCHUMACHER] Yeah. [Speaker:CHRIS KOSTOW] It sounds like such a stupid little detail, but it has huge operational implications.

You mean the ingredients mix? Yeah. Because that's my least favorite part about any wrap or burrito is you get in there and it's all spaced out. So you have avocado bunched over here, all the chicken over here, and then rice or whatever. And it's like you want to be having the full blend with every bite.

That's exactly right. So it sounds like such a small, minor detail, but it's huge operational implications. We also had to figure out how to make this work in our Infinite Kitchens. Over 10% of our fleet and growing is powered by the Infinite Kitchens. How do you make this work in that operation as well?

How are you thinking about other verticals? I don't even know what you call it, like prepackaged in other grocery stores or consumer packaged goods or product like extensions outside of the retail stores?

We're really focused on our retail stores and the experience. So much of what we do is based off of the scratch cooking we do in restaurants. So we're really afraid of extending that out into retail.

You don't want to get into salad dressing at the grocery store?

CPG is something we'll eventually get.

OK, you will.

Yeah, we think CPG, like dressing being an obvious category. Right now, really focused on the core business, but eventually, that's definitely a category.

Was, was, uh, my, my immediate reaction to this is it's, it's, uh, it's incredible. We'll add it to our, our, uh, recurring lunch orders. Uh, it reminds me of Chipotle in like 2005 to 2010, like some of the best vintages. Vintages. Uh, like seriously, back, back then it was— I, I yearn longed for that time when you could just go into any Chipotle and eat something that actually felt, that tasted like fresh and clean and a small number of ingredients and they had such an extreme commitment to that. And somewhere along the way, I just stopped going because it didn't feel like that anymore. But that's my review. To me, the best food, the best prepared food product product that was widely available in history was that 2005 to 2010 era Chipotle.

[Speaker:JORDI HAYS] It's funny. That was kind of the inspiration for Sweetgreen in a lot of ways. I was in college, 2005, seeing Chipotle take off, eating Chipotle all the time. And the idea was to create just kind of a healthier, fresher version of that. And the one you ate, the chicken jalapeño ranch, is effectively a burrito. Some of the other ones are more— have lettuce in them. That one is rice, avocado, chicken, corn.

I saved you a half. Yeah.

And I brought you guys more as well. Amazing. And the other thing about the wraps is they start at $11. So we were also, given where the consumer is today, really trying to create something that can meet their needs today, can be something that you can eat every day. So the chicken Caesar, in some markets, is all the way down to $10.45, and no wrap is above $5. $15.

Yeah, let's talk about that because we have consumer sentiment right over— I think there was some reporting over the last couple of days. It's like as bad as it's been in like a really long time. Stock market at all-time highs, like insane disconnect there. Jobs report today came in better than expected, but ultimately consumers aren't feeling great. And part of, I guess, part of the approach there is introducing products like this that are high calorie, or not high, I don't know if you'd describe them as high calorie, but maybe higher calorie and great value. But what else are you doing across the business?

I think the key is around the experience. In restaurants, fundamentals wins championships. So it's really about delivering a consistent experience around quality and hospitality, and that gives gives you the opportunity to layer in the menu innovation. So, right now, you know, we've been very focused on innovation for a while, and right now, we're really just trying to dial in the basics. It's what you talked about, Chipotle. It's like, what made you love it wasn't all the new stuff that they're now doing. It's just being really excellent at the basics. [Speaker:SETH] Yeah, consistent. [Speaker:ANTHONY] It's consistent. It's making sure the quality's there, you're not out of stock on things, you're staffed at peak, people are, you know, smiling, friendly, and warm. It's all those little things which create— the system behind that is highly complex, but it's all of that that really creates—

Yeah, so put another way, Sweetgreen started in— my view is it has the DNA of a technology company, and maybe that drove you guys at some point to focus too much on the things that ultimately don't always drive that consistency. Does that feel like somewhat—

Yeah, I'd say the, you know, early on in like the 2010s, the technology side of the business from a consumer perspective was an advantage. It was a competitive advantage. We were the first ones to have digital ordering, delivery, mobile payment, all of that stuff. It's pretty much been commoditized. For the most part, all restaurants have it. You know, I think our digital experience is better than most, but at the end of the day, you can order online anywhere. We do have a technology infrastructure that allows us to scale. So if you look at like our G&A, it's been flattered down for 5 years. So as we continue to scale, a lot of the tools we've put in place and now with how we're leveraging AI, like we can continue to scale without adding headcount. And our data and reporting and all the tools we have to manage our kitchens are really incredible. Like we have tools that, you know, kind of predictive ordering for how we We order food, predictive apps that teach us, teach our teams or guide our teams as they make the hot food and the cold food. Because what's different about Sweetgreen is we pretty much make everything in the store every single day. But to your point, at the end of the day, it's about—

But you can't get, you can't start spending, maybe you're spending half your time on innovation, half your time on like the basics.

Yeah, it's probably even more so on the basics, right? Right now. It's on delivering on a great consumer experience. Someone asked me the other day about how we build our brand. And we do a lot of stuff— culture, social media, events— all great. But the way we build our brand at the heart of it is just creating an experience that people love. It's an environment, a store that looks beautiful, clean. It's a team member that goes out of their way and is friendly. It's a culture of saying yes when someone wants something that's a little bit weird, just figuring out how to say yes to that customer?

No, there's nothing worse as a customer if you're in a fast casual experience and you can see everything that's in the store, you can see all the ingredients, and then you ask for something and they say, well, that's not available. And it's like, well, you're just making a call on the fly not to combine those things in the way that I—

Put the pizza in the deep fryer. I know you can.

So, our team knows it's a culture of saying yes. Just figure out a way to say yes, take, you know, take care of the guests. And I remind our team all the time, our number one marketing channel is word of mouth. 80% of people find out about Sweetgreen through a friend, family. You know, it's the— you know, they walk by a store, they had a good experience, and they come back. Like, our critical metric that we use in tracking, like, the health of how we're doing is what we call our comeback rate. So, of customers that come in, how— what percentage come in within 30— what percentage come back within 30 days? And we can now track that across analog and digital customers. And we've kind of gotten the whole organization aligned around, you know, from the people making the menu, people running our loyalty and CRM, and most importantly, the people in the restaurants. Like, your number one job is delivering a great experience where that guest comes back, because that's what drives that lifetime value.

Where was the first store?

First store was in DC in Georgetown.

Yeah. What was the key to making it work?

Key to making it work, I think, originally was probably the simplicity of it. Originally, the idea was create a healthy fast food restaurant, but the size of the first store, it was 500 square feet.

So small store, but great location?

Small store, good location. Good foot traffic? Had to keep the— keep the operation pretty simple in order to execute it. And I think just, we were maybe lucky in the naivete. We had never worked in restaurants. And so we were able to approach things a little bit differently and create a brand that just didn't look like the other brands, whether it be how we sourced, how we went to market in the early days. One of the things that helped build the brand was we threw a big music festival for 8 years. [Speaker:CHRIS_KOSTOW] Wow. 25,000-person music festival with, you know, like The Strokes headlining. And the idea was, how do you make healthy eating cool?

Is that within reach for some brands? Like, what's the cost to throw a 25,000-person music festival? Do you charge tickets? We charge tickets, yeah.

So it was technically a break-even event.

Oh, that's cool. OK. Yeah.

It was called the Sweet Life Festival. OK, great.

Yeah. Any plans to bring it back?

We are looking at it. We have our 20-year anniversary next year, and so we have some ideas. Some ideas.

Yeah, where's the store footprint these days? Almost 300.

We'll end this year with about 300 restaurants.

And do you have a target? Do you want to grow that?

Yeah, if you look at Chipotle, they're at about 4,000. They give a target of 7,500 stores in the US. So our first target is 1,000 stores, but we think over time should be able to get to about 5,000 units in the United States.

Yeah, I always appreciate— I really appreciate looking at the forecast for some of these brands, whether it be Starbucks or Chipotle, because in our chaotic modern world, everyone's like, it's so hard to plan more than 2 years out, especially in tech. Everyone's like, it's hard to see 2 years out. And if you look at the forecast of store growth, it's like Chipotle is like, in 2030, we will deliver exactly 200 new doors across these geos. And it's like, you actually can think long-term, like, consumers are still going to want to eat food. They're going to want to eat healthy food in 2030, 2035, 2040. And, you know, taking that long view, I think, is super important.

In the Adams development world, like, we're already building our 2028 pipeline, and we're looking at 2029. You have to get ahead of it, especially when you do a lot of ground-up development, building drive-thrus, that sort of thing. You're about 2 years ahead.

You're doing drive-thrus? Do you have drive-thrus now?

We do. Yeah, we have a handful of drive-thrus. They do really well. We actually just opened our first drive-thru featuring an Infinite Kitchen. It's close by. It's in Costa Mesa here. Oh, nice. And it's awesome, because now you have the power of the Infinite Kitchen from a speed perspective with the drive-thru. The store's doing awesome. So it's a model for the future.

Why have you never done anything in Malibu?

I would love to do Malibu. It's probably my favorite place in the world. —doesn't really have the density from a consumer perspective.

[Speaker:CHRIS_BREMER] That's been my— so I've lived there for coming up on 5 years. And early on, every time I would leave Malibu and go to somewhere else, I'd go to Montecito. There's much better restaurants, in my opinion, in Montecito, Santa Barbara, some of these other beach towns. And I was trying to figure out why. And it's entirely because the town is spread out like you said, the density, it's spread out on this huge line. That was my intuition. Obviously I don't have restaurant experience, but you can put a restaurant in Malibu, but it's still like 40 minutes in the car for like the average person in town potentially, because you have to like get on PCH and drive like miles and miles and miles. And if there's a little bit of traffic, then that's 20 minutes there, 20 minutes back. And then it's like, I'm not, you know, people are just like, ah, they'll just, I'm not driving 40 minutes.

