Shaun Maguire, Harry Stebbings, Blake Anderson, Sean Frank, Adam Ryan, Connor MacDonald, Perplexity $18B Valuation, Tornado Cash

You're watching tbpn live. It is Friday, March 21, 2025. We are live from the temple of.

Technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital.

This show starts now. Jordy, what's going on? On the desk. There's a bottle of Dom Perignon there. It's not an episode. What's going on?

Our friends over at Slow preempted our Dom episode. So they said, hey, the growth this week has been tremendous. We wanted to have the next Dom episode be on us. So thank you.

Thank you.

Sam, Yoni.

They're kind of in the business of.

Extrapolation over at Slow and Jack, of course. So, yeah, they're just, you know, basically preempting our Dom episode. So, yeah, we'll have to.

I got very excited when I saw this. I love. I love a nice bottle.

Yeah. When I was opening it like the way the box was, I thought somebody sent me a plant.

No, that's great.

And there we go. So thank you, guys.

This is a 2015 bottle.

Very tempting, Very tempting. It is a Friday. Very tempting to crack into it, but we, we like to do Dom episodes on Monday.

Yes.

Sort of power lunch. Start the week strong, but thank you to the Slow Ventures team.

Fantastic.

And let's get into the show. We got some great guests today.

Yeah, we got some great guests for you. I think we have four different guests coming on in about half an hour. But we're going to rip through some news. There's a ton of stuff to talk about. First up, Perplexity is an early talks for a new funding round at 500. They're raising between 500 million and a billion dollars at an $18 billion valuation. I mean, you got to kick it off with a sized gong for Perplexity. Absolute dogs.

Absolute dogs.

Big numbers to be doubling their valuation from December.

That's right.

And it's March, so that's three months. Double ARR is also nearly $100 million. Not too bad. Let's break it down. Let's read this little Bloomberg article.

I will say the actions. I feel like the posters didn't like this, but we can wait for some.

Of the reactions mixed. I found some very positive posts in here. We'll get to. I found some more critical posts. We'll break it all down. We'll give our take. So Perplexity AI, a startup building artificial intelligence search engine to compete with Google, is in early talks to double its valuation to 18 billion. In a new funding round, the company discussed raising as much as 500 million to 1 billion in the round. Founded in 2022, it's a pretty young company, just three years old. Perplexity has emerged as one of the most prominent startups using generative AI to rethink core Internet services. Last year, Perplexity tripled its valuation from 1 billion to 3 billion and then tripled it again several months later, a sign of the immense investor interest in all things AI. This new $18 billion valuation would include the amount raised in the round. So was that. That's a post money valuation, but still 17. 17 billion. Pre money isn't that bad.

What's pre or post among billions?

Yep. At this point, doesn't really matter. Their ARR is nearly 100 million. Perplexity said it has more than 15 million active users. They're facing growing competition from Google and OpenAI in its core search business. OpenAI rolled out a search product to all of its users of its chatbot ChatGPT. And of course Google has those AI generated autofill answers. I forget what their, what their product name is for that, but basically when.

You go to Google they're Gemini.

Yeah. You get an AI, generative AI.

And they count all of those as Gemini users.

Yes.

Which is cool too. It's great.

It's cool. Yeah.

If you're, if you're optimizing for usage, it's great if you are literally Google. And anytime somebody Google searches, you can sort of put it on the.

I mean this is what's happening with Llama too. I mean like Llama is torked into WhatsApp and stuffed into Instagram.

Put it in there.

Yeah. It's the number one LLM. It's the one people are talking to. Let's talk about the backers. Perplexity is already backed by SoftBank Vision Fund 2 Nvidia.

I didn't know Amazon got in there.

Softbank getting in early in this case.

Oh, don't they have some big. I think SoftBank is a big customer too.

Oh really?

Doing this thing where they're sort of investing and becoming heavy users. Dog fooding the product.

Well, we should have the founder on because he's a very interesting, he's a very interesting figure, very interesting poster and obviously, I mean I've used the product. I'm not, I'm not like a daily active right now, but I think, I think it's cool and I think we'll get into this later. But Sam Altman was just on Stratecherie interview talking to Ben Thompson and on there Ben really tried to nail him down on where the value is going to accrue in AI, is it going to go to the application layer or the model layer? And this has been the big debate with all the new founders foundation model companies and Sam. And it's funny how. It's funny how Ben like phrases it to try and kind of like nail him down. I'll actually pull up the exact post. It was from Tane.

According to Perplexity SoftBank Vision Fund 2 invested between 10 and 20 million in Perplexity as part of a larger $250 million funding round. This was back. Yeah, Last year. And so south bank has gotten almost a 5x, I think on this. More than a 5x, potentially on this song. Get the size gong for that.

So Ben Thompson was interviewing Sam Altman, trying to get to the bottom of does the value accrue to the model layer or the application layer? And he can't just say that. So of course he has to come up with a good question. And he asks Sam this. He says, what's going to be more valuable in five years? A 1 billion daily active user destination site that doesn't have to do customer acquisition. Wink, wink, wink, chat GPT installed on everyone's phone, already in the home row on my phone or the state of the art model. And Sam Altman says the 1 billion user site, I think.

Yep.

And so Sam is now, you know, he was at the forefront of the state of the art model race. Now he is somewhat acknowledging that the value might accrue to the application layer. And he is actually, this is.

I think he's more than acknowledging that he is. He's pushing that narrative now because I think he views it, and we've talked about this before, the reason that Elon Musk. Elon can train a model fairly. He makes it look easy to train a model that's competitive with OpenAI. Much harder to get an app that is pacing towards having a billion users. And so that says it all.

Yeah. So it's like if you have distribution through X, you own X or you own WhatsApp or Instagram or you own google.com, you're going to do very well. Harder to bootstrap a new destination site with billions of users. We saw on the perplexity numbers, 15 million active users. That's a ton.

Yeah.

But they got to grow that. They got to get into the billions because that's where the consumer tech apps really play.

Yep.

But it's interesting. Yeah.

The bees, they call it the B zone.

The bees. But yeah, I mean, it's interesting because, like, for a long time the, the, the hater, the Sam haters were very much like, oh, like he's like, all the value is going to accrue to the, to the application layer, not the model layer. And he's stuck on the model layer. And now he's kind of like pivoting his argument and the narrative's kind of shifting and now it'll, it'll just be interesting to see how that plays out.

Because it's oscillating back and forth.

Yeah, yeah. It's always unclear. It's like, it's like, is the CEO.

Spinning because Elias or is it.

The truth is.

Yeah, you guys can have fun at the app layer.

Yeah.

I'll see you. I'll see it as I see it.

Asi. Yeah. Anyway, I wanted to go through some reactions to Perplexity in general. Our buddy Emmett Shine said this was a couple of months ago, but he said he up Perplexity as my default search tool within ARC. I use Claude for creative work and ChatGPT for general larger processing work. I like Perplexity's multimedia results for search. So far, so good. And in the little video he shares, what's he searching for? Rora PFAS filtering. I thought that was really cool. Easter egg. He's doing a little shout out for our friends over at Rora.

Well, Emma did the branding for Roar.

Yeah, I just thought that was.

And he's a shareholder. Oh, there you go. One hand washes the other, which we cycle.

Ash Aurora has a funny post here saying at this point, Perplexity not raising every six months is a bare market signal.

But yeah, I mean, they've set the bar high.

And if you're trying to go after Google, if you're trying to go after a trillion dollar company, yeah, you're going to need a lot of capital, you're going to need a lot of aggressive growth targets. So it's not an unreasonable strategy if you're underwriting it against we're going to be the next Google. But it is a high valuation.

Yeah. And on the next Arvin, the CEO says on the next post, perplexity will make Apple intelligence work. So that seems obvious. That seems true in many ways. Perplexity, the team at Perplexity would do a much better job leveraging the power of Apple and their position in the market than Apple's current AI team.

Totally.

So there is a world where. There's a world where Apple, you know, has to like pay a huge premium to just buy a Great AI product.

Team, which is not in their DNA at all. I don't think they've ever done a multi billion dollar acquisition. It's super, super rare. They really.

Yeah, but, but they're also. But, but you're, you're thinking, you know, Apple's evolving as a company. They, they're not, they're not seemingly in a position now where they're able to do deep, innovative, you know, vision work.

They're shuffling, they're shuffling, they're shuffling up.

And if Apple was ever going to move from a, hey, we just, we do all of our R D in house. We, you know, we, we don't sort of acquire teams, etc.

This would be a big shift.

Yeah, it would be a big shift, but it, but it might be something that over time, you know, I don't think If Apple paid $20 billion to acquire Perplexity today that the market would love it.

Yep.

But you could see a world in the future where, you know, something like that could make sense.

Yeah. I mean the shareholders would be like, apple, what are you doing? You, you wasted like six weeks of cash flow on this company. What are you doing?

No, it's, but honestly, I think it's more like I forget the actual number, but I mean the numbers on. The numbers on like Tim Cook's comp versus like how much money they make. And like Tim Cook like barely makes like, you know, a day cash flow. Poor guy, poor guy, poor guy. But you know that the dynamic here that's interesting, him saying we're going to make Apple intelligence worth. Apple makes $20 billion a year from Google through their search integration. Yep. So for Apple to want to integrate, I'm sure that there's something related to that contract that would, that would prevent.

Well, they also have a. Apple has a deal with ChatGPT and in theory you can ask Siri to go to ChatGPT and you can actually on your phone, if you're on the latest OS, you can add your ChatGPT Pro credentials. And it basically uses the consumer API key to send the query to ChatGPT. Should be a great experience. I can never really get it to work though. It still gets confused about where to route the query, which is really rough. They, I think they're just so spoiled from the experience of Google where it was just. There's just this one little bar in Safari and they route it to Google and that's the end. And this is a much more nuanced consumer experience, but clearly a strong deal between Apple and Perplexity would be transformative for Perplexity. Yeah. And so good luck to him as he tries to hunt that down. Should we go to near There's a great post.

Great post.

It's just like tangentially related to Perplexity, but I like it. Every man has a stack. For some it's Creatine and Magnesium. For other it's Arch Linux and Vim. Some just answer Perplexity and Claude. Others have Vercel and Cloudflare. Cloudflare or Nginx and Redis. Some guys will even say Bitcoin and Ether. The essence of being a man. You must have a stack.

I love that my daily show stack is very much Lucy and Yerba Mate.

I'm on the Celsius and the nicotine pouches and the Creatine and some chatgpt here and there. A lot of X. X is my stack.

Yeah.

And. And a stack of weights in the. In the weight room beforehand. This is a very funny post. But. But I agree. And then there was this interesting Perplexity ad they're doing. It's like Apple level cinematography when I saw this. So they. This is from a few days ago. March 17th. Perplexity just dropped its first celebrity ad starring Squid games. Lee Jung J. I botched that pronunciation, I'm sure. Anyway, he's a guy from Squid Game. We love him. The AI search startup takes a jab at Google. They call it Poogle with a cheeky line. Don't use glue. Which was a reference to Gemini.

I think Gemini was suggesting that.

Suggesting that you should eat glue on.

Yeah. Something related to mozzarella.

Yeah. And then Katie Nut Polis over.

What I like about Arvind is he's not will poke the bear.

No.

So in the case of Google he's not. So yeah, sorry. He's not afraid to poke the bear. He will clear. You know, frequently get in Sam Altman's you know, comments get a little spicy.

Sometimes he goes a little bit too far. But. But I like a challenger CEO like a bull.

It's like a. You know, you're fighting with a bull.

And just from a comms perspective we should talk to Lulu about this. But I think like there's something about when someone is so much bigger than you, your downside is so limited because if they reply to you at all, you're blowing up because it's like oh, you were acknowledged by.

He probably runs the numbers on what percentage of Chad users can I sign up for my product. If I get Sam to reply to me yeah. So let me just do whatever it takes to get the.

Poke the bear. Poke the bear.

Yeah. Yeah. This. This article was. I mean, can we pull up a.

Little bit of this ad, Ben? Because it was a little controversial. So Token Bender here, quote, tweets this and says, perplexity seems to be on a path to be a case study. I will not elaborate. But look at, look at this ad. This is beautiful. It's really, really well done. And I mean, the lighting, everything, the sets, like, this feels like it would be at home with Apple. But I think people are a little bearish on this because it's like, oh, they're spending too much before they have, like, true breakthrough consumer adoption. Feels like a Super bowl ad. People are always really skeptical about, like, oh, you're advertising too much. But it's like, this is a consumer war. You got to get people. You got to. You got to get people on. And I think it's. I think it's fun. I think it's a well produced ad. So he goes to Poogle and does not get a good result. And, I mean, they clearly made the font small.

I never watched this show.

Oh, you know, yeah, I watched. It was pretty good. It's very funny because. Because they created, like a fake Google and they clearly size the text down so it just looks like a complete wall of text. Whereas when. When he uses Perplexity here, just like a single answer, it's just like, very clear.

Much more trying to be an. I like their positioning as an answer engine.

It's a good phrase. And they also have nice merch. There's been some cool, like, coffee cups I've been seeing on the timeline that are pretty cool.

Clearly, like, no, the token vendor line was in reference to Perplexity launching a venture fund. And the response at the time was, hey, I don't even think they were in the top 25 apps in their category at that point. And so the pushback would be like, why do you have a venture fund? And, you know, you should just focus on the product. But yeah, yeah, they're getting attention. They're getting users. They're 16 in the charts right now.

If I have to go long short on this, I would go short. Perplexity Venture Fund. Long Perplexity Cinematic ads. Because you're trying to get consumers to use it. It's much. You have to do this crazy dance of logic.

We saw all the.

Invest in this company and then our product will become better.

All the ads.

All the ads work.

Yeah, all the ads from the super bowl from the big AI players. The Googles were very mid, like very. I don't remember any of them at this point. I remember bits and moments.

I remember the OpenAI one.

The OpenAI one was more like a design film. Cinematic and cool.

Yeah. But for a lot of these, it's just like you got to just remind normies that you exist and.

Yeah.

Hey, yeah, you should try this out. You know, if it, if it drives, installs.

This marketing is better for the average American.

Yeah.

Perplexity is new ad.

Yeah.

Then the open air sort of sun God.

Yeah.

Black sun.

Yeah, Black sun was weird.

Worshiping the black sun. We're all, we're all turning into bits anyway.

You do an $18 billion. You raise a billion at an $18 billion post. Let's say 809 million of that secondary. What's the first thing you're doing? You're heading over to Bezel. Yeah. Bezel. Get bezel.com Shop over 23 luxury watches fully authenticated in house by Bezel's team of experts.

That's right.

Pick something up.

And we love you, Bezel.

In terms of other amazing wearables, we got breaking news from big screen VR. They launched the Beyond 2. I am so excited for this. This is just a fascinating story of a company that's just been grinding in in VR for so long.

I hate it. Hard to take anything away from big screen. But I almost forgot briefly about that soul reader company.

Oh, yeah, that's Trace Company.

Yeah.

I have one, E Ink Screen. Very different product, but that's.

That's what I want. Are they selling? Are they delivering?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can get a soul reader. You should.

That's great.

Soul Reader is great right before bed because you just throw it on. It can pull in articles, it can pull in e books and stuff. I read, I read the Driver, that story about cannonball on the Soul Reader.

Nice.

Great. Alex. Roy. Yeah.

My main thing is I'm falling asleep. Yeah, I. Right now. I do a lot of audio. Yeah. You don't want light.

So it's just, it's very. It's very warm color temperature. There's no blue light. And so you'll just fall asleep in like five pages. It's honestly hard to finish.

I'm sorry. To the Big Screen. We got sidetracked.

It's a very different use case.

No, no, I know.

It's a very different use case. So with Big Screen, it's for this, like really immersive, like Ready Player One style VR. And it's so, so light. They, they launched the Big Screen one last year or maybe the year before. They launched the Big Screen beyond two just a few days ago. We're trying to have the CEO on soon to talk about it and actually one of my friends, Kyle Russell, works over at Big Screen now too. So it's 107 grams which is phenomenally light. And John Carmack when he was at Meta working on their headsets said that the key to creating consumer adoption in VR was I think he said like $100. A hundred grams. So if you make it super light and super cheap, people will just start throwing it on. And there's a bunch of interesting posts that we'll go through here, but they're claiming breakthrough optics. 116 degree field of view, edge to edge clarity, a massive sweet spot, reduced lens glare, increased brightness and eye tracking improved. For share ability, we added adjustable IPD so you can adjust where the lenses actually go over your eyes. You can give it to a friend. The first version was they would actually like 3D print your face onto the mold and we should pull up the video if we can Ben to kind.

