MetaCloud, Bending Spoons IPO with Founder Luca Ferrari, Amble Founder Joins | Mark Pincus, Shubh Sinha, Wayne Ting, Jeffery Liu & Jon Wang, Eliot Pence, Luca Ferrari, Nick Grossman, Julian Hoenig

You're watching TVPN.

I'm zoomed in. You're zoomed out. It's Wednesday, July 1st, 2026. We're live from the TVPN Altar Room, the temple of technology, the— Capital Capital. Let me tell you about Ram. Time is money. Save both. Easy use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Jordi Hays. You're hitting the gong so hard. What is that for?

Is that for Mark Zuckerberg?

Bergen Meta, two gongs for two.

People are always complaining that we don't warm up the gong enough. And so I want to start the show.

Welcome.

Improperly warm it up.

Now it's warmed up. Couple warm-up hits to get it warmed up. You'll love to see it. Anyway, we got a great show for you today, folks. Mark Pincus is coming on. We got back-to-back IPOs. Wayne Tang from Lime, Luca Ferrari from Bending Spoons. We got a bunch of other folks. We got Nick Grossman from USV. Talking about the Rebel Alliance thesis. And Ample, we got Julian from Ample, the co-founder and chief design officer, coming on to talk about the electric golf cart. Very aesthetic that you're a big fan of, right?

I'm a huge fan of.

Huge fan. Very excited to talk to him.

Perfect show today.

Perfect show.

Perfect show today. So our first guest will be joining in 30 minutes and we'll take you through the news. Meta is selling compute. They're getting out of the computing business. They said, we don't need computers anymore to do what we need to do. We don't need them. We're gonna be selling them. Meta Platforms is developing plans for a cloud infrastructure business to sell access to AI computing power and models competing with industry leaders like AWS and GCP. The company is considering selling access to various AI models hosted on its existing AI infrastructure as well as raw computing capacity as part of its Meta Compute initiative. Meta plans to generate revenue from excessive computing power, uh, could help return its investment in AI infrastructure, which includes hundreds of billions of dollars spent on data centers and expensive chips. And so, um, lots of reactions to this. The, the, the NeoCloud market is selling off. Oddly enough, Meta has a bunch of NeoCloud contracts. Some of those companies are selling off because now they're a buyer and also a competitor. Uh, lots of different takes about, you know, Meta finding its footing, finding something that justifies the massive, uh, cap X, of course, deeply confusing, John.

Yeah.

Is it?

I mean, the whole thing. The whole thing.

What's confusing?

I think that— I think it is practical what they're doing. Yeah, but it shouldn't— it doesn't— as somebody that, that, you know, I would say overall has been a big, you know, cheerleader for Meta, I think it's truly the best in my view. It is a perfect business. It doesn't give you a lot of confidence in like the strategy overall. They're signing these NeoCloud deals worth tens of billions of dollars. They're built, you know, spending hundreds of billions of dollars. And yeah, they can make the argument that these type of like doing any type of NeoCloud deals themselves is just good business. It's just like how it's just the best way to get ROI today.

Yep.

It doesn't give you a lot of confidence that there's near-term products on the horizon for Meta that are gonna be able to utilize that capacity themselves, which has clearly been their strategy. Mark and the team have never said, we wanna be in the cloud business. They've talked about—

Yeah.

They've talked about the possibility of it.

Yeah.

But the stated goal of MSL is personal superintelligence. We don't know what—

Which I was a fan of. And I think you were a huge fan of. You were like Manus on your phone going around your social networks. That's my biggest bull case for all of this. Like it's very, there are so many different applications that I can imagine being a daily driver of in the Meta family of apps. Oddly, none of that has really been even tried in my opinion. It feels like a little bit early to call.

Yeah, all we've really seen so far Muse Spark.

Good on benchmarks, like decent, you know, like, but, but again, not anything that, that anyone should really get that excited about as a, you know, as an API provider. Exactly.

Exactly.

They did announce that they were going to release it via an API. I don't think they have. They might still.

It's a model.

It's a good model, sir, but I don't think it will have a lot of demand.

Yeah.

And then we've seen MetaVibes, which was a Midjourney.

Yeah.

Wrapper.

But the fact, even if MuseSpark is not on the super giga frontier, can it be good enough to get some work done inside Meta family of apps? Like it should, I would imagine, yes. But they just haven't found that killer feature. Like there are plenty of applications that are AI powered. There are plenty of models out there that have found their footing without being on the, you know, superintelligence path or on that particular curve.

Yeah.

And it's interesting because yesterday we were talking about the story where Google had been telling Meta like, hey, we don't have the capacity for you. And here, here Meta is with, with plenty of capacity themselves. I don't think we can read too much into this because it's just one article from Bloomberg. I think it will matter a lot who the potential buyers of compute are going to be. Yeah, if it's— there's a number of companies that I think the market would get excited about.

Yeah.

But if they're actually just going and trying to compete as—

yeah, it's weird that it came as a leak about around like a plan to sell compute as opposed to just what SpaceX did where it was just like boom, huge contract with Anthropic, lots of excitement going into the IPO. Like that was such a perfectly massaged story as SpaceX entered the public markets. That would have been great if they just said, hey, we have a Frontier lab that's paying us $1 billion a month now and like it's going to show up in earnings next quarter, like get ready. But the stock market loved it. Like the stock is way up and I don't know if it's way up because they see it as a huge growth area for Meta. Now, is it that crazy?

Well, I think that's a pretty solid platform. Where's the ROI going to come from for this hundreds of billions of dollars spend? And up until now, there's been —no obvious place that it's going to come from, right? Yeah. The Manus deal, that's being unwound. Yeah. They have the deal with, you know, Midjourney and Vibes. That's, you know, unclear. Yeah. There's—it seems very obvious that they're going to be able to integrate AI into their glasses over time. Yeah. But the glasses that have product market fit today are more of just like the—I think the product market fit is really with the camera.

Not the intelligence combined with a pair of glasses. Yeah, which is also surprising that we haven't seen a diffusion model, an image model, because even if you don't, like Instagram in general is pretty, it's remarkably slop-free, at least my feed is. I don't see a lot of viral slop images. It happens every once in a while, but they don't have, they have to have some twist to them, but you can imagine AI-powered features, background replacement, a lot of that stuff being AI-enhanced and people receiving that very positively and enjoying that. I was using Adobe, like Adobe products recently and like in Photoshop they have an integration with Gemini, Nanobanana, and you can plug in all the different image models and you can actually use the tools in very interesting ways. So sort of interesting. I don't know, I would imagine that that would scale very quickly and use a lot of compute. But yeah, maybe this is, a better way. It does seem like it's easier to set up a NeoCloud than a true cloud platform. Like, if they were jumping into AWS or GCP and they wanted to have databases and servers and routers and elastic compute and also load balancing and a DNS and, you know, all the different features that come with a true cloud platform, that might be a tougher lift, might be a bigger lift. But just saying, We have a bunch of servers, we're gonna run whatever model you want and then we will serve it, serve the tokens to you over API. It doesn't seem like that's happening.

Yeah, but what would the stock do if they announced that they were, and again, I'm just like, you know, it's total hypothetical scenario, but they were just spinning out all of their AI infrastructure and commitments and powered shells to like a SpaceX. Yeah. It would probably rip, you know, maybe even harder.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, maybe, I don't know. But yeah, I keep going back to that idea of like the personal superintelligence. What do I actually want? I ran into an interesting conundrum the other day because I've been sort of disappointed by the lack of AI in Meta apps, which I know I'm like the only person that feels that way because the general vibe on Instagram is like extremely anti-AI and every other, every other reel is like someone chugging a 55-gallon drum of water and then doing a, you know, GPT-3.5 impression. But the— but I like— Meta does have granular data about every reel I post. Some do better than others. I went to Meta AI in the Instagram app and I asked, what should I do more of in order to grow my account? You know, I'm a professional content creator. Essentially, this would be useful. Sort of a high-powered analytics tools, personalized analytics tools for what I do. I mean, the lifeblood of Instagram is the creator that actually posts. A lot of people want to know what does well, but I got this very generic LLM response. We might be able to pull it up. I think it's in— I shared the image in the timeline. Let me see if I can pull it up here. Did I text it in? Did it go in? I don't know. I can share it with the team. Team. But, um, I got this very, very generic, uh, let me see if I can do this. Um, this very, very generic response that just said, wait, skill issue, skill issue, basically. Oh, I don't know, it didn't go through. Um, anyway, um, it said, uh, Buffer recommends focusing on sustainable organic growth instead of quick hacks like follow trains. Post reels consistently since they get 36% more reach than carousels and 125. It's so funny to be referencing—

it's referencing a blog post from a social media management SaaS company. Exactly. Like you would think that if you had— I mean, and clearly they're not focused on this use case. Yeah, but you would think that there would be an opportunity to give creators personal and super intelligence to just keep creating on the platform. Yeah.

I said use Instagram Analytics to see which content converts viewers into followers and double down on it. Like, that's what I asked you to do. I said, what can I do better to grow my following? Like, you have all the data about what does well. I don't want to go and look at this reel got 5,000 views, that one got 50,000 views. What's the difference here? I want you to do that. Collaborate with micro creators in your niche for authentic cross-promotion rather than paid ads. Engage with responding to comments and testing out. It also said to optimize your profile with clear keywords in the bio and maintain a consistent visual brand. It's like a lot of that I'm already doing. A lot of that is, is old. And so I'm just like sort of disappointed that, like, say what you want about MuseSpark and its benchmarks or whatever, like clearly if they wire that model up to the user's data, they should be able to integrate appropriately and they just haven't productized it properly. And maybe if I get Manus and I get an API integration, like I could get there, but like it should just live in the Instagram search box, I imagine, since they already have an LLM there, it's just a legacy one. And so on the product side, it's just not, it's just not enough to get to, okay, there's crazy demand for AI within the app.

Adam, did you ask it if the shareholder value is 3 eggs is the goose value?

That just sounds like a, like a jumble of words. Is that even a correct sentence? I don't know, but it sounds correct. I mean, honestly, like the best place— it's very ironic, but the best place for Instagram growth hacks these days is just Adam Mosseri's front-facing videos. Have you seen any of these? So he takes to Instagram, he uses Instagram very well. He goes direct, posts reels about all sorts of things. So today I got surfaced one: if you post something and it doesn't do well, should you delete it and then post it again? And he says no, because the algorithm will give the same result, and your followers who saw the first one didn't like it, they're going to see it and like it even less the second time they see it. So he just, he just answers a bunch of common questions. He does Q&As. And it's actually the best way to communicate and get insights into how the Instagram platform works. But it's not personalized. Like he's just giving generic one-size-fits-all advice. I want the Adam Mosseri brain enhanced with Meta's AI tailored to my account. That's what I want. And like a social media copilot. But maybe I'm in the minority here. I don't know. Maybe I'm the only one that would want this. I feel like tools for creators would be a great way to to launch this because even like a small user, they— everyone almost always cares about, "Ah, I'd love to get a couple more views on whatever," even if they're just using it in primarily a consumption tool. And so— and then there's also agentic shopping, which we asked Mark Zuckerberg about at Meta Connect last year. This idea that, you know, the Meta Ray-Ban displays, they have the HUD. They have AI, you should be able to look at a pair of shoes and say, order me those. And he sort of like gestured towards that being one potential possible future. But it's crazy to me that we haven't even seen them really try to remove at least one click from the shopping experience, store some more of your data, shorten the funnel, increase conversion rates. That's good for brands, that's good for companies that advertise on Meta. It's good for Meta, it's good for users. And it just doesn't feel like that's where the end energy has been in terms of productizing AI within the family of apps. And so it feels like e-commerce will see agentic shopping happening. We're getting closer. Computer use is getting better. APIs are there, MCP servers, and Shopify has a bunch of tools for this stuff. But it's weird that Meta hasn't even been experimenting there. And we haven't seen like, oh yeah, like they launched a thing where if you see an ad, you can click a button and the agent will try and go check out with you and then just confirm the details within the Meta app and you don't actually have to open up the Safari window. I don't know, maybe that works, maybe that doesn't. At least run the experiment. Maybe they have, I don't know, maybe I just missed it. But either way, it feels, yeah, this feels like a wind down of like the super intelligence ambitions that Zuck was gesturing towards last year. But I don't know, maybe this is in the path, maybe this is just a temporary thing.

Yeah. If you look at the SpaceX deals with Google and Anthropic, they weren't like 5-year deals, right? They were shorter-term opportunities for both sides to get out. And I think that Meta could easily do something like that where they could make, again, this is like the practical decision and say like, hey, we actually do have way more capacity than we need. We plan on being able to utilize it fully over time, but we need to get our products sort of ramped up. And so in the meantime, why not sell that capacity and signal to the market that we're not entirely irrational? Yeah. Yeah.

My— yeah. Tyler, what's up?

Yeah, I was going to say maybe a comparison to Apple here, which is like, I think Meta can actually wait until like the features that they need to implement are like extremely obvious, right? Like Apple waited a long time to actually implement these things, even though everyone was like basically begging. I don't know if people are, like, begging for AI features in Instagram, and maybe that'll happen in the future, and they can just basically just wait while, like, "Oh, we're not really sure how to implement this stuff. Yeah, you can put it in the search bar or whatever, but it doesn't improve the experience that much." But maybe, you know, in a year or two, there's gonna be some feature that, like, "Wow, everyone really wants this in Instagram." By then, you know, they'll have all the compute necessary. They can, you know, 90 days before they implement it, they can, you know, get out of the lease or whatever.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, it's interesting. I feel like they just need to do more product experimentation. Like the core Instagram team, they launched the, what's it called, glimpses or something. It's like a shorter, even shorter version of stories, like lower. It like sits in like the little sidebar of the chat. Like they are launching different features across the family of apps, but that culture, like it feels like they have a research organization, but they don't have an AI product organization that's actively productizing things as quickly. I mean, MetaVibes, for, you know, even though it was like this white label of Midjourney, was, well, at least it was launched fast and at least they got the feedback. Yeah, I mean, I would've liked to see a MetaVibes level effort like once a month.

Facebook has, I don't think, or like Meta, whatever, I don't think they've ever been like the company that like really innovates on product, right? There's gonna be some feature that everyone's like, wow, this is really great for AI. And then they can then just integrate it into all their apps. They have all the capacity to serve it by that point.

Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know where it goes. Amit Is Investing over there shares his perspective. Two perspectives on the Meta news. He says bearish. The bearish take is if Meta has excess compute that they're willing to sell via a new cloud business, doesn't that mean we aren't compute constrained? Isn't this really bad for neoclouds? Why would Meta give a deal to CoreWeave or Iron if they just sell the compute themselves? Furthermore, wouldn't they cut CapEx because idle compute as the basis for a new business means they don't need as much compute as they bought, which means CapEx should come down? That would be bearish for all semis. The bullish take is if Meta is building a cloud business, even if they are using idle compute, which means they aren't compute constrained, they might end up spending more on CapEx to compete with GCP, AWS, and Azure. Like if they realize that selling computing services on top of a Meta cloud is better than just ads,, then wouldn't they end up having to spend in the same way that Google, Microsoft, Amazon do in order to build out a full cloud business? They do have a lot of capabilities in terms of spinning up data centers quickly, uh, maybe not quite as quickly as SpaceX and AWS, but they're certainly like near the frontier of that capability in terms of putting up GPUs in tents. Um, says more CapEx would be good for Semi. So what do people think? Where do we land on this? The market is certainly, reacting positively to Meta and negatively to the Neo Clouds because there's a new competitor in town.

Zephyr and the Citrini team are going pretty hard. They say, LMAO, Zuck finally takes the L.

Okay, so if this is a metaverse-style SideQuest and the superintelligence Meta-trained models are the VR of this cycle for Meta's attempt at a new business creation and the Meta-trained models get sort of mothballed in the way that the Meta Quest and the VR strategy got mothballed. What is the Meta Ray-Bans of MSL? Like what would remain? Because when they wind down one of these projects, sometimes you get a Meta Ray-Bans, which is pretty good business and growing and cool. Like there's development there, but it's a much more narrow-focused, and I would say image model, but they seem—

But wouldn't it just be this like Neo Cloud business? Maybe. Yeah, that's what's going to stay on.

It's like profitable. As fun as Ray-Bans though, I want a consumer product. It's a consumer company. Yeah.

And it's interesting because you can, you can make the case that Meta could build an amazing inference business. Yeah, right. Because they already they already serve millions of businesses globally. Yeah. And they could make a pretty compelling case for how like, hey, we help people acquire customers and we help people deliver products and services over here.

Yeah, we talked about that before. I don't know that I buy that, that the fact that they have like, you know, every single mobile gaming company and D2C e-commerce business on is actually flows over to Well, now get your tokens from us.

Yeah, I just think that people have it in their head like, okay, Meta is a consumer business, right? It's thought of as like a consumer business, but they have incredibly massive sales teams, account management teams. They know how to get in front of customers. They've got to the point where, you know, again, they're not operating a commodity business, right? Having their social networks, cloud is closer to one. But anyways, I'm interested to see. I imagine they'll have to come out with their own kind of news around this pretty quickly so that they're not sitting in limbo with just one kind of rumored article floating out there and people are speculating. Jukun is saying Meta falls out of the AI race. He's over at Citrini as well. Too soon to say that probably. They still have a bunch of amazing talent. They certainly have a lot of GPUs. And, you know, Elon getting into the cloud business, certainly he was not ceding the AI race, right? I think he seemingly is as motivated as ever to do what he can to win or at least be a player.

It's just, it's almost like the curse of size or something. Like when you're a trillion-dollar company, there's probably a world that the Meta Ray-Ban display is a good example of, like, or Meta Ray-Bans, good example of, like, there's probably a piece of consumer hardware that's AI-enabled, like the Ring or something where, or just getting really good at voice models or just getting really good at image models. And if they're a little bit more narrow and constrained, they could probably completely dominate that. But trying to do superintelligence and, and coding agents, and it's a little, it's a little scattered potentially. Serenity says there's a lot of disinformation going around about Meta cutting CapEx because they, quote, overbuilt. This is an if they have excess capacity and looks like the opposite right now. Hyperscalers like Google are so much, are so compute constrained that they have had to cut allocations to Meta back in March since Meta was using too much for internal projects. Meta was immediately constrained, so it looks like they were forced to immediately sign massive $48 billion contracts with Neo Clouds like CoreWeave and Nebulas. Meta is selling excess capacity if there's any, especially since their large contracts are take or pay from the Neo Clouds. Yeah, this all could just be like a potential, um, like you're laying the groundwork in case you wind up in a situation where that is where the value is accruing, that's where the advantage for Meta is. So there certainly is a, a positive thesis there. Jay Yoon says we are still massively short compute. Meta and XAI are selling compute because there's no inference demand for their models. It's a compute allocation problem. Too much compute in the hands of players with no internal use for it. Not a compute surplus problem. Interesting.

Well, we can continue to cover the story. More Meta news. What is that? Apparently, according to Bobby Allen over at NPR, oh yeah, consider buying Kalshi before it's developing its own prediction market app. That is sort of a classic Meta playbook. This sort of puts to bed your theory that they might be just making a, a, you know, clout-based, clout-based prediction markets where you compete for your ability to see the future. I like—

I know Manifold is that, right? Yeah. So it's like a— it's like a pretty big platform. Yes.

But I was saying there's a chance right now based on the reporting that it could be the Manifold strategy or it could be the Polymarket Cauchy strategy. And the fact that they didn't try and acquire Manifold, they tried to acquire Cauchy, sort of signals like, hey, they're probably going the, the financially incentivized route. Which I think fits with your thesis that, you know, it's in consumer, it's profitable and growing very fast. And also Tarek from Kalshi was taking shots at Instagram saying it's brain rot, saying that like every minute you spend on Kalshi is a minute that you're not spending brain rotting on Instagram, which is like, okay, I think a lot of people would say that these are like equivalent or maybe one is worse than the other. But, you know, that's a way to get attention.

Don't you think that So, so the potential pool of profits in prediction markets and sports betting broadly, I think in the last year was at $100— and Tyler, can you check? I think it was like $160-ish billion of like trading volume. That is not at all equivalent to revenue, obviously. Yeah, but it doesn't— it feels like, again, it's not a space that it's a space that has consistently had many, many, many players wildly different than, you know, Meta's core social networking business. And I just wonder, is like, is the potential profit pool risk the attention— worth the risk of all the attention you're going to get from lawmakers globally by integrating, integrating like betting into the product that is already under attack on like a million different fronts, right? It feels like—

with the movie coming out and stuff, it's like you're jumping straight to the—

it feels like you have a golden goose, right? And the goose is getting valued. The goose is getting value. Going back, I'm going to just keep going back to the slides. You love these slides. Um, the goose is valued, it's producing golden eggs, and you see another golden egg, but it's almost like a poison golden egg. And if you bring it over, yeah, it might— to the farm, it might kill the goose. Okay, yeah, I kill your your main goose potentially. And so it feels, feels risky.

Yeah, I, I just sent in the true value. This is, uh, the rise of American gambling. These are losses by year, uh, in the United States. It's now almost at $250 billion. So I wanted to think about getting into gambling. How— what's the correct gambling strategy? And I got one, I got one. So you go to the Monarch Casino.

Wait, Americans are losing $240 billion a year, I think.

Or maybe this is— is this cumulative? No, this isn't cumulative. This is— this is per year. I don't know. I don't know. I just saw this image. It's high. It's growing. Doesn't look good. Doesn't look good. Here's a gambling strategy that might work out. Not financial advice, but the Monarch Casino and Resort If you— this company went public in 1993. And if you went to the Monarch Casino Resort and every week you gambled $100 on their stock by buying the stock, over the run, just gambling $100 a week on their stock from 1993 to today, you would have put in $174,000 and it would be worth $3.3 million. So, Just depends on where you want to gamble. Gamble on the stock, potentially. It's a fascinating company. Golden Door Motel, family-owned. They have 2 assets. They have 2 casinos, and this company is just absolutely printing. 36% EBITDA margin. And they buy back stock, and they also pay a dividend. It's just 2 properties, Reno and Black Hawk in— where's Black Hawk? In Colorado.. And they've just grown this small chain of casinos. And then the stock's done very well. So, own the house, don't bet on the actual casino. Stay out of the casino. Stay in the stock market, potentially. Anyway, moving on. Google Gemini, there's some news there. Google AI Overviews Decreased Outbound Organic Clicks by 40%. Eric Sufert is sharing a new paper by researchers at Carnegie Mellon and the Indian School of Business finds that AI overviews were triggered in roughly 41% of observed Google searches. And when triggered, reduced outbound organic clicks by about 40%. That seems like 1 to 1. The presence of AI overviews increased the likelihood of a zero-click search by roughly 35%. Everyone is going— everyone's going Google Zero at this point. The founder, Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo, wrote about Google AI oligarchy and the end of the open web. It's an interesting read, but we'll go through it another time.

December 2010. What happened? Demis was scraping together a couple million bucks. This is crazy. For a small company called DeepMind. This is for a founder that just like, you know, that had their, started their career in the last few years, this is like inconceivable. They're like, wait, you mean 2 on 50, right? It's like, no. Sold half the company at $5 million post as one of the most elite—

Can you imagine what the company would've been worth if it stayed independent this whole time? I don't know, maybe there'd be another, another path or something.

You're saying they sold too early? It seemed like they sold too early.

I don't know.

Hard to say. Hard to say. Paper hands? Paper hands, Pete?

Paper hands. No, no, no, no. I think all the VCs didn't want to sell, especially because the whole Google thing, that was like the whole story was don't sell to Google. Google's like the bad one, which is funny because Google's been very responsible. And, you know, great, great company. I was playing around with VO3 or VO4. Where are we in the VO models? So good and yet still not indistinguishable from reality. We're so, so close and yet so far if you want to generate a video these days. It is cool that you can do it on your phone though. I like it. Where do you want to go next? Mark Pincus is joining us in just a few minutes.

Millennials be like, Norm MacDonald is funny. Then you watch some of his videos and there's no Meta Glasses pranks, no Vine boom sound effects, no meme clips interspersed, no undisclosed gambling ads, no Dexter background.

I don't know the Dexter background music thing.

I'm not online enough for that.

I think you would probably recognize that. The sound. Yeah, I recognize it's just kind of like meme background music at this point.

Yeah. Dexter background music. Got to figure this out.

Bullpen is planning his bachelor party for November. He's not getting married. Just feel like the fellas need to let loose a little. What's that? Interesting idea. Interesting idea. Which one?

Christopher Nolan went to an AMC Burbank 16 fairly often. Team loves it. We're seeing the new Nolan movie. We just bought tickets. We got a crew assembled for, uh, The Odyssey. We're very excited.

Look at this, it's just kind of blowing up his spot a little bit.

Yeah, really let the man just enjoy a film, a film and a big bucket of popcorn. 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 Mark Pincus, the author of Life at the Speed of Play. He's with us in the TV Pen Ultradome. Welcome to the show, Mark. How are you doing?

I'm great. It's good to meet you guys online.

Yeah, actually, thank you so much for taking the time.

After a whirlwind media tour. Yeah, I feel like, I feel like you probably have worked through like all your your best bits at this point. This is going to be the finale. Or we can play the hits.

We can also go a different way.

I want to play the hits. Okay, okay. Where do you want to start, Jordi? Now, where should we start?

You were supposed to be the very first one.

I know, we were trying. We got rescheduled. It was terrible.

It was on us. No, but I hope this is the first of many. So it's great to have you on. Me too.

Yeah. I mean, let's start with the book. I want to know, like, before the actual— before the thesis came together, like, why write a book at all? Are people even reading books these days? Like, we see these charts of, like, books just falling off entirely. What was the— is it about legacy?

Authors should do that. They should have— you should put something in the book that's just like, hey reader, I want you to pause for a second. If you ever meet me in person, I will ask you for the code word. This is the code word. Easter eggs. Yeah, Easter eggs.

Reward you for making it this far.

And if you tell me I love your book, I will ask you for the code word. Oh, there you go.

But yeah, I want to hear about just the general motivations and the general— I think everyone should—

I think you should build a house and write a book one time. Okay. Because neither one ends up feeling like it was, you know, the right return on the investment of time. But it's— but you have this passion in you and you should be all in and get it out. Yeah. There's one time, and this is my one time, I, I had— I'd say that there was just a lot of lessons and a whole playbook built up across 5 companies and in building Zynga. And I give— I created a course at Stanford Business School and Stanford CS, and I give this advice over and over to founders. And even people running companies at scale. And I just said, I might as well get in a book. And I think that my reference was Zero to One, Peter Thiel's book. And I thought it's a big reach goal. But if my book can be referenceable 10 years later like that, then it's of use.

Yeah. Where do you think you either differ with the Zero to One thinking? Do you think it needs expansions, updates? Like, what needs to be added to the canon that isn't in Zero to One?

Well, like, what to actually do. So, I mean, Zero to One is— I just reread it a year ago, and it motivated me again. And I was like, oh yeah, I love the moral arbitrage and the monopoly. It's these big ideas that you love and you can repeat, but it's not a how-to guide or a playbook. And I think so many people have ideas and they either don't pursue them. And I think in this new world, AI, that's a shame because the bar is so low, or they do and they fail for the wrong reasons. I think you guys have probably seen this too. So many people who, they have a great idea, but it's buried in a losing product. And so the core thesis that I've been saying over and over to myself and other people across my career is that, that it, once you realize that you have winning instincts and you've attached them to losing ideas, it changes everything. And that's how you change your odds of success. Yeah. Yeah.

I've heard that. A+ entrepreneur with a C+ market or C+ opportunity. It's a B+ idea.

Yeah. Is the enemy of an A because it's good enough to get funding and get a team.

And yeah, it's funny because when I was, when I was like around maybe senior year of college, I was working on a product and I felt like I was getting like two different types of advice. Like one is like, don't listen to anyone. Just like, you know, advice is worthless. Just like, do, do, do, and you'll, and you'll figure it out. And then, and then, and then on the other side,, you know, people are giving you, you know, advice and sort of playbooks. And I distinctly remember one meeting that I had where somebody who's now a friend was like, you're super talented. This idea, like, it's okay, but it's not great and it's going to hold you back from your potential. And I, and I just like didn't fully listen, but it's just stuck in my head since that point.

Yeah, it's sad, right? We see founders who are talented, and they are just sticking with an idea that's just not quite right or not that good. And it's because there's something in their gut that they know is amazing. And that was me. I mean, I talk a lot about in the book that I— this is not a humble brag, okay? I managed to fail. I created one of the first 3 social networks, Tribe.net. Yeah. There were probably 10 launched in that 2 or 3 year period, including Facebook and MySpace and Tagged and Bebo. 8 of the 10 probably made it, were successful on some level. I was probably amongst the 2 that weren't. And so it took an act of willpower to fail. And I had that much will. I was, I was so determined to stick with this one losing idea that really, by the time I got to Zynga, I was just not going to do that again. And I think that's a big message in the book. And I think it's— I still need to hear that message today because we fall in love with our ideas. Yeah.

