0:05
[Music] Hey, hey, hey.
Search this video
0:28
[Music] Overnight success. [Music] Triple glaze.
0:45
[Music] Hey, [Music] hey, hey.
1:13
[Music] All [Music] right.
1:35
[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] All right.
2:17
[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] We came to this world.
3:24
We came to this world to shape our future.
3:41
reach the stars to shape our future.
3:49
[Music] We came to feel the new If you wouldn't think.
4:16
Market clearing order inbound. [Music] music.
4:36
Let me [Applause] You're watching TVPN.
5:01
>> Today is Monday, September 29th, 2025.
5:04
We are live from the TBPN Ultradome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital.
5:11
>> A lot of people have been asking, was the TBPN Ultradome built by human beings?
5:14
It just looks like something that humans don't know how to build anymore. >> Civilization. >> It's possible. We haven't confirmed it. We're not commentating.
5:25
>> It just appeared here one day.
5:27
>> It's I'm just I'm I'm just asking questions.
5:30
Just want to dig into it a little bit further. >> Yep.
5:33
>> So, you know, that's why we have free speech.
5:35
>> A lot of people have been a afraid to ask that question. Yes.
5:36
And we're here saying with you, we also >> Yeah. We also have questions. >> It showed up one day.
5:42
We went we went off the air.
5:45
>> We showed up the next day.
5:45
There was this dome shape almost a monument >> to entertainment and capitalism just appeared overnight.
5:53
>> Where did this come from?
5:54
>> Where did that come from?
5:56
>> We're getting some claps from the team. >> Team is fired up. Best day of the week. Most day. com. >> True. >> Time is money. Say both. Easy to use.
6:05
Corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Uh most underrated day.
6:07
I think Monday is potentially the most underrated day of the week. >> It really is. You're fresh.
6:14
>> So much excitement, optimism. You're back.
6:16
You've never been more back than on a Monday. First day of the work.
6:20
>> Friday is the day of being over. It is so over. >> It's so Monday. We're so back. >> You're so back. Yes. It's perfect. Uh well uh continuing.
6:27
We're going to talk about Dores Cash on Sutton, some AI stuff, some other AI stuff, the AI meta AI app uh vibes.
6:34
Uh people the reaction I think this came out on Thursday and then the reaction happened on Friday for the most part.
6:43
We talked about it a bunch uh debated it nal said >> fired shots >> creation without a creator is meaningless and I think it's an interesting post because I kind of disagree with this.
6:54
So I think when I when I open up the Meta AI slop app the vibes app they should have called it sloth.
7:01
It would have been so funny.
7:01
It would have been >> it would have been >> or a trough >> trough would have been good too.
7:05
Just lean in all the way.
7:08
>> Our new feed called trough meta. >> It's already a feed. You're feeding you.
7:13
Um but uh so when I open the app and I scroll it, I I don't think it's uh it's creatorless.
7:19
Like I think that there is a creator. It's David Holes.
7:21
David Holes is the one that created the one creator. >> One creator.
7:25
And I'm down to look at it for like 10 15 minutes and then I'm like kind of done.
7:30
I didn't feel the urge to open it up over the weekend for any other reason than research and just understanding the platform a little bit more. Yeah.
7:39
I wanted to know if you got past the first like presscripted 15 shorts or I guess vibes is what they're calling them.
7:47
Um >> like would I see UGC? Would I see other stuff?
7:51
Would I see people in my network?
7:53
Like would the 4U algorithm have taken hold by then?
7:55
Um I didn't notice anything like that.
7:57
There were a couple accounts that were like, "This person's clearly into like monsters, so they do like really big monsters."
8:02
Or like, "This person does like POV dogs driving cars," which honestly was awesome.
8:06
And I think that >> Monkeys on jet skis, dogs driving cars. >> Dogs driving cars. Yeah.
8:11
Although some of the renders were really rough where it was like the dog was at the wheel, but then the front of the car was behind the dog.
8:18
So, it like didn't get it right, but it was still fun. And it was funny.
8:21
I noticed it was what what the one that I enjoyed the most was one of a golden retriever uh like jumping and chasing the camera with this wave going over it.
8:30
But what made it really special was that the song that was paired with that was who let the dogs out who let the dogs out.
8:39
And it made me realize that like there is a little bit of a game mechanic to the app where if you have a song that you like, you can now go and basically direct a short form music video for it.
8:51
And so if there's a song that you think is fun, you can go into the Meta Vibes app and start with the song in mind instead of layering the song at the end.
9:01
The the default flow is image prompt, animate it, then add a song. >> Yeah.
9:07
But I think that it might be more fun to flip it around and think about this as like I'm curating a playlist almost >> music visualizer.
9:15
>> Yeah, music visualizer >> which went incredibly hard when I was 10 years old. >> Exactly.
9:19
The win amp visualizer just to put that thing on or iTunes had one for a while.
9:24
Some of them were reactive to the music which is cool. That one was cool.
9:28
Uh and and I think that there's something there where uh I thought it was mostly I thought it was interesting that everyone is saying like this is a creation without a creator. This is pure AI.
9:38
Even even Meta is marketing this app as there's no there's nothing human about it.
9:43
It's just the AI content >> except the music. >> Except the music. There's no AI music.
9:48
It's all iconic licensed songs from like the most recognizable musicians in the world.
9:55
You can actually just go put a Taylor Swift song over something.
9:57
Um, which is crazy to think about from a music.
10:01
>> Can you generate music, too?
10:02
>> No, >> you can't generate music.
10:03
Of course, there are some songs that are AI generated that have like snuck into the Instagram library >> probably on Spotify >> because you can use any song from the Instagram music library. Yeah.
10:11
So, people will put stuff up there and then you can pull that in.
10:14
By and large, the flow is generate a midjourney image, animate it with Black Forest so that it has a little bit of motion, and then pick a real song from the real library.
10:26
>> Black Forest, which just announced a new fundra >> 4 billion. >> There we go. >> European company. >> There we go.
10:32
>> Um, >> let's give it up for the German artificial intelligence industry.
10:37
>> So, >> we got a comment in the chat said, "I like the table when it was messier."
10:40
We did we did go to a round table.
10:42
We cleaned it up a little bit.
10:44
I'm sure it'll get messier. >> Yeah, don't worry. >> So, don't worry.
10:47
We're working on >> the mess comes back over time.
10:49
We'll we'll >> It's relentless. Yes, >> it's relentless.
10:53
>> Um, so yeah, I mean I I'm still I'm still unclear about like will this be successful.
10:58
A lot of the takes on the timeline were presuming that it will have very low churn and be so good it's irresistible.
11:05
Like, it could just have high churn.
11:07
It could just be a product that no one likes and everyone tests it out and they're like, "Okay, I'm done with that."
11:12
And Meta is no stranger to launching flops.
11:16
>> Yeah, that's happened a number of times with Facebook trivia.
11:20
>> Yeah, they've had clones of a lot of things.
11:22
>> Even threads arguably probably wouldn't have worked if they couldn't have just continued to push people to the app and grow it steadily using the existing distribution they had.
11:31
Yeah, I think that, you know, if I if I'm trying to get serious about a take, I would probably land on they have the flywheel down, it works because you can already share vibes to Instagram to your story and whatnot.
11:44
And I feel like there's going to be a flow back and forth and they will get that to work and they will actually uh inject them back and forth and even if it lands as like a tab on Instagram, like it will be adopted.
11:53
But it just it was just funny that everyone was like this is there's 0% chance this doesn't work and it's like there there is risk to these things.
12:03
Uh anyway I I I thought it was interesting.
12:05
It made me think like I was listening to the David Senra interview with Daniel a >> one one interesting thing is if they had added all of the functionality and vibes the creation tools into Instagram it would have been even more controversial. I think so.
12:20
>> They would have had to deal like this is a an experiment that you know basically it's a it's a sandbox that they can do anything in. >> Low stakes.
12:27
They can get users using it.
12:29
They can get some feedback, get some information, test stuff out without saying we're launching this into Instagram which has >> millions of creators.
12:36
They're going to going to feel super strongly about it.
12:39
They might start saying they might start campaigning to like keep it let's keep AI off Instagram which they don't want.
12:45
>> This is keeping AI off.
12:45
content will, you know, I would I would assume, >> you know, it's only uh so long until every piece of content on Instagram has some AI element to it, whether it's just >> editing or enhancement or whatever. >> Yeah. Yeah.
13:00
So, uh, the the other the other interesting takeaway, I was talking to I was listening to David Senra interview Daniel Ek, the founder of CEO of Spotify, and I was almost thinking like, is this more of a Spotify competitor than a uh than an Instagram competitor? It's so music driven.
13:16
Should should Spotify have an answer to this?
13:21
Should they buy something similar?
13:21
or should they do a similar deal with Midjourney so that anyone who listens to a song can generate imagery and then the the most liked imagery can become kind of that cover art and you can have like your community.
13:32
You were kind of saying like that's not the way short form video works.
13:37
But I think with Spotify they also have the benefit of the best songs end up having music videos which are the artists interpretation of a visualization of the music. >> Yeah.
13:49
and it's gonna be >> Do you think that's the way it always works though?
13:53
I feel like sometimes they >> But they also Spotify has also done something where they basically take an asset from the artist that's not a music video.
