Kushner and Iger Buy The Lakers, Grok 4.6 Launch, NVIDIA Nemotron | Darren Rovell, Patrick Whitesell, Harjot Gill, Jeff Huber, Soren Monroe-Anderson & Shaun Maguire, Andrei Georgescu

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Today is Wednesday, August 12th, 2026. We are live from the TVPN UltraDome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital.

That's right.

Tell you about ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Some really interesting data out of Ramp. We'll go through the, the latest workings of our Karazian over at the Ramp Economics Lab soon. But first, we got to talk about Josh Kushner, Bob Iger. They bought The LA Lakers. They're buying the LA Lakers.

He's done it again.

He's done it again. They said he couldn't do it.

In the sauna this morning, I was thinking about the name Thrive Eternal. I think it's one of the best names for a fund ever.

Yeah.

Eternal is such a powerful statement, and it fits the strategy so well. And it does— people have been talking about this this morning, but it feels like With all of the technology disruption happening, it just feels like these sports franchises could be more durable than many of the biggest companies in the world today.

Yeah, well, we have—

Could be.

Rovell coming back on the show to discuss it at 11:30. Let me take you through.

Yeah.

And I figured out how to put on a suit.

Yeah.

Doesn't he look great? Look at this guy. It's incredible.

I cleaned it up.

Yeah, I cleaned it up.

Super clean. Looking amazing.

Uh, yeah, uh, finally, truth be told, we— when we started the show, I went from— we started hitting the gym.

We did a little bulking season. It was bulking season.

And I added, I added some weight, and I basically—

You added 45 pounds of lean muscle. You don't need to undersell it, Jordi.

And you lost 20 pounds of fat. Yeah, so I added a little weight, and I basically grew out of my suit slowly about 2 pounds a month.

Yeah.

For 18 months.

It went exponential.

And it became extremely uncomfortable to sit here, even though all these— the suits—

Suits are beautiful.

That, uh, that we had gotten made.

But they got a little tight.

I'm gonna have to save them for when I'm an elderly man.

Yeah, maybe.

Because at some point we'll shed— we'll shed the muscle.

Cutting season's coming.

We'll be lean maxing.

Summer's only—

Cutting season is coming.

9 months away.

In 40 years. 40 years. Yeah, but it's good to be back. Yeah, it's good to be back.

Yeah, looks good. Let me take you through the story so everyone has the facts straight about this incredible deal for the Los Angeles Lakers. The headline is the Los Angeles Lakers are being sold to American businessmen Josh Kushner and Bob Iger for a record-breaking price of $12.5 billion. Multiple sources have told this to ESPN. So Kushner and Iger made the offer to Mark Walter, who only last year purchased a controlling interest in the Lakers from the Buss family at a then-record valuation of roughly $10 billion. Walter, the CEO and chairman of holding company TWG Global, officially became the Lakers majority owner last October after the NBA unanimously approved the deal. The new sale will likewise require approval from the NBA's Board of Governors, which is scheduled to meet next month in New York. But looking at that picture, it seems like they've had this conversation with the relevant people. They're not some random businessmen coming in from out of town who—

the seller's under federal investigation.

Yes. For some very complicated deals where some private credit transactions were put into an insurance firm that they own, those affiliated transactions. If you originate the deal and then you put it in your insurance company's— on your insurance company's books, you need to You need to disclose this. Now, you can actually do this. Berkshire Hathaway, about 46% of their insurance assets are related party transactions. So there's a way to do it above board. The allegations are that he disclosed that only 3% of the insurance assets were related party affiliated transactions. But in fact, it was much higher when you considered some of the other assets that had made their way through a capital allocator.

Bit of a bad, bit of a, bit of a bad boy.

You in the bad boy thing? Yeah, maybe. But, you know, innocent until proven guilty. Obviously, these are just allegations. He's just being investigated.

And a nice, nice little return.

Yeah.

And he's denied all wrongdoing. But it does, it does give you a little bit more context on what might be motivating a sale so, so soon after buying an asset that he was clearly optimistic about. So Kushner is the founder and CEO of venture firm Thrive Capital and co-founder and vice chairman of Oscar Health. He also is the brother of Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump's son-in-law. Kushner owner currently owns a minority stake in the Miami Heat, which he will have to sell to complete the Lakers deal, and was previously a minority owner of the Memphis Grizzlies. Iger, meanwhile, stepped down as Disney CEO earlier this year and has already made a major investment in the Los— in Los Angeles sports. He and his wife, Willow Bay, become controlling— became controlling owners of the National Women's Soccer League's Angel City FC in 2024. The prospective new owners are already getting a warm reception from some of the biggest names associated with the franchise. Luka Dončić said, being a Laker means everything to me, and I'm excited to get back to the court and bring a championship to L.A. I've gotten used to big changes over these last few years, but I know that no matter what, there's no limit to the potential of this iconic franchise. I look forward to meeting Josh and Bob so we can get to work building something special in L.A. together. You love to see it. Magic Johnson chimed in as well. He said, Lakers fans, you couldn't have any— you couldn't have 2 better owners. Johnson said, I've known Bob personally. For over 40 years, he has always loved the Lakers and basketball, and he will bring championships back to L.A. So Magic Johnson is optimistic about this deal.

Weirdly, this is making me optimistic on L.A. overall. Yeah, I've had a generally bad outlook. I have had extreme confidence that the weather is going to be very nice for a long time. Yeah, but that's really been the only thing I'm willing to really lean on. Yeah, but this is giving me a slightly more positive outlook.

And you've been pitching Thrive on your new incubation, the pothole company of Los Angeles, the pothole filling company of Los Angeles.

Huge opportunity. It's really Palantir for potholes.

Yes, yes. Hiring the best AI researchers.

No, I want somebody to do this. Figure out how to fix potholes quickly.

I think it starts with its own satellite constellation. You have to put up 10,000 satellites in low Earth orbit with cameras pointed directly at—

With actually those small— Small, effectively missiles fired at potholes.

Yes.

And then a laser that sort of like melts the debris down to fill in the hole.

Yeah.

It just kind of sort of— you bring the molten asphalt up to space. It comes down, warms up as it travels through the atmosphere, lands directly in the pothole, and smushes in, fills it in.

Perfect. But people are always saying, oh, why is— like, you go to LA, every other car is a G-Wagon. Well, you know why? Because the roads are absolutely terrible. You pretty much need something that's 4-wheel drive.

Yeah.

Otherwise, you're going to have a bad time. I was talking to— I was talking to a Maybach owner a couple of nights ago, and he had blown out multiple tires in the last year. I've blown out multiple tires last year. It's a disaster. Do you have a moment of silence? The pothole company of Los Angeles.

It's a banger idea, right? It's a banger idea. It's a banger idea. Yeah.

I might become the Batman of potholes.

Ooh.

Sneaking out late at night.

Yeah.

Look, I could go out in this suit.

You could.

You could.

Yeah, like that guy who was cleaning up the FDNY corner call box. Same thing.

That's right.

Potholes in LA. They're really, really bad. Every day I drive to work, and I have to swerve into the other lane to avoid one on this one particular road that's just been a disaster for the last 6 months.

Anyway, the last quote.

Related to this deal, as lifelong NBA fans, we are deeply honored for the opportunity to become the stewards of the Los Angeles Lakers, one of the most iconic sports franchises in the world. Kushner and Iger said in a statement, they said they have immense respect for Jerry and Jenny Buss and intend to build on the family's legacy. I don't know what you're laughing at. Compete at the highest level and serve this extraordinary team, its fans, and the city of Los Angeles. If approved, the deal would give the Lakers their third controlling ownership of potholes. I think he got it.

And Tyler says he's going to film the missions. This would just be absolutely riveting content. You're out on the 405, 2 a.m., just you and a nasty pothole and a little bit of traffic and a little bit of asphalt slathering it in there.

Right. Is that what you're doing?

Well, my big issue is when they, they, when they fill in, they just do a really bad job. And so it basically creates a bunch of mini speed bumps.

You get a sinkhole. So then you just start sinkhole company and flop sand.

That's a whole other problem.

Yeah, that was crazy. Oh, whatever happened with that in LA? It was really bad for a while. I guess they fixed it?

I would like to get somebody to throw on a tinfoil hat and figure out why a bunch of pipes started exploding everywhere around the city.

Somebody's got to ask the question. Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Just do it. There's a bunch of reactions hitting the timeline. Sag Harbor Capital says, while there are plenty of issues you can point out with sports investing, I think this actually makes a simple yet incredibly compelling case. Longevity. Sports is a portfolio diversifier. Investment firms and wealthy individuals now view investing in sports properties as a hedge against higher-risk investments. Very interesting. Everyone has always said sports investing is just— it's a trophy asset. It's just because you like the team. But you're locking up a lot of capital. And when you're long AGI, the future, the most cutting-edge technologies, also building a portfolio with some things that are going to be around forever, no matter how many robots there are, makes a lot of sense. And so that balancing effect seems to be a new thing that's driving demand in sports investing. Do you agree with that?

I do. Fits the strategy.

Yeah. Spore agrees. If you truly believe in AGI, buying a massive sports franchise is actually one of the best financial decisions you can make right now. And we've seen hints and rumors of this for a while. Anything else on the Lakers? We're gonna talk to Darren in just 13 minutes about it. Get him to explain.

He's gonna walk us through the whole rule set.

Yeah.

We're very excited about that.

Anyway.

Apparently there's a solar eclipse going on right now.

Oh, is that going on right now? I saw a link to a whole bunch of different webcams that you can use to watch it. The last time, a couple of years ago, there was a full solar eclipse, not a partial one. And everyone who went said it was one of the most insane experiences of their life. So I would highly recommend it. Tyler, can you say—

Yeah, so it's in Europe right now. Full solar eclipse.

Full solar eclipse.

Yep.

Wow, should have gone. I missed this one. When's the next one?

I should start planning now.

What does it mean?

What's the meaning, Tyler?

What does it mean?

It's a great omen for high beta AI stocks. That's what I choose to read into it. Lever up. That's what the eclipse is trying to tell you. Anyway, let me tell you about Console. Console built AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. Grok 4.6 is roughly the same performance as Fable 5 Max at an 85% discount, 80% cheaper for input tokens and 88% cheaper for output tokens. Pareto dominance, says Gavin Baker. Grok 4.7 will be significantly better as is a much larger model with the cursor and SpaceX data included in pre-training. So the headline is SpaceX sort of jumped to the frontier, at least on these benchmarks. We'll see how this comes out, how people adopt it. Obviously, Cursor has huge, huge usage all across the enterprise, across businesses. Groq has been slower on adoption with a bunch of different pushback there, but the model seems to be catching up. The teams seem to be gelling and things seem to be pretty good over there. We'll see how, I mean, I'm sure on X we'll see lots of people demoing examples of what they build with Groq 4.6. There's already some games that have hit the timeline. There'll be a whole bunch more on benchmarks.

Yeah. So, so seems incredibly impressive. Yeah. Excited to get reactions and get people's lived experiences with the model.

Yeah.

The price wars have definitely begun.

Yeah.

You know, we saw this with Meta. We're seeing this with Groq now. And then third, I would say, Trust in benchmarks has to be at an all-time low. Yeah, right. There's been enough, you know, moments, releases so far where the benchmarks looked amazing, but then the actual lived experience is, is, you know, less, less significant. They also had a great launch yesterday, so they're building momentum.