Of show that's cool. They're shipping in less than a month.

Oh yeah. And the demand was crazy. I think they sold twice as many as the previous version.

How does it integrate to any headset in the world? And our community loved it. With Vyond becoming people's daily driver VR headset for VR chat, racing, sims and other VR games. But our community's been asking for more, asking us to push further on optics and a wish list of new features. After years of cutting edge research and development, we're unveiling our most advanced product yet. Bigscreen Beyond 2.

Let's go, let's go.

I'm so hyped.

I'm never taking these off.

Yes.

That looks very cool.

Yeah, somebody actually did a tear down of this headset too. They like cut out even more stuff and got it down to like 60 grams which is like nothing. Feels like just having like a pen on your face basically. But I mean the weight thing, this was the number one complaint about the Apple Vision Pro. They've just gone completely the other direction to give you a super, super light headset. Now they've made a bunch of sacrifices to get there. Like you, I'm pretty sure this thing has to be powered by a computer. It has to be plugged in. There's a bunch of different things that you put to do. It's for a prosumer or kind of a Developer almost. But I want to figure out how to get this rig built out really, really easily with maybe some small Mac Mini powering it or some Nvidia box that I can just use super simply and just have this wonderful experience. So. But Palmer Lucky's actually been a big proponent of what Big Screen is doing. He wrote we're on the path. Or he was. He was interviewed and was talking about it. We're on a path where we can make virtual reality devices that provide matrix level immersion. The big screen VR costs $990 and it weighs one fifth of the Oculus Quest Pro. Apple headset display is the next generation for the same company. And so he was interviewed by Peter Diamandis and talked about how excited he was about that direction. And Carmack was saying the same thing. We mentioned this. Big Screen beyond feels like a prop from a futuristic movie, but it works far and away.

I really want to do. I really want to do Sim Racing in here.

Totally.

We have to. In the new. In the new studio, like the most ridiculous rig.

I went. There's a place in Pasadena that has like full sim. It doesn't do VR because people get sick and it's kind of gross to share them. Yeah, but they have full, full VR. Full like, you know, three screens. And it was fun. I was at Laguna Seca Racing, racing some Porsche cup car. And it was. It was fun putting up LA times. I think I was on the simulator for like an hour. Just blew. Blew right by. It's great. Avi Schiffman chimed in, this is an interesting old quote from Steve Jobs. Steve said there's no such thing as headphones for video. Steve Jobs would have turned 70 today. And I can't help but wonder what he'd think about the early steps for Apple Vision. Avi says Apple should have made something closer to Big Screen Beyond's tiny, tiny little goggles. Just a more immersive content viewing experience that fits into the Apple ecosystem is enough. It didn't need apps, and neither did the watch. And that's a really, really good point. You just put it on and it's just whatever's on your phone is just boom, right there. There are, there are a couple companies that are not even doing VR. It's just basically a big TV screen and you. And it has the form factor of like, sunglasses. And so if you're on a plane, you want to watch a movie on a huge screen, you just throw those on. There's a couple companies, but they're all like a little rough around the edges soon. But just to put the weight in persistence. Kyle Russell, my buddy, shares this. He says even the tiny iPhone SE weighs more than the big screen beyond at 144 grams. And back in the day, do you remember those VR headsets that were like, you literally slot your phone. It was Google cardboard. And so you'd slot your phone into a holder and then strap that to your face. And there was another one, the Samsung VR something. You needed a Samsung phone. You put that in there and then you just bought the lenses. And there was this idea that like your phone would be driving the VR experience. Never quite got there. But you can go even lighter if you're just purely focused on VR like big screen is. And then Kyle also shares a little meme from the Big screen team. Discord Silence Optics engineer, a physicist is talking because clearly in internally they're always bumping up against the limits of physics. It's very difficult. That's the number one constraint for these companies.

I can't believe how cool this thing looks. This is again, this, this is why we need new science fiction for the products from like 40 years from now. Because this feels like a device out of, you know, Snow crash.

Yeah. We're going to check the box and then, and then we're going to need to move on to the next bit. Next big thing. But I'm excited for VR to finally get here and I can't wait to get my hands on a big screen beyond two. I'll have to do unboxing on the show.

Big screen wants their next million customers. What should they do?

They gotta buy billboards immediately, immediately, immediately.

We gotta figure out how many billboards are on the 101.

Small device, massive billboard.

A power play is to just get.

Every billboard, get every billboard right around Cupertino. Really let Apple know, hey, we're putting the screws to you.

We're home.

This ours weighs nothing. Yours weighs more than a truck.

You can't make even. You can't make your 29th generation iPhone weigh.

Does your neck hurt? A brutal logging a Big Screen beyond. I want to see it on an Ad Quick billboard. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising only Ad Quick combines technology, out of home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. Anyway, you see the Tornado Cache news.

Tornado Cash. Yeah.

This is a story that's been developing for a while and it's, it feels like tracking. It's kind of hard because it's Moving in slow motion. There's been little basically just to set the level set on Tornado Cash. Tornado Cash was a I believe like an ethereum contract. It was just code but it would allow you to deposit. Deposit crypto. It would get basically like tumbled around with all the other mixed in with all the other tokens and jam it.

In the smart contract. Turn the blender on.

Yep, turn the blender on. Just let it run and then you can come back later and kind of sneak it out. No one knows who's taken what. It's like basically like money laundering on the blockchain. But it was a big question because although it was used by criminals a lot.

Yeah.

Is math a crime? And a lot of the libertarians and a lot of the crypto folks were like privacy is important. That's why we got into this whole game. What are you doing? The. I believe the founder was arrested and has a court case coming up. But the most recent news that just dropped today is that Tornado Cash has been removed from the OFAC sanctions list along with many other addresses. Shout out to Brian Armstrong and Coin center for suing the government in court and winning for your human right to privacy. Beware. Many front ends to Tornado are fake and scams and will empty your wallet. So yeah, you know, maybe don't try and use this but from a libertarian political perspective, everyone's celebrating in that yeah.

This seems like a win for human rights and law enforcement will still be coming after the criminals that try to use Tornado Cash totally in as they.

As they do with, you know, Ross Ulbricht using Bitcoin. Yeah, the. The problem is that like Tornado Cash was a lot harder to track than than bitcoin.

There still are ways to little insight. So former teammate of mine and friend Dylan Abrascado is the founder of. Of this online Survivor style game called Crypto. The game.

Yep.

He ran I think it was the first or second season two before they were acquired by Uniswap. The winner of the season won all this money from playing the game and then donated it to the legal defense for Tornado Cash. And so yeah, huge. This was. Yeah, this was just a very.

Yeah. I mean Brian Chow here at Psycho Sort says the Tornado Cash founders are political prisoners. The case against them should be immediately dismissed. This is a couple months ago and there's a little breakdown from one of the founders, Roman Storm. Great name, Tornado Storm. Wow. He says my name is Roman Storm and I am one of the founders of Tornado Cash, a non custodial privacy protocol. I am being Prosecuted for writing open source code that enables private crypto transactions in a completely non custodial manner, meaning his company never takes ownership over your crypto. It's the opposite of a bank. It's not designed to be like Coinbase. It's merely a smart contract. This, this prosecution represents a terrifying criminal criminalization of privacy. The charges against me threatened to criminalize software development itself. If successful, the implications could extend far beyond the crypto industry, impacting every software developer. I face up to 45 years in prison on charges including operating an unlicensed money transmitting business, conspiracy to commit money money la and sanctions evasion. This case has already had a chilling effect on developers working on software tools. Recently a developer filed a lawsuit against the DOJ seeking relief because my case has made them fearful of releasing new software. And so this has been very, very controversial. Vitalik actually chimed in. No man left behind. Roman Storm and Alex Pertsev next Tornado Cash itself won an important case today and the, the, the whole crypto community is behind this. There is a flip side to this that we should talk about which is that there the allegations are that you know, maybe this like this operation was profiting off of the money laundering in like a maybe more criminal way. And I think that's what they're alleging.

But this has always been the challenge with crypto where you have these sort of open source on chain protocols that, that in many ways can operate autonomously, yet they have to, they end up building sort of front end services that have to, that end up using like aws. And there needs to be some company that sort of like puts a ramp card down and probably not ramp in this case, but you know, has to put a card down or pay for these services. And so then you have to look at what is the company that is a US or some type of corporate entity that can pay USD for services and then what is the protocol? And this is why in crypto they historically would have the sort of foundation that sort of manages the protocol and then there's usually a C corp that sort of engages with the foundation. Very, very complicated structures which is why all the big crypto funds would have these pretty massive internal legal teams to help their portfolio companies think through this.

I think in general I'm pro privacy but anti money laundering. But it's obviously very nice.

Vivek commented on it apparently and says you can't go after the developers of code. What you actually need to do is go after the individual bad actors who are breaking the laws that already exist.

Yeah, that Makes sense. It's like you don't go after. You don't try and lock up Satoshi for creating Bitcoin. Even if you could find him. You go after Russ Ulbricht for creating the platform.

So Vitalik, the creator of Ethereum, said no man left behind. Tornado Cash itself won an important case today and the founders are next. So, yeah, interesting that, you know, just because Tornado Cash was able to sort of beat. Beat their case doesn't mean the founders are fully out of the woods yet.

I think the case is going to trial in April, so we'll have to track that. Crazy. But if you want to avoid money laundering at your company, if you want to avoid waste at your company, you should go to ramp.com Time is money save. Both easy to use, corporate cars, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Go to Ramp.

They got. You can see on this image here, you got a little picture of Saquan. It says, keep your team focused on the game, not expenses. We're going to get Saquon on the show.

Yeah.

It's only a matter of time. Excited to have him on. He can teach us about football and.

Investing, apparently, because he's a fantastic investor.

Yeah, yeah.

Ramp and Androll now.

Yeah. He just got into Andre. He's over at the, at the, at the Anderal offices. Huge alpha. Just being a, a pro athlete and getting into the non, the typically non sexy categories. Normal for an athlete to be like, you know, we've got an NBA player and like Rora.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Protein powder, but that's very competitive.

Yeah. The real Alpha is saying, no, I'm gonna go. I'm gonna become an American dynamism investor.

Fantastic. Well, speaking of guests, before we have Saquon on, we got a whole bunch of guests hopping on right now. We got Harry Stebbings coming.

The king of Europe.

The king of Europe.

The king of Europe. Harry Stebbings. Harry sent a nice note on the timeline yesterday.

He's been super supportive.

It's interesting. I was DMing him with. With him a little bit and I'm sure he's going to be in the waiting room any second. But on how he's in the waiting room.

Yeah, he was saying he listens to the show and I think we finally made a show.

There he is.

Long enough for his marathon walks because the guy's putting up 40,000 steps a day. How many steps have you racked up today?

50,000 now. 50,000 like 2 and a half hours. And I listened to you on the fantastic.

We got it. So just let us know when we need to go from three to four hours. We want to pace with your walking your steps.

Honestly, I walk with my mother on the weekends. If we could do weekend additions also, it would save me having to talk for six hours.

I love. It's been. It's awesome to see your relationship with your mom sometimes makes me feel like a bad son because I don't walk for. For that many hours with my mother. But I was just saying you had a nice message yesterday on the timeline.

Thank you for the support.

It's interesting, you know, the shows that we really respect, all of them are highly ephemeral. Right. Like, they're shows that aren't really oriented around the news. They're oriented around individuals, people, companies, et cetera. And ours is the exact opposite. Right. Like, it would be kind of crazy to go back and listen to that catalog. It's kind of crazy sometimes. We'll talk about a story that maybe is more evergreen, but you've built up this sort of crazy catalog of some of the most amazing investors in venture ever. I wanted to have you on for a few reasons, but really to give you an opportunity to talk about Project Europe. We joked on the show that until you guys came out with this new program, the Project Europe that most VCs thought about was planning their sort of of trips to Saint Tropez over the summer. But you guys are taking it back.

Do you know what? We're taking it back. We also have Portofino.

Yeah.

Fundamentally, the world has decided that Europe has lost innovation, We've lost entrepreneurs. And I meet great founders every day. And you know what they're told? You gotta move to the Valley. And I'm like, you don't have to move to the Valley. You can build a massive company here. And I think, bluntly, we need to change the vibes. Vibes is everything. Elon, you like him or you don't. The guy knows how to master vibes.

There is a.

Now we've told our young entrepreneurs that you should leave, that you should build a company elsewhere. There's a guy, Gary Stevenson, who is blowing up in the uk, who tells young people that bluntly, it's the system's fault. It's not your fault. And you know, there's nothing you can do about it. There is. I was guys 10 years ago. I had no money. I was a kid in a bedroom. Today we manage over $750 million. The show and the media companies. Multi, multi millions. Because of the Internet, I'M not doing that as a me. It's the Internet and the empowering nature of. I DMed Mark Benioff 53 times before he came on the show.

I, I, I, I, we, by the way, we were reminded. Sometimes we'll message a friend about coming on the show and they like, don't get back right away. And I'm like, I gotta channel Harry.

Yeah, for sure.

I just gotta hit him up again. And it's important to share those. A lot of people would just, you know, have the temptation to make it look easy and say, oh, yeah, I just messaged Mark Benioff and he just like, popped on. It was easy. But it's important to remind people that persistence is what creates totally.

I mean, Logan Bartlett the same way. I think he DM'd.

He.

He said he emailed SBF like 15 times to try and get him on the show. And I was like, I don't know how you could do that. It feels so awkward to me. But you've clearly broken it down and it's paid off massively.

But you know what?

You've got to get innovative. I use Suno AI to write songs about people and then I send them to them. So I'm like, you know, write me a song asking John in a male folk guitarist tone about the future of M and A and then I'll send it to them. I promise you, you're the only one who's going to do that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's so important in, like, fundraising sales and, you know, even growing a podcast. It's all the same thing.

Oh, my God. Totally the same thing. But, but on Project Europe, yeah, it was like the doom loop, just pervasive. And I have so many friends in the US who are just like, Europe, dude. Like, why are you still there? It's just, it's just not true.

But the timing, but, but the timing seems incredible. You've been, you know, banging the European drum for a while now, but it does seem like even in the last month almost, there's been this sor shift. And that's sort of potentially coming from this. You know, the US is getting into trade wars with our neighbors, some of our closest allies. This is sort of like nationalism happening around Western Europe kind of waking up. You know, people are. There's more. You know, the people are talking about what is going to be the ande role of Europe. You know, I'm sure you're looking at some of these companies, but the timing seemed great.

Do we need I think we're going through this intense period of deglobalization. And what happens in intense periods of deglobalization is intense patriotism. And I think we're at the start of that now where absolutely we're starting to see Europe once again get a little bit more patriotic. It's funny, you said there about like the angel of Europe. It's Helsing. And my favorite thing is when you see defense funds and you're like, no, no, I don't quite know if defence is quite the category. It's more like Anduril and Helsing.

Very cool. Do you, I'm curious, you run your fund, you run the media business. Do you LP into other European funds? Are you trying to kind of create a sort of, of like, I imagine one of the benefits a Caretsu. No, but one of the things here in America is great. If I've got a buddy who's raising a pre seed round, I talk to them. I'm like, okay, I know 30 people that could lead this pre seed round. Like, don't worry if any one person says no, like you're gonna get a yes. Just talk to a bunch of people. But I imagine when there's probably not 30 London pre seed funds that you kind of at the moment, but maybe there should be or maybe they are.

I, I mean, I don't actually LP really into other funds just because with the network from the show, if I lp'd into one, I'd have to LP into all of them. So I find it easier to say just like, I'm sorry, I can't do LP checks. Otherwise you end up being Mark Andreessen. Where, like, I don't know, a fund that Mark Andreessen is not in. I've been paid so many funds where Mark is an investor and so listen, he has more money than me and can afford to do that. I couldn't do 100 funds.

Can you tell us a little bit about the patriotism in Europe? Is there, are there layers to this where a Spanish company will only want to raise from Spanish investors and say, hey, get this British guy out of here. Or is Europe kind of solidified in the same way that the United States is kind of a bloc? Even though obviously there's a difference between Florida and New York and California?

