Saratoga Water, Amjad Masad, Guillermo Rauch, Lulu Cheng Meservey, Kian Sadeghi, Vercel and Replit

You're watching TVPN live. It is Monday, March 24, 2024. We are live from the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. This show starts now. We got a great show for you today, folks.

Thanks for saving me there, John.

How's your morning?

I wasn't quite sure. I was too focused on my routine this morning. I forgot to focus on the job at hand.

Yep.

Which is to do the show.

But I Woke up at 5:50. You woke up at 4. 4:50.

That's right.

There's a guy online who Woke up at 3:40.

He's doing 3:40. I mean, there's real alpha of your morning routine, guy. And you're just getting up. If that's your identity, just be the. Be the boss.

Be the final boss. If you're gonna film it, you gotta get up even earlier to talk to your cinematographer. Hey, can you get into the building, set up the cameras for every shot. But a fantastically viral strategic.

To start your day at midnight when, you know, the clock strikes, you know, 12:01. Just. Just get into it.

I've been saying that I've been waking up earlier and earlier to the point where some days I'll wake up at noon the day before.

Yeah.

Just to be super ready for the next day.

Yeah.

But we are, of course talking about Ashton hall, the viral influencer, fitness influencer, who has a bizarre morning routine where he dunks his fitness ice in ice water and rubs banana on his face. But respect for the hustle, what we.

Really care about is that he's moving markets.

He's moving markets and he's also moving views. He is pulled basically a billion views, become a celebrity overnight. He already had millions of followers on Instagram. It's now at 8.8. I'm sure if I open it up now, it's even higher. He posted. What's interesting is that this broke containment. So this video he's been posting on Instagram for years, this broke containment.

You've probably seen some of his other videos where he's running with the G wagon.

And it's always, always great, but this video was art. And so it broke out in a completely different way. It was actually not even posted by him on X, it was posted by Tips for Men, Fashion, Essentials, Luxury. And it has almost a billion views, 100,000 quote tweets, something like that. And it's fascinating the way it. It's structured just to be the most viral thing possible. I mean, he's obviously very muscular and jacked and Then you have this weird repeating, like, imagery of the Saratoga blue bottle of water that he loves. He dunks his face in ice.

Which we figured this out. It's not. It wasn't sponsored by Saratoga. So he was just appreciating.

He's just a fan of it.

Just appreciating business. Just wanting to put them on.

Yeah. There's a bunch of other funny things where as you dig into the video, there's just more and more Easter eggs. Like at 6am or something, he dives into the pool. But as he's walking up to the pool, you can see that there's a no diving sign. Did you see that one?

I didn't see that. I saw that. He was in the air for four minutes.

That was really funny too. So, like, the editing is genius. And clearly it's crazy because, like, the cinematographer and the editor on this is genuinely a generational talent in terms of social media.

You don't think it's him?

No, it's not him. He has a team.

Really?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He has a team of like three.

I figured he was just setting up the camera.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no. You can actually see the other videographer in there because he has a team of like three people. And in one of his Instagrams, I went on different than his dive. Yes. I went on a little deep dive. And he, and he said, like, if you want to be a successful online coach, he referenced Alex Hormozi and he said, you need to, you need to build a team. And of course his, his. The product that he sells is help you build that team to become the, the. The fitness coach or the online influencer. Right. This is like kind of like a meta level of like, he's the boss's boss.

He's the coach.

He's a, he's a course seller who helps you sell courses effectively. But, but he talks about you need to start by getting a social media team around you, a great person that can film you constantly so that you're posting every single day. Then you need a appointment booker who just schedules appointments with clients, like your leads. Then you need the closer who gets on with super high energy and is like, yes, like, like this is going to transform you. Like, get ready to put.

But that's not you. The closer is not you.

No, he's not involved. And then, and then they get them to download an app, and then the app says, here's where your workout routines are. Here's where your diets. Diet is. And then, yes, Ashton will get on a Zoom call with you, like, once, but, like, he's scaling his business out and so he can't possibly be on Zoom with, you know, 50,000 fitness clients, but they can watch his content and they can be in his program that he's overseeing as essentially the CEO of this training corporation, which is probably doing fantastically well. He says he hasn't made $10 million yet, but he is well into the seven figures, which.

So he's not building in public. He's sort of like partially he's talking about it.

I mean, you never really know what these guys, if they're lying. But I totally believe that he's making millions dollars. Like, I. I think there's no.

It would be impressive if he wasn't making millions. That very hard attention.

And he has deals. He has brand deals as well. I think he has a shoe deal already. And I wouldn't be surprised if Saratoga Water partners up with him as well, because he's done fantastically for that brand face of Saratoga. The news today is that the morning LMAO, the morning routine guy, really added 1 billion to the stock of the water he drinks. It's up 10% before hours. Saratoga is actually a private owned by another company. People are still buying it.

I'm just looking now. It's actually basically flat. I guess it popped out. It popped out of the gates.

It's not going to be Lindy, stick around. It is a very interesting question of how do you seize the moment on mega virality? He is not like the Hawk to a girl where he was unknown and then he went mega viral. He. He already has a machine to convert all this. Yeah. So I wouldn't be surprised if we see him do a whole host of interviews and podcast tour off of this. He already has millions of followers and a complete funnel with a team where he can capture and monetize. I think that was part of the problem with Hayley Welch. The hawk to a girl was that she became famous and then had to go do podcasts and then go and set up a podcast on her own and then set up a business around it and start making money from it. She wasn't equipped to capture all that attention and all that value immediately. And so that's why probably when she heard, hey, this crypto thing's interesting, she launched the coin. And then that went very poorly. So Lulu, who will be on the show later today, says she's sad to see the Saratoga X account sleep through this. Most posts Most recent posts are from 2022, and they're hashtag soup. You're missing the moment. Get back in the game. You have three more hours before this vanishes. Vanishes into the sands of Internet history. And they don't even have their most recent bottle design on there. It's rough.

Pretty amazing. You can get almost a billion views at this point with. For free.

Yep.

For your product.

Yep. So my question for Lulu, which we'll get into with her, is, does Saratoga actually need to do anything in this case? Like if. If case in point. Like the viral video of Ashton, the one that kicked all of this off, wasn't even posted by him. It wasn't even an example of him going direct. He posted on Instagram, Tips for Men, posted it on X, and that's the one that went viral. Doesn't matter. The value still accrues to him. Does Saratoga.

We need to go study the Tips for Men account because.

Oh, it's.

I don't know what the.

Because they've posted other stuff and they get like 10 likes. And then this one was like this.

Yeah, it's one of those accounts.

Yeah, it's just like. It's kind of just like slop cool images sometimes some interesting stuff, but, you know, it's. It's very high volatility because it's just a. An anonymous, like, out feed the algorithm account. So my question for Lulu is, like, what do we want to see exactly? Let's try and concretize that more. Because if Saratoga just came out and we're like. We're like, oh, yeah, like, this is cool. Like, you know, maybe that gets some virality, but it's not going to be a billion views. They've already got the billion views in their product. They probably captured most of the value. Like, what do we really want to see from them? This is a company that's been in business since 1872. Let's remember, it's not like the founder is going to come on and be.

Like, oh, yeah, like, this is a whole other. This is a whole other story. But at one point, one of my favorite bottled water brands is Mountain Valley.

Yeah.

Popular. It's the green bottle.

Sure.

I looked. They, like, at one point, like, filed for an IPO or something like that. Then they didn't go public. So I looked at some of their numbers, and however bad you thought the business of selling bottled water is, it's worse. Like, they. They at one point, with one of their SKUs, did 10 million of revenue. 10 million, like, and they had $100,000 in margin on it. It's like just, just don't do it. Just stop yourself. Just stop, stop that business activity. You know, there's got to be like better ways to make 100k.

But anyway, speaking of tips for men, I got a tip for men who made sleep. That's right, nights that fuel your best days turn any bed into the ultimate sleeping experience. If you're trying to wake up at 4, 4am, 3am, 2am, 1am you're gonna need sleep. It'll help you wake up earlier and get on your.

I actually did wake up on my 8 sleep at 3am this morning. I assumed it was time to wake up. I checked the clock, I'm like, ah, I gotta go back to bed at least for an hour and a half.

But I'm glad you were up early because you got to experience the stock market open which was fantastic. Let's hear it for the stock market folks.

Let's hear it.

It's fantastic. A massive rally. Stocks are up. The dow gains around 500 points on tariff optimism. This is from the Wall Street Journal. Import investors are welcoming the latest pivot on tariffs. With the US set to limit the range of import levies it introduces next week. US stock benchmarks started the week solidly higher. The S and P inched up last week snapping a four week losing streak partly driven by uncertainty caused by President.

Yeah.

And many policy.

Many people are saying that this is related to tariffs but you know, on the other side of this it is very possible that the market is reacting to Ashton's routine going viral. And you can imagine if everybody just started, you know, started consuming products at 3:45am versus waiting until it would be.

A big boost to consumer adoption.

Yeah, just a big.

And consumer confidence for consumer.

Consumer confidence, overall spending.

It is hilarious watching his routine and being like this guy has been up for five hours and he still hasn't started work. It's like so much time before I.

Was thinking I got very Tim Ferriss coded in college and I would do the whole like wake up, meditate, breath, work, journal. And then I was like what actually makes me feel better about my life is to just get the things that are important done and be productive and yes, be active. But the whole like hour and a half like morning routine just to start your day. I'm much more of the mindset now. I just like to get up and start.

Yeah, he's probably taking it a little bit too far but I do think there is some truth in there. He actually laid out his reasoning for waking up so early and he said like you should be up from four to eight, you will be unbothered, there'll be no one else bothering you, so you can really get deep work done. Which is probably true whether or not it's just this crazy morning routine. But even if you're just answering emails, it's probably productive. And he was saying that you will be self selecting your, you'll be selecting yourself out of the, the you know, 10pm to 2am crowd which is usually filled with drinking and partying and all these things that kind of just set you back both physically and mentally. So I think there's some truth in what he's saying and if you follow his protocol, I mean, yeah, it's going to be a little silly rubbing banana all over your face, but you'll probably be, you know, closer to higher performance than the doing the opposite of what he's doing. Right.

I think my point of view on it is that like it seems like willpower is one of those things that the more willpower you use, the more that you get. But it's almost, it's maybe not a perfect rule because if you spent all your willpower in the morning like hammering through this like multi step routine and then you're like, you get to the email and you're like actually doing my email is a lot less fun than like jumping in the cold pool. So maybe you should just start and do the stuff that takes a lot of willpower and then do the jump in the pool in the afternoon. Right.

Yep. I mean he probably could get 90% of his workout done in like an hour instead of five. Yeah, but I mean he's a fitness guy. Like he needs to be doing fitness.

Yeah. And I also respect his game of, of what is the most viral thing that I could do from 3:45 to then.

It's fantastic. It's, it really is art and I think it's, it's just shows you how extreme the power law can be on social media.

I think that we should spend this week and make the TV version of it. I like roll it out by Friday.

Well, back to tariffs, the important thing. Trump said he would impose tariffs to match those aimed at the US by trading partners. The planned reciprocal action looks set to be more targeted than originally thought. The Wall Street Journal reported the administration has narrowed its focus to about 15% of nations currently running persistent trade imbalances with the U.S. treasury Secretary Scott Bessant calls this the Dirty 15. The sectoral tariffs are now unlikely to be announced on April 2. Though the measures under consideration still amount to a shock to world trade, they fall short of the worst case economic scenarios investors had been girding for. And so another classic economic story where the initial headline news is very bad and then pull back and then you get to something that's a little bit more reasonable. So hopefully it shakes out. Hopefully all of the companies that we're rooting for get through it and are able to make their products in safe places and deliver them to consumers affordably.

That's right.

Well, if you're looking to trade the tariff news or get in on the action, head over to or hedge.com can do it all investing for those who take it seriously. Multi asset investing industry leading yields trusted buy millions. Go to public.com and sign up.

Do it anyway.

23Andme filed for blank bankruptcy.

Yep.

We got some news from Delian friend of the show. He says out with the old, in with the new. Keon over at Nucleus is building the new 23andMe and the old 23andMe has filed for bankruptcy. He Keon says Blockbuster has collapsed. It's time for Netflix to rise. The number one greatest detail that is currently being missed from the story is the chart below. When 23andMe launched in 2017, it cost about $10 million to read all of someone's DNA, a whole genome test. So 23andMe, hence the technology 23 used, missed millions of genetic markers that could dramatically shape someone's health and future family. 23andMe use something called shotgun sequencing. They basically blast all the DNA away and use and use a bunch of averages to guess what your genome's like. They don't actually read out a single strand of DNA.

And so now which taking the shotgun approach to your health sounds a little bit bad when you say it out loud, John.

Yep.

So we're glad. Take the sniper approach.

Yes. Yes. And so now this whole genome test cost a few hundred dollars. We can now finally bring to everyone a true DNA health test, family planning, disease risk. And he starts shilling for his company, which we love. So good luck to you. Kian. Let's read from the co founder, Annie Ann Wojcicki. She says the 23andMe special committee released news today indicating their plan to take the company through chapter 11. While I'm disappointed that we we have come to this conclusion and my bid was rejected, I am supportive of the company and intend to be a bidder. I have resigned as the CEO of the company so I can be in the best position to pursue the company as an independent bidder. She wants it back. I love it. 19 years ago, when I co founded 23andMe, the direct consumer industry did not exist and most people had no idea they would ever want to see their genome. So much has changed. There's now thriving direct to consumer industry. Over 15 million people have been 23andMe customers. These customers are continuing to learn about their family relationships and how to optimize their health through thanks to the incredible team of individuals at 23andMe. And this is a pretty interesting bidding process. So lots of people came out in support of what you did.

Didn't Keon submit an unsolicited sort of bid?

He was talking about bidding months ago. We'll see what actually happens. I don't think he's quite at the scale where he could just buy this off of his own balance sheet, but, you know, he is a growing company and there's always a chance of a bigger round and got a bunch of.

Big investors behind it.

It's possible. Balaji came out in support. Celine from Loyal came in support, talking about how inspiring the leadership at 23andMe has been. And it really was a formative company in the, you know, 2010s, basically. What's interesting is that Willmanidas has been beating this drum for a long time about, hey, 23andMe has a lot of genetic data. Let's not let this fall into the hands of an adversary country. So, yeah, I'm sure there will be a lot of questions about who buys this and where the data goes. And if you're. If you have 20, if you did, 23andMe, maybe like 15 years ago is like a Christmas present. Like, you might want to export that data and then delete your account and make sure that they remove it from their servers just so that your. Your data is not up for sale at some point. I don't know. It's not health advice, but it seems like a reasonable thing to do. And I do believe that if you ask them to delete your genome, well, that is the.

I would imagine that the core asset value of the business is the genetic data of the 15 million people that have used it. Or.

I don't even know. I don't think so. I mean, I think your asset is really just like getting people to come pay 100 bucks for something.

PE Fund is saying, you know, look, we can buy this.

No, I don't think PE funds are thinking that. I think maybe some venture investors might be thinking that in terms of, let's train a Custom ll. I think Kion is thinking that, but I don't think private equity is thinking that. I think private equity is thinking, okay, it has this much revenue. People kind of like, there's a thousand customers that come in every week and buy this thing. That's 100 bucks. And here, and here's the profit margins. Can we strip out any of the costs? Can we actually make this work? I don't think people are thinking about this trove of genetic data because it's very hard to monetize at this point. It's not like, okay, Reddit is for sale and you can just take the Reddit data and immediately train an LLM and boom.

No, there's going to be so much scrutiny on this acquisition and who buys it, what they intend to do with it. There's millions of Americans and I guess people globally that are going to be, have, have, you know, want to have a say and what kind of happens.

So, and so the Wall street journal reports that 23andMe said that there will be no changes to how it stores, manages and protects customer Data. Any buyer of 23andMe will be required to comply with applicable law with respect to the treatment of customer data. And then they immediately move on to the next segment in this, in this Wall Street Journal article, how do I delete my 23andMe account data? But saying, and then it's very clear. It's like, log into your account, go to the Settings section, click delete data, permanently delete data. So you can go do that if you want. Anyway. What will happen to the genetic data in a bankruptcy sale? Certainly in certain bankruptcy cases, a judge can appoint a consumer privacy ombudsman on Buds Midden who makes a recommendation on whether a bankrupt company should be allowed to. Should be allowed to sell consumers private information. This happened when lab testing startup Youbiom filed for bankruptcy in 2019. The court appointed one who ultimately recommended approval of the sale of personal data. So watch out, might get your data sold anyway. Did you have something else to say?

Yeah, I was just going to highlight that it seems like a very real possibility. Yeah, I think that Ann would have come out and said there is no scenario in which a company buys 23andMe to then sell your data to other companies. She would have been very explicit about that. So the fact that she's not being explicit about that and then they're highlighting this. You buy them.

So they did sell the data case.

Where they did sell the data. Yep, I would, I would just, I think the safe thing to do is assume your genetic data will be sold to the highest bidder.

Yeah. And so if you're. If you're particularly jacked and have great genetics and great muscle insertions, you should go and put your data on 23andMe so it leaks out and then we can create more super soldiers.

That's right.

That's. That's my recommendation.

Huge alpha there. It's kind of like training an LLM. You want to put out a lot of content online.

Exactly.

Put your genetic data in 23andMe.

Yep.

Do whatever. Go into debt if you have to.

Well, if you don't want to go bankrupt, what should you do? Jordy?

Run on ramp.

Ramp.com time is money save. Both easy to use, corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Don't go bankrupt, people. Manage your expenses, manage your finances. Get on ramp. It's that easy. Anyway, time is money to move on to the. The drama that's tearing up the timeline. Tearing up the timeline was really in turmoil this weekend. We got a post from Nico over at Default. He says this is like Kendrick versus Drake for people who know React. And it's because Amjad, who's coming on the show, is beefing with Guillermo from Vercel, who's also coming on the show. And we will try and take you through a little bit of this back and forth. And I just lost power to my.

John needs a new battery. Yeah. So this. You've got new batteries here, right? You're good. Yeah. So this was tearing up the timeline over the weekend. We also tried to get the third. Third party we did.

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince, you're invited on the show. Please come on. If not today, maybe later this week. But Amjad took some shots at Vercel. So basically we should start by setting the table with exactly what's happening here. It all started because there was a vulnerability found in Vercel. And so Vercel is a web hosting service for Next JS apps, which is an open source React framework that they maintain. And so research suggests that Vercel faced criticism for unclear communications about the vulnerability. The drama centers around a critical vulnerability. CVE2025 29927 in next JS, disclosed around March 22. That's two days ago. Came out on a Saturday. And this allowed attackers to bypass middleware authorization checks. This affected versions of Next JS using middleware with NextStart and output standalone. But applications hosted on Vercel, Netlify and Cloudflare were not as were stated, as not affected. And so Vercel CEO Guillermo Rowe acknowledged communication missteps, especially with key industry partners, and committed to improving processes. Cloudflare, led by Matthew Prince, released a tool to migrate product projects from Vercel to Cloudflare Savage, possibly to capitalize on the incident. So he's saying, I think a little.

Bit more than possible, beating them when.