Sure. SpaceX is up almost 40% just in the last 5 days.

That's a pretty— yeah. And I'm so curious. I wish, I wish you could figure out a way to parse out what, what's driving that. Is it the Semi analysis?

Yeah.

Thesis Semi analysis.

That felt like Friday.

Friday. Well, yeah, that was Friday at the close.

It popped during the day, though. Right.

So, but then up 10% today.

Yeah, I don't know. Maybe it was leaking out.

CNBC says SpaceX short sellers are running out of bullets as stock rebounds more than 30% off. We're running out of ammo.

We're running out of ammo.

I'm tired, boss. I can't keep buying at these prices. You gotta buy more. Michael Truel at Cursor, founder, CEO. Excited to release Grok 4.6. With each release, Grok is becoming a more capable digital colleague. The age of work is upon us. Grok for work, it's happening. 4.6 is significantly better at difficult tasks and knowledge work. It combines Opus-class intelligence and polish with very low cost and high speed, which people love. Even just in the cursor workflow, the more iterative approach instead of having to come back a day later and see what goes on, there's a lot of value to that workflow in particular. Groq 4.6 has a very impressive test time curve on CursorBench in a league of its own. They did more mid/pre-training on the Groq 4.5 checkpoint and newer SFT stages with Groq 4.5 traces and model-based filtering. Once again, shows how important a good SFT checkpoint Interesting. Getting some more details on what's going on with Grok. They also launched Grok Bot. We recently hired a new teammate. Bots are AI teammates that do real work for you. They sign into your tools, use them just like you do, and come back with finished work. So I guess, I guess Gwork isn't going to happen. It's going to be Grok Bot, which actually it has a nice little rhythm to it. I like, I like Grok Bot. Also very good results on the artificial intelligence index. Joining the frontier at 61. Strong agentic performance, lower cost, obviously. And the model wars are upon us. NVIDIA is also joining the model wars, selling weapons to both sides, potentially. Nimotron 3.5 Lightning, their open source model, came out, but they also launched a model router, Nemo Switchyard, to deliver faster, smarter, more efficient agentic AI.

Switchyard. Switchyard's a good name.

It's a good name. I like that.

Kind of railroad connotations, which—

Oh, yeah.

Which is maybe—

That's interesting.

Yeah.

Maybe you got to go through Ben Thompson stuff at some point. But interesting to see where this goes. I mean, it does feel like if you're an organization that has NVIDIA chips, you have your own data centers because you're a mid-scale, maybe not a hyperscaler, but you're pretty big, being all in on the NVIDIA stack and then using their Model Router could make a lot of sense. Like, it's a logical place for it to live. And then you're— it has more integration with the rest of your NVIDIA stack because you have a whole bunch of GPUs racked for the lowest possible cost. If you're cost optimizing, you'll probably eventually have your own racks and your own NVIDIA work data center basically. Anyway, should we debate Anthropic's watermarking, or is our next guest here early? Should we bring in our next guest?

Why don't you dive into this? I don't, I don't know that I have a strong take yet, but Ben Thompson has a strong take on Anthropic's watermarking.

So the basic news is that you might soon be able to know for sure if something came from a human being or from Claude. Anthropic said this week that text and files generated by its family of AI models will be watermarked. to let consumers know. Now, they won't be watermarked. Like, you'll still have to take the text and then go to their watermarking tool and validate that it was—

that it was AI-generated.

Yeah.

Bill Gurley was making the point that watermark— a traditional watermark on an image is very visible.

Yes.

It's just, like, immediately visible.

Yes.

Yes. And so it's not actually— it's more like leaving— basically, we're going to leave evidence that this was generated. Breadcrumbs.

Yeah, breadcrumbs. And so in theory, a LinkedIn could, or an X could integrate with an Anthropic API to check the watermarks. But the interesting read on this is that this was actually implemented by the regulation in the European Union. So Anthropic in theory could watermark, could only watermark text in Europe, but the EU has achieved their dream of regulating the world. according to Ben Thompson. And so they actually— instead, I think the idea is instead of doing a last step at the end of the generation to add the watermark in, it's baked much deeper into the model level, which means it will be watermarked whether you're in Europe or not. And so Ben Thompson explains a little bit on how it works. Obviously, they're not explaining too much because then you can avoid it easier.

Yeah, it's so interesting. How much of their revenue is coming from Europe?

Oh, yeah.

Given how compute constrained they are, like, was there— I wonder if they ever considered like, hey, let's just say, hey, if you're gonna go forward with something like this, we're just gonna exit the market entirely.

But I don't think people care. I don't think Anthropic cares about watermarking. I think they're fine. I think it's nice. I think it's a good thing. And then also I think business users don't care because they're like, yeah, I want AI-generated code. All over my codebase. I want it to be clean and efficient, and I want it to just do the job. And I'm totally fine with it. I'm not— that's not my business. And so I don't think people will be upset about this, at least in the enterprise. Ben Thompson points out that he is somewhat frustrated by this because even if you're using an LLM for proofreading and making individual changes in your text editor, like you just upload your blog post to Claude now and you say, oh, like what could be better about this? What's wrong with this? Did I make any grammatical errors? Did I make any spelling errors? If you go and implement those, there's a small risk. It seems like a very unlikely risk, but there's a small risk that even in just accepting those changes, you accidentally insert a little bit of the watermark in or potentially all of the watermark in and then you don't get credit potentially because people will be like, oh, this is AI, when really it was like the last step that was AI. We had a back and forth on this a little bit where I would write an essay by hand, we would throw it into ChatGPT to proofread it, and it would put in a bunch of em dashes. In the earlier model, it was really heavy on em dashes. And so people would just be like, oh, this is AI. And it was like, well, like the last step, but it's like, but does that matter? It does matter to a lot of people. They do care about that. But it's odd. And Ben Thompson's point is saying what the EU is doing is stealing the last thing humans have, creation, and demanding it be bundled with substantiation, effectively giving the AI the credit. Even if you come up with a great idea, you write a great book, if you have AI edit it, if it has a watermarking feature, it will be watermarked. And people will be like, yeah, yeah, it was all— well, it was the prompt. And it's like, well, maybe there wasn't a prompt. Maybe there was a whole process that you went through to develop your idea, and then you took it at the last step. And so that's the source of frustration. At the same time, it does feel like there's ways to work around this. If you become more collaborative with the AI system, you can avoid the watermark by only using it at one certain step and then doing an editing pass yourself. People have been going back and forth with these all day long. He says the human that gave AI the text to proofread or even the prompt to generate writing doesn't matter to the bureaucrats in Europe. Everyone is worried about being replaced by AI. The EU is mandating it. That's what he says. He's got some harsh words. What do you think, Tyler?

Yeah, I mean, so I don't think the actual, like, underlying— the way they watermark it is like public, but presumably it's like basically during the sampling process when you're like generating tokens.

Yep.

Right. It generates some distribution over the tokens, like which one is it going to select and then It uses like a slightly different method than just choosing like the most likely one.

Yep.

And that way you can like see, oh, this is like less likely. So it's probably, you know, written by AI. But like, if you basically have, you know, some essay that you wrote and you replace like one sentence, then like 99% of the tokens are still the same. Then like, it's like, it shouldn't mark the whole thing as being like AI written. That doesn't make any sense. Like only the sentence that you changed. Would be marked as AI written. Oh, oh, sure, sure, sure, sure. Yeah, or whatever.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It doesn't like say the whole document is AI.

Yeah, yeah.

It's like this sentence.

Yeah.

No, no, no.

These tokens are very—

people think of a watermark as it's a binary. It's either going to say it's AI or not.

In fact, it's going to represent— I think people are going to just look, you know, like the peanut gallery online is going to be— it'll be very binary for them.

Sure.

Like if somebody puts out even an Instagram caption, they'll get dunked on even if it's one sentence. Right.

Like, like if you look at the Google Synth ID, so Gemini has done this for like a few years.

Yeah.

If you look at their blog that like explains how it works, it will like highlight specific basically words in the, in the blog or whatever.

Sure.

Sure. It's like, okay, this is probably AI written. It's not saying the whole thing is, is like, yeah, 0, 1.

Yeah.

So yeah, yeah.

I think, I think this is kind of like blowing it out of proportion.

Yeah.

I don't, I don't think that many people will have a problem with it.

How long till someone ships the Claude watermark remover?

I mean, somebody shipped a Pangram fighter like yesterday. There's something where you take the text, you put it in this model, and then it reads 100% human to Pangram because it rewrites it in a style that Pangram can't detect. And so now the Pangram team has to go figure out how to defeat that. It's all a game of cat and mouse, I guess. But let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era unlocks seamless real-time experiences And new value with Cisco. We've been keeping our next guest waiting for far too long. We have Darren Rovell coming back on the show.

How are you doing? Welcome back.

We're doing well. Big day. Take us through the story, how you're processing it, what this means. Set up the story of the Los Angeles Lakers changing hands again.

Yeah, just a surprise, obviously. Teams just do not change like this. I do not think— hold on, I got to get off my center stage. There we go. I do not want anything to follow me. Give me a second here.

There we go.

I am a pro.

There we go. There we go. Mark Walter clearly did not say, oh, I could get in now, and I could make $2 billion quick. It is amazing that in 2014, I was saying, oh my God, Ballmer bought this team for $2 billion, and now that is the profit that Mark Walter is making just from getting out of here. I will tell you this because I know your show well. I have never understood Guggenheim's insurance business.

Yep.

It's one of those things where I could never follow the buckets. It's buckets upon buckets upon buckets, and this going to this and this going— I would say it's purposely obfuscatory. And so, the fact that there are third-party loans, apparently, where they don't understand it, and that the report that at least Bloomberg had that he had to get loans quickly to perhaps make them kosher—

Yeah.

Does make a lot of sense given my previous work with trying to investigate exactly how Guggenheim works.

Yeah. So a little bit of motivation for the early sale.

Yeah, for sure. And the other motivation for the early sale, you would think, is the NBA in general. The NBA is a hell of a lot more progressive than Major League Baseball. Not to suggest that he would have lost the Dodgers, but when you have the Bomber situation, that investigation, that's in LA. You have— I wrote on Twitter today kind of the— this world where people are going to become rich really quickly, but they also could become poor really quickly. We've seen that before. But I think that in the degenerate, you know, I think we wake up every morning and we're more in a casino than ever before. And that, that means that you're going to hear people buying teams for massive values and you're going to see a higher percentage of those people be poor in 2 seconds. Oh, so, I don't— well, while I don't think the assets of sports teams and the assets in general, obviously, the macroeconomy is important, falling, I do see individual people falling and replacement people have to come in more than ever before.

Yeah. I mean, we saw that just a few weeks ago. Situational Awareness, a fund, a hedge fund that scaled from $250 million to almost $50 billion. round-tripped very, very quickly in dramatic fashion. Fortunes are won and lost extremely quickly in the modern—

Yeah.

modern era.

Very basic question, but what are the kind of groups that can own an NBA team?

Yes.

I thought it had to be individuals. Obviously, they can bring in partners on it. There can be, you know, a bunch of, you know, co-owners. But then I was looking it up and Madison Square Garden owns the Knicks.