I would say that Europe has solidified completely. There's definitely not this kind of isolationist element of like, oh, Spanish versus Italian versus whatever. And Jesus, even the English and the French are getting on these days. That goes to show Just how much of a united front it is. And I think especially in the wake of, you know, the divide that's growing between the US and Europe, that becomes ever stronger, that unified country element of Europe. And so I don't see that at all. And Europe really stands as a block and I think you see that in how people have responded to Project Europe. And we've had, had, you know, thousands of applications. I started with 25 founders that I was like, hey, I'll go get 25 founders that are amazing and they will, you know, write a check into this vehicle to back Next generation literally went to 150 in three days. We've had another three to 400 requests to be in. There's a legal cap of 250. So we can't actually do. Was amazing.

Talk about when you were an early investor in Lovable. They've seen ridiculous growth. It's one of those charts that's not really a line, it's more like a wall. Talk about that round how that came together. Are you getting these companies weeks earlier than American investors that would want a shot at it? Is it months? Talk about your edge in your Europe on the ground.

Yeah, yeah. 100 lovable is a great example of a global company that's being built from Europe and Sweden in particular. Their numbers are insane. They're growing, you know, 2.3 to 2.5 million ARR per week. Their retention is better than chat GPTs at over 85%. I mean it is a monster. And their retention is really important. It is not sugar high AI revenues and so, so phenomenally impressive. Listen, Anton is quite obviously brilliant. I think we over exaggerate how difficult our role is as venture investors. Our role is to invest in the 1% and generally the 1% I find is quite obvious. And so when I met him, it was pretty apparent that he was bluntly creating an entirely new category. I've learned one thing in investing that when you're able to make your customer a superhero, it generally works very well. Nike's a good example. Everyone's an athlete. That message is empowering. Shopify, everyone's an entrepreneur and Lovable allows anyone to build a website. My mother who has a bakery uses Lovable to make her bakery website.

That is. I love your commentary on just the website market in general, the sort of you've got the framers, the web flows, all these different platforms. It's felt over the last few years. Yeah, it's felt over the last few years if you just waited for, you know, webflow to kind of become four years old. Then you could create the framers and then you could do the lovables.

Like the unending gold mine, honestly.

Yeah. And it seems like you've got a.

You've got a couple of different segments here that I don't think people are really talking about enough. Which is like you've got the number ones, which is PE owned larger, older players now. They are in a lot of trouble. They've lost innovation, they've lost product centricity, they're in a real world of pain. I'm really looking at a lot of the PE board assets, your anaplans, your coopers of the world, thinking, wow, you were bored at the height of the market. You don't have the founder as the CEO. You've lost product centricity. This is going to be a really tough slog to get back to that acquisition price and they know that. And then the second that no one's talking about either is this really worrying segment. It's almost what I'm most worried for. 50 million to 200 million ARR. SaaS, businesses that are growing in the teens and they're not profitable yet or they're barely profitable. They are not acquisition targets for pe. Those are not good enough numbers. They're not good enough to IPO what happens in that case. And there's a lot of these companies that is a really dangerous chasm to fall down that I don't think many people are talking about.

What about just the broader market? We're seeing a pretty significant sell off in the us Is Europe seeing something similar? I haven't been tracking it very closely.

When you say sell off, what do you mean?

Yeah, I think he's talking public equities. But I mean, in your position, do you as an venture investor probably don't care, but I even talk about maybe just like pricing in the early stages market, which is probably what you're more clued into.

I mean, there's so many things here. I think one thing that no one's talking about, I'm so shocked about it, is bluntly how LPs are responding to a lot of the endowment policy changes enacted by a Trump administration. I mean, this is a very, very difficult position for a lot of endowment funds to be in. They're forced to rethink a lot of their private allocations and that will significantly impact managers abilities to raise fore funds this year.

Can you go back and explain exactly what the change is?

Well, so you're seeing essentially the Trump administration reduce a lot of the budgets that they're able to have to their privates. And so you're seeing that reflected in how they're engaging with new managers. When I speak to a lot of endowments today, they're simply not adding new managers and they're even trimming their existing. And so I think that's bluntly going to really impact the amount of new managers that we see this year. In terms of pricing, honestly, it's. It's higher than it's ever been for the clearly great assets. And there's a lot of people who come and say, oh, so unfair. It's so unfair. I understand that for a lot of the market, you're not coming out of stripe or Facebook or you name it, but if you are, you have more money than ever before. And the prices are honestly higher than ever before. The prices are absolutely nuts today. And so you either have to be. If you want to win in Manchester State, you have to do one of two things. I believe I'm a better picker than anyone else and can find diamonds in the rough, or I believe that I am such attractive capital that I can win a beauty contest and still pay a very high price. But beat everyone else.

Yeah, do it all at the same time. No, I think that was it. It's funny, like, any investor who's claiming, you know, complaining about high prices is just like just price every investment perfectly and never miss you'll put up a great fund.

But by the way, entry price really matters. When you look at wiz and insight, something very timely. You know, their entry price was very high. And so people are really shitting on it as an investment, saying, like, oh, it only returned a third or a quarter of their fund. It's not, it's just that the entry price was so high. We'll talk about that.

I'm curious, do you know any dynamics? Because I was wondering. Imagine you're the partner who leads, you know, $200 million investment, turns it into two and a half billion, and then you're kind of waiting around for your other partners saying, like, I kind of. I kind of did the heavy lifting here, but I need you guys because they're not in carry yet. Is there a scenario where that partner doesn't really see much of a personal benefit from having, you know, returning $2 billion?

I mean, let's just say I think they'll be getting a pretty big bonus at the end of the year. So I'm not too worried about them. But. But I mean, it is just testament to the like Fun. Size matters.

The scale's massive. It's never been bigger.

Yeah.

All right, Harry, there's a lot more to talk about. Yeah, I'd love to have you on again. Go enjoy dinner. Thanks for coming on late.

Yeah, we appreciate you coming on late. We really appreciate it.

Fantastic to have you.

You are fantastic company on the walk. Always let me know what I can do. And huge love, guys.

Fantastic.

Thanks so much.

Talk to you soon.

Enjoy your evening. Cheers. Yeah, I was coordinating timing with him and being in London, well, he seemed.

Like he got to a great podcasting studio.

He's locked in.

He's locked in.

He's locked in.

You love it.

Over time, over time, we're gonna get the Dallian's like a permanent sort of like hub in the office. Just say, come flip on the lights, you'll be live.

Yeah, yeah, we'll set it up. The remote studio. I mean, that's what the. The big TV channels do. It's like, oh, if you're doing a spot on. On, you know, NBC, go to the local NBC affiliate in your town and we'll have a green screen and a great microphone and a. And a teleprompter for you and you. And you'll look great if you can stop by. Anyway, we got Adam coming on the show in a couple minutes. Give me some background. Adam, how do you meet him and what does he do?

The godfather of media, Adam Ryan. That is a bold intro. So, Adam Ryan's a very good friend. I was actually on the board. Board of his company in the. Through the series A. And he, prior to that was at the Hustle. He, like, ran sales there. Eventually was the. I think the president and the COO under Sam Parr. He also was at Under Armour when they acquired my fitness pal. So he's just been kind of like right in the. He also was at. He was at spiceworks as well. So he's always been at kind of the intersection. Intersection of, like, software and business, media and content. And so he can talk a little bit about work week. And then I wanted to get him on to talk about the TechCrunch acquisition that happened today, which there's a lot of turmoil.

Has the number actually leaked, or is that private information?

It's private information, but we got him ready.

But should we be ringing the size.

There he is.

Or not?

That's the question.

That's what we'll ask Adam. Adam, we heard TechCrunch was bought. We have this beautiful. We have this beautiful gong right here. Should we ring it or not.

I think this is like a Portnoy champagne bottle situation. It's time to ring it.

Okay, okay. We'll hit it. We'll hit it. But great. Great to see you, Adam. I just want to say you always thought that I would be good at podcasting and always believed in me, so, you know, thank you for that. You were the first person to say.

You have a Facebook podcast.

You should be podcasting. But it's great. I gave a quick intro earlier, but it'd be great to have it in your words. And then I want to kind of get into the news.

Jordy, I think I sent you a contract once to become a podcast host, so we can talk about that. But, yeah, big fan of the show, guys. It's been amazing, and I've never seen Jordy just in his natural element of getting to shoot the shit all day.

It's a. It's a perfect.

It's a perfect job.

It's fantastic.

Yeah.

So Workweek is imagine if LinkedIn was only for people that were verifiably in your profession. So think about if you're an E. Comm or on a hospital system or hr, you have a platform, social media platform, that's built just for you. Conversations that are authentic around your lingo. You get a similar to what this podcast is all about. Actually, I think this is why we all like it as founders. As you guys talk like us, you think like us, you bring that out, and we've built that in a social media platform. So that's largely what we do. I think one of the areas that we've focused on is, like, if I wanted to go launch an hr, our social media platform, I would never have a shot to do it. HR people would not listen to me. And so our go to market is to partner with operators, practitioners in these industries, and have them create newsletters and podcasts that then help us build an audience to drive to these memberships in the future. So that's most of what we're up to nowadays. And previously, as Jordi said, the Hustle, MyFitnessPal and Spiceworks kind of at various different points of media.

Cool.

Amazing. Let's jump right into tc. You know, we've talked about this on the show before. They were owned by, what was it? Aol. Apollo, the private equity fund, bought aol. It seems like at some point there would be an incentive to sort of dismantle aol, the underlying assets. And I imagine that Apollo doesn't want to just hold that position forever. Maybe just talk about kind of the history of maybe why you think TechCrunch has really just struggled? I think it was owned by. It was. It was owned by Verizon.

I'll give you some background. So, founded in 2005 by Michael Arrington Parker Partners of Archimedes Ventures. Eventually they went under the Yahoo umbrella after its former parent AOL and Yahoo were acquired by Verizon. So it became a Verizon company. And then Verizon sold to Apoll. So it's been private Equity back since 2021 and now it has been sold to Regent, a media investment firm.

Yeah, it's the property. It's like the hot potato that no one wants. Right. It's just been sold and sold and sold. But I mean, I think the through line is. If you look at their search interest on Google Trends, they peaked. Any guess what year they peaked of search interest?

2012.

2011. Good guess, Jordy. 2011 was the peak of their search history. Today their search history is essentially the equivalent of what they had in June of 2006. And it's just been a depreciating distressed asset for 12 years. And that's why it keeps getting tossed around. And you know, I actually think it's. They're an interesting one to study though, because, like, why were they so good?

Good.

And they were so good because they figured out one move that was just awesome, which was building relationships with VCs in Silicon Valley, breaking the news, having mom be proud, creating the cycle. Keep going.

The mom be proud engine.

It really is true. When you start a company, it's so fake for so long. Even if you go to your parents and you say, hey, I got $2 million from Andreessen Horowitz, they're all like, who? That's not bank of America. And at some point you get the TechCrunch article and you can send it to your family and be like, hey, I'm in business. I'm a real person.

Yeah. At some point I had one funny TechCrunch story. So we announced our seed round from Andreessen and we simultaneously launched our pre seed. It was this awesome moment. We had been in the timeline a lot and TechCrunch agreed to cover the story. They didn't tell us when they would release it. They didn't even tell us they were for sure going to cover it until like a couple days before. And then when they did released it, they refused to use our product imagery or any assets that we created. And they used a stock image of a birthday cake. And we Were just like, hey, like we're really excited about the article and like, we want to share it broadly but like, this is not on, you know, not on brand for us. And like feels kind of random. And they like fired back and they were like, you're not, you don't, you're not a writer here. Like, don't. And it was like very hostile and it left this like terrible taste in my mouth. And I was like, okay, I'm never talking to TechCrunch again. And I think a lot of founders have had that sort of frustration where it's like, hey, we still love the TechCrunch brand because like for me, I grew up reading it. I remember just as a kid going to the homepage and being so excited. And I think it has like a ton of potential as being a place to inspire entrepreneurship. But the fall off is potentially that. And this is like the entire work week thesis is that business people, whether you're an investor, founder, et cetera, want to learn from other business people. And so at some point along the road after Michael Arrington I think was out of the picture and it was private equity owned, they maybe stopped hiring sort of founders or people that just deeply loved venture. And it sort of coincided with this explosion of just like, you know, content creators broadly within venture capital that, you know, Packy would start breaking, you know, fundraising news. And you knew if you work with Packy, he was going to, you know, publish it on the day that he said he was, he was going to make you look good, he and actually.

Deep dive it at a much deeper level than you would ever see on TechCrunch.

Right?

Yeah.

And I think the other piece of that, like two things they, I think they really screwed up. Like one, when you build the, your actual best product, which was their like fundraising breaking news around the relationships with the investors, you can't write anything that's actually like deeply critical even in the future. And what they did was they got stuck in middleman land of like you can have like the Axio, Sarah Fishers of the world, Packies that are like, hey, I'm here to like tell a good story, a real story, but like to support you or like hard hitting journalism. Like I'm going to like go say the thing that no one wants to say aloud.

They like John Carrey Rue, like, like he broke Theranos, like he's a serious investigative journalist in the business world.

They tried to do both and you just can't win in the middle.

Like.

And I think with today like either your editorial and your audience, like, it can't be rounded anymore. It has to be pointed. And like, you have to be like, this is what we stand for. This is what we do. This is who we support. If you're like anywhere in the middle, you're just going to get forgotten. And I think they, they lost that like 10 plus years ago.

Yeah. I mean, looking at X account, they have 10 million followers on X and their announcement, 19 likes on their announcement that they have been sold, which is like big news in their own world. And it's just so rough.

Yeah, it's interesting. You know, we, we had heard months ago that it was for sale and was trying to find a buyer. And, and I do think the actual purchase price came in a lot lower than, than what, what they had hoped. But, but what I can imagine happens now is whoever this guy, I don't know the guy who bought it, but I imagine he basically fires everyone because I can't imagine that.

He'S not going to. So Regents is a private equity firm that owns a bunch of logos that 15 years ago were cool. And his playbook is. And TechCrunch put this in their own press release. I think their gas line was like, this is a software update, not a system restart. But, but he said he's not firing anyone, but he owns a bunch of different logos and publications that are typically distressed assets. And I kind of see it as like, his playbook is like, I own 50 of these. If I can make a few of them a little bit better, flip them in five years. And so I don't think they're actually going to probably fire a ton of people, unfortunately. I think it's actually going to continue the path of not being relevant or good because they're going to not lose money. And I think they need a whole restart to do that.

Let me give a little overview of who they own at Regent Computer, World Network World, CIO Magazine, CSO Magazine, Mac World, PC World, IT World, Rate, my professors, Cheddar News, Military Times, Defense News, Marine Times, Army Times, Navy Times, Air Force Times. So a lot of like these hyperverticalized small trade publications they've put together and then they own some stuff in fashion as well, and then industrial and consumer products as well. But. And it says that they were in super cuts for a while and then they.

Yeah, I saw that. I saw that too. That was a fun. I was like, actually, I'd like to hear that story. But I mean, the, I think, you know, when was the last time you Heard a founder now say, like, I can't wait for TechCrunch to like, break my story. And I think that's like, the core of what's going on.

And yeah, founders would still want them to break the story, but it's hard to get them to respond. Even if you have something that's somewhat newsworthy, what else is going on in media today that you, you find interesting? I know you wrote earlier this week about the Skims, which was like a hustle era, super hot, you know, newsletter that, that sold. How. How did that go? Is there any takeaways from it?

Yeah, they, you know, they were started 2014. Oprah said she loved it. Reese Witherspoon, Chelsea Handler kind of like went on this. Raised like 25 million from 21st Century Fox. Bunch of good companies. Also hit their search interest peak in 2016. So I think with them, they had a great business. They were probably seven years too late. I think that's a founder, not founders. Not selling at the right time than like being bad builders. And their time had passed, but I don't think they crossed the prep stack. So, you know, 12 plus years down the drain for them and pretty sad considering one time they were, they were a household name among, among like millennial.

A few short years.

But yeah, that happened this week. And I think that's what we're seeing. It's like, it's the onslaught of like, if you're not loved, you're out. And none of these people that are getting sold today, like, have people that are truly, like, logging every day and loving what they're seeing.

Yeah, I mean, last question, then we'll let you go. What do you think the founders of the Skim should have done differently? Is there a path where this could have been a great cash flow engine if they'd not raised and kind of run it more as just making them influencers. Could they have been the next, you know, call her daddy or something if they'd played that differently? What do you think?

I do think they were more of a faceless institution than they probably got credit for, which is kind of against my belief of what you have to be today. I think you have to have individuals at the forefront. But also my interesting analysis there from 2014, their press release was like, our advantage is that we're Low Tech. In 2018, when they announced their series B, they said at the heart of what we do is technology. And, and I think there's like, it's okay today to just admit who you are and what you do and they tried to be something they're not, which is a technology company. I think they wasted tons of capital trying to do shit that they have no idea how to do. And they should have just kept with building content for women their age and building, creating for themselves and they would have been just fine.