How much like to you, what is the balance between some ideas? Like, I find this in consumer, like, quite a, quite a bit more than, than enterprise because it's typically is a lot more defined. But in consumer, like, there's ideas that I've been pitched and I'm like, that's a terrible idea. And then like the founder, you know, uh, just does it and it, and it totally works. And, and sometimes it's unpredictable. And I think you can like tune your intuition like quite a bit, but it can never be like 100% crystal ball. You just know exactly whether an idea is going to work or not. Like, what is your— what has been framework of, uh, yeah, like, what's the point where you're like, I'm not 100% sure this idea will work, but it's worth putting in the 3 weeks or 3 months or whatever time is necessary to actually get the reality check to the idea?

Well, I think that we have idea veins or instinct veins, and so there's a zone that you have an instinct around, and then I have this framework, Proven Better New, which is a way to kind of de-risk that and keep ourselves out of trouble. So it's like just narrow down where your idea is new or novel and wherever it's not, look for what's already proven and copy it. And people like Nikita Behrer have really, really been good at that. And, you know, there he's done kind of the same product over and over again and it's worked. Each time. So I think that at least means you're not going to fail for the wrong reason and you get a lot more shots on goal. And the whole— and in consumer, even, you know, much more than enterprise, it really is. If you test more ideas in a week than the industry you're in, in a contest in a year, you probably have a 4 or 5x advantage, you know, higher odds of success. And I'll also say that the reality in consumer is, you know, where you see traction, there's a good idea, and where you don't see traction is not a good idea. And, and that might sound kind of dumb, but, you know, I find in consumer you could back a— you're better off backing an unproven entrepreneur who's found, for whatever reason, product-market fit than than a proven entrepreneur like me with no product-market fit. And that's just, you know, that's an unfortunate reality.

I have a bunch of questions. I have a fun thought exercise. So, so I, John and I have had this debate of is it possible to build a competitor to Instagram? And, and I think that I would like to see someone, someone try because I believe the capital markets are in a state right now, you know, even though it's insane and there's like, you know, 99% chance it doesn't work, like there's going to be people that would take the bet. And you have Instagram, which is one of the most popular products in the entire world. And the company is like very focused on like other things, right? Like they're focused on— Yeah, AI for sure. And now a cloud business. And, and maybe the company overall doesn't fully appreciate just how amazing the businesses, and it still continues to grow. And so I want to believe that it's possible for a smart team to actually go and create something that would actually compete in that category. John is like, it's just not possible. It's over. It's like, you know, network effects and the scale and the social game that it's turned into. But I want to believe. I'm curious what your view is.

Well, one of these instinct veins that I talk about is the cocktail party. And, and originally, like, there was a cocktail party on Napster, and then there was a cocktail party on Friendster, and then Facebook, and now Instagram. And once the cocktail party is there and working, it is hard to get people to move. But these cocktail parties can wear out and kind of lose their excitement or appeal. And in the case of Instagram today, I think it's lost a lot of its original value to us, which was social networking. It was the, the kind of serendipity that we get at a cocktail party. And they, for maybe business reasons, you know, they pursued engagement. They want to be more like TikTok and get you— be more entertainment, reels. And so I do think that that opens up an opportunity. I, I don't know if you guys spend much time thinking about Net Promoter Score. It used to be really popular, NPS. And there's a funny thing you can— you could go research this now, or maybe I could simulate it for you even quicker. But I would bet that, that today users of Instagram probably have an NPS of 35, and the day they quit, it's like quitting cigarettes is probably a -35. That's usually the sign of some weakness, you know, in your product or brand. Looking at that, you know, on the exit, you know, they're not promoting it. In fact, they're proud that they've given up this bad habit. And what I would say, though, is there probably has to be a—

the only thing, the only thing, it's a small sample size, but the friends that I know that quit, quit Instagram, they end up still sending me memes from like their business accounts. And I'm like, all right, I get it.

They can't give up the addiction. Yeah, yeah.

I think they're actually like they're, they're signaling that they've quit, but, but they're, they're still like, you know, having a cheeky drag here and there.

You know, I got to say, I, I got my drags down to like I probably use Instagram once a month and then I find myself just drawn into time wasting. I'm on Twitter or X. That's like my social network, my drug of choice. Um, I tell myself it's more valuable content, but you know, that's what we do.

Yeah, I look at it as like, uh, it's an opportunity to do any, you know, that whatever the inverse of a meditation is, right? Meditation, you're sitting there, you're like, I'm gonna let the thoughts flow through, but I'm not gonna hang on to them, you know, whatever, whatever your approach is. And, and it's like, what if you could add 20 new ideas to your head every 10 seconds? Would you do that? And it's like, here's, uh, here's drone warfare, and here's a test somewhere else and like, here's some startup who's rage baiting you, you know, it's— but it's addictive, whatever it is. It is.

But I would say that it's probably— you need a shift. You need something new, I think, to get consumers, to get all of us. We are lazy and apathetic and low attention span. And so, you know, no one's downloading new apps. So there has to be something, probably AI and agents that that is the new thing that pulls you into a new cocktail party. Yeah, I do believe it'll happen.

Even though I'm, I'm like skeptical about the particular go-to-market, I'm curious on your read on the state of venture capital, because if you go back to Zero to One, the sources of monopoly power, network effects are one of the four. They're, they're very enduring. And everyone believes that network effects will endure even in the age of AI. And so I guess I have been surprised, even though I can't think of how to disrupt an established social network. I've been surprised that we haven't heard about a $1 billion pre-market round. Well, yeah.

So that's what I'm saying.

So that was the venture capital community to actually buy their way in.

Network effect. Yeah, you can build a new social media company, but you need billions of dollars. And like TikTok is evidence that TikTok was spending. Yeah. How much money on Meta? How much money on, on Snap?

All these other people are probably the biggest advertiser on the internet.

For a while. Yeah, yeah. For, for a minute there.

And so I do think it's possible they are getting their users, you know, from social networks. Yeah, yeah. But, but I would just say your question on venture capital, why aren't we seeing this funded? I think you got to pull the camera back and just also say we're not seeing a lot of consumer being funded. It almost feels like it's not investable right now. I think Y Combinator, probably less than 10% of their companies our consumer. But I'm investing in some consumer, but it's after I see traction. Sure. And it feels unpredictable and completely uncertain before there's traction. So I just think distribution is pretty broken, even though AI feels like a new platform at a consumer level. It's not. We have kind of a portal in GPT, but we also have to remember, like, we're so early. GPT is a single-player experience, right? There is no multiplayer version. Of Claude or GPT. There is no app connection. You know, there's none of the things that enabled Zynga, you know, or MySpace was started. I mean, YouTube was started on top of MySpace. People forget that. So there isn't an obvious way to jumpstart distribution. And I think, you know, VCs rightly want to see something predictable. And so— the small number. A company called FOMO announced a big round last week, and I invested in that along with Union Square Ventures. I only invested after they proved it and got the traction.

Sure. Yeah. How do you think, um, vibe coding, agentic coding is going to change or is already changing game development? Because it feels like we should be seeing AAA games produced by solo developers. I don't know if that's more of a VC-backable strategy or opportunity, but it feels like we're very, very close to some inflection point there. The indie game, indie dev community is already booming. But how do you think it'll play out? Like a thousand flowers bloom?

Happy Bar Simulator and the simulators are fun.

But yeah, I'm just wondering if you think that there's like a business opportunity there or if it will just be more like the D2C boom where there were a ton of small brands, a couple of breakouts, but by and large it was just that, oh, there's a ton of, you know, solo entrepreneurs on Shopify today and that's great, right?

It's, it's a, it's a $280 billion industry that doesn't seem to have any innovation. You know, I think games have gotten really boring and have kind of stagnated. And, and I think it's because distribution's broken. Will AI change distribution? Probably pretty— on a pretty small level. The only place I think it could is enabling much faster testing of ideas like what some of the hyper-casual game companies, like a company called Rawlik that Zynga bought, was brilliant at that. So they would say what was TikTokable. So they would figure out what's a TikTok meme. They made a game in a week called High Heels that became the number one game in the App Store. So that happened. I don't see anyone really using AI effectively to do that. So then you get to, well, okay, I can reduce the cost. Sure. And I think it is making headway in reducing the cost. But I don't think you get hits in games because of less cost. You get hits because of more dimensions you can innovate on. And I think, you know, will come down from $100 million to maybe $30 million. But, but I don't, I don't think that's going to spark growth in the market.

It's so fascinating that I can't think of a single even media asset, game, anything like that where AI created the hit factor. The whatever. No, like the— we, we, we go back to the Harry Potter Balenciaga video. That was one of the first AI videos that really went, went super viral and people were like, well, this is actually entertaining and interesting. Yeah. And it's always like the human that used the AI to do something that they wouldn't have done. Yeah. If they had just had an idea pre-AI because it would be like, well, I'm not going to pay for all the CGI to do, you know, It would have just been way too much work. But the human still is the hitmaker.

We still got it. Yeah, and even if— it's awkward because when we were doing, you know, games, there was Flash, we were doing web games, and we were able to innovate and test really quickly and put things out in a day or a week. And now in the App Store and Unity, it's slower, but AI is really well suited for web languages and web gaming. Web gaming is 1.9 billion out of 280 billion. So a lot of people are betting that Three.js is going to unlock innovation and growth. But you're going to have to see people embrace web gaming, which is a tough bet. So what do you think?

How would you How do you think Apple should approach vibe coding? It feels like an interesting, interesting challenge. They're kind of— I don't think they necessarily know. At least they don't necessarily know how they want to approach it, or they haven't made it clear yet. They've made it hard for these apps to, you know, I think they kind of froze updates on a bunch of apps and said, like, you know, we're just basically like saying, like, your business is like over until we figure something out. So Clearly, they want to make money from it and they want to protect users, which I think are both, you know, developers are going to be annoyed at— or at least good developers will be annoyed at both of those things. But it seems like a tough one where users are clearly going to want modular software that they can create and multiplayer experiences that they can imagine and then share with friends. But it feels like it's at odds with all of Apple's kind of principles.

Yeah, 100%.

I mean, I, I don't think that there is a real incentive for Apple to do anything about that. And I don't think— it doesn't feel like that's not the energy I get from Apple. It's not the, the vibe is vibe coding. Yeah. Yeah. And I don't even see Apple doing anything to help distribution of the apps that, you know, are put out on their platform now. So I don't think— I know I just have a hard time seeing them motivated to help, you know, people put out tons more apps. I mean, I think it's more likely that that logjam gets broken because somebody makes an app container that somehow, you know, Apple allows people to keep changing massive amounts of change of content inside. I mean, almost like a Roblox, but it's— yeah, it hurts my brain to figure out how that's going to happen. And Vibe Coding, I actually— I think Claude Code, Codex, I think I think automating coding and using coworking agents has obviously— you don't need me to tell you that has legs. I think that's going to go somewhere. Yeah, but, but Vibe Coding almost feels like the misstart we had with blogging and GeoCities where there was a moment where everyone was going to make their own website and they did, and then they just weren't very good. And it didn't go anywhere. There was— there weren't really websites that blew up. Yeah, that I know that were built on top of like a GeoCities, or maybe I'm dating myself. You guys don't even remember those.

Yeah, uh, we, we are like— it feels like we're very close to being able to effectively vibe code an iOS app in the cloud, have it deploy it to TestFlight and you get that app back on your phone and close that loop entirely on your phone in an Apple-compliant way. Now, it couldn't go viral because it's not in the store. Right. You might be able to have your agent go and submit it to the store and wait 2 weeks and then it gets out there, which might be an acceptable flywheel for some developers. But it is like the technology is going to get there quicker than the distribution and like the ideas. I think, I think you're spot on. And the ability to test that.

I'm also surprised. Sure. This far into this AI cycle that it's— I would have thought that the first thing we'd see is kind of top of the funnel, massive testing of, you know, using ads and links and things and, and tell your agent to spend all night testing and come back in the morning with the winning variant. And I don't even see it. I don't know about you guys. I don't see even one successful company or service offering that. And I don't find any founders doing that. It's more you can build something in 3 months, kind of, that would have taken a year or two. Yeah. So it's more of I can get to my prototype faster, but not, not I can test a lot of ideas faster. Yeah.

Speaking of ads. Do you think hyper-casual games should be allowed to advertise with fake CGI versions of a different game to promote the install of their very basic, probably pick-three game?

Mm, wow. Now we're getting to— at a cost level, should they be allowed? At a morality level? I'd say it's— It— I don't like it. I mean, I think it's, it's misrepresenting, you know, it's— I wouldn't mind— I wouldn't blame Apple for taking somebody down for that. Yeah. Because it's misrepresenting things. Yeah. It's a bad user experience. Now, what I would be okay with is what we did in the beginning of Zynga is I would go— I'd put up a link for some amazing new game you want to try, and it would go to 404 page not found because I was just testing for heat. Yeah. And interest. Yeah. So I— or eventually we got more sophisticated and say, you know, we'll— you'll be the first to know about this game. You know, I had a—

I had, I had an experiment.

Record the fake game, have it have an agent vibe code you a real version of the fake game, because a lot of people, they want to play the fake game, but the fake game doesn't actually have have the flywheel of you will keep playing it. You'll play it for a couple of minutes and then you'll get bored and so they have to funnel you to something else.

Jordi? I had a product in college. I was taking a lot of film photos and there was like a— it was a 30-minute drive to the closest place to get film developed reliably. And I was quite frustrated by it so I wanted to make like effectively a subscription service. They would send you 1 or 2 rolls of film a month and you just send it back and they would develop it and upload it for you. Whatever. And to test it, I just ran a bunch of Facebook ads at a landing page. And I actually got— I think I had like a $15, $20 CAC or something at the time. Facebook ads were a lot cheaper back then. Ended up not pursuing it, but I just refunded everyone, obviously, right afterwards because I wasn't able to offer the service. Sure, sure, sure. I was just like, hey, sorry. That's a cool experiment. Oversold or whatever, but best way to test something. Yeah.

Back to the book. Peter Thiel did a Reddit AMA after Zero to One launched, and someone asked him, "What is the Straussian reading of Zero to One?" And he said, "Don't become an entrepreneur," which is a very funny response. What is the Straussian reading of life at speed of play?

I would— not to be, you know, completely carbon copy, but I would say, I'd say don't, don't become a product founder. Don't do it if you want to make money. Like, don't, don't go be a product founder if you think this is the best path to be rich and successful because I end the book by saying, how ambitious are you? And everyone says, I'm an 11 on a 10 scale. But then the question is, well, the flip side of that coin is, what are you willing to sacrifice to get to that place? Would you toil in obscurity for 10 years in order to have an 80% chance chance of the greatest home run of your life? Or would you take an 80% chance of a first base hit in 1 to 2 years? And most people would take the latter. And that's why they stay in their jobs or careers. Or that's why even once we go found a company, I think we make all these compromises to de-risk it. Yeah.