14:01
It's like this it's like a gift effectively. >> Exactly.
14:04
>> And I think that's smart because I don't I don't think that people are primarily consuming music these days by, >> you know, setting up just I I remember being a kid and being entertained at a desktop Macintosh. Yeah.
14:16
just putting on the iTunes visualizer and just hanging out being being like this is awesome. Yeah.
14:22
>> But I don't I don't wa I if I'm putting on music I'm not like wanting to watch the music anymore as an adult. Right. >> Yeah.
14:30
I almost I I almost view the Vibes app right now for like as a music discovery tool.
14:34
Go and swipe a little bit, find some interesting songs, add those to a Spotify playlist, go listen to the real songs. >> Yeah.
14:40
The reason that that's not a hit consumer product is because people can just easily discover music in every other short form video feed, right?
14:48
>> Yeah, that's what you were saying.
14:49
>> That's our Tik Tok already function.
14:51
>> Tik Tok works that way discovery engine.
14:53
>> Anyway, uh well, if you want to live stream some music, get on reream one live stream 30 plus destinations, multiream, and reach your audience wherever they are.
15:01
Um, but the big news over the weekend was Dwaresh Patel dropped a banger of an episode with none other than Richard Sutton, the touring award winner who is essentially the Nobel Prize in artificial intelligence.
15:17
Um and the and the author of the bitter lesson the blog post that says that uh again and again in artificial intelligence um there is a there's an inclination for seeking out a new algorithm a new design a new architecture but in fact progress comes from scaled compute and so that was used to underwrite massive investments in uh data centers massive capex uh >> continued investments >> continued investments a lot of people.
15:45
I mean, uh, the Andre Horwitz partnership has has been throwing around we are better bit better bit better bit better bit better bit better bit better bit better bit better bit better bit better lessen pled a lot of people are bitter lesson pill uh that's certainly been a rallying cry for the AI capex buildout um but uh Mr.
16:00
bitter lesson now sounds exactly like Gary Marcus.
16:04
According to Gary Marcus, Gary says, of course, he's been a a long uh longtime LLM hater or LLM criticizer.
16:11
He says, "Astonishing, it's been a long hard unpleasant road, but one by one, every major figure in AI has come around to the critique that LLM's of LLMs that I began giving here in 2019. Yan Lun was first.
16:22
Demisibus sees it now, too.
16:25
Touring award winner Richard Sutton is now on board.
16:28
And Richard Sutton says, "You were never alone, Gary, though you were the first to bite the bullet, to fight the good fight, and to make the argument well again and again for the limitations of LLM.
16:39
I salute you for this good service."
16:41
And so I think that there's something interesting going on where we heard about like the infinity story, right?
16:47
This idea that there's a few firms that are working on AGI, super intelligence, God, uh, and if they achieve it, it's the last innovation, the final investment.
16:55
All future companies will be all future economic value will be birthed from the AI supercomputer.
17:01
You can finally hang up your Patagonia vest. You'll be done.
17:04
You'll retire as a capital allocator who got into the correct final deal.
17:06
Uh if you get a slice, uh if you're you'll be good.
17:11
Uh it was a little bit sloppy as deal logic.
17:14
Uh but it was directionally correct like if you LLMs were a useful technology.
17:18
uh there were compounding businesses to be built on top of them and investing in them even at unicorn valuations in 2013 pencils out pretty easily now.
17:26
But many in AI didn't like Sutton's take.
17:30
Uh my interpretation my interpretation of his claim is that biological systems don't learn purely through imitation whereas LLMs do.
17:36
His example was like >> if you think about a a bird that's learning to sing a bird song, um >> the the bird doesn't necessarily need to study the way that the mother bird moves the vocal cords.
17:53
It's more just listening to the song and trying to im imitate the output and then the internal >> running through its own actions. >> Exactly. Exactly.
18:02
And and now >> like when I take this thing and I put it in my mouth, I get sustenance. >> Yes. Right. Yes.
18:09
And so >> it's not just watching the mother bird do the same thing and just realize, hey, maybe I should do that thing. >> Yeah.
18:17
And so a lot of the a lot of the AI researchers are kind of like and and this is why the there was this discussion of like were Sutton and Dorcash like talking past each other because a lot of people in AI research tend to view the the internal structure of the neural network the training of the weights as exactly the same process.
18:37
you are just mimicking the output tokens and the internal logic like the muscle movements that create the bird song are learned the in the same like random way as the actual bird does.
18:49
And so there's continuing to be this debate over like are we on this on are we on the correct path?
18:55
But it kind of doesn't matter in the in the broad sense of the market because you can just put aside the super intelligence AGI question and just start underwriting the the companies as just normal businesses.
19:10
Uh tokens clearly have value.
19:12
Anyone who's used an LLM to answer a question understands this.
19:14
They also have a cost and if you balance those, you make a profit.
19:18
So we're back to econ 101.
19:20
And so in the real world, the question is like data center overbuild.
19:24
Uh the bitter lesson said just keep scaling compute and you will always see improved performance.
19:29
At least that's how it was interpreted.
19:30
Uh but exponential cost growth for linear gains doesn't always math out.
19:35
If someone says we're going to spend 10 times as much money training this next model and it's going to be 5% better.
19:42
It's like okay well maybe we don't need to do that one.
19:45
Like let there might be an if you look at the leaders of various hyperscalers they are not concerned about ROI.
19:53
They're concerned about winning. Yes. Yes.
19:54
Uh and so this like landed on Oracle's plate.
19:58
People were worrying about Oracle's 500% debt to equity ratio which search which surfaced from this JP Morgan note.
20:05
Uh now the interesting takeaway is like it's pretty clear the debt is on the horizon.
20:13
Microsoft has a lower cost of capital than the US government right now.
20:15
And so like the ability to borrow is extreme. >> Satia. >> Yeah. Yeah.
20:21
and and and people are just ready to in to buy debt in these projects.
20:26
Like that's just a thing that's going to happen.
20:28
Um but uh you can't overreact to this viral chart.
20:33
There's a like Oracle has a hundred billion in debt.
20:35
It's an $800 billion company and they produce 11 billion in cash flow last year.
20:39
And so the question is more about servicing of the debt than true book equity to debt ratios.
20:43
Um, McDonald's actually has negative shareholder equity because they've been doing so many buybacks that they bought back all the equity.
20:52
And so, uh, you can get really weird like divide by zero airs.
20:57
And I would expect that we start to see those, especially at Oracle if they >> Yeah.
21:00
And that's the thing with Oracle.
21:01
You know, Ellison just owns so much, >> you know, he's bought bought back so much of the company. >> Yes. Yes.
21:07
And so, um, I don't know that that chart is like the the red flag that people thought it was.
21:12
Uh Doug Olaflin had a good post about this.
21:15
He said, "The chart weirdly makes no sense and doesn't matter.
21:19
Time for the feed to relearn buyback math impacting book value."
21:23
Um and it is it is somewhat complicated.
21:26
So maybe that's econ 102.
21:28
Um but basically it feels like as we get closer to the efficient frontier of AI capex, risk does increase because you have that risk of doing the hundred billion dollar training run and only getting 5% gains.
21:38
Uh but ROIs become increasingly predictable as we move away from the infinity narrative.
21:43
Uh and even if there is an overbuild of infrastructure, there will be immense benefits to America broadly.
21:49
This is the real American dynamism story in my opinion.
21:53
Multi-billion dollar projects are moving through government approvals.
21:56
Massive structures are being built in America again.
21:57
And there's a real chance that we will see per capita energy increase.
22:01
What's your read on Satia pulling back on, you know, obviously he's scaling capex but not being as aggressive as some of the other players.
22:10
Do you think he's happy to let the industry overbuild and then come in later and say, I'll take that off you for, you know, pennies on the dollar or some some fraction of of what it actually costs to produce. >> I think so.
22:24
I mean that was certainly the lesson from the >> or or another another way to look at it is you know I I control a huge amount of the demand for tokens through the Microsoft Office suite. >> Yep.
22:37
>> In you know tokens in the workplace and >> I'll just come in and I'll just do deals once this infrastructure is built off my balance sheet and still get the benefit of it.
22:45
I would love to know how Satcha processed the dotcom boom because we always go back to that story of there was a massive overbuild of fiber.
22:55
Everyone thought that the internet was going to be this overnight revolution.
22:58
It took 20 years to really squeeze all the value out of it, right?
23:00
But um Google was a massive beneficiary of the overbuild in fiber because they they were able to go snap up a bunch of cheap fiber and build a massive consumer internet company on top of it.
23:14
So I I don't know exactly what what how did how did that impact Azure?
23:19
How did that impact Microsoft?
23:21
impact Microsoft? Because if Azure was able to build a a very serious player in a three-party igopoly in in cloud basically between AWS, GCP and Azure and so if Satcha is saying look in the future the there will be a consumer internet company that's open AAI we have
23:39
a stake in that and they're the new Google and then there will be cloud providers that are token factories and I'll need to get in that market and I'll need to make sure that Azure is monetizing those tokens effectively and Azure has data centers, they also lease data centers. We will adopt the same
23:54
We will adopt the same position, the same strategy.
23:55
And so, uh, we will skip on the overbuild, skip on the high-risisk stuff, but eventually buy in at prices that make sense.