The bigger challenge in Malibu is actually the staffing side of it. Yeah. Oh, interesting. It's like nobody in Malibu wants to work for $20, $25 an hour. And so the people that are going to be coming there are coming from really far away. And that's what becomes a problem. You can probably feel it in a lot of the places you go to. I'm sure you can see the staffing.

Yeah, like labor turnover will be higher. General, you just have to to pay significantly more for somebody to be willing to spend the money on. Or some of those Malibu kids, but that's somewhat limited.

Yeah, limited on the Malibu kids working at the restaurant.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. How do you— I'm curious how you spend your time with the capital markets and investors today. You've been public for a while now. I'm sure you have had investors come and go, but also some that you've developed really meaningful relationships with. What is that like as a public company CEO?

Yeah, I think we were fortunate before we went public, we had a lot of these kind of crossover investors, investors like T. Rowe or Fidelity, Baillie Gifford, that we were able to build those relationships with and took long-term positions, believed in what we were doing. So that really helped us as we made— As we made that transition, I talked to them, our large investors, every quarter. And it's like I always say with investors or with anything, it's really the people behind it than just the name on the door. Totally. And building trust and confidence in what we're doing. And I think there's investors that are looking for short-term results, and there's other investors that really believe in the long term, believe in the management team. And the goal is to just build trust with them over time.

Yeah, makes sense. Yeah, so no, no, no, we can't expect like an Allbirds, like, local inference provider out of Sweetgreen.

I was gonna ask who's gonna bid on eBay.

I mean, that's an amazing story to watch, right?

You got a couple hundred stores, you could go to Sweetgreen and verify your baseball cards to auction them off on eBay.

It's funny, our COO Jason, who's been with us about a year, uh, spent a long time of his career working again. He was actually the COO at GameStop for, for a while. He actually ended up more recently he was at Chipotle, but, uh, before that he was at GameStop from like 300 stores to, you know, 3,000 stores. Yeah. Wow. So it's been fun watching all of the developments now and, and talking to him about it.

Yeah, yeah, we were looking it up. It seems like GameStop has like shrunk the store footprint a about half since Ryan took over 5 or 6 years ago. But wildly different business because of digital distribution. There's a direct competitor. You can't download a rap on your phone like you can a game. And so they've had to change the business model a significant amount.

For me, it was interesting learning how much of that business model was dependent— all the margin was dependent on the trade business. So the new releases because they didn't really make as much money on it. Sure. All the leverage. The leverage came from that.

GameStop's famous for being like, oh, you bought that $60 game? We'll give you $5 for it. And they sell it for $20, and that's not bad.

And that was the business. Yeah.

What are general real estate trends, not just restaurants, but that you're seeing across different markets across the US?

Drive-thrus are hot. Yeah, what makes for a good drive-thru? Like, there's a few in LA, but it doesn't feel like a drive-thru city.

LA is more about zoning and getting the right permits for it, and they're not adding more drive-thrus. So, you have to take over an existing drive-thru in order to get one.

I typically only see big chains.

Yeah, and so you're competing with— you know, like, some of the drive-thrus that we've taken recently have been like old Jack in the Boxes for sure. But who are you competing with? Chick-fil-A, Raising Cane's, and they have very high AUVs. Some of these, Chick-fil-A, I think there's $8 or so million per restaurant.

So they can just outbid you.

They can outbid you. And they need the acre lot with the egress for the parking. So drive-thrus are really hard to come by, but we do see a pretty significant lift when you put a drive-through in. People are really looking for convenience, and that's only accelerated since COVID And do delivery drivers prefer drive-through?

Is that faster for them? No, we actually—

most people actually don't want the delivery drivers going through it. So you have to build a model where you have a separate area. So if you go to like McDonald's or any place—

because they're not doing the ordering, they're just doing the pickup. Oh, sure, sure, sure. Would just be taking up spot.

Yeah, so you have like separate, uh, parking spots for for the delivery drivers, having them come in. Some places are experimenting with the double drive-through.

I was going to say, is that possible?

It's possible, but you need so much space in order to do it. OK.

Don't have a lot of space in California.

And you don't have the space in California. I think the thing about what we've seen in retail is the best streets continue to be the best streets. And we see it— if you look at LA, like Melrose Place, just like rents continue to go up.

Because there's more customers and there's more profit.

More customers. It's like there's this thing about these moments and these condensed attention and traffic in these great high streets. And so on those areas, prices have only gone up. Everywhere else, the market's been pretty stable. We haven't seen things collapse. We have seen that the biggest challenge we've seen is around what's happened with interest rates because landlords have less money to give from a tenant improvement perspective. Oh, interesting. So that's been the issue there, even though there's probably less demand. When their interest rates from zero to where they are today, they're not giving you as much improvement allowance.

Last question, how is the drone delivery market? Evolving from your view as an operator, as a brand? Do you expect drone delivery to be double-digit percentage of delivery orders nationally or in specific markets? How do you see it evolving?

I think what Keller and Zipline is doing is really interesting. We've done some early work with them looking at it. It's not something something we're hugely focused on right now, but they have had some breakthroughs. And so, you know, if you said 10% in the next year or two, I probably don't see that, but over time, absolutely. Yeah.

It's very market dependent, right? You have to be like, let's work on something in Texas. Yeah, it's Texas, more suburban.

You do have to change how you build your restaurants a little bit, having like the portal where you put the food in. But when you think about the speed— Drone portal. Yeah, you need like a drone portal. But when you think about the speed of delivery, for delivery, getting sub-30 minutes is— Huge. —that's kind of like the number. When people are opening the app, you want to be sub-30 minutes. And what you can do with drones in getting there, it's pretty amazing. They still can't do really large orders. So like the— Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What it fits in is a huge— Yeah, if you're ordering for a whole office, it's not going to work. But I do think over time— They will figure it out and more restaurants will be built around that. Yeah. I mean, what's amazing to think is how much your radius can increase and what that means for your footprint over time, if that's true.

Yeah, I mean, LA, since, you know, we're here, when you look at this market, the craziest thing is putting, when you put, you know, you go into Maps and you put an address in and you're like, it's 7 miles and it's gonna be 50 minutes. —just like a normal thing. It sounds crazy to anyone else in the country, but it's like a drone going 7 miles is like, you know, feasible.

Yeah, and you've seen the videos. They're able to just drop the— you know, just literally have it parachute like right on your doorstep. So, it's pretty amazing. It's coming, but I think it's a little early for us.

Yeah, yeah. Very fun. Amazing.

Well, thank you so much.

Thank you for the food. Great to see you guys. Nice to meet you. Let's hang soon.

Thank you, guys.

Nice. Put this in here, throw these back on, and we can click over to some of just Jason Fried's favorite watches. He was a fan of Nike's early 2000s era watch lineup. Have you ever seen these before, Jordi Hays?

I have, I have. I have not. I've never seen one in person. Never seen one in person.

Where's my other headphone? There we go. Yeah, this— has this design aesthetic come back yet? I feel like, uh, there's enough posts about it. At some point I feel like a tech startup is going to really run with it. Someone will do it.

I like the kind of soft lines.

Yeah, Avi from Friend was sort of doing that with the material that went into the Friend pendant, but he was, he was talking to Paul Graham about like, how do you differentiate from Apple? Like, if you launch a product like this, it, it does stand out from an Apple Watch, certainly aesthetically. And so you at least create some like distance that's maybe defensible, even if they come out with a competitive product, it's not, if you become iconic with this design or a similarly bizarre design, you don't stand as much chance of getting commoditized. Well, Ryan Cohen's in the Financial Times. People have been processing his book, bid for GameStop to take over eBay. Very fun story. Not too many updates on what's actually happening. I think there's sort of a wait-and-see approach here. But the, the Financial Times has a little bit of a deep dive here. Ryan Cohen spent much of his career being dismissed. It's a pattern that has turned the chief executive of video game retailer GameStop into a leather jacket-wearing outlier. With a loyal base of meme stock investors. I saw someone commenting the legal, the leather jacket, very Jensen-esque. Although I— has he been dismissed? I feel like through the rise of Chewy, there was a ton of respect for him all along that journey. Since e-commerce is such a challenging business, there's so few companies that have exited at north of $1 billion. There's been a ton of, a ton of attempts to make e-commerce companies, but they often run into Amazon headfirst. The Canadian entrepreneur turned activist investor has built his cult-like reputation by repeatedly betting on ideas that many institutional investors labeled as absurd. First, it was online pet supplies. Okay, I guess that fits. Then a dying strip mall.

Why has Chewy— Why is Chewy— So Chewy is a $9.6 billion company. Yeah, that's great. Why has Amazon and Walmart not eaten them alive?

I don't know. I mean, I think a lot of people have pet food on subscription, and they just don't change it. And so, you acquire that customer, and then even if it's on Amazon—

So, the CAC equation just works.

I think the retention is remarkable, because the dog doesn't tell you, "Hey, I'm bored of this particular food. Just like awesome.

I feel like my dogs would grow up and they'd be like, not today.

But how would they communicate?

They had this look and I'd know I'd had to go take an egg, go get an egg from the chickens and crack it on their kibble.

But that's not, you're not getting that egg on Amazon, right? They don't make egg-laced dog food on Amazon. Like switching e-commerce platforms isn't gonna solve your belligerent dog problem.