Anyone now, I mean, they've recently even allowed— Blue Owl has a Home Court Ventures Fund, which became— when Blue Owl had their whole, we're not giving any distributions and we're locking everything up, of course, people would say, well, you own 5% of a bunch of NBA teams, which wasn't convenient at the time. But yeah, I mean, pretty much anyone can own anything now, even the NFL now opening up, you know. But listen, the Yankees and their Apollo deal yesterday, I think sports leagues are willing to have pretty much anyone as owners as long as the value continues to go up.

So does that—

we could see a hyperscaler Do you think leagues will just end up buying a sports team just as basically a part of their treasury? It seems like a relatively stable asset. They get some potentially some halo effect from it.

I think, I think, I think leagues will still be very careful as to who they let in just because they're worried about information as a whole. Right. They don't want things to come out, especially as long as a lot of these teams are going to still be asking for public financing for their stadiums. stadiums. So, so I do, I do think they, they— I know I'm contradicting my— contradicting myself, but I do think there are some caveats. And if they open it up to many people who are, say, invested in a fund who then have to have access to those financials, I don't think major sports leagues think that's interesting. So that's the only thing that I think is, is probably like prohibitive to all of that.

Got it. So when you say information, you mean financial details about how that particular team operates because there's been—

Yeah, but can't you— you could certainly raise from a number of people and just have it be a condition that they don't get any information, right?

Sure.

Right?

Yes. Yeah.

But that would be hard if it's like— Listen, the one thing that I can think of— The one thing that I can think of—

For example, I know a bunch of people that would happily co-invest with Kushner and Iger On the condition of like, you don't have to tell me anything ever. I just wanna effectively be able to say, yeah, I own part of the Lakers.

Sure.

And that's the thing, by the way, minority ownership, it's ridiculous. I mean, I can't believe people say, hey, I'm gonna put $100 million in and I'm going to own like an infinitesimal part of a team. I mean, it's like, yes, there is a trophy value, but there are seemingly better investments. I will say, obviously, I have been wrong at every stage of— since covering this for 30 years, I've been wrong. If you wanna pull all the videos, you could see me on CNBC saying in 2011, $450 million for the Warriors? That is crazy!

And then—

And then the next year, the Bucks sell. And I even said in 2014, Ballmer for $2 billion is 12 times— it was 12 times expected gross revenues. And this deal is now 20, probably 22. With LeBron leaving, it's probably 22 to 23 times gross revenues. $12.5 billion for next year.

Yeah.

Wow.

It's crazy.

Someone under the numbers in the chat said most of the leagues allow up to 30% institutional.

Yeah.

In individual teams.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Yeah. But I think that will change a little bit more. Again, I mean, there's been relatively little— we haven't seen majority Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth funds coming into American sports. I know that the Monumental Washington Capitals and Wizards, small piece in there. But— and it's obviously infiltrated European soccer football a lot more than it has here.

Well, yeah. And for all the existing owners, no one is probably sitting there owning one of these assets and thinking like, no, I don't want to unlock large institutional buyers for these assets. Of course, there's a massive incentive to allow these like much, much bigger buyers to come in.

Do you think— do you think the trophy asset thesis is still driving the market or is there something else going on? Because, I mean, I guess the trophies can just keep getting bigger and bigger as the pool of capital and the larger buyers come in and people are wealthier, so they need a bigger trophy. But it feels like there are other things afoot in the US economy, changes to like the big, the big like macro thesis around sports is usually like We're all on our phones, and that means we're craving—

Experiential.

Experiential, right? And so, I'm wondering if there's some other way that we should be thinking about a deal like this outside of the typical, it's a trophy asset.

Yeah. Well, you have a lot of people who are interested in ownership because they're rich and no one knows who the hell they are. And that's obviously not the case with Kushner and Iger. One of the things that's not a surprise is Kushner and Iger. I mean, Iger's been around forever. And he obviously was at the helm of Disney, which owns ESPN. And he's had a first look at everything in sports over the years. And I just thought they were going to get the Vegas team. I mean, they were looking at Vegas a week ago.

Yeah.

So that just shows you how quick this is. And Kushner and obviously what he's been doing and always, hey, every day you got to throw in a Trump connection somewhere.

Sure.

So, so the— what I'm interested in though, and I'm not—

But you said, you said, so, so I haven't been following the Vegas team at all or anything in the NBA.

The opportunity that there'll be a Vegas team.

No, but, but, but my question was like, is it, is it possible that they always wanted the Lakers and they wanted— and these were— this was going on in the background and And they just were using that, the Vegas team as a stunt?

Not what I was told. They wanted a great team, and this happened over the last 100 hours.

What is the shape of Las Vegas sports these days? I know like teams have relocated there and there's F1, but is there like an indigenous fan base that's strong enough? Is the indigenous fan base relevant?

They can't believe how big it is. I was there the day that they announced the Vegas Golden Knights. And obviously, their first year going to the Stanley Cup helped. I mean, that crowd is probably in the top 5 best crowds in hockey.

Wow.

Everyone go— people go there for road trips like they go when teams play the Raiders. The Raiders Stadium, Allegiant Stadium is amazing, is great. They've won. Vegas is very hard to win at, and people laugh at me when I say this, but eating has become the next act. And it becomes eating versus Cirque du Soleil. It used to be eating and then show. Now, eating is actually an activity. And so, you're competing with eating over the last 5 years because of the chef brands and everything else that's out there. Yeah. I think they think you know that the the A's are really gonna make a lot of sense, and and and listen, if you look at the Knights and you look at where the Raiders are, I mean, ten years ago you were concerned about gambling. Now now Calshy has you gambling on what flights are late. Yeah, you know we've gone we've gone from from oh my god! When I asked Gary Bettman. That day when they said they were moving to Vegas, he said, oh no, we're gonna have— the odds will be off the board at the 2 closest casinos to T-Mobile Arena. We're concerned.

Whoa.

And, you know, and now you look today and you look at the prediction markets and we're literally betting on toad races every 2 seconds.

Is prediction—

are prediction markets— Is toad racing a thing?

I mean, there's— No, it will be though. I showed you that crazy Russian livestreaming site where People play fake sports, like there'll be 2 guys sitting in a chair and they're playing soccer.

You can bet on— you can actually— there you can bet on how many cars will go through a traffic light.

I've seen those.

Yeah, until it turns red. I mean, listen, prediction markets are the dopamine that is going on, whether it's gambling, whether it's opening packs, collectibles, obviously I'm close to. My son, who's 12, is on a free-to-play app, and he's looking at whether Giannis is going to sneeze during a game. And by the way, I don't say don't play that. I say, yeah, play that. Play that and use your fake money. And when you lose 14 times in a row, that's a learning experience. And if you had real money, you'd be screwed. Yeah.

But I don't know.

I mean, the prediction markets are the craziest thing that I've ever had to watch in my entire, you know, reporting gambling life.

Are prediction markets net good for sports in terms of the businesses of like the Lakers? There's more points of entry. And so you wind up buying tickets and going in person, or does it not affect or does it pull people away? Because—

No, I think until people run out of money, Yeah. People run out of money. It's very, very addictive. And it's difficult to avoid because, again, we need to be on dopamine. We are a degenerate nation. And this is, in a way, the perfect and most horrible product.

Yeah, interesting. We talked to the former head of the CFTC yesterday about it. about where the regulation might go, whether you are going to get some of those gambling addiction warnings applied to prediction markets.

What about Kalshi and Polymarket's market cap? If you are Andreessen Horowitz, how are you predicting— if you are raising at a $50 billion valuation, but at some point, you have to believe that with the sportsbooks and you get a complete proctology exam if you're related to the sportsbooks. And then if you're Kalshir Polymarket, you get a free pass to do anything. You'd think that that would have to come to an end at some point. But, and is that end when Trump is out of office?

Yeah, who knows? That's the question.

Who knows?

Break down, what's your updated view on Whatnot?

Oh yeah.

We had Grant on. The show, I believe it was on Friday. The business is growing like crazy. It seems like there's a lot of like traditional online commerce happening in this live format. You know, he gave an example of a guy selling fish, doing quite well selling fish.

I love that example. That was crazy.

That was live fish.

And that's like, you know, the example that people always would give with China is like you can go on these Chinese live streaming apps and buy like mangoes.

That's right.

Kiwis and fruit and all this stuff. And we hadn't— haven't really seen that at scale in the US yet. But, but if you were going to put a number on it, what percentage of the activity on Whatnot or what percentage of the volume on Whatnot is like closer to gambling than commerce?

90%. I mean, I mean, I, you know, it is so much breaking. that I'm surprised that they don't have an insurance policy against breaking by selling normal memorabilia. I mean, it's not as close to prediction markets, but if a bunch of attorneys general decide that they're going to go after breaking, Whatnot's going to go all the way down.

And break it—

break down breaking for us. It's like, it's like I buy— you're sitting there with a pack of cards, you're about to open it, I can buy it for $10, and it's possible you pull a card that's worth $100. Is that, is that how it works? And then people just spam that all day?

That by 3, you put in, you put in $300 to win $3,000, or you put in $700 and then potentially you could get nothing, which is, which then becomes a lottery rule issue. And Whatnot has done a lot more recently to try to curtail it, but it's very hard to say that it's not gambling. Um, and so I, I think they should be doing a lot more regular traditional eBay-type memorabilia sales.

Yeah.

I didn't believe in them in the beginning because I confused the smallness of their transactions, that the average transaction I think was like $15. that they wouldn't be able to get a critical mass. And to their credit, they certainly have gotten that. People enjoy watching the shows. They enjoy being a part of it. But again, as they get bigger, I'm surprised that they're not investing more in traditional commerce almost as an insurance policy.

Well, thanks, Mike.

We got to figure out if they're gambling on fish.

Maybe.

Because it's like— Yeah, because this fish might have caviar inside.

You don't know how much caviar Caviar's inside. This is a real thing, the fish.

By the way, by the way, if anyone wants to, uh, uh, have a great time, you should go to, um, Oklahoma where you can fish for paddlefish, which is pretty much a fish when you pull it out of the water, it looks like it was on The Simpsons.

Okay.

Um, and, and, uh, and you can fish all you want, but you must give Oklahoma the fish. They will then clean out the caviar and then hand you back the fish.

Oh, interesting.

American paddlefish.

American paddlefish. Well, thank you so much for the tip and thanks for coming on the show.

Great to see you.

We'll talk to you soon. Have a good rest of your day. Let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI, own the data platform that powers it. Our next guest is Patrick Weitzel. He's the founder of WTSL. Here with us with his first appearance joining in just a minute or two. There are some other posts in the timeline, but while we wait, let me tell everyone about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents. Whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows, Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish. And our next guest is with us here in the TVP and Ultra Zone. Let's bring in Patrick. How are you doing?

What's up, boys?

What's up? What's going on?

Thank you so much for taking the time.

I'm good. I'm just in New York City. Can you see me okay? Yeah, you look great. I'm in this hotel room here in New York.

You look great. There's a little bit of lag, but I can hear you fine.

Yeah.

So, yeah, make it work.

Well, let me—

It's that hotel Wi-Fi.

Yeah, classic. It'll get you every time.

All right. Well, sorry about that, boys.