24:02
You could be looking at it through a very financial lens.
24:05
But >> Satcha joined Microsoft in 1992.
24:06
So, he got to see the full cycle. Yep.
24:11
>> In this first decade at the company. >> Yeah.
24:13
And he was the I mean, he's remembered as like the architect of the cloud transition.
24:17
and Balmer was the one who like missed mobile and missed cloud.
24:23
But, you know, the company has done really well now.
24:25
So, maybe that was maybe maybe if the risk if it like what would a worse Balmer look like?
24:34
>> Well, it could have been someone who put the business like out of who like bankrupted the company by taking too much debt and going too long into the dot boom and getting overleveraged and really losing the company.
24:44
>> We should read this post by Anan.
24:47
He says, uh, quote, "This feels like 1999 again."
24:49
He goes, "No, it doesn't." And I was there.
24:52
Uh, I joined Cisco in January 2000 as a co-op, then full-time in May 2001.
24:57
At the time, Cisco was the hottest infer company on the planet, riding the wave of the dotcom boom.
25:02
But by the time I started full-time, the crash had already begun.
25:05
A month in, my manager was laid off. The party was over.
25:08
Entire industries vanished.
25:08
Here's what actually happened.
25:11
Uh, one, the users weren't ready.
25:12
Most people were on dialup. Mobile didn't exist.
25:14
E-commerce logistics were immature or non-existent.
25:19
Everyone had ideas but the end user wasn't there. Two, capital vanished. The IPO window shut.
25:23
Uh venture funding dried up.
25:26
Startups that depended on future growth couldn't raise and died fast. Uh metrics were fake.
25:30
Uh companies like Cosmo, Web Van, Pets.
25:33
com burned cash chasing usage that never converted. >> I was a web van user.
25:40
>> We see if some companies burning cash.
25:43
Yeah, I got I I got some groceries delivered, >> but uh back back with Web Van >> with Web Van. >> No way.
25:48
They were they were so right and just >> There was another company called Home Grosser that was more popular in Pasadena where I grew up and they got acquired by Web Van and I'm pretty sure the founders of of uh Home Grosser probably did very well because they probably got some crazy buyout.
26:03
Hopefully they didn't take too much stock.
26:05
>> Um >> things like LTV to CAC wasn't common enough vernacular. That's crazy.
26:10
>> Oh yeah, that was a new concept.
26:10
We we were in concept >> arithmetic >> uh four infra got overbuilt.
26:15
Telos like Global Crossing and Worldcom spent billions on fiber and data centers.
26:19
The demand never showed up.
26:20
Cisco's customers disappeared not because they lost but because their customers died.
26:25
Five business models were broken. Most.
26:27
coms were never real businesses.
26:29
They scaled early and hoped revenue would catch up. It didn't. Now look at today.
26:32
OpenAI, Meta, Google, XAI, Microsoft are all scrambling to keep up. Jensen put it plainly.
26:36
Every hyperscaler has realized they dramatically underbuilt.
26:41
Every forecast we've seen has been too low.
26:43
Uh we're not building for speculation.
26:46
We're building for active workloads. So no, this isn't 1999. This isn't pets. com IPOing on vibes.
26:53
We are not in a hype cycle.
26:53
We are in a compute bottleneck.
26:55
And this certainly I mean this feels real if you've used the apps like like there have been multiple times over the past few years where I've just had LLM queries fail even though I'm paying yeah hundreds of dollars.
27:10
And so like maybe the cact math is a little bit iffy because what's the margin?
27:17
Am I am I overusing it with the deep research recently >> during do people are like I just used web van to deliver groceries and it took 48 hours and all the food was rotten like how do I short this stock?
27:37
>> Yeah, that was happening in Wall Street memos I guess like Mary Mer reports basically.
27:42
Um, but yeah, I I think this uh so he's quoting the Spencer Hawkins uh chart of the of the AI bubble now versus the dot bubble.
27:50
And uh if you're apatheic and you and you like a pattern, you will love this chart.
27:55
Uh I think we have to commit ourselves to revisiting this exact chart a year from now and seeing how closely does it keep tracking because it could be wildly different in either direction, right?
28:09
Like that's >> why don't we just make a live tracker?
28:12
>> We shoulder Tyler's not in the studio today.
28:14
He uh had a travel but uh we should just make a live tracker of >> Yes.
28:20
of this chart and see follow how how are we actually tracking to this or are we are we diverging it?
28:26
>> There was another post that was going pretty viral.
28:29
>> Before we covered this, let me tell you about privy wallet infrastructure for every bank.
28:32
Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rail securely spin up white label wallets, sign transactions and integrate onchain infrastructure all through one simple API.
28:38
Uh what was the other post?
28:40
>> The other post uh is the uh from Stephen Furio.
28:45
Uh he went uh pretty viral.
28:45
2 million views yesterday.
28:49
He said, "The AI doesn't the AI bubble doesn't exist. The bears are wrong.
28:53
Time and time again, I've turned on a major financial news network, listened to a financial podcast, or seen a post on X indicating that we're in an AI bubble.
29:00
The rapid surge in AI related investments and some stock valuations have created a narrative that the current environment is similar to the dotcom crash of the early 2000s.
29:08
The main arguments I've seen are that the current euphoria outpaces real world results.
29:12
Valuations are detached from fundamentals. There's a lack of ROI.
29:16
Companies are hitting infrastructure and resource constraints and the escalating costs are creating unsustainable business models.
29:22
The bare narrative almost always leads back to the idea that AI stocks and startups are trading at premiums that resemble past bubbles and are being driven by FOMO rather than profitability.
29:32
It doesn't help that users on X are posting triple and quadrupled digit gains that are often hundreds of thousands or millions in profits from their actual accounts.
29:41
Some accounts on X are twisting the dagger deeper as they're posting gains from naked options or call spreads which have finance professionals screaming into thin air as some of the underlying equities are unprofitable and pre-revenue businesses.
29:52
remember there was that company Fermy that uh is going to IPO? Yep.
29:56
Uh they have a they have a a lease to a piece of land in Texas.
30:03
They they're planning to go out around $14 billion uh and they're about 9 months old.
30:08
So uh I think that uh it's very fair, you know, uh there can be uh distortions, things happening in the market that don't exactly make sense. Yep.
30:20
uh while simultaneously there being some businesses with strong underlying fundamentals and incredible opportunities that are trading at relatively fair multiples. >> Yep.
30:32
>> So had a good take on this too.
30:32
He said I know there are some questions about this including some smart people but there is a word for this that it describes the exact situation where Nvidia is investing in OpenAI.
30:41
OpenAI signs a compute deal with Oracle.
30:44
Oracle commits to buy Nvidia chips and it seems very very circular.
30:48
Uh Martin Skrey has a word for it. He calls it an economy.
30:52
He says the way you measure its success is not by the trading between partners but by nonparty demand.
30:56
That demand is pretty high and growing quickly. It's I am demanding it. I'm prompting it.
31:04
Everyone is prompting it.
31:04
Companies are prompting it.
31:06
Uh there there is a lot of demand for tokens.
31:10
>> So anyways, uh Stephen continues.
31:10
He says, "I have a news flash for every bear. AI is not a bubble.
31:14
In every market environment, there are always companies that become overly expensive with valuations that look unsustainable for no reason other than they have built a cult-like following and there are more buyers than sellers.
31:24
This is not a period of extreme speculation unlike the dot bubble where investors poured capital into any company with a dot in its name.
31:32
Yep, >> that was a that was a big factor.
31:33
Uh the rapid growth of the internet changed how information was disseminated and how people communicated which led to the overvaluation of startups as venture capital flooded the market fueling unsustainable growth. the.
31:43
com bubble burst because many of the companies from height of the era were nothing more than hype prioritizing user growth over sustainable business models that focus on revenue and profitability.
31:52
Again, I'd push back a little bit here.
31:54
There certainly has been companies that are uh scaling, you know, revenue really quickly unprofitably, sort of betting on um you know, capturing market share and token costs coming down.
32:07
>> Um anyways, I I'll continue.
32:07
The Fed hiked interest rates several times during 1999 and 2000 which caused investment capital to tighten making it harder for cash burning companies to sustain operations or roll over debt leading to bankruptcies.
32:18
So >> um and then he goes into how Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta etc.
32:23
uh says these are not startups or companies tapping the debt markets to build out new business ventures with the promise of becoming profitable.
32:31
These are the largest companies in the world with the strongest balance sheets and largest profitability.
32:35
Everyone has the right to their opinion, but when the CEO and board of directors are taking a blank check approach to building out data center infrastructure to harness the power of AI, they're probably the ones who are probably correct.
32:46
Uh here are some statistics about Microsoft.
32:48
And keep in mind that their 2025 fiscal year just ended as they are not on a calendar year.
32:53
So since 2022 fiscal year ended over the next 3 years Microsoft's long-term debt has declined by 14% while they have increased their allocation towards capex by 170%.
33:03
Uh over this period Microsoft has increased the cash from operations it generates by 52% 47 billion from 89 billion to 136 billion which has allowed them to increase the amount of capital they're allocating towards capex while paying down their debt obligations.
33:22
Microsoft is now generating 70 billion of free cash flow while allocating 64 billion toward capex.