Was that the correct question to ask to assess someone's someone's level of ambition? Should you ask them 80% chance of a home run in 10 years versus, you know, 20% chance of base hit or something like that? Or sorry, vice versa. Or are there other— I like that. Yeah, yeah, 80%, those are good odds. But, or are there other questions that you can dig into when you're talking to a founder to actually assess their level of ambition?

I think you can pretty quickly— you guys seen this too— get a sense of what's motivating somebody and why they're doing this. And I think that the best founders have a passion for this that goes beyond this one business or opportunity, and they need that because it's probably going to fail. And so I think that there's a question like, why are some founders repeating success and some have one big success? And I think it is like your kind of commitment and willpower. And if you have— if you're more committed to— because we've talked about founder mode and there's all these moments where I think as a founder, we have to have real courage. But it's not courage to go against the world. It's usually courage to go against our own team our own investors because we've promised them things. We've built expectations with them. And now we have to tell them we are wrong. And you come in on Monday, you're like, we— I just saw another product the competitor had last week. And what we're doing is totally wrong. And people have complained working with Mark is like third grade soccer. Every Monday he wants to chase another ball. And they're not wrong a lot of the time because I'm trying to be intellectually honest and I can burn people out that way, you know, but it's because I'm more committed to winning than I am kind of harmony or even keeping this team with me. So I think that's more of the thread that I look for is do I see that this person is more motivated by taking the hill and winning than, you know, being liked or Respected.

Yeah. So it's so interesting because you have— I've been in that mode too, where third grade soccer strategy where— and I think that comes from like fundamental knowing that what you're working on is there's something wrong with the idea, at least in the early days for me, because with, with, with our, with our, with the podcast early on, even when we literally had like 100 viewers, I didn't have that. I didn't have that like third grade soccer strategy. It was just like, this is a good product. And I know because there's people I trust that are not lying to me and they say like, this is great, keep doing it. And so like we had the blinders on, but I've been in that mode and in hindsight where you're just kind of like, oh, like let's try this other variation of this thing or let's, you know, we need to go in a totally different direction. And that was— it comes off as scattered. But if you're able to admit that, it's more like you need to be intellectually honest with yourself and your team that you're scattered because there's something that's fundamentally off with the approach. Right.

You knew that you liked this product. I mean, I think, and feedback loops you got from people around you, like, you felt good about it and they liked it. You're like, OK, if it's not catching on yet, I think it's a marketing question and a patient's question. That's different than you kind of feel in the pit of your stomach like it's just not that good. And I think a lot of times we're so hopeful about a product we're building. And then when we finally see it, it's usually never as good in code as it was in our mind. And, and what do you do? I mean, that's happened to me so often in games that like, this will be so cool. And then we build it, like, ah, or we see a competitor who has that. And I want to send them a thank you note because I'm like, thank you for building my bad idea for me. I'm definitely not going to do that now. And but when you— it's kind of like love, you know, finding your partner. When, when I think when you do find the person, you're not asking, is this right? You're not asking other people, do you— what do you think of her? You know, totally.

You mentioned a bucket list. Everyone should build a house. Everyone should write a book. Was taking a company public on your bucket list before you did it? Was it appropriate to have it on that list? What was that like?

Well, this is the second company I took public. I had a company called Support.com that took public in 2000 on the last day of the IPO window. It was because it was enterprise software. Yeah. And our VCs had no interest in the company until the consumer fell apart. You know, we had $170 million in bookings. We were able to go public. I, I think it's a false dream. I mean, I, and I think I even felt it a little bit then. But I for sure, by the time I got to Zynga, I didn't want to go public. We were forced to go public. We, we were incredibly profitable. We had over $1 billion on our balance sheet when we went public. But we were forced because of the SEC rules, which Obama changed with the Startup Act. And there's all this pressure because people want your stock and they're finding ways to buy it through side letters. And then that's exposing you. And there's all kinds of things. We're seeing it happen now with Anthropic. And you write write really, really mean letters and policies scaring them and saying, like Anthropic has, that we're not going to recognize your stock if it wasn't issued to you. But in the end, you still— the SEC is going to see you as responsible for anyone who bought it. So anyway, we were forced to go public. So was Facebook. So was LinkedIn. This other class of companies like Stripe have put it off for years for good reason. Anyone who tells you that there's anything that's going to help your company about going public, I think 9 times out of 10 they're lying to you. Now, SpaceX and, you know, these large-cap AI companies, they want— legitimately need access to capital markets. And so they are optimizing for that. If you don't have that need for capital market access, There is no benefit. It's only bad. In fact, you have so many employees who leave because they say, yeah, I always wanted to be at a company that went public. It was on my bucket list. Goodbye. And so you give them this liquidity, you know, you give them this thing on their resume. And so now they're gone. Your culture changes. Ours did. And now, you know, Michael Dell once told me before he took his company private and then public again, that the biggest reason to go private was to control communications with his employees because he said, you know, they, they get their views from stock chat rooms and what their family is reading and not from Michael Dell. And so it's— no, there's— it gives you like 5 other jobs as a CEO that you don't need. Like, you should be focused on your product. Customer product team, not investor IPO media.

Yeah, makes a ton of sense. Well, the book is Life at the Speed of Play. It's available everywhere books are sold.

Go pick up a copy. Congratulations on the launch. And let's do this again soon. I have a million more questions.

Yeah, we can go all over the place.

Yeah, there's so many more topics to get into.

We'd love to have you back.

This would be great.

Yeah, I'd love to talk about my broken internet strategy of public stock investing, which— Yeah, we didn't even get to Snapchat.

Yeah, we didn't get to Snapchat.

That's a whole show.

Yeah, that's a whole show. Let's do it soon.

Come back at one.

Maybe have me and Evan on together. We can debate like whether, you know, this, this whole journey into AR goggles is, is the best thing.

Shareholders love the specs. Shareholders really love the specs. We'll get to the bottom. Well, thanks. No, I mean, wait till we see how many sell. I think. I'm pricing in 20 pairs. 20 pairs. But I think there's a chance that it surprises to the upside.

It could. Anyway, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us.

Have a great rest of your day.

Great to see you, Mark. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange.

Mark just gave the anti-ad for going public.

Hey, if you need You need to raise capital. If you want to raise the most capital, you got to go to the New York Stock Exchange. That's the endorsement that we're proud to give. Our next guest is in the waiting room. Shub Sinha from Integral is the co-founder and CEO. Welcome to the show. How are you doing? I'm doing okay. Thanks.

Thanks for having me.

Just okay. Just okay.

Hey, on this big day, I'm riding the highs and lows and getting back up right now.

That's, that's pretty normal for the entrepreneurial journey. But, uh, take us through your entrepreneurial journey. How'd you get here? What are you building? What's the news today?

Yeah, yeah, definitely. Well, I'm excited. Uh, today we actually just announced an $18 million Series A for, uh, for my company Integral. And so the gong—

there we go.

There's a good warm-up hit. Had to get the real hit in there. We like to warm up the gong on this show.

Double hit. I don't think we've done that before.

There's a warm-up hit and then the real hit. Yeah, yeah.

That was special for Integral.

So tell us about Integral.

Yeah, so what Integral does is we sanitize proprietary real-world datasets such that AI builders can get very bespoke, very sensitive datasets, but that data holders can also make sure that privacy and compliance is adhered to. And so this thing, this looks like medical records, financial transactions, et cetera. A lot of this contains the real-world human behavior patterns that people like you and me have. And there's a ton of individuals and enterprises who are now monetizing it since the AI companies and the AI builders want it. That being said, the builders want the signal. They don't want the secret values. They don't want the proprietary secrets, so to speak. And so Integral sits in the middle where we ensure that through privacy engineering, both with our privacy teams and our engineering teams, we can retain the utility and the signal while also ensuring that privacy and regulatory and contractual.

Yeah. So how about this for an example? There's, there's been, you know, there's been examples of, of, you know, a company buying a company just for the data around how that company was operating, like just for the Slack. But then you can imagine a Slack, there's so many things that so much information in Slack that again, you talked about is signal, but not necessarily information that should be available for even people, let's say working at the labs to see, right? That's like PI, et cetera. That's right.

And folks at the labs don't even necessarily want to see that, right? They want the context of it all. And so it's a real win-win for data holders who want privacy and trust and also revenue.. And then the lab, uh, who, or, or the AI builder who wants to ensure that they're not stepping into anything they shouldn't be stepping into, but they get that value.

What are some types of companies that have valuable data that, that don't know that it's valuable and it would be something that they could monetize if they were, let's say, working with you?

For sure.

And, and that's, that's one of the bets that we're making, that there's this new proprietary data economy of individuals and enterprises. And so we've seen kind of all across the board, just given the kind of newness of the economy and the types of datasets that are coming in and the bespoke demand. So we've seen, for example, like mid-market hospitals that see compressing revenues but have a very, very specific treasure trove of data because they focus on a rare disease or a specific procedure. And that's not available anywhere else. Fitness apps. Some people, you know, they log their entire lives in the fitness apps and these apps have free or paid users. They're only making money off the paid users, but they can then— those apps can then monetize what is that entire real-world signal and really continue to make that app free and introduce a ton of value. And it all becomes circular because as AI gets better, a lot of these same companies will actually use it. Sure. So it's a real win-win there.

What's the state of the art in sanitization and maintaining privacy? We talked to Ed and Ty from the National Design Studio on Monday. They shipped a something like less than 15 meg, it's like small language model for sanitizing documents in the browser, runs very efficiently. Are you just throwing open source models at this? Do you need frontier models for data sanitization? And then is there some worry where it flows back if you're using some closed source model and the frontier lab takes the data that you sent them and stores that improperly?

For sure, for sure. And there's a variety of solutions out there mixed with, call it, human services, BPOs, and entire teams of PhDs looking at it.

So it might just be regexes, right? Like if it's a phone number, that's right, identify it, just turn it into X or number, number, number sign or something like that, right? That's right, that's right.

So there's a ton of solutions that kind of do that first layer. I think where Integral really specializes is, you know, we got our start in healthcare. Yeah. And healthcare has all proprietary data. Your doctor should not be putting your internet on or your data on the internet. And as far as we can tell, they're not.

I told my doctor, go ahead.

Yeah, I hope it would be embarrassing for everyone else if like your, your lean muscle mass and your body fat percentage got leaked out there.

Everyone will know. Just your— if your test levels leaked on the internet, it would, it would be, it'd be crazy. You'd be getting accused of doping. Yeah. Are you— when did, when did you make the switch from AirPods to wired? I'm also a wired, a wired headphone guy, so I'm curious.

I hit number 5 on AirPod replacement and then I went wired and it turns out— so I'm in New York and it turns out it's a fashion statement as well. So I'm kind of rocking both sides.

I think it is entirely superior. And that is even before the fact you can get like a bunch of pairs of wired headphones, have them everywhere, and for the cost of just one pair of AirPods. So maybe we're ahead. Congratulations on the round. Yeah, the business makes a lot of sense and excited to see where you go with it.

Yeah, we'll talk to you soon. Have a good rest of your day. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era unlocks seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. Our next guest is Wayne Tang from Lime, coming in on IPO day. Wayne, how are you doing? Congratulations. Welcome to the show.

Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.

Uh, talk to us about the journey to get here today. What does it feel like? What's going through your head right now?

It's been a, it's been a long journey, and I, I feel great to see Lime go public today. And I think, yeah, it's, it's certainly not been a linear journey. I mean, as you guys know, there's been a lot of companies in micromobility, and Lime is the last man standing in a very tough industry. And I think we're the only ones that have built a scalable, sustainable, profitable business. And I think that's why we've earned the right to be a public company today. And I feel like to see Lime trade publicly was a validation of the hard choices we made along the way, but also a lot of sacrifices to get Lime to this point.

Yeah. What, what changed culturally recently or what is the culture like? Because it feels like the key to this business is is operational efficiency, excellence, excellence, not having a ton of side quests. You have to be focused. This is not a business with some, you know, just crazy— you struck lightning 25 times in a row and you can just make a ton of mistakes. Like, operational efficiency is key to the business, correct?

You're absolutely right. It's a— I describe it as it's a game of inches. I mean, our average vehicle is generating $7.50 of revenue a day. We have to charge the vehicle, fix the vehicle, use spare parts, make sure it's positioned the right place at the right time. And we do all that and we generate a 50% plus cash margins on that $7.50. And because we're able to get that level of margins, we pay back our vehicles in less than one year. But you're talking about a relatively low price point product. Small mistakes. Very quickly adds up and the business becomes upside down, which is what you see most of our competitors. Yeah, it's not for the lack of capital. A lot of our competitors raised more money than we did. They were in the market longer and it's obviously hard because if it was easy, they would have done it too. And I think it also requires a clear, a clear view of like what actually matters. And in the world of limited resources, we are very focused that we want to be The way to crack this business is great hardware, great software, great operations, government relations, and then everything else we have to deprioritize in an incredibly strict way in order to put our limited resources towards the things that actually matter in this business.

What is going on on the supply chain side? Is there a— is there a constraint on battery capacity because of demand from from AI broadly? It feels like the AI industry is sucking up every possible piece of the supply chain from, you know, coatings that go into toilets to everything that generates power under the sun. Rocket motors and jet engines are being bolted to the ground to generate power. Is that a constraint or is there an opportunity that demand for energy will ultimately reduce the price of batteries or maybe even extend their life?