Yeah, that makes a ton of sense.

Did you follow anything? Last question on my side for now and would love to just have you back on when there's, when there's media headlines. Did you follow? So call her Daddy had all this big issues with barstool because they just weren't really getting a good deal. Alex Cooper eventually leaves, starts her own network, does very well, but then creates this sort of new superstar in Alex Earle. And then Alex Earle announced this quarter that, that she's leaving. Do you think it's possible to build networks anymore, long term or with these sort of like, you know, scaled networks, do you eventually just lose, you know, your best talent? How does that work?

I think it depends. I mean the Alex Earl one's interesting. I was confused because she was already a superstar. I mean she was like, she was already making like a few million a year pre Alex Cooper. I think, think what the net, what the best networks do, I think is find emerging talent early, early, like in precede stage, essentially as like a content creator and to keep them. And I think there's been plenty of good examples. I mean everyone talks about Bar still leaving, but like Big Cat PFT and all those guys are still there and drive most of their revenue actually and always have. And so what would happen? How'd they do that? They get paid a lot of money, money and they feel like they're treated fair. And I think that's like at the core, not everyone wants to do everything. And I think when you're, when you're building out those networks, the only way to keep talent is I think to talk to the talent and be like, what, what kind of life do you want? What, what kind of pay do you want? And you've got to build for that. And I think if you look at tv, they actually, this is what people should take away is like, Stephen A. Smith just got a whopper of a deal. They kept him, but he, they like knew what he needed. He wanted to be the high, he wanted to get the highest contract. TV's done this really well for a long time. Friends cast giving them their new contracts to keep them together. Those are all innovative contracts to keep talent. I think to do, to, to sustain, you have to kind of take that.

Same approach, that makes a ton of sense. Well, thanks for stopping by. We'll talk.

See you, Adam. See you later. Talk soon.

Bye. Very interesting.

Nice.

Who we got next coming in?

Adam's always. He's never. He's never pulled punches in his writing. He's got a great newsletter where he just kind of says it how it is in media because he's been in the trenches. Right. He built a million subscriber lists while at the hustle, and it's certainly not easy. We got Blake Anderson coming in from the cage live from New York City, where he's been. Been in an apartment for 33 days straight.

How you doing, Blake?

Can you guys hear me?

We can.

Yes.

Welcome to the show.

They can hear me, but I cannot hear them. Okay, try it again.

Check, check.

Did y' all say something?

Check, check, check.

Go to public.com investing for those who take it seriously. Multi asset investing by millions.

Yeah, like, can you play music?

And do you hear it in your podcast?

We got stocks, bonds, treasuries, options. Can you hear that? Yeah. Test speakers. What about eight sleep? I know you guys are sleeping on eight sleeps out there. Nights that fuel your brain.

How do I sound?

Ultimate sleeping experience. Go to 8sleep.com.tbpn. can you hear that, Blake?

Yes, I can.

What about getbezel.com? can you hear it? Can you hear that?

I can hear that.

Blake's a watch guy.

Ramp.com.

I was about to ask about ramp. Could you tell me about them?

Yeah, Time is money. So say both dot com. You can hear that. Okay, good.

Are we good? I think. I think we're in a good spot. Flake. Okay. Blake, it's great to have you on the show. It's a big day today. Thank you for taking the time. You haven't been. I think everybody here is very familiar with you, just from. From PMF or die and everything. You haven't left the cage for 33 days. Today you're launching the nap, and maybe you start to get a sense that freedom might be on the horizon.

Freedom might be on the horizon.

But, yeah, talk to us. How are you feeling?

I'm feeling very stressed out. I feel like I have this pit in my stomach that is not going away for anything. And I think that the only way that I can release that is achieving pmf. And if I do not achieve pmf, I think I'll be in a very dire spot, you know?

Yeah, yeah, we're going to have. The audience will get to vote on the sort of fantasy football style Punishment like you might have to do pink hair or something like that? No, but we're believers. Why don't you break down 10x in your words? Maybe just start with kind of the manifesto. It feels like the app is extremely timely with everybody sort of realizing that one of the biggest opportunities with AI today is giving everybody a tutor. But yeah, tell us about 10x in your words.

Yeah. I think that the power of AI education cannot be understated. Everything that I've built has been on the backbone of AI and yet at the same time, I have so many friends that constantly ask me how they can use AI to learn more efficiently, to learn how to code, to learn how to market, to learn how to do anything, any digital skill. And I don't think that there exists a platform that's kind of synonymous with AI based learning. And this was the general background thesis on building 10x. And next came the medium.

Right.

What is the form factor? And so the original form factor, with how we are launching and the version that's going on the app Store this evening, is a duolingo style learning path where you can select your skill, skill and progress through the foundational knowledge needed to learn how to code with AI, market with AI, you know, build a business with AI. And so that is one key function of the application. Additionally, we have the ability to custom generate lessons, so you can generate a 15 minute podcast on anything that you want to learn about. I find myself going down these like, interesting podcast rabbit holes on Spotify and what I found is that, that once you get past the very base layer of any sort of domain, it could be machine learning, it could be complex systems, it could be American history. It's very difficult to find these sort of custom tailored information to progressing to that next step. And 10x provides that for people. Additionally, you can track your skill progression over time as well as chat with a chatgpt grok, like basic chatbot within the application.

Very cool. I saw a post earlier today from this guy, Chris pike, who's over at Pace. He says when elite universities uploaded all of their courses online for public consumption, we collectively realized that the limiting factor for global intelligence is not access to information, it's motivation. What's your read on how motivated is the sort of next generation of builders who the initial 10x app is like, how do you make somebody, how do you turn somebody into a developer, right, who right now maybe knows nothing? Do you feel like there's like, like just a ridiculous amount of sort of motivation that doesn't necessarily have, like a. A pathway yet do you see that 10x is like, hey, here's how you go from zero to builder?

Yeah. So one of the most popular questions that I get on social media is, how can I learn to use AI? How can I learn to code nowadays? And there doesn't seem to be any resources that are really constantly up to date with the newest and best techniques. In addition, if we look at what Duolingo has done for language learning, the big thing that they've done is they've gamified it, they've made it fun. And I think that that's in line with your point regarding motivation. And so right now with 10x, it is significantly more enjoyable to learn through 10x than through basic standard chatbot, though obviously we have the chatbot embedded within. But going forward, one of my primary North Star metrics is how much dopamine do you feel rushing into your brain when you hear those little sounds and get that XP and see yourself level up?

Do you have haptics yet? Or you got the phones vibrating, or is that rolling out soon?

Yeah, we've got haptics, but haptics are just a small step in a very big mountain in competing with. With Instagram and TikTok. Because, you know, my view for the 10x mobile application is that it might not be the platform that you sit down on and use for three hours straight, but it certainly can fill the latent space in your day instead of Instagram and actually put it towards something productive.

Yeah, talk about. Talk about the concept of, like, character building and sort of leveling up your character, because a big part of 10x is like, okay, I'm a character. I'm jordy. I can go on 10x and, like, level up my character to learn how to code. That's awesome. Was there a specific video game or anything that inspired you as a kid that you were super into? Like, that you got maybe way too into? Was it. I think World of Warcraft was probably way before your time, but yeah. Was there any specific.

Absolutely. So I would say Skyrim was a big one. So not to be confused with World of Warcraft. I think a big difference in terms of the type of person that played those two games. Now, that's. No, I think that games where you can see your skill and level progression over time are just inherently so much more addicting. Skyrim, Madden, FIFA, even Minecraft in a bunch of these different mods that I would use when I played as a kid. And that was essentially the thesis behind umax and what made it go so viral is the ability to scan your face and get this sort of like six factor rating system about your skin quality and your jawline and your overall attractiveness and potential. And, and so in its current form it's just XP based but moving forward I think that really interesting thing that we can implement is the ability to take these sort of preliminary challenges and quizzes to assess your current skill position and then make this into more than just a system to come and learn statically and linearly, but something that can dynamically update based on where you're at, where you're progressing and then become somewhat of a status symbol. Right now we all know the term 10x engineer. I want a level 99 in 10x to be a hallmark of somebody who has agency in this post AI world.

Love it. Talk about your go to market. I know this is historically how you've grown your apps is leveraging these short form video platforms. You're taking all that learning and channeling it it 10x's GTM. Are you doing anything different this time or is it the same playbook that you've sort of happily shared with the world because it's, it's easy to talk about, it's hard to actually do.

Yeah. So you know, I think that 10x is inherently less viral than the previous products that I've built. Now that said has so much more long term upside. And so if I were launching a Rizz GPT right now, it'd be like done wraps. I'd be, I'd have completed it, I'd be at a million ARR. But, but I'm trying to build a big business here and I really believe in the long term mission. Now that said, I think that I'm taking a lot of the learnings that I've had from my previous applications and figuring out how to, how to make something that isn't inherently as viral or maybe like scandalous into something that people really resonate with and still can go viral on organic platforms. And so I think that one of the big marketing messages that we have is you won't be replaced by AI. You'll be replaced by somebody using AI. Learn to use AI. Now that's inherently a little bit scary and digs into insecurity and I think that'll be conducive to engagement on these social platforms. We're split testing a ton of different niches. We're working with self improvement creators with AI and tech creators, we're working with OnlyFans creators and so we've got the whole roster.

This is what you were saying before that somebody logs on to only fans for whatever reason, and then it's like, hey, why don't you learn how to code? When are you. When are you. I know you're. You're launching today. I got the pre order page pulled up. When you think.

What do you think you're.

When do you think you're going live? Because I know you probably still have some stuff to do there.

No, we're going live immediately after this call.

Amazing. Okay, everybody listening? Blake really wants to see the sunlight. He wants to surf. He wants to go hiking. Go download the app.

I just changed my bio real quick to my. My X bio, which used to be MJ of AI apps. And then everything built. It's now. I haven't left my apartment for 33 days. Please download so I can surf and hike.

I love it.

All right, I'm putting it. I'm putting it in the chat right now. You're the man, Blake. Good luck today. We will. We'll talk to you later. And excited to see. I. I see Sam Sheffer in the background there. He's collecting all this footage. I can't wait to see the documentary. Documentary on it. It's going to be amazing. And Godspeed today.

Thanks for having me, guys.

Cheers.

Bye. What a hilarious project. So chaotic. 33 days without going outside.

I mean, they do have the roof deck.

I know you haven't seen the Shawshank Redemption, but when he gets out of prison and he's just being like, they.

Do have a little sunlight.

It's beautiful. Yeah, I guess he can go outside.

There's somebody in the chat says if he fails, he has to. This is Rusty Pitchfork. If he fails, he has to buy a Dodge Charger ev and use it as his daily driver. Brutal.

So much fun. Well, should we go to one more story? Because we have Sean McGuire joining in 15 minutes, but I think we got enough time to break down the billionaire who just bought the Celtics. He doesn't have a Wikipedia page. No one knows about this guy. Sean Puri said the Celtics just sold for $6 billion to a guy with no Wikipedia page. Money talks. Wealth whispers. Send tweet.

I love Sean, and it does crazy numbers.

It does crazy numbers.

I love when you. I love when you can drop something that's. When you can drop something that's just, like, very niche, like, only for your fellow posters.

It still does numbers. It's also great because, like, Sean's been on the show. You know, obviously we're notorious yappers and basically the opposite of whispering. But we love wealth so we'll break it down. William Chisholm was a complete unknown to sports fans and most private equity investors until earlier this week. He just bought the Boston Celtics for 6.1 billion. By the time they're ready to spend their billions, most sports owners are already celebrities in their own right. Wall Street Titans CEOs are prominent companies, heirs of America's richest family families. But when the most prestigious team in the NBA was sold for 6 billion, a record price for a pro sports franchise, the most shocking part of the deal wasn't how much the buyer paid, it was the person who bought it. This is from the Wall Street Journal. William Chisholm, the little known managing partner of a little known private equity firm will become the new owner of the Boston Celtics after agreeing to purchase the team from Wick Gruesbeck. The parties announced on Thursday. The deal stunned NBA insiders and private equity investors and even chief. You think of me at 8 years old, 10 years old, watching the Celtics and never dreaming that this could possibly happen. It's just a pinch me moment.

Amazing.

Chisholm has a far different public profile than other NBA owners, especially those who have splurged on teams in recent years. He's nowhere to be found on Bloomberg or Forbes billionaires list. Little L for Forbes there. They missed a big one before the.

Sale would stay off the list.

Yeah, he's getting on there now. He didn't have a Wikipedia page.

So this line from Bill Simmons, we know so little about this guy, I don't even know how to pronounce his name.

Yeah, Chisholm. Apparently not Chisholm. Chisholm. Chisholm, whose firm Symphony Technology Group, invests in technology groups, intelligent technology companies that handle cloud security software or run job search platforms has been quoted in the Wall Street Journal exactly once. When STG bought the construction data unit of McGraw Hill. We look forward to helping the business achieve the next level of success. He said.

Amazing line.

Goated. No.

No private equity bro has ever said something like that before.

Yes. Yeah.

Except every time if they don't actually want to make a comment.

Yeah, yeah. You could have just said no comment. But he's on record with the Wall Street Journal just once. Now the man whose firm invested in companies called on Clusive, Reich and Keltra has a slightly more recognizable brand to his name. The Celtics. Chisholm, who grew up in north of Boston in Georgetown, Massachusetts, spent his professional life far from the spotlight. He attended Dartmouth as An undergrad, received his MBA from UPenn Wharton. He worked at a private equity firm, Bain Capital. I wonder when he worked at Bain. Probably pretty, probably in like the 90s or something. And then set off to start his own private equity firm. Stt.

You were at Bain?

I was at Bain, but in 2010.

Do you have like a Bain alumni chat?

Definitely not.

I would not be in that.

No way.

But you could have made a generational run at the top for the top spot. Got the height for it.

Yep.

They would have just said, hey, we gotta push this guy through.

The height thing is real there. I was working out at the like the corporate gym at Bain Capital once when I was interning there and one of the big shot mds comes in, is on the, the exercise bike. He's just like you like me race right now. And it was just the most like mogging ever. And he's like, I could put up. It was like the fan bike. He's like, go as hard as you can. I can do 21 units of electricity or whatever. He had some weird metric that he was benchmarking against and he just wanted like the, the young guys to see like oh like push me harder, you know, because he's like a 60 year old guy. Yeah, really competitive.

I love, love it.

STG, which Chisholm Co founded and 2002 invests in companies your average hoops fan have never heard of. But it positioned Chisholm to strike when the opportunity of a lifetime came calling. The capital to put something like this together is frankly the easy part. Chisholm said. Based after striking the largest deal in pro sports history. It's getting the right folks around the table. The investors alongside Chisholm include current Celtics minority owner Rob Hale, Related Companies president Bruce A. Beal and investment firm 6th Street. The Celtics shines a light on the changing financial landscape. I bet this was sports.

This was done over a group chat or around a golf probably.

Before the Celtics deal, the last three NBA teams that changed hands were sold for between 3 and 4 billion. So the price is soaring. The league recently allowed. The league recently allowed private equity for firms and sovereign wealth funds to buy team stakes. So they're allowing more capital in. The price goes up. It's just supply and demand. It's fascinating because the narrative around the NBA is that they've lost ground to the NFL. Then there's also this larger narrative that just professional sports are falling off and becoming less relevant. And yet prices have never been higher.

Yep, yeah, these are trophy assets. Yeah, they've They've, you know, over the last 20 years, they've been fantastic investments, but they don't need to make money to be valuable.

Yep. Based In Menlo Park, STG manages just under 12 billion in assets, according to Pitchbook. I wonder how much of that is his because he's putting a lot of money into this deal. Chisholm's backing from Sixth street drew some shade throwing from current Celtics minority owner Steve Pagluca. I definitely mispronouncing that. And I bet all the sports fans know exactly how to pronounce his name. Who would also be leading a group bidding to buy the team from Gruzbeck. We had no debt or private equity money that would potentially hamstring our ability to compete in the future. He said in a statement on Thursday. The former co chairman of Bain Capital is no stranger to private equity. Oh, so both of the guys that were building on the deal were Bain alums. It probably was a Bain chat. You're right. He said he and his group would remain at the ready if the announced transaction does not end up being final. We'll see if this Chisholm guy actually has the money. He's throwing down the gauntlet. If you have one false step, I'm hopping in with my deal. Chisholm attended Celtics games as a kid, sitting in obstructed view seats in the rickety old Boston Garden. So when he learned that the team of his dreams was available, he didn't take. Didn't take long to make up his mind about pursuing it. It was certainly a discussion with my wife and family for about a second. Second. Hey, honey. Hey, honey. I know you're working on dinner, but can I spend 6 billion on the Celtics? Oh, okay. Cool, cool. Got it. Yeah. Okay. At least we talked about it. Yeah, great. Chisholm said that every.