33:28
And they did this while re repurchasing $18 billion worth of shares and paying 24 billion in dividends during the 2025 fiscal year. >> It's a lot of money. >> Mic drop from Zata.
33:40
>> I mean >> um this is much different period than the do era and when companies like Microsoft are leading the way funding the data center buildouts organically from their cash from operations, there's no bubble in sight.
33:49
So um and he does uh the same kind of analysis for uh Google and and some of the other players.
33:56
So worth going and finding this uh the account is at dividend streams.
34:00
account is at dividend streams. Um and uh anyways worth and and the other last thing I'll say here I was talking with a buddy who uh runs research for uh a multi- trillion dollar asset manager over the weekend at a kid's birthday party and he was saying uh the market is like generally even though you see this euphoria right you see see retail traders you know posting
34:27
screenshots of their Robin Hood accounts posting these insane gains >> if you look at like cash tied up in money market funds that sends a signal at record highs that sends a signal that >> actually people are quite bearish right >> so it's uh interesting uh certainly living through history >> yeah I feel like um the the speed at which these companies can actually get up to making a profit is just wildly different than 1999 like if MP3.com,
34:58
com, which was a good idea.
35:03
Like the idea was Spotify, right?
35:07
It was a hundred billion dollar opportunity at least.
35:09
Um, they IPOed with just a dot domain and a business plan.
35:15
And if you think about what they were going after, they were going after record stores that sold CDs.
35:26
And they had to build databases, licensing agreements with every >> They didn't have the Facebook ads platform.
35:32
They didn't have the Google ads.
35:34
>> They didn't have cloud hosting.
35:34
They had to build servers and and and and mobile apps.
35:38
And where do you listen to music in your car? Okay.
35:40
How are you going to listen to mp3. com in your car?
35:42
Well, normally you'd put in a cassette tape or a CD.
35:45
Well, like there's no integration there.
35:47
Whereas today, if you come up with some app or product or B2B software, which is where a lot of the money is, uh you call someone up and you say, "You want to switch to our product or you want to add our product on to what you're already using?" They're like, "Sure. Uh send me the link.
36:04
I'll put out I'll put in my credit card today and then start using you tomorrow."
36:09
And it's just like everything is set up for acceleration on the actual product development, getting getting some sort of value delivered to a customer.
36:19
It's just more possible now.
36:21
I I don't know that we're in an era of like wildly different ideas, but it's just easier to actually go and move chips around the board and like eat off of other people's plates.
36:33
We see this with like like there is a bubble but a lot of it is like the SAS the SAS apocalypse is you know legacy companies are actually selling off and so there's there's more of like a rotation to a newer company that's potentially taking market share from existing players as opposed to just completely new market cap that's being created out of thin air with >> disrupting ourselves. >> Yeah.
36:57
And and and that disruption actually >> it was more fun for tech when when they were just as you know was just trying to disrupt the record store, right?
37:05
It was another industry that we were disrupting.
37:06
Now we're >> we're eating we're eating our own. Yep.
37:11
>> Um >> well, quickly let me tell you about Cognition.
37:12
They are the makers of Devon.
37:15
Devon is the AI software engineer.
37:15
Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team.
37:21
>> Uh back on the bitter lesson, Nando Defrritos says, "The only bitter lesson is that LLM have succeeded beyond any expert expectations.
37:28
Underpinning LLM is the idea of scaling, which is too often misunderstood as more parameters.
37:34
Scaling is about using massive compute effectively to maximize the throughput of data ingestion into the learning process to obtain more capable models.
37:41
We're still far from hitting the limits on this. We are still hungry.
37:43
We're still compute hungry because there's a ton more that we could achieve if we only had more compute from exponential from experimental ablations to data acquisition and curation.
37:52
Scaling is largely about data and evals, but the models are now trained on almost all of the web in an equally large but growing self-generated synthetic data uh set.
38:00
Uh sifting through such vast quantities of data, the whole of human creation requires formidable engineering and intelligent ideas.
38:08
This is what differentiates most models.
38:09
AI is finally in the hands of billions of users and with it will come billions of tasks every reasonable user need.
38:15
This scaling in task and evaluations is order of magnitudes higher than prels.
38:20
of magnitudes higher than prels. And if you think about the the yeah every time a any any user of the chat GPT app for example uh fires off a query like that's more training data especially if you're using the reasoning models those rollouts will become reinforcement learning
38:39
environments as well as training data and if you're not on the enterprise plan like they will be training on that data and that's going to make the data set even larger and the products get even better and the gains will probably be less 0ero to one feeling but there will just be continued progress and uh and
38:58
fortunately at least for open AI a lot of the other companies are in are in uh different positions but at least for open AAI the monetization in front of them whether it's from the premium model to the ads model agent to commerce model like there's a whole bunch of news today about their agent to commerce stuff um
39:14
it it certainly feels like it can it can support a lot of spend a lot of spend >> totally the other the other thing you know happening right now is that certain companies are growing revenue so so quickly that it's placing pressure on other companies that aren't doing that to do weird accounting tricks, right? Or
39:32
Or or doing stuff that's like just blatantly wrong.
39:37
Counting, you know, one-time revenue and and bundling it into >> um >> Well, ARR is uh yesterday's revenue times 365, right? >> Yeah.
39:47
>> Yeah. or last minute's revenue >> last minute time 60 times 24 time be refreshing the stripe dashboard and then multiply by 60 by 24 by 365 uh don't do that stay serious uh stay compliant with Vanta automate compliance manage risk improve trust continuously VA's trust
40:08
management platform takes the manual work out of your cons security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation should we pull up this Catrini video it seems like they flew a drone around >> Catrini research has been absolute terror. I'm going to read I'm going to
40:23
I'm going to read I'm going to read this.
40:24
So they had a a post from 2023 >> which was uh the first phase uh talking about global data center hyperscaling uh May 31st 2023.
40:34
The first phase is centered around the development and buildout of robust computational infrastructure.
40:40
This involves a massive and sustained tailwind to the suppliers of data center equipment of accelerated computing required for both AI training and inference.
40:49
The enormous computing power required for AL uh A IML places considerable demands on a variety of technology sectors.
40:55
The companies involved in providing the necessary infrastructure stand to benefit significantly from this heightened demand.
41:01
This includes businesses involved in semiconductor manufacturing, networking equipment, data center construction and management and more.
41:07
Um and uh again uh even uh even even you know storage right is a is a category that was ultimately overlooked >> uh and again we we covered I think Western Digital at the end of >> uh the end of last year um and it is up uh 146% pulling up a Wall Street Journal article and and the thesis is like oh like uh probably going to be important.
41:38
Yeah, like there's a lot of data and so a place to put that >> like wow missed a generational trade. >> Yeah.
41:46
So, Western Digital up 146% since Q4, >> but you should really read this whole article.
41:52
Uh Stargate, they went to Stargate and they >> Yeah.
41:56
So, they just decided, hey, let's fly a drone over Stargate to see. >> It's so remarkable.
42:01
The scale of this thing is insane.
42:03
They they they show uh a ton of images of what it looked like before.
42:08
It's just a field basically.
42:10
It's so crazy that uh that uh Chase uh Lock Miller over at Crusoe like really like clocked this as a logical place to go. >> Yeah.
42:20
So they go through all the different categories.
42:21
Stargate power and energy, Stargate thermal, Stargate mechanical, electrical and plumbing, Stargate civil and structural, Stargate fiber, and Stargate construction services.
42:30
600 football fields filled with ca cables, pipes, >> and that's the building.
42:35
That's that's that's 600 football fields single facility >> buildings.
42:40
Yeah, it's it's remarkable.
42:42
>> Try and pull up this before and after.
42:44
You can just see the screenshot of the land.
42:46
This looks like a Google >> Google Earth.
42:49
>> Each is literally a ludicrous building.
42:51
There are eight under construction on the single site.
42:53
And this is just one of the Stargate data centers. There are many more.
42:56
Colossus 2, Meta's Louisiana Hyperion, Microsoft's Fairwater, Quantum Loophole, Nebius's New Jersey, DC P Amazon's uh Pennsylvania project, Google Anthropics Project Rainineer, to just to name a few.
43:10
Together, the current footprint is roughly the size of lower Manhattan. It's so huge. It's so huge.
43:16
And uh apparently Meta's Louisiana facility uh will be uh even bigger.
43:23
even bigger which uh Zach shared on on threads.
43:26
Uh >> so there there was also some news over the weekend residents shut down Google data center before it can be built.
43:35
>> So they Google Nick's plans for a gigantic $1 billion data center on more than 460 acres of land in Indiana after residents hotly protested the proposal due to concerns the complex would jack up electricity prices for neighbors and suck away untold gallons of water in an area already plagued by drought. Um, it's funny.
43:54
Futurism is a crazy website.
43:57
I'm looking at the recommended um articles.
44:00
>> They don't seem to be fans of the future. >> Yeah.
44:02
So, I'm gonna just the trending articles on >> brand to returnism. >> Yeah. >> Back to the land.
44:09
Uh, trending articles right now.
44:11
Bon uh Bon Bon Iver Bonnie Bonnie V. >> Bonnie V. Right. Right. Right. Um, uh, side projects. It's funny.
44:19
I've seen I've seen Bonnie Ver live and I still botch the pronunciation.