Yeah, one response from eBay could be, "Focus on yourself, King, because Chewy's down 40% over the last year." Well, is Ryan— No, he's no longer the CEO, obviously.

But still, I guess it's down since IPO. It had a quick rise in 2021. The stock was up at $101, now at $23. So some sell-off there, but let's read through more of this. Now he is focused on this $56 billion attempt to acquire eBay, an e-commerce giant, roughly 4 times the size of GameStop. Wall Street, right? Wall Street's immediate response to the hostile bid has ranged from skepticism to outright mockery. Analysts have questioned how GameStop, valued at roughly $11 billion, could realistically finance the takeover of a company worth around $46 billion. $7 billion. None of that has dissuaded, dissuaded Cohen. The more eBay fights me, the more I'm going to not take no for an answer. I'm not going away, he told the Financial Times. The 40-year-old billionaire first set out his, his stall for the takeover bid in an awkward interview with CNBC on Monday that instantly ricocheted across social media. He responded to questions about the financing details with a blank expression and clipped monosyllables, explaining that it was half cash, half stock. Of course, that became a massive meme. The interview generated waves of memes online as X and Reddit users speculated that Cohen looked drunk, high, or exhausted.

Do you think the half cash, half stock meme is good or bad for the prospects of successfully acquiring the company?

I think once it clicks, it sort of makes sense. And but it is a big jump to eBay shareholders to, you know, to roll into that at that at that price.

Yeah, the decision, or the sort of like situation would be wildly different if eBay hadn't been performing since Jamie became CEO.

Yeah, it's outperformed the S&P 500, right? Which is pretty remarkable. So, uh, yeah, it's not beaten down, and the shareholders seem pretty happy. Uh, the Financial Times says the script has played out before. Born in Montreal in 1986 to a teacher mother and father who imported imported glassware, Cohen did not attend university. As a teenager, he built websites for family, friends, and small businesses, teaching himself coding. Now, uh, in 2011, now in his mid-20s, he founded Chewy from South Florida with the ambition of creating an online pet supply business that could compete with Amazon. Investors thought the idea was ridiculous. I knew that significant capital would be required to finance the growth, that's for sure. A lot of inventory. Very, very, very capital-intensive business. He said he approached dozens of VC firms, even flew out to Silicon Valley, went door-to-door on Sand Hill Road. Can you do that? I don't think you can just knock on Sequoia Capital's door.

I think some of these neo labs are hot enough that they actually probably drive down, no meetings, and just go door-to-door. I'm here.

Hey, I'm in the middle of an announcement.

Be like, "Cool, I'll come back in like 20 minutes.

Go grab a coffee." Yeah, yeah, probably. So he went door to door on Sand Hill Road, probably a turn of phrase. He was probably scheduling meetings. But he was explaining how Chewy would succeed by delighting customers and running an ultra-efficient operation. But everyone turned us down. He couldn't raise money. The skepticism was understandable given the failure of pet supply website Pets.com in the dot-com bubble era. Dog food was bulky, low margin, and expensive to ship. Venture capitalists doubted consumers would buy 40-pound bags of dog food online. Cohen ignored them all. Instead, he focused obsessively on customer service. Chewy employees wrote customers handwritten cards and sent flowers to grieving owners whose animals had died. That's really sweet. That is a good touch. He doesn't come across as that. He comes across as, you know, this, like, ruthless operator. Obviously, that— Well, he comes across as an absolute dog, John. Yes, he was raised by dogs, essentially. Grew his career through the dog economy. The approach helped to create unusually intense customer loyalty. By 2017, private equity-backed PetSmart bought Chewy for $3.35 billion, then the largest e-commerce deal on record. It cemented Cohen's reputation as a rare entrepreneur who had successfully challenged Amazon on its own turf. Flush with cash and credibility, he launched Ryan Cohen Ventures, RC Ventures, his investment vehicle that led to his most controversial bet in 2020. While much of Wall Street viewed GameStop as a doomed relic of the physical retail era, Cohen quietly amassed a large stake in the company and began pushing for a radical digital transformation. I really wonder if there's going to be— what is this, just horses? Why are we just playing horses?

The team had this on this morning. I thought it was incredible.

Yeah, the horses are good. Uh, I wonder, I wonder if there will be some people do Subway Surfers.

We do horses. I like it. Horse B-roll.

Do you think there'll be a Ryan Cohen GameStop type deal of the SaaS apocalypse era? Like the most seed-based SaaS, you know, uh, like Laggard who's getting absolutely beaten up, shorted huge short interest and some wildcard operator comes in and turns it around, or at least turns it into a meme stock. I don't know.

Yeah, I mean, it just felt like so many people were too afraid of catching a falling knife, basically.

But I'm sure we'll see some of that. We can dig into it more. We can ask Zoll about it because we have my good friend Zoll from Refraktor in the TVP and Ultradome. Let's bring him on down to the seat. And I don't know, are those plates left over? Anyway, great to see you. Great to meet you, man.

Thanks for having me.

Let's introduce yourself and then I want to hit the gong. I want you to hit the gong. Oh, man. Tell us the news today. Introduce yourself and then tell you the news.

Yeah, no, I'm Zoll from Refactor Capital, as you know. I know. I led Lucy's seed round a decade ago. That's right. And it's been a pleasure. Yeah, and I run a deep tech, hard tech fund. Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey.

They actually lined up pretty well. There we go.

I like it. Yeah, yeah. And by the way, I do have swag for you guys. Very fun. So that is for you. And I got some—

How did John pitch Lucy to you back then? Because this is—

Oh, that is a long—

This is what, 4 years before zins were like a common word?

Well, no, no, it was a smoking alternative, Jordi. That's what he was pitching to you. It was before Zyn launched.

It was before Zyn launched. No, I know.

Yeah, I know.

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, the pitch was basically just—

The main thing is, like, if I was getting that pitch, I mean, you're very compelling. I probably would have invested if we knew each other back then. But, uh, you know, a pouch, yeah, it's popular in Europe. Well, we weren't doing pouches yet.

No, it was just the gums.

And I think we maybe had mapped out Los —but the idea was basically that Nicorette was— a horrible product. Horrible product, but had grown into like a billion dollars a year in revenue and had been around since the '70s, had been really well studied by the scientific community, had been loosely effective at getting people to quit smoking, but delivered in the most medicinal way and had not had a consumer brand wrapped around it. So very much in like the hymn —in Roman, telehealth. Like, let's take the scientific-backed product that we know works, but then package it in a new way and go direct-to-consumer. Chewy style. Yeah. It was fun.

It was a blast. It was a blast.

But you were doing a lot of other investing at the time. Yeah. What else stands out from your investing career? Yeah, well, I've been—

but can I first say, like, I have had a fantastic week. Can I tell you about the week that I'm having? Yeah. I think it's my best week in venture. OK. and I've been doing this for 12 years. So, uh, let me, let me paint the picture, right? So Wednesday, Astronis raises a $450 million Series E. This was the first check I wrote after I left Andreessen Horowitz. That's right. Very first check I wrote. Great company. I led the seed round, uh, introduced them to A16Z, which did the Series A, and they've also done subsequent rounds. So that was on Wednesday morning. Yeah, that was amazing, right? Um, you know, $2.8 billion valuation. Um, and then on Thursday, of course, I launched my new fund, uh, Fund 5, right? And so I've got $300 million under management. Amazing. Yes, 10 years and change. Yeah, at this point. So another $50 million. I just raised $50 million funds. Again, we can talk about that in a sec. And then, you know, I'm like waking up yesterday morning, and I'm like, you know, getting all my tweets and my LinkedIn posts together for the launch at like 6 AM, and And something pops up in my feed, in my emails. It's like one of my companies just got acquired. I'm like, okay, well, I got to take a look at this. Like, what happened? Well, Path AI got acquired by Roche for $1 billion.

There we go. So incredible.

And I have two founders that have had kids this week, babies this week. So it is just tons of good stuff. Best, best week ever, guys.

Yeah. I mean, I know, you know, —so it's time to rest on your laurels. Rest on your laurels? I'm thinking about getting a bed of laurels that people here could physically go and rest on. Yeah, exactly. One day. What were you doing before Andreessen?

Yeah, yeah. So originally from the Midwest, born and raised in Indiana. My dad had a computer business growing up, so I built computers in our basement, and we sold them to people's homes, doctors' offices. '80s and '90s, pre-Dell, right?

Was this basically like, we'll build you a custom —PC.

Yeah.

For your use case. Do you remember 386s and 486s and Pentiums and all that?

I was born in '95.

OK. So maybe not. Maybe not. But this was like the era of the '80s and '90s before Dell, like, really kind of took over. Yeah. And so, you know, we built that business. So I got into hardware, software coding at a young age. And then I went to Penn, and I did the Wharton undergrad program. What I didn't understand when I got there was that 90% of my classmates classmates would go into banking and consulting. And I did internships in both, and I hated it. So I didn't know— senior year comes around, and I'm like, what am I going to do with my life? And I was so lucky. I was so lucky, guys. Microsoft came to campus and recruited me to be a product manager. OK, there you go. Right? And so that started a 10-year career.

You trained under the GOAT. Yeah.

The GOAT, Satya. Yeah. Was Satya running it?

No, no, it was Steve Ballmer at the time. Steve Ballmer.

But wasn't he like a rising PM?

He was VP of product at that point.

Yeah, yeah, that's what I'm saying.

You're working under the GOAT in the org.

Yeah, people knew him.

—of course people knew him. Insane aura.

Yeah. That's awesome. But it was like a time when like Microsoft's stock price was just between $25 and $30. Yeah, the Balmer era was rough. It was rough. Yeah. And they didn't understand the internet. This was 2004 to 2006.