No, you're good. We can hear you fine.

Okay, good. So yeah, give us a little bit of an overview of your firm, the thesis, and then the recent deals.

So the idea was, you know, when we took Endeavor private, essentially what we— what that effectively did was kind of we dismantled the company and essentially sold everything but our ownership interest in WME, the talent agency, and our position in TKO, which is now around 60 1%.

Yeah.

But everything else that we ran and sat on, we sold. And so effectively kind of eliminated the job. And going forward and looking at the next chapter, I didn't really want to start, you know, a new company right away. And one of the things Egon Durban and I talked about, we had a really great long relationship with Silver Lake. Everything we kind of did, at Endeavor was really fueled by them and with their partnership. And so out of that, I talked to Egon. He goes, well, why don't we just keep investing in the field that you're in? You know, kind of entertainment, sports, content, the things that I've kind of spent my, you know, 30 years in, but on a much smaller level, you know? So we just started with $250 million and the idea was to make, you know, kind of $20 to $100 million investments in different things that were in our sector and help companies that I could, you know, have some influence on, help build. And so that's kind of what the whole thesis is around Weitzel, the investment company. And then the other part of it is when Egon bought the Raiders or invested into the Raiders, I should say, we had a WME at a football representation business. And per the league, you can't be a buyer and a seller.

So—

Right. I took that entire group out and started Wynn Sports, which is predominantly a football agency. We're starting to do a little bit of golf too, but it's really focused on building a really great dynamic football agency. And we have also a handful of artists in there, of clients of mine that I've worked with forever. of actors predominantly and directors that just have been longtime clients. So they're also a part of it. But the investment that we put into Alex Cooper's company came from Weitzel.

Got it.

Awesome.

What are the key ingredients to a great investment, great media company in the modern era where it's individual-led, influencer-led podcasting, live streaming, these types of things? What are you looking for?

I think the reason why I was attracted to Alex is, I mean, again, going back, you know, 30 years, the one thing that is always the most important thing is having someone really talented and really special. And Alex, to me, I mean, obviously her podcast, you guys know how big it is, how influential she is. She's a cultural powerhouse. To, you know, kind of Gen Z women. And but she's also built out already at Unwell a really diversified company that is not only in these other sectors but doing very well there. It's in live events, their consumer products, of course, they're in content, both, you know, kind of scripted and unscripted. And that's at, you know, kind of the traditional media companies like a Hulu or Netflix. But it's also, she's kind of started her own network of channels on YouTube and funding and producing content for YouTube, everything from microdramas to just reality shows. And that's gone exceedingly well, you know, on top of it. And then lastly, an advertising agency, um, kind of for digital solutions for people, creative agency that, you know, Alex was saying yesterday, um, that she thinks that by the end of '27, that the revenues of that will exceed her podcast revenues, which is, you know, quite a feat. So what I thought was interesting is, yes, she's a big force as a podcaster and talent, but she really has built a company that I think can only grow in every one of these sectors that we're in. So that's what kind of attracted me to her. I think also the part about, you know, what you're seeing within this kind of creator economy is They can, they don't. For 30 years when we built our company, if you had someone who had an idea like Alex's, you had to go to one of the traditional media companies, convince them to pay for it, you know, and finance it, distribute it, market it.

Yeah.

Now, of course, people like Alex and others have done it themselves. You guys know that very well.

Yeah.

And didn't need to go to the traditional players, but In that, I think now you're seeing a bunch of capital coming to this space and are going to invest in it. You see people raising funds for it. I think that what Alex has done is really, really hard. And so I don't think it's— at the agency business, you do it at scale. I don't think this is a thing you can do at scale. I think there are going to be unique individuals and opportunities that can build multibillion-dollar media companies. And so That's where I think kind of where I wanna kind of spend my time. And I think I hopefully can help them think through the strategy, whether it's M&A or just in kind of figuring out how to grow their content business or live event business. Hopefully my, you know, kind of 3 decades of doing this could be additive and fun.

That's great. All makes a lot of sense. I feel like so many, different investors have been so excited about the creator economy for so long and have struck despite that excitement. They tried to invest in— the best thing to do was invest in the actual platforms, right? A decade ago, go invest in Spotify and, and, and, you know, the YouTube seed round, do the YouTube seed round, things of that nature. But then all the other attempts, you look back at like 2019, 2020, people were like, well, what if we can invest in the, in the sort of tools that these businesses are using. The problem there is that these businesses will just like— they don't need a QuickBooks for creators. These are just media businesses, right? They just use QuickBooks. You can use Bank of America. You don't need a fintech just for your business. You don't need a— creators don't need an Amex card. They can just use Amex or Ramp or whatever it is. And so it's come— it's becoming a lot more clear to me. And then even looking at investing in the early stage of creators, The best creators early on are scrappy. They figure out how to get an audience without a lot of capital. They can just turn on their phone and start recording. Maybe they hire an editor, and so they can ramp revenue pretty quickly. And I think what investing in this category is going to look like is like people like you waiting to us to see who these sort of power law creators are, and then going in and investing real dollars once they've established like at least the beginnings of. of a platform, just because I'm looking at the early stage. I don't— there's a lot of early-stage content creators that I'm bullish on, but none of them, the smart ones, would take money because they're like, well, capital's not a constraint for my business. The constraint is like, how do I reach more people? How do I grow my existing business? And these businesses, at least on the advertising side, just generate a lot of cash.

I think perfectly said. And I think it's all the more reason where I think there will be a lot of people rushing to this space and will, I think, make the wrong decisions. Because to what you just described, you have to get to this place. And where Alex came to us, it isn't like she needs the money. I mean, obviously, you know, it's well documented what her Spotify deal is alone. And, you know, and will only grow there. The— oops, what was that?

That was an air horn for the Spotify deal.

Cha-ching!

And the Sirius deal.

Yeah, she's put up some huge numbers.

Yeah, but the point of it is that she's like, listen, you know, I need help. You know, I want the, you know, smart people around us to help kind of grow it and think through exactly what you described. And what's interesting is the traditional media companies, they are kind of saying, listen, we don't know how to get to this audience that you reach and we don't really know how to do creator stuff. So she's kind of gonna, I think, be able to, if we do this right, go back and forth, have her own ideas, her own kind of things that we will incubate and do on YouTube, but also for the traditional media companies. And that's kind of a hard thing to do because I don't know many people who can do both, at least that have come along historically. So, you know, and also she's, you know, her audience follows her as she's becoming a new mother.

Yeah.

And I think that's going to open up a whole different you know, categories, not only consumer products, but other things that she can kind of get involved in. Yeah, that her audience is going through those same things. And I think there's just an authenticity to her and a connection that is real. And it always starts with that. You got to have like great talent to build these things. And she is very ambitious and, you know, and loves it. I mean, just loves what she's doing every day. So yeah, it's going to be fun.

How are you thinking about flowback from the creator economy to traditional media to Hollywood. Obviously, we've seen the Netflix, the Spotify deals. But the more interesting trend that emerged this summer was around Obsession and Backrooms and Iron Lung, these YouTube creators, these independent, you know, new, new filmmakers who were able to put up really incredible numbers at the box office. If we were having this conversation in 2 years and you told me that there was an Alex Koo Cooper-directed rom-com that put up $200 million at the box office, I'd be like, yeah, that tracks. But is Hollywood set up to embrace a new modern creator now? Because it's— because in the past, it's always been, well, take, take, take 6 months off your current podcast to come do a Hollywood project, and maybe you'll make 6 figures. Maybe, maybe a million dollars is in the mail. And that's just not enough to take the whole podcast down for 6 months while you go do a project.

Yeah, I think you're right. I think where you're gonna see it is, and you referenced those 2 movies, is what's happened with the tools, and this is not brand new, but like, you know, when Chris Nolan was 15 years old, right, he either had to get his like, you know, video camera out or go rent film equipment. If you actually wanted to shoot a short film, you'd actually go rent lights and cameras and all that. And so the kid today, and whether it's just on TikTok or YouTube, that 15-year-old Chris Nolan—

Yeah.

Is doing that every day and getting really, really good at making content and coming up with ideas and very facile with the technology. And that's where I think the next generation of filmmakers are gonna come from. And, you know, we would used to go to film schools and, and not that they won't still come from film schools, Mm-hmm. But I think what you're gonna see is the writer-director creator in the film business and in television is gonna come there.

Yeah.

And the power of like both of those things when you kind of like, you know, get the kind of virality of online and you can incubate things there. So I think part of what I think will happen with Alex is she'll have an idea.

Yeah.

That will do there and just will start as a microdrama or something for YouTube.

Yep.

And it'll catch on. Yeah, like this, and then you're going to socialize it. So by the time you go out, then you could go make it as a feature film or as a show for Netflix or whatever. But you've also got this built-in awareness. I mean, obviously you guys followed it, but Backrooms was, you know, massively well known by a target audience long before it went out, right?

Totally.

And so I think that's where I think it'll land. I think the idea of like leaving your podcast to do it, I think, is still going to be risky. But these other people are sitting here every day and making really, really good stuff, really good content.

Yeah.

Um, and so I think that's exciting. Uh, and, uh, you know, we'll see long term how Hollywood embraces that because ultimately, like, you know, where the role of the studios are in that and how does the studios compete. You know, he made that movie for $700,000. It looked really good, you know, for, for, you know, for that. And, and those efficiencies are only going to get better and better.

Totally.

Last question I have before you leave. I'm curious how you think about generating returns from an investment like you're making in Unwell. I'm sure you have a preference on it. You probably make back the original investment over the next few years, and on top of that, it's just you're in the money. But is this the kind of thing that you and the team want to just own and, you know, help operate for 30 years? Or do you think that there's going to be in 10 years from now, you know, a bigger set of buyers that would come in and do, you know, majority buyout of these type of platform creator businesses?

You know, it's funny to talk to Alex about that. I mean, because obviously it's her company and how she decides to kind of grow it. And she's not really sure. I think she wants to keep doing this kind of forever. And I think One of the things that, you know, when we went through it, you know, we started our own company. Several, they came in and invested. And over time, as we bought other things, obviously our shares got diluted down and we owned less and less of the company. But the company became worth, you know, obviously exponentially more. But we still kept control of the company and had the governance of that. And so I kind of look at it in a similar light here, is I think as long as Alex wants to do it, yes, I think there'll be room for other capital partners to come in if they— if needed and if wanted. But I think my experience with Silver Lake is kind of like, you know, I got a bias to let's keep building something great as long as we can and as long as we're enjoying it. And, and then I think the, you know, the exits and all that will kind of take care of themselves.

Mm-hmm.

But, you know, she started this company. It's, you know, it is her. So I I think, and she's got such an incredible work ethic. I just think she's gonna be doing it for a long time and, you know, just gonna grow it and own it. That's my guess.

Yeah, she's done a fantastic job.

Love it.

Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us.

Yeah, great to meet you. Let's do it again soon.

Likewise, and congrats on everything you guys have done.

Thank you.

It's incredible. You know, start this thing and, you know, the OpenAI deal, it's just awesome. And even down in LA, people are, Watching you guys. So, you know, yeah, spend some more time. I saw, I saw the Bob Iger thing today. Yeah, that was incredible.

Yeah, yeah.