44:23
Uh, Side Project Spotify page features an AI slop song.
44:28
The second article, chat GPT is blowing up marriages as spouses use AI to attack their partners. >> Whoa.
44:36
>> The next one, Sunfire's energy blast at mysterious interstellar object.
44:42
>> Um, >> they might be algo maxing.
44:45
>> AI coding is massively overhyped. Report finds. >> Yep.
44:49
And of course, OpenAI's new data centers will draw more power than the entire >> captured, baby. Let's go.
44:54
Uh anyway, uh VCs say some AI startups under pressure to show rapid ARR growth are using questionable accounting practices like counting onetime deals as recurring revenue. You just mentioned this.
45:07
Bill Gurley chimed in to say, "Sad to say this isn't new, but as they say in Den of Thieves, your bunny has a good nose."
45:16
What is is Den of Thieves that that movie with Gerard Butler or something? What is Den of Thieves?
45:21
Is this a book or something?
45:24
I'm I'm I'm out of the loop on this.
45:25
But uh in other news, figma. com.
45:28
Think bigger, build faster.
45:30
Figma helps design development teams build great products together.
45:31
You can get started for free.
45:33
Uh but the real news of course is Claude Sonnet 4.
45:34
5 is out and Claude is declaring it the best coding model in the world.
45:41
They say it's the strongest model for building complex agents.
45:45
It's the best model at using computers and it shows substantial gains on tests of reasoning and math.
45:49
And of course, we will be joined by none other than Mike Kger from Anthropic in just a few minutes.
45:58
Um, but the model card is out and >> you remember Mike joined Figma's board of the IPO as well. So, we have Dylan.
46:07
>> Perfect overlap will be joining >> the whole Figma board today. >> Board meeting.
46:11
board meeting um live on TV, >> but uh the model card is up and the benchmarks look great.
46:16
Next to GPT5, Claude Sonnet 4. 5.
46:19
Interesting that they didn't just go fully to Sonnet 5.
46:22
OpenAI is on the fifth iteration. Gemini is at 2. 5.
46:28
There's a little bit of like uh all of these are just going to go the way of the So the cars are like it's the 2025 car, it's the 2025 911 or the Ford Explorer.
46:40
Uh, and now the phones are doing that too.
46:41
Like iOS 26, all the phones kind of jump forward just to say, "Hey, look, just keep it on the year cadence."
46:48
And I wonder if the models will wind up doing that too.
46:50
I wonder if people will care about the models.
46:52
Uh, certainly people, you know, enterprises will demo these against the paro frontier.
46:58
How much value am I actually getting out of this API relative to the cost?
47:02
Uh, and they will benchmark it in their own internal uses.
47:05
Um, >> and of course Satia sharing uh four decades in some things never changed then and now.
47:13
And it's an old ad for Microsoft Excel saying Microsoft Excel AC's final exam.
47:22
>> Uh, spreadsheet for Windows, >> trademarked, of course. Yes.
47:27
>> Uh, and they're showing spreadsheet bench accuracy results for their new co-pilot in Excel agent >> agent mode.
47:34
It's way better than the previous co-pilot in Excel.
47:37
>> The founder of Shortcut was taking uh taking some shots >> shortcuts here at 46. 6.
47:44
>> He was saying get ready.
47:44
He said something something to the effect of uh something to the effect of like get ready to dance for the next few decades or something like that.
47:54
Um so uh competition heating up in the uh Excel agents category. >> Yeah.
48:02
Well, um, this post, uh, Kathy D hit the timeline over the weekend.
48:07
CTO started coding the second we got to the gate.
48:12
Colin Frasier says he went on his laptop at the airport. That is crack.
48:20
very rude post, but >> I think it's a fair post from from Kathy, but at the same time, I think if you're traveling and you work, >> it's not the biggest flex in the world to do some work at the airport.
48:30
But >> it's been done before.
48:34
>> It's better than watching slot videos, I suppose.
48:36
You know, I'd rather I'd rather the CTO work when possible, when on the move.
48:42
Um, anyway, uh, let me tell you about graphite.
48:45
dev, code review for the age of AI.
48:47
Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster.
48:51
And we have our first guest of the show, Mike Kger from Enthropic.
48:53
He's in the reream waiting room.
48:56
Now he's in the TV pin Ultradome. Mike, welcome.
49:00
There he is looking sharp. >> You look fantastic.
49:03
>> Congratulations on everything.
49:03
There's a >> He wore a suit. Look at that. I love the suit.
49:09
>> I got, you know, I was going on TV. I had to. >> Thank you.
49:11
>> It's a great sign of respect in our culture and uh we appreciate it. It's great to see you. Big day. Big day for you. >> Big day.
49:19
Yeah, we're super excited.
49:19
Um, you know, and actually I was I was listening to you guys.
49:22
I was falling asleep last night and I was like, we should have called it Sonnet five, but you know, >> you never know how good it's going to be until the very end was out really well.
49:30
>> Well, I mean I I >> Yeah. Now you raised the bar. You threw that.
49:33
You raised the bar even higher for five, right?
49:36
>> That's what happened with three and four is that we ended up with this like, well, it's it's getting better, but what's four going to be? And we're like 3 37.
49:42
We're like, should we call the next one 3. 999? like99. >> I would love that. Yeah.
49:48
Well, uh, you know, you you can take all of our criticisms or or ideas with a grain of salt because we are the the kingpins of being armchair quarterbacks here and it is very different being in the arena.
49:57
I do wonder how how long it'll be until the numbers just melt away and it's just like, you know, OpenAI is powered by GPT and Enthropic is powered by claude and, you know, we stop caring about the minor revisions to the Google algorithm. >> Yeah.
50:13
I think you can take a lesson from Apple and realize that it's hard to get people really excited to buy this, you know, app iPhone 17. >> Yeah.
50:22
>> But but at the same time, there is a lot of value in putting a number on something, doing an an announcement, sharing new data, and and it seems like that's just a way to re-engage with the customer base, bring people back who have tried.
50:36
It's also very satisfying to to win, you know, the place at the top of benchmarks against people that have a higher number than you.
50:43
>> Of course, who everyone wants to win.
50:46
>> I always wonder like init like when I came into this role, I was like, I think why don't companies just want us to be on like dash latest and just be just getting the, you know, latest and greatest and then they're like, ah, but the model might change and we want to be careful.
50:56
So, I think the future looks like some hybrid where maybe we help people get on the new version for them and then just auto upgrade.
51:01
That could be a little bit easier. >> Yeah.
51:04
uh what what are the other trade-offs like the the benchmarks tell one story.
51:09
There's been this previous story about uh 3.
51:11
5 having like this particular personality.
51:14
Are there other things that uh you find that customers and counterparties are are looking for um in a release like this beyond just benchmarks?
51:24
>> One of the biggest ones is like how eager versus lazy the model is.
51:27
Um you know maybe intuitively like you want the model to be as eager as possible.
51:30
We had this with three son at 3.
51:32
7 where it was great but it was a little too eager.
51:36
He'd be like hey can you make this button blue like I made it blue and I also refactored your entire website and uh it was like too much uh so we scaled it back with four and then four was a little too lazy where people you know we actually have a monitoring signal inside
51:49
Anthropic where if we finding people are saying like keep going just go like guess come on uh then it's probably you know being too lazy and so we're trying to tune it for this one which is like the right blend of eagerness and laziness and make it as steerable as possible. That's a big one. That's a big one. >> Yeah.
52:02
Um, what about on the on the compute infrastructure side, the actual uh being able to keep up with demand?
52:10
Uh, is there any messaging that you're sharing around?
52:12
Um, what this particular model means just for like speed, availability, reliability because uh it seems like there's there's so many businesses that are just like it's good enough for my use case, but I need a lot of it. >> Yeah. No, for sure.
52:27
We think a lot about about capacity and infra and for us it was really big to be able to deliver something that was more powerful than Opus for a fifth of the cost and you can imagine that's like you know we think a lot about where we're serving and what we can serve at that scale.
52:40
So having our best model also be the kind of sweet spot middle child is really really big for us to be able to scale up to capacity.
52:47
I think earlier this year a lot of the conversations I have with customers like how do I get more set like I'm at capacity and we're finally getting to the point now where we can meet that demand.
52:55
Can you I I I I'm not sure if this story is real, but there's this story about uh Instagram where one of the key user experience kind of hacks in the early days was as soon as you would go to uh start filtering a a photo, it would start uploading to the server and then the filter would be applied on both sides.
53:19
So when you hit post, it would automatically be live and you didn't have to wait for the upload to start. Is that roughly true? Can you tell me that? >> Yeah, that's rough.
53:27
Yeah, and you got flashback and it was 2009 like networks were really slow.
53:31
So, we did everything to try to make it fast.
53:33
So, that was one of the things we did was you know the second you people would type you know messages it would take them five minutes.
53:38
Um and all that time we were just doing all the processing in the background and then that last post you sync it up and then you post it to the timeline.
53:45
So, that was a really big thing we did.
53:46
We also did a lot on the timeline itself where uh which photo you fetch next was a lot of optimizations that we did.
53:51
Um, it's funny like now the person who initially started Claude Code, one of our products, his name was Boris and he came from Instagram as well and he brought some of the kind of Perf ideas from Instagram uh into Claude Code and so there's some there's some lineage of of Instagram to cla code now.