They'Re down, saying, hey, there's a vulnerability. Get out while you can. Replit under Amjad Massad highlighted their proactive scanning and patching of affected applications, while expressing a preference for more open frameworks over Next js. And then of course, there was a back and forth there because Replit uses Next JS for their website. And so it's like, how could you possibly come for us when you're using our open source framework? And so public exchanges on X saw Guillermo accusing Matthew at Cloudflare of using, quote, childlike tactics and memes suggesting competitive tension. The CEO of Cloudflare often refers to Guillermo as the Triangle Boy or something like that because I guess the logo for Vercel is a triangle. It's actually the aesthetics of Vercel are fantastic. I think we were talking about this earlier. The design's fantastic. An ex post by Anselm IO noted attacks from Cloudflare and Replit on Vercel as being in bad taste, indicating a broader controversy. Additionally, there was a mention of a significant customer switching from another company to Vercel, potentially heightening the rivalry. And so we can go into a little bit about the history here. And I thought it might be good to give a little bit of an overview of Vercel and then repl it and then Cloudflare.

Let's do it.

Tee up our guest, which we'll be joining in 20 minutes. So let's kick it off with Vercel, founded in 2015.

Yeah. One other thing to highlight. There was a post that you had flagged here from this guy. Do you know how to say this guy's name? George Lee Gurgley Ollerzo. I'm sorry, I tried to say it right. John John made no effort.

It looks like Gurgly, but is that Gurgly?

Gurgly or rose up to recently, if a vendor had an outage or security issue, their competitors would purposely not take advantage of this, would not badmouth the vendor or tell customers to switch, at least publicly. Feels like this is changing. Ripple it and Cloudflare are both doing this following the Next JS cve.

Yep.

And yeah, so anyways, I was Talking.

To a friend and he said open source and security fights always seem to lead to no winners and everyone looking worse.

Yeah, one, one thing that I feel like is potentially broadly happening in tech is when, when, when there was so much Internet to build and there was so many sort of like greenfield opportunities, it was very easy to have this sort of positive sum mindset of there's plenty of market. We're just going after these sort of legacy incumbents, we're creating new markets and then when you get into this sort of hyper competitive dynamic where there's a bunch of different substitutes. Yeah. Then you get like rippling deal issues. Right. Where it's like, yeah, we are going to spy and like try to steal customers, you know, that our competitors getting. So I feel like this is just the evolution of software broadly where in other industries if a competitor has an issue, their competitors will try to highlight it and use it to their advantage. That's just business, right?

Yep. And it is a little bit. It's not necessarily winner take all, but it is kind of zero sum in the sense that like you're either on Cloudflare or Vercel and in many ways there's been this kind of upgrading process where maybe, I mean, the story I think we'll get into is you prototype and build like, kind of almost like a Vibe code, an app on Replit, then you might take it a little bit more seriously and deploy something on Vercel, which is going to be very fast and we'll talk about some of their clients. But Mr. Beast famously did a merch drop on Vercel, drove hundreds of millions of hits very quickly. Vercel was able to manage it, but Vercel is on top of AWS and can be very expensive at scale. And so Cloudflare might be the cheaper option when you go a little bit more professional. And so they, they play in similar markets, but they're all at different tiers and, and so they, they like to chirp at each other, especially with the coming wave of like AI and Vibe coding and even less infrastructure, more abstraction. It's, it's. They clearly are all coming for each other's markets. And so over at wap, Sharkey says the Vercel team has been a great partner to WAP Engineering. They are always available to debug and solve our complex critical issues. Recently we've hopped on several calls with our lead engineers. They all care deeply about what they're building, excited for the future of Next. And Paul Graham came out in support of Vercel. Guillermo said, One of our main values at Vercel iterate to greatness. We're constantly learning, adapting and improving. We have an insatiable appetite for feedback. The job is never finished. Keep your asks and complaints coming. We're listening. And PG says a sign of, a sign of a company still run by the founder. What hired CEO would solicit complaints? And so I think, I think Vercel is doing a pretty good job of managing this, but it's getting, it's getting a little nasty on the timeline because people are going back and forth anyway. Let's give a little background on vercel. Founded in 2015, Guillermo Rao. Oh he created socket IO. I remember this socket IO was a, what was it? Web sockets framework for doing like communication in the browser in real time. So you open a socket for my computer directly to yours. So instead of, instead of going through a server and kind of round tripping, I can communicate with you directly. Great for chat apps, great for video and anything where two people are communicating directly. Lots of cool web apps came out of that. Around this time, 2012, 2015 era, he founds Zeit, which was the precursor to Vercel. With co founders, the mission was to simplify global cloud deployments and streamline developer workflows. So at the time, you know, you go to AWS and you have your application. When you open up AWS, you see a slate of like 75 different products that AWS has. They have databases, servers, cloud storage, S3, like long term storage, cold storage, hot storage, like all these different things and you have to decide what you need to build your app. And so it's, it's an infrastructure as a service infrastructure, first product. Now they do have Vercel competitors. They have Heroku, which is kind of a Vercel competitor in the sense that.

Yeah, to be clear, it feels like, I mean, Vercel ate Heroku's lunch.

There was definitely.

There was an era where I feel like every White Y Combinator company was on Heroku.

I built on Heroku, it was great.

And then it was okay.

Everybody's building on For Sale and basically it's a more expensive option, but it allows you to come product first. I just wrote the code and I want you to handle the scaling and I'm willing to pay hand over fist for it. It'd probably be a lot cheaper to go direct and it's even cheaper to go below aws. At a certain point you wind up like, you know, these big LLM foundation model companies are building their own Data centers right now, they're not renting those from AWS because you get. You save money as you go down the abstraction layer, but you lose flexibility. And so early Product launches in 2016, they launched now a one command development service for static sites and Node JS apps. In 2016, October, they released next JS 1.0, which was an open source React framework for server side rendering and static sites. Now React, there was a whole battle in JavaScript frameworks around this time. I don't know if you remember this, but like jQuery was like the popular JavaScript framework. People were debating should we use jQuery or vanilla JS? And then the JS frameworks got like more and more bloated. Google came out with this great one called Angular, which was. It had basically the model view controller. Like you could basically say on my front end, I have an idea of data like I have on our website. You have all of our sponsors listed there and there's like a row for ramp and a row for bezel and you pull those in and then as you're dynamically changing them, the front end is updating. Angular was really cool. It allowed you to. You had to learn it, but it was pretty performant. And then Facebook came out with React and just like ate their lunch and Angular went through the second version, they came out with a new version. It was much more complicated to use, in my opinion. And so React really took off. Next JS is a framework for React, so they're layering on top here. And they wound up building an ecosystem around immutable deployments, preview environments and serverless architecture. So the idea that you don't need to think about what's happening on the back end and if a million people show up or a thousand people show up, Vercel will just send you a bill that scales. But you don't actually have to go in and say, okay, I need 100 servers today instead of one. That's the whole pitch. And so in 2020, they rebrand to Vercel and they wanted to reflect a broader focus on developing preview and shipping. They retain the triangular logo while adopting a name that suggests versatility, acceleration, excellence.

I gotta say, Vercel's website is the fastest site in the world. It is hilariously quick. It puts every other site to shame.

It's really great.

They're obviously just like flexing the power of their product, but go to vercel.com and just click around. It's almost addicting.

When I figured out like CDNs and you can basically build the entire app and then deploy it onto a CDN so that when someone hits your website for the first time, they're not pulling it from your server. On AWS in Virginia, they're pulling it from the local server that's just like a couple blocks away from them and it's much faster. I was really hooked on it. But at the time, if you wanted to deploy your whole site to Cloud front, which is AWS's product, or Cloudflare, which we'll talk about later, it was a lot of work. You had to bake everything down into HTML and make sure it was served just like a single file and there were no server calls and it was very difficult, but it was a magical experience. When you click on the link and it just loads immediately. It's amazing. Let's go through some funding milestones. Vercel does a Series A, so they were kind of grinding for like five years doing this open source stuff.

This is a 10 year old company.

10 year old company. But in 2020, things start working. They rebrand, they raised $21 million from Excel. And Nat Friedman, what do you know, he's in there early, of course. GitHub, classic goat series B, they get 40 million from Google Ventures.

Series C was a, that was. That A was a Covid round too.

Yeah. Oh yeah, yeah. I mean, maybe announced maybe.

I'm saying if it was announced in April, it was getting done.

March maybe.

Yeah.

Well, in Series Series C, June 2021, $100 million at $1.1 billion valuation. Series D, just six months later, they get 150 million from GGV Capital. The valuation goes up to 2.5 billion. And then Series E just last May, 250 million from, from, from Excel Co. Valued at 3.25 billion. And they hit over $100 million in ARR. And they have over a million monthly next JS users. And so we can go through some of their technology. They've, you know, they've built their whole, their whole game plan is build Next JS into the best REACT front end framework that everyone kind of needs to use. Now. This is a cut down that, that is a controversial statement. There's a lot of Next JS haters out there that say, hey, you should just be writing react. Why are you, why are you messing around with Next js? It's going to lock you in a box. And then there's a lot of people that might say, hey, you could use Next js, but why don't you just host it on abs. You know, just figure it out, figure out the, the actual implementation. And so they also launched the V0 tool for generating UI components. They wound up partnering with AWS to bring in some AI features which we'll need to talk about to Guillermo about. And in January 2025 they acquired Tremor, a REACT component library for data dashboards. And so they've, you know, they've built their team, they've made some acquisitions, they've done some partnerships and now they have a pretty diverse list of customers. Airbnb, GitHub, Uber, Nike, Washington Post, Under Armour Fanatics, hashicorp, century, autho, OpenAI, perplexity, chick fil, a reduced build time from 25 minutes to 5 seconds.

Wow.

Love it. You love to see it. Wow. And Stripe developed a viral Black Friday promotional site in just 19 days. You'll love to see it. And MrBeast, as we mentioned, also absolute dogs.

Yeah, I think most of the sites that I've been involved with building over the last few years were Vercell.

Yeah.

Based.

No, of course, because you want to just get your product out quickly, worry about the scaling later. And at the low end, optimizing your infrastructure is just not a key cost. Like the server bill is going to be so much lower than what you spend on designers or implementation. So you should just be able to, to not really worry about optimizing your infrastructure, your servers. And so, so that's, so that's kind of where Vercel is. I'm very interested to hear where Guillermo is planning to take the company because now they're, they're talking about, well, we're going to host anthropic APIs, we're going to host LLMs at the edge and deploy and scale those for you. So you should in theory be able to have a front end website that has an interaction with an LLM and it's not needing to go call back to some anthropic server. Because one of the most time consuming things, if you're wrapping One of these APIs, if you're an API, if you're a wrapper is okay, I take the user's request. The user said, you know, write me a funny joke. I take it to my server and then I take from my server over to OpenAI server and then I get the response from OpenAI back to my server, back to the client. And that's, that's just extra round trips. And Vercel is all about speed and you can't have that. It's unacceptable.

That's Right, well let's.

Should we move on to a company that's been going even longer? I guess, or I mean I guess the story has been going on for longer. This is Replit. They were officially founded in 2016, basically the same year as Vercel. Very different product approach. But Amjad Massad has been in the development technology world for years. In 2019 he wanted to build a browser based coding environment, a Google Docs for coding. He envisions a Repl which is a read, evaluate, print loop running entirely in the browser. Normally you have to open up the terminal, get install Python, but what if you could just do all this in the web? It would enable you to share these and then obviously like add a bunch of features over time. So he released an open Source version in 2011 called JS REPL to allow interactive coding in multiple languages. Brought some people on the team, brought some design stuff and then he worked for companies like Code Academy and Facebook. He built development tools there. Then JS Repl used used to power in browser tutorials at Udacity and Codecademy proving the concept's value. So if you go to Code Academy and you were learning Python or learning JavaScript, you would be able to write the JavaScript and then also evaluate it and run it in the browser, which was very fun and it definitely helped people learn this stuff. And so the platform grew to over 100,000 users, primarily students and staff, self taught coders. He founds replit in 2016 with some co founders. Initially bootstrapped with personal savings and early community traction. They received seed investment from Bloomberg Beta and initially targets both the education market, coding classes and hobbyist developers. And so Replit has always been about like democratizing programming, much less about, hey, let's abstract away the complexities of AWS infrastructure. It is abstracting away complexities, but it's taking a much more product focused approach. And, and that's led to, you know, a lot of, a lot of fans, basically a lot of like solo developers, indie developers have really come out in support of Replit throughout the years. PG has been a big supporter. And so in 2017 it's interesting, you.

Know, both these companies felt like they exploded onto the scene in that 2020 era.

Totally.

They actually had been toiling away for almost more than a decade before that. So it was like these sort of like ten year overnight successes.

I mean he didn't get into YC until winter 2018, but then once he was in YC he quickly closed a four and a half million dollar seed Round from Andreessen. They surpassed a million registered users and developers started launching hundreds of thousands of projects. And so the focus is really on these interactive multiplayer coding, kind of like Figma for software development, writing, even backend code, any scripting. Multiplayer functionality was really new. There's GitHub integration support for many programming languages. They raised $20 million.

The big moment really came in 2021 when they got the dot com. Absolutely. That just really put.

That's a turning point.

March 2021 pounding the table.

Let's go. We're hereuplet.com moving away from the dot.

It go to snag.com and reach out to our friend Rob if you want a great domain.

I love it. So they upgrade the from the ACE editor to Monaco in 2017, later transition to code Mirror. The move to Code Mirror sparks community backlash which is later resolved with rapid bug fixes. There's series b funding in 2021. Another Covid round. I remember when these were happening. He raised 80 million at 800 million valuation. The user base exceeds 10 million. Infrastructure is scaled to handle massive growth. And there was always this question of like. Of like, is RELET for learning and testing or will someone actually build a real business on top of a RELET app or something that they develop in relet? Is it more for. For practicing and prototyping? Is it a tool or is it an infrastructure? And I think as we talked about who's.

What is the long term customer base going to look like?

Right?

Is it. Is it the, you know, indie hacker who wants to create their first one to 10 apps or is it somebody who's. If you look at their website now, it's really oriented around this similar thesis to like Lovable, which we talked about with Harry last week, turning your ideas into apps with AI. What do you want to create a website for your dream business, a habit tracker, an education app for your kids, etc. So kind of, you know, long term this feels like the user base could. And he might not like me describing it like this, but it could look like something like what. What Squarespace did for websites. Hey, anybody can make a website. Other platforms like that, but more so with anybody can make a website that actually has like crud app sort of functionality.

Yeah, no, I mean I think that's. That's what all these companies are fighting over is that everyone recognizes that that's a huge opportunity and whoever gets to it first and becomes the portal for making new websites is going to be extremely valuable.

But at the same time vercel is very much also competing with cloudflare and competing over the enterprise and moving up market and moving into these other use cases.

So, yeah, and so Amjad and Replit have launched a few things over the past few years. They had a bounties marketplace for freelance coding tasks. You could just put up a bounty and say, hey, I need this build. And they had this massive community of like, kind of indie hackers, kids who are learning.

It was like, hey, let's give people their first time making money with, you.

Know, by writing code. Yeah, I thought it was a really cool, really cool thing. In September of 2022, they debuted Ghostwriter, which was a competitor to GitHub Copilot. Something to help you. AI powered coding assistant. Essentially fancy autocomplete, but extremely valuable in the context of replit. And then they partner with Google Cloud in March of 2023 and quickly secured a 97.4 Series B extension, reaching a $1.16 billion valuation. So up there with Vercel in the unicorn club, they continued rapid growth to over 20 to 30 million users. And then they fully removed the education product. The freestarter plan limits new users to three public private projects. And they're kind of going upmarket, trying to be more serious in like the business world. They relocated their headquarters from San Francisco Soma to Foster City, and now they are over to 150 employees with a sharper focus on professional and enterprise development. It says they remain committed to innovating in cloud IDEs and AI powered coding tools, guided by the founder's original vision. And so that's the story of Replit. We have four, four minutes. Should we try and do some cloudflare? We got the biggest one yet, but we can kind of rip through this cloudflare down in 2009. Oh, wait, we got Guillermo on. Okay, let's just bring him in right now.

Let's do it.

Flare after. Welcome to the show. How you doing, my man?

Great. Thanks for having me. I've been looking forward to this.

Me too. I think everyone's looking forward to this. There's drama on the timeline. We need to have a TVPN segment. We really appreciate you coming on. Can you. Can you just give us like a breakdown of what's happening in the world of Vercel right now?

Well, yeah, maybe to introduce Vercel too, for those that are. That are new to our company. Vercel creates frameworks and infrastructure to deploy great web applications. We're super invested in open source. We created a framework called Next JS that powers a lot of the Internet and we're very proud about it. But we also have investments in a bunch of other open source projects. I have a long history of being involved in the JavaScript ecosystem, TypeScript ecosystem. So if you're building a new application, Vercel and Next JS are a pretty good choice for people.

Fantastic. And what's going on most recently?

Yeah, I mean, if you go on X, there's a lot going on. Maybe the thing that started a lot of this was we got a ping from a security researcher about a potential security vulnerability on Next js. We get lots of this operating at the scale that we're in. We have millions of monthly active developers on Next js, tens of millions of applications deployed to the Vercel platform. And so we get a lot of pings. But this one in particular was interesting because it was a potential AUTH bypass, which in the security industry, it's as bad of a bug as you could imagine, bypassing login, sign up, things like that. We took a look at it, we process it through the queue, we remediated it and then when we disclosed it to the world, you know, we, we, we could have done a lot better in how we disclosed it. So we, we filed a CVE in partnership with GitHub, which is the standard mechanism for how you notify every Next JS user on the planet, whether they use Vercel or not, about this, this vulnerability. But the awesome thing about Next JS is that once you use Next js, you're actually not just getting the open source project Next js. You're getting a huge ecosystem of, of products with it that you can use that integrate really nicely into Next js. There are a lot of AUTH partners, a company like Clerk Stack of better off Lucia in the open source ecosystem. This is awesome products and I think we should have notified those people before that CVE went out so they could have had the opportunity to look at what the impact would have been to their projects and things like that. On the other hand, we did test internally. Okay, is netlify, which is another deployment option for Next JS affected? And again, we could have done a much better job at partnering with companies like netlify and Cloudflare who host Next JS as well. But it kind of became like a Twitter thing, you know, that like it got big and then Cloudflare got involved. I think you guys were just talking about it before I joined and yeah, there's some banger tweets being exchanged here. And there.

Yeah, you're entertaining.

I'm curious to get your read on it. You've been in the game for, you know, you founded Socket back in the day. Do you feel like the environment now? There's, you know, there's still a lot of Internet to build and there's still a lot of opportunity but at the same time we have these sort of scaled businesses like Cloudflare and Vercel and things like that. Do you feel like the environment today is like more hostile or emotionally charged than ever before? Because there's, you know, people are, there's now like sort of like the market's established in many ways. It's not maybe going quite as quickly as it used to. There's new opportunities but it's. Yeah, it's like it's, it's started, you know. Is this sort of more zero sum environment making things a little bit more charged today?

I think not. I do think that on X people get really spicy. I was very shocked that the CEO of Cloudflare came. I mean his, he's the CEO of a public company and he came guns blazing, even putting out like some like cringeworthy memes against Vercel which is a company that is very developer loved. We invest not just in next JS but we power for example the AISDK which is the most popular way today in the JavaScript ecosystem to add AI to your product. It has a million downloads a week. It's provider agnostic, it's deployment platform agnostic. So to come actor in such a aggressive way. I was, I was a little taken aback. Our style has always been if you look at my ex feed the thing that I love to do is highlight great products. If you create anything great, especially if you use an X rays I just love to say like look at this really cool thing. I never talk about competitors, I never especially in a diminishing way.