A lot of that was the first thing that made me optimistic on LA in a long time. Yeah, everyone's like, oh, California is falling apart. LA is a disaster. Bob and Josh are just like, we're dropping $12.5 billion. We're setting a new record.

We're going incredible.

It's going great.

I love it.

Thank you so much.

Thanks a lot, man.

Goodbye.

Congrats.

Let me tell you about public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. Our next guest is from Code Rabbit. We have Harjot Gill, the CEO, here with a big fundraise. We got to warm up the gong.

How you doing?

Hey, folks, I'm pretty good.

How are you? Welcome.

Tell us the news.

Welcome back.

Well, he's been on the show before, haven't you?

Oh yeah. Yeah. Have you? But it's been, it's been maybe a year and you didn't have an orange background.

Can you up the volume please? Sorry.

Oh, sorry.

Yeah.

Well, give us the news. Tell us what happened. I want to hit the gong for you. And then we have a bunch of questions about the business.

Yeah. So we're pretty excited to announce like Series C round of funding. So we just ended up raising $143 million.

Nice!

Billion-dollar valuation. So officially a unicorn now.

Yeah.

And, um, in a short order, like we started like 2 and a half years back. Um, so it's been an amazing ride for the team.

Good.

What's been the biggest—

Creating only $500 million of value a year.

Not bad, not bad. Uh, yeah, what's been the biggest driver of growth? What do customers, uh, like about CodeRabbit more than anything else? What is— what What's the real growth vector?

Yeah, we're pretty much like riding the wave of AI code generation here. So the growth is, it's a second-order effect of growth of cloud code, Codex, Cursor, as you know, like the biggest use case for generative AI has been code generation. And that's what's leading to the bottleneck downstream with code reviews now being a massive, massive bottleneck and a choke point. And that's where CodeRabbit is right now, the market leader, like providing automated validation and building trust in these AI outputs. And that's what is bringing all the growth to our doorsteps.

Yeah. Unpack a little bit about— I was just reading on Hacker News the death of the mid-tier engineer. You either need a vibe coder who can just, you know, hammer prompts or you need a real experienced expert architect to make any headway. And the messy middle is getting much messier with endless code, huge PRs, huge code reviewing steps that are unmanageable without AI. What is the correct balancing act that a company should be pulling off to actually move quickly, not run up the budget, but still be able to understand their system and get a good result?

Yeah, it's pure chaos right now. I mean, especially like the recent inflection point we have seen with these agents becoming more and more capable, like in the last, I would say, 3 to 6 months have been amazing with some of these models like Opus 4 or 5 being so capable and being able to run for longer periods of time. And what that means is that the inner loop of coding is now fully automated. Like, you can just go from idea to code without even going through like planning process of Linear and Jira tickets anymore. Even Linear famously did a blog post that issue systems are dead, which is the truth. Like, now your ideas are just being translated to code directly. Yeah, and it's not just the developers writing code now. You are seeing, as you said, like product managers, even designers who are non-technical in terms of coding capabilities are now actually opening pull requests. And on top of that, we are now seeing every company wants to be a coding company. Like now we are seeing Spotify release a coding app.

Oh yeah.

I mean, Linear is writing code, Notion is writing code. Yeah, um, Datadog wants to write code, or Sentry. Everyone's writing code, right? So what that is leading to is like a massive like backlog of The code changes, you now have to validate and understand those massive outputs and then ship to production. So, the role of human has become more of a reviewer now. So, every day you're waking up, you're deciding which AI task I take to completion, where do I add my taste? And it's a taste thing, it's a judgment thing now, which is scarce now. So, that's what we are helping scale. So, what CodeRabbit does is it first of all fights fire with fire, essentially like you're making Claude code fight with CodeRabbit in a loop. So it's a lot of loop engineering aspect of it, making sure your changes are all meeting all the guardrails or the pre-merge checks that you have.

Yeah.

Then after that, we are helping the reviewers also triage and prioritize the work. So the nature of planning has now shifted downstream because that's the choke point. And thirdly, we are helping the reviewers also understand the changes. So no one's looking at the code, which is the fun part. Like, the— this is like the biggest inflection I've seen. Like, when I'm not reading the code anymore, expecting a reviewer to do that is, is certainly impossible now. So what CodeRabbit is also doing is like raising the abstraction of understanding these changes, like where you're not looking at lines of code but understanding the blast radius and the architectural impact of those changes.

I have one last question, Jordi.

Go for it.

I'm interested in the opportunity internationally. You're expanding. How big is the opportunity in Europe, in Asia, abroad? How focused are you on it? Is there a unique opportunity because other companies are maybe less serious about international expansion, and so you can be a more trusted partner faster, accelerate there? Or is it just the logical next step for your company to expand internationally? internationally because there's demand and pull everywhere.

Right. For us, like, we have always had like pull from all segments of the market, even globally. Like when we started, like initially we went viral in Japan, which was so funny, right?

Yeah.

And even in this round, like we are partnering with a partner in like one of the VCs who led the round, Atomico, is a very large fund out of Europe.

Yeah.

BMW Ventures invested in that round. So BMW has one of our early customers who believed in us. So massive opportunity. I think it's a global opportunity. Like the developers across the globe are like—

I love cars.

Yeah, but you get the idea.

An M3, M2, M4.

I was thinking of a wrapped i8. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Ideally.

The doors do go up.

Yeah.

On the i8.

Yeah. Anyway.

Sorry to interrupt, but What were people most skeptical about with, in regard, like during the financing process? Obviously, a bunch, you know, it sounds like a bunch of customers invested. They have a good feel for the product. But, you know, Space Cursor buys Graphite. I'm sure that was an accelerant to your business in some ways, but it also signals that like—

Sure.

these companies that are generating code want to—

Do everything.

Do everything.

Yeah.

And so I think you can, like, I imagine a good argument is like, you know, it's helpful to have a non-lab review your code, you know, like a third party be in that flow. But how did you answer that question?

No, that's a great question. I mean, this was one of the interesting fundraisers I've done. Like, this is my third startup, by the We have seen all kinds of fundraisers. This one you can clearly see there's a lot of anxiety in the market when it comes to the SDLC space. Everyone's just concentrating their capital on a few model labs. Everyone wants to be in Anthropic, for instance. And the other dynamic itself is what does the future of SDLC look like? I mean, is code review step even needed? I mean, people are completely on the fence on what the future of I mean, you know, like Dayo gets on the stage and says that you don't need software engineers anymore, right? So all those like anxiety had been there, which we had to like talk to the investors to make them understand where this is all going to land, where the stable ground is, and code reviews. In fact, like you bring up Cursor, it's a great example. Like what we have seen in the last 3 years, even the code editors are not future-proof. Like Cursor started with tab completion and then they got blindsided by Cloud Code, which was almost like a Yahoo versus is kind of a Google moment for them, right? On the other hand, the code reviews, the guardrails, they never go away. Like, you can never have a scenario where you're going to take AI code and ship it to real customers without having any sort of guardrails in place. So the GitHub is becoming like a choke point for a good reason. It's under a lot of distress, as you know, but that is kind of a sign of things to come. Like, that is the only place where you can actually take a look at the changes and then approve them.

Yeah.

And this is kind of like An example that I'll give you from my first startup was in the observability space. I had seen kind of the same thing happen where when microservices were taking off, cloud was taking off, there was a lot of chaos. So operators were kind of flying blind. And then Datadog comes in and defines this whole category of observability, right? And became a massively valuable business. Like while AWS, GCP, and they were all growing, but Datadog also continued to become a standalone company. Same thing we're seeing with code reviews. Now there's a lot of chaos. Explainability has become a bottleneck, just like observability. Now you have an explainability problem. So in a way, like, CodeRabbit is now kind of becoming the Datadog of this new world. And very interestingly, Datadog is one of the investors in this round as well. So they see the analogy here as well.

I love it. Well, congratulations and thank you so much for coming on the show.

Awesome progress.

Have a great rest of your day.

The team on the milestone.

We'll talk to you soon. Have a good day.

Thanks, folks.

Cheers.

Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. Our next guest is Jeff Huber returning to the show. I think it's been over a year. He's the founder and CEO of Chroma. And we got some good news from Jeff Huber. Let's bring him in. I know we were keeping you waiting, Jeff. Sorry for that. Late today. How you doing? Good.

Doing great, guys. Good to see you again.

Good to see you again.

Been too long.

Give us the latest in your world. Take us through recent announcements, and then we can go all over the place, I'm sure.

Let's do it. I think it's been a really interesting year in AI, and in particular, seeing how companies are more deeply adopting AI agents. I think as we sort of reflect on the biggest gap in AI, it still feels like memory is the biggest gap. I mean, I'm sure You all try to use agents all the time, and they're constantly forgetting how to do things, and they're not in the right context. And so, yeah, we're announcing on the show kind of our solution to that.

Yes, take us through it. What is Zeitgeist?

Yeah, I think in short form, there's probably a lot of sophisticated approaches to solving memory for AI. But in very simple form, if you can get AI agents just to be able to write things down, And then later find those things.

Yeah.

Uh, you know, that's all you need. And in some ways, I think Wikipedia solved it 20 years ago. You can call it a revolutionary data model. It's just a wiki. Um, and so I think really inspired by like how OpenClaw and Hermit's Agent have been managing Markdown files.

Yeah, I was about to ask, kind of thinking through why not just a bunch of Markdown files? Why not just take the OpenClaw vibe coder Mac Mini guy and scale it up to a the organization of 1,000 people in the enterprise?

It's a great place to start. You know, as our team was adopting this technology over the last 3 or 4 months, you know, we wanted like this shared memory layer for our whole team that knows everything about our whole company, really. And you've got to think about concurrency control and access control and versioning and lineage and just a bunch of infrastructure things that matter as the dataset scales.

So, so as a concrete example, like there might be someone in human resources that's developed a skill to give people raises, but you don't necessarily want that skill proliferating across the entire organization. So otherwise everyone's just giving themselves raises left and right. Is that a reasonable example?

I think so, yeah. Hopefully the other access control systems would not allow anybody to give anybody a raise, right? But yeah, maybe more grounded, like what we've seen amongst our own team is that like now our engineering team, the first place they go when they have a technical question is they ask Foundation, sure, it's called— they asked Foundation that question, and Foundation has seen all of our Notion docs, all of our Google Drive docs, all of our coding agent sessions, which actually have so much like high-value tacit information in them about how our team works, how they operate, what we care about. Um, but now it spreads. So customer support's constantly asking it questions, sales, GTMs asking it questions. It's really become this like repository of everything we know.

So yeah. Uh, take us through the, the shape of the core business. The the launch of Chroma Cloud, how that business is going. Just overall demand for for core products in and around the AI boom because everything's sort of booming and every system's like straining. What's your experience been?

Yes, we launched Chroma Cloud in late 2025. We now have close to a thousand paying customers on the product and tens of thousands of. other users who, you know, we'll bring on board soon. You know, I think like these lower-level infrastructure primitives are cool, right? A core database, core search, core operations. They allow developers to pick it up and build useful applications. As we were looking at the market and seeing really what our customers were building, we realized there was an opportunity to meet them where they were. They were all asking us, hey, how do we build How do we build wikis? How do we solve access control? How do we solve versioning? Just time and time again. And so, you know, us just building those infrastructure primitives for customers to use allows them to, you know, focus on what actually differentiates their business.