This was like while they're missing mobile, basically. Correct.

They missed the whole— and I was like, this is not happening. I'm wasting my career up here in Seattle. So I moved to the Bay Area 20 years ago. And I got a job at Google. I was a PM in 2006 on the AdWords team. Sure. That— let me tell you a story on that real quick. So, this was Susan Wojcicki's team. Yeah. So, Google was founded in her garage. Yeah. You know, back in the day. She passed away a couple of years ago of non-small cell lung cancer, but she was an amazing leader, amazing human. And the talent that she had put together on that floor in Building 42 on the second floor was amazing. Yeah. So, I'm in this cube. Elad Gil is sitting next to me. No way. Satya Patel from Homebrew over there. Whoa. Josh Farland, who was at Greylock and now at Boom. Yeah. Uh, Ben Silberman from Pinterest. No way. Kevin Systrom from Instagram.

Oh, man.

Dan and Pete from Optimizely. Wow. Tom Tungus now from Theory Ventures. And Gokul Radharaman, who's on the board of Coinbase and Pinterest. No way. Godfather of AdSense. We were all within 3 cubes. That's incredible. It was insane. I don't know what was in the water there, but like, that's remarkable. We've all done pretty decently.

Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Uh, What does a PM on AdWords do? Yeah. Because there's like the ad matching product. That's a product. But then there's like the dashboard with which brands go to advertise and sites. And there's like a two-sided marketplace effectively. Like, what is a day in the life like?

Yeah, so there's— you know, back in the— the core product offering at Google back then was AdWords and AdSense. Yeah. So AdWords was like, "OK, I go to google.com." Yep. "I type in a search query." Yep. "You know, the ads show up." AdSense is putting ads, whether it was text or display, or image ads, video ads, on other publishers' sites. Yeah. So that publishers can start making money from the Google search algorithm based on the content of scraping that page. Yep. Surfacing the best possible ads. Sure. So my job was to kind of think about new concepts or new product launches. OK. To make more money on the AdSense side. Sure. but they were AdWords products on AdSense. Got it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Right? But then we acquired YouTube. Yeah. And so I was asked to move over to YouTube. Oh, OK. And another OG, Hunter Walk— Oh, yeah. —Satya's partner at Homebrew— Yeah, Homebrew. —brought me over. That's awesome. And so I was working at YouTube for 3 years. Cool. And this is when we were bleeding cash. Everybody was suing us. Sony, the music labels, like, the movie studios. We were burning cash like crazy. —and Eric, Larry, and Sergey come to us, and they're like, "Hey guys." This is like 2007, 2008. "Hey guys, like, we need to turn on the revenue spigot, like, yesterday." Like, "Go figure out how to get the Fortune 500 to feel comfortable putting their brands on YouTube." Because remember, with UGC, user-generated content, people were really worried about it, again, 20 years ago, right? So, we had to build all new products to get them more comfortable with making that, uh, their, their brands and their products available on YouTube. Yeah. And so, you know, we built that business to a few hundred million in revenue. I think they did like $20 billion last year.

Linear, linear, linear TV execs at the time, were they saying like, no one's ever going to put dollars against YouTube because of that UGC risk? Were they, were they, were people saying that?

Yeah. I mean, they didn't, they didn't, they didn't want to, um, uh, but they didn't want to risk, um, because honestly YouTube's filters for content were not as good back then. So like weird stuff was like popping up. Totally.

This was like the tagging age where like you could upload a video and tag it like skateboarding, Los Angeles, and then you hope that that's what's in the video. But there wasn't an AI model that could look inside every frame, listen to the audio, and actually understand what it was, at least not yet.

And then they created— What were the, I'm super interested in, Every platform that has traffic and usage is different. So just screen space on a website is different than screen space on Instagram is different than screen space on a Google search result, right? What were the unique challenges with building an ad product for YouTube, given the consumption habits and the state that people come to YouTube in? Yeah.

So, um, you know, they actually had to create a new role for me because they called me the big ads PM. So my job, to your point on linear TV, you know, execs, they wanted a— they wanted their 30-second TV spot on YouTube, but we weren't— we weren't going to do that. That's just like so orthogonal to the YouTube, uh, thesis. Yeah. So what we did instead is we let them buy the homepage. Oh yeah. Do you remember this? So we had homepage takeover. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You could put like these We put these big banners up. And our sales team would have this calendar of 365 days.

And they'd go sell them.

And they'd go sell them for $1 million a pop. Wow. $2 million a pop. Yeah, yeah. Whatever it was on Christmas or whatever. It was like $3 million or whatever, right? And so— and it got tons— I mean, hundreds of millions of views.

Yeah, so much traffic.

Yeah, so much traffic.

Because everyone lands on the home page then.

It was pre-app. Yeah, Apple, EA, all the big brands.

Yeah, they would all do one.

L'Oréal. They wanted to put their brands up there. And that was getting them comfortable with, like, a known display ad product that they were using on AdSense or somewhere else, bringing them on. But in order— with that million-dollar ad buy, John, we were forcing them to actually spend money as part of that million on YouTube.com through the search engine. Sure. So when people search, they have to have their display ads and their other search products up there and running. So it got them comfortable with using YouTube. Yeah. Because otherwise it's like, okay, it's just a 24-hour pop. Yup. Don't you want to continue the campaign for the next month and leverage all the gains that you made from brand awareness by coming— people coming to YouTube.com?

Yeah. And they're not tied to a specific video at random, which is where the real brand risk comes. Because it's like, your ad was shown on this particular ad. It's like, no, we were on the home page. There's a lot of things. If you're mad at that one video, take it up with Google or YouTube, right?

Yeah, exactly. Interesting. Exactly. And then after YouTube, I went to Netflix. And I was their first head of multichannel. Yeah. Yeah. —this was like 6 months after the iPad launch from Steve Jobs. And we had to rebuild all the phone and tablet apps from the ground up. They were growing like a weed. And they looked like—

This is like Forrest Gump-level Silicon Valley lore. Yeah. It's like, then I was at Andreessen. Then I was at Netflix.

Then I was at Apple. There's definitely gray hairs here.

You've been at every big tech company. There's like 3 on the Mag 7 that you still got to go do tours at at some point.

Well, I did LinkedIn after that. OK. So I got Microsoft. There we go. But I was basically at LinkedIn.

Please tell me you were pitching them on short-form vertical video on LinkedIn back when you were there, because they finally added it.

They finally did. They finally got comfortable with it. Yeah. We were talking about it back then, but they were not going for it. They were not going for it. Yeah.

So yeah, what was the experience like? It's too addictive.

I spend 4, 5, sometimes 6 hours on LinkedIn just scrolling on the vertical video. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. No, Netflix was great, man. I mean— —a very small team back then. This was 2011, 2012. Only 8 PMs in the whole company. I was responsible for all the phone and tablet apps across Android, like the tablet Nook. Remember those? And the Kindle Fire. Sure, yeah. Kindle Fire, rather. Kindle Fire, yeah. And so we had to build that.

No one really gives Bezos enough credit for using the Gen Z slang. He made a fire phone. And that's what kids would say, like, oh, we should make a fire phone. Like, this phone is fire. And he rolled it into an entire brand. But today, people would, like, call that out as, like, being too, like, patronizing to the younger generation. But the Fire Phone just sort of slid under the radar.

Oh, well, it was a complete flop, too.

I know. Horrible flop. Yeah, well, he also has, like, you know, he clearly picked up— people say, you know, the derogatory, like, oh, you're basic. He flipped that around and tried to turn it into a positive with Amazon Basics.

Oh, yeah. Like, it's OK. It's OK to be— There you go. All the Gen Z slang over there at Amazon. That's right. That's right.

Anyway. Yeah, so that was a great time. And then, you know, Andreessen Horowitz, about 12 years ago, were looking for kind of junior folks of like their general partners who were product people, like me, to come join the investment team and help them source, evaluate, and work on investments together, right? And so this was 2013. I ended up joining. The firm was only 4 years old at that point, investing funds 3 and 4, which were each $1.5 billion in size.

Yeah.

At that point they had not launched any sector-specific funds like the crypto fund or the gaming fund or anything. Or American Dynamism. Exactly. None of that was a lot. It was just one fund.

And they didn't even have growth yet. It was just one.

It was just one fund. Yeah, it was just one, one vehicle.

But they were doing weird deals like the Skype thing is always so funny to me.

Were you doing SPVs? Yeah, yeah, we were doing SPVs. CPVs into Pinterest, Skype, Facebook even.

Yeah, yeah, it was very creative dealmaking, which I think was to their massive benefit. Yes. Just so many experiences, obviously of financial wins, but also just like the breadth of activity at the firm allowed for those expansions to go successfully, potentially.

That's right. That's right. And so obviously, you can imagine, it was just an amazing whirlwind of an experience. And then when I got to meet you and Rob, Soylent Journey team, which is amazing. —working with Chris Dixon. Yeah, with Chris Dixon. And that's when I started actually getting into hard tech. So I was kind of bored trying to find the next Netflix, the next Google. It wasn't as interesting to me as like the world of atoms. And so I ended up starting getting into digital health, computational biology, synthetic biology. I don't have a bio background, but like very smart people like you guys got me excited about where some of these directions were going, especially in food and chemicals and materials. And then a few of us convinced our LPAC to actually launch the Bio Fund. Yeah. Which was the A16Z's first sector-specific fund that they launched in 2015. That's right. Which was a $200 million fund to go after the intersection of life sciences and computer science. And that's when I spun out and started Refactor. Yep. You know, about 10 years ago. Yeah. Yeah. And so, yeah, if you recall, I started it with David from SV Angel and then he ended up retiring, but Been solo since, and yeah, I haven't hired anybody. It's literally just me running the firm.