Sure.

But in this case I had a reply because he's saying, oh, if you want security come to Cloudflare. And the record shows that if you want security protection come to Cloudflare. There's a very mixed bag there. Right? There's a mixed bag. And I had to recover from the annals of Cloudflare. I did bring up Cloud Bleed which legitimately was one of the worst things that has happened to the Internet. You could, I don't know if the audience knows but you could Google and literally find auth tokens of different companies like Uber indexed by Google. So that was an order. And by the way our bug was Bad. I'm not here to say like, oh, like whatever, make excuses for middleware and whatever. Our bug was really bad, but theirs was catastrophic. And the attack, the impact of the bug was googling. It's like accessible to everyone. The impact of our bug is actually very nuanced and I'm super thankful to the researcher because it takes a lot of thinking and reverse engineering to arrive to these conclusions. But yeah, to your point, I think that it was uncalled for. We've tried to, I think we could get into like the speculation of why he would do such a thing. We tried really hard to use Cloudflare. We were a customer, we tried it out for a new compute product which coincidentally was edge middleware. And it didn't work out for a number of reasons. So maybe there was some soured relationships there as well that, you know, we had a piece out of the, as a customer we had to build our own. But I can only speculate.

Let's, let's get into more of the positive and talk about kind of the future and what the biggest opportunities, you know, that you feel like Vercel has in this sort of new. Probably the most, you know, most exciting time of my life. John's, you know, a few decades older than me, so it's good business to.

Be in the Internet and AI, it really is.

But yeah, let's talk about, yeah, let's, let's kind of ignore the drama for a second and talk about the future.

Everyone loves drama. But my message to all of the vendors and partners and people in the ecosystem would be the pie is about to get as large as we've ever seen in the history of technology. Vercel doubled the number of signups year over year, mostly due to the introduction of V0, which is our coding agent. I don't think we've ever seen a technological platform shift of this dimension where every piece of software will be rebuilt and reimagined with AI and the pie is about to get so big that being paranoid about the size of your slice and taking cheap shots if you're a security competitor to me does signal short sightedness on this AI opportunity. In fact, the AI SDK is powering competitors to V0. So today one of our partners announced new email is like the B0 for crafting email campaigns, all built on open source technology that we've sort of taken from the zero and given back to the world. And so, and I also had a. You should check it out. I had a banger ideas thread on X the other day, every single day I'm thinking, here's a bunch of ideas of amazing products that you could create with AI that customers are so willing to buy. I just actually interviewed, we're at a company off site, slash Ordvo, and I interviewed one of the greatest public company CEOs of our times. I can't disclose who. And I asked him, what are your priorities for AI? He's like, oh, we're completely reimagining the company across these three dimensions with AI. I want to buy AI for this, AI for this, AI for this. So to your point about the positivity is there is room for everybody. There's all this amazing open source technology that you can use to create new products and new ideas. I also believe, part of my optimism is that in the beginning two years ago, there was maybe a belief that there was going to be one gigantic chatbot to rule them all. Like a sci fi movie. You go to one computer or you talk to the room, hey, computer, everything is computer. Or what I believed at the time. And we actually, this is why we started creating a lot of open source technology. There's going to be expert AIs, focused products that cater to specific requirements. And that's actually what's ended up happening, right? So on Vercel, we host companies like Open Evidence, which is a chatgpt for medicine, getgc, AI which is like the chatgpt for lawyers, amazing products for finance like Hevia. And so what's actually ended up happening is that there is a redistribution of wealth, so to speak, that's happening with AI. There is also, I call it sometimes the unbundling of Google. It's no mystery that a lot of companies or a lot of consumers, sorry, are not going to Google for certain queries and they're going to specialist products to answer. Like when I think knowledge, I might go to perplexity or I might go to Grok and do a deep search. Right. So that unbundling of one of the largest companies and information technology services in the world will create massive opportunities for startups and companies of all sizes. So I really do think I share your optimism and positivity. Beyond the drama that happened, one thing.

I always think about with Vercel is just like the first focus on speed. I feel like that's almost like the core brand tenant is just like. I mean, Jordy pulled up Vercel.

Yeah, it was like so fast.

That's a whole brand. And I want to know what's the importance of like speed in AI deployments?

Oh, it's dramatic.

I know you're hosting AI, but are you hosting AI at the edge or kind of delivering it in like a, like a cdn? Like how. How does that work and how does that. What impact does faster AI usage happen in like the consumer experience?

There's a couple of things if you're running a business that you should know right off the bat. Number one, a lot of traffic will shift towards answer engines. I reported recently that we see 5% of our Vercel signups that also happen to be some of the highest intent signups coming from ChatGPT, which is up from being like 1% or less than 1% six months ago. And it's growing. I didn't share the growth metric, but I'll share it now for you guys since I like you. It's 30% month over month.

Wow, that's insane. So walk me through that. It's people going to ChatGPT asking, how should I deploy this? What should I build? It's recommending Vercel.

Sama had a really good take. And also if you want to see a fast website, I am very proud that we host OpenAI.com Sama recently shared. You might not want to learn so much coding or only coding. You might just want to learn how to use AI. Which one of the artifacts of that, and I love the Claude artifact name, I think it was one of the most important inventions, as has happened in AI in recent years, is that coding and writing code is an output of what you ask the AI. So what's happening is people are asking what is the best way to build a website? What is the best way to deploy? I actually posted. So we have a little tool, a little playground. You can check it out. It's SDK Vercel AI. And you click playground. You can ask a bunch of models what they think about you. And that'll give you a glimpse into how the AIs are thinking, but not only how they're thinking, how they're directing the world's behavior in choices. I was very proud to share a screenshot that I asked four Frontier models in parallel, what's the best way to deploy? And they all said Vercel. And I actually constrained it to like, you can only, you know, like the classic thing, you can only do one thing or I've hurt myself. Like, okay, Vercel, Vercel, Vercel, Vercel. And so to me that was. I actually didn't know at the time. I was just like messing around in the weekend with the Tool. I think that's the canary in the coal mine of how you should be thinking about AI sending traffic to different places. The consequence to our business is number one, SEO still matters. So one of our customers, for example, sponsors this fantastic show ramp. They're in the business of being found. And so it's going to be through Google searches or it's going to be through these agents. And so the agents are still performing a web search. So you still want to be in good terms, so to speak, with the people that are retrieving and crawling the Internet. Right. So that's one thing. And Vercel really helps companies with SEO.

That's an interesting thing to think about. Like it's interesting to think about Google over time. If nobody's searching on Google, they just every link is paid for and they sort of still have this sort of.

Like I do wonder, has the train left the station on SEO or is there still an opportunity for new companies to kind of bootstrap their way into AI recommendations? And I also want to hear your second point. Sorry for cutting you off.

No, no, it's totally fair. So I think what's still relevant is that quality, content, facts, truth, this agents will be. I actually like also Elon's truth seeking AI goal. Because it really matters that you train a model that is subjective and is post trained on truth seeking. Right. During pre training you throw a bunch of data at it. During post training you like, sort of like orient its behavior in this model. So this is why I'm a big fan of OpenAI in the sense of open source and also in giving developers choice. The AI SDK lets you very quickly swap models. I think it's going to be very important as a community, I'm not talking about entrepreneurs or business people, I'm talking about as citizens of the Internet, we have to be very vigilant of the behavior of models. The decentralization of AI, something that Vercel deeply believes in, is. And we have a template, you can basically roll your own chatgpt within two clicks. And we recently partnered with XAI to power the default model. So you can go to chat Vercel AI and you can basically clone and deploy your own chatgpt in your own domain name. And so what would be great for society is if we all invest in massively decentralizing intelligence so that we're not at the behest of the one truth center or truth company of the world.

Sure, sure.

Yeah. I mean it's one kind of question that comes to mind. So you guys are powering OpenAI.com and OpenAI.com somewhat recently is like very much reoriented around being a sort of like, you know, search bar, answer engine. And OpenAI right now is being priced like it's the next Google, right? At $300 billion plus plus. Like that is the next Google you talked about. Sort of.

Yeah. And by the way, one comment on that because it's been super double minded. I actually think that's a brilliant design. So I talked about how every piece of software will be rethought and rebuilt as an AI product. What people will expect is that when they go to your product there is an interface like that. And I actually think that's really good design because they blended marketing content, which is what typically we think of as a website. I sometimes dismissively call them E brochures to remind the team that we're not in this world to take a magazine and plaster it on the Internet. The whole point of next JS and Vercel that we bet on 10 years ago was a more dynamic web, a web that powered products. And so what's brilliant about the design is that you're immersed immediately into the product experience and it's AI native. And I think that's just a sign of things to come. You're going to go to so many other products. I mentioned the email one, but and Open Evidence. There's so many of those where the interface will be okay, what do you need? What do you want? When you go to v0.dev, the question that we ask is what do you want to ship? Because we want you to convert an idea into an application.

Talk about the line between developers and non developers. It seems like it's sort of blurring today. Vercel's entire brand has been around building building products for developers. That is the core of the mission. But is there a point in the future where. And you have your coding agent now, right? There's, there's this full sort of like stack. Is there a world in the future where, you know, you land on vercel.com and somebody that's not a developer can just type in what do you want to build?

A prompt.

Right. Because it seems like, you know, part of the drama if you extrapolate it out, it's like there's, you know, real.

Whoever becomes the aggregator for building new websites and apps will be incredibly valuable.

Yeah, that was going to be my third point actually. So the other huge opportunity for us is what we call agentic deployment infrastructure. So there's going to be all of these agents that create for every user on the planet. And also to your question, I think that the TAM of what a developer is is going to. So I mean we're already seeing it in the numbers. I'm already seeing it in the customer interviews. I was chatting with a lady yesterday on the X platform, the Everything app. She was reporting feedback about V0 and at one point in the conversation she goes like, by the way, I want to be very clear, I have no idea how to code. I use v0 and I get stuck and I need some other expert's opinion, like go to another doctor. I ask Rock and she brings it back and forth between the two products and she's creating. The reason that she was giving me feedback is she was saying like the app has gotten so big, what do you recommend? And so people are just having the best time of their lives being able to create when they couldn't code before. But going back to the agentic infrastructure, think of it this way. V0 is automatically calling out to Vercel to create deployments, to assign domain names. In the future to even buy domains, v0 might even just say, hey, I thought of a banger domain name for your product. What do you think? And so we're very excited to see the growth of this infra. By the way, there's a defensibility to it that's really interesting, especially for people that are working in infra that are listening to this call. I'm very convinced that by the coding will eat a lot of the world of creating front end applications. Meaning these AIs are so good at writing React in Tailwind and Next js. It's actually shocking to me and I've been a front end engineer. I started front engineering when I was 11 years old in Argentina. And so I had my ego tied up to this thing of writing front end code. I contributed a library called Mood Tools when I was 15 years old. I was like the kid that could do front end. And now I'm ready to give up on part of my identity of hey V0 is creating an opportunity for a lot more people to be like me and experience that joy of creating front ends totally. Now what I'm not so sure about, and you've seen all these conversations on X about security and you can vibe code but it's hard to vibe debug. I believe that you don't want AI in your infrastructure just yet. We operate in 20 regions worldwide. We reach dozens of cities through our pops in Our CDN network, we have to maintain uptime for the world's most valuable properties. From AI companies to cryptocurrency companies, some presidential meme coins. Whatever you think of, so much is going on on Vercel, every second of uptime, everything that can happen to this platform is absolutely mission critical. It's life critical. So many healthcare companies banking on Vercel. And so I don't want AI to necessarily be messing with the foundational sort of infra and software that needs to ensure that these things run perfectly. The train runs on time, on the other hand. And this is why Karpathy, I think, points vibe coding. When you're exploring, when you're creating, when you're designing, when you're crafting the interface, that's where AI is completely dominating.

Makes sense.

And now it's gaining full stack powers where you can integrate with that infrastructure. So we recently partnered with companies like Supabase and Neon and Upstash that they also hire those fract infra engineers that they might be using some AI. But hopefully for our partnership, they're very careful in that creator. That new creator is getting the best of both worlds that you vibe code and you're working on rock solid foundations.

Yeah, that makes sense.

Can you talk a little bit about value accrual in AI? I know that there's been this debate over the model layer or the application layer. You could even abstract that. And now people are just saying, I either want to be The Aggregator, the ChatGPT app that's installed on 100 million phones, or I want to be in energy and get me shares in a nuclear company. Because I think everything else in the middle is going to be commoditized. You don't have hardware yet or your own infrastructure. Does what you're seeing in AI change any of those decisions over time? How are you thinking about just the different opportunities? It seems like you're obviously going upmarket to be more of an aggregator where you could come to develop apps. But are you thinking about going down the stack further, training your own models, developing your own chips, or like, what does the far future look like for Vercell?

I really believe that the best metaphor for AI is what happened with the cloud and mobile, but it's going to be much bigger. And so if you look back at the cloud and we in this room have all studied it, there wasn't a particular player or category that had a lot of upside. It was all over. It was the foundational infrastructure and hardware, obviously, and we're very proud to partner with AWS to provide that quote unquote hardware layer to Vercel as a global network. There was a lot of upside for developers that quickly changed their behavior. So this is very important. By the way, when I noticed aws, I was very quick to. Luckily for me, I was very quick to dismiss the other DIY options that were available to me because I got so excited by the automation potential. And there's merits to all solutions, but being an early adopter in writing the right way can be transformational to your career. Later on it happened with React. React was open sourced by Meta. I believe this is one of their greatest inventions. I was also quick to adopt and I noticed its potential as the engine for what later became Next js. I think my advice to people would be just adopt AI and see where you can add value. I think the application layer is extremely exciting because the interfaces to AI as I mentioned, will decentralize and unbundle. There's going to be a lot of upside for agentic infrastructure. So companies that know how to work well with not just humans, but agents. And that's a remarkable shift. Right? A lot of products have been so far created for developers, not for the agent. You think of it as a representative of the developer. You have to create products that are good for the representative of the developer.

How do you. Yeah, yeah, I was going to say how, you know, as a leader, how do you work with your team? You know, a lot of people, the sort of like high level leadership advice is like the CEO helps the team focus. But then in the case of Vercel, there's so many different areas of the business now and it seems like you're very focused on serving your customers, the developers and the sort of, you know, companies building on Vercel. But at the same time you have like all these different bets. How do you kind of like prioritize internally? And it seems like you're okay with just doing things in the way that, you know, Facebook releases, React, you know, they've benefited from it, but they haven't nearly captured all the value from it. And so it seems like you're okay with sort of, you're very open to sort of releasing things and not it's less oriented around. We need to, you know, capture 100% of the value that we create or.

Yeah, I think short term obsession over value capture is not the right recipe to build a generational company. And I'm obsessed with growing the size of the pie. My number one allegiance is the web. So when I was In Argentina I was able to. And this. You know, when you're a kid and you try out lots of different programming languages, the thing that blew my mind is the URL. In fact, if you look at the success of Vercel so far, it really is about the success of a URL is that I thought holy crap, Kubernetes is so hard. CDNs are so hard. What if people could just deploy with one click or one press of a button and get back a URL of what they're working on that they can share with the world. Look at other companies that have been massively successful or products like Google Docs or figma. They've essentially done that. I think that didn't have a URL before, now has a URL. We're doing that for every application on the planet. So it's primarily an infrastructure business. And then on the other hand, we know that in order to cast the widest possible net and attract the widest biggest number of people, open source is the only way is non negotiable. And in addition to NEXT js, like I mentioned, we created NEXT js sorry, NEXT JS and AISDK and Turbo and we acquired a bunch of companies like SHAD, CN& and so the more we can cast this message out of the world of the web needs to win and also needs to win because we have the best products. You can think of our competition as all these other products in the developer ecosystem. Another reframing that is perhaps more interesting is think about Apple. Apple is holding an entire world hostage to a lot of arbitrary rules. They make all the calls. The web that I experienced when I was a kid was a web that is completely permissionless, which is also why I'm crypto pill. Then we could get into that and whatever. But permissionless is actually the most important. It's like freedom of speech is up here and then right up there is also permissionless, which is also increasingly a form of speech is that you can get something into a URL without asking Tim Apple for permission. And so that is the true enemy, so to speak. And I think my message to all these other companies would be like let's band together and make sure that you can publish without going through an app store review process. You can launch crypto companies without asking Apple what they think about crypto. Whatever you want, you should be able to in AI, right? Like AI models need to decentralize and get into the hands of developers as quickly as possible so that we build defensibility against the sort of like monolithic AI systems. I think I'm trying to think about like HAL 9000 or whatever that is like, or Skynet. I just, I don't want to go to one interface. Vercel needs to decentralize and democratize URLs and interfaces to the world. And by the way, my other point was going to be, I'll give credit to Apple, they have a culture of quality and they've managed to permeate that culture of quality to that to their ecosystem. And I want that for the web as well. I want to make sure I actually don't even have a particular force in the race. We not only support next JS, we support another 35 frameworks. Whatever framework allows me to go to a website like a blind tasting and be like, oh, this website is freaking great. You should be able to work backwards to, oh, they use some technology supported by Vercel. That's my fitness function.

Curious.

Did anybody ever come to your office with $5 billion in cash and tell you to ask you to train a foundation model? And how did that conversation go? Cause I'm sure like, you know, in all the craze of the last couple of years, there could have been an opportunity to just like, you know, I'm sure there's a bunch of people that would have been happy to say, hey, you're really well positioned to build.

Yeah, when's the humanoid robot coming?

Yeah, not that people seem to be.

Very obsessed with the V0 data. So I'll tell you, I also haven't shared this before, but so many companies have come and asked for. Because by the way, the interesting thing about V0Is and going back to the design mindset and quality mindset is we're trying to produce things we're proud of and nested, we're proud of our customers are proud of. End users of the Internet say, okay, now there's a better web. I think we should also bend against AI slop. Like we shouldn't create a web that has this overly brushed texture images coming out of low quality models and whatever. And so a huge inspiration for me was actually midjourney. Midjourney. Speaking of which, is a Next JS user that self hosts Next js. Extremely proud of that. And there's something about the taste that gets embedded into these models. So it's not just the data that you want, it's also infusing your preferences and taste. And it's almost like casting an opinion into the world. This is what I believe products should look like. And by the way you also want. And this is why the conversational interface is so fantastic. You can still leave the customer to their own creativity. So you can say, you go to V0 and you say, build me a product for travel, like Wonder actually also a Vercel customer. And then you're like, well, I don't like it. Make it more yellow and the model will follow.

Yeah.

So it's striking that balance between creativity and best practices for a better web.

I have a question. So I'm like completely convinced on the strategy of bringing in new developers, allowing even non technical folks to build and deploy websites. But some of your companies, some of your clients are absolutely massive. And one of the critiques is like, well, you're abstracting this AWS infrastructure, it can get kind of expensive. What, what are the conversations like on your side to keep a Nike or an Uber on Vercel long term? And what, how do you see those relationships going and how important is it to not only enable someone to show up non technical prompt, build an app, but then scale it into that one person, $1 billion company and they're saying, yeah, you know what, I'm sticking with Vercel forever.