So give me your— not your AGI timelines, but your timeline to just good search. I feel like I go into my Gmail and I search for something. It's still bad and I want an LLM to be involved, but I don't want it to be as slow as a current LLM. I know I can wire it up to Codex or whatever and, and have it read through everything, but I don't want to wait 10 minutes. But I also don't want the current experience. And I feel like there will be a merging of these two. But do we need to bake it into an ASIC or something? Like, how complex is it going to be until, like, you just show up to a website and the search function is magical? and also as fast as you remember it?

Yeah, I think there's a few different pieces of the puzzle. So number one is having highly expressive, accurate, and fast search at the database layer.

Right.

And then the second piece of that is the agent itself or the model being really fast. One thing that we made a bet on earlier this year was agentic search becoming the default, that all searches will go through a model. This is what I think the bitter lesson means for search is that You'll spend more tokens, you'll use more inference. That's how you get better at search. And so we released a model in the spring called Context-1. It's a fine tune of GPT OSS-20B. And that model on Cerebras today already runs at 3,000 tokens per second. And we were targeting— I think Talus got bought last week. I think you guys covered that. ChatGPT.

ChatGPT. ChatGPT.ai.

The best demo.

Proof that names don't matter when the product When the product is really technical and good, the team has that cracked. You can name your product whatever you want. Chat Jimmy.

We are a shared investor. You know, we were targeting context run running at like 15,000 or 20,000 tokens per second on that chip. And I think like if you think about that's going to come right, that's coming this year and that's going to change how we really rewire how people think about language models.

Yeah. Is there still like even though the token speed is very quick in that example. Is there a delay to sort of like fire up the chip, like load data into memory, build the context window, like do whatever you need to actually get the— once the inference is cooking, I can imagine it being very fast. But is there— if you're dealing with something that's like a scaled email product and you have millions of users that are going to be searching things randomly, like you can't store all of that in memory all the time. So what is the process there? Is that a meaningful barrier or not?

I think fast inference—

maybe sort of what you're implying here— fast inference does not solve just sort of for you context engineering. You still have to make sure that you're bringing the model the right information, the right granularity of information, letting it forget information successfully such that it can refocus. And so I think it's been cool to see context engineering to some degree get folded back into the model. But also, as we've seen as of late, really good harnesses, like the stuff from Primal Deluxe, really good harnesses that are targeting specific tasks, that is in some ways context engineering, and they can outperform frontier models by a huge margin. And so I think there's still huge gains to context engineering.

Jordi, anything else?

I got more questions, but we're running behind.

Yeah, sorry.

Great to see you, Jeff. Let's not let it be so long again.

Yeah, let's do it again soon.

Congrats on all the progress.

Yeah, thank you so much for coming on the show. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one. Let me tell you about Figma. Agents meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context. Go check it out. Up next, we're going back to back again. Sean Sean Maguire is doing deals left and right. He said, I want the entire gun dough. I want every gun.

Kind of like the Kushner of deep tech.

Yeah, everything. But we got Sean Maguire and Soren Monroe Anderson from Neros. Great to see you guys. How are you guys doing?

Well, it has to feel good to have a lot of money.

Yeah, it's great.

Job's finished.

Take us through—

take us through the deal. What happened?

Yeah, I mean, overall this year has been super, super strong. We've been growing like crazy, building the team, producing a lot more drones. We're up to about 1,200 a week in terms of production output. So things are going really, really well there. And we've also started expanding into multiple product lines. So we just started talking publicly about Bandit, which is our interceptor drone. And really, this round is fuel on the fire to go expand to new verticals and make bigger investments into the core technology behind the platform. So, you know, core business doing extremely well. And now we're ready to take some, some big swings.

How much did you raise?

We raised $250 million led by Sequoia and ASTX.

Congratulations.

Let's go. All right.

This is the 3rd round we've either led or co-led in this company.

You were early.

Yeah, led the seed. There was a pre-seed led by Ian Roundtree from Cantos. Got to give him a shout out. Yeah, he connected me with Soren back in the day. But then we also, Sequoia, co-led the B and co-led the C. And so that is— I'd say that's max conviction, boys. Like, that's, that's up there.

Yeah, really, really cool. The thing I'm most interested in for you, Soren, is like, how is the American supply chain developing? How much are you guys having to take on yourself versus are there companies coming out of the woodwork hitting you up saying, hey, I can make this, I can make that, and you're vetting them?

Yeah, we heard rumors of an American drone motor company because those were in really short supply. But walk us through what's going on in the supply chain side? Where are there green shoots? Where are they? Where are you issuing like a call for new startups?

Yeah, it definitely depends on what part of the supply chain and it's pretty varied across. So we have taken the overall strategy of designing our core components in-house. We really specialize in the electronics design. So this is things like the radios and the flight computers. So when we're going and figuring out how to build these at scale. We're going directly to the chip companies. We're going to many different board houses. We get a lot of control down at the granular level of these subcomponents and the materials going into these parts. We do a similar thing with motors where, like, we are sourcing neodymium, non-Chinese neodymium, where we have a place where we can get that processed outside of China. And then we're also working with multiple motor companies. Including one of the American motor companies that has started up recently. So I think because drones are getting so much attention, there are some really capable companies, you know, like Westmag is one of the motor companies that's making fantastic progress. We benefit from that, but we also know that we need to control our own destiny in many of these areas. So we are going very vertical in our design and our manufacturing, and the intent is to be multiple, like sourced, have multiple sources for all of these critical things?

Problem number one feels like you're on the path, which is as a country, we need to figure out a way to make a ton of these as fast as possible. Second is maybe like capability and form factor and how do you basically push the form factor forward. Sometime between when the last time you were on and now, I saw a video of a drone where effectively the whole body of the drone was spinning and it almost made it invisible. And it was very, very scary looking. It feels like there's a lot that can be done on the form factor side. How important is that to the company right now versus just problem solving problem number one?

Yeah, I mean, we're constantly iterating on form factor for Archer, basically figuring out ways that it can be a better product for the soldiers. These are really granular things. Like, for example, you know, every time they train with it, they find this one little like plastic part breaks. And so then now we need to go and figure out how to change that plastic part. That's a really, really specific example. But we get a lot of advantage by having now tens of thousands of drones deployed and constantly doing that iteration with the end users. But in terms of overall form factor, the The biggest thing I would look at right now is Bandit, which is our interceptor. So it is pretty much all of the same components from Archer, but in a new airframe with a different payload. It's designed for maximum speed versus really like maximum range with a heavy payload, and it's designed to go and chase down other drones. It's a great example of how we've built this ecosystem of these core components that we can produce at scale with a secure supply chain, and now we're applying all of that to a new form factor. And we're able to go and chase down Shaheds with it, which is something that we cannot do with the current product line today.

Wow. Can you explain, like M5, sort of the buyer here and how the drone procurement process will change over the next few years? Because drones don't fit— you'd think like air Air Force, they fly, but I'm sure the Navy needs drones. I'm sure the Army needs drones. Recently, Space Force was built up, and that makes very— that makes a lot of sense for where space is. But you could see selling to the Coast Guard, selling to different branches of the military, even within—

Are you saying we need Drone Force?

We definitely—

maybe, maybe that's the solution. But I can imagine like the Navy SEALs needing something different than other Navy servicemen. And so how do How diverse will your customer base be within the armed forces, within the Department of War? How does it break down currently? Is there one buyer and then they do deployment and repurposing, or are you actually interfacing with smaller segments of the armed forces?

Yeah, it's a great question. So today we sell to every service branch of the US military, but the Army and the Marine Corps are the largest volume customers. Navy and Air Force have less of a, you know, a large quantity demand, at least for Archer, because Archer is really designed for maneuver forces, you know, striking targets within a 20-kilometer radius. And that's really the specialty of the Army and the Marine Corps. However, with, with Bandit, you know, the counter-UAS system, That is, I think, very applicable to the Air Force with protecting air bases as one example. But we design all of our products to be useful in many different domains. And the, you know, in our business development team, they are broken down by service but not by product. And so we really want our— the folks who are interfacing day to day with the customers. So this is our, our BD team and our mission success team. We want them to be really intimately familiar with the customer's needs and focusing on, you know, what does that specific service want so we can deliver them the best product.

How are you thinking about lessons from that?

John, let me just add to that.

Yeah.

So, you know, you talked about a bunch of the American Department of War customers. Sure.

These—

Soren has also already started international sales.

Yeah.

So obviously these products are needed all over the world. Yeah. And then with this next product, Bandit, the interceptor product, you get into like we need to defend pretty much all critical infrastructure. And with the Iran war, especially what happened in the Gulf, yeah, it's it's not just going to be government customers. I think that if you're building a data center, you're going to have to buy interceptors, you know, and you'll do it in cooperation with your government. But maybe the dollars will come from you know whoever owns the oil rig, Exxon or. Or anyone. And just this problem is so big, and it's gone, it's like already going beyond the traditional just Department of War procurement cycle. And we're seeing it just extremely strongly at Neurus with their demand.

Lessons from the F-35 program, some really amazing technology, also tensions between different branches. For different features that might have delayed, might have caused cost overruns. There's a bunch of different ways you can tell the story of the F-35, but are you leaning more into modularity than another company might? Are you trying to— are there benefits and trade-offs of modularity at your current scale, or is there something where you're thinking, okay, down the line we'll need different products, so let's set things up now to be prepared for when that comes.

Yeah, that's exactly right, actually. And we've started really trying to instill this in the engineering team, which is breaking down our systems by, you know, the logical component and subcomponent level and thinking about what is going to transfer to the next product and being really smart about what every interface between components looks like. Neuros, our, our theory of victory is building a component ecosystem and making it so every new product is, is utilizing that. And so we just build this flywheel. You know, a lot of companies have done this really well with software. Neuros is trying to do this with hardware as well. And that is very clear as we're developing Bandit, that we're able to reuse so much of the componentry. I will say that modularity is generally hard for mass manufacturing. Like you can take parts of a design, but actually having individual components is generally harder for making a really mass manufactured product. But it is something that our customers demand, especially with components like radios. We've just seen that you have to be able to switch out your comms quickly. And as we redesign this next generation of the drone, we're doing a full ground-up redesign from what you see today, and that is going to be in service partially in service of modularity, but also setting the requirement to be manufacturable at 1 million per year. So those things are somewhat at tension with each other, but we have to, we have to figure out the right line in between.

Sean, it's your third investment into this company. You have a ton of capital. Are you, in terms of your defense tech investing arc, are you in growth investor mindset mindset now? Are you going to be— do you expect to do fewer seed checks, really early-stage companies, and focus on growth-stage board seats, figuring out the public markets, doing later-stage deals? Or is there still an opportunity for early-stage defense tech in your mind?

Yeah, I mean, many people will disagree with me on this, but I am personally more in the growth mindset now. I think there are these moments in time, these why nows that happen that create an opportunity for the first movers to go and just build companies that could not have existed prior. And the Ukraine war was that for a lot of defense tech. And so the companies that were started immediately then or right before and are actually delivering value abroad in some of these active theaters, they're just in a different level than the ones just getting started now. And I personally think it's going to be hard to catch up for a lot of these. I do think there are, you know, like, let's say there are 10 very successful defense tech companies started in this decade or so. My guess is 7 of them have already been started and we know the names.