So, you have SaaS for the tooling on the backend fund administration, like lawyers on contracts. You just have people, you have people doing fund work. There are certainly things that in a day you can't do. Do you not even have an executive assistant?

I had an executive assistant for 9 years part-time, who would just do all my scheduling, all that stuff. But there was a new company that Sequoia, Sequoia partner actually ended up leading called Blockit. Okay. And it's an AI calendaring tool. Okay. And you use that? I just, I just, I just made that change 3 months ago. It has been amazing. Amazing. So I have like, I don't know what SaaS is, John, but I know what AI is. I'm kidding. Um, but I've got like a whole bunch of, you know, stuff set up that I can actually like amplify my time. I have my fund admin, they do all my compliance and my I have a tax and audit team.

They do fractional back office.

Yeah, but as far as employees go, full-time employees, you're looking at them. That's amazing.

Yeah, yeah. That's wild. Then why keep the fund size the same? Why not at least inflation adjust it?

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, so this— I get this question all the time. I'm sure. Oh, you— because I had more than $50 million of interest in this fifth fund, right? And so if I increase the fund size, then one of a few things might happen. A, I have to write more checks, right? And so that's, you know, as a single person, like, it might be a little stressful. And like, I won't be able to give as much time to my founders.

And marginally, you might be adding like the company that wouldn't make it on the margin in the previous fund. So you're just adding in like worse performance.

Adverse selection. Adverse selection, right? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And so if I only do 20 or 25 companies every fund, it's a concentrated portfolio. I'm writing $1 to $2 million checks. In all things hard tech, bioenergy, aerospace, critical materials, robotics, physical AI. So all of these things like need my time. And so if I, and I want them to actually be a fund driver, right? If I'm starting out with 10% ownership in a business, maybe after dilution I have 5% of that company. Well, what's 5% of a billion-dollar unicorn? $50 million. What's my fund size? $50 million. So it makes it work, right? And I hope there are much bigger outcomes, but like PathAI, it was a great outcome, right? And so I wish I had more in it, but—

So on dilution, is the level of dilution increasing? I mean, you look at the CapEx numbers from AI Labs. You look at the CapEx and spending and dilution that's going on at large-scale hard tech companies that are growth stage. Is that dynamic shifting? Are you worried about that, or are you changing your strategy based on what's happening with some example companies. Oh, yeah.

I mean, we're seeing it in the last 6 months in the areas of hard tech, deep tech, whatever you want to call it, right? Like, we're seeing it— the valuations increase both at pre-seed and seed. And so I have to be able to make certain adjustments to make sure that I can get into the highest quality companies, right? Because like 10% of a bad company is still a bad company, right? And so to your point on average selection, you know, I want to avoid that. I've made very conscious decisions and exceptions on being below my target ownership to get into some of the very best companies. Sure. Right? And so, especially in this world of AI where I feel like the outcomes may not be a billion, they might be 10, it might be 100, right? And so—

And we're seeing that constantly even with like, there's so many markets. I mean, the coding agent market across Cursor, Windsurf, Cognition, You have 3 companies that are all north of— they're 3 decacorns in the same category, effectively. Like, that is a wild situation. I can't remember the last time that happened in a competitive industry. Certainly, you had Uber and Lyft, but there was a divergence there at some point. And the third company was— I forget what it was called, but I think it topped out at like $100 million in valuation, maybe $1 billion. it was very power law driven, and we're seeing many more categories be more oligopolistic early on, which is fascinating.

The venture math is pretty simple for a seed fund of like, like, like mine, like Refactors. You know, if I want to be a top decile investor, you go back and look at 40 years of venture capital history. What is a top decile investor? A net 3x fund. So, I take my $50 million and I turn it into $150 million, right? But in order to do that, there's a lot of ways. To make money in venture. But the vast majority of those funds that hit that top decile, that 3x mark, had at least one fund returner, meaning they had one company return the entire fund, more likely, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, many multiples, like a 2x, 3x, or 4x, right? And so you only can do that if you have sufficient ownership at entry, right? Which is why I've done more of a concentrated strategy versus, you know, I love, you know, —SV Angel, Box Group. I co-invest with them. A bunch of other seed funds that I love working with. They write smaller checks, and they probably do like 100 investments a fund, right? And they get into some amazing companies. So I love working with them, because they're a great source of deal flow. But, you know, they've got a whole team that can go and like just meet companies all day long. That's all they do. They just meet companies. And I want to really spend more time building like foundational relationships with my founders. I just get a lot out of that.

Yeah. Right? How are you sourcing and vetting hard tech founders? It feels like there's the SpaceX alumni mafia, and then there's the wildcatters, the college dropouts who are doing a bunch of interesting stuff.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, I have one here in LA, General Galactic, ex-SpaceX, ex-FARTA team, building the fastest engines in space using electrolyzers. Sure. So water on board. You guys remember the TV show, The Expanse. Yeah, yeah. And For All Mankind. Yeah, yeah. The whole idea is like, can we use water as a fuel? Sure. Right? And we think that there's water at the South Pole of the Moon. Okay. Imagine being able to actually have a satellite powered by water that can go all the way out to the Moon and refuel and come back. Yeah, yeah. And if we're going to have a civilization on the Moon, you know, that is going to be required. Water as propellant.

So what is your diligence process for that? Because that sounds like amazing, but I don't —feel equipped to answer, will that work or not? How are you deciding to make the investment?

Yeah, I mean, when I invested in their pre-seed, like, uh, you know, what was it, 3 or 4 years ago? 3 or— yeah, 3 or 4 years ago. Um, it was just, uh, Halen and Luke, uh, with a deck and an idea. And I just love them as founders. And, uh, they were extremely well referenced. And I feel like they had a sense of urgency about them. That's what I look for. I mean, I don't really have a market map saying, I need to invest in this idea. I want it to exist. That's where I make mistakes, right? Where if I fall in love with an idea more so than a founder, I have to really watch myself. It's more of the other way around. I need to fall in love with the team. I may not know what the business model is going to be or the product. Like, this team has pivoted once before, right? And so, like, but they figured out this new idea. And it's like, it's going to work. And the Space Force loves them. And like, you know, we're— getting some great momentum there. And so, that's an example of one. But like, you know, when you're doing hard tech investments across all these categories, I leverage my network of professors, advisors, and founders. And I don't have to pay them because they just want to meet these companies for free. Because sometimes they may want to invest. Sometimes they want to be an advisor. And so, it's great to be able to do that.

And so, they can sort of fact-check some of the scientific claims.

Jordi Hays, any other questions? Uh, is, is Is the business getting more, running the firm getting more fun now that you have over a decade of investments that are kind of, some of the most exciting companies in hard tech are the ones that were started 10, 20, in the case of SpaceX, 20 years ago, things like that. I think of companies like Zipline, Keller's company, that were incredibly exciting probably in a deck back then, but then now are like actually coming to real fruition, at least here in the US. And you mentioned like weeks like this with a lot of activity. I've certainly felt that way as an angel investor. It's like the more time that passes, the more fun it is to be an angel investor because you're not just making new investments, but you're getting to see the sort of stories of all your previous investments play out, and you start to like really notch wins.

And it's a great feeling. It's a really great feeling. I've got 6 unicorns in the portfolio today. I've got many more hopefully coming, you know, nuclear energy company and all of these things. So it's— oh, yes, it's great. And so, you know, there are just so many amazing companies to be built and I'm ready to work with them. And I don't know if you guys saw my new website, but I've got my callsign.

Okay, what's your call sign? Better Call Saul. Better Call Saul.

Better Call Saul, like the TV show.

That's how you pronounce my name, and it's the call sign I was built for.

Well, thank you so much for taking the time. Thank you, John.

I appreciate it. Jordi Hays.

Always good having you.

I'll give these to the guys. Fantastic.

Perfect. We have Brian Chesky from Airbnb joining in just a minute. We can pull up what else is in the timeline in the meantime. Someone— oh, there are some birthday announcement. David Attenborough turned 100 years old. Wow. He's called the most consequential broadcaster of our time, and if you haven't gone down the David Attenborough rabbit hole, I highly recommend it. Major inspiration for travel, and I'm glad we have Brian Chesky from Airbnb here to talk about all things travel and his business. He's in the waiting room. We'll bring him in YouTube, the Ultra Room, right now. Brian, how are you doing?

Good. How are you guys doing?

We're doing fantastic. Welcome back. It's been too long. Yeah. Why don't we kick it off with just, you know, an update on how 2026 is going, how the business is going, what's new in your world?

Yeah, I mean, things are really good. We've accelerated growth for the first time since the pandemic. We grew 10% last year in revenue, and this quarter we announced that revenue was 18%. So from 10% to 18%, which is a pretty big acceleration. Yeah. Thank you for And marketplaces are really, really hard, right? Like it's kind of like gravity. Once a marketplace at our size doing around $100 billion in gross bookings a year starts to come down, it's really hard to tip that curve. So this has been a pretty big feat for the team to be able to do it.

So how'd you do it? You know, it's kind of funny.