So I haven't seen a shortage on battery cells today, but I think one of the advantages that Lime has is we are vertically integrated in hardware, software. So we have every e-bike, e-scooter you see online, we have designed, engineered in-house. We control our own supply chain. We outsource the manufacturing. But because Lime is the world's largest purchaser of e-bikes, e-scooters. It also means we get, we get warning when there are shortages of critical parts and suppliers want to sell to Lime. So I have seen this year a shortage and inflation in memory chips. I mean, clearly AI has driven up demand on the high-end memory chips. We don't put the AI chips into a Lime bike or scooter. But I think a lot of this supply chain has really shifted towards manufacturing the high end. So even if you're using a middle of the road or low-end memory chip, we're seeing significant price inflation. But more importantly, if you don't lock in supply, you're not even— there's not going to be any supply to be bought in 2027, 2028. But because Lime is the global leader in micromobility, our suppliers are coming to us early and saying, how might we work with you to secure supply? Supply for next year and let's lock in prices now before the kind of price inflation that we see. And I think that's one of the advantages of being vertically integrated. But even this is it's a real game of inches. We have to, we have to look ahead on not just what's going to happen this year, but what's going to happen in the future. The other supply chain challenge we, we navigated this past year was Liberation Day. So the president announced a series of tariffs, and some of these tariffs were 150% on some countries. But because Lime controls our own supply chain prior to 2026, we started to diversify where we are doing our manufacturing. In fact, we stood up full manufacturing capacity in 3 different countries. And what that allows us to do is depending on the policies of the day, we can work with with different vendors to ensure that not only do we have the right supply, but that we are optimizing for the, um, any sort of tariff, um, of headwinds that we see. If you're buying off-the-shelf hardware from the same Chinese manufacturer, these are not tools in the box for you. And I feel like a lot of our competitors really couldn't navigate whether it's the tariffs or any sort of component shortages in the same way that Lime can. This is also where scale matters. We are in a winner-take-most market similar to Uber and rideshare and DoorDash and food delivery. And winner-take-most market is great to be the winner. And that's Lime. It sucks to be second and third place because you don't have the same reliability, the same scale to invest in software, hardware, capital expenditure, and you don't have the scale to actually build proprietary hardware. It doesn't make sense to build your own scooter or e-bike if you only have a fleet of 1,000 vehicles because you have to amortize that R&D cost over a much smaller fleet. We're able to have an independent product strategy because Lime operates over 300,000 bikes and scooters in 230 cities, 29 countries around the world. That scale advantage only accelerates now that Lime is public, because we have more capital to invest in the business. I think we realize it's important to be vertically integrated. We realize the importance of scale and we build a business to capture those competitive advantages early, which is why Lime is here and most of our competitors are bankrupt or not doing very well.

Yeah. If you could rewind to the early days, during the height of the competitive dynamics between, you know, you and Bird and other players? How would you have— knowing everything that you know now, what would you have done differently?

I think there's lots of small things I would do differently, but I think the overarching strategy, it was the right one. And I think it's proven out by Lime's going public today. I think it starts with I remember early days of Lime, and people still have this debate in Silicon Valley, and it really is a false choice, which is, is growth more important or profitability more important? And that's not really— you need to get your unit economics right to earn the right to grow rapidly. And the incentives in the early days were so that it really incentivized the wrong behavior because nobody was making money. The only way to survive is to open up incremental venture capital. And when venture capital firms are saying that what we're going to value on and what we're going to give you money on is growth, it incentivizes companies to chase after unprofitable revenue and frankly unsustainable growth, even if it doesn't make financial sense.

Yeah, and that would be even like markets, markets that turned out to not be a great fit for this type of mobility solution. Is that like an example? Because I imagine like there was just like, like LA is an interesting city because it's like so dominated by, by cars and it feels, you know, anyways. And I just remember when I moved to LA during the early days of this, like of the war that you guys had during the heyday of like Bird Graveyard and all those accounts that probably made everyone's life a lot harder. But it felt like if you're just chasing growth, you're going to go into markets that, you know, are not even that great, because if you don't get that revenue growth, your competitor is going to and they're going to be able to raise more capital, etc.

Capital fight. Exactly. And in fact, one of the first things I did when I became CEO was shrink our footprint because, I mean, if you are running a coffee shop and you are losing money at every cup, every single cup of coffee, you should probably sell fewer cups of coffee and figure out how to make money before you started opening up new coffee shops. And that was the reality of Lime 8 years ago. I think I want to say our gross margins were -300%. Every dollar revenue, we lost $3. It was like, before we think about growth, let's fix that. We should be making money at the trip level, at the scooter level. So we shrunk our footprint, focused on the things that matter. Fix our unit economics and then really accelerate growth once we got that right. And I think the companies that really had a growth at all costs mentality, even when it doesn't make financial sense, actually raised more money for a period of time. But the law of economics catches up to everybody. You can be economically irrational for a period of time, but you can't be economically irrational forever. Even the dumbest VC at some point figures out the game. And I think when the, when the irrational funding left the industry, that's actually when I think Lime's competitive strengths really became more obvious because we were not competing on our ability to raise more capital and to burn it faster. We started to compete on the quality of our hardware, the quality of our operations. And I actually think getting past the hype cycle was a major reason why Lime is here. If we're still in the middle of the hype cycle, then we'll be on that treadmill of crazy growth, burn all this money to raise more money to burn more of that in order to raise more money. And I think that's a loser's game. Yeah. Well, congratulations to the whole team.

I'm sure when, when you took the job as CEO, maybe 8 out of your 10 friend closest friends were like, you're absolutely crazy for taking that job. But you did it.

You got it here. Congratulations.

I actually was texting with a friend the day that I took this job. I was having drinks on the rooftop of a friend's house, and I was there with 6 friends from Uber. Every single person is like, this is such a dumb decision. It's a no-win job. You will never be able to turn this around. You should have never done this. You locked yourself into a trap that you can't get out of. And I just recall, I mean, the fact that you mentioned that, I recall this conversation. I was texting with that group of people being like, remember what you said to me? Contrarian and right.

A victory lap. You deserve a drink on top of a roof deck. Hopefully you got one. I'm sure it's been a long day. No, I literally knew.

I knew. I was like, these guys, I'm sure around a lot of smart people. It was very contrarian to go and do this. And congratulations on, you know, an incredible moment.

Thank you so much. Thanks so much.

Really appreciate it. And congratulations on all your success as well. This is a great podcast.

Really, really appreciate it.

Thanks, Wayne. Have a good one. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agents to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. Our next guests are from Assort Health. We have the co-founders and co- CEOs. Co-CEO alert! How you guys doing? Welcome to the show. Hey, introduce yourself for everyone. Love the cowboy hats.

Jackson, can you grab mine?

Yeah, we got to get some cowboy hats.

Get as many as we need. Maybe get John the bear mask over there.

The bear mask? I'm not a bear.

We love that you're in J&J as well. We always— we were—

our Slack tag is @JJ, you guys. John, well, tell us about the company. Tell us about the round. I want to hit the gong. Tell us what's going on.

Sweet. Yeah. So we're John and Jack, co-CEOs of Assort Health. We are an agentic platform for the entire patient journey for provider groups. So healthcare providers, we do everything from work call center automation, voice AI to handling fax and document processing, patient intake forms, care gap activation and payment collection.

So we have a bunch more questions, but tell us how much you raised. We got to hit the gong together. Double gong for you. Go first.

No, together. Together. Together. Tell us how much you raised.

$222 million total. So that's going to be hundreds of millions of patients in the next few years. So we're super excited about that.

That's, that's a signal. Thank you. Wait, when did you guys start the company? 2023. 2023. All right. Not bad. Just a couple hundred million of value creation.

Annually. I like it. Yeah, take us through the actual customer journey. Who's buying? How do you interface with both the doctors, the patients, the hospital networks, and the insurers? Like healthcare is famously a 7-party negotiation for everything, but who do you actually sell to and how do you flow through?

Yeah, I'll let Jeff answer that.

Yeah, in terms of how we actually approach these provider groups, it's, it's— I think when we first started the business, it was actually educating the market on voice AI agents. Like when we first started, it might have been too early, right? It was— no one else was really thinking about this in early 2023. And I think the landscape has now completely evolved where all of our customers and partners, they know voice AI agents really well. They understand, they have this burning need, then they're really eager to adopt, right? I think the big difference for us now is we're really overarching, as John mentioned, a Gentec platform for every part of the patient care navigation journey. That's really our huge durability and differentiator. It's like you've all experienced this, having to tell your story over and over and over and over again with the healthcare system. Like, why didn't you remember that? Like the patient, like you feel invisible as a patient, right? So really with our sort synapse model, which is now powered by over 190 million patient-facing interactions, super proprietary data that our agents are generating to feed back into our product and agents to make the next interaction more concierge and personalized. And then also the fact that every product talks to each other, right? If you engage with our voice AI agent inbound and you book your appointment through us, when we send you those patient intake forms for consent and everything, it's going to be 70% prefilled. And it may also recognize like, hey, you know, John is eligible for a colonoscopy. Colonoscopy, colonoscopy, colorectal screening. Let's get them to go through that. Right. And that's— I know. Congratulations. You know, make sure to take care of your health. Right. So like, you got to be really preventative with these things. Yeah. And then also be like, you know, instead of getting a paper bill, it's going to surface that payment right there to be like, you have this outstanding bill. Right. And then let's say on that first inbound call, you're like, you know, you will remember that you prefer Monday mornings. We'll remember what type of voice you like, what tone you like. For us, it might not be you know, we want the next call with the agent. It's not going to repeat itself over and over again. For a more elderly patient, it is going to proactively repeat their Medicaid number back to them, the address, how to get there. So this level of personalization per patient and really the kind of durability that we build across all of our products talking to each other where it's like, I'm never going to turn off iPhone because I have iMessage, right? Talk, you know, that's what we really want to build with patient journey memory to really create the best experience possible for our patients in our, in our practice.

What, what, uh, what flipped in the procurement process over the last few years? Because I mean, if, if we were doing this show and you're building in healthcare, you know, 5 years ago, you guys would be doing this round after like 12 years or something like that, and you'd probably have less revenue. You know, it just, it just was always like every healthcare founder would be like, it's an insane Your hands. And now that's clearly flipped because you guys are growing, accelerating super quickly. A bunch of other founders have been on the show saying that there's like such insane pull. It's just the magic of, of AI and it's real. Are there any other factors at play? How do you guys see it?

Yeah, it's really interesting. I'd say there's like two components of market and then of course our unique approach in terms of the market. If you talk to any of these provider groups, it's really challenging, more challenging than ever to run a business in healthcare, right? You're seeing revenue actually go down every year from reimbursements from insurance. Costs are going up because the cost of working with payers, the cost of administering healthcare, it's literally going up 20% year over year, right? So they're in one of the hardest businesses. Every single admin labor person they hire typically has a 40 to 50% turnover rate on average. Average, right, per year. So they're just in this really tough position as a business and as a market. And in the past 10, 12 years, if you talk to any of these provider groups, CEOs, they have not really seen any change to their technology stack. It's been pretty static. A lot of existing partners have not really innovated in the space because there hasn't really been much appetite or hunger for like AI, right, historically. And so with this technology, it's really mind-blowing. We work with groups across the entire country, over 200 customers, and we'll fly out to rural parts of Idaho. Thunder Moon. And they will literally hear our demo and be like, this is mind-blowing. This technology is going to change and transform my practice. Patients will no longer have to be on hold for 30 minutes. They can actually finally get access to care. Elementary school teachers, working from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. can actually like get access to care after, after their work.

Right.

So stuff like that, really heartwarming to hear. So yeah, that's been a really inflection point in the market. Sure.

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

You guys wear the cowboy hats normally or just for fundraising? For the show?

Yeah, we wear it at our board meetings, all hands, customer events.

We just had a huge customer event in Sonoma last week. We went all out. I love it.

I love it. I love it. It's the Asian cowboy.

It's very memorable. You know, it is.

It is. You got to be quirky. It's your edge. Yeah, it's your whole— Love it. Well, gentlemen, cheers. It's been an honor. How are you?

Have a good one. Cheers.

See you out there. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Consul. Consul builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. Our next guest is Elliot Pence from Dominion Dynamics. He's the founder and CEO. Welcome to the show. Hey guys.

Sorry, that's a special sound effect. It's very dramatic.

It's very dramatic, but we're very excited.

But I feel like it's fitting. It is fitting. It is fitting. Let's do it again.

Can you just like acknowledge that? Welcome to the show, Alex. Welcome to the show.

How are you doing? Love it. I'm great. It's hard to follow the Asian Cowboys though.

I know, tough act, tough act. Well, we'll hit the gong even harder for you. Yes. We'll make it up.

Tell us about yourself. Tell us about the company. Tell us about the round.

Yeah, for sure. So we just raised $100 million. Company is called Dominion Dynamics. It's focused on— we're building a Canadian Neoprime. Okay. So we connect autonomous systems. We're focused on domain awareness in the Arctic. All software or hardware as well? Software and hardware. We've built 10 things, 5 hardware, 5 different platforms, and we're about to build a big drone.

Why is that not crazy? Like, building one thing is hard. Building 10 things, 5 things like that, that feels like, like, you know, obviously $100 million Series A, it's great, but like, you know, isn't there value to focus? Why is this industry different?

No, look, the opportunity in Canada is not to focus. It's such a wide opportunity landscape. Sure. Canada used to have a very rich and deep defense tech history. Yeah, you know, you, you can track it back to Canadair and Bombardier and all these companies. First, first autonomous submarine, first, uh, two operational drones, first passenger jet. And then we basically went on a starvation diet. So there's talent in tech here, but we've not actually had a large prime for some time. So I think actually the, the, the opportunity is to basically to basically do a land grab, but to do it with software, not just kind of one specific thing. So like in the US, yeah, there's 970 companies that have been backed over the last 6 years. But in Canada, it's a G7 country without a defense prime. That's insane.

Yeah, that's crazy. Is the— in America, Palmer Luckey's talked about how the government does not want Anduril to be a monopoly. It can be a great business. Big business, but if it gets to be the only supplier of something, the government will say, look, we're going to give a contract to someone else because we want a diversity of supply chain.

Of course the government's not going to want to have a monopoly. That's not the point. Like, the point is have the best capability. Yeah, but it is likely that some of those companies will build the best capability, and if they build the best capability, they should have a monopoly.

Okay, how are you, how are you thinking about, uh, You guys feel uniquely, you know, situated to be able to dominate in with like Arctic capabilities. How big is the opportunity outside of Canada in your view?

Yeah. So what we want to build is a global company. We want it to be a Canadian company headquartered in Canada, majority owned, majority controlled, which it is. We think it's a huge opportunity. What we're really building is not just Arctic, right? The reason we're starting in the Arctic is it's the harshest operating environment in the world. But the other reason is because you have to architect solutions very differently. There's no comms. The hardware situation is insane because power doesn't work. The ground, what they call, breathes because of the tundra. So it like cracks and breaks. So runways don't work. If you're building drones, you've gotta go 5,000 kilometers. So like, it's basically like building for the moon. If you build for the moon, you will build massive moats because it's the hardest thing to do.

In terms of Canadian ownership, what does that look like when you go out to fundraise? I see Valor Equity Partners, Atreides, Bessemer— amazing funds. I think of them as American funds. Is— do you draw the line around G7 investors, or is there— is there a broader scope that you can think about? Or do you think about cap table construction one way or another?

100%. We talk about and think about cap table structure. We've been super intentional about who we bring in. So we wanted to have pension funds in. Sure. Canada has $2.5 trillion under management by the Maple Eight. So we brought two of those pension funds in. Exactly. BCI and Omris.

For the pensioners.

Let's give it up for the Canadian It's fantastic.