Yeah.

Maybe there's opportunity for like 2 or 3 more. So I am open-minded and paying attention to the space, but like, it's more active on the growth side.

Yeah.

And I got to say on that, Neros is still today a deeply underappreciated company, like $2.5 billion valuation. That's cool and great. These guys, their revenue is growing at an insane clip, actually very efficiently from a financial perspective, which is very rare for a hardware company. They are actually like having profound impact in theater, right now in multiple places. And it's like that caliber of company is very, very rare. There's maybe another couple of companies in that, you know, group. But this company kicks ass.

I love it.

Great way to sum it up. Last question I have, how meaningful is drone racing as a pipeline for talent? Like, are there people that— I'm sure you have Plenty of attention from, from that world, given, you know, the meteoric rise of Neros is like the— what, what the IMO medalists are to Scott Wood. Is that what drone racing is for Neros?

A little bit, yeah. Basically, our whole flight test team is like insanely good drone pilots. And we're— we've actually started going to the biggest drone racing events just to be there, have a presence, and like show people people that there is something that they can come and work on that is actually a real career. Like drone racing is not much of a career, at least for the majority of people who partake in it. And honestly, I just wish it was bigger because it is such a fantastic source of talent. So my theory is that over time, as military FPV is really growing, it'll eventually mean that the hobbyist FPV world will come along with it and we'll see more, more very, very cool racing events happening.

I've got to add one more pipeline, which is, you know, now that these guys are doing very, very real deployments, they have a pipeline of former Special Forces operators joining the company. And I mean, for me, as an American that used to work in, in that world as a civilian, makes me very, very proud. So the drone racing, you know, is where Soren comes from, but it's really Incredible to see these guys hiring a bunch of ex-Mill guys.

Yeah, there was the story of Palantir. A lot of guys like used it and were like, let me go work for this company. And it did very well for them.

We have had that happen multiple times. I'm sure that is, that is saying something good.

Yeah.

Are you the best drone racer at Neros currently employed, or have you hired somebody better? What percentile are you if there's a company outing?

Oh man, I, I'm I'm definitely not the best, and I'm probably not even the second best. I have not flown very much in a long time.

That's because he's old at 23 and his skills are exponentially decaying.

Yeah, it's like Formula 1.

Yeah, I'm washed at this point. I would say Levi— Levi's our lead flight test pilot. He runs the whole flight test team, and he was a professional pilot before. He's like the most naturally talented pilot I've ever seen. He's probably the best at the company.

That's awesome.

He also flies for a living, so that helps.

Yeah, there you go.

That does help.

And for those of you that don't know, Soren was the world champion drone racer in MultiGP.

I've watched him in person. Ben over there on our team came and filmed you in the park in El Segundo, and it was one of the craziest things I've ever seen because I'd seen a DJI drone sort of like take off and sort of, you know, Like float away. Maybe it goes a little quick, and Soren puts on this headset and is just whipping around this tree going as fast as you can. It was a crazy video. It was a lot of fun. But thank you so much for coming on the show.

Great to see you guys.

Great to see you.

Thank you, guys.

Amazing progress. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more while Railway automatically takes care of scale monitoring and security. Our next guest is the real Liver King, not the social media influencer, but the CEO of the world's largest human biological data center. Fascinating story. Andre from Vivodyne, welcome to the show. How are you doing?

Doing well.

Thanks for having me.

Thanks so much for hopping on the show. Please introduce yourself and the company a little bit.

Sure.

So Vivodyne grows human tissues at very massive scale so we can test drugs in humans without testing in people. And we do it at very massive scale. So many times the total amount of clinical trials run in the US every year. And the reason for doing all this is the failure rate of drugs is huge. So 19 out of 20 drugs fail because all the animal experiments we've done Just so it translates to people. So, we can cure cancer and Alzheimer's and all these things in mice, and then they fail in people.

When did humans first grow human tissue in a lab?

Yeah.

This is the first time we're able to grow large pieces of human tissue, so hundreds of thousands of cells in each individual piece, and we're growing tens, hundreds of thousands of these tissues at a time. to test all sorts of different drugs and permutations. So, it's a new development.

So, hundreds of thousands of cells, this is still microscopic or?

Oh, you can see them. Yeah, you can see the little blood vessels growing in them. So, it's like inch scale, centimeter scale.

Interesting. What we have—

Have you ever had a rogue tissue?

Yeah. I am the first rogue tissue. I crawled out of this guy back here. Here I am.

What is the key unlock that allows this? Because I imagine that 50 years ago, there were scientists that were like, it sure would be nice to have a ton of human tissue to test drugs on. They couldn't do it then. Why is it possible now?

So one of the things that made it possible is having the throughput to test all the different formulations for like the medias and the protocols that we use to grow them, which the robotics, you know, by kind of dogfooding our own technology, we also get better at.

Okay.

So, it's, you know, with biology, it's like climbing a big mountain with a little valley at the top, right? It's the kind of skill is like getting the ball up and having it just kind of nest there. And, that is when it kind of falls into what it would naturally do. So, gains the function it would normally have. We can dose through these blood vessels that self-assemble and this tissue actually performs the function of its native organ counterpart.

Yeah.

Are humans like sourdough? Do you need a little starter? How do you actually kickstart tissue?

Yeah. So, that's a very good analogy. So, we use primary human cells. So, we get them from donated blood or biopsies of things like tumors and we get the primary cells out of there. We're not using transformed stem cells or the old cell lines. They are primary human cells, and they are what seed this process of the tissue self-repair. Yeah.

So, someone has a tumor, they do a biopsy, and then instead of just saying, okay, you can test one drug on it because if you kill this, you're done, you can scale it up and clone it effectively. And then, you can say, let's test 50 drugs on this and see what actually works.

Yeah, 50,000.

50,000.

Yeah, the search space is just so big, right? I mean, the, the kind of real problem I think drug development is butting up against is, you know, over the past decades we've tried to find like single-target cures, right, for disease. So like maybe this receptor or maybe this compound in the blood, by reducing it or by increasing it, we can, we can fix some disease. But things like cancer and fibrosis and Alzheimer's and all of these just like keep getting away from us, right? It's— we might get a little bit close and then Oh, does nothing in people. And you imagine, like, if the check engine light comes on in your car, the solution is not gonna be you turn a single screw. It's like a little more complicated than that. And so the hard part about drugging multiple targets and interfacing with biology, like, at the complexity that it has, is how do you search that space? How do you know which things to bind and how it all works? And To be able to address such a large search space, you can no longer just do screening. It just runs away from you, right? It's like a cliff of just numerical climb.

Yeah.

And so you have to do the inverse, which is understand biology and back-solve the things that you should drug to make it do the things you want instead of trying to drug everything and seeing what happens. And so to understand biology at that level, especially human biology, We have to be able to test it.

We read a story about the price of monkeys spiking based on demand from biotech companies to test drugs on monkeys. Where does this technology fit in the new drug development process? Because it feels like we're very close to like the computers being really good at testing a bunch of ideas. But then of course you go, What was it, mouse or monkey or something at some point?

Yeah, mouse, dog, monkey, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And but this feels like an interim step that could be before mouse models, or would this be a full replacement for mouse models, or would this be after a mouse model? Like, where does this fit into the, to the story arc of a new biotech company?

So, you know, we, we're currently working with like the very large majority of the top 10 pharma and the majority of the projects that we're working on are things that do not translate from monkeys into people.

Okay.

So even the primates are not giving the same responses that humans are.

Interesting.

Or strange things are being seen in the primates that were not seen in the mice and dogs. And you wonder like, which one is it, right?

Sure.

And so instead of just jumping, you know, we have some cells in a dish here, we have some inorganic acid here, now we're in mice and then and woodchucks and the sort of— we just need to test on human tissue from the get-go and replace this whole outdated approach to maybe the mouse is going to tell us because all these drugs that are failing in clinic, these 19 out of 20, they are working in the animals. They're safe. They're pretty efficacious.

Yeah.

So, it's like, fuck, where are our cures instead of all these cures for the mouse disease? And so we are working from discovery all the way through to supporting clinical trials with these tissues, both to do things that you cannot search easily enough in people and also things that might be too unsafe to search in people.

Yeah. Jordi, you have another or—

what were you doing before this? How'd you get into growing human tissue?

Doing it for fun, probably. Hobbyist.

Yeah.

How do you get into this? Yeah, so my background was in designing high-throughput microfluidics.

Okay.

And then I met my co-founder Dan as my PhD advisor, and he had invented this concept of the organ-on-a-chip, of growing, you know, these functional units of human tissues. And we kind of came together and said we need to scale this up dramatically and also improve like the fidelity of these tissues and make them basically indistinguishable from what we'd get in a deep biopsy punch.

Interesting.

Fascinating. What are the regulatory guardrails for creating— I just imagine if your company continues to gain traction—

You're worried about accidentally creating a Frankenstein type of thing?

Well, yeah. I feel like that's the natural path here. And I'm just wondering, like, there's a lot of, like, moral and ethical dilemmas surrounding that. There will probably need to be regulations surrounding that at some point. And yeah, it just feels like that's probably the end state is just vats of people living in this.

People.

Anyways, I'm not a big movie guy, but the It's The Matrix, right? Where they're all—

Pretty far away from The Matrix.

It doesn't feel that far. I see the robotic arm in the background.

Yeah, well, the real movie is The Island. With Michael Bay's The Island, they clone a human, and then the rich person can be like, oh, I need a kidney transplant. And they're like, well, we got a direct clone of you over there on that island. Let's go get that liver out of them. It's very, very—

dystopian.

But we can do this hopefully without the full person. Yes. And the FDA, you know, like the FDA is actually, I think, among all of these cases where there's a new technology and you're like fighting with the regulator to push something forward, the FDA has been, you know, has put out now like 3 modernization acts that drive the uptake of these animal alternatives. Right. Like given the failure rate And it really gets worse with biologics, right? Like antibody-based therapies and bispecific antibody drug conjugates and all these new modalities for drugs that are good because they're specific, but they're specific to human targets. And so it's even harder to test those. And so the FDA has been an extremely strong tailwind actually in making these.

Yeah, and then at some point, Would you grow a specific individual's tissue and then test a wide range of drugs on that to figure out what was going to be most effective? That also feels like the next logical step is—

Personalized medicine?

Personalized medicine.

Yeah, sign me up.

Take a bunch of cells from my hair or something. That is what we're doing.

Okay.

Yeah, so by definition, these cells have to come from someone. We are usually kind of broad across the different demographics that we test on, both age, sex, race, and so on. But ultimately too, for various patient-specific diseases, cancers, right, is a great example. I mean, just imagine being able to, if you have a solid tumor, I mean, The Island is like the perfect movie, right? You imagine like 50,000 clones of yourself and you say, all right, like who will survive?

There's a lot of moral weight to that movie though. You gotta actually watch it. If you watch the movie, I think you're going to get into some hot water.

We'll pick out the good parts.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, just the tissue in a petri dish, I think most people can get behind that.

No-brainer.

But as soon as it's Scarlett Johansson walking around with emotions and ideas and history, it gets a lot darker.