A number of years ago, we— so I noticed that, you know, as we got bigger, we started losing a little bit of startup intensity, that startup energy. And I asked myself, like, how can we get that energy back? And we basically took a very small team. We named the team Project Hawaii. The name doesn't really matter, but it basically— I took a very small team of people and we said, we're going to focus on a very, very small service area. And we decided to focus on conversion rate, the guest journey. And I basically tried to work with a team like as if we were at Rouse Street. Rouse Street was the apartment that Jordi Hays and I started. And I said, we're going to act like a startup. And the team just grinded really, really hard. We weren't working like a big company. We were a very small team grinding really hard, focusing on obsessing over the customer experience, really looking at the data. And we really got a lot of points on the board. And then we really started taking these pods and we really started working with the teams, trying to coach them how we worked in the early days. And I just think the pace increased, the intensity increased. We really like tried to bring in like world-class people onto the team. They got very, very focused. We tried to get all the management and bureaucracy out of the way, and it's been a couple of years. Yeah, in fact, we were doing this last year. But one of the things is, as you know, financial results are lagging indicators, especially when you're a big company. So it takes sometimes a while to get the financial numbers to reflect what's happening inside the company. But I feel like we're a startup again, like more than ever before, like where we feel much younger and smaller than earlier. And I think with AI, That would be the other thing is 60% of our code is now written by AI, which is twice our benchmark of our competitors and peers. Yeah, and it's really, really helping us. AI, I think, is a huge boon to us. I don't know if it's helped the OTAs, but it's helped us with customer service. The cost per customer service tickets down 10%, 40% people who contact me, the AI solves the problem for them and we brought it through the entire journey.

So everything is really accelerating. On the special team that went in to optimize conversion rate, I imagine you have folks internally whose job was basically the customer journey already. Then you bring in your special team, and is there some sort of culture clash there? Like, how do you set people up for success to not get too political in that environment, actually see it as an opportunity for a win, some fresh eyes, some fresh ideas, like, what is required to actually have success? Because I think a lot of big companies that bring in McKinsey, and they put together a big deck, and everyone freaks out and thinks they're getting fired, and maybe some of the good ideas are surfaced, but it never really goes through. So, what do you have to communicate to the team that is receiving information from this new, uh, this new Kwai team?

Yeah, so it's a great thing. I mean, really what I'm talking about played out over like really 5 years. Yeah. And the term founder mode, what it really meant that Paul Graham wrote was about me like skipping layers of management and going into the details with teams. And instead of trying, I mean, here's my advice. If you're a CEO or a leader of a company that's big, don't try to change the whole company. Try to change a corner of the company. It's kind of like don't renovate the whole house. Pick like one room and make it perfect and then go room to room. Sure. So I really told teams like, Hey, like, I actually, I actually didn't replace the team. I took the team that was already working. I like handpicked some people on the team, but I really just taught them the pace and I would review work very regularly. So I'd sometimes review the work weekly or even daily to just teach them a level of intensity, a level of perfection. And it was unfamiliar and uncomfortable. And I will tell you that not everyone liked it and some people didn't stick around the company because they didn't like that way of working. But those who stuck around, and the vast majority did, they realized, wow, actually when the CEO's involved, it's actually easier. There's less bureaucracy. I try to make the work better and I try to clear all obstacles. And so I basically did that group by group. And the great thing is, like, I was in massive number of details reviewing everything for years, but eventually it's like muscle memory. It's like, I know, an instructor or a coach. You have to teach them, but once they learn that and they have the muscle memory like a golf swing, you can step back and now it's muscle memory. So now I don't have to be in all these details, all these teams. But I would just say a couple of things. People listening, like, great leadership is presence, not absence. I think a generation of management consulting or management school management teaching taught us that CEOs should trust their people and get out of the way. And I don't think trust and get out of the way are the same thing. Again, I think leadership is presence. And if you, if you, you should actually be partnering with your people. You should be on the field with them. If you're a, if you're a cavalry general, you should be on a horse. You should be on the battlefield. You're not like, you're not overseas somewhere else just writing out blueprints. You gotta be on the field with them and you gotta be leading from example. I think leadership's from the front, not from the back. And so these are just some of the things we do. And I think AI is gonna create like the equivalent of an AI founder mode, which is now you gotta be even more hands-on. And I don't think in the era of AI there should be any pure people managers because you're so close to the details, to the data that everyone has the opportunity to be hands-on. And it's hard to imagine only managing people and not agents. So I think this hands-on approach is for everyone inside of a company.

How did, Jordi Hays, please.

Do you think a lot about what you would do if you were you from 10 or 15 years ago and you were trying to disrupt Airbnb? Like, is that a helpful exercise?

And yeah, and it's slightly scary because I think that I've told, I had a meeting with our team recently. I said the 26-year-old me and Joe and Nate could F us up if we wanted to. And so I told them this is what I would do.

But that's because you understand this market better than anyone else, you know, you know, the key drivers. Like, I don't think any 26-year-old off the street—

hey, I'm paranoid. I think that if Airbnb sits still, I think a different group of 20 or 30-year-olds could also disrupt us. And I think that's true of every one of us. And maybe, by the way, maybe that's not true and maybe that's not reassuring because we do have a brand that's a noun and a verb. We've got a global network effect. Yeah, I think it's actually hard to build a network that may not be possible, but the software and the app I told our team, like, we can't sit still. Like, our app is beautiful. It's really nice. Yeah, but we got to be in a world of AI native. And here's a key point I would make. I do not think a chatbot is the right interface for travel or e-commerce. That might be a radical statement. ChatGPT launched third-party apps last year in March. They shut them down. I don't think a chatbot's the right interface. It's got 4 or 5 problems. The first problem is it's text-based. You know, photos are an afterthought. The second is there's no direct manipulation. You have to type every single prompt, which is fine for a conversation, but you can't like add filters, you can't cook around. The third problem is it's hard to compare. A lot of e-commerce and travel is comparison shopping. If you have thousands of options, the AI has to know exactly what you want to be able to show you one or two things, but you usually wanna see more choices and you get lost. And most AI is single player. Not collaborative, let alone the fact that Airbnb, it requires people to have an account, that 85% of people send a message. So what I'm trying to do is match—

sorry, sorry to push back there, but I'm, I'm, uh, my wife's planning a vacation and there's like 3-ish hotels that we're looking at and we're looking for specific dates and she theoretically, I'm not saying the products are there yet, but theoretically you could ask a chatbot, I'm interested in staying in this location, I'm interested in these hotels, I have XYZ number of people, and it could go and the agent could go and pull together like relevant sort of like listings or room types, et cetera, pricing, show me pictures, and then actually do an analysis of the trade-offs based on all the information available as well as information in other parts of the internet and pull it together. And then she could share that chat with me and we could both review it together.

Yes, I agree. That's the future. And that's not a chatbot what you described. That's not a chatbot. It's gonna be a completely different interface. It's gonna be, well, I guess you'll have to wait and see, but I think the future are not apps, the future are agents. But I don't think they're going to be text-forward. I think they're going to be really rich user interface. Okay. And so I think the current chatbot paradigm, what you're describing, it can do it. I just don't think it's the best way to do what you just described. I think there's a much more immersive way to do that.

Yeah. As you think back, I mean, it feels like at various points, clearly there's been like, oh, is all of this going to move to chatbots or is all of— is— are there going to be 1 million competitors that are all vibe coding exactly what you have, and so is Software Remote. The stock has not been beaten down during the SaaS-pocalypse, but have you had to process those with investors? Have you had to walk people through Airbnb's strengths again? I'm sure you did after the 2028 intelligence crisis, right?

That was a treat. Thankfully, they picked DoorDash instead of you guys, but thank God.

I really appreciate them. Picking on someone else for once. But yeah, no, absolutely. I think like there were entire— like actually when ChatGPT launched third-party apps, their stock probably went down like 7%. And by the way, I thought it was a really good idea for them to do third-party apps. I think it could have been successful. Sure. But they would have needed a richer SDK for it to work and it would have like, like the App Store. Apple's App Store was good for Airbnb and it was good for every company because they had a really rich user interface. Maybe this is the point I'm making. Yeah. That imagine using iMessage on your iPhone to do everything when in fact, like, every other app has a unique interface. So what I think is e-commerce, you want a very rich user interface. Yeah. It would be agentic. You could be able to have a conversation with it. You can talk to it. Yeah. I could talk back to it. But I think the point is it has to be more visual. Yeah. I think a text-based interface is for some solutions. Yeah. And a chatbot that's visual. Yeah. Yeah, that would work. I'm just saying today's chatbots aren't the right solution. But the answer to your question, I had a couple of new employees, like one of our, one of our new team members is a name, a guy named Ahmed, who is the CTO of Airbnb now. He led the Llama models at Meta. And one of the comments he made to me was he said, wow, yeah, Airbnb is so much more than the app. And in fact, the app that you see is like 20% of Airbnb. I mean, we have typically 4 or 5 million people staying in an Airbnb every night in more than 100 countries around the world. So there's a lot more to do around payments, around customer service, adjudicating everything. We have to, you know, we have a $3 million guarantee against theft or property damage for 1 million homes a night. That's $3 trillion. You know, there's just so many types of things around managing 5.5 million hosts. We have a host app. So there's a lot of things that are beyond the guest app. I actually think the guest app would be pretty easy to copy. And I think in the age of AI, you can make a better app than ours and We want to make that app before anyone else does, and we want to be agentic. But I think the key is most of Airbnb is not the app that you use. It's mostly the offline experience.

It's the operation. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, the iMessage example is good. It's even maybe even going deeper into like old SMS because iMessage has hydrated so many things with the reactions and you paste a link and it hydrates it and it's becoming more of a visual tool. But it is a long road.