54:06
>> That's why I was asking about the the that story.
54:08
It feels like there's we're we're in this we're in this wave of like consumerization just uh like where the user experience really matters for these models and there's uh I have to imagine that there's low hanging fruit.
54:21
I was joking that uh at a certain point there's so many LLM queries that you might just be able to go back to database lookups for certain things because like like how many times has someone went to a really beefy LLM and just asked for like the capital of California and you can actually >> we get a lot of messages that just say hello and then you can cash that one. >> Yeah. Yeah.
54:43
You c that and then you're just saving that inference for other more serious things.
54:45
Um, and and I'm wondering if there's any other places where you feel like uh you've reached into your your history and been able to draw comparisons to the work that you've done at Instagram or other places and say, uh, oh, there's something interesting that we can apply here at Anthropic that actually maps into the pre-AI era. >> Yeah.
55:08
I think the biggest one, so I think one thing we did well at Instagram early on was just make it look good.
55:12
make your photos look good and it's be something that you're proud to share and you know flashback like was iPhone 3GS the camera was pretty bad right so you're trying to just get to the point where it's actually good and sharable so we were working on like you can now create um powerpoints and Excel files within cloud AAI and then you can edit them further if you want and the thing I
55:30
was really pushing the team on is you know we talk about how the model can code for hours and hours but the thing that it produces has to be good you don't want it to be autonomous and bad or autonomous and slop so a lot of what we've been doing on the on the office front is like the anti slot like make something that is actually good out of the gate and of course you're going to polish it up and and correct it. So
55:45
So that's that that that um effort to output ratio that I think Instagram has is what we're aspiring to here around can you give it some instructions, get it some data and then have it produce like yeah that was pretty good, pretty close and I'm going to like finish it up myself.
55:59
myself. Yeah, I feel like that has been my biggest uh hot take around the Meta AI vibes app is just that uh people say there's no artist and I'm like no, it's it's David Holes's vision and that he has honed that at at midjourney and it's
56:16
his opinions and his artistic vision that's come through and >> well the downside there is that >> it's great if you want to consume that style of of uh content >> but People like being in feeds and having randomness and new >> new ideas and perspectives and aesthetics. Whereas if you're generating
56:35
Whereas if you're generating UI >> for some app, you know, an internal tool, it's actually totally fine in my view if it like feels like claw, right?
56:46
Because it's like a it's not necessarily even if if you're creating an internal tool, it's not necessarily even something that needs to be a reflection of your brand, right? Sure.
56:53
And so having like a distinctive style and if if if you need to do that in order to avoid just slop then I think that's a good trade-off. >> Yeah, that's fine.
57:03
>> I think it's a good the Figma connection is real there too.
57:04
I think if you ask Claude to make a website most of those websites look kind of similar but then can you incorporate your design language or library so it actually looks you know generically yours at least like it's something that could have been created inside your company and sure it doesn't have like the hand of a designer on it but at least it's not the full generic uh version as well.
57:22
But yeah, it's interesting watching vibes how much of it is it's like 70s prep school summer camp vibe and or futurism and it's it kind of falls into one of those two. >> Yeah. Yeah.
57:33
It's definitely like found its way into some like local minima maxima or something.
57:37
It it feels it feels like almost overfit in but maybe in a good way because the alternative is is maybe sloppier. Who knows?
57:45
I'm more I I'm also interested in in um how you actually bring an opinionated vision to bear in a company like Anthropic like uh going back to Instagram again I remember hearing stories they might be true maybe not but about like the initial filters were
58:04
handcoded where like you were adjusting sliders and dials and code to make the filter look a certain way and that was the expression of basically a single individual and I'm wondering if there's if there's when you think about the the texture and the flavor of what Claude 4.5 is putting out is this something
58:23
4.5 is putting out is this something that's coming from the you know selecting the training data or building the RL pipeline like are there multiple people that are bringing an opinion or is it an emergent property is it the whole team like how does all this fit together to actually create something that has taste in something that's just
58:43
a big uh big bag of numbers and >> yeah I think that's actually an underappreciated thing about training is how much individuals and their taste really matters like I think um our particular post-training team I think has excellent taste on the code environment and just the code uh production itself one of the things that we found with sonnet 4.5 is that if you
58:59
5 is that if you point it at some code that previous versions had written it'll go clean it up and be like what is this comment here it's totally unnecessary it'll rip it out and so it's like improved in in some taste so there's that part and then there's the work that we've been doing kind of around the model around how you instruct it, how you give it the right skills to actually go produce the right content.
59:17
And there it's actually reminds me a lot of Instagram where we're looking at outputs and saying, "All right, can you get it to make it make PowerPoints that look a little bit more real?
59:25
Can you make the docs, you know, they don't need five fonts?
59:26
Can we simplify that down?"
59:28
And so there's a lot that you can do in that kind of scaffolding where taste can come in around how you shape the model and like again get it to the point where you're, oh, this is actually good.
59:38
>> So do you think slop is is a is a function of laziness?
59:40
I think it's, you know, if it's the default parameters.
59:43
I saw a talk um by Ted Chang, uh amazing sci-fi writer, and he was talking about AI and and creativity.
59:50
He's like creativity is a bunch of choices, right?
59:54
And if you just type to any of LLM, like tell me a story, it's going to tell you a pretty similar story almost every time.
59:59
And that's, you know, kind of like a nature of of the model.
1:00:00
But if you then go and instruct it with a bunch of, you know, custom things, now it starts becoming a little bit more you.
1:00:06
And it's not a zero to one thing, right?
1:00:07
Like there's some spectrum on there as well.
1:00:10
I think to me the the slop is the stuff that tends towards like the minimum effort and the minimum amount of choices.
1:00:16
And when you tend to a bunch of choices, even if they're like not the best choices, at least it's got some creative spark in it. >> Yeah.
1:00:22
>> How are you thinking about imagery?
1:00:22
I mean, you rich history there with Instagram.
1:00:27
Uh models are becoming multimodal generally.
1:00:30
Uh, Anthropic hasn't been chasing that really publicly, but there's a world where I can go to Claude 4.
1:00:37
5, I'm sure, and say, uh, draw me a cat with ASKI art and it'll do it.
1:00:42
Uh, and there's a world where maybe if the models get really good, I could just say, hey, uh, just write out the individual RGB, uh, you know, numbers and I will encode it as a PNG or something like it feels like if the if the text models get really good, I I can just get images out of them.
1:00:56
So, how do you think that develops for Enthropic or or where do you think uh you want to bring that to bear?
1:01:02
Is there anything that's interesting there or do you just see it as a completely different set of the tech tree that you're happy to just watch other folks work on?
1:01:11
>> Yeah, it's funny you say that.
1:01:11
One of the the launch kind of like internal things, one of the PMs put together was a a self-portrait of Claude that it drew using cells in Excel, which is it was like it's actually pretty good.
1:01:20
Um yeah, I think for us, you know, I always like zoom out like what's the goal here?
1:01:24
It's like the goal is to build powerful AI in a safe way.
1:01:27
And we think that the sort of direct like like I love your tech tree kind of metaphor.
1:01:31
Like the direct route of that tech tree is models that can think for a long time, actically, can write code, can execute code, and kind of keep track of state.
1:01:39
And like almost everything that's not in that tech tree we've not focused on.
1:01:42
And that's, you know, I think been good.
1:01:46
We've been able to get a lot done with a smaller team than most other frontier labs.
1:01:49
Um, but it's meant that on things like image generation that's like maybe we're le leaning on partnership or bringing some images in via MCB or to your point maybe it actually emerges as a property of the model where it's able to both you know write and run that code.
1:02:02
The the a late breaking thing that we found the model is actually very good at is generating memes.
1:02:06
So sure given a virtual machine uh sonnet 4.
1:02:08
virtual machine uh sonnet 4.5 can take a you know basic image and then put in you know like the butterfly meme like is this agi um and it's actually like pretty funny too like another thing that I think people will see over the next couple weeks is sonet 45 is like our funniest model I think um and so there's
1:02:25
>> what in what uh in what what what types of ways because >> there's a lot of ways to be funny and and and and to date I think the thing that consistently >> everybody has enjoyed is is like the um you know like be me format is one format and then but like stand up every model that I've seen is struggle. >> Yeah. And and specifically the funny >> Yeah.
1:02:46
And and specifically the funny examples where people say oh AI generated this it's usually like a a top voted joke on r/okes on Reddit and so it's kind of stealing the joke and it doesn't really count as like a new joke in my opinion >> but anyway.
1:03:00
So, uh, we need to like formalize an email for this at some point.
1:03:03
But the thing that we do is we we bring Claude into our Slack channels.
1:03:07
Um, mostly in serious ways like we have Claude help out with, uh, you know, if it's a coding task or whatever, but we also have Claude in our basically like internal posting, you know, channel.
1:03:15
And we'll do it for every model.
1:03:18
And, uh, I most anthropic employees, at least many of them, were up really late this weekend because it is so good now in the like water cooler channel that it's like funny.
1:03:29
It's like kind of roasting people but not in too mean a way.
1:03:30
It's like reacting to in jokes.