But you know, those, those funds like Valor and Trees Investment, they're all global funds, right? They have mandates to do global investing and we wanted the best of the best, so we went out and got the best of the best.

Very cool. Um, what, what have been the biggest breakthroughs since you were on the show last? I think it was January of this year, 5 months.

Well, we did a 5,500-kilometer snowmobile operation across the Northwest Passage with Aurinet, which is our, our kit, our backend. Um, yeah, yes, exactly, across the Northwest Passage. Wait, is that a snowmobile, a drone snowmobile, or you guys are, uh, like literally snowmobiles, dudes on snowmobiles for 3 months across that testing out the communications backend?

That's very cool. No gong that. We'll hit it again. We'll hit it again. Uh, tremendous, tremendous progress. Um, great to have you back on. Uh, and, uh, you're, you're, you're coming on at a good clip, so I, I, I'm confident that we'll see you again this year.

And you know the name of the, you know the name of the communications platform? Aura?

It's called AuraNet. Exactly. Wow. Powerful. AuraFarming.

It's good. I love it. Very on trend. Thank you so much for coming on the show. And happy Canada Day, guys.

Happy— wait, it's Canada Day?

It's Canada Day. We got to hit that gong again.

Wow.

For everyone who's listening, please text Jeremy Giffon, happy Canada Day. I'll give you his phone number right here.

It's 292— whoa. Wow. Canada into the round of 16. We're hoping to follow you. We're hoping to follow you guys in there.

So later today. Exactly. And thank you so much. Well, thanks guys.

Yeah, great to see you, Elliot. Cheers. Have a good one.

Let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify, founded in Canada, Canadian company. Shopify is a 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. Uh, good news, we gotta do Canada Day, Canada Day deep dive. I'm glad we got one Canadian on this show, but up next, Next, we have an Italian, Luca Ferrari from Bending Spoons, the co-founder and CEO. Luca, how are you doing? Welcome to the show.

Hey guys, nice to see you. Thank you for having me.

Thank you for coming back on such a great day. Great to have you back. How's it going? Where are you at mentally? Are you relieved? Are you excited?

What's it like? Just another day, Jon.

Just another day? I'm exhausted. Exhausted, okay. You know, I'm an extreme introvert and there's nothing worse for an extreme introvert to do a roadshow and then a media day.

Yeah, well, we appreciate it. We can just hang out and we'll keep this— we'll keep this casual. We'll pretend it's just the three of us catching up. Yeah. What— how is your approach overall? We had— when Klarna did their IPO, it was literally— they had a handful of people on the team. I think it was like sub-10 people. Yeah. They dropped into the stock exchange, they did the IPO, and they just— they left. Like, you know, the next day. Yeah. What's been your— what's been your approach overall?

Because it's a company building moment. It's a celebration. But also it can be exhausting to fly a whole bunch of people around the world if you want to do that.

I think we've done probably the opposite. We— NASDAQ told us that we broke a record by bringing over 500 people.

Pretty much everybody who could fly on a float noted. That's awesome. No, it's been wild.

I mean, look, we are a very competitive group, and we're already, if possible, even more motivated than we were before. But at the same time, it's good to pause for a second and acknowledge this milestone. It's not easy. So, you know, happy for it, but also just hungry to show that this is just the beginning. Yeah.

What was the one-liner that resonated on the roadshow most with bankers and investors who were trying to get their head around the company?

I mean, the financials. Okay. You start there. When you double the company pretty much every year for, for as long as I can remember, that's— that goes a long way, uh, getting people to, to like you. No, I mean, jokes aside, I think the— you have to ask the investors. Every person is different. In my opinion, what people liked about us is a combination of a technologically advanced platform, uh, where everything is highly integrated. We're pushing AI to its limits, which is obviously the promise for the future and how companies get to be run. And at the same time, a track record that shows a combination of we are willing to make aggressive moves, whether it's in acquisitions, monetization, but at the same time we invest just as aggressively and in a farsighted manner on product, having, you know, added a ton of features, brought innovation to product that's sometimes. I haven't seen it in a long time. So that combination I think is unusual. And the— and we see a huge pipeline of acquisitions out there. So I think that that was quite resonant with at least the best investors.

How crazy is this as a reason to be excited about what you're doing? A lot of the companies— there's a lot of fear around AI disrupting tech companies, but a lot of the companies in your portfolio have survived the mobile, mobile apocalypse and the cloud apocalypse. And so you have a number of organizations and brands that are just resistant to sudden disruption from the new hot thing in a way that a company that was started in the pre-ChatGPT era might not be quite equipped might still be in the hypergrowth, but then there's a newer thing, whereas a lot of your companies have maybe more resiliency built in just by virtue of the fact that they are maybe over 5, over 10 years old at this point. Is that realistic? Oh, absolutely.

I think the— I don't think we have any significant business that's— that hasn't been around for at least 15, 16 years. On the one hand, you know, they're not going to go to the moon, you know, which is bad. I prefer it to be the case. But on the other hand, yes, they've gone through so much and the customer base is so self-selected at this point. Yeah, it's a huge advantage. You, when you bet as a VC, for example, in a fast-growing company, of course that's exciting. But also you need to believe that growth will stay. That company typically is the, you know, N of 1 offering that product or that product in that way. So as competition comes up, you don't know what's going to happen. You haven't seen it happen before, but for AOL or Eventbrite or Vimeo, we have seen it all. Like, they've had— basically, they've lived in a perfect competition kind of environment for a decade plus. So plenty of clones, emulators of all kinds. So you kind of know what you get, and there's value in that for sure.

Yeah. Um, are you getting calls from VCs who are trying to offload shares or whole companies of zombie corns? There's an article in The Economist this week about zombie corns, companies that were valued at over $1 billion and have not raised an up round in years. What kind of deal flow is getting pushed your way? And then what are you doing with that deal flow? Is it interesting or not?

Yeah, look, we look at everything. It's like you got it. I mean, it's a particularly good time for a serial acquirer. There's a bit of dislocation, a fear, fear due to disruption from AI, which I think is a lot of truth to it. In many cases, it's a bit nuanced, but, um, and we can only do so. One of the disadvantages of our model where we almost rebuild some of these businesses from the ground up, we try to keep everything that's great and rebuild everything that's less great. It's— I mean, the good thing is I think it's much more challenging and interesting than going a little bit more shallow, and also it's delivered very high returns. But at the same time you can't do it a million times a year. It takes a lot of time, a lot of effort from a big team of engineers, designers, product managers, and so on and so forth. And so we have to be very selective. So yes, it's a good time with a lot of opportunities, but equally we can only do a few. So, uh, the key is, you know, listening to what's available, the opportunities, but also not get too excited, stay patient for the right one.

Yeah, more than 50 deals done.

Yeah, how much of an advantage is, is being public can actually give you in net new acquisitions. I imagine a lot of acquirers are going to be, you know, it's potentially a lot more compelling to get, you know, if they're going to sell to you to get, you know, depending on whatever the cash equity debt split is, to actually just have exposure to something that they feel like can compound while having access to liquidity.

Sure. I think— I mean, you may be right. We will see. Of course, it's, you know, day one. In that regard, so I don't have a track record. We chose to go public primarily to improve our access to debt. It turns out that the lenders really like lending to private— public companies, better regulated, more externally transparent, they like valuation, all things a lender loves. And historically, if you look at the capital we have deployed, it's been like 80% directionally from debt and like 15%, 20% free cash flows. So it's important for us to have access to that dollars and cheap debt if possible. And this should help on the margins a little bit. But yeah, I think you're right that we may find opportunities that would not have been available to us had we stayed private.

Do you think any of that new debt market access might unlock sort of like a white whale acquisition, some mega deal where you are taking down a company that fits the thesis but is much larger than anything you have done in the past?

Look, I would say I believe that a good strategy is predictable to some extent, and our predictable strategy is do 3, 5, 8 deals a year of relatively speaking, the same scale more or less, and it's going to grow as we expand. But, but yes, that's an upside. That's a cherry on the cake. That's, you know, I'm sure that in time something like that will happen and we'll try to move quickly and seize the opportunity. So, yeah, possible. Likely? No. Possible? Yes. I think if you look at this over enough, you know, long enough a period of time, it's almost guaranteed to happen before or later.

Yeah. What— oh, sorry. Jordi Hays.

Do you think, uh, how do you, how do you think about people's like nostalgia around software products in general? I feel like, uh, we were talking with Scott Galloway yesterday for his podcast. He was saying that he's quite excited about Bending Spoons specifically because he was like, they're great brands that people have like positive association with. And, uh, in fashion, everything that's what's old and uncool eventually becomes cool again, right? I would say like, you look at an example of, you know, one of the hottest brands in the world, Chrome Hearts, right? Has gone through periods where it wasn't the hottest thing, but then it, you know, and these things go in cycles. So like, I can imagine a world where 5 years from now, every Gen Z kid is like, oh, of course I'm using AOL. Like, it's like, it's like, you know, it's like vintage It's like cool and nostalgic and like the— and so, I can imagine like at some point, and it feels like software is going the way of fashion where it's like fashion, you know, it's very easy to make a new fashion brand, right? Like, it's very easy to go compete with a Gucci or a legacy brand, but there's some— there's just brand value is like a real thing. Do you see a potential where, where you see a reacceleration or renewed cultural relevancy in any of the brands, or is that not something you think about at all?

I would say it's possible. It's not something we would embed in a business case. We, we, we're kind of math, science and engineering people. We look at the numbers and try to make sure that we base our capital allocation on assumptions that we can be close to certain about. And I would say what you just described is plausible, but does it happen when it's— so again, you know, maybe we'll try to make these products better to the best of our abilities. And if that helps ignite some of that, we'll, you know, we'll be incredibly happy. But even if it does, our investment thesis does not hinge on it.

Yeah, I mean, it certainly could be true for Vimeo. The community there has always been very culturally different. And like anti-brain rot. You don't have a lot of like YouTube-style slop on there.

Yeah, I, I associate Vimeo with like quality filmmaking, and it's still right. Like when I think about my favorite surf movies growing up, they were always, always there. Snow, you know, snowboarding, all these different kind of niches I was into, like the quality was going there.

So, um, what, yeah, right.

By the way, on that one quickly, I, I, I agree, we some surprises in store for, for that community. There's— they've, I think, that they've been a bit frustrated over time, rightly or wrongly, but I can empathize with the direction premium has taken, which has been more like enterprise. And it makes sense, I mean, but we'll see whether we can do something for them that they like. I don't know if that will turn out to be a success, but yes, I do think there's Potential there for sure.

Yeah, a lot of people have fond memories. On AI, we've seen a lot of engineering organizations sort of like take out the biggest hammer possible.

Wait, are you talking about Advanced Italians or artificial intelligence? Artificial intelligence.

I know that you deploy a lot of Advanced Italians, but I want to know how you're deploying artificial intelligence. Obviously, your operating team is fantastic, but But I imagine that your operating team is also fantastic at making sure that you're not token maxing and overspending, that you're— if you are using a coding agent, you're using it judiciously. What have the learnings been? Have you been on as much of a roller coaster ride as some of the bigger tech companies? We've seen headlines out of Uber where they spent so much token maxing, they spent their whole budget, then they had to pull back. There's been these back and forths. What's your journey been like at Benning Spence? Yeah, totally.

So, but by the way, we have more people in the States than in Italy. I think because we're based in Italy, it's a little bit like, it's, it's, it's unusual. And so it's cool that in the Italians or whatnot, and I'm, I'm Italian, but yeah, anyway, we've got a bunch of Italians, that's true, but not just Italians. Sure.

Just as many Americans, just to be clear.

Um, in any case, uh, yeah, AI, I mean, almost nobody knows that my co-founders and I had an AI startup in 2010. Massive failure. Uh, and we raised $1 million, which at the time felt like a lot. Today it's basically, you know, like nothing.

No, that was a lot. So Demis in 2010 raised $2.3 million at a $5 cap. Yeah. So like, that's, and that's like the most elite AI scientists in the world. That's crazy.

At the time. Yeah. That was the market.

He did much better than we, than we did at the time on AI. I'm sure he's more competent on AI, but we, I mentioned it because it, it's certainly something my the founders and I have been passionate about and try to use as much as possible in the business. We've had it as part of our proprietary technologies for almost a decade. I think 2018, certainly we were using machine learning. Yeah. So, so yeah, we push it pretty hard. We, we actually don't have any limitations on using AI at the company. We encourage everybody to push the envelope there, but we have very limited cost. And the reason why we have very limited cost is that we have developed a ton of models in-house. It turns out that if you have very good people, you can build narrow purpose models that do one thing really well. They're pretty dumb in general, but they can do that one thing pretty well and they're very cheap. They're self-hosted, basically almost free, just a little. And then there are good open source models you can fine-tune, combine. Again, they may not be as good as the Frontier models, but if you use them intelligently, we have built our own AI orchestrator that will help us make sure that for each task we're using the models that are optimal in terms of cost, quality. We don't end up using the Frontier models for a whole lot. Just either the more complex stuff or supervision of more dumb models. And with that, we are pushing pretty hard on AI where last, you know, as per our disclosures, we are over 90% of our code being written by AI and pretty modest expenditures.

So we're pretty happy there. That's— yeah, that's fascinating. How do you see the footprint expanding for the company post-IP? IPO, you mentioned that you have a lot of employees in the United States. Do you expect to spin up more offices, go more regional, centralized, decentralized? What's the thesis there?

I think, well, I mean, the trend is one where we open more offices. And also, ultimately, our— basically, a key way we do well is by creating this core team of exceptional people, giving them a lot of responsibility, powerful tools, and a culture that helps them be a little bit better than otherwise be. And, uh, and sometimes we acquire companies that have failed to attract some of the best for a long time, not for anybody's fault. Like sometimes management teams are great. It's just that if the brand is not as appealing, you just don't attract the right applications. And so we, we, we, we, by injecting some of that talent, we help reinvigorate those organizations, uh, bring back that— we call it startup mode, where, you know, high talent density, more intensity, ambition, innovation. Basically, we look to hire as many great people as we can and from wherever they are. Historically, just out of simply where we were based and are based, it was like Milan, Italy, and then London, and now again the States and Madrid in Spain, Poland, anywhere we can find great people who are excited about what we do using tech to reinvent how businesses are run and take a lot of responsibility much earlier in their careers than would appear reasonable, I think that's us. Uh, so yeah, probably more locations, not fewer locations going forward. Makes sense.

What, uh, do you track average timelines from first conversation with a management team to, to close? Like, I imagine there's some companies that you've acquired where you're talking for, for years and they're not really ready yet, but then the moment comes and then you can move really quickly. And then others where it's like you have an opportunity to do a a deal in, you know, 6 weeks.