Questions for you. Yeah. Yeah. Well, before you say it, one of the things is the last time I was on, I did make a comment and I'll make it again. Almost every AI company is an enterprise company. And the last stat I think I said on TVPM was like 3 months ago and the stats haven't changed. I think it was 175 companies in a YC batch and I think 16 were consumer. That trend hasn't changed. Almost everyone is going into coding. Almost everyone's going to enterprise. I think that's great. My whole point, though, is that the consumer experience hasn't fundamentally changed that much beyond a chatbot. And I think the consumer is a massive opportunity for AI, and I think it's going to need to be a richer user interface. I think, yeah, people that want to do more things, they wanted to be— I mean, the modern AI today is text, photos, and buttons. Yep. Mostly in some videos. And I think there's a more breakthrough visual paradigm that can be much more immersive. And with the new image and video generation models, you could do something so much more immersive. So the exact example you gave of trying to book a hotel, yeah, you can do it on chatbot, but there's probably some more breakthrough way to imagine that, to visualize it, to see the neighborhood, to see the map, to be able to talk to it, to understand where it is, to be able to compare photos, different hotels. There's something, I think, richer on the horizon. Yeah, that was—

I was surprised at the push into browsers last year from some different— AI companies specifically because I always, I already felt like an LLM, like the chatbots were helping me browse around the internet. It was like just double down on that and helping me find information all over the internet. I like that it's brought together in a standardized way, right? If I like the example, you know, of comparing like different hotels, right? It's nice to have it just like formatted the same way. So I'm looking at it, I'm not being like, influenced— I want to be influenced by the images and like the property, but not necessarily the design of the website, right? Because that they can be disconnected. I wanted to ask if you think LLMs will impact travel in the world in the way that social media did and travel trends specifically, because Instagram nowadays, like a place like Marfa in like Texas, right? It's like it's random. Town, or, you know, artistic type town in Texas, and then it just becomes a cool place because of Instagram. And then, and then, and then the entire kind of town evolves because of that. I can imagine like people researching like places to go with LLMs could ultimately drive some of that and then ultimately reinforce each other. But, but what do you think?

Yeah, maybe the simple framework is think about a travel journey. Step 1 is destination discovery. Where should I travel? Step 2 is flights. How do I get there? Step 3 is where do I stay? Airbnb or hotel? Step 4 is like, what do I do when I get there? Restaurants, activities. And step 5 is typically like logistics, car rental services. And then step 6 is you're in the city and then you might want to do things that time spontaneously. I think LMs, or let's call it the LM technology, applied to, I'm arguing, a slightly richer user interface than typical chatbot will be revolutionary for step 1, step 2, for destination discovery and flights. Also because flights are not very hard to build. There's just 3 global distribution systems. Anyone can pipe in an API and have a flight booking app pretty, pretty quickly. And so I think the LLMs are really, really good at destination discovery. If you want to say like, hey, I want to go somewhere that's like Paris, but it's a little more affordable, it's It's good to go in August. I like opera. Like, it's gonna give you like a very rich, like, suggestion of places to go. Now, I think the current chatbot doesn't have really rich maps. I think it could do a lot more visually. I think eventually chatbots or this new interface could be very video-based. So imagine a chatbot that was actually video-based or very, very photo-based rather than a little less text-based. I think that would probably be what you'd want for travel. I think what I'm describing would disrupt travel. More than the current chatbots, which are more acting like Google sending referral traffic. And they actually— the referral traffic from these chatbots are converting higher than Google. And so actually the chatbots are actually additive to travel companies. To disintermediate travel company, you would really want to disintermediate the travel journey. It would have to be much richer.

Yeah, I feel like— do you remember that company Hipmunk? I think it was founded by some USC founder. Users, right?

Yeah, actually the CEO of Reddit.

That's right, Steve Huffman, right? Wait, are you talking about Hipcamp? No. Hipmunk. Hipmunk was a really cool flight booking dashboard.

It was a really cool flight booking dashboard.

And it would rank the flights by pain, like a pain index. So it would say, well, you're not going to face financial pain because it's a really cheap flight, but you do have a stopover, or you do have to get to the the airport super early. And so it would blend all these things together. And it's something that it feels like could be vibe coded over a weekend now. Totally. And yet it is weird that when I open up the App Store charts, I see ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and then it's just AI chat apps. And we haven't had that breakout moment. Demis was on stage at YC actually talking about the fact that it feels weird that we have this super intelligence in the enterprise and vibe coding, and 60% of Airbnb's code is written by AI now, and yet we don't have like a new AAA game or a new video game that everyone's playing. And I'm wondering, like, is that a lack of creativity? Is it a lack of risk-taking? That there's just too much money, it's too obvious to be able— if you're good in AI, just go into enterprise because you'll just raise a bunch of money, get a bunch of customers. It's really easy to make money, and it's more risk-on in consumer? Like, what do you think needs to happen? Or is it just the intelligence isn't quite there and maybe the next model's the one that unlocks it?

Man, Wes, this is such a good question. I think there's like 3 or 4 factors going on. The first factor is I saw a tweet recently that I think there's like 60 new Neo Labs being formed. Yeah. And I've met a number of these researchers and a lot of them are interested in doing the same things. And I think what I'm noticing is most of these teams are purely AI people. Yeah, they don't have product people or designers on their team. They're picking things like science, they're picking things like coding, they're picking things like we want to create a different type of model. This is great, but I don't know if all 60 companies should be doing the same problem. And so what you're seeing is you don't see a big focus on people wanting to do consumer. I think some people think that the AGI can just figure out consumer. I think that's maybe simple. Overly simplistic thinking. I do think you have to have a, a point of view about consumer. So I think that's the first point. I think the second point is, you know, Silicon Valley's become more vibe and trend-based than when I came to Silicon Valley 2007, although it was back then. And one of the things I think when people see enterprise companies doing well, they go into it. And I think there's this like natural flywheel. Um, the other thing is I know in Y Combinator, for example, we teach the Y Combinator companies use the other companies as their customers. Yeah. Now back in the day, we would get them to use our product as consumers. Yeah. But I think everyone's figured out actually it's way more efficient to get them to become customers.

It's like 5 code, 5 code gen startups all being like, you code with me.

Yes, exactly. Yeah. And so I think enterprise makes a lot of sense until everyone does enterprise. Yeah. And then suddenly, like, everyone's saying consumer's hard, but you know what's also hard? Like, competing with 10 other companies and enterprise doing your idea too. That's also hard. Yeah, I think additionally the image and video generation models are having a— I think Image 2 is almost like a Claude Code breakthrough. It is so good now in the Seedance video models that I think we're about to enter this new era where suddenly going beyond text is possible. I think you're going to even be able to see real-time AI-generated interface in the next year or two. So my prediction is this has been the era of enterprise. Even ChatGPT's breakout success, I would predict that most of the revenue is going to be going to Codex. That's my— I might be wrong, but just given how much money is going to Claude. And I think in the next 2 years you're going to see a massive revolution in consumer. And I think you're going to need a couple of companies to lead the way. I think we need reference points. I mean, even me saying the chatbot's not the interface, people probably asking, well, what is? And someone needs to be the one to do that. I mean, we're going to try to do our part. I'm not sure Airbnb will be the company to blaze the trail, but I think someone has to. I think in another era it would have been Apple, like the Steve Jobs era. Apple would have done that. Maybe Apple will do that, but they would have been typically the company that would have done that. Yeah.

Are you worried that everyone is working on the exact same thing? And when I say exact same thing, I mean agents that can do things on your computer and/or, well, you know, look at the iPhone App Store chart or look at the early-stage startup market, right? A lot of companies, you know, the full spectrum of companies from hyperscalers to labs to Neo Labs to—

I'm not too worried. I might be a little worried for the entrepreneurs If they're like the 10th company doing something. I mean, like Peter Thiel was one of our earliest investors and he used to— he wrote this book Zero to One that a lot of people listening probably read. He has a saying, competition's for losers. And you want to kind of try to do something that no one else is doing. Back in the day, that was enterprise because everyone was making an app. And now I just had to be careful about being the 10th company doing something unless you're going to be a lot better decisively. It's just really, really hard in a crowded market. So you want to kind of zig when everyone else is zagging. So I'm not too worried, but maybe a little bit. And I would just encourage entrepreneurs to try to claim a space for their own. And by the way, Airbnb was that. It was kind of accidental, but like, like in 2007, everyone wanted to do like a social networking something. And we were like, it was tempting for us to try to be a social networking something something as well. It was accidental that we inflated through airbeds one weekend and created airbed and breakfasts, and people thought it was the worst idea ever. I guess it became like the worst idea that ever worked. But we carved our own space, as did Uber, and we weren't trying to be anything else. And so I kind of— and by the way, OpenAI wasn't trying to be anyone else either. Maybe they were a little bit like DeepMind, but AI was not the thing when OpenAI and Anthropic got started. So I do think there is something about not chasing trends. I think once it's a trend, it can be a little crowded and to try to claim out your own space. And I would say there's so much of the US economy that AI hasn't yet touched.

Yeah. On that note, how are you talking to, or how would you talk to designers or RISD students about applying non-native technical skill sets or non-AI disciplines, non-computer science backgrounds to consumer? The reason I ask it is I feel like there's a lot of pushback against AI in design communities, in colleges right now. Broadly, AI is not particularly popular and there's a lot of fear of job loss. But at the same time, you know, I'm sure, The tools have changed throughout the history, and I feel like you believe that there's incredible opportunity, but I'm worried that some people are not jumping on that opportunity because they have hesitations about various, oh well, does this displace this tool, or how was this made, or is this the right tool for the job, should I even be using this?