Every husband has gone through that at some point.

Yes. Whether it's the GT3RS or the Adamarpage Royal Oak, you know, these are conversations that you have to have as a family. Little family meeting. Hey, I'm buying a six billion dollar sports team team. Let's go. He said a central goal with the Celtics is to maintain its current success. Under the previous leadership, the team won the 2008 championship and added another last summer. This season is well positioned to become the first repeat NBA champion since 2018. To that end, Chisholm agreed to an unconventional arrangement. Gruzbeck is to remain the team's governor, leading its team operations through the 2027-2028 season. Chisholm referred to that decision as an intelligence test. Why would you want to mess with that? Chisholm said. That is working at every level. When Chisholm does take the reins of every part of the Celtics organization, though, he is confident that what put him in the position to buy the team will let him hold on to its winning ways. In our little way at stg, we've done that, too.

They've done it in so many good lines in here.

They've done it in higher job platforms, apparently. And now he's doing it in sports. Very fun story. Anyway, one day you'll be able to trade shares in these. In these teams. Hopefully you'll be able to do it on public.com investing. For those who take it seriously, go to public.com but we got to move on to. We talked a little bit about Wiz. I don't know if you want to do some timeline. We got seven minutes, but Sean McGuire's hopping on. We can talk to him about Wiz as well.

I just was curious, what are the publicly traded sports teams?

I don't know.

There is the Atlanta Braves, mlb.

Really? You can just go buy shares.

That's Major League Baseball.

Okay. Yeah.

Thank you.

Good. Clarifying.

Just our audience follows business like sports.

Yes.

So you got to clarify these things. Manchester United, it's got some shares on the New York. I'm looking it up because I wonder how these things. So Manu is trading at 2.3 billion on the. The. The NASDAQ. You can go buy that on public. Madison Square Garden.

Oh, yeah. I guess the MSG Group, but that's the Garden. That's the actual, like, holding company for all the different media assets founded by James Dolan, who also, or I guess his dad founded it, but then he runs it. And James Dolan created the Sphere.

Oh, interesting. So the Green Bay packers have done sort of these public offerings, but they're not doing it anymore.

But.

But I have a special announcement. It is Jeremy Geffond's birthday.

Oh, Happy birthday.

I figured we could sing him Happy birthday. Ready? Happy birthday to you Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday, dear Jeremy. I hope you find a special situation today. We love you, Jeremy.

Fantastic.

You deserve all the success in the world. You're still a young whippersnapper and you have such a bright future.

Yes. May all your deals go through in 10x.

10X.

Much like this Wiz deal, which did more than 10x, it turned into a $4 billion windfall for Index Ventures. They're set to earn a 250 fold return on seed money in a startup Google has agreed to buy and the partner on the deal is Sudhur Shawl. And Shah got the call he had been waiting for on his 37th birthday in January of 2020. A promising Israeli cybersecurity founder that he had been asking for years to launch a company was in need of funding. It's. It's time, said the voice on the other end of the line. Shah kicked in 3.5 million on behalf of Index Ventures. Flash forward five years. And that original seed money earned a 250 fold return this week, turning into an $875 million stake when Alphabet agreed to buy Wiz for $32 billion. And Index didn't stop at its first check, folks. It went turbo long. It put more money in Wiz during every subsequent funding round. Let's hear it for the folks at Index. They built up a 13% stake in total. Index has turned its 240 million dollar investment into 4.3 billion. You love to see it, folks.

So Bryce over at Indie, Bryce Roberts, front of the show. Taller than you, I believe.

I don't think so.

Really?

I don't think so.

Sit up next to him. But nice try. And yeah, he broke down. The challenge here is how many they need. They just need so many. This is. This is the biggest software m and A transaction in history.

Yes.

That's crazy.

And we'd been on a dry spell since the WhatsApp acquisition for a decade.

That was like 25 billion. 30.

I think it was like 16, but yeah.

Oh, wow. Okay.

So this is crazy.

So Figma would have been the next biggest.

Figma would have been the next.

And the crazy thing is is Index or Insight needs like 10 of these to have a 5x fund. Yeah.

Because it's a. It's an $8 billion fund that they're investing out of. Although was that the case for this particular seed fund? Because their seed fund, it might be a different vehicle.

Yeah. But either way, huge win.

They made a lot of money. But yeah, we talked about this with Harry. It's possible that, like, they still got to do more work. Can't retire to the slopes just yet. Index, keep it grinding. Find five to six more whizzes. Come on.

Yeah. And I'm excited to ask Sean about.

Yeah. Because Sequoia was also big in Wiz.

Yeah.

Yep. Success stories such as these were once dime a dozen during the go go years of Silicon Valley, when massive startup exits dominated the headlines and made being a venture capitalist one of the hottest jobs in finance. These days, the IPO market is dreary. Prized startups such as Stripe and SpaceX have chosen to stay private for over a decade, putting their investors in a perpetual holding pattern as they await a chance to cash out. Doesn't really matter from a fund performance perspective for most LPs, they're happy to hold on to Stripe and SpaceX shares at a high, at a high mark. They don't really mind that, but. But still, it's an important factor in terms of getting cash out of these things. That's right. Regulators, meanwhile, have become more cautious about blessing acquisitions. Google's Wiz deal still needs regulatory approval from the Trump administration. We talked to Joe Weisenthal about the new head of the ftc, the new Lina Khan, and it seems like they will probably be more friendly to M.

And Mizdale gets blocked ventures.

Yeah, it will be very, very.

It's all over.

It's so over if that gets blocked. But, but this is a weird one because it's not. It'd be very hard to make a an argument about a monopoly in the cybersecurity cloud market. Obviously we've talked about how Google is third in cloud. They're not even first when you look at Adobe and Figma. Adobe is the number one creative suite of apps.

And so it's not like Wiz is going to be competing with Google's core business.

Yeah, exactly. It's not really consolidating the search market. I'm sure Amazon and Azure both have cybersecurity products that compete directly with Wiz especially, and so it would be harder to make the argument. At least I think it would be. We'll see what happens. The review process itself could take years to conclude, so don't buy those vacation homes just yet. If the Wiz deal proceeds, investors hope it will pave the way for similar startup exits in the future. Getting the call When Shah received Asaf Rappaport's call, the entrepreneur and his three co founders hadn't yet settled on a name or a specific plan for the start startup. Beyond wanting to go big in the fast growing world of cybersecurity. The how and what Shah said was still waiting to be discovered in his head. Shaw called the startup Asafco, a testament to his conviction in Rapaport, the founder. It was completely unexpected. It was. It was completely expected and unexpected at the same time because I had been waiting, shaw said of the 2020 call. Shaw's hunch about Rapaport, a dog lover and veteran, which we talked about. They have dogs at the office. And I believe their dog is the chief dog officer or something like that. And a veteran of the Israel's Israeli army's elite cybersecurity unit dated back to 2014, when Shah backed Rapaport's first startup called Adalom. It was later sold to Microsoft for a disappointing 320 million. But. But I love the Wall Street Journal. But Shah felt he had spotted an entrepreneur of rare talent. After the call. Yeah, I mean when someone's sold 320, they're in a position where they've gotten tons of experience, they've known how to run the full playbook, probably hired a great team, can build a team very quickly and they probably want to go bigger, maybe two orders of magnitude bigger, which is exactly what they did. And they exited for 320 million. The first one, 32 billion. The next one, it's exactly 100 times as big.

Wow.

You love to see ambition like that.

Love to see it. Should we talk briefly about the One X and Nvidia?

Sure, yeah.

They're doing a research collaboration. You see the. The. You pull the picture.

All I saw was the picture of the robot holding a jacket, but I thought it was cool.

I mean, insane aesthetics. It almost feels like out of sort of Yeezy Easy inspired to some degree.

Yeah, we're getting somewhere with this. Where it doesn't look uncanny Valley creepily human. It looks more friendly. It doesn't look terrifying. It's not as scary as some of the Purely Terminator.

It would still be weird to have this thing walking around your house while.

You'Re sleeping, but I could get used to it. This is. This is the friendliest looking humanoid I've seen so far, I think.

Yep.

But I like it.

So anyways. Developing AI for humanoid robots involves tackling many open research challenges in safety, dexterity, visual understanding and much more. It helps to compare notes with other labs tackling similar challenges in order to accelerate progress towards a future future of NEOs doing all the tasks needed to keep your home in order autonomously. To that end. I like One X's focus on the home. Obviously going to matter a lot to just like pick it.

Focusing on the home is just critical. I like One X's focusing the home. I like wanders focus on the home. I could imagine having a wander with a One X in it.

We got Sean McGuire himself.

What's up, team? I didn't wear a counter strike T shirt this day. I let you down. Sorry.

You're still looking good. It's great.

And not whoever that lady that anyone that comments on your hair is just jealous. Yeah, you guys are very good looking men.

Everyone, everyone on the call has, has good hair. But I mean it's been, it's been a rough week. Sequoia is only making like a few billion dollars these days off of these acquisitions. What are you going to do to turn it around after the Wiz acquisition kind of fell so short of expectations.

Yeah, you know it's been a tough one. Five years after investment to pretty mega outcome.

What are you going to do?

Congratulations breakdown. I'd love to hear the quick highlights of meeting the team and how that investment came together and then what you think from your view, how they were able because we talked about this yesterday, the winner team, the reason they were able to get such a tremendous price or one of I'm sure multiple is because they just were growing so quickly and getting so much traction that they didn't need to sell. So it's, you know they had infinite optionality. But how do you think they pulled this off?

So on the team, I mean Gilly Renan and my partner Doug Leone get all the credit. They are both absolute legends. So the backstory there is, is you know Sequoia used to have Sequoia Israel. Gilly was one of the three partners there. Gilly's an insanely talented guy and he started his own fund called Cyber Starts which we seeded and early on meaning like Sequoia invested in his fund which we don't do very often. And Gili called up Doug said I have the next one and, and you know it was ASAF and the team. Doug pulled like four of us into a rapid fire meeting. I was in that first meeting and I mean to be very honest, the learning I personally got from watching Doug operate here and like get getting to see like a phone call from Gilly of I've got the next one with these crack team to multibillion dollar gain five years later. It's really hard to explain how much learning goes into that but I think there is a lot of really interesting stuff from the beginning here. And so this is my recollection. Different people have different recollections but basically Doug got the call, set up the meeting. Four of us joined from Sequoia. The, the team had. It was obvious how insanely good the team was. They had sold their last company to Microsoft and they're basically running cloud security there and they had a very strong point of view on what the problem was. The problem was cloud security. No one had solved cloud security. They had an extreme articulation around the problem but they didn't really know how they were going to solve that problem at the time time. And so they had a really clear insight into the wedge into the market which was mapping that basically people don't even know what assets they have in their cloud environments. And so the first thing they're going to do is they'd figured out how to map people's assets kind of outside in so you can tell a customer in a first meeting this is everything you own and therefore these are vulnerabilities. But the original idea of how to solve the problem after the that wedge in was basically a networking solution like a zero trust networking solution. And so it's. I wouldn't say it was a pivot because they had identified the problem they wanted to solve but the actual solution changed dramatically in the first few months. And so people talk about market versus team. This was a market and team. But I think it's interesting how the idea changed so much in the first few months.

And I think but digging in a little bit more. You guys made the first investment. Was it 2020 or.

Yeah, it was. It was called January February 2020.

Okay. In 2020 was the average venture capitalist believing that no one had solved cloud security? Or is that something that you had to really be in it running it at Microsoft to realize that it wasn't problem? Because you know, I think the market was reacting to the news saying wait, is Google not. Did they not have a coherent like cloud.

They didn't think about security at Google like this. That's why they did this deal. What was going on before?

But yeah, was it? Was it?

Yes, really good question. And it's funny, I mean I personally have like an extreme background in this space.

Sure.

I had started a company called Expanse originally Kadium a long time ago. Started in 2012 and to be very candid like we were a precursor company to Wiz basically directly and we started off in an on prem era and so doing like the mapping of on prem networks from the outside in. And like our primary value propper like our sales wedges we would show up and we already knew people's networks and their vulnerabilities when we would show up. And so like I personally had a prepared mind but I think very there was this extreme skepticism of the cloud has been around for 15 years.

Why.

Now? Why is cloud security not solved? But I think to anyone that was a practitioner it was clear it was not solved at all. And I think the lesson is that the way I think about it, the cloud penetration was still very very low. And call it 2015. If you look at total percent of compute in Fortune 500 companies, I don't know what it was in 2015 but it's probably like 5% or 7% or something. That'd be my guess. And by the time you got to 2020 it was a much bigger fraction. And so it's like I think we had just flipped where customers and buyers in their heads. If only 5% of your your network is cloud, you care more about securing the on prem than the cloud. And if you're second class that is in like it just doesn't really get done. By 2020 Cloud was like the first class citizen. It was by far the most important thing to secure. And no one had everyone before had had us including my own company. Like we started with an on prem solution then we started to bolt on a cloud solution and our cloud solution wasn't very good because. Because that's not what we started. And so to come in and only do cloud that lets you have a way better product experience for the cloud. And they just, they entered the market when it was you know, call it maybe not in terms of total compute but 40, 50% of the mind share in an org had become cloud and then they were able to grow with that as it went from there. And so it's just that something can happen like the cloud can get created but it may not be the right time to build the cloud security business for another 15 years. You have to wait for maturity of the market and all that. And I think they just timed the maturity perfectly. And then the last thing is you need to solve this from the outside in. Microsoft can't solve this themselves. You have to have a solution that is looking at all clouds and looking at the entire industry because people are multi cloud, they work with multiple vendors and like I think that this has to be. You have to have wiz very much came with the right approach for that time.

That makes sense. Can you talk about Kela got announced a few days ago, I think five days ago. Very high profile round. I heard about it I think last year at this point. So they're probably already getting know preempted on on the next one. But talk about the team there. How quickly did you know that you wanted to to back them?

I mean basically we're killing it, killing it in Israel or maybe it's the wrong language.

We're.

We're investing very well in Israel anyways. So Kela, my partner David Khan led the investment and I'm his wingman there. Kell is another amazing team. We have known kind of one of the two primary co founders Alonzor for quite a long time. He was an absolute legend. One of the things we've been doing in Israel is. And actually let me make a bigger point about Israel. One of the things that I think is very unique about Israel right now compared to most other places. It's much easier to concentrate talent, talent in Israel than it is as like a Stanford spin out. Let me unpack that. Like if you go back in time, basically every, every great company I can think of in the past has done a phenomenal job concentrating talent. You know, if you think about Palantir, they got all the best people out of Stanford in a few year range. If you think about Google like they got all the best people, you know, 10 years prior and, and after the dot com crash they went and Aqua hired a bunch of the best teams. They brought in Jeff Dean and they scooped up a bunch of the best talent. After the dot com crash, if you think about PayPal, obviously the PayPal mafia, they had concentrated insane amounts of talent. SpaceX in the early days, anyone in the world that wanted to work on rockets, there was only one place to go and they went to SpaceX. The best companies, companies concentrate insane amounts of talent early on for a bunch of reasons. I think it's become much harder to concentrate talent spinning out of Stanford or Harvard or wherever than it used to be. To be very blunt, one is these universities, they basically lost meritocracy and they lost. There's great inflation. You don't even know where you stand relative to other kids. Harvard last year implemented their first ever remedial math because there are people coming in that don't know algebra because they drop the admission standards. It's the truth. It's crazy. They drop the admission standards so much and so the people coming in are no longer as good and then there's great inflation. So you don't even know who the absolute most cracked people are. If you go back to call it the 80s, 80s and onwards. For a while Harvard had this insane math class called Math55. Math55 was legendary in the math community. It's like probably 50% of the people that even finished the class went on to be math professors. It was something that you would basically learn a whole undergraduate math curriculum in one year so you could just do graduate classes and research after.

Is that, is that class like YC where if you enter into it you're kind of doing it for 12 hours a day type of thing. Is it that intense or is it.