Yeah, we've seen both. I'm sure we track it. I'm not— I don't, I don't have the data off the top of my head, but we have had cases like that. And we want to be an excellent acquirer, like, like, like, ideally a 10 out of 10 reputation. We're, you know, super honest, super reliable, good price, fast. And, and it starts with establishing a good relationship with founders, owners, boards, um, uh, I'm actually— I think our ability to do that has surprised me in a way because we're so active that you could imagine— my assumption was selling to someone who's so active and rebuilds parts of your business can be a little bit more difficult than selling to a more passive investor. But it turns out a lot of founders see us as the preferred partner because number one, we never sell. So, you know exactly what you're getting into. It's Spanish spoons and it stays there for decades, forever, probably. Also, people appreciate that we invest for real in these products. They keep expanding and improving, and often founders see that as their legacy, and they like to know that technical people, product people will continue to pour love and effort into their babies. And I think we have a good history in that regard. And also, we're super flexible. So if, say, a founding team wants to to depart 2 weeks after closing because they feel that their time there is done and move on. They can do that. And many more financial acquirers would ask you to stay for 3 years and roll over equity. And it can be pretty difficult after, you know, you ran that business for 10 years, 15 years, and now you've got to stay there essentially taking direction. And so, yeah, so that's, you know, that's what we find they like. But also it starts with the with meeting and spending time and getting comfortable with each other much earlier than the transaction takes place. So, yes, absolutely, we've had cases where we've known each other for 2 years and then the company felt ready and we got it done.

There's so many companies that I would love for you to own, and I hope that you do in time, companies that are— you're now quite a bit bigger than in the public markets.

So, um, I have one last question. Is AI speeding up dealmaking specifically on research, spreading comps, getting to valuation, legal diligence? Are you seeing AI bleed into your dealmaking? A little bit.

It's not really a major area of efficiency for us because ultimately we only do 5, say 5 acquisitions a year, get like order of magnitude. So it's not really there that we unlock a lot of value. Where I think it's helping us tremendously is by enabling us to do more acquisitions and so scale the operational side of things after we close the transformations around these companies because that's really a bottleneck to growth. And we have seen major improvements there. We went from— the KPI we think ultimately is the best proxy for our productivity of that core team, we call them Spooners, is revenue per Spooner. And that went up from about $1 million in 2023 a $3 to roughly $4 million round raise.

Let's give it up for the Spooners.

That's fantastic. I love it. Um, so yeah, well, thank you so much.

What an incredible moment. I'm so happy for you and the— and all, all 500 of you and more. Yeah. Uh, uh, really, really too many incredible deals.

Have a great rest of the day, guys. Good luck. Great to see you. Congrats again. Let me tell you about big Ah, agents meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context. Did you see what Riley Walls shared? He shared a heat map of the most popular types of dogs in San Francisco. The city is dominated by chihuahuas. It's overrun by chihuahuas, apparently. I had no idea.

It's the capital of— explains chihuahua, apparently, a lot.

There's some Labrador retriever hot spots. There's a couple golden retrievers in the city. There's a little area where there's a lot of poodles. What do you guys think about pit bulls?

Are you pro pit bull?

Um, not my favorite.

Not around me. Not my favorite. Or anyone I love.

Uh, skill issue. Just learn to wrestle with the pit bull. Just exert your humanity over it and put it in its place.

Are you a big pit bull guy? You like pit bull? No, not a big pit bull guy. What about Mr. 305?

I like, I like a golden retriever. That's my, that's my dog. Even though I have— I don't mind them. I like Newfoundlands, but—

Bending Spoons opened at around $30, $29, $31 a share. It's now at $40. Nice little pop. Bill Gurley in shambles.

A very modest pop.

He only gets mad when it's like up 2x or 3x. 40% pop, not too bad. Not, not, not probably, probably we probably will not get a post from Bill Gurley about this one.

Luca is clearly just an absolute animal. Yes. Like, he's just like a guy who's just going to— he's got the blinders on. He's going to just keep executing the strategy. He's going to own every iconic American company in time, running them out of a castle. He's getting everything. He's clearly like, he's clearly like the Mag Seven. He's, he's clearly— he's clearly, he's clearly drooling over Snap. You know that every day he's just, is texting. No, no. Like, you up? Sell now? Question mark. No, but I mean, that's the kind of, that's the kind of like, I would say in the fullness of time, Spiegel's obviously happy running the business, but that to me would be like a white whale.

I don't think it's a white whale, but social networks and network effects businesses seem uniquely durable in the long term. And I wonder if that's where they'll get into next. A lot of these businesses have recurring subscriptions. They have great businesses. Some of them are enterprise, lots of stickiness in the revenue, but would be interesting to see them at the helm of a true social network, potentially even a growing one. Anyway, our next guest is in the waiting room. We have Nick Grossman from USV. He's a general partner, and he's here to break down the Rebel Alliance thesis. What's up, guys? How you doing? I'm doing great. How are you? So you're fighting against the Death Star. What— first, introduce yourself. Tell us a little bit about yourself, your general investing thesis, and then break down the Rebel Alliance thesis.

Yeah, you got it. It's great to be here. Um, yeah, I'm Nick. I'm a partner at Union Square Ventures. I've been at USV for about 15 years, and we've over that time been investing— overnight success, bingo— been investing up and down the stack and across, you know, moments in time when different sort of layers of technology have emerged and, you know, opened the door to lots of new stuff. And it's— I think if there's one thing that's consistent about the way we if you look at the world, it's like every sort of wave of technology is either kind of expansive or consolidating. And those moments where it starts to feel expansive are just incredible, right? So back in our history, the first one was like Web 2.0. You know, you had built the core internet and now you could build anything on top of it. The other one, you know, for us it was, you know, Twitter was probably like the big investment from that era. If you look at like the crypto era, USV also in like Tumblr and Etsy.

And like a bunch of other companies from that era. It was a great portfolio.

Yeah, that was back— so the firm was founded in 2004 by Fred Wilson and Brad Burnham. And the thesis back then was there's been this epic infrastructure build in the fiber and switches and routers, a first pass at building mainstream consumer apps, but like a big blowup with the dot-com pop. And the thesis in 2003, which was pretty contrarian, was there's going to be a big opportunity at the application layer. And there's going to be a moment, you know, it's time to build, basically. And that was pretty, you know, it wasn't the most popular view back then. I think it created an opening to make some really great investments in a lot of early, you know, um, application layer things. So we did Twitter, Tumblr, Etsy, SoundCloud, you know, Indeed, you know, a whole bunch from that era. And it was all about, you know, the, the tools are on the ground, so what can we build with them? And I think I think those moments when the tools are on the ground and it's time for people to build with them and anybody can build anything in any direction, I think those are the moments that have always felt the most exciting to us and that we've been looking for, you know, for 20-some-odd years.

Pros and cons of thesis-driven investing. Most, I would say, investors now are humble enough to be like, I just try to find the best possible founder and give them money.

The most common thesis I hear is this one, buy low, Buy low, sell high.

Yeah, that's also a good one. But I just feel like you guys have done so well trying to really crystallize your vision of the future and the opportunity in the present, and then investing and actually being like, we know there's a company that should be built here, and then taking the time to figure out what the right team is to go and attack that opportunity. But I'm sure there's the other side of it was sometimes you just get a little high on your own supply and back an opportunity that doesn't exist, and you forced it because you wanted it to exist. So, every good strategy has its downsides, but I'm curious—

Yeah, I would say that the two potential downsides of thesis-driven are you're wrong. That's the worst one. You're just like, you think something's going to happen, and it doesn't. That's happened to us. Don't get me wrong. And then the second The other flavor is like right idea, wrong team, or, you know, right idea too early, you know, or whatever. And like we've had our share of those too. And so I think, you know, we're a small fund. We don't need to play a coverage game. We don't need to play momentum. That's just not how we've operated. And so we're sort of set up to be able to pick our moments and take shots and, you know, have a point of view about what we think is going to happen. And hopefully if we're right, We're contrarian and right, you know, and we've been that way a bunch of times. And hopefully if we're wrong, you know, we limit, we limit the damage.

Yeah. On the losses.

Yeah. So take us through the Rebel Alliance. Who's in the alliance? Who's out of the alliance? Break it all down for us.

Yeah. So the Rebel Alliance, we just put this up on the USP blog last week. It's an idea that's been cooking for some time for us. And it's basically the idea that if you think about AI and now agentic AI, The opportunity is so much bigger than any one company and that there is a, a massive ecosystem exploding around these incredible magic core models. And there are layers and components and modules and we're just beginning to start to see all of those get built out at an ever increasing rate, especially now that model capability is so good. Yeah. And, and that means that we believe there are going to be generational companies built up and down the stack, not just, you know, and really the, you know, I don't think that OpenAI or Anthropic are the Death Star. I do think they are these really powerful companies with that, that have sort of a vertical, vertically integrated approach. And I think the meme in the market is like maybe, you know, Claude becomes the world's only employee and all value gets sucked into those companies. Our thesis, the Rebel Alliance thesis is that the opportunity is so big and so massive and so expansive and there are so many forces pushing for this expansive motion that there are going to be companies, you know, in all these components of the stack building around, including the models themselves, but also so many pieces around them. We're already starting to see it. We're making lots of investments around them. And to us, it feels like, you know, the beginning of the whole economy, but maybe the whole internet getting rewritten on the agentic stack and with an agentic approach. And so really, the idea is that this— what's happening is bigger, is so freaking big, and that the opportunity— it's like a great time to be building. It's a great time to be building for builders. And there's a lot of big companies are going to get built.

That's really the core thesis. No, I love the thesis. And we see it every day. On the show where someone's coming on, not just with a big fundraising announcement, but a ton of revenue traction and a ton of customer love. I'm interested in the down the stack feels maybe less contrarian to me just because I'll like, you see announcements from the big labs where they're using Salesforce or they're storing all their data in ClickHouse and, and, and, or even going deeper into the semis and the memory and energy, all of that feels really obvious. But the, the bigger meme from a year ago was like, are you going to get steamrolled by the next model? And there were some companies that were just sort of thin wrappers with some prompt engineering. But then you have companies like ElevenLabs and Suno and these specific— Midjourney is doing really well. There's so many companies that have gone and carved out different niches and done really well.

Yeah, Suno is one of my favorite examples. I love it because it's, it's, you know, clearly a massive opportunity, already a multibillion-dollar business. Millions of people love the product, and yet it's not a good fit for the labs to prioritize because the size of the prize is just like, you know, I don't— you know, Mikey's extremely ambitious, but like, you know, maybe it's a $20 billion business over time.

And I mean, the Gemini app has a make music button inside of it. And Suno has still carved out like this incredible niche. Anyway.

And I think there's two, there's two ideas, like just looking at example like Suno. Yeah. One is user experience, right? And I think as we cover this, we rewrite the world with AI, whether it's in media or industrials or robotics or health or whatever, these experiences are gonna need to be specific and tailored. And you know, they're, they're— maybe you could call them niches, but they're really big. And I think that all doesn't collapse into a single app. And then the other thing, or an experience, and the other thing that we're seeing from everybody we talk to building at the application layer, whatever you— however you describe the application layer, is model competition. There's so many good models today. And as we move, you know, as more things move into production, we start being aware of the tradeoffs between model capability and model cost, everybody who's building is thinking about how to build an abstraction layer to make those, those best tradeoffs to deliver the best experience and to have margins. If you're building a product like Suno, you know, you need to have margins. If you're an enterprise adopting this stuff, you're thinking about your token cost. And I think both of those, those sort of forces are, you know, are good for the Rebel Alliance. And at the end of the day, it's a core theme is competition among the model but it's not the only one.

All right, let's live workshop an idea that I have that I want someone, I want someone to build. Uh, I, over the weekend, I was, uh, messing around with, uh, in ChatGPT with the image model on some furniture ideas that I had. I managed to make some stuff that I think is cool. I would happily pay, like, for this, like, chair that I made, I'd happily pay a couple thousand dollars to get a very great version of this chair. And I was thinking, like, it'd be great if I could upload it and then have, like, some combination of, like, an Etsy or an Upwork style thing where furniture fabricators could say, I will make it for this price, here's the work that I've done, and basically, like, a marketplace to kind of manage that. Uh, theoretically, if I made it and it's great, then other people could just buy that product and the order would go to the fabricator, and maybe I could get a little bit of a cut. And I thought it was an interesting idea because It sort of like rides the tailwinds of like anybody can imagine and prompt a product into digital form and then like you need this network of people globally that can actually go make the products. I'm not sure if it's just like too small of a TAM, you know, like how many people really want to make furniture. But what's your immediate reaction?

Well, there was a company maybe a decade ago that did this for physical products. I'm blanking on the name right now, but, you know, this idea of invent your thing and make it, you know, from the 3D printing era to the, you know, furniture or other things, I think is even more possible now because part of what we have is the ability to design, you know, amazing things, you know, overnight. And I think where, kind of where you're going with this is it— this isn't really part of the Rebel Alliance idea, but it's another theme that we've been really focused on is services that plug into agentic experiences are, I think, with unique data or networks or sort of systems attached to them, right? So in this case, like product fabrication, distribution, so on and so forth, it's like, you know, these are durable types of networks that need to exist with a very different architecture that can plug into the agentic future. And so I think things like this are going to be successful. And then there's a question of like, at the end of the day, who owns the interface, who owns of distribution, what's the consumer experience for that? Does it all roll into a ChatGPT or a Claude or is it something else? Kind of a separate question, but I think another theme is durable networks as APIs into agentic experiences or MCPs or whatever. I think we're going to see tons and tons of those.

Should I pitch my idea? The agentic AI for doctor billing? No, no, definitely not.

Definitely not. Potentially for another time. For another time. For another time.

How are you?

Yeah, how are you? It's interesting. The— like, I still have some wariness around this, like, Rebel Alliance style plays because of the first generation of companies that were leveraging GPT models. They grew like crazy. And then it just was a matter of like building an interface and an interface is straightforward. How are you like— you clearly are overcoming that fear and are willing, are investing a lot against it. Part of it is like, I just feel like this dynamic now where hiring an agent is quite different than hire, just sign, using software and you just assume that agents are gonna get better. And one of the challenges is, it's like an agent that is generally intelligent, just like a human, you can kind of plug into an organization and it can start just doing things and you don't really care that much how it does things. And so I just feel like the, the process of like hiring agents for companies is going to be like quite a bit different than like the last generation of software where you had to build out this massive sales force and, you know, you're going to conferences and it's like, it's, it's, it's just a very different motion. And I think that like the growth of, of Claude Code specifically is like proof that like software has changed to some degree and you can get adoption of something at a speed that is entirely unprecedented. So I'm curious how you're thinking about like how, how just like the procurement and sales is going to change because like, again, we have, we have companies on every single day that have, that have grown revenue incredibly rapidly. They clearly are solving customer problems. You know, we had a healthcare agent company on today, started in 2023. It's a billion-dollar company now. But yeah, the question is like, are you still betting against— when you invest in these companies, are you just betting against general-purpose agent progress? Yeah, that's a really good question.