Yeah, I'm really worried that an entire generation of designers, artists, and creative people are gonna decide to kind of sit out AI. And I think it's the biggest opportunity for creative people in my lifetime. By the way, this is not the first time designers were late. We creatives and designers were really late to the internet and web. So going back 30, 35 years, most of the prestigious designers did not get into so-called web design. Web design was considered a lower-tier, lower-status design, and they stayed with print, all the established people. And so they did not really chase design. What ended up happening was because you had a lot of these really excellent designers that did not go into web design, I think what happened was a lot of— there were a lot of good people that became web designers, but I think there became a gap between web design and engineering. You had people that, you know, maybe didn't have the full full design skill set. And what happened was this function emerged called product management. Product management, I'm not arguing against. We have product managers, very important. But in industrial design, there's no product managers for the most part. They're industrial designers. In architecture, the architect is the product manager. And so I think what ended up happening in web design, designers were very, very narrow. There was a void. Product managers filled that void. I'm not arguing against that model, but I think if designers sit out, we are going to see they see as engineers and product managers designing for them. And I think the counterpoint is designers can be engineers and product people for all intents and purposes. Said differently, if I were starting Airbnb today, I'd be vibe coding in Claude Code. Um, yeah. And I'm trying to do it now. I'm, I'm doing it for fun. I'm not really gonna be doing anything productive Airbnb. But if I was 26, I would've thought of myself as a technical person. I think all designers should think of themselves as product people. And as, you know, front-end engineers, if anything. And so I think this is a boon. I don't think that the future of the internet has to be all text-based. I think it can be very visual. I think that photo and video generation models allow you to design incredibly rich interfaces. And this is, I think, the best time in the world for designers and creative people to get involved. I think they're just a little bit afraid. And whatever we can do to enlist them to just get their hands sturdy. Many designers are. I just think more should get involved and not be even getting out of typical wireframes.

Just start coding. Do you think— so assuming we solve this problem of not enough, you know, creative people working in consumer, we build, you know, we as a society build cool new consumer products and experiences and apps. There's something that deserves to be at the top of the App Store. App Store. Has distribution and the acquisition of customers and users changed structurally? You know, you were very good at SEO and Google, and there was a referral program. Do those patterns still work? Are they broken? Is there a new playbook that needs to be rolled out for anyone who has something that's great, but they need to get it in the hands of consumers broadly?

I think, I think we need new patterns. This is a funny saying. I think the highest turnover job of any executive in Silicon Valley might be the CMO. I don't know for sure, but like, you know, you don't see a lot of turnover CFOs, you don't see a lot of turnover CTOs. Yeah, but like Amazon was famously— and I don't know if part of my theory is that like what works in marketing changes every few years and you have to be adaptable in your old playbook gets outdated. So marketing is unfortunately one of the hardest functions. I have a huge amount of respect for people in marketing cuz once something works, it almost becomes stale. Yeah. Because then everyone does it. Yep. And so like influencer marketing was really successful until everyone did it. Yeah. And then people kind of tune it out. It's this thing called banner blindness. Banner blindness is after you see something over and over, you tend to be blind to it. Mm-hmm. And so you need a new tactic. So I think that a couple thoughts. Number one, I think that just like we need new interface design, new creative experiential approaches, we also need new types of marketing. I don't know off the top of my head what that is. It's probably something we haven't done before. I mean, Joe and I, we did like bizarre things, like we sold collectible cereal boxes and we like when social media was new, we were all over social media. And when, when there were newspapers, we would hunt down reporters and like try to get them to write about us. But people ask me, how do I get users? I'm like, all the tactics from 2008 aren't relevant anymore. So you gotta be relevant and you gotta find new tactics. The second thing I'd say though is, you're right, the distribution is mature. When we started Airbnb, the App Store was young. In fact, the internet was still young. I mean, we could just— you could launch a website and just ride the growth of the internet. And it's hard. The internet is not growing like it did before. In other words, people were coming on the internet in hundreds of millions a year, new users. So I do think distribution for consumers mature. At the same time, the top apps in the App Store are new apps. They're mostly chatbots. So what that tells you, if you do something truly breakthrough and revolutionary, consumers will still probably find it. And so that's— I think, yeah, I think the two principles are do something so revolutionary consumers will find you. And number two, you're going to have to find your own new tactics. And, you know, anything that is standard is probably stale. Well said.

I have one more, but yeah, looking out into the future, you've ridden the growth of the short-term rental market. You dominate it now. Is, is the biggest opportunity to just continue to make the best product in the category, ride the continued growth of it, or do you think there's another STR-size market for Airbnb?

I think the biggest opportunity for Airbnb is to go beyond our core business. I do think, you know, core business does close to $100 billion in gross sales. If you net out all the other businesses, gross booking value, the total amount of reservations going through the site, I think that could probably double one day. I don't know how long that one day is, but for every person who stays in Airbnb, 8 or 9 stay in a hotel. I think we can get one extra person in Airbnb eventually. And I think that can get you to $200 billion. I think there's a market much larger than Airbnb, which is hotels. Again, hotels about 8 or 9 times the size of Airbnb. I don't think we'll ever be a hotel dominant site, but we are going more aggressive into hotels. A fun thing is that about half the hotels in the world are independents and boutiques. They're not chain hotels and they're not really happy listing on the OTAs because they pay a higher commission than the chains. A lot of these independent hotels are being forced, or they feel like their hand is being forced to franchise to Marriott, to Hilton, other brands because they have loyalty programs. They can, you know, they can negotiate lower commissions. So we think we can be a distribution channel for these boutiques, independents. That is a multi-billion dollar market. I think another one would be services. There's no Amazon for services. And, you know, think about like you can hit a button and a car can pick you up. You can hit a button and food can be delivered to you. But what about hitting a button, having 80 other things possible? You know, I don't know if any one market is large, but if you add up the 80 different service verticals, that to me is another pretty big market. And then maybe the last one is like living stays of longer than 30 days. More and more people have a job via laptop. More people are nomadic. More people are moving around. That's another really big market. So I think for Airbnb, we're looking at really expanding expanding to a lot of different categories. And I think that's where most of the growth is gonna be in the future.

Do billboards in San Francisco work on you? Going back to marketing, it's one of these old things where like, yes, I completely agree with you. Like the CMO who did the first billboard campaign back in the '50s, probably printed legend, you know, books written about them.

Well, the billboard campaign that worked over the last couple years was just by— So many billboards that people are like, wait, how did this company buy so many billboards, right?

Yeah, and so I'm wondering, is your thesis on marketing that these things go in cycles and yes, we might be out of the influencer marketing meta right now, but it's gonna come back in 5, 10 years, who knows? That's possible. Or is it rise and fall and then never again?

I think these channels though, they don't go away. Yeah. They just stop being like, if you do this thing, you're gonna grow like crazy. Crazy. Yeah. Still need to do that thing, but it's no longer an art. Okay.

Yeah. What do you think you guys are—

Okay, so, so one thing I have to acknowledge is I think all of us— advertising works better on us than we admit. Yep. I honestly, I— we, we spend a lot on like all these ads and I kind of think to myself, do these really influence people? Yeah. Like, and if they do and if they didn't, we wouldn't be spending like $1 billion a year on advertising. So I want to admit that advertising does influence us more than we realize. There's, I think, a lot of studies that show like, oh, that doesn't change my mind. But you see something 7 times and it probably— even if you don't want to believe it, you might start believing it. Yep. So clearly it works. Yeah, I do think though, the ROI of new ideas works a lot better. Just for example, we spend a lot on advertising, but the most popular marketing we've ever done is like when the Barbie movie came out, we took a house in Malibu, we turned it into Barbie Malibu Dreamhouse, and it was like new. And the whole internet talked about it. And the ROI of that was better than any ad we've ever done. Right. We've done things like that. So I do think doing kind of crazy, slightly unhinged things that people notice. Like, I mean, you guys are successful 'cause you're different, right? I think. Yeah. I think being different is the key to marketing. And so if you have a billboard, people are probably influenced, but if you, if it looks different than another billboard, it's gonna work. So I think the key to marketing is to be different because you gotta stand out. Yeah. Yeah.

The Red Bull, Baumgartner, the skydive from space is, I think, like 1,000x ROI. I think they spent less than $1 million on that, and I think it has 1 billion views or something like that. Space. Great example of that.

Space, Airbnb.

But if like 10 people did that, then the 10th one wouldn't work as well.

Yeah, and that's probably why they didn't do a sequel and then another one, another one. They went and found something else. Let's put a plane through a tunnel or fly a hot air balloon upside down or something.

Get a blimp on Airbnb that I can go.

On a sky cruise, sleeping in a blimp.

Yeah, so that would be, that would be, that would be a very good idea. Maybe we can talk about it.

I'd love that. Ship it, definitely. Podcast.

Yeah, I don't know how long it takes to get to go. Yeah, LA to San Francisco. If it takes me 2 days, 3 days, but I have a beautiful view. Would you guys do that? I would 100% do that. So, so, so, so we say things like this all the time where we're like, oh yeah, like, we'll definitely like to do something, and oftentimes it's hard to schedule, but we have been talking about blimps for like over a year.

We know we can broadcast. We've been having to happen with a blimp. We've been having guests call in from their jets. Yes, with Starlink, and the connection is perfect. It is so much so that people in our chat sometimes don't know that the person's on a plane.

Okay, Airbnb and TBPN are going to work together on a blimp partnership. You guys are going to broadcast across the country on a blimp. I love it. He's going to be a part of that. Yeah, I want to make this work.

Let's, let's, let's figure it out. Okay, uh, fantastic. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Have a great weekend and we'll talk to you soon.

You're the man. All right, bye guys.

We're going on a blimp, baby, for Blimp Maxing. Let's go! We've been waiting for this for so long. We've been thinking about blimps, what we could do with them, and we finally have the perfect that I couldn't be more excited.

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