It's the only thing you do when you're at Harvard, like if you're in that year. Bill gates actually did math 55 and so did a bunch of the other kind of Microsoft founders. The fact that they did math 55 and survived as computer oriented people rather than pure math people, and that they went and started a business, that calling card let them recruit anyone from Harvard, anyone they wanted would go work for them just because people knew how smart they were because of math55. It's like these things are actually very important as signals to other smart people that this person's on a level above me. And so therefore I should lower my ego. I was not able to finish math 55. Some hypothetical person tries math 55, gets absolutely smoked, weeded out in the first week and then Bill Gates crushes it and so they want to go work for him. We don't have that as much anymore at Stanford and Harvard, et cetera. There also just weren't as many companies getting formed back then. And so, so, you know, the ones that actually did get form, you know, I'm. I graduated college 2007. Facebook was the hottest company in the world kind of when I was an undergrad. And at the time, I think Zuck is probably two years older than me. There were basically no startups coming out of Harvard at the time. And so like everyone that was good that would consider a startup or was technically brilliant, like they would just go recruit them, them. Now there's like 50. And so the talent gets spread across all of them. In Israel, there is still this insane concentration of talent. And it comes from, this is my weave, this is my Trump weave coming on. There's this insane concentration of talent that comes from the fact that because everyone goes into the army, there's extremely rigorous selection of people for the army.

Me.

And call it from an intellectual standpoint, there's like 60 slots for the most prestigious best things and there's extremely rigorous vetting to get those slots. And so the people that go do that are already kind of selected on a totally different level than most other people. And then out of those 60 people, one or two will emerge as like the apex alpha. The men or women that just do insane work and are geniuses and everyone else wants to follow. And so when they come out of the army, they are really able to concentrate talent in a way that is basically impossible if all you've done is gone. To a school that has, if you've gone to a school that has pass fail grades and and your admissions like process is basically non meritocratic and like an essay and so anyways like with Keller, I mean if you go back to Wiz, the Wiz founding team were absolute legends, like psycho level legends in Israel and therefore able to concentrate insane talent. In the first couple months of the company, like basically day one they hired 20 people that were ultra elite. And it's just like when you're that good and everyone knows it, you can bring in these incredible people from day one. And Kala is of this mold as well. A lot of people know what VCs are now learning, what Talpiot is. Talpiot is kind of one of the most elite horses in Israel. It's people that have extreme aptitude in mathematics, 15 physics and leadership ability. And so three of the four Wiz co founders were Talpiot Alonjor, one of the Kello founders was also Talpiot. And so there's the Talpiot mafia and he's especially highly regarded there. And so anyways they've done an incredible job concentrating talent and alone alone teamed up with this woman, Hamutal Meridor, who complemented him perfectly. She'd been at Palantir for a long time and just really obviously when you're working, when you're a defense tech company, you need two things. You need to build great technology, but you also need to be able to sell it and you need to understand government sales, government procurement. And Alon is a genius at building great technology and Hamutal is a genius at, you know, selling it and navigating government relationships. And for researchers, I think both Palantir and Androll did this unbelievably well. They kind of established this playbook.

Well, related to that, what is it, what is your take on the latest continuing resolution? It seems like there's not this massive increase to the defense budget that some, you know, defense tech startups were hoping for. Maybe there's money that's going to shift around. But what is your advice to maybe young defense tech founders that are hunting for that first program of record looking for some, some government money in the new era.

It's so crazy that we're having this conversation like the, if you would have told me 10 years ago that someone's going to say in like a live podcast, what do you say the young bar that's hunting for a program of record like that language, you know, this was like you, you are an alien 10 years ago.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Look, I would say to the young founder that's hunting for program of record, only one or two of you a year are going to do that and it's going to be of new companies and it's really hard. And it takes both having great tech and great government BD and so don't underinvest it in either of those.

Yeah, it's interesting. It used to be extremely difficult to raise venture capital. Now it's seemingly very easy to raise venture capital. The hard part is to in this category.

And I want to hear your take on dual use. There's a theory that we were kicking around yesterday talking about, well, maybe you're better off if you're a dual use company. We talked to a satellite company, Albedo. Obviously they do imaging of the earth at 10cm scale still that has military applications, but that also has commercial applications. So if the DoD money doesn't come quickly enough, maybe they go sell it to hedge funds and oil and gas companies. Do you think there'll be a shift in VC or defense tech? VC towards. I want a little bit more of a dual use story earlier just to hedge against defense budgets.

So it's kind of crazy that you're asking me these things. Things because the company I started was a cyber security company that was basically a worse precursor to Wiz.

Sure.

Where it was dual use. And you know, about two thirds of our revenue is from the US government and one third was enterprise. And so it's like it's these maximum two sets of overlap of the threads you're asking. I think, I mean, look, with our company everyone told us you cannot be gov only it has to be dual use. That's what every investor told us, every expert. And so therefore we did it because we wouldn't have been able to raise money otherwise. But I think dual use is kind of a mirage. It can be great. But I think you have to. I think we're entering an era where investors are okay with just government sale companies, single use. And I think you just have to do what's best for your company and what's best in any given moment. If it's natural for your company to be dual use because the product is basically the same in both, you know, enterprise and gov, then do that. But if it's, if it's going to like really cost you on one side to do the other, then I would just not, not do it early on. And like with Palantir, I don't know, I was never in the building At Palantir. I don't know the story that well, but my kind of, my understanding was that early on they had way more pull with the government than with Enterprise, but they tried to do both. I think with Foundry there were different points in time where they had way more poll with the government than with Enterprise. In times where they had more pull with Enterprise Enterprise than with government. But I think there was pressure on them to always be doing both. And I would just say lean into wherever you're getting a lot of pull right now, but don't close the door on the other.

Yeah, it depends on the product. Like I mean obviously Microsoft Teams is ITAR compliant, right? Like is it a dual use technology? Yes, I guess. But then Windows XC4 on it or.

Like Windows 95 is which everyone's are still certified to run, you know, none of it. At least when I was in the duty, like the most current operating system was from the 90s.

Yeah, crazy. There was allegations in a lawsuit of corporate espionage earlier this week. I don't need you to or want you to comment on that incident, but do you think that corporate espionage is a sort of potentially broader issue in Silicon Valley? Something that needs to be taken more seriously, or is this just sort of like a one off sort of, sort of crisis?

Oh man. Well, I think that Elon was right when he said the most entertaining outcome is the most likely. That's just been true at every level. It's like second law of thermodynamics. Look, I don't have a super strong point of view on this, but I'll just say I think that nation state espionage in Silicon Valley has been much, much, much bigger scale than people have understood for at least the last decade and probably beyond that. And you know, Delian, yesterday, whenever I think he's right, like if you're, like if, if you're a hardware company, just go try to compete on the merits of the hardware and obviously do what you can to protect your ip, IP and data assets and everything. But, but like at the end of the day in hardware you're going to win on the merits of the product. On the software side, I think you have to be a little bit more concerned. But it's just in hacking there's this expression you want to be a target of opportunity. Sorry, you want to be a target of choice, not a target of opportunity. Meaning like if some nation state says we are going to hack this company, like they can hack anyone, but you don't want to be like the slow pack animal that's just like the target of opportunity, the slowest gazelle taken down.

By the North Koreans that are just stealing your crypto or something like that. The Everything app.

Well, yeah, I'd love to give you another victory lap on X because I think last time we came on it was rumored that there was this new announcement. But before that, could you talk about what's your sort of takeaway from the incident with the NASA astronauts? We're very happy to have them back here on Earth with the dolphins. But, you know, is there any learnings that you think, you know that, that you know, the space industry should be taking away from that broadly and you know, NASA in general?

So I might have mentioned this guy before, but one of my closest friends from Caltech, his name is Casey Hanmer. He's a brilliant guy guy, he's a prolific blogger, very smart guy. He has been saying for. He worked at JPL and he's been saying for many years that this is not what he's been saying. So I'm sorry, Casey, I'm making this more provocative than what you actually said. But he's basically said that NASA's been underestimating SpaceX and that it's in NASA's interest to, to kind of understand and anticipate just how fast the progress of SpaceX is. And what he actually said is that they're underestimating Starship and that Starship is going to really change what's possible in the future. And that NASA has been still designing missions with the constraints of 10, 20 years ago, which is when launch costs are in the limit, infinity, and there's very few slots per year than the economic rational thing is to spend close to infinite money making sure that your satellite works the first time because the launch cost dominates in the return math infinity divided by infinity or whatever. But if you have any large constant number divided by infinity is zero. So anyways, they've had this state of mind that that launch is precious. It's infinitely expensive. There's very little of it. I think NASA needs to get in the state of mind that launch is becoming abundant in the future it's going to be in the limit, going to zero, literally if you go 20 years from now. I think that Elon has said that the forecast for Starship are something like $20 a kilogram or something like that. And you get a hundred thousand basically used to be $100,000 a kilogram. And so we have to get in this mentality that SpaceX is not just Elon, SpaceX is an incredibly well run company that has a very diverse set of leadership and very robust team and that they are bringing insane capabilities to bear that that will deeply, deeply benefit NASA. And we need to intersect the future, not the present or the past.

I love it. Can you talk a little bit about, I mean we talked about the X funding last time, but I want to know about. X is clearly on the war path to becoming an everything app. We're basically running the entire show on X now. We have group DMs for how we organize the show and stuff. It's been a really robust platform for, for us. But I see that they're rolling out payments and all sorts of different features. There's always been this narrative that everything app can only happen in the East. It's America happened in China 10 years ago. Exactly. So can you lay us out? What are the hurdles? What are the milestones? What are the opportunities for X to become a really fully realized the vision?

Not my place to fully lay this out. I'll let you know. I'll let Elon do that. He's pretty good at setting vision on things. But I think people are going to be. Look, X has been underestimated the last few years and not by you guys. You guys are part of the small cohort of people that realize the 80s was a great decade and that America is the greatest country in the world and that X was the place to be the last few years. But a lot of the world's been underestimated and I'm very optimistic about where it's going the next few years. And I'll just say instead of saying the roadmap, I'll say the company has had to sense the take private. There's been a few years of fixing the foundation of the company and we're starting to enter the era where like the foundation is strong and they get to now like actually build on top of this new strong foundation. And so I think we're going to see it's like the progress has been below the ground the last two and a half years. It's about to go above the ground where we all see it.

Yeah, a lot of the, a lot of the products that got built or rolled out were just things that had kind of been on the shelf and maybe were like not really launched for whatever internal political reason reason. Elon kind of got all those out the door and I feel like the app's been working really well. The algorithm's been more satisfying than ever. I feel like I'm seeing really interesting content so I've been satisfied.

One more question. Do you think M and A is really, you know, is the Wiz acquisition. It still has to be approved from what I know. But is M and A, you know, really back on the menu? Do you feel like, you know, when you're talking to some of these later stage founders that are exploring, you know, thinking about the future and saying, does an IPO make sense? Does some type of strategic acquisition make sense? How are you thinking about this? Personally, I'm sure your general advice is just be a great company and grow really fast and you'll have a lot of optionality. But do you have a sort of a feeling about where things are going?

Not about Wiz at all. My general kind of M and A view is, is I think there's two things that people are looking for. They're looking for guidance that things will actually be approved. And it's not just in America. There's also like for most companies, European regulatory approvals. And that has been the bottleneck for quite a few M and A deals in the last few years. So I think it's like greater clarity on the global US and Europe, but everywhere kind of regulatory approvals. And the second, I think there's still like when I, when I talk to bankers or anyone, the last six weeks, there's a lot of macro uncertainty. Like people are very nervous about tariffs and very nervous about, you know, like doge and kind of of people don't want to go do a big M A transaction when the markets can change 20, 30%, you know, either way quickly because it just, you don't know exactly what you're underwriting.

This happened with Square and afterpay or whatever, they, they bought afterpay for like 20, $30 billion, some crazy number. And then Square was worth something like that, like a year later, you know.

Yeah, look, those are the two, those are the two things. I think if, if we get clarity, like favorable clarity on those two things, then I think M and A will rip. But it requires both.

Well, the new head of the ftc, Andrew Ferguson, is out doing podcasts. We'll have to have him on the show. Maybe you can. And we can put the screws to them and so say let's do some deals. Andrew.

He's not coming on after that comment anyways. Thanks for having me, boys.

Yeah, thanks for stopping.

Have a great, have a great weekend.

I just gotta say, you guys are crushing it. Keep going. Absolutely crushing it.

Thank you for being a part of it. Good man.

Bye.

Very cool.

It's Great. It's always difficult to get him in trouble with Sequoia Regulatory.

Yeah, that's the challenge of being an Aria.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we, we're. We're getting.

I think we should have a. We should have a. We should have a button.

A cone of silence.

We should have a button that we hit before. This is not financial advice.

It's not financial advice. And then we have to beep each other. Because I lean into it so often because I think I'm just asking, like, hey, do you think that Tesla's a cool car? And he's like, that's a public company. I can't talk about it. But. But still, lots of great insights and always a fun conversation with Sean. And speaking of Sean's. We're having another Sean on the show. Sean from Ridge? Is he in the temple?

Oh, no. We got Connor. Surprise. We got Connor. So for those that don't know you, I'm sure everybody already knows. So Connor and Sean are business partners and leaders over at the Ridge. Dear friends of mine, Connor, I wanted to have you on for a bunch of reasons. Cause I knew you were gonna dress for the occasion, dude.

Of course.

Looking sharp.

Showing some respect to tvpn.

Yeah, yeah, Respect.

Little fun fact, piece of lore for the fans in our first launch video. When you see us having dinner and drinking wine. Connor was at that dinner with us.

Yeah.

And he is pictured. He's the shoulder that you see us over.

Fantastic cameo.

Little cameo.

Early, early technology. Brother supporter for sure.

Sure.

Thank you. We appreciate it. And now you're on the show. Welcome.

It's great to have you on. I wanted to get a kind of a market update on how performance marketers are thinking about the various platforms and planning for the rest of the year. We've lived in a world, you're also a young adult, but our entire lives have just been. Every single year, ads get more expensive. So you kind of need to plan around that to some degree. But. But you're very plugged into the sort of E commerce space broadly. There's challenges in E. Comm on the sort of tariffs side, but there's sort of this, like sort of dual pressure. It's hard to get products, it's expensive to get products, it's expensive to sell them. Maybe I'd love just sort of like a high level, sort of like market update around how you're thinking about the different ad platforms and maybe we can get into, like, where you're finding an edge. Obviously. Don't give, you know, give away the stuff you're doing like nine months ago.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. No, perfect. So to take a quick, quick step back. Yeah. Ridge is a direct to consumer brand. As Jordi mentioned, the last 10 years it's gotten harder and harder every year. I think DTC acquisition has been like a war of attrition. Things get more expensive, you're reaching that new marginal buyer who's harder to acquire, more expensive. It is. It's been a difficult environment to scale. And as a DTC brand, regardless of kind of consumer sentiment meant, I think what we're facing right now, clearly what all the data is telling us is that not only are things getting more expensive, ad platforms are performing worse, there's restrictions on privacy, but I think people are spending less money. And when it comes to the business of selling minimalist wallets like I do that that's become increasingly difficult. So I've got two quick data points, one anecdotal but there's a great, there's a great service called DTC index.com and they have something called the, the direct to consumer confidence index. So it's like a stand in for CPI which has like, you know, they only take that snapshots of data sparingly throughout time. DTCCI is measuring the sentiment of consumers every single day. And on the 18th, so just a couple of days ago, consumer sentiment about the economy dropped to the lowest level since October 14th of last year. To paint the picture of how are people feeling about spending dollars today. The second point that I have is from our contact at Meta who described the current climate for B2C brands, at least the growth oriented ones as a quote unquote blood sunbath. So that's my, that's my quick, that's my quick performance update is that, that is what we're working with. But I can talk maybe what we're doing to, to, to work through that a little bit. If that was.

Yeah, that'd be great.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Amazing what is working right now. So actually with a little more doomer news and then I'll get into what's working consumer's tougher. That makes everybody's lives harder. On top of that I think there's, there's been changes within Meta that makes everybody's lives more difficult and people like to poo poo the, the importance of Meta. But it's like you know, there's that stat. It was like 40% of every VC dollar went into meta advertising. It's like 30% of all digital dollars spent something like that so when Meta is worse, it's harder for everyone. And right now we're at this point in time where it feels as if the Meta platform in and of itself is not doing what it used to do. They began kind of weighting outcomes differently. It's become more middle and bottom of funnel to say, you know, it's serving to warmer and warmer audiences and us as marketers or you know, growth people like we want to be driving incremental results. Meta is harder to get that done with, at least in the way that it has always been. So that gets to what has been working. We've basically had to completely change our strategy.