Yeah, yeah. Your question also contains the answer because you said, you know, Vercellas has been getting a lot bigger.

Yeah.

And because we've been getting bigger, which comes with these challenges like X drama and whatever. But the ultimate privilege is the amount of incredible infrastructure optimization that we can do. When you're starting a company, a little company, you're not thinking about optimizing. If you're thinking about optimizing, you're probably not doing the. We have this motto that we introduced at Next JS Conf. That is famous. There's a famous essay in the software engineering industry of like, you first make it work, you then make it right, and then you make it fast. And I would add a fourth and then you make it cost efficient.

Sure.

And actually from a computer science point of view, fast and cost efficient actually almost come together. We've done so many optimizations of the infrastructure. I think this year we've already announced eight price decreases or like last quarter and this year and we continue to announce price decreases because we're passing on the cost savings that we realize in our infrastructure. On all sides, the CDN is getting more efficient. The compute, we just announced Fluid Compute. It's staggering what we've done in terms of compute efficiency. Some customers saw an improvement in efficiency of 85%.

Wow.

So what I would say to the 90s of the world. The previous story of Vercel, which is still fundamentally awesome, is you won't have to worry so much about DevOps and platform engineering and on call and those human costs which are ginormous. And now you'll be fighting for high quality infrastructure engineers with all of the AI companies as well. So the human cost is very real doing something like Vercel, but then the scale cost of Vercel actually gets more efficient the more I use it is awesome. And we're committed to continuing to share those infrastructure savings with our customers. And by the way, the inspiration here is aws. I think when I started using aws, it was quite expensive and then they just announced so many price decreases because. And by the way, that's kind of the dance we manage Next JS for people. You can also self host and manage it yourself. And we're actually also partnering with companies that are even competitors of Vercel to help them manage Next JS better when they want to create an offering like that. And we know that there's work to do there. But the nice dance is that if you let up and let us manage your workload, we will be able to optimize it to a level that is sort of unbelievable.

Well, it's noon. We'll let you go. I'm sure you have a bunch more.

Great having you on.

Great having you on. Please call back in when you have more news.

I love it.

It's a really fun conversation.

I love your show. Thank you so much for having me.

Yeah, thanks for coming.

I'll see you next.

See you on X.

See you on X. Yeah, that's fun. Always a good excuse to use drama to get the real story. I feel like, yeah, we struck the balance.

It's great when somebody's able to speak with more than 144 characters.

Yeah. All of a sudden the nuance just comes in. It's amazing. Yeah.

Emerges.

Yeah. Fantastic. But very, very cool. Very cool company.

And it's a crazy position to be in where you're hosting potentially the next Google.

Yeah.

Right. You go to OpenAI right now. This is relatively recent. I don't know exactly when they searched it. It just says, what can I help you with?

Yeah, yeah.

And then.

Yeah, there's no landing page anymore for learn about OpenAI jobs. It's like you're here to do.

Yeah, they still have a little bit on the side, but you know, very, very oriented around.

Anyway, we got Lulu coming on to break down the. The drama and the comms. We're going to Talk to her about a bunch of stuff. But we got to ping her because she's not in the waiting room yet. So let's ask. Let's see. Okay, good. We do have her on.

She was here, then left.

Okay, maybe I should send.

She's extremely busy. She jumped on. She only had 30 seconds. We weren't ready. No, I'm kidding.

I believe it.

Yeah.

Anyway, let me try and send her this thing. And in the meantime, we should do.

Some posts and she is back.

Is she back? Let's see. Well, I mean, maybe she was getting tell you about Bezel.

Bananas.

That's a great time. I got a beautiful vacheron called Constantin on purchased from Bezel. Highly recommend you go pick something up over there. They have over 23,500 luxury watches, folks. Fully authenticated in house by Bezel's team of experts. This watch right here, it's shipped from the seller to Bezel.

And anytime I see drama on the timeline, I can't help but think if the two people arguing just went, watch.

I was thinking about that watch to.

Watch if they went or. No. If they just went and they browse around Bezel together for an hour talking about what they like and what they don't like, they find common ground.

Exactly.

Squash the beat.

This is. Bezel is a. Is a technology that will bring harmony to the timeline.

I believe now a lot of people said, oh, we got Lulu in the chat. Let's do it.

Hey, how you doing?

Hey, Good to see you.

Welcome to the temple of technology. We're live.

You're so finance.

The fortress of finance. The capital of capital. Great to see you.

I'm surprised it took this long. To the show.

Former brother of the year 2024. And for some reason, we had to do 75 guests before we could get you to sit down. What happened?

I had to make sure the show was good.

Oh, yeah. Okay. Big dogging us.

She's reasonable.

But we're glad you could take time out of your incredibly busy day to sit down with us. Chat. There's so much to talk about. I want to talk about the comms around Saratoga water. I want to talk about morning routines. Did you wake up at 3:40 this. This morning and dive directly into a pool or are you taking a little bit slower today?

No, Every morning I dive for five minutes.

Yep.

Suspension is four. I like to go for five, sometimes seven. Fantastic average. Five for me.

Great.

I duck my face like every once every 10 minutes. I think just got to go a little bit above and beyond. Stay Ahead of the package, rub the banana peel. I don't just do the face. I do the neck. Get behind the ears. So fully ready for this show.

Always taking it. Always taking it to the next level.

What.

What do you. You had critiqued that Saratoga water. Their. Their last post was a bunch of. Was Hashtag soup. You described it.

Yep.

How if you were. If they were a client, do you have anything particularly that you would have advised them on of what they could have done better?

Yeah, you're. I. I don't have any fancy water companies in my portfolio, so you might.

Be getting a call later today.

Yeah, yeah, no, no, I'm not fully diversified yet. I thought I was. Okay. I. I think they just have to wake up here. There's somebody whose job is to run social for them. I'm sure there's, like, a person whose area of responsibility is this. And they were just completely out of the game. Like, some people said they were on Instagram, but on is pretty generous there. Like, they were present on Instagram with a check mark. The posts weren't actually that good. I think there's some brands that are, like, boycotting X because of Elon. Whatever. But you're just kind of hurting yourself. Like, it's like you're owning your own balance sheet to try to own Elon. You're owning your own cash flow because you're mad at Elon. Just, like, go on X, make money, do what you need to do. Forget about your personal feelings. I don't know if that's actually the reason, but if it is, it's a bad reason.

It does feel like it's a bit of a 15 minutes of fame moment for them. And so I wonder, like, what is the good ending here? Like, they quote, tweet the video, they lean in, they're making jokes, they capture a bunch of, you know, attention. Maybe they grow their account from a thousand followers to even, like, 100k because it's such a viral moment. And a billion people saw the morning routine. But then what do they do with that after that?

I think they have to. Okay. I think the gold standard for this before the famous rug was the hawk to a girl. Like, she took the 15 minutes and just extended it beyond what the laws of physics seem to suggest was possible.

Yep.

And I think what the water company could have done here to extend would be, like, lean into the routine. Like, partner on some routines, lean into the unhinged. Like, I know that they're this sophisticated, fancy type of person, but still, sometimes you just got to Roll with it, strike up some partnerships, have like follow on content. Like lean into the funny. Just do the bar is like literally anything. And then it's like getting creative and then it's like something really enduring. And if they want to do something really enduring, maybe it's like a program, maybe it's like some pop up stuff to just stay top of mind. But the actual bar of just like showing a pulse was not that hard to hit.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I feel like the challenge is I have no idea what Saratoga's brand stands for, but now in my mind it stands for getting up at 3:45, putting the banana on your face, having four minutes of airtime. And so it's almost like they. I'm the most water obsessed person that I know by a long shot and I didn't know what they stood for before. It's almost like the right thing to do is the right deal to do is you hire. You just say hey, we're going to kind of scrap our brand from the last 200 years. I think they're a very old company. We're now the Ashton brand. We're signing them to a maxed out.

It's just 158 figures. 150.

Yeah. It's 150 year old brand.

70 too.

It's time, it's time for a reefer Do a brand partnership with Chiquita Banana. That'd be great to the banana collab. You could be doing like some people commented when he opens up the journal. He's on page one of his journal.

Oh yeah.

Like a notion partnership that like the world is your oyster here. There's a lot you could do.

Yeah.

Let.

Let's talk about. You created a meme going, going direct. I feel like it's one of the. The most powerful like basically memes trend of the year. Potentially trend of the year. I mean that and founder mode are the two. When you think about. When you think about things that have sort of influenced founder thought in the last five years, it happens to be in my view going direct in founder mode.

Totally.

And they go, they go hand in hand. Have you. I'm sure you're already thinking about sort of what the next play is. Is the next play going indirect, going into sort of like going.

Getting puff pieces, you know, getting puff.

Pieces and stuff like that. No, but what do you think is now that sort of this sort of like way of comms has become the standard? Is this just the enduring approach for the next however many years until we get better institutions or you Gotta.

You gotta always outrun yourselves. I'm really glad you brought this up. We did not coordinate by this, by the way. Like, you guys gave me virtually nothing to prepare with and no talk points. Fully unprepared. Thank you. So we didn't coordinate, but I actually had been thinking about this because Rostra launched around a year ago, almost exactly a year ago. And in that intervening year, Founder mode has kind of become part of the canon. Like it's here. It's not evenly distributed, distributed. Maybe Deloitte is not going direct, but like founders, going direct is now part of the default playbook for comms. Like any YC company that's coming out into the world today, they're thinking the founder is going to go direct. But the thing is you have to outrun yourself. Like once something becomes the thing that everybody does, that becomes the new norm. And you always want to be standing up above the norm. Like, I remember for a while last year I was doing manifestos. I was having all of like my founders and my companies do manifestos. And then for a three month span, it's just like every other week of manifesto it actually I kind of got like manifestoed out. And same with like the secret plans.

Same with live reels, Same thing kind of burned through them.

That one happened really fast.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Sorry everyone.

Yeah, well, how do you think?

So more montage reels, guys.

Yeah, so we just had Guillermo on Vercel creates next js. They release it to the world and then they say, yeah, we'll manage it for you if you want. Or you can just use it by yourself. You basically open source the concept of going direct, but then you have sort of playbooks that you run with your founders. Is there anything else that you know? The thing about something like going direct is you can tell somebody exact any, any sort of like highly specialized skill set.

Double fisting Celsius. What is that in front of your hands?

I go, I go yerba matzo. You go, the yerba John goes Celsius. That's pretty reflective of our brand.

It triggered me because the week before last I had two. I didn't know how caffeinated.

They have a lot of caffeine in there.

I needed like a defibrillator.

Oh yeah, well, 400. Yeah, it is six Red Bulls, I think technically. Who's counting though?

Yeah, got to be careful. But, but the idea is like, is there other things that are. That maybe fall outside of that, that you feel like you can sort of like open source, like things that you can Just tell the world they're very hard to execute, so they should still go to your firm to actually pull them off. But what else are you thinking about? Kind of like open sourcing.

Yeah. Or they can just do it. I like the concept of open sourcing. Like, in fact, you should be able to do it by yourself. Whether I get hit by a bus or your team gets hit by a bus, it should never just rest on any one person. I think the next era, so going direct was probably the big thing for the last year. I think the next era is in shorthand. Attention is all you need. Like, in a world where AI can just do anything all the time, you can see people, like, shipping and launching stuff. It used to be monthly, then weekly, and now daily. There's just, like, huge crops all the time, and it's a tree falling quietly in the forest, unless you can get people to actually care about it. So the two things are, number one, how to get the attention and just, like, focus it for a small period of time. And then number two, how to harvest it and turn it into something. Like, the big mistake that founders make is they'll do something to catch a little bit of attention, and then it goes away. Like, we're talking about Saratoga water. It goes away, and you didn't do anything with it. So you're doing, like, attention, catch and release. Well, like. Like. Like California with illegal migrants or like sports fishing. Like, don't do the catch and release. Hold on to the attention and turn it into money. Like, your job is turning attention into money.

I mean, that's the beauty of the Ashton hall thing. He. He went super viral, but he already had been on Instagram for five years, had millions of followers over there. He goes super viral. He already has a whole business set up on coaching and fitness stuff. Like, there is a funnel, and if you found him from this exposed, you're going to be paying him if you. If you like him very quickly. Whereas with Hawk to a Girl, we were talking about this, like, she had to spin up a podcast. And then I'm sure at a certain point, she was like, well, this crypto thing seems like a good way to make money. Whereas Ashton already has a business and can just go capitalize.

We got a delivery here. Oh, thank you.

Thank you, brother. Here we go. We got the Saratoga.

You guys should do the Dunk Lives, the new ice bucket challenge.

Yeah. We also need bowls to dunk our face.

Yeah, we definitely.

So. So here's a question for you that I think that I think is actually Interesting one. So the three of us are dear friends with David Senra, and David has sort of studied all these entrepreneurs that were able to build these massive careers or massive sort of family empires completely in silence. Right. He made a post, he made a post two weeks ago that was something to the effect of like, I talked to this family, they had written biographies about the family and he asked if he could do an episode on them. And they were like, absolutely not. We're not giving away our sort of secrets. Is, do you think that, you know, do you think that, that the playbook of just sort of like building in silence and you're sort of in the shadows and nobody, you know, and not really sharing what you're working on. Do you think businesses like that will? There seems like there's tons of examples throughout history, but that was pre Internet, right?

Yeah.

If you take the strategy of we're going to kind of like build in silence, you know, be very secretive. Does that playbook work when you have 10 competitors that are going to be extremely loud, constantly sort of like accumulating attention?

Yeah.

And I just wonder if that's sort of a pre Internet strategy.

So the thing here is, you know, one day soon maybe you'll have the one person billion dollar company, but for now, the company that wins is the company that can recruit and attract the best talent. And the pool of super elite differentiated talent is pretty concentrated and they're all being headhunted by like the same firms. And so the way to get ahead is to get that talent before your competitors can. And they'll join you if they know you and trust you and believe in you. And so if you're someone who's already a household name, like, if Palmer Lecky went silent for a while, it'd be fine because people know what he's about. Ilya Suts been silent for quite a while. And people, you don't have to try to figure out, like, what am I going to get if I try to go work for them? And they have like demand knocking down on, on their doors. But if you don't have that, then you do need to build it. And I think where your question is coming from too is like, we see a lot of founders get dunked on for like yapping too much and posting too much. And it's like, when are you, when are you building your company tweeting like every hour? And I think the, the one thing to know is it's not about how much you yap, it's about the ship yap ratio you have to respect the ship yap ratio and if the ratio is right, you can get away with anything.

That's great.

Yeah, Elon. Elon's a perfect example of this. Nobody's like, hey, what you bro, you're posting, you know, 20 times an hour. Okay, the rockets are being caught.

The rockets are being caught. That's sitting in the chopsticks. He's gonna, he can post what he.

Wants on ongoing direct. I've always thought that there's a little bit more nuance there. Obviously it's really key to tell someone that, like, hey, it's okay to start posting and going direct and doing, you know, founder led communications, but that doesn't mean that you should close off the indirect channels. And I see it almost as like tiers or levels. So level one is like, you start telling the world what you're building, build some credibility. Maybe there's some posts on X from the founder's account. Then you start doing new media like podcasts like this, calling in, telling, you know, you're using other people's platforms but you're accelerating. And then eventually the traditional media comes in and writes like the big profile. And that still has a lot of benefit. Can you talk to us about how founders should think about riding up that curve and where the value is across all three of those?

Yeah. So roughly you want to think of it as like concentric circles going outwards.

Sure.

And you cannot mess up the order. So the inner, the innermost circle is your co founders and executives and the people who work for you. And they have to believe and you have to fully saturate them with the propaganda and the sense of mission before you go out to the next circle. Next circle maybe is investors board. And then you get to customers, and then you get to maybe regulators, maybe other people. But the problem with trying to skip one of these in the sequence is let's say that you didn't brief. Let's say that you're launching like a new mission and you didn't brief your employees on this refreshed mission. But you go to the press and now your employees are reading it in the press and there's a disconnect. Two things can happen. One, they're like, wtf? This isn't what I signed up for. Now you have a world of pain because any pain coming from inside the house is like a thousand times worse than external. And, and two, your employees have freedom of speech and they have Twitter accounts and they can go on X and post like, well, wait a second, I'M not. Are you sure? This doesn't seem right. And then all of a sudden everything downstream of employees has lost credibility because people figure if it's true, employees would know about it. And so sequencing it correctly and not getting too greedy too fast is really important. Like, always go from the smaller circles to the outer circles.

That makes sense how? In terms of getting every. Every company wants to get attention. The challenge is that there are some sort of cheap things that you can do that get massive amount of attention that are sort of like, you know, basically like slop. Like, I won't name it, but there was a launch video in the last 30 days that was just in my group chats, was like super cringe. But then it got like millions of views. And I was looking at it, I'm like, all right, like, this seems like cheap attention, but then maybe it just got so many views that it works. Talk about, maybe talk about like taste when it comes to getting attention. And is there more longevity if you're sort of building that sort of slower base of sort of like tasteful releases and messaging and comms versus, like the cheap high attention moments?

Yeah, tasteful, tasteful vids. So there's. There's two things. One is, you know, the, the crazy hot chart. Yeah, the crazy hot chart.

Of course. Yeah. Who does?

There's like, there's like a company crazy hot chart where if you're really hot as a company, there's a lot that you can get away with. But if you're new and people don't know a lot about you, then every single thing you do is say is like disproportionately affecting how they think of you. And so if you have a 10 year history of just like wins and bangers, and you have one thing that is kind of weird or flop or a little bit cringy, you can kind of get away with it. It gets absorbed a little bit better. But if your company is launching for the first time and the one thing people see is 100% of the data points that they have about you, you can't really afford that. So I'm not saying don't take risks. I'm saying that the importance of taste goes up, like even, even more when you're new and there's not a lot of data points about you. And then the second thing about just taste versus quantity is a lot of things that get a ton of likes and engagement are just total garbage. And the responses are all like, bots. Like, if you go to a TechCrunch X post and look at the replies. It's just straight up bot replies. If you go to these, these like framework bros or I don't know, the like mental model bros. Sure, sure. Here's what happened this week. Thread bros get a lot of engagement, but I would not trade that for the world. And so the thing to look for is like who is in the replies and who is not in the replies.

Yeah.

Cause replies are usually really positive too. But it's positive from people that like, it's a counter signal if they like it.

Yeah, exactly. It's all about signal. Right? Signal.

Yeah.

Do you think the best sort of like going direct founder mode to put it in one bucket? CEOs are sort of like born that way and maybe you need to help uncover that ability of like sort of communicating their story to the world or is it something that anybody can figure out with sort of proper training and understanding, sort of social mechanics and the platforms that we distribute content on and all that kind of thing.

Okay. There are different archetypes of super cracked impressive founder that you want to just throw your life to the side and go follow them and do whatever it takes to get on that rocket ship kind of feeling. There's different archetypes of founders who can inspire that feeling. But the key is you can be in an archetype, but you can't be between archetypes. You can't be in the cringy uncanny valley of here's the real you and here's the online you. And you're sort of like make it halfway there. You can be the like super brash, controversial, loud type. You can be the Mimi funny type. You can be the strong, silent type of founders and just like one thing once a year. But if you're type three and you're trying to force yourself into type one, it's going to be painful for everybody. Like most of all you. And people can tell. Right?