Most fascinating company we've had on the show this year, I think.

Yeah, very interesting. Well, congratulations on the progress.

I appreciate it, guys.

Thank you so much.

Hey, if you want to grow copies of yourself—

No, when we hired Tyler, I made sure I was a perfect match on blood type and everything. So, I'm pretty much good to go. But this sounds good for those who don't have a type.

Where are you based, by the way?

San Francisco. We're right in the Bay Area.

Cool. Fantastic. Well, have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon.

Thank you so much for having me.

Have a good rest of your day. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform That grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents.

Let's head over to the timeline. Alfred Wallforce over at Listen Labs has been on the show before, coming in with one of the hottest takes.

Yeah, got some pushback.

Said founders only send investor updates.

Yeah, give me the boat horn. When you're winning, Listen has sent three in its history, all fundraise announcements. Nobody reads a bad update. I think your crazy voice sounds crazier than mine. Let me check. Oh, it sounds about the same. It sounds about the same.

But, um, yeah, this is just, uh, I think this is terrible advice.

Really?

Except if you're winning.

That's great.

Um, I think it should be founders, if you're winning, only send investor updates.

Yes, I, I, I, I know.

It's just like, it's, it's, it's just such bad advice because I've had so many— I mean, I've had instances, like, kind of surprise and delight moments, where I haven't been getting an update from a company in a year, and I just assume the company is, like, dead and dying, and then they pop up with an update. I had this happen where a company that I thought was fully dead, I didn't even want to— I almost felt bad asking.

Yeah.

It was a small angel check. I thought they were dead until I got an update that I needed to sign something because they were selling for, like, Wow.

There you go.

A quarter of a billion. So anyways, like, I just think, like, investors— yeah, if you have 10 investors and you send a bad update, a lot of people aren't going to be able to help. But if there's a chance that one helps, then that's great. And even if you're not winning, you can show momentum, which is going to— like, updates are how you build trust. It's how people start to process, like, how is this team and this founder performing? Even if they're not winning yet, are they making progress? Are they iterating quickly? It's how— and if you're not sending any updates and then suddenly you need to raise more money, like you need a bridge round or something like that, the likelihood of getting that round done is much lower because you just don't have the— you don't have the trust. People can't get a good read on like, okay, do I believe Do I have more conviction in this team today than when I invested even though they haven't figured it out yet? OK.

So I'm taking the other side of this with some reasonableness maybe. I don't know. You can debate me on this. So do you think it's important to send investor updates when you're a pre-seed company? Like purely in the idea maze, very early stage, the revenue is zero every month, You're just sort of like out figuring out the first product.

I mean, at that stage, it depends. Hopefully, you only have like 1 or 2 investors. Yeah. But it's still important to see—

So you're maybe just doing phone calls.

It's still important to see— it's valuable to see a snapshot. It doesn't have to be— at that stage, if I get an investor update that's paragraphs and paragraphs and paragraphs, I'm like super, super bearish.

Yeah, yeah, totally.

But it's still better to just have like Even quick bullet points. Hey, here's what we're working on. Yeah, we'll come— we'll have another update in a month.

Okay.

So because Listen Labs is only a 3-year-old company and they raised their Series A in April of 2025. So and he— and there's a, there's a rumored Series C going on right now. And so if he sent 3 investor updates, that might be April of 2025, January of 2026, 2026 and August of 2026, which is like every 6 months, which doesn't feel like that crazy of a cadence. It's like, yeah, it's not quarterly, it's not monthly, but it's a pretty regular pace because they're raising money regularly. So it's very different if it's like, okay, this is like a more like less like hot time in the market. You're not going to be fundraising every 3 months. You're going to be raising money every 18 months, realistically every 24 months. It's a harder industry. And so, as an investor with a Series A check, I want to know, okay, how much runway is actually left?

Yeah.

Because— but that's not the equation here. So, a little bit of a unique— this post reveals a little bit more about the level of fundraising activity that you can only send investor updates and still be emailing all your investors every 6 months.

Yeah. So, there's a little bit of that. And a lot of this comes down to Alfred. Listen Labs has been crushing. I remember when they first came on the show, it seemed like the company made a lot of sense. They quickly raised follow-on rounds from great investors. I'm sure they're still doing well. You wouldn't post this if you weren't winning. Still sure they're doing well, but just really, really bad advice.

It's not one-size-fits-all advice.

I completely agree.

Yeah.

And the other thing I would say is, how do you know a company that's building in public is struggling, they stop building in public.

No, right? Yeah, that's true.

They haven't— like, I've seen this like at least 10 times right now. You see the company that's got all this momentum, the founder's like, I'm sharing our— here's our— I'm sharing our investor updates.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, because they're just proud of it.

And they usually will string together like 6 months of that, and then they go dark. It's like, oh, what happened? Oh, you don't want to build in public when you're not growing anymore?

Yeah.

And revenue is declining or, or you were, you were a thin wrapper, whatever it is.

Yeah. Yeah. The other side of this is this. Nobody reads a bad update and helps. They just mark you as dying. I think that maybe that's not 100% accurate, but the thing is, like, you're dying unless you're winning. Yeah, I think there is something where in investor updates a good investor update can be a pitch for the company a little bit, and it can be an opportunity for the founder to sort of rehearse their next round's pitch with their current investors and say, okay, let me restate the vision, the mission, the progress, what we're doing. And instead of framing things as like, I need all these different things, it's more just like, I'm going, I'm working. Yeah. Also, there's the dynamic of sometimes companies stop sending investor updates because there's a tier 1 partner on the board who's shepherding the company and all of the activity really happens at the board meeting. And maybe one of those early angels has a bigger stake in a competitor. And so you don't actually want to share the update broadly, but the board meeting is still happening. There's still oversight and infrastructure around the business. And so, in fact, you're getting something that's bigger and more important than an investor update, which is a board deck and a board meeting. It's just not being shared to all the investors.

Yeah.

The other thing about updates is they just keep companies top of mind. Like, I have a friend, I have a friend, he has a bootstrap company. He effectively sends a monthly update.

Yeah.

And it gets him so many customers because it's just at the top of the inbox. He's like, hey, I'm trying to connect to this company.

Yeah.

And people just loop him in. all the time, so it's an amazing way to just stay top of mind.

Yeah, that's happened a few times, like companies that I'm not even invested in, I get on the investor update list, and I'll just be getting calls from them.

Yeah, the other thing is, like, if you're not updating somebody— like, I had one of the 70-odd angel investments that I've made, like, hadn't heard from them in a year, and then they texted and said, hey, like, are you free to catch up? And the ask was basically like, will you do a bridge round?

Yeah.

And it's like, yeah, I can ask all the questions to try to understand what has happened between now and when the investment was made, but it's so much different to be getting those updates in real time, seeing how they're dealing with adversity, seeing how they're building momentum as a company. And, yeah. So, anyways, don't do this. Just don't do it.

Don't do it in every case.

Don't listen to Alfred, the founder of Instagram.

I'm sure it applies to some companies. I'm sure it applies to some companies.

I'm fully— I can fully get behind not sharing up if you have a ton of—

What if you raise money every month?

If you have a ton of—

You're only sending fundraising announcements. Does that count?

If you have a ton of— if you have like a really kind of crazy cap table, I think it can be fair to— and you're in a competitive category, I think it can be fair to say like we're—

We're keeping these numbers closely held.

Yeah, we're going to have specific numbers or even just say like, hey, we're basically sending updates to people that have invested like more than $1 million, right? Yeah.

Or like leads, things like that.

Threshold. Yeah. Makes sense.

Anyways, very, very funny, very funny post.

Put the timeline in turmoil.

Definitely got the people going. And we should have Alfred back on the show to get an update on the company. They must be crushing. This is the only thing you post when you're just on fire. Yeah, he must be ready to send another update.

Churn.

What's churn? Walk us through the funnel. Pull up the slides. I want to see them. Anyway, we got one last news story. It's good news for the gamers in the audience. If you're a gamer, the U.S. government wants you to consider becoming an air traffic controller. You've had the practice. Now it's time to go into the real world and become an air traffic controller. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy says a federal campaign specifically targeting gamers has helped the FAA hire more than 2,000 people to train as controllers, putting the agency agency at 94% of its hiring goal, with another 200— or another 2,000-plus candidates moving through the pipeline. Duffy launched the effort in April, arguing that the government needed to look beyond its traditional recruiting pool and that gamers already practice some of the skills controllers need, including rapidly processing information, maintaining focus, and keeping track of multiple things at once. You don't necessarily need a 4-degree, 4-year degree either. The FAA accepts candidates with qualifying work experience, education, or a combination of the two, ideally a STEAM account as well. It's also a potentially lucrative career. The median air traffic controller earned $144,580 in 2024 according to the BLS, while the top 10% of air traffic controllers earned more than $200,000. $110,000. Getting the job, however, is another matter. Applicants generally have to be U.S. citizens under 31 years old, pass medical and security screenings, and take the FAA's 3.5-hour air traffic skills assessment, which is designed to predict whether they have the cognitive aptitude for the work. Those who make it through then undergo extensive training at the FAA Academy in Oklahoma City before continuing continuing their training at an air traffic facility. The recruiting push comes as the FAA tries to dig itself out of a longstanding staffing shortage. A Government Accounting Accountability Office report published in December found that the controller workforce had shrunk 6% over the past decade, even as air traffic increased 10%. So the number of air traffic controllers relative to the amount of flights was decreasing Really, really in a bad way. At the end of fiscal 2025, the FAA employed 13,000 controllers, and shortages at critical facilities were already contributing to delays and cancellations. We've all seen the reports of those. The problem—

Zach in the chat says, being an air traffic controller must be like being a lifeguard for planes, just MFs doing laps all day. Just shoot me instead.

Say you're not a—

Speak for yourself. Some people like Controlling air traffic.

Yeah, it's the same thing as playing SimCity. I don't know. You think you could make it as a SimCity controller?

No, not for everyone. Not for everyone. But the few, the proud, the air traffic controllers.

Do you think there's specific games that they recruited from?

I mean, you have to imagine RTS is better.

Yeah.

I would go with a StarCraft player over an FPS player.

All day.

Yeah. I don't know.

All right. Final post of the day. Hit me, Tyler. I want you to read it.

What does he say?

Got a post here from Hamant over at Lightspeed.

Wait, oh really?

Okay, let's see if your if your new app works, Tyler.

Hamant over at Lightspeed. The curse of discipline is that every day looks the same. The curse of indiscipline is that every year. That's some good wisdom. The curse of discipline is that every day looks the same. The curse of indiscipline—

This one every year did crazy numbers.

Whoa, I did not realize.

Not every day you see a VC other than the mall putting up numbers like this.

True, true. Very, very—

He went mainstream.

Yeah, very good post.

He went mainstream.

You're going mainstream. You're going mainstream. With some advice for everyone in the boys group. If you're— if you have a boys group chat, take the picture of Adam Silver, Josh Kushner, and Bob Iger and send it to your boys chat and just say, us. It's going. It's going to 3K for sure.

It's going.

It's going. It's going. It's ripping. Well, thank you for tuning in to TBN. We'll be back tomorrow at 11 a.m. Pacific.

Can't wait.

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It's been an honor and a privilege, and have the best Wednesday ever. Please do.

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