Real quick, Connor, why is Meta worse? Is, is it stuff that they sort of need to do or is it stuff that they did? And it was sort of the unintentional effect is that the ad product gets worse for advertisers. Like why is it happening? And are your contacts at Meta saying, hey, we know this is not great and we're actively trying to get back to where we were, or is it just get used to it. This is the new normal. Normal.

Totally. Yeah. No, some of the things are out of Meta's control. Like Meta's obviously gotten less efficient post iOS 14, which was when Tim Cook and Apple really put a lot of restrictions around what data did Meta have access to. At that point you went from, as an example, being able to optimize for a 28 day outcome. So if you're optimizing for a purchase that could happen over 28 days and meta could take, could attribute that, that purchase to itself. Now that's just a seven day purpose period, right? So now it's like a much smaller period. You have fewer or less ability to exclude the customers that you want. And Metis began waiting these click based outcomes. So all of those things together means Meta is only able to attribute orders to the platform on a shorter time frame. There's less exclusions and it's serving to people who have already seen your ads. If you're trying to introduce new people to your brand and actually generate awareness, generate intent and drive incremental orders, that's just a harder environment to do it within. And those are like, that's half things that are out of their control and then part of the things that I mentioned are within Meta's control and I think they are trying to address. So the answer to your question, Jordy, would be a combination of the two.

Yep, that makes sense.

Anyways, I have a question on AI ads, not AI generated ads, but actual Ads in LLM responses. Perplexity is starting to monetize by allowing advertisers to inject advertising advertisements into you. Ask Perplexity. What wallet should I buy? Boom Ridge Wallet. Ad people are proposing that OpenAI will do this as well in the Chat GPT app. Are you thinking about that? Will that be something that you're testing this year if you're not already?

Well, I will say. I just got off a phone call with the VP of growth at Ramp, George Bonacci. He wanted me to remind everyone that if you're looking to save time and money, go to ramp. Com.

There we go.

Thank you.

Yeah, but no, we were talking about. We weren't actually talking about paid ads in Perplexity. What we were talking about was SEO optimization within chat responses, which is not something we've done a lot of so far. It's one of the things, as a more established brand I think we immediately benefit from.

There's already Reddit.

We are.

We are you right, and so Reddit gets baked into all the LLMs and you already publish pop up.

Yeah, totally. So we. I don't think we have to focus on whatever you want to call that, like LLM, SEO optimization versus someone else who's less established. But I think over time, as people hatch on to that as a opportunity, then we'll have to pay more attention there. But I'd be more interested in it from a organic, A quote unquote organic perspective versus the paid ads on Perplexity.

Okay. Interesting. Interesting.

Yeah. Do you feel like the. The. The sort of E commerce industrial complex, like, needs another great ad channel right now? Like, it seems like throughout the history of selling products online, like, things have gotten a bit rough. And then, you know, we got Instagram or then we got Reels, or then we got, you know, TikTok or whatever. And it just seems like in order to like, keep the, you know, keep. Keep growing, there always needs to be that sort of next platform. And could that be LLMs? Like, right now, I don't see a lot of. From, from my lens, it's not commercially oriented searches happening on Chat GPT. People still discover products on places like Instagram, and then they ask ChatGPT, how do I make a good quesadilla? Maybe, but it's not like, there's not a lot of commercial intent there. But do you think. Do you see a world in which LLMs can be that now x, like, you know, 10x ad platform? Or do you just think it's a different.

Probably. I wouldn't say a 10x ad platform. I think the, the important distinction is like there are certain brands and industries that benefit from like these high intent channels. Right. You are looking for a mattress or you are looking for insurance. They're the ones where as people discover those products through LLMs, like that's probably a massive opportunity for them.

Them.

How many people on a daily basis are going to be searching for men's wallet in ChatGPT? I don't think is going to move the needle on our business. What has moved the needle are these like discovery channels which was like when Snapchat was introduced or a TikTok or whatever else is. How can we get out in front of millions of people and say hey, we've got a better wallet than you currently own. You know they're supposed to launch ads in meta's threads so we'll hold out hope. Maybe, Maybe that's the 10x ad platform.

There we go. You never know. There's always a bull market somewhere.

I love it. We had, we had Ken and Davison on from Icon. His company helps D2C companies like yourself build and scale out AI ads. Not fully ad generated a lot of repurposing content. Can you tell us a little bit about how AI is incorporated into the creative workflow? Who's actually doing this work on your team? It seems like it's probably still like a centaur model where there's a human working with an AI editor of some sort. But can you break down the creative workflow and how AI is impacting that right now?

Yeah. Awesome. And I'll start with, you know, from a performance perspective. I think one of the most important things we've been able to do is scale up our content creation so that those are like one in the same. We have two performance creative strategists on our team who went from manually concepting to writing briefs to sending out to creators, to receiving that content to editing it, to creating ads. We're trying to like truncate that all down via AI so you can imagine the further upstream parts of the creative process. The concepting the briefing is we're probably doing five, 10 times faster and probably more with more novelty than we were otherwise. Just because it's easier to ideate with something like we use Claude mostly. We found it to be very helpful in that sense. That's really benefited the ideating process and sped up that workflow quite a bit. I'm a big fan of Icon and Canon and they're a really cool example of once we've generated all of this content. How do you go 0 to 1 on some new concept? We have thousands of hours of content just laying around in Google Drive. How do we repurpose that and elongate the value of that icon's been cool in that because it is basically an AI video editor. We can say, hey, we want AI, a concept to appeal to 40 year old men in flyover states and it will put together a concept and kind of piece together and stitch together the content to do that.

Got it.

Do you have another one?

No. I was going to make a joke about asking Siri to buy me a wallet with high grade materials, lifetime Warranty and a 99 day risk free trial, but I don't think Apple Intelligence can do it yet. But maybe operator can. I don't know.

I had one more. How are you thinking about sort of activations and stunts and things like that? Ridge is out of scale. Once you're doing, you know, hundreds of millions of revenue, you can start to think about, oh, should we sponsor a NASCAR team? Should we, you know, do this? You have a big partnership with them.

A racehorse.

Yeah, he's thinking about getting a Bentley Continental GT Speed. And I thought you could wrap it with a Ridge wallet logo and make maybe help him with the payment on that as he commutes in.

Yeah, that'd be great. You can have, you know, It'll just be $3,000 a month.

Yes, exactly.

No, but how do you think about these sort of bigger stunt marketing and is it just brand marketing or do you historically just see like how do you think about attribution?

What we're kind of gearing up for right now from a stunt marketing perspective, each year we do a sweepstake. So last year we, we did a 24 karat gold plated Cybertruck that we gave away or up to. Yeah, so, so that's what we did last year. And I think each year we're just going to try to raise the stakes. That's kind of the name of the game. So what we're we're doing now is we're gearing up for that. Can't share too many details, but we'll have more cars, bigger activations that'll be live in August so everybody can look forward to it.

I feel like the last one, it went really far because I, I think I saw MKBHD do something with it. But then later like Doug demuro was auctioning it off and I saw, yeah, yeah. I was like, we're now like four steps away from the Ridge, guys. But I'm sorry. Still seeing Ridge on all of this stuff. Like, how did this happen? Was that kind of intentional that you talk to multiple influencers and you say, okay, you're going to have it for a day, you're going to have it for a week, you're going to. Was that the plan?

Yeah, no, totally. So it was, it was, that was a part of the plan. Some of it was serendipitous. So we had realized the year before, hey, if we can get the car in a YouTube creators video, things just perform like three times as well, which is like no real surprise. So the game last year was just like, yeah, how do we get coordinate getting one or both of these trucks in as many videos as possible. The serendipitous part was I had this, the cybertruck here in Salt Lake and Jerry rig everything, who has a very big tech channel, tweeted. He said, hey, does anybody in Salt Lake have a cybertruck that I can use for a project? And we were like, hey, we do. And that's how we got into his 24 karat gold plating video. So that kind of started it and then we got it in a Marques video. We had it all over the place. We made it in 2024 videos. Colin and Samir did, did an ad read in the truck, which was really cool. And then to top off the campaign, the winner selected the cash actually. So they didn't take either car. But we were able to auction off the 24 karat gold plated Cybertruck on Doug Demuro's cars and bids. So it was a very YouTube heavy campaign which was very fun.

Is it tricky running these sweepstakes? Because I think legally you have to be, you have to say no entry required. Anyone can just write in and then people can kind of like batch mail in a thousand entries. I remember hearing stories about someone at Caltech in the very early days of the original photocopier figured out that McDonald's monopoly didn't require any purchase, no purchase necessary. So they dropped off like thousands and thousands of pages of like, I would like to enter the contest. And they got like every single code back and then they changed their rules or something like that. But what do you think about in terms of like manipulation of these sweepstakes? Is that a risk at all or is it pretty standard these days? We use it.

We use a third party legal team who like run sweepstakes professionally. So I think we're relatively buttoned up. We have the, you have to Be able to mail in. You've got some free entries on the site. We are able to see some people trying to game it. We had this like, yeah, yeah. So we were able to take care of that, but otherwise it's very above board. We're not doing any like sort of McDonald's monopoly sort of schemes over here.

Yeah, yeah. You can get in trouble if you're, if you're running an unregistered lottery. You want to stay away from that, run a clean game.

Last question I have. Because you're talking about a bunch of these different creators you're working with. You guys have your MKBHD kind of like core partnership. I grew up at a time like following the surf industry where every surf apparel company had like, you know, their core ambassadors and they had other people on the team and then they had the people that were trying to of like, you know, you know, just more like development side. Is there a world in the future where Ridge has effectively you sponsor a ton of creators so you're just like spending money across all these different channels. But is there a world where Ridge has like a proper team of ambassadors that are just sort of rep, like in a more serious way, like representing Ridge within industries, helping with product development? Or is it the kind of thing that makes sense to do with like one tent pole kind of creator and then everyone else is just more commercial relationship?

Yeah, I think it's a combination of both. I mean, we went from kind of the spray and pray approach. We've sponsored thousands of creators and billions of views and now our goal is to just do deeper integrations with creators over longer periods of time. Marquez being like Marques being the flagship example of that. But I would love to assemble like an Avengers team around him of cool creators and celebrities.

It's very cool. We'll reach out if you're that creator. Creator.

Where can people find your podcasts?

Oh, marketing operators. You can find it anywhere. You listen to podcasts.

There you go.

Only, only weekly so that we're not putting out that much content but. But well monetized. You guys would appreciate that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You do have ads, which is great. We probably wouldn't have you on the show if you didn't have some ads.

Are you guys going to be sponsoring the all in Summit? I know you are. You been writing that back this year. That's the one place ad. So it's, it's a great place to be. But, but yeah, TBD still.

Tbd. Yeah. We got a sweet deal on it last year. If that comes about again, maybe.

Cool.

Okay.

Well, good luck.

Good luck. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for coming on, Connor.

Bye.

So what's an absolute dog?

An absolute dog. What's the. What's the word on Sean? Is he joining or should we move on to some timeline?

I mean, we can start some timeline and then when he's in the waiting room.

I like timeline.

He's coming in right now.

He's coming in hot. We got Sean Frank from the Ridge Wallet. Back to back. Ridge Wallet.

Guys, there he is.

Welcome to the show, Sean.

Look at that microphone. That thing is serious. Do you podcast?

Dude, I am so happy to be in the capital of capital, the fortress of finance. This is. This is my zen garden. I do podcasts. I just want to say I was listening before I jumped on that last guest you had. Does not work at Rich Wallet.

I've never failed in my life.

Never seen him before.

Just been LARPing. He's got the LinkedIn set up. He's got all the wallets, everyone.

He actually works for a rival wallet company and he's been selling secrets on the side.

Yeah, there's an alt. I mean, are you worried about buying at Ridge? No. Ridge has had so many knockoffs over the years and from all different parts of the world, there's an alternate reality where like 10 years ago, like, Sean and Connor, like, you know, have a blood feud and then like, Connor goes and works at one wallet company and Sean does the other. And then then like, they're just always like the same because they're like. You guys are like yin and yang in terms of, like, I think, like, being good, you know? But anyways, great to have you on the show, Sean. How's your week going?

I'm good, man.

Yeah.

Connor is my rippling. So I'm dealing this scenario and I'm going to steal all the secrets.

Okay, that's great.

The rippling to my deal we want to talk about. Yeah, I. I wanted to just have you guys both on to just get a high level read on what's happening in E commerce. It certainly hasn't been a easy start to the year with the tariffs. I mean, technology companies are in a pretty good spot if you're just selling SaaS worried less about the impacts of all these different sort of policy decisions. Talk to us about how the start of the year has gone. We had you on the show. You were one of our very first guests. But I feel like a lot of has transpired between then and now.

Totally, man. And I changed my Mic. So hopefully this sounds better for you guys.

Better, Dude.

I'm reading chat on the, on the right hand side. So I'm here to support. Dude. The biggest thing about tariffs is just the uncertainty and the rollout. So like we're friends with a lot of nine figure brands and everyone would like to bring stuff to America.

Right.

But that is a, that is a two to four year manufacturing timeline. Right. Ridge has been working on our US factory and our capacity for like two and a half years and I can currently make 20,000 units a month. Okay. I sell 50,000 units a month. Right. And in peak, I sell way, way, way more than that. So it is just I've not been able to keep up with demand and maybe in four years I could get there. But with all the whiplashing on tariffs, it's very hard to know what to do invest in. And what that leads to is just me hoarding capital right now. Like I'm not going to do distributions, I'm not going to hire anybody. And it's really this freeze because I don't know where the puck's going. Right. We had tariffs come in, tariffs come out, tariffs come in, tariffs come out. Section 321 was stopped and now it's back on. It's just very hard to make a decision when you don't know what's going to happen in two weeks.

What are you seeing? Situations with brands that have less of a, you know, that, that have less of a sort of fortress balance sheet where there's like actually, you know, like I imagine there's certain brands that are kind of running the calculus of like, are we even going to make it to Q4 with how this is going? What's kind of like the chatter in the industry.

Yeah. So there's been like five years of bullshit when it comes to D2C. Right. Like, you know, there was Covid, which was really good for some people, horrible for some people. Famously away sales dropped 90% because people stopped traveling. Right. And then you have tariffs. It's just the latest flavor in this. You know, there was iOS, iOS 14 issues and everything else.

What was credit cards going up. You know, it's going to hurt consumers.

Totally, dude. Yeah. I mean, you talk about credit cards. Bracks very famously was an E Commerce credit card provider and they shut down all the credit cards when Covid happened. So that's why I'm so glad you guys work with ramp the better of the credit card providers. No, so what we're seeing right now is a wave of shutdowns in smaller, sub $10 million brands.

Right.

Like, that's always been a trend, but it's really ramped up the past, like, three to. Yeah, probably the past three months since Trump got elected, because they just can't absorb tariff costs. Like, things. Things were on the water, right, to be brought into America. And then costs went up 25, 40% for these people. And when you add that in with everything that's happened, you know, iOS changes, advertising changes, consumer being softer, there's just a wave of bankruptcies and shutdowns happening. So. So if you haven't secured financing, if you don't have a solid balance sheet, it's just a really, really hard time to be trying to sell stuff on the Internet.

Talk about Solo brands. They're currently being priced at $12 million on 450 million of revenue. They're not profitable. I have to imagine this is a tariff thing. But we were trying to figure out what was going on, on with the company.

Have you tracked this at all? It's like, I. The. The numbers just don't make sense to me whatsoever.

Sean is like. Sean's got his finger on the buy button. He's like, I could just buy, like, the every. Every share.

Because they also own Chubby's. It's like a pretty popular men's fashion brand, too. And they're doing like, 100 million in sales over there, too.

So I know Solo so intimately. I know Spencer, the original founder. I know Bertram Capital, the private equity group. The bottom. I know Summit, the private equity group that bought them from the private equity group to take them public. They had a rollup strategy. They overpaid for some assets, and they've. They've depreciated all of them, except for two. So they have Solo, which makes the stoves, and they have Chubby's. And they used to not break out revenue. Last quarter was the last quarter, they actually broke their revenue out. And what you have is Chubby does roughly $100 million in sales and is EID a positive? And then you have Solo, which is a shrinking business, shrinking 25% year over year, losing, you know, $50 million or whatever. And the reason why the market cap so low is they have so much debt on that business. I think it's over. Over $250 million in debt for a shrinking business that loses money. So, you know, they will sell Chubbies that, like, when you break out the finances like that, that's. They're looking for someone to buy that asset to pay down some of this Debt and then they're, they're just to take private. It is just somebody will swoop in. Does it happen before or after bankruptcy? That's the whole challenge, right?