So.

So I think it's less about there's one type and you have to be it and can you learn it or do you have to be born it? It's more like there's different types and you can fit into one of those types, but you can't try to jump from one type to another and kind of like fall into the abyss halfway in between.

Yeah, I think about the difference between like David Holes and a Justin Mares. Like Justin is doing threads, but they're very detailed on health and breaking stuff down. David Holes just shows up once a week and tweet something like about the Future and how AI will like change.

Yeah, like alien civilizations.

Yeah, alien civilizations. But they're both great posters. But if they tried to swap, it would be really, really weird.

You sometimes see people like online larping as Palmer.

Like.

Yeah, they're trying to. Someone else. Yep, exactly. They're like, I, like I have a.

Chip on my shoulder.

And I always say this for the going direct thing is like how do you communicate? Because there are some people who their authentic communication is best in a blog post or a long post. Other people can be really pithy and just post bangers. Other people are really great on video and should just do a podcast circuit. Other people are great on national tv. And so figuring out where the founder sits and then accelerating that instead of being like, well, X is the popular one. So I got to figure that out. It can be very hard.

We were talking about and you were saying I should describe it as default out.

Remember? Oh, default out. I don't remember that. Explain that.

Weren't we. You and I were.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Standard out. Standard out.

You were talking.

Oh, right.

So programming in programming as like a, as like a, A metaphor for the, the default. Yeah, the default type of medium that somebody should use.

Yep.

And if they need to go outside of that, they can. But everybody has like a strongest like a default medium and you can, you don't have to like only stick to that. Like you can go outside of it. Some, some of these like andrej Karpathy posts are actually a blog post and just dumps it into the Xbox and hits post and it's fine.

Yeah. I mean a lot of that's about the flexibility of the X platform. But there are definitely great CEOs out there who's like their default out should just actually being going and sitting down with, you know, Andrew Ross Sorkin and doing an interview. And they will, they will crush that. And if they. And then, and then that clip should live on X and someone else should.

Yeah, exactly.

But they should not try and turn it into a banger. Hilarious post. Because like that's just not authentic to who they are. I have a prompt for you. One of our 2025 goals is to get a glowing puff piece in a mainstream journalism outfit. What's the strategy for getting TVPN on the COVID of the New York Times or the New Yorker? What should we do?

Or the journal would be.

A journal would be ideal. So how can we reverse. Reverse engineer this? Take us through the steps.

I think Financial Times, that'd be great too. I see you looking really nice with that salmon pink backdrop.

Oh yeah, that'd be fantastic. Okay. Yeah. Financial Times. How do we get the profile done?

Okay, so the first question is, what is the business goal here? Like, how do you convert attention to money? Right, and you guys converted. Okay, let's just work through it live. You guys convert attention to money by getting a lot of listeners so that you have leverage with advertisers and then the advertisers pay you and then it grows and continues being the most profitable podcast in the world.

That's the business, baby.

Number one question is, who are those marginal listeners? Are they people in tech that you haven't reached yet and you're going to get more bang for buck by converting like people in tech who have been living in a cave and don't listen? Or are you going to go out and reach a new community that you haven't gotten into yet or you're going to go to some like, in between, like adjacent community where it's people who in, let's say it's people in D.C. who now understand that half of Silicon Valley is in Washington D.C. and they need to understand tech better. So it's like policy people who want to understand tech. So, so here's my first question to you, is like, who is that next group of listeners that you're going after?

Probably slightly older public markets investors. We were pretty big in the private markets for tech, but moving are we? We like to think of it as like YC Demo day was our NFL combine earning season is our Super Bowl. And so we want to deliver on, you know, a Super bowl level event for TBPN covering public company earnings. Mag 7.

Okay, so you want to go to sell side analysts, you want to go to the big banks, you want to go to probably the extreme exchanges have some events like New York Stock Exchange has events. You probably want things that are like Citadel adjacent, like D. Shaw adjacent to get into that community. And also there's a lot of overlap between young tech people and young hedge fund and quant trader people. Obviously, like the young Jane street people just go back and forth. And so if that's the audience, then I would work backwards, like reverse engineer this whole thing and think, okay, where are they getting their information and what do they already care about that we can tap into? Like it's hellishly difficult to make people care about some new thing that they've just never heard of. Yeah, and Derek Thompson had this insight too. The best viral thing is something that's a little bit New, but a little bit familiar.

Yep.

Okay, let's say that we're talking to those people you're probably going to aim for. I mean, they'll read Wall Street Journal, they'll read Financial Times. Let's just say Journal because the paywall is less strict. Now you want to think about how do you fall into one of the coverage areas, like, are you in tech, are you in culture, are you in finance or something? So there, for example, New York Times has a guy who is, like, between tech and culture. And so maybe someone like that. Or let's say it's the Journal and their tech. Honestly, their, their tech desk, their tech team is in, like, shambles right now because they had this super bizarre layoff a few weeks ago, and there's just like a crazy management decision to lay off a bunch of AI and tech people. The cusp of. Hi. It's crazy. Yeah. So maybe you want to aim for, like, culture, finance. And then now you're putting together two pieces. One piece is like, what are the. What do those young hedge fund analysts or whatever care about and what are they thinking about? They're probably trying to understand what's coming out of the tech world and which companies are worth watching versus which are not. And they can see publicly available information, which is very scant, but they're trying to read behind the scenes of, like, which founders are respected and how good are they really, and can they recruit that kind of thing. And then what does the paper cover? And the paper probably covers big trends and what's happening in the world of AI, like, as we approach AGI, what are changes happening in the world? So, and then the third circle is like the unique perspective that you guys bring. So I would start by not doing a pitch at all, just vibing, networking, going out for drinks, chilling, and starting to talk about what's in the middle of that Venn diagram, which is like, you have the unique experience. It's interesting to the people you're trying to reach, and it's interesting to what the Journal has been covering. Do that, like, for three months or so, and then figure out one hook that's in the news, and then offer to do a deep dive into the hook, and then have somebody who's not you, like, have somebody else that they respect who's in your network and their network tell them, or like, like a me or like a founder, like an Eric Lyman, you know, go to them and just tell them, like, this is the thing blowing up in tech, and they should really take a deeper look and at that point, you're familiar to them. Familiarity breeds affection, positive feelings, but it also breeds credibility. So people who are told a fact 10 times tend to believe that the fact is true just because they've heard it a lot. So at this point, you're familiar, you have the story dialed in, you have your unique area of expertise, and then you have some third party validator telling them to look deeper into it. And that's how it begins.

Well, thanks for coming on the most profitable podcast in the world.

Last one. I know we've got a minute left. We try not to swear on the show because swearing is vulgar.

Yes.

And we're very short, bearish. Using cuss words online right now. How are you advising your clients in a world where, you know, big names are thrown around, mean words?

I think it's the same thing as before, which is like, whichever bucket you're in, stay in the bucket. And if, like, if there's a founder who just talks like a sailor and that's how they are, you can try to ask them to clean it up. I've never seen that work. I've just never had an experience where someone tells the founder, like, clean up the potty mouth and talk different. They actually do. And so it's just. That's your archetype. You stay there. But I will say the big takeaway, if people are trying to figure out what is the next era of comms. And just if there's one thing I as a founder need to know about, about building a cult and a movement around my company, it's. We're. We're entering the era of personality hires. With respect and affection, you guys. Ultimate personality hires. I'm one too. Safe space. It's okay.

Cheers.

Cheers.

Cheers to that.

But in a world where AI is better than us at pretty much everything, every human is going to be a personality hire. So just figure out what your lane is, is, and lean into that. And if you have that fire in you and you get into fights once in a while, it's not the worst thing. And if you don't, don't try to larp as Palmer Lucky and find the fights just so that you can have something to beef over. Just find your lane. Be in the lane. Don't try to jump into a lane that is disingenuous and unnatural for you because people sniff it out.

Yeah, that's really good advice. I like that a lot. Authenticity, as silly as it sounds.

Great. Well, I have to say thank you for coming on. When your clients have historically, that I'm aware of have come on the show. I'm sure there's been some that I'm not aware of that have come on the show. I always come away and just tell John he was too, too. He was too media trained, like too prepared, too good. So you're doing great work and thank you for, for, for being a. The former brother of the year and a friend of the show.

We'll see what happens this year. Keep up the good work.

You might be just to be clear, just be clear.

It can be two times ceremony. You need to do the ceremony where I go and put the crown and then we all cry.

Well, I mean, we're gonna have a black tie event this year for the award show and I'm sure you'll be invited.

That's it.

Perfect. All right.

Fantastic.

Amazing.

Thanks for stopping by.

Take care.

Bye. That was great. Lots of great insights from Lulu, as always. What's your review of the Saratoga water? Is this gonna put Rora out of business? Is this gonna put every water company out of business? They're getting so much. Let's do a taste test.

Tastes good. I mean it tastes fine.

It's okay.

This just screams to be the restaurant that a mid restaurant or the water that a mid restaurant would stock.

Okay.

Trying to be like, oh, yeah, we have bottled still.

Yeah, yeah.

Oh, we have Saratoga. Okay.

Saratoga.

Yeah.

I think it's. I think it's fun that it's going viral and good luck to the team.

No, I'm happy for them because I enjoy and appreciate value creation. So I'm glad they're they're doing. I'm sure they're numbers today.

Fantastic. They must be so happy.

Yeah, every single.

Well, you know what they should do if they want to keep up the sales coming out of this viral sensation?

They should buy some ad, buy every billboard in the United States. They really should just take advantage of this moment.

They should go on adclick.com they have out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Advertising only Ad Quick combines technology, out of home expertise and data to enable efficient seamless ad buying across the globe. That's great. Do you want to dive into Cloudflare? Should we just move on to some timeline? What are you feeling right now?

How much did we actually get into of Cloudflare?

I feel like it's start Cloudflare but they are the third player in this debate. We're going to have Amjad Massad from replit on in 30 minutes. And I thought it'd be good to kind of show the three companies that have been duking it out on the timeline. Yeah, we, we broke briefly cover it.

And then we'll go into the timeline.

Fantastic. So it's an older company, it's a public company founded in 2009 by Matthew Prince. That's the CEO who has been chirping at Guillermo on X. The goal was to build a globally distributed network to improve website security and performance. And so when you run into Cloudflare, it is a cdn. And so when you're scaling, you're getting a ton of traffic. The idea is instead of those hits triggering database queries and all the stuff that's going on wherever your server is on ABS, they hit Cloudflare first. It can mitigate DDoS attempts because it's just delivering the front end webpage first. And Cloudflare is a product that helps your website, similarly to Vercell, be very quick and fast. And they started with a $2.1 million Series A round in 2009 to develop a prototype and kickstart operations. They launched a TechCrunch Disrupt. What a throwback. 2010 they had core services, CDN, DDoS protection, which I mentioned, performance operation. And it was all a freemium model. So you get onto Cloudflare free for a little bit, and then quickly as you start scaling, they start charging you more. But as the, the tenor on axe has been, Cloudflare is still pretty affordable, even when you scale up. Amazon AWS has a lot of Cloudflare competitive products. Cloudfront, I think, is literally a direct competitor to their CDN product. But Cloudflare has been price competitive, roughly. And so you get a lot of stuff and then we'll go into kind of what they're doing to add features and functionalities to their product catalog. So in 2011, they raised a Series B by NEA. They wound up hitting billions of page views, millions of domains served. They're scaling pretty quickly. After only two years, they get to that $20 million Series B, then the next year.

That's interesting.

50 million series.

I mean, they were basically five years ish ahead of Vercel.

Yep.

But it's interesting how Vercel's series A was 20, you know.

Yeah, yeah. Everything just, everything got pulled forward around. That's a standard. And now a $50 million series a comment.

$20 million series B. Yeah. If a company does that and doesn't say, hey, we intentionally raised less money than we could have, you're like, okay, they're probably struggling.

Fred Wilson, Union Square Ventures comes in for the series C. That's $50 million in 2012. And they added more points of presence, which means more local servers that can deliver content even faster. Because the whole name of the game is if you're in Chicago, you want a server in Chicago that's delivering that website. So it's extra fast because the speed of light and physics come into the equation when you're going, even just going across the US and back is, you know, at light speed is several milliseconds and that matters. I think it's almost like 30 milliseconds. I don't know for sure, but it's, it's, it's significant enough that a content delivery network makes a lot of sense.

Roughly. Is that roughly how fast I was running this morning?

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

When I smoked the whole team.

Yeah, we had a little ra, little foot race this morning with the team and Jordy came out on top. He's a fast, Fast brother. In 2012, they reached a $1 billion valuation, or close to it, based on rapid growth and network expansion. In 2013, they added DoS mitigation and they successfully defended against high profile, high profile attacks. The Spam House incident, you know, that's going to be a good story when you dig into Spam House, but I'm sure there were, there were a lot of DDOSing going on. I mean, basically anytime someone was upset, I mean.

Yeah, the backstory. So in March 2013, Spam House, which is a non profit organization that maintains block lists of malicious IP addresses, experienced a massive detox attack which experts called the largest in history, that knocked their website offline and broadly disrupted the Internet. So, hey, let's, you know, the guy that's trying to stop us from doing what we do, let's, let's stop him.

Oh Yeah. I mean, DDoS, DDoS stuff is serious. I mean a lot of nation states use it to knock off different services that they think are not aligned. X has been the subject of DDoS attack hacks. Elon's talked about that.

It was a nation state potentially, but.

It'S happened, it's happened all the time. And it can happen on a very small scale too. If you're just running a small company and there's some kid who's a script kitty and gets upset with you or just wants to troll you.

My dad.

Oh yeah, that's right.

From our own home, I'd set up, I'd set up a computer.

Yeah. And it's Basically I mean, DDoS sounds complicated.

I'd mess with him and I'd go like, dad, why is your website down? And then he'd go spend like 10 minutes being like, I don't know.

But it's really as easy as just going like, like in the python code while 1 like infinite loop request. This website, it just requested millions of times and it can just be done so quickly that if you don't have something set up, you can be in a lot of trouble. And so they doubled their domains to 1.5 million, servicing roughly 5% of global web traffic. Getting really, really big. Then they go on.

The best thing is when companies do do the mean, it turns out these generational companies, they do, they do the meme.

And that's the lesson. Always do the meme.

Whatever percentage of your TAM that you put in your pre seed deck that you want to achieve, just do it, do it.

Just do it.

Yeah, you'll be a big company.

They face results, scaling challenges. Then on 20 in 2014 they go on this acquisition spree. They acquired Stop the Hacker, what a great name in February of 2014 to boost threat detection. They acquired Crypto Seal in June of 2014 to enhance encryption and certificate management. Crypto Seal, I believe, founded by Ryan Lackey, good friend of mine. Great, just kind of genius programmer, honestly. Major initiatives. They launched Project Galileo to protect to protect vulnerable public interest websites. Introduced universal universal ssl, free HTTPs for all customers and keyless SSL for high security clients. And then they expanded their global network to over 30 data centers. That set them up for their Series D, $110 million from capital G. That's Google, Microsoft and Baidu. They got three of the hyperscalers essentially in the company. They expanded to China and then they adopted a bunch of other technologies. Web Application Firewall, introduced the I'm under attack Mode to counter layer 7 DDoS attacks. And at this point in 20, 2015, they hit 62 points of presence worldwide. So they're continuing to grow. And whenever you're deploying fast applications on the edge, we saw this with Vercel, Vercel going to something like 30 points of presence. Cloudflare is up at 60 in 2015. And that's the name of the game when you're trying to deliver the Internet very quickly. In 2016 they acquired Eager Platform Company to build out Cloudflare Apps Platform. And we'll talk about that because. Because that's kind of the product that will compete with the Repl Dot and Vercel stuff is actually being able to run your entire app on Cloudflare instead of just deliver content. So the traditional CDN is images take a long time to load. Let's put those on servers that are close to the people requesting them. Netflix is a great example. You want to put Squid game, the video for Squid game. You want that to not come from far away. You want that to be up close unless you're caching it. But in general you want it to be close so that when someone clicks that button.

We explored high. You know, people talk about high frequency trading. We'd explore frequency podcast trying to get.

I mean with the rate we're growing, we'll probably have to build our own Cloudflare honestly and just buy our own hardware. We'll probably have to set up our own nuclear plants for. To run facilities energy requirements, create our own chip fabs and ultimately design our chips. Yeah, exactly. Just completely vertically integrate down to the mining and extraction of nuclear fissile material. That's right. But that's the, that's the modern media game you play. Yeah, Person company. Now I'm sure we'll be at thousands in a couple years.

That's right.

Cloudflare. In 2016 they hit 100 global cities. They had some outages and operational errors. It's. It's a, it's a rough and tumble game that they're. In 2016 they expend. This is what Guillermo was mentioning. The cloud bleed incident, a security bug led to data leaks. Quickly identified, patched and mitigated. I don't think there was a huge, huge impact on the business. I don't think information and we didn't get a chance to talk to Gamera about this. But I think both with the vercel security issue and with cloudbleed, I'm not sure that there was a lot of like, you know, customer credit card data that was stolen, but it was. The potential for harm was. Was really significant and that obviously hurts reputations and needs to be addressed with open communication, which is what all these CEOs are trying to do now. There was also a little bit of, a little bit of like a political content debate because the Daily Stormer, which is a very controversial right wing website, was using Cloudflare and obviously was the subject of intense ddosing constantly. Cloudflare had taken a stance of hey, we're just an infrastructure provider. We abide by the first amendment free speech. If the government wants to shut you down, they can do that. But we are not the arbiter of what should and should not be on The Internet, we're just an infrastructure provider. But in, in 2017, they did drop the Daily Stormer after public pressure and internal reviews. And they, and they had to kind of rewrite and figure out where is their content policy, what's acceptable and what's not. Of course, their private company, they can decide what is appropriate to use their server for and they have a right to refuse service.

They had this happen later. They had, they had 8chan, that was the same thing.

Yep.

So they drop them at some point.

And so that's always been kind of a hot button for all these infrastructure platforms. When Alex Jones got deplatformed, it was all the way down to like, you know, the Shopify plugin that he uses for reviews wants to not let him use that review widget anymore. And it's all a nested bottle like bag of worms, basically. It's very frustrating. And I mean we saw this with Trump where he got to platform from like Pinterest and stuff. So sometimes these things can become like big hot button issues. But back to the interesting tech stuff. They launched Cloudflare workers, enabling serverless code execution at the network edge. So what that means is that if you do have something that needs to be computed on the server side, you're not just delivering your content on the CDN anymore, your HTML and your images. You're also allowing the user to, to interact with your app and create actual server side functionality through these Cloudflare workers. Part of the whole serverless Trend. They acquired NewMob to optimize mobile performance, implemented Creative Entropy Generation lava lamps, pendulums, Geiger counters to enhance security. That's crazy. Have you seen the lava lamps thing? You heard of this? So basically there's this big question on when you're working in security, a big piece of that is how do you generate random numbers? And so one of the ways they do it is they create a wall of lava lamps that all move in a completely random and not predictable way. And so they take a video of that and then they compress that image and that generates a random number that can't be predicted. Because even if you're, even if you're just like, we're going to use, you know, some random number generator from the computer, there's sometimes vulnerabilities in there where you can actually truly predict. They're all pseudo random number generators. So there's this like race to create the, the amazing, craziest.