And I think one important idea here is we're not just talking about will there be other agents that compete with Claude or ChatGPT? Like, will people build sort of like personified agents and how will those get to market? I think that's one version of what agents look like. Another version of what agents look like is like cloud infrastructure, where every, you know, company that's building any system is going to have agents and the orchestration of hundreds or thousands of agents built into their underlying platform, whether that's an app or whether that's an enterprise or anything else. And so if you— I think part of the Rebel Alliance thesis for us is agents are moving from sort of people, you like personified people you hire to cloud infrastructure. Yeah. And when we look at how agents are getting deployed and orchestrated today, it's not just I'm hiring an agent and it's showing up in my Slack. It's like I'm programmatically spawning, you know, 50 agents, you know, to go sort of be part of whatever system I'm building. And so if you think of agents as infrastructure as opposed to agents as employees, I think that's where a lot of these forces come into play, where every company, every enterprise who's building in an agentic style is going to need model routing, model choice, orchestration, memory, some sort of harness. And there's different options at each of these as you're building up agentic systems. So that's really a big driver of this, is the move from agents as people to agentic systems that have all of these layers in place and have more of like a corporate— the wrong word— but like a more of a production vibe to them where they're going to get built by professionals who want to have control and who are going to want to lay them out in increasingly sophisticated ways. And so, so I feel deeply like, like very, very strong that that's happening. I see it everywhere. And I think a big— like a lot of the stuff that we're looking at right now in the agentic stack is like kind of low-level, like networking and identity and payments and all these like pieces you need in order to compose and orchestrate agents. We're moving from like agent as employee to agent as infrastructure. And, and I think that also is like a big driver of why we believe so much in the Rebel Alliance thesis.

Last question. Can you take me through the financials, what they might look like at a Rebel Alliance company versus a non-Rebel Rebel Alliance company. When I think about a lab, they might spend a billion dollars on a training run, amortize it over months, and there might be all these GPU commits, and, and they're spending money like an industrial company sometimes. Uh, if you're building Rebel Alliance company, does it look different? Is it all talent? Are you subsidizing tokens at some point? Is it cost of customer acquisition? What are you pattern matching to in terms of like the shape of the business? Are we doing 12 to 18 month runway here? Like, how are you thinking about deploying capital and watching that capital flow through the business at the early mid-stage of a company?

Yeah, it's good that you brought up like capital intensity, right? So I think because I think an idea here is there's this category of hyper capital intensive AI companies, which is the big labs. Yeah. And then And then there's kind of everything else maybe that's like less capital intensive. Yeah. You know, we have a portfolio company called Pluralis Research that does model training, but in a decentralized network using compute that's scattered around the internet. So you can still do training in a capital light way. I think that's possible. So I don't want to make it seem like all the models must be capital intensive in the form of a single company. But I think generally speaking, you're looking for things that are more capital light. A lot of the things in the middle, like harnesses and memory and, you know, identity and payments, I think a lot of that looks like kind of regular tech companies. And then anything that sits at the sort of user level that's passing through token spend, you know, there's a category of margin profile there that's, that's new in the AI era, right? You're either taking a loss on, on token spend passed through to the big labs, or you're like eking out margin by swapping out models. And so I do think there's like, actually, it's almost like this barbell of capital intensity where at the model layer, there's a lot of capital required. And at the application layer, there can be, if you're subsidizing a lot of token spend, certainly on a free tier or something like that. But there's a lot in the middle that I think has more of a traditional capital profile.

It's just all wildly different than Web2 where a dollar of revenue was usually a dollar of gross profit, basically. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not anymore. You might see 60% gross margins, you might see 20, you might see 90. It just depends on how the entrepreneur has positioned the business and how—

what— yeah, and like 20% gross margins for some application companies is like great.

Yeah, yeah, it might be negative 50% if they're growing really fast. Anyway, uh, thank you so much for taking the time. Really fun chat, and we'll talk to you.

Great to have you on. Yeah, my pleasure.

Have a good rest of your day, guys.

Thank you so much. Bye-bye.

Let me tell you about public investing for those that take it take it seriously. Stocks, options, bond, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. Our next guest is in the waiting room. We have Julian Honig from Ample. He's the co-founder and chief design officer. Julian, welcome to the show. Round of applause. Hi guys, we're very excited to have you. We very much enjoyed digging into the images of the new vehicle. Would love to—

I view you as an angel sent from heaven to make my dream motor vehicle.

You saw the Ferrari Luce and just snapped and said, there has to be a different way.

Enough. Enough. It's time to make something beautiful.

Actually, take us back. Tell us how you got here, a little bit of your history, and then some brief history on the company would be a great place to start.

Yeah. Well, first of all, thanks for having me. Super excited. Yes. How did it start? I mean, it started with a pretty simple conversation with with me and my friend José, who is the co-founder, one of the co-founders. And he has this beautiful hotel in Portugal, in Alentejo, called Barrocal. And it's really beautiful. And he's building a second one on the coast, directly on the coastline in the dunes. And he asked me, do you know of any good mobility solution or golf carts for my resort where everything is designed perfectly? And then, you know, I did some research before and said, I think there's nothing that really you know, fits your standard you have in the resort. And we said, well, let's for fun, let's do something on it, let's design something for you. And this little idea became reality because we realized if one hotel wants this, probably more hotels want it too. But also if you make it street legal, you open up a whole new customer base, right? And I lived in Pasadena, I lived in LA, so I You live in Pasadena, California?

Yes, I live there. I live there currently.

I was born there, raised. That's amazing. I mean, you're sure you know Arts Center? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I live very close there. And I sent this to a friend who lives also in that area, uh, because we've been talking— he's— we were talking about like, can you get a golf cart in this area? Probably not. I was asking ChatGPT like, how much trouble will I get in if I have a cart and he saw a golf cart and was like, I think it's just an unlicensed golf cart. I think somebody's just bending the rules. And then I sent him the AMBLE immediately because I was like, this is what we've been talking about. So I fully expect these to take over Pasadena. But anyway, sorry I interrupted you there.

No, no, no, no. But it's, you know, those are the LSV and you can, you can through the low speed vehicles, you can make it street legal in most states, almost all states. Yeah. But yeah, I know growing up there, I know the need and, you know, I've been many times in Florida, all parts of California, Texas. So I think the understanding a bit of the American market, I thought, oh, this could really work well because there's nothing really nice out there yet that is electric, open. And then we also said, well, you know, we don't— we just don't want to take a golf cart and make it pretty. It's like we really started from ground up, meaning we make it Slightly bigger, it's wider, has of course bigger wheels, has individual suspension. So not only the design but also the engineering. We spend a lot of time with engineering. One of our head engineers actually comes from Formula 1, so we really take it seriously to make something special.

No, I, you know, I was joking when you came on, but I totally agree. I've spent— I live in Malibu, like, so we're the perfect customers for you. I live in Malibu, John lives in Pasadena. I've seen every possible type of golf cart in every setting from commercial settings. I worked at a hotel, you know, a long time ago where I would drive these big, you know, bulky commercial golf carts to driving, you know, golf carts on golf courses to around the neighborhood. I've seen the ones that are street legal, the ones that are not, the ones that are, you know, gas-powered, the ones that are, you know, more like farm vehicles, things like that. So I've looked at the the full spectrum, and you guys really nailed, to me, all the different elements that matter. Specifically, I think a lot of vehicles in this category try to sell you on tech. I went through the buying process recently, and they're like, "Well, this has a smart system and the backup camera, and it's got full..." It's full speakers and it's got all these other things. And to me, I think just people are desperate for the best of modernity, but also the best of, you know, the '50s and the sort of like truly analog era. And I think that, and manufacturers just haven't like really listened to that feedback. And so, yeah, when I look at all the design decisions that you guys have made, it looks like it's going to be incredibly solid to drive, right? The wider base, the proper suspension, it'll feel better in corners over things like as simple as speed bumps. And then just the usability of it. Like, I don't want my outdoor vehicle to feel like a big computer. I just want it to feel like, I want it to feel like a classic, like something closer to a modern Moke or something like that.

So, uh, I mean, I, I, I think you, you absolutely— because what, what for us was the most important is of course the design, but then the comfort, ride comfort, also performance. It's not something, you know, you take to Pismo Beach and you, you go down the dunes, but it, it has quite some, some, some power, like 3 times more than the, you know, the average golf car, so it's quite more powerful. You can go 25° uphill with full load. So this is something, you know, so it's the comfort, the performance, the design. And in terms of gadgets and screens, we really intentionally said just the basic screen in the front that's really nicely designed, and then bring your own device. Like some of these, you know, some of these products, they have the screen, but after a year or sometimes already when it ships is old, right? It's old news. So we said instead of that, let's focus on having a nice USB-C port. You bring your phone and then you, you know, have— I mean, we all know this, right? You're in your car, you have a huge screen, and what do you do? You put your iPhone there on the screen and use Waze, right? Or Google Maps or whatever you use.

Can you take me through your design process? Does it start with pencil and paper? Do you start in Photoshop? Do you pull a mood board together? Do you use AI to generate something? Like, what is the process? Because I imagine it ends in something like CAD, but where does it start and how does it evolve? I'm just looking for my sketchbook. Yeah. Okay, sketchbook. You got it. Yeah.

I think, I think there's all for, for, I mean, I tell my son and I think all students, they should never stop sketching. I think sketching with pen and paper is still the most direct way of expressing ideas and the fastest. Okay, now with AI, you talk to your phone and the drawing comes out, but I think that's half the fun. So it starts with sketching ideas. And then fairly quickly, we went into 3D modeling, like into CAD. And what we did, I think what's very, you know, my experience before was Audi, I was 8 years at Audi, then a year at Lamborghini doing car design. So my background is really on the one hand, car design. On the other hand, I worked 10 years at Apple in Johnny's team. So I have bring both the product design but also the car design. Yeah, but yeah, but what we did, I think what's unusual, we built a driving prototype fairly quick in the process. Usually you make a lot of models like 1:1 scale models and we just went directly into a driving prototype.

It was pretty, pretty cool. What is the next 2 years like? What needs to happen to get to 2028 for deliveries? It feels extremely fast. It's amazing. At the same time, I'm not happy. I want it today. And so I'm— but I am interested. Is it supply chain? Is it— is it manpower? Is it regulatory? Is it all of the above? What does it actually take to bring a new vehicle to the market? Because I mean, every other company, it's 10 years. So 2 years is great. But what, what does the next 2 years look like?

So what we are in the process now, we are, I would say, 90% finished with engineering for manufacturing. What it means is basically we have this amazing prototype, but the last year we spent the full year of making this ready for mass production. Yeah. Which is the most difficult part because you have something you love. Then you have to factor in cost, you have to factor in visibility, the parts, the extra parts you want to order, the supply chain. So we are like 90% there to have that ready. Spending a few months, 2-3 months more to put it together. And then we produce, we start producing end of the year and we ship 2027, but only to hotels because as you said, the process of making this street legal takes another half a year. Intentionally start with clients like, you know, Amangiri and really the top clients for hospitality. And then we have—

It's a dream come true. We talk about Amangiri a lot. So, I mean, it's fantastic. Yeah. So do you have— it seems like there's a little bit of ambiguity in your mind about where the split between hospitality and personal sales will be in a few years. Are you starting to narrow the aperture there? Do you have a vision for where you want the company to be? Because it feels like with developing a great brand, interfacing with the user the first time they ride on it, it's at Almengiri, it's beautifully cared for, it's in this idyllic setting. They wind up buying one. They have very great brand aspirations. Do you want this to go into street vehicle, sedan, SUV? Do you want this to be 90% consumer sales eventually? Like, where does this go if it becomes a huge business?

I mean, it's interesting. We— I mean, hospitality is a great starting point, but we already see now after 3 days, we have already over 1,000 preorders. And a lot from the US.

So I like this.

Oh, this is the— I have to get one of those too.

Yeah, we have lots of sound effects.

We can get you one. Yeah, that's great. No, I think it's— I think there's going to be a big market here. I just— I know so many people that— and I guess I would say like I think maybe it's a smaller market, but I think you can get a very, very, very meaningful amount of it just because I know so many people that have spent this much money on a vehicle and gotten something that is just not special in any way.

The open air, not having the doors on, I was looking at getting Ferrari Luce and taking the doors off for a similar experience, but it's like 20 times the cost. And so this just makes so much more sense. It's a more rational purchase. And I think that's—

I think that the door is more expensive than our car.

Probably. I think every door is probably $50K on that car. Anyway, thank you so much, Jordi Hays.

Thank you so much for joining. We will be your strongest supporters. And you guys are welcome to come on anytime. And thank you to Riley for connecting us. This is fantastic.

Yeah, thanks so much for having me and looking Yeah, and hope to meet in person, maybe for the first deliveries.

Yeah, that'd be amazing.

We can go do a tour of our—

You can be the second car review on the show. The other one was a hypercar. The Zinger. Yeah, the Zinger, which is, I think, over $1 million. This is much more affordable. It's available at driveambl.com. You can go check it out if you're listening at home. And thank you so much for taking the time.

To come on the show. Great to hang, Julian.

Thank you so much. Talk to you soon. Cheers. Goodbye. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. And Jordi Hays, people were asking you to do a little bit of a, little bit of a spin for everyone. Show off the new merch you got there. I'll tell everyone about Codex. Just on the arms. 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, or just trying to, just trying to look good.

Kodak. We just got our first shipment of, I think, around 200 of one of our new merch products. Oh, okay, I know the one you're talking about. And that one is going to be available online. That's the one? No, no, no, no, no, not the one, not the one you're thinking. Okay, okay, okay. That one will also be available online. We have one, we have one that, uh, we have one that's a a little bit silly. It's groundbreaking. It's groundbreaking in the best way possible. It's a product that humanity has been trying to create for centuries. Yeah. And we did it. We did it. Uh, we did it. Uh, we had a breakthrough. We had a big breakthrough. It took a long time. Uh, but, uh, but yeah, no, the merch will finally be for sale and we will make the— it will be dropping in the chat. Oh yeah. First. Yeah, we're not exactly sure exactly when. Yeah, but we will give it to you guys first. And thank you for the patience. Yeah, but on that note, we'll see you tomorrow.

Leave us 5 stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter, tdpn.com. We'll see you tomorrow. Goodbye. We love you.