Yeah. You're not just going to pick that up for 12 million bucks. You're going to pick up $250 million of debt with it potentially. And that's a big, that, that's a big decision. You got to be ready to do something with that. Right. Refinance that or pay that down somehow, right? Yeah, yeah.

I mean, look, the obvious suitor is Yeti, but there's a bunch of outdoor roll ups. I mean, there's. It's one side that's somebody. It makes sense to own that asset, but it's just, it's a, it's really, really hard to be solo stuff right now.

That's rough.

Well, good luck to them is, do you believe there's potentially another ad platform on their horizons that will save the industry, swoop in and provide cheap ads that allow everybody to scale?

Just one more ad platform. Yeah, just one more.

Yeah. I mean, I mean we, you know, you guys have talked about this a bunch, right? Ridge benefited massively from the rise of just meta platforms and being able to buy cheap ads and scale very profitably. But what's your conviction level? Are LLMs gonna. LLM ad networks going to be a thing or are you short there?

Well, they will find a way to monetize, right? I mean, Google is the most profitable, best business on earth. $80 billion in, in revenue or whatever. It's all straight profit and it's all just people searching and then getting in the middle of that. So, you know, if you're chatgpt or perplexity, you could probably build an amazing, you know, sales business on top of that. But dude, this year Meta. Meta is working like last year, Meta did not work. And we are giving so much of our money to the big blue beast and we're spending more today than we spent in December. Right. It's just because I think they're taking AI seriously and they're really trying to bring AI across their ad like their ad networks, they do have threads. That's new ad space. Right. You know, Twitter is looking to highly monetize its ad space. I think their daily users are going up famously. There's Reddit, which has never been able to monetize. Well, the revenue per user is dog. So all we're hoping for is that AI helps people. People bring the power of the Facebook ads engine to more places. We think App Applovin did that in Q4, but just more ad space to be more higher powered. And unfortunately, if we're in a recessionary environment, the first thing that gets cut is marketing budgets. And then Ridgewald swoops in to buy those cheap CPMs. So podcasts crushing it right now. It makes so much sense. Why Ramp, Bezel, Wonder, Public.com ADCO, Quick8Sleep are sponsoring this podcast because podcast ads for us crushing right now.

Yeah, I love it.

What's your take on I need to redownload threads? I deleted it because I'm just so loyal to the Everything app. But do you, are you using it at all yourself? Do you think it, do you, do you think it will be like, if anybody could make the sort of like text heavy format, the sort of conversational format be have good ad units, it would be meta platform. Are you guys spending, like, can you spend on threads yet? Are you getting invited to spend on it soon?

So I don't use threads. I'm trying to spend less time on the Internet, dude. Trying to touch on that delicious sunshine. It's been hitting my face lately. But dude, never bet against Zuck. You give him, you give him Pixels, he will monetize them. So if he's got users, he's going to monetize it. The rumor is the threads ads are coming in Q4 of this year. And with that, they're also going to better monetize messaging and WhatsApp in general. So, you know, WhatsApp still has 100 million users in America. Like, if you're not logged in every day using it, a lot of people are and they do have, you know, just DMs and everything that hasn't been monetized. So Snapchat lost Messaging ads last Q4. Whatever Snapchat does, Meta will just scoop up and do it too. So we got up more ad units coming. Guys, are you long?

Are you long or short Apple ever doing an ad platform? You'd think that they sort of like handicapped the American online ad industry. It would have been nice if they had offered up like, you know, stick and a carrot at the same time. Is there any, you know, if Apple's entering this era of just like, you know, toll road operations, you know, squeezing margin everywhere, getting these sort of incremental rental fees. Do you see a world where they.

Do App Store ads?

Yeah, App Store is, but not much.

For direct to consumer companies, if I'm correct.

So my wife was interviewing for a role at Apple years ago and she, she, when you interview At Apple, they make you do these, like, presentations. And her presentation was the advertising opportunity at Apple. And they, you know, the executives there were very much like, we're never going to do that. Like, that is so, so against who we are. But then what we've seen in the past two years is that, no, they're actually totally. It'll be an ad exchange, right? So I don't think they'll actually monetize any of their ad space. They have the App Store, right? They have Apple TV. They have iMessage as a social network. I think we all spend way more time on imessage than anything else. They won't monetize it, but they will sell your data. And that was the whole iOS 14 breakdown, right? Is that. That Apple wanted to model. They wanted revenue from Facebook in exchange for that data, and Facebook said no, so they shut it down. So it. They will get a. They will get probably $40 billion in the next two years from just ad data exchange. I think that's traffic.

I'm curious.

AI Telemarketers, like, they have your phone number, so you pick up your iPhone, it's just ringing, and it's just an ad on the phone.

Hi, this is Sean Frank here. I was just calling to see if.

You wanted a Ridge wallet.

And it's just A.I. sean, last question. Are the. Are the various platforms treating you nicely enough? Are they taking you out to dinner as frequently as they should? Do you feel like you have. Do you. Do you feel like they're, you know, you're a huge customer for them and client.

Didn't Ramp send you like a huge, like, tombstone for how much advertising you've spent? Has, Has Meta sent you anything?

No, dude. I mean, I, I think I'm at, you know, over a quarter billion dollars in meta spend. So I'm wa. I'm waiting to get to a billion, and then maybe, maybe they'll give me, you know, maybe just a cameo from Mark Zuckerberg being like, hey, man, I appreciate all the work you're doing, but no, I did ramp. Ramp's a great partner. I got a little tombstone from him.

I love it.

You know, Snapchat is the. In terms of, like, understanding in client relations. I think they're best in class, dude. Evan Spiegel, super involved in the ad platform. I've, I've, I've had lunch and breakfast with him probably three or four different times. And he's, he's just like, how can we get these ads to work? That's all he cares about. So yeah dude. Love all of the network. Also Shopify is the best partner out there.

That's amazing. 11 Breaking News Story that I want to get your take on. Doordash and Klarna signed a deal where customers can choose to pay pay for food deliveries in interest free installments. There's a lot of chatter on the timeline about this. I know Ridge Wallet has Afterpay installed Shopify integration. What's your take on paying for your Chipotle burrito over several years?

Well, so the previous guest you had on a good friend of mine, Connor. We lived together and when these things rolled out, he was so bullish. He's like dude, I can smooth out out my my my burn. He's like everything should be financed interest free. Everything Take advantage of the the zer environment. Surprisingly, we see a large percentage of our purchases go through a firm. It's probably 15% of all purchases are running through a firm. So they, they do do serious revenue. There is needs from consumers and I think people. It's probably, it's probably more bearish for the credit card industry than anything else. Like, like alternative merchant provided financing, eating high interest rate credit cards cards. Who pays for it in that transaction? A firm takes a higher payment processing rate than Visa does. So like that's how they're actually funding this whole exercise. Do I think people should, should be putting Chipotle burritos on layaway? I do not think that's a good purchase. So that makes me very, very scared. And the memes have been for me.

It'S such a contradiction because like leverage is awesome and then burritos are awesome. So like you would think you're putting them together would, would be, you know, this sort of 10x experience. But it feels very dark.

What about like conversion rate effects for Ridge, when you rolled that, do you remember when you rolled that out, was there actually a lift in, in conversion or revenue that you could see or is it just something you kind of feel builds like a better customer experience over time when you roll out something like afterpay.

So the reason why we did it is because, you know, at one point, not that long ago, 2020, 2021, E Commerce was the hottest industry. Everyone was rushing into it the glory days. All of those providers would pay you money to actually add it to the website. So I think it was either Klarna or Affirm gave us $50,000 to have it as an option on there.

And also, I mean Ridge's product portfolio has grown a lot. Like you could easily wind up Checking out with a whole Christmas gifts of luggage and wallets for a lot of people wind up in the several thousands. And at that point, point, you know. Yeah, doing some makes a lot of sense.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if, you know, everyone listening is probably billionaires, you know, multi billionaires. But if you need to get gifts for your staff, rich.com Sean, use code Sean for 10% off. There you go, guys.

Sean, I love you. Good luck in the trenches and hopefully there's not news in the next week that is so dramatic that it requires us to call our e commerce correspondent. But if there is, expect a call.

You know what? I would like to go on your guys payroll as the e commerce correspondent. I'll get a whole outfit and I'll just, I'll be out there in the warehouses telling you what's going down. So I appreciate you guys.

Goodbye.

Well, I don't know about payroll. I mean, we're trying to be the most profitable podcast here, but we'd love to have you on.

Yeah, we'll do it if you quit. We'll do it if you quit your show. If we can acquire, if we can acquire your show, we can work out a deal. You know, don't have to do. All you got to do is turn on. All you got to do is turn on Zoom.

Yeah, there you go.

I was, I was going to pay you guys.

Oh, okay.

Now there we go. Yeah, this is the Klarna firm strategy.

Yeah, you can pay over time.

Great to see you, Sean.

Good to see you. Bye.

Our, our new studio, if it goes where we think it's going to go, will be much closer to Sean.

Oh, fantastic. Just pop by, pop by. That'd be great. Well, should we finish up with some timeline, wrap it up and get out of here because we actually got to see some new studios in 20 minutes and I think they're about 40 minutes away. So we are fully screwed.

Fantastic.

Anyway, there's some new poly market. Very exciting. Will Jesus Christ return this year? What do you think, jordi? It's a 3% chance. Are you long? Are you short on the return of Jesus Christ?

I don't feel ready to make a bet. Although I would like to talk to, to the 3% that are going long and just try to see if we could get some insights.

Yeah, I bet the comments you said.

We don't talk about politics, but we never said religion. We wouldn't talk about religion.

Fantastic. Anyway, let's move on to LinkedIn has discovered loot boxes. Kevin Kwok shares that jobs are being recommended that are just from stealth startups. So you apply to the company and there's two, there's two jobs that look identical as chief operating officer at a stealth startup and chief operating officer at another stealth startup. And so you click, you apply. You might wind up at the next Decacorn. You might wind up at something that's bankrupt in six months. But it's a lot of fun.

Speaking of unknown stealth startups, I have a portfolio company, Stealth Robotics Company.

Is that the name of the company? Stealth Robotics, because that's a good idea.

That'd be a good name.

I mean, why not?

It's not.

They're coming out of stealth.

They're going to be coming out of stealth later this year. But they are absolutely ripping and in a very interesting category. And that's really all I can say. But they're hiring for a ton of different engineering roles. And if you are in the market to join a robotics company or you want to learn more DME on X, I will connect you to the team.

Well, we got some quick hits because there is more news that I want to make sure we cover because we'll be going deeper on these stories next week. First off, we didn't get a chance to talk to Sean about this, but Sequoia, Sequoia Capital has stepped in and backed Elon Musk in his Delaware battle. A comment from Sequoia Rare they say Delaware law should not subject founders to heightened scrutiny for being an asset and benefiting to all and benefit to all stockholders. And so if you haven't left already, leave Delaware. Is the, is the, the, the comment from the account leave Delaware. And so I want to get, I want to go deeper here. I want to know exactly what it takes to leave Delaware. How many companies are actually moving, where they're moving to the Texas Stock Exchange. All these different things that are going on, isn't it? I want to know what's going on.

Something crazy. Like half of Delaware's like, tax receipts are from.

I think it's more than half. I think they, I think the state makes like all of their money.

So I want to see. And didn't this. I'm pretty sure that the governor was like going on television and kind of mocking. So anyways, they gotta really turn this around unless they want to be relegated to obscurity. I always wanted to vacation in Delaware, the home of the C Corp. Oh, okay. Just because I just love business and I respect the, you know, if they're.

Going to have a hall of fame of business that's where it should be.

The biblical hall of Fame home. Yeah, yeah.

The, the ancestral home of the. Of the corporation.

The Business hall of Fame in Delaware.

We should build it. Let's go to shield monot he says exit mania is upon us. 2.6 billion dollar exit for next exit Radio Exit Mania coming soon. Like Wrestlemania.

Yeah, yeah. We gotta have SHIELD on to talk about Action Mania.

So Next Insurance. The rumor is that it was 8x revenue, 14 and a half half x 2024 gross profit. They got scooped up by Munich Re for 2.6 billion. Congrats to them. Little size gong moment for the folks over at Next Insurance. You love to see it. Lots of M and A stuff going on. Let's also move to more news about Apple. We've been talking about the Apple intelligence delay on repeat for the last few weeks. Well now they're getting sued. They're facing a false advertising lawsuit over Apple intelligence delay.

Yeah, you never know how much to read. This is a pretty wild ad. You never know how much to read into this kind of lawsuit because they'll. You can just sue anyone or anything for anything at any time. So this could just be a. Yeah, money.

I mean it could literally be like I don't know how Action settlement where everyone gets 75 cents. But it's bad press and you know Apple hates bad press. So they're shuffling executives around. We covered that yesterday. And I'm sure the folks at Apple are thinking about how to handle this crisis. They probably need to call Lulu who will be on the show on Monday. Anyway, Gary Tan. He says this is the golden age of building. He shares some news from CNBC. Why Combinator startups are the fastest growing, most profitable in fund history because of AI.

Do you think did CNBC get this scoop from us? Probably from us when Gary was on the show. We'd like our scoop.

Attribution required on everything we say. Although who knows if we will give you attribution when we cover you. We'll try. We'll try. We'll do our best.

Well, at least do a sponsor acknowledgement.

Yes, definitely. Definitely. Yeah. Who's advertising on this CNBC landing page? We'll, we'll shout them out anyway.

We got some great math by Christian Kyle.

This goes viral every time he posts it. It's insane. He just knows how to play the hits so well.

My three month old son is now twice as big as the day as when he was born. He's on track to weigh 7 1/2 trillion pounds by age 10. Great. And it's awesome that this is definitely, this is the first time his, his, his son has been on tvpn. But I'm sure he's going to be an absolute Chad Hard Tech founder someday. And we'll, we'll be interviewing him by the time he's, you know, at least a teenager.

So he posted this once on ax. It got a hundred thousand likes easily. He just posted it again, got another hundred thousand likes. It's made its way over to Reddit, got become the front page of Reddit over there. People love math jokes like this and exponentials. Very fun. What else, what else should we cover from the timeline? Saquon Barkley is in Anderal now. That's exciting. He says thank you to palm hit the gong for that and the entire Anduril team for having me out. Couldn't be prouder to be an investor. I see a lot of people wore Eagles gear at Anduril headquarters that day. That's a lot of fun.

Saquon, pull up the Founders Fund portfolio page and then just DM every single CEO. Because if you look at Founders Fund performance, Arfa Rock leaked it and he was quoting Harry Stebbings who earlier this month says, I've never seen such institutional demand for fund than the current demand for Founders Fund Growth fund. And the reason for that is they are putting up incredible numbers. And I will say this because John can't comment, can't comment, but I can comment. And this is the kind of performance that you're pleased when it's leaked. So inspiring to the whole community. Yeah. So Saquon, go hit up the FF portfolio. Get in however you can. We got a post from Jason Levin. We'll close it off here. Let's do it. Jason says when TechCrunch gets acquired by a PE firm to be chopped up.

For parts, this is a very creepy, deep fake. It's pretty good.

Is that.

There's a little bit of me in there.

Ant, is that.

It's from the Shining.

Oh, it's you.

It's me as Jack Nicholson in the Shining breaking through the wall with an axe because he's gone insane. I think that's the story of the Shining.

Well, yeah, we love private equity and.

We love, compare it on the, on the street.

We love private equity. We love when companies get bought by private equity.

Yeah, very pro.

Especially when they're potentially, you know, competing for attention.

And I mean, if you're the private equity firm that bought it, we have a genius idea to turn it around. We've said it before, turn it into a lifestyle magazine about skiing. That's how you get the capital allocators back on board.

And that's a great way to leave it. We should, we should have the new.

We should go skiing right now.

We should go skiing with the acquirer and break down the plan, the plan to turn. TechCrunch, thank you for tuning in today. It is a pleasure to do the show. We're pretty bummed. It's the weekend.

It's not normally 21 hours and we'll be back 21 hours and that's what I think. Just 21 hours. And now it's like almost 72 hours. 68 hours. 70 hours.

We'll just be brooding.

It's going to be rough but we'll get through it, folks. The timeline is always there. We'll still be posting, we'll be posting clips. Follow us on X, review us on Apple and Spotify and enjoy your weekend.

Thank you.

Thank you.