1:03:33
It's making back references to something happening earlier.
1:03:36
It's definitely not like you wouldn't be fooled for a human yet in most ways, but it definitely like had some leap where it's actually just really fun to talk to.
1:03:43
Um >> water cooler bench.
1:03:45
Call it water cooler bench. >> Exactly. >> Um how are you?
1:03:49
Uh, I I loved your guys's recent campaign around, you know, Claude being for, you know, uh, it's never been a a better time to have a problem.
1:03:59
I've seen some some out of home that you guys have done around LA, which is great.
1:04:04
Uh, as you um, as you kind of uh, introduce more and more of the world to Claude, how are you thinking about uh, you know, uh, kind of pouring?
1:04:19
Do you think there's ways to pour uh fuel on the fire around social features and surface area that maybe hasn't been explored before in LLMs?
1:04:25
I mean, you're very qualified to to uh comment on some some some of that.
1:04:32
So, don't uh don't feel like you need to give away your road map, but I'm curious, you know, what what's been underexplored in your mind.
1:04:39
>> No, I think about the things that like where Claude feels like it had some breakouts, and I think there's been like three or four in the year and a half been at anthropic.
1:04:46
One was we had Golden Gate Claude where we actually put a research demo up where you could talk to a claude that believed it was the Golden Gate Bridge.
1:04:52
And I still talked to people a year and a half later.
1:04:53
I was like that was the first time I really thought about interpretability and how the model features might work.
1:04:57
And that was like a cool breakout moment for that.
1:05:00
Um there was also like the the sort of point where people realized like Claude's actually pretty good at relationship advice.
1:05:05
And there was like lots of like college students posting the like you know uh you know talking to Claude about their kind of relationship thing that had like a a viral moment.
1:05:14
And then um who knows if this will go viral, but I'm excited to see what people build with it.
1:05:16
We're putting something out today called Imagine with Cloud where you can talk to Cloud and Claude will like create whole software on screen, but also simulate what the software would do if you clicked a button.
1:05:25
So it doesn't write sort of a backend code.
1:05:27
It is the backend code, which sounds a little trippy.
1:05:28
You kind of have to play with it.
1:05:30
Um but people have been doing all sorts of stuff like, "Hey, uh show me what Steve Jobs's desktop looked like the week before the iPhone launch."
1:05:36
It's like, "Okay, well here's the Finder window and here's a you know keynote file about his keynote."
1:05:41
So you click the Keynote file and it's like, well, I guess I have to imagine and create what Keynote looks like now.
1:05:45
And it creates that from scratch.
1:05:46
And it's kind of this like glimpse into the future of what UI might be, which is fully generative, fully dynamic and and and drawn on demand.
1:05:52
Um, so we'll see what people build with that.
1:05:55
But that's another one I think that'll be the kind of thing that we push on, which is either demonstrations of where the future could be going.
1:05:59
It's probably not as mass market as Instagram would ever be, but it hopefully breaks through to the right people who are thinking about the stuff. >> Yeah.
1:06:06
A product like that seems within reach, magical, amazing.
1:06:11
It also feels like if I was using generative UI fully, a fully generated app for like hours, I might go down some weird path and it might lose consistency.
1:06:20
We've seen this with the benchmarks.
1:06:22
I mean, just in 2020, you know, GPT3 on the meter uh length of AI task can that they can do at a 50% success rate, it was like 10 seconds and now we're blowing past an hour.
1:06:35
Uh I'm interested to know how you're thinking about four five if you think about that internally as a benchmark.
1:06:42
It wasn't on the model card. Should it be?
1:06:43
Uh are you seeing promising results there?
1:06:45
And then I'm also interested in what should the ultimate target be?
1:06:52
Because I was I was trying to think about like yes, I want an AI that can do tasks for a really long time, but what is a human's task length?
1:06:57
Like is it a hundred years?
1:07:00
And how long does it take to get to 100 years if we're doubling every seven months?
1:07:03
it turns out it's like a decade.
1:07:05
Um, and I'm wondering how you think about like the the just the the length that the model can maintain consistency.
1:07:13
Uh, do you like that as a metric? Are we on track there?
1:07:16
And what are the consequences of that?
1:07:19
>> Yeah, a big part of cloud 4.
1:07:19
5's training was around both keeping its own memory and staying be able to work for a longer period of time and and keep that consistency.
1:07:26
I put a video up on my hex which is uh for every version of cloud we asked it to build cloud. ai.
1:07:31
So kind of like our flagship AI product and you know one through three just >> can't even do anything out of the gate.
1:07:38
35 you're like ah it kind of showed something on screen but you can't log in.
1:07:41
37 you can log in but it doesn't work.
1:07:43
Four it works a little bit but message failing message sending fails.
1:07:47
Four five like didn't just implement it also implemented our whole artifacts feature in its like prototype.
1:07:50
So you think about like that whole kind of thing and it's a fun like time lapse of just even watching it do that.
1:07:56
So, I think it is really important even if for most tasks you're not going to kind of set it off on a, you know, 30-hour task like a couple of our customers did during testing.
1:08:04
The fact that you could I think lets you start trusting it for longer and longer um tasks.
1:08:07
The way I see our engineers actually use cloud code now is they have like three or four terminal windows open and they're running cloud code concurrently on multiple ideas at once.
1:08:15
And the only way you can do that is if it's not going to interrupt you 10 seconds and be like, "Wait, what did you mean again?"
1:08:19
Or trust that you're not going to go off the rail.
1:08:22
I think it's if not the it's one of the most important um kind of metrics to look at is how long is it going to maintain coherence.
1:08:29
>> Yeah, that that colot example you gave is is crazy because um do you know how many manh hours it actually took to build the real product? >> A lot.
1:08:38
>> Like it's more than an hour.
1:08:38
It's more than four hours.
1:08:39
more than anything on this chart if it's and and yeah, that's a very very mind-blowing concept that like we're still like it's working for an hour, it's working for two hours, but it's maybe doing hundreds of hours of manh hours if you were to try and create an apples to apples comparison.
1:08:55
Uh very >> it's hair raising. >> Yeah.
1:08:59
I mean it's it's exciting. It's exciting. >> It really is.
1:09:02
And also like it hopefully makes us more flexible too where I think there's a lot of sunk cost that happens in software, right?
1:09:06
Like oh when I rebuild it it's so good.
1:09:07
things we did involve with Instagram was saying like yeah you built it but if it's not going to be good just rip it out you know and then start over.
1:09:13
then start over. One of the most uh magical experiences I had with cloud code recently was um I I essentially I don't write a ton of software and build a lot of applications but I do a lot of research and so I asked Claude code to do a deep research report but instead of just uh creating a markdown file like I
1:09:33
would get in any other deep research product I asked it to build an HTML 5 website with all of the nice features bar charts and graphs and all that stuff and it it was it was okay on the research side, but it was a really cool glimpse into this like generative UI uh world that it feels like we're going into. And I'm wondering if there's a how
1:09:51
And I'm wondering if there's a how you see that flowing into just consumer right now.
1:09:57
When I think of clawed code for deep research, I think of a proumer product.
1:10:02
And I'm wondering if you if you think that there's a a path maybe it exists through mobile maybe iframes like how how does this actually work its way into like my my mom's life you know someone who's not going to understand the terminal and get fired up on that way. >> Yeah.
1:10:19
Something we put out actually in our mobile app about a month ago that people have been enjoying is kind of giving the same sort of agentic kind of multi-turn thing in cloud but with your local mobile um capabilities.
1:10:28
And it's a little easier on Android.
1:10:30
You can do a lot of this on iOS but not all of it. Sure.
1:10:33
>> Um, and you can say things like, "Hey, you know, look at my calendar for tomorrow.
1:10:35
Like, I have these three meetings. Do some local searches.
1:10:37
Like, find out where I should have coffee.
1:10:40
Remind me to like grab my coat before I leave.
1:10:41
Um, and by the way, like compose a text to these three people because I need to like let them know about it."
1:10:46
You'll see it work through all like use all these local tools.
1:10:48
Do it a um you can't send it automatically, so you have to like press a button still to be like send the message.
1:10:53
So, it's not like all the way, but I think that's where it's going to start showing up in in consumer applications.
1:10:57
And I think, you know, for better or for worse, it's going to require more partnership with um with the device makers because a lot of that's skated on the on the OS.
1:11:03
You can do a lot more on the web.
1:11:05
But I think that's the that's where things are going.
1:11:08
I think that's where it start will start feel real to people.
1:11:10
>> What's the biggest lesson from Artifact?
1:11:12
I was a huge fan of the product and I feel like where with where we are in terms of how effective the models are at scraping the entire web creating summaries like it feels like we're on the cusp of another breakout like product or problem solution in that space.
1:11:30
Uh what are what do you take?
1:11:30
space. Uh what are what do you take? It feels I mean for better or worse it feels like you could ultimately like Claude could one day function as AR in a in in what I what I loved about artifact right >> I don't know >> and >> yeah we even you know you can like uh
1:11:49
see it already like search the web do the synthesis and then like create a briefing for me um I think one sort of underappreciated artifact lesson was um if your product really shines when it really knows you and is really personal to That's a hard sell for newcomers, right? They're going to We had a like our
1:12:04
They're going to We had a like our retention was actually really good if you stuck around.