Yeah, look at random Cloudflare lava lamps. They have a picture of the actual wall.

It's so cool. It also just like a great vibe. So I love that. Yeah. 2018 they launched the 1.1.1.1 DNS service. There's a free privacy first DNS resolver. They did. They expanded to domain registration. Wholesale cost domain registration with no markups. Formed an alliance with major cross cloud providers to reduce data transfer fees, which can actually get really crazy expensive. Zero trust enhancements. Cloudflare access and Argo Tunnel setting the stage for comprehensive security suite. So they're taking security seriously?

Oh yeah.

Putting the screws to Google and they set themselves up for an IPO. So in 2019 they go public right before they did pre IPO funding. Series E, that's $150 million at around 3.0.2 to 3.5 billion. They dropped more controversial clients as you mentioned 8chan and they had a few operational hiccups around this time. Some outages, some software deployment issues, but nothing that stopped.

This is what Guillermo was talking about. The number one thing is, you know, mitigating outages.

Yep. And so they filed their S1 in August, went public on September 13th, 2019 at $15 a share. They raised over 4,525 million dollars. Let's go. Historical size gone for them.

There we go.

They launched Cloudflare Warp, a VPN mobility service. And then they went on another acquisition spree. They acquired S2 Systems for browser isolation technology and Lync to bolster developer tools leading to Cloudflare pages getting more into the application layer. And then they appointed the co founder Michelle Zatlin to as president, marking a milestone in tech leadership. Revenue reached $431 million in 2020 with significant growth in enterprise customers because again, even though they are competing with aws, they, they famously have built their own servers, own their own hardware and can be much more competitive on pricing. So they enhanced workers for with support for new languages. Launch Cloudflare pages and R2 storage, which is S3 compatible object storage. But it doesn't have egress fees. So if you're storing a bunch of images or text or JSON files on S3 you can just move right over to R2 which is I think, isn't that the one. One letter, one letter more and one number less. It's a very funny name. And so they're, they're all about, you know, getting people to migrate more and more stuff off of AWS onto Cloudflare. And then they acquired Zeraz to improve, improve third party integrations. Revenue grew to 656 million in 2021. They surpassed 1 billion in annual revenue in 2022. Introduced D1, a serverless SQL database, and went on some more acquisition sprees. Navigated complex issues during the Russia Ukraine conflict, balancing service continuity with policy adjustments. They blocked Kiwi Farms, which is another controversial website. There were harassment issues there. And so they're, they're constantly scaling and then dealing with the fallout of, you know, having a whole bunch of companies on their. On their platform. Launched workers AI in 2023, partnered with Nvidia Nvidia to deploy GPUs at the edge. So if you want to do AI workloads in an actual city, very low latency. Cloudflare now offers that more acquisitions. Zero Trust networking company, secure infrastructure access companies, cloud native security company. Just tons and tons of acquisitions as they go. And now they are aiming for net profitability and targeting $5 billion in annual revenue in the coming years. They're expanding enterprise sales and enhancing zero Trust and edge computing offerings. And they're deepening their AI integration, broadening the developer platform.

Yeah. One thing I love about Cloudflare is they sponsor the US Ski team.

Oh, that's great.

So if you like skiing, you might also like their set of products. And this is a. Cloudflare at the Moment is a $42 billion public company. And they've actually, they've suffered much of the same selloff that other firms have. But it's just wild to think about whatever that pre IPO round was. The series E3 billion, 3.2 billion.

So they're up 10x those, those IPO buyers. Something like that. That's great. And certainly a good outcome for Union Square and all the early, early investors that got in at those $10 million, $20 million rounds, but took a while to get here. 15 years. Yes.

Interesting. One thing that's fascinating. So Cloudflare as a sort of scaled platform, has plenty of pages comparing itself to other providers.

Sure.

And you would think if Matthew Prince, the CEO, is coming after Guillermo, that they would have be positioning.

I would expect a Cloudflare vs. Vercel landing page.

There's no mention of Vercel on Cloudflare.

Who are they comping themselves too?

Vercel does mention Cloudflare, but I'm sure does not.

Interesting. Well, maybe that changes after today's spicy.

Yeah, I mean, I just think like, you know, who knows what's going on behind the scenes. Right. Guillermo didn't mince words when he said, like, we tried to use Cloudflare for a pretty important project internally. It didn't Work. And so now I can imagine there very well could be some ego involved.

Yep.

But anyways, yeah, it does feel like.

A little bit of like a big dogging going on. Just like, hey, little bro, you don't even have servers. You know, Vercel, we have our own infrastructure. We compete with aws. You're not even in the conversation. Like that's kind of the energy Matthew Prince brings. But you know, hopefully everyone can benefit from a rising tide and a great growing pizza pie. And the pie slices will get bigger for everyone because that's what we want to see. We want to see bull markets.

Do you know where. Where you can enjoy a nice piece of pizza pie at a wander? That's right, John. Find your happy place. Find your happy place.

Book a wander.

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That's right.

Anyway, we got eight minutes. Should we hit the timeline?

Let's hit the timeline.

Let's go to she.

Yeah. Great post from SHIELD Here. He's pulling up. He says venture capital in the 90s was wild. Good funds had trouble. Triple digit IRRs. And he's pulling up. So KP here. Vintage. Their first vintage.

This is why they're in the holy chain.

Yep.

This is why they're in the holy trinity.

So their first fund, it's $8 million fund. They only got a 31. 31 multiple. Only a 51% IRR.

But yeah. Why is the IRR so low given the multiple? Is that just because it was such a long fund? It took them a long time to get liquidity on those. Like because they had a 32x fund. Fund seven. But it's 122% IRR for.

Yeah.

For Kleiner Perkins fund seven. I wonder what's going on.

No other. There's no insight.

We'll have to get Everett Randall from Kleiner Perkins on the show.

But anyways, their best performing fund was in 1996. Unsurprisingly, right before the doctor right time.

They IPO'd everything in that portfolio.

Yeah. So they have a 17 multiple. But their IRR was 286%.

Crazy. I mean they turned 300 million.

Much bigger fund.

Yeah, they. So they turned into like almost $6 billion.

Yeah.

Wow.

And then there's a bunch of other funds here. Mayfield, which I feel bad. I should know better. My venture history legit.

Very old school, though. I mean, you can see in. In the 80s they were already on fund four.

Can you imagine? KP comes out their little 8 million dollar venture fund. They 31 exit and they're like, oh, I think we might be on to something here.

What's also interesting is all three, they just were like, we do $150 million funds. Like that's what we do. They were, yeah.

But the fascinating thing is they have their first fund in 1972, $8 million. They don't raise their. Their second fund until eight years later. Oh yeah, the $55 million fund.

Probably just so slow and took so long for those companies to get to liquidity.

It's funny the.

They had to prove it.

The learning is like they do this huge. We don't have any data past their 96 fund because I think it just switched to being KP at a certain point. But it's funny that, like, they didn't learn their lesson on like upsizing the fund because they just put up this ridiculous performance on the biggest fund that they have outlined here.

So, yeah, I mean, I Wonder what's in that 72 vintage. It might have been like intel maybe. I don't even know Apple, that kind of something like that. Yeah.

Get a couple of those and a.

Lot of bangers in there. Sequoia also doing quite well, putting up big numbers.

It'd be fun to do. I have a feeling that this summer the news cycle will slow down a little bit. And it's fun to do totally deep dives on like the top 20 individual funds ever.

And the individual went into them talk. I mean, if they're. They're still in the game or they're.

Still got to get them on the show.

Maybe probably retired. Probably skiing where they don't have chairlifts. That's honest.

That's right.

But we'll get them on the show. We'll have them break it down. We'll have them toast to the good old days where you could put up a 31x multiple in a couple years.

I want to, I want to find somebody that was doing venture capital in the 70s, send them a bottle of Dom and a bottle of Saratoga. Say, hang out with us for three hours straight.

Yep.

And let's just, let's do it. Talk about the good old days.

Anyway, should we go to some nominative determinism?

Yep.

I love this one. It's Andre Karpathy and If you break down his last name, it's Car Path. And of course, this is the man who worked at Tesla on self driving cars, an AI pioneer and dj. Cows says, I think about this every day. And I think about it too a lot. Not every day.

We do think about this.

I love it, but I love this.

Yeah, the. Bill Ackman is really into nominative determinism. That's why he's Ackman Activist man.

Sure. Yep. Makes sense. Yeah, it's a good, it's a great one.

It's.

Should we go over to Super Dario talking to.

Yeah, I just thought this was funny because it's been this ongoing sort of thing that we talk about on the show. So Arvind Srinivas from Perplexity says we're building why, explaining why they're building a browser. He says it's the only way to create AI agents with enough control over multiple apps, especially on iOS. The goal, agents that can book, travel, buy things and act as a personalized assistant. So we're just waiting some for one person to build an agent to book private jets.

You know, this is, this is a very silly bridge to what's basically an ad read. But Ramp Travel is fantastic. I like, it is a magical product. And I'm not, I know I'm saying that I'm super conflicted, but honestly like you go there, it aggregates all the flights, it saves all your information perfectly. You, you click it and it's just automatically expensed, automatically put into like you just, you just show up to the airport and oh wow, like TSA PreCheck.

Is in there cheap every single time too.

Yeah, no, it's, it's a flawless product. And then you can also book the hotel right there. It is such a good product. And of course like as a, as a, as a, you know, a manager of a company, you can decide what's in policy, what's out of policy, how much you want to spend and stuff. But you know, for us it's more of like you put a minimum on how much you spend on the hotel so that, yeah, we're not staying anywhere staying on. But for some companies that want to save same time in money, they can put the cap on as well. But it really is, it really is a magical product. And I, and I wouldn't be surprised if the first time I have an agent book for me, it's in Ramp. Yes. They've, they've built all of the like the harnessing to actually plug in, in a really, really seamless way. And there's no, like, ads or upsells. It's. It's so much better than booking.

No ads in there. So we'll put one in here. We got a post from Austin. A friend of the show has been giving me a bunch of just, you know, he built the morning brew into a monster. Has been very helpful on tvpn. He's retired for a minute.

I put this in here because I want to call him out. Stop it. This is like, one of the worst things I've ever seen. I really, really hate the idea of someone with as much talent as Austin retiring. It's like, get back in the game. Create some shareholder value. Build a massive business. You should be working 100 hours a week. America needs you. And I saw this and I was just disgusted.

Okay.

But it was revolting, honestly. But it's. It's really, really depressing.

But okay. But clearly he's a marketer. He's a media man, and he's retiring so that he can unretire. Come out of the gates. I get it.

I still. I just have a lot of sensitivity around our word specifically. Yeah, I don't think we should be talking about retirements. I think we should be working to the bone forever.

Well, he's staying busy. He is staying busy.

I love it. He's got a bunch of things that.

He'S doing and we're going to have him on the show soon.

I love it.

I'm trying to pull him out of retirement.

We're going to pull him out of retirement. We'll convince him. We're giving a talk.

We'll give him a come get on the show. Yeah, we'll give you a dedicated spot.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it is funny because he's like, I'm in. I'm in retirement. And here's my focus. I'm training for a half ironman. I'm investing. I've written five angel checks. I'm tinkering. I'm playing with dozens of AI tools. I'm growing. I helped 3x Oceans talent monthly growth rate to in 2.5 months. Obviously, he's still in the game. He's merely in his Michael Jordan playing baseball era. I believe he's getting back.

I was looking for the right sports analogy. I was like, I just don't know if. I don't know these things. But did Brady. Brady retired at one point, briefly.

Did he. I don't know.

Is that not even correct?

It's more like, doesn't Bo Nickel retire in between every UFC fight? Right, and then he comes back. Is that how that works? It's technically a retirement.

Amazing. You always find something new to not understand.

Well, come out of retirement. Come on the show and announce your life's work and get to work. Austin, you're on notice. Let's skip the Humanoids thing because that's a bigger deep dive. Let's do just a funny, funny post because we only got a couple minutes actually. How we doing on Amjad? Is he in? No. Okay, we will do this. Ashley Vance post. Dan Primack shares. Remember when Elon and Zuck said they were going to fight in a cage and like, lots of people believed them? I believed them. And Ashley says, I heard somewhere that Italy wanted to charge them $300 million to use the Coliseum. Not sure if it's true, but I think it is and I think it killed the brawl.

What a miss. It would have been so good in general.

It would have been amazing.

Cash grab. Not. Not usually a good idea. And missed opportunity to make Italy the center of celebrity grudge matches, pay per views, things like that. Huge miss. Also, they had a rough weekend.

Who do you think would have won? Because there was always the thing about like, Elon is just much physically is physically bigger, but Zuck had been training more. And so it felt like if the fight had happened like that week that they were beefing, Zuck would have won. But if you gave Elon a year to train, Elon could learn enough of the basics to put his size to work and win. What do you think?

In a pure play boxing rule set.

It was going to be next Martial Arts?

Oh, it was, yeah.

This is something I know about. The only thing I know about UFC is from the Zuck.

It's actually so funny because I do think that Zuck could nerd out enough on technique and get the right and. And Elon would go into it being like, yeah, I'm sorry, just going to rely on my size advantage and just.

Try to not work out at all.

And then Zuck would just be nerding out. He'd get some like super technical submission.

I mean, the weight alone, I mean, there has to be like a 40 pound gap or something. It's like pretty significant, right?

Yeah. Well, speaking of the Italians, they had a rough go in F1 this weekend. Coming in at what happened.

Both.

Both didn't. Didn't finish.

No.

Leclaire and Hamilton, they've had a. They've had a rough start to the year. People are saying there's mechanical issues.

Is it the car?

It's always something with Ferrari people. People are saying like Lewis has gotten like a full season of like the typical Ferrari stuff just in. In, you know, barely starting the year, two races. It's unfortunate. It's rough but predictable.

Well, should we go to Zach Gladman? I don't know how to pronounce that. Might be Zach G Labman says crazy ad placement tri ramp. And it's a united worker at an airport. And in the middle of his. In the middle of his bright yellow vest it just says ramp.

And this just makes a lot of sense because you have business traveling. Ramp has travel products. I actually saw this and I was like wait, is this actually.

Do they actually do this? Yeah, no, of course not. It's a joke. But the guy works on a ramp. I guess.

We got a chart here from Oren Hoffman. He says insane growth. What an amazing company. And he's showing the Flock Safety ARR chart from Sakura. We gotta have the soccer guys on sometime.

Oh yeah.

Because they have some of the best insight. We got a fact check. Adcock came out and said that oh yes figure is the number one most in demand stock in the private markets. Which I think is categorically incorrect based on my insight into the market. But I would like to have soccer on to talk about. What are the sort of. They do this research, heavy research on private companies kind of pulling out random different data sources and putting it together nicely. And yeah, I would imagine they would have something to say about that.

But Yeah, I mean YC company Flock Safety. We've talked about them before. 200k in revenue in ARR in 2017 growing to 285 million in 2024. Wow, that is a lot.

And I wonder what they do next. I can talk briefly about Prasanna who's the founder of Rippling. Sounds like he had a. Was really in a pickle over the weekend. This was yesterday at 6am a lot of people sent this to us. I like when there's just something extremely dramatic. People send it to us.

Yeah, I get some of these texts and I'm like.

And I'm like is this a tech story? We'll cover it but it's not necessarily top of our list. But sounds like he was. Had some.

But you got to pay attention. When there's a billionaire on the run that's always an interesting story.

On the run.

Something like that. I don't know.

At least we just spend like 10 minutes analyzing like dilution.

Well, Green Oaks came in at this valuation. They wanted 10% delusion but then they.

Had the SVB thing and they had to take kind of an emergency round of shorts.

And were they 50, 50 when they started the company?

We don't know. We don't, we don't really know. But anyways, he's going through divorce. Had a bunch of issues over the weekend, but they've been resolved, I think. So I was happy to cover that. Now he sent an update post.

Yeah, so I mean, the high level here is that Persona posted a massively viral thread. 17 million views, 68k likes. He said that he's going through a divorce and he's on the run from the Chennai police, hiding outside of Tamil Nadu. He had a rough go with his wife, who he was married to for ten years. They have a nine year old son. Their marriage broke down and his wife was having an affair. He was accused of a bunch of crimes. The police came for him. But it sounds like he's been more or less exonerated from all the accusations and is now, and is now safe and sound. And fortunately the kid is unharmed. And I think that's the silver lining of what really matters here.

Yeah, we got a post from Will Brown.

He says, bro, this is why we do the show.

Last night was a deep seek moment.

It's funny because, like, that makes sense and the whole deep sea thing, the whole reason that that phrase makes sense because people were saying deep seek is a Sputnik moment. Yeah, it's like now, last night, it was a deep seek moment. I love it. Internet utterly snapped.

Did we kind of miss coverage a little bit on deep. Deep seek.

There is a new version of deep seek out, but I don't think it was as revolutionary. It was much more incremental and it didn't have the narrative of, oh, it was built for $10 in a shed with, you know, screws.

And it doesn't hit the same.

Doesn't hit the same. And you have a bunch of fake news around it.

Yeah. There's also the new Baidu model that they're training, right? Or no, it's Jack Ma with Ant.

Well, speaking of someone as handsome as Jack Ma, we got Amjad Massad in the building. Welcome to the show.

There he is. Crazy intro. What's going on? How are you?

Good.

I just dunked my head in a bowl of ice.

I hope you got your banana on there too.

The banana's key. You can't get. You can't start your morning without banana on your face.

No, no, just some banana all over, you know.

Are you still lifting like Crazy. Last time I saw you, you were deadlifting like 500 pounds or something like that.

I lost a lot of weight. You know, it's just like you get, you get to a point where it's unhealthy. It's, it's not exercise, it's, it's, it's killing you.

It gets, it gets a little risky. The risk of injury gets up there. But you got to be able to, you know, break a sweat every once in a while.

You see Daniel growing, Daniel's tweet is like if you want to look like and feel like, start powerlifting.

Yeah. Because he's just, oh well if I want to get the number to go up, I better bulk more. And then I just put eating so much.

Yeah, I still maintain some of the muscle but, but you know, just trying to work out for longevity and health.

Yeah. Anyway, thanks for joining. Can you give us just like a brief overview of like where relet is, what you're working on? How's it going?

Yeah. So replit, kind of like the genesis of it has always been how do you make it so that, you know, programming is more accessible to more people. It's had a profound effect on my life. Like you know, coming from, from Jordan, growing up there, you know, lower middle class family, being able to come to the US come to New York initially and then move to the Bay Area and be able to build a billion dollar company. That's outrageous and it shouldn't be possible. But the reality is that we have this massive wealth engine machine that's called the Internet. And for a long time it hasn't really been possible for a lot of people to take part in that. I think Peter Thiel said the paradox of the Internet, it was supposed to decentralize wealth, yet somehow concentrated into Silicon Valley. But I think what we're seeing now is finally the tools of creation are becoming more accessible. And that's really been my mission. And so initially replit was about let's get people learning how to code. And I think that was a good pursuit. But people don't want to code. The reality is I spent whatever working at Codecademy and replit. I mean it's good. I think we taught a lot of people how to code and at replit we built a ton of infrastructure structure around how do you set up a virtual machine, the runtime, install packages, automating, all of that and all the way to deployment. But really the big unlock was the agents putting an agent on top of all of that. We were the first Agent in the market to be able to configure services, databases, deployment and go all the way to deploying an app. And it kind of transformed our business just in the past seven months.

Can you talk a little bit about the benefit of knowing how to code and how that collides with vibe coding? I see a lot of people that are like, oh, I vibe coded and it didn't really work. And then Andrej Karpathy is like, I vibe coded it and it worked great. And I'm like, there's probably a little bit of a difference between when Andrej Karpathy is vibe coding and when someone who's completely non technical is vibe coding. Like, is there still value to learning to code in 2025?

I think there is. But I mean, it depends, John, about what is your prediction about where AI is headed, right? Like if, you know, in the up case, like what Dario just said recently, all code will be AI generated. I assume this optimization path we're on, where agents are going to get better and better and better, the answer would be different. The answer would be no. It would be a waste of time to learn. Learn how to code. But like, you know, you could have different predictions and I think different people will. Will make different assumptions. I'm at this point like sort of agent pilled. You know, I. The. The progress we're seeing with agent, we just, we just are rolling out. V2 agent. I've never seen a sort of like an a B test as we're rolling out. I've never seen metrics in my entire life. I worked at Facebook, other places. We're moving metrics like crazy. Just, just by improving the agent, like 100%, 500% on certain metrics on, on success that users are having. And so I think where Vibe coding goes wrong is when a beginner is using Cursor, some other platform, great product, but they don't give them guardrails. Like, you know, there's the guy that lost six months of work on, on Reddit, there's the guy on Twitter that leaked his API keys. Like on Replit, we do git commit for you. You don't have to worry about that. We hide the API keys in like a secure vault. And so I think a lot of it goes to like, hey, these beginners should not be using a lot of these tools and instead they should come to places like Replit. But that being said, I'm very bullish. Like, you know, I sort of changed my answer even like a year ago, I would say kind of Learn a bit of coding, I would say learn how to think, learn how to break down problems, learn how to communicate clearly as you would with humans, but also with machines.

Can you tell me some stories about success stories from replit? Maybe what's possible as a solo dev? Today we're seeing Peter Levels IO do crazy stuff. But what are you seeing from the, from the most successful Replit users?

Let me start with the, with the business cases because I think those are kind of really profound because we've always had like micro entrepreneurs like make money and you know, it's certainly accelerated massively. But 100 plus year old company Sears, I don't know about you, I didn't know they continue to exist. But they, they have this spin off called Sears Home Services. About a year ago they hired a team to like a more trendy sort of tech team to get them off of Cobalt, which is whatever 100 year old programming language. And they were able to do it very quickly. And then after they'd done that, basically most companies as they're modernizing, they go adopt a bunch of SaaS tools and no code tools and local tools to become like a modern company. They actually skipped all of that and went to AI and their operations team which manages the kind of field workers that go out and every day kind of do house repairs and all that. They started building AI tools. So one AI tool that they have is like the worker would go and would talk to the AI and it would optimize their route and that made it so that they're making a lot more money. And now everyone on that team started building AI tools. And so you have this ops theme that's highly levered that are able to move business metrics and they leapfrogged an entire era of computing and landed on AI agents. And now these are the generalists that are building the business. And I think this is a view into the future where firms would not be made of like you know, SDR and like ea, whatever it's going to be like. I'm a sales generalist, right? I can do all that stuff because I can spin up AI agents that can do all these things.

That makes sense. How do you think about balancing the sort of needs and demands of the different types of people and customers of the, of your platform, right? You have somebody that comes on, they're sort of early in their sort of like entrepreneurial journey, they build something but then suddenly there's this moment where they become a business. And once you become a business and you're sort of like servicing. So like you have the challenge of having so many people on your platform and some of them can end up wanting different things. What does it look like in terms of, you know, you want to be able to continue to service these users over time while still making sure that replit is the best place for somebody to sort of like start their journey.

We've taken a difficult approach and perhaps not the smartest. Right. The reason I've been working on it for my entire life is because what I try to do is build an end to end experience where we infuse a lot of taste and decisions and choices on behalf of customers. Actually you had that in the past where like the Apple ecosystem kind of makes a lot of decisions for developers and even Windows as much of as we look down on it. But Visual Basic was a great product, it made a ton of decisions for you and like a lot more people were making things at the time. And so then you had the open source movement and the open source was this radical, disruptive bottoms up thing where there's 100 competing libraries and 100 computing ways of doing things. And that created a lot of mess and created a lot of power. But now getting started and doing things, programming became a lot more difficult. Difficult. Like imagine setting up a modern web app, let alone trying to set up like a Python environment. Like if you mess up your Python environment, the best thing you could do is throw your laptop in the garbage and get a new one.

I've been there. It's miserable, it's terrible.

So you had this bottoms up innovation, kind of like the early hacker lingo. You had the cathedral versus the bazaar. So the Windows ecosystem is the cathedral cathedral. The open source ecosystem is the bazaar. And so in my mind, well, let's build cathedrals made of bazaars. Like I think open source is awesome, but let's actually build tasteful experiences on top of that. So my work at Facebook, I was part of the early React team. You know, I was working on the tooling there and especially like React Native, we made it so that in five minutes you can spin up a hello World app as if you're trying to do it using Apple and iOS. That would take you hours perhaps. So now fast forward to Replit and we built basically all the way from nuts and bolts to the UX of what it means to make software. And so that's been a lot harder. But I think you end up with this general purpose horizontal tool that can satisfy a lot of needs. The challenge of course is like positioning and Marketing this thing you guys know as entrepreneurs like people like to do, to pick one product on the market. But look back on the history of computing. Typically the best products that end up being a core part of our lives are the general purpose horizontal product.

There's kind of a narrative that's floating out right out there right now that companies that are aligned with the AI growth trend are seeing extremely fast rates of adoption. You're seeing companies get to 100 million ARR faster than ever before. The risk that people are kind of worried about is that maybe churn rates are going up, up as customers test a new AI tool and then kind of bounce around. They're using cursor one week and then Claude code the next week and then they're bouncing to this one. What are you seeing and what do you think is happening and do you think there's any, any merit to that fear in the market or on X right now? That maybe the AI revenues that we're seeing are not as sticky as previous SaaS installations?

Cycles is certainly suspicious. I mean, anyone who tells you differently is sort of. And I was a little worried about our growth, like, is it going to go away? What is going on? Like, this is like a little too fast. And I think, you know, we really start focusing on the metrics that really matter, which is the revenue, quality, retention, things that more advanced companies are thinking about, like net dollar retention. We actually have above 100% net dollar retention even for our consumer plan, which is probably unheard of. But you know, I think maybe ARR is becoming a bit of a vanity metric, like how fast you can grow the ARR. I think you want to make sure you're biting an awesome service and also make sure that people just want to stay on your platform. I think especially on the VS code wars, the switching costs being so low is going to be a challenge for them. You can go from Copilot windserve to cursor in like 5 minutes. Same project quite like it's one click you can open the project. And so they're going to have to find a way to differentiate. The great thing about replit, we provide this really great convenience and so if ain't broke, don't fix it. You deploy something on relet and people really tend to stay.

That makes sense. Internally. I'm sure the entire team is using replit all day long. Is there still a place for traditional prototypes? Or are you. Is everyone across the team sort of like doing rapid prototyping of features, which is obviously something that your end customers use or is there still like, hey, let's just make this in figma and kind of align around it first?

There's certainly a place for figma. I think there are, first of all, there are things that are tough to prototype and there are things that you want to do very, very quickly, even faster than sort of any kind of software prototype. And it depends on how people think. I think designers still would want a canvas to think. I think products might end up growing in that direction where maybe you go to Replit and you initially have some kind of canvas and that results in a, in a piece of, in an application. But right now I, I still think there's a, there's a place for figma. But the way I think about what Replit is doing to, to our organization, I hope more and more companies is like everyone is highly levered like we just built, you know, agents are new and part of the exciting things is that no one knows how to build agents.

Yep.

There's no tracing tool like an apm, like a new relic or datadog for agents. So we built our own internally and a couple people on our team spent like a week using replit and Vibe coding this really great infrastructure tool that has saved many, many hours of engineering. We have even more exciting story. We have someone in HR that couldn't find an org chart tool that really fit what she wanted to do or it was too expensive. She spent three days, she spun up this org chart tool with connection to ADP and versioning history and it's amazing. She never coded. Right. So I think the way to think about it is how to increase the productivity in your company and less about like, oh, what should we displace? You know, I think, I think these, these tools will have their place.

Yeah. How do you, how do you think about sort of buying software as someone that enables the creation of software when you know, you've obviously been building replit for a very long time. Ten years from now you guys are in market for a new CRM, you're talking to the big players is, is building it yourself. Just become a part of that sort of like RFP process where the team is like, okay, well we can build this. Like this is, you know, what we think is going to, it's going to cost to, you know, basically build it.

Maintain it, or we can bear signal. If a startup was building their own CRM, it was like, oh no, you're way over your skis. This is going to get terribly wrong and you're going to be maintaining this thing for years and you actually don't have a special, you're not a special snowflake in this case. Just use Salesforce or something.

But yeah, like nih not invented here syndrome.

Yep, totally.

So, yeah, I agree. So I think I thought quite a bit of like the future of SaaS. I think that the question is like if you can conjure up a SaaS product, can like is there even a future there? And we do see this. Every time I wake up on Twitter I see someone using Replit and replacing a piece of software that costs them 15,000, 100,000. I just retweeted one this morning. And so there's a lot of I think vertical niche specific SaaS tools that are generatable very easily even with today's technology, let alone like a year from now. I think you'll be able to generate them straight, especially on a platform like Replit, which gives you all the cloud services involved. I think there are ecosystem SaaS products that are fairly hard. So I think think about Rippling how embedded into your company as like the, what do they call the like system of record.

Yeah, yeah.

And Salesforce think about the ecosystem and the developers that they have. So I think if you're starting a SaaS business today, you want to go against the Silicon Valley dogma of focus. You want to build a Chinese style company. I think what Rippling is doing and I think this idea of being generative and having larger pieces of software I think is going to become more important in the future. So I think I'd be really worried about vertical specific SaaS, but I think I would bet on those horizontal SAS components.

Well, we got to ask about the Vercel drama. We talked to Guillermo earlier this show. What's going on there? What's your take? Can you break it down for us?

Well, you know, I. Someone asked me, do you, do you plan on supporting next year in Replit agent? I said no because we want to bet on something like Vite that is open, like community builds. And the way Next JS has been trending is that it's optimized for Vercel. They disagree, but it is actually not a controversial statement in the larger community. There's a project called Open Next that makes it so that Next JS is deployable on more platform. Matt, the CEO of netlify commented, agreeing with me. The larger community feels like Next JS is perhaps more tight of versal than they would like to admit. And I think they overreacted to my comments and they Streisand My comments, I think it would have been less of a story if they don't overreact to it. And look, Vercel is an amazing product. It's an amazing brand. They've done a great job managing a lot of open source projects, not just Next js and for me, water under bridge. Like, you know, I, you know, I think, you know, emotions get, get high on Twitter and you start name calling and you know, I wish them really the best.

Yeah. How is, how is Next different than the React relationship with Facebook? I mean with all these big main core frameworks, you're kind of, if you're in Angular, you're aligned with Google. If you're with React, you're aligned with Facebook. But has, has Facebook or Meta done a better job of kind of releasing that into the community?

Well, they're not trying to monetize it as aggressively.

Well, not at all. Not. Not monetized. Look, I worked, I exclusively worked on open source at Meta and the, the advantage and disadvantage of working in open source at Meta is that there's no direct tie into the bottom line. Right. So we were not trying to monetize React. So far they haven't monetized Llama in terms of like selling an API.

Sure.

And so generally, as long as they.

Are.

Sort of, they're using it internally, they're going to maintain it and support it and get some value out of the community and Mindshare support. Now the disadvantage of that, we actually weren't ever able to like make a complete product because like if you go to Google and you know, use now Flutter, I think that thing is actually much more polished of an experience because they have a direct incentive to advance the Android ecosystem, for example. And so Facebook, we built really cool pieces of infrastructure, but the UX around them are bad. So you have companies like Expo building on React native to make it a better experience, companies like Vercel building React to make it a better experience. And these are amazing companies and I think that's how it should be. I think where it gets tricky is when you end up also maintaining the core software and really tying them together.

What do you think about kind of the Ben Thompson aggregation theory around there might be a new company to emerge from the AI boom that is the hub for these vibe coded apps and websites and games. Obviously it, for a long time it's felt like web development services, if you could call it that, were very much, it was bifurcated. Like there was Shopify, which is a power law winner, but then there was also Squarespace and Weebly and like dozens of other companies that did quite well. But if there's a new aggregator emerging and Nikita Beer's written about this, like, maybe there will be one company to really break out and be the hub for vibe coded N64 level games, that would be very valuable. It would also be more of a winner take all environment. How do you think that that plays out in your category?

Look, I don't really. That's not the model for our business. Like the way I think about it, in the early computing era, you had the mainframe, it was the domain of the expert. And then you had the PC and it became possible for anyone to use computers. And that ended up eating our economy essentially because that's how disruptive technology work. And so in the modern era, the modern software engineering is also the domain of the expert. And now it's become so that anyone can make software. Initially it looks like a toy Vibe coding games and things like that. But I think it will fundamentally change and transform the economy. And my model for what we're building, it's, let's build an Excel. It should be fun. We do a lot of things that make it fun. We actually build a 3D gaming stack. But, but the model is like, can a billion people use it to, as part of their everyday work to build businesses to really be a core piece of the infrastructure in the economy. And the idea that it's going to be Roblox, I don't see that as interesting. I mean Roblox is a great company. Maybe Roblox is the aggregator for, for Vibe Coded games. But I think it's really not the big prize. It's like you want to build a trillion dollar company, you got to think a little bigger than that.

I love it.

Yeah. Do you have any words for your doubters? Something you said is like the next big thing looks like a toy. It's been this idea within Silicon Valley that you can apply to, you could have applied it to crypto. This was Chris Dixon's, I think, original, original thesis. It still feels like, you know, Riplit is this billion dollar company now. But I still think your doubters and your haters would say, oh, it's just a toy. Like it's, you know, kids making apps or whatever. But do you, do you like that, that people still kind of underestimate this potential? Is that part of what creates the sort of the, the opportunity for the next 10 years is people not realizing like the tsunami that's kind of about to hit the industry?

Yeah, I think it used to bother me, but now I think it's actually an advantage.

And I think.

When we're at the height of AI trendiness and Rutlet obviously was early, we were the first outside of Copilot to train a code model. We were this company in the city and we're growing fast and hired a bunch of executives that I think are part of the sort of the hype kind of Silicon Valley. They jump from one company to another. And last year I did the founder mode. I cut the team in half.

Wow.

Now like 65 people. I moved us out of the city. We're now in Foster City. Literally. There's no other sort of. There's actually nothing out there. It's sort of a desert. And so we have this nice sort of kind of office that we're turning into a campus. We have food, we have all that. And the team here is sort of a tight knit team. There's a selection effect on who joins Replit. If you are smart enough to figure out that Replit has this amazing potential in the future, then we would want to on the team. If you really think it's a toy, it's not worth your time, then great. And so I, I think these things that just sort themselves out.

Awesome. Well, thanks for joining. Love to have. And you will have to have you back soon.

Yeah. I'm incredibly excited to watch what you guys do for, for the next year, the next two, the next five, the next 10. And yeah, I would love to have you on again in the future sometime soon.

Yeah. This is fantastic.

Thank you for doing the show. It's. It's been, it's been really cool.

Thanks so much for joining, man.

Cheers.

Awesome.

Do we, do we have another guest?

We have a surprise guest.

Surprise guest. Is he ready?

I just sent him the link. He's jumping in in just a minute and he should be all queued up. We'll go through some more posts while we wait. Oh, Bryce Roberts bought two cars. We got to talk to him. We got to have him on the show, figure out what he, what he bought. Bryce Roberts over at Indie VC says bought two cars today. One dealership wanted me to come down to. To the lot, get on a bunch of calls and refuse to send me basic info over text. The other was willing to send me anything I needed and requested. Requested over text and email. Can you guess which one got the sale? And it's not a Tesla. He went, he. He said he's done being a Tesla customer, not a political statement, just that his lease is up and his Model X was absolute trash according to him. I wonder what he did to the car. But we'll have to take talk to him about what car he chose. I'm hoping it's a Dodge Demon and a Lamborghini LM002. I think that would be a perfect fit two car garage for Bryce. But we'll have to talk to him about it. But it really is a, an interesting take. I, we talked to the car dealership guy and I've wanted a car dealership that, I mean, sometimes I just want to buy a car. I just want to click a button and I don't really care. Jordy likes to go to the dealership and take a look at everything. I completely disagree. I want to just push a button and have it arrive, which is maybe stupid, but I don't know. I certainly enjoy it. And let's see if. Ready when you are. So we are going back into the 23andMe news and we'll give some more context on this. But I like that we're able to be responsive.

It's actually crazy that Keon single handedly bankrupt.

Yeah.

He was barely in market for.

Well, I mean it doesn't, it's not a surprise because he did the TVPN interview and I'm sure, I'm sure the market saw it very well and said, hey, you know, if he's gonna be in the temple of technology every week, let's just get out of the stock. Let's just call it. So let's bring him on down. Keon, how you doing?

There he is.

What is.

Welcome to the show. Are you guys celebrating? I mean, it's kind of, it's kind of depressing. It's kind of macabre to celebrate on when you're, when your rivals go bankrupt. But what happened?

Listen, let's put this tweet up. John, we got a tweet up here I put up late last night. I think it was around 2am Eastern or so maybe 1. 2am Eastern.

Okay.

I saw the announcement. The first thing I have to say 23andMe is thank you. Because the reality is you see on the shoulders of giants here, right, we turn the shoulders of giants. All companies do. You know, you go from Blockbuster to Netflix. You go from, you know, BlackBerry to the iPhone, you know, go from MySpace to Facebook. And now you go from 23andMe to Nucleus Genomics. Right. The industry is wide open. Nucleus is years ahead and we're going to seize the moment. But before I talk about that. Thank you to 23andMe. Did a great job building the foundation, and now it's time for something new. That's the reality.

So, yeah, talk me through the key. It seemed like your post was really focused on the. On the technology and the price to sequence and the difference between shotgun sequencing and full sequencing. Talk to me about that. How different is the technology? And also, why can't 23andMe just use the same tech as you?

Yeah, great question. So pull up. I have another tweet here, John, that actually I just put another tweet thread out here that I think I should pull up on the screen, give some further context on what's going on and what 23 users should actually do. It's currently riding high on Twitter. But the difference between microgreens whole genome sequencing is massive. It's like a horse versus a car.

Right?

Okay, you're talking about Trentmease technology missing millions and millions of genetic markers. Effectively, it's not actually useful for any really, disease risk assessment. So it's fundamentally different here. And the same question is the classic innovators alumnus problem, right? Why can't this big company do this thing? Well, because imagine, you know, 23 means a castle. They have to pull out the foundation of their castle. Everything has to change. Technology, product, regulatory infrastructure, every single part of 23 have to change to actually embrace whole genome sequencing. This is capitalism at work. We love capitalism on here. 23 is dying because they couldn't adapt Nucleus Ascending because we are embracing the newest genetic technology. But actually, I think even goes beyond technology. I. Go ahead, Johnny.

If I say no, I just want to push on that more because, like, if I'm like, I like you, I'm not going to compete with you. But if I was a potential buyer, I would buy 23andMe, rip out shotgun sequencing, drop in, you know, call up, I don't know, Illumina or something, and figure out how to do whole genome.

And you would independently derive nucleus. That's the beauty.

Yeah, exactly.

You have to change all the models.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Maybe the de novo approach is correct. And, I mean, that's why I'm bullish on you. But, you know, at the same time, it just, it. I. I'm still not really understanding, like, why is it such rocket science for them to just offer, oh, hey, we're on V2 now. We're like, you still spit in the tube. You still pay 100 bucks. You mail it to us. We just put it in a different machine. It doesn't seem that complicated to me, no offense.

Well, it's a massive informatics change, it's a massive regulatory change. It's extremely non trivial. It's kind of like being like, you know, horses both get other places. Why can't they just make an engine? It's fundamentally different, you know, but really the thing that 23 got wrong, it wasn't just technology, was also actually the philosophy of the business. They really viewed data gathering as a means to make drugs. But because it's such a small sliver of your DNA, you actually can't really make drugs off of it, which ended up making that such that the customer wasn't the customer, the customer is the pharma company. And I want to say here's something really important which is a lot of people ask me right now, what should I do with my 23 data? What should I do by 20 data? Well, first and foremost, you should move it to a HIPAA compliant environment. Right. Like one of the most shocking things about 23 me, it's actually not HIPAA compliant.

Right.

It doesn't follow the gold standard clinical regulations that ensure your data is safeguarded. So Nucleus, for example, we are HIPAA compliance. We are physician ordered clinical grade tests. We make sure no genetic or protected health information is shared with any third party. It's very similar to like going to your doctor's office. Another thing to know, and I hope you have the thread up here which is, you know, we outlined some of these things, is we, you know, 23andMe, the reality is that it's actually been illegal since 2008 for any insurance company, any health insurance company, as well as any employer, use your genetic information. That's been legal for two decades. It's very, very important to say that. So there are some safeguards in place even though not 23 is not HIPAA compliance. But if you're a 23 user and you're listening to this, you do two things. One is you download your genetic data, secure your genetic data. And then two, which is micro data, small snapshot of your DNA. But two, you should probably put that in a HIPAA compliant environment. You can actually DM me, I can help you doing that. Some customers are currently uploading the DNA to Nucleus, currently because they know that we're going to take very good care of their DNA because it is of course ultimately all about the patient.

Talk about there's not total clarity right now. 23andMe is not HIPAA compliant. I'm trying to understand 23andMe in a bankruptcy environment is the value of them as an asset, it's pretty damaged. It's a pretty damaged brand. There's not a lot of brand value necessarily. What are some of the risks of the types of buyers for that business? And it seems very possible from our initial research that somebody could buy it and with the explicit intent of not even rebooting the business, but just monetizing the underlying user data.

Is the value the data or just the revenue stream? Because I'm sure that they have marketing campaigns running. I'm sure they're bringing in customers and charging them 100 bucks a test or something. There's some. There's some normal business going on there, might not be profitable, but, like, maybe you could cut costs and get to profitability. Or is this. Is this nightmare scenario of someone buys it just for the data? Is that at all credible?

Yeah, so it's a good question. I think one thing is Nucleus actively is looking into right now considering whether it makes sense. You know, earlier, I'm sure you remember, you know, we explore the possibility of acquiring 23 me. And we're looking into right now whether that would make sense to go and see what we can do, how we can help in this situation. I think the thing to remember is that again, this is microarray data. It's a small sliver of someone's DNA. A lot of the most critical genetic markers that you wouldn't want someone to know about simply do not exist in the data. And that cannot be overstated because it is microarray data. It is a small sliver of your DNA. It misses the most fundamental health basis someone could have. So in some respects, it's a little bit overblown when people are worried. Right. Sometimes there's this funny narrative. People are like, I did 23 me. I learned that, you know, my pee smells like asparagus. You know, if that gets out, I mean, that's bad. It should never gone out, but like.

You know, not that big of a deal. Yeah, yeah, it can be both, you know. Yeah, yeah, it can't be both. Doomsday. They're getting my DNA. And also the product isn't that good and it's not that reliable. It can't be both.

Yeah, exactly.

I would encourage your options.

You can dose.

There's.

There's two really extreme narratives. About 23 minutes.

Totally, totally.

Look at it. It's like, oh, I learned nothing. It's like, why do you think you learn nothing? Because it's a small sum of your DNA. That's like one narrative. Then it's like, oh, it's the end of the world, my data share. It's like, well, actually, you know, the reality is that's a small sliver of your DNA. Obviously no data should ever get breached. No, no one's saying that. Of course not. But of course it's micro data. And so what I recommend is download the data, knowing that one, there's federal regulations that protect you and protect all people who do genetic testing and that there are actual regulations that exist in clinical genetics companies like Nucleus and that can safeguard your data. Right. It's like on your doctor's office. So that's the thing, I think that should be top of mind for consumers right now.

You mentioned that they were potentially selling data to pharmaceutical companies. Again, that's kind of this weird narrative where if the data is not that valuable, then who are they selling it to?

But this is also, this is one of the, again, this great point is one of the reasons why 23 failed. Because originally the founder and she said, okay, listen, we're going to use this data, people. Actually she has a quote on the record. People are going to donate data to 23andMe. In other words, one of the reasons why 23 failed is they never wanted to build a true consumer health application. He was never actually about, hey, can we provide you with life saving or medical insights? It was about, hey, because it was really genealogy business for a long time. Hey, when you get ancestry on, we're going to get as many people as possible. We're going to take this data and then go to gsk. They worked with, you know, GSK for example. The problem with that is this is the thing they underestimate because it is a small sliver of your DNA. It's fundamentally not useful for drug discovery, which caught up with them because then if your business model is based off collecting a lot of data to then make drugs, but it's microarray data, it's kind of, it doesn't work. Right. The customer doesn't want what you're buying, which is why eventually 23 collapsed. So in some sense it's a technological problem, which is again, it's the smallest bit of your DNA. But also I think it's a philosophical problem. They didn't. The customer wasn't the customer, the pharma company was the customer. Right. And so that's why people say I didn't learn anything about femtren. To me, 20 really, their goal was not actually to really help you in your health. And that's another big shift from 23 meter nucleus.

Right.

We're HIPAA compliant. Our technology is far more advanced. We actually want to give you medical grade insight that helps you live longer, helps you have healthy family as well. And then also we want to continue to build out that platform beyond just genetics, blood wearables, urine analysis, full body MRIs and beyond into a true consumer health application. Imagine 23 shipped, right? They will how far ahead that would be? They'd be 20 years ahead of everyone. Right. Consumer health has just recently hit the zeitgeist. By 20 they would have had a head start. But that wasn't the customer. And so it's not just technological difference, it's actually a very strong philosophical difference as well.

How, how are they such a, you know, they have this sort of one time purchase problem that, that could contribute to challenges from a business standpoint becomes much harder if you're sort of get this upfront payment and then I'm assuming the average 23andMe customer just gets testing done, maybe references back at some point. But why don't you think they were able to avoid bankruptcy given the scale that they were at? This is a company that does hundreds of millions of top line revenue. You would think they would be able to figure out some economic like they've been in trouble for a long time. You would have thought that they would have gone found, you know, Ann would have gone founder mode and and like figured out a way.

It sounds like she tried and is now bidding on the business to go founder mode maybe.

I always say that there's no such thing as a genetics company. There's only such thing as a healthcare company. And the reason why people always say 23 is one time. 23 is one time.

Right.

There was actually no difficulty for 23andMe to add in other diagnostic tests and build a more consumer health application that was vertically integrated. But again their customer was the pharma company. They actually, they didn't care that it was one time. They got your DNA. And that is the fundamental difference. 23 could have solved that problem. I mean you look at some companies today, you know, some blood testing companies are building on top of Quest Diagnostics. 23 could have snapped their fingers and launched that product in one minute. Right. But of course that wasn't the customer, that wasn't the business model, that wasn't the strategy. So this is a good example where strategy meets technology which eventually results in failure.

Right.

You have the innovation lemons problem. The genetics has really changed the 20 domains been around since 2006. 2006 the cost of being a genome was 10 million a sample. Today, Nucleus, that's over a couple hundred dollars. It's one of the greatest technological shifts ever. Right. And so all these pieces together, you have, you know, 23 collapsing, which is sad. But I also think it's the sign it's time for something new. It's time for a true health, consumer health application.

Can you talk a little bit about ancestry.com, they required for by Blackstone for 4.7 billion? It seems like that business is doing pretty, pretty well. Again, not a genetics company particularly. They have their little niche and ancestry people really love that. They become experts there. But how does that business play with you? And great question, 23andMe.

You know, it's interesting because one time a very, very wise investor of ours said, he said retention isn't about the product, it's about the use case. Okay. It's a very sharp comment. And I think ancestry is a great example of that because genealogy is a very super high touch point of business. People love genealogy. They love looking at who their ancestors are. The people who like literally spend their entire hobby actually around this.

Right.

And ancestry capitalized on that. They realized that genetics was a means to do better genealogy. 23andMe never realized, are they a genealogy business? Are they a health business? Are they a drug discovery business? They never got that right. For Nucleus, we use genetics to help people live longer, to have healthy families. The value prop is very clear. It's not about DNA. DNA is a means to accomplish some end goal for the user, which is namely better health and having a healthier family. Right. That is a fundamental difference. And to your point, answers is a multibillion dollar business. Natera people say genetics businesses don't work. The terror is a clinical genetics business. It's about a $20 billion. Okay. So genetics is in its absolute infancy stage here. And I really do think in the next decade, you're going to see the rise of a consumer health behemoth. And that consumer health behemoth is going to have a whole genome, the entire someone's DNA at its foundation, and it's going to impact not just someone's health, but again, also their family. And Nucleus is building that future.

So is it, is it possible then that 23andMe had become this sort of toxic brand and even the pharmaceutical companies said, you know, we like the data they have, but we don't want to kind of like even mess around here because there's huge potential for blowback. Right. I imagine, you know, there's, there's some risk there is that part of why they.

Well, the pharma companies worked at 23 me. But because the data is such a small sliver, they realized that there was something to be found. The most important thing for drug discovery in a genetics context is finding rare genetic markers because those actually elucidate mechanism to identify novel rare genetic markers. You need a whole genome file. Right. Because a micro again is such a small bit of your DNA. If your DNA is a thousand page book. It's funny thing, like I said, one pages, one page. You can't actually get anything out of that. So it didn't work from a drug perspective business. It didn't work from a consumer health business, hence its collapse. There's a great actually chart here. I don't know if you guys. It's old tweet Peter my maybe guys put up later. It's on bedrock. Does screen sharing work? Can I share my screen?

I think you can actually.

Oh, here we go. We're going to try.

Yes.

This is a technology first year.

Whatever you screen share is live. So it's live API keys.

Ignore the tabs. There's a lot of tabs up there.

It's actually cropped out perfectly. Yeah, it looks great.

Okay, so here we have, you know, this great thing I shout out to bedrock, right? They have this narrative violations, right? Clean tech is dead. You have Tesla dating apps always fast. You have Tinder. Consumer is dead. You have Canva. And then of course, the most recent artificial intelligence has been overhyped under the for 10 years. You have open AI.

Sure.

I will tell you what is next in 2024. Popular narrative right now is consumer genetics is dead. And then right now, Nucleus is open AI. That is what's going on.

Let's go pump the bags. Let's ring the size gong for eon on Nucleus.

Do you have any idea how quickly do you have any sort of read on how quickly this is going to get resolved?

Well, you know, Nucleus might be the one resolving it, if you know what I'm saying.

Listen, I'm rubbing his hands. Some of our.

Big boy investors is my, you know, they currently text me, say, yeah, what can we do here? And you know, you know, we tried for a quarter of a billion dollars. You know, what's $50 million?

Hey, you have to ask? Getting cheaper every day. Getting cheaper every day.

There we go.

That's great. Well, good luck to you, Keon. I hope you can pull it off. I know you'll be successful regardless.

Thanks for Jumping on me.

Love it.

Great. I hope this gong is going to get hit for a very specific reason soon.

Absolutely. Good luck to you.

Thanks guys.

Take care.

Thanks for coming on.

Bye. Breaking news. I love some breaking news and I love having founders hop on to help us break it down because we are going full golden retriever mode. I don't understand anything about that. But that's why we get the experts on. That's the way the show works. Trust the experts, folks. Trucks trust the seed stage founder pumping his bags.

Even trust yourself.

Don't even trust just the experts. Exactly. Do you want to. You want to finish out the timeline right now? What do you think we can do a little bit?

I thought this one from Liz Wessel. This has to be the frothiest VC market for seed and precede I've seen in my tech lifetime. 2012 to present. It's becoming truly absurd.

I ramp investor seed stage.

Wow.

She did the seed round.

Crazy.

Yep.

Goaded. I haven't seen anything crazier personally than 2022.

I was gonna say crypto stuff was really crazy.

Like the last company that I committed to was like a $60 million post seed round, but the founder had sold his last company for hundreds of millions and I don't care. But again, I'm not an institutional fund that's. That's trying to cares about ownership targets or anything like that.

This is good context from Jason Lemkin. He says I would be fine with it if public multiples were higher. And so, yeah, I mean this is why we had Logan Bartlett on the show to kind of break down what's happening in the public markets because there should be some sort of tracking between these two. And it's when there's a really crazy disconnect that you think, hey, maybe the public markets are a leading indicator on what will happen to venture valuations. But at the same time, there's a lot of companies that are getting to hire ARRs faster than ever. And it'll be interesting. The weirdest outcome I think would be that, you know, seed and pre seed deals they get overpaid for and they don't produce the same number of power law outcomes. Like maybe there's not a single trillion dollar company that comes out of this vintage, but all of those companies wind up producing like 100 million of EBITDA and they're like good businesses and then like the funds kind of perform anyway. That would be a very strange outcome. It look nothing like Venture has ever. But to see a. It would be very interesting to See a venture fund, vintage 2025 produce a reasonable IRR without a power law winner in the portfolio.

Yeah.

I have no idea if it's possible, but it'd be interesting.

To steel man that there's potentially we've accumulated in the last 25ish years the know how to repeatedly build valuable software, tech, just technology businesses generally. And in that scenario paying these expensive prices because you have this incredible team.

Yep.

And maybe you only get a 3x on that one investment, but you get a bunch of other 3x's and collectively you get a 2x fund and that becomes venture.

That'd be very interesting.

And there's nothing if that happens and I can argue against it easily as well. But if that happens, it's not necessarily bad because ask any dude in private equity that has just been doing These sort of 2x funds for however many decades, they've done very well.

So yeah, of course.

And yeah, we want higher success rates for founders and teams too. Even if it's lower terminal sort of like exit values.

It's also interesting that I mean OpenAI is maybe positioned itself as like potentially the power law winner of AI. Like people are clearly underwriting that deal at a future valuation of like a trillion dollars. I think it's going to be a big consumer tech company and no one's really concretized how like what the source of monopoly power will be in that com in that company. Like there's not really a network effect yet.

At least there's no the value is a scale.

It's just an aggregation theory thing.

It becomes a verb.

Yeah.

And it's.

It's like Google competition is always a click away but you accumulate so much customer support that you just data.

And by nature of the usage the product gets so much better.

I would think so too. And then, you know, so maybe we're bullish, who knows. But I mean it's certainly not cornered resource because the LLMs are, you know, commoditized now. It's not really scale because everyone can serve these. All the hyperscalers can serve these. It's really just that attention. Anyway, we should have Augustus on to talk about this next one soon. Yeah, from Liz Jin.

I actually want to have him on to talk about his.

Oh yeah, the debate with Ron DeSantis or. Yeah, his, his.

He was debating ron.

Well, Ron DeSantis trying to ban cloud seed has been trying to ban cloud seeding and RFK recently came out saying I support what Ron DeSantis is doing. Like part of the MAHA movement. Is anti cloud seeding. And Augustus came out very strongly saying, like, no, rfk, like, don't do that. Like, like this. There's more nuance to this argument. And so we should unpack that. We should unpack his testimony, which was very interesting. And we should also have him talk about this, which is that China is erasing deserts from its map. The first time I ever met Augustus at Josh Steinman's house having some cigars, was he could just comes up to me and is like, oh, yeah, did you know that, like, the Gobi Desert is going away? And I was like, what are you talking about, dude?

Goby.

And he's like, yeah, China's erasing their deserts. And I was like, how? He was like, yeah, they're basically just planting tons and tons of trees. And that's exactly what this video shows. He says, by far, 65 million mu of desert has been greened. That's around the same area of Denmark. And you can watch this video. And it's crazy because it's just like, literally just sand dunes and then the most verdant, lush greenery you've ever seen. And it just looks like, wow. Like, I would never want to live in the desert, but I would absolutely live on this beautiful lush farmland. Like, imagine plopping like a nice farm farmhouse on that. And that's just like the American dream. And we could do that with our deserts in America. And so.

Yeah, yeah.

And so we talked to Augustus about this earlier saying, you know, after you do cloud seeding, like, is there a tree planting startup that needs to be built or will that be your company? And he was kind of saying, maybe it'll be a different company, but. But I want this to happen and I want to figure out what the economics of this business are. Is it just a handout from the. From the Chinese government? If so, do we need to do that in America? If there is there a way that you can do this just with the free market, that would be amazing, you know?

Yeah, this ties into the terraforming stuff with the. What's that? The Salton Sea.

Yep.

If we can get water back into that boy, then everything around it. But we have some breaking news. I wanted to pull it up. It's not actually breaking, but. Well, it is breaking. It's the Nucleus genomics team. Oh, yeah, they were all posted up watching Keon come on the show. So, Ben, Ben, pull it up if you can. Look at the team here. All meetings were canceled, but shout out to the team. Thank you for keeping our. Thanks for watching genetic data safe.

That's great.

It's great having Keon on the the show. He's, he's definitely built for television. We talked about this, we talked about.

This earlier with Lulu. Like what is his format?

What's the format?

He's a good poster but he is great and just come on and rock and roll and and rub the thinks about acquiring a multi former multi billion dollar company.

Yeah, absolutely fantastic. Well that's a great place to end the show.

Yeah. Thank you for watching.

Go leave us a five star review. Put an ad for your business or your fund on the show into that.

If you're breaking news, if you're raising the big money, if you think we should raise the ring the size gong for you, give us a call. We'll have you on the show.

And we have a number of founders this week coming on to break their fundraises. I can't wait. Yeah, it is a beautiful.

You have to set the minimum threshold and then just raise it. It's like oh, 50 million. That's you know that's a Tuesday for us. Yeah, call us when you're raising 80.

Exactly.

But right now it's a golden opportunity for anyone who's it is making making waves in venture.

It's a beautiful week to get to work in and around technology for sure.

So many interesting stories and if we.

Keep up this pace we will be doing a Dom episode probably next week.

I can't wait.

We're at 26K.

I can't wait.

6K out, let's go.

Thank you for everyone who's been supporting.

Thank you everyone.

Really appreciate it.

Have a great rest of your Monday.

Have a great day.

Bye.