1:12:06
But it was that kind of activation that was the the trickiest.
1:12:09
Plus, like any sharable thing in news is really difficult.
1:12:11
But think about that now with cloud where if you ask it to do something, we can't have expected you to already have taught it a bunch of your preferences or connected all the right things.
1:12:20
We actually can because cloud can be conversational.
1:12:23
Say, I'm going to be way better at this if you let me connect to your Google Drive. Like, is that okay? Right?
1:12:26
or I'm going to be on your iOS, you know, it's going to be way better if you connect your your maps or your calendar for this.
1:12:32
So, that's I think where we need to go, which is don't expect people have done all the upfront work because that's going to be too hard for most people and then they'll churn.
1:12:37
But the nice thing that's different now in 2025 is the model can now have the conversation about how to get it to the state where you know it's going to be actually useful to you.
1:12:46
>> Everyone in teapot on X in tech Twitter is reacting to Dwaresh Patel's interview with Richard Sutton.
1:12:54
with Richard Sutton. uh are you bitter lessenp is enthropic bitter lessons pilled like how how would how did you and the team kind of process uh the debate between Dwarash and Richard Sutton >> I think we're overall super bitter lesson pill what an interesting example
1:13:11
and this is kind of a bitter lesson derivative but I think kind of feeds into the same kind of idea uh you mentioned deep research so you know the our original you know advanced research you know implementation in in cloudi was like thousands of lines of code some like pretty complex infrastructure. We've since, you know, re-implemented,
1:13:26
We've since, you know, re-implemented, we haven't launched yet, it'll come out soon.
1:13:28
We reimplemented on top of basically the cloud agent SDK, which we put out today, too, which is basically what cloud code runs on too.
1:13:33
And it was basically just a prompt and some tools and like none of that like custom scaffold and instructions and all of that.
1:13:40
And like that to me speaks the same idea, which is like you want to like let the model do as much itself as possible.
1:13:45
Don't try to like overly specify all of like the steps and the infrastructure and all those different pieces.
1:13:50
So that definitely shows up even in product which is you know not what the bitter lesson is about but it kind of uh feeds into that as well.
1:13:56
But I think overall like very bitter lesson filled but also still really bullish I think on the possibilities of RL and you see it in how much the models have advanced even since February.
1:14:09
uh do you think you're uh bullish on this idea that there will be some sort of new paradigm or new buzzword in a few years that describes uh a material change in architecture or uh just like how AI research is done.
1:14:26
We certainly saw this when we went from just transformer-based large language models to reinforcement learning with human feedback to RL and and uh and synthetic environments instead of the synthetic data.
1:14:40
Does it feel like we're continuing to come up with new ideas? >> I think so.
1:14:44
And I think the other piece that's going to be really interesting one just the scale of all of these RL runs is getting enormous.
1:14:49
And I think the second one is the model's ability to maybe actually introspect and see if it can propose ideas will be interesting too.
1:14:56
I don't think we're there yet, too.
1:14:58
And when we get there, we ought to do that very carefully and with the right kind of safety kind of guardrails in place, but I think that's that'll potentially yield to some kind of divergent ideas at that point.
1:15:07
>> What are your thoughts on hardware or what's going to change in hardware over the next few years?
1:15:11
Uh, Instagram was so interesting.
1:15:14
I remember that it was designed to be used with the phone in the vertical.
1:15:18
It was such a vertical app even though people were so used to turning their phones.
1:15:22
Um, and in some ways the hardware, like the medium is the message.
1:15:27
The hardware kind of defined what you built, but then eventually uh, you know, we got more cameras on the phone probably because of Instagram.
1:15:33
And I'm wondering, uh, if you think AI will change hardware or hard or will be get entirely new hardware to interface with AI in different places.
1:15:43
Uh, just kind of what's your view on hardware over the next couple years?
1:15:44
I think this is the consumer side where um you know like I think the AirPod Pro is going to be like the sneaky like AI you know sort of thing that actually does that does the mass market.
1:15:54
Not a super controversial take.
1:15:56
I think the other one that people are thinking less about is what's the business side of this.
1:15:58
You know we've designed these open office plans but I think in the future we're going to actually talk to our AI a bunch in order to get stuff done to delegate tasks.
1:16:07
It's like really nice already.
1:16:08
People have like hooked up cloud code with like open whisper or something so they can talk to it and it feels very natural.
1:16:14
Um and and so like what does that do for office design?
1:16:16
Are we all going to be using these like sub vocalization things now that people are prototyping like >> Yeah.
1:16:22
Um but it's like you know like walk through an office a bunch of people mumbling like what's the be like >> or or the the the dark sci-fi just it's a it's wallto-wall the phone booths you know just like thousands of phone booths and everybody's sitting in their phone booth >> recreated like 1960s IBM like I feel like there's got to be something better too.
1:16:41
Um, I'm also really interested in what the sort of multiplayer like I mentioned like uh Claude talking to us in our social channel, but like there's also what is like what is it like to not just have an AI noteaker in these meetings which everybody has, but like an actual participant and how does it know when to chime in and what is it listening for?
1:16:56
Can it be like hey you guys haven't talked about this thing you said you were going to talk about or hey I'm detecting a lot of like you know disagreement here. Can we move forward?
1:17:03
So that's going to be an interesting it's like the hardware necessary for that won't be super complex but it will need to show up in more and more places. >> Yeah.
1:17:10
How do how do you guys think about uh what comes to mind around the word focus?
1:17:16
Anthropic feels incredibly focused and not every lab feels that way.
1:17:22
Is that is that something that you guys you know just keep coming back to around >> uh or or what does that mean to you? >> Oh, for sure.
1:17:31
>> Oh, for sure. Like I think that the one of the things that we've done well is like there's been that extreme focus from the research side I think you know before anything else which is like here's the path like we're going to build that we're not going to have as many people perhaps as much compute but we're going to like remain focused but like that is actually another kind of bridge to Instagram we were very very
1:17:48
focused I think they finally shipped the iPad app always ask why doesn't Instagram have an iPad app and like it's focus like you know you're not going to get a lot of new users that way and most of the usage is going to be on on the iPhone and
1:17:59
>> web web took years to have a years and it was like, you know, people think we were stubborn, but it was actually, you know, every new platform you add is like another thing that you're going to have to think about. Um, and you know, yes,
1:18:07
Um, and you know, yes, you can staff up for it, but it's just that that coordination cost.
1:18:11
It's the kind of additional overhead.
1:18:13
So, we've really pushed the focus thing here as well.
1:18:16
Um, you know, it's like do do more with less and and do fewer things better, but I think it's really important and it's meant that we've got more of this sort of proumer, power user, and then business lens, but also think that's like a interesting place to occupy in the market.
1:18:28
Last question from my side.
1:18:30
Jordy, do you have another?
1:18:31
>> Yeah, kind of last question.
1:18:31
We're having uh Dylan on in a bit uh to catch up on Figma make and I know you joined the board prior to the IPO.
1:18:38
What are your, you know, with with Figma, the AI opportunity and current reality is very obvious, right?
1:18:46
It's a place that people go to make things uh and build software.
1:18:51
But what are your conversations like with uh I'm assuming other public, you know, public SAS CEOs and boards reach out to you all the time trying to get your read on where software is going.
1:19:03
Are those conversations happening?
1:19:03
What what do they what do they look like uh today?
1:19:08
Yeah, I mean I think there's this if you think the models are going to be able to act agentically and retrieve over you know your uh you know employee records plus connect them to your current work in Google Docs all these pieces.
1:19:20
I think the the concern I think from a lot of these SAS providers is do they become just document and data repositories right and how do you like modify that but then I think that there's the the sort of like uh way of making that actually interesting is um if you actually connect um an agent with another which doesn't sound that profound until you actually try it. It's really powerful.
1:19:40
I saw this demo of uh Claude talking to an agent that was built on top of some Salesforce data and rather than just like search for Salesforce data and then get results back.
1:19:48
It had a conversation with they had like two back and forth conversations where the cloud agent was like here's the email I'm thinking of sending to this customer and the Salesforce built like thing built on top of Salesforce like no no they're not going to like it.
1:19:59
I I looked in the like earlier messages and they really hated that turn of phrase.
1:20:02
They ping pong back and forth with actually like very little human input at the end had a message like ready to send.
1:20:07
So that's where I think like you can move from worrying about oh are people going to visit my website less because of agents to more like well maybe not but if you're actually building value beyond just the data store you can still play a really key part in that exchange.
1:20:22
>> Yeah it goes back to what we were talking about about uh Claude being able to generate images but then just using an Excel sheet as a canvas.
1:20:28
There's a world where you might be able to train a model that's super expensive to inference that can, you know, just do all the math in the world and has every number, every every calculation memorized or you could just say, "Hey, here's Python."
1:20:40
Like just write some Python and you get the exact result.
1:20:42
Uh, and so it's a beautiful synergy.
1:20:44
Uh, well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Congratulations.
1:20:50
>> Congrats on the launch.
1:20:50
We're looking forward to five or 4. 999 4.
1:20:54
999 would go extremely hard. I would love that. >> The pressure is on. 4. 99999. Uh, >> awesome.
1:21:02
Well, we're we're excited to uh to to play around uh with with five and and get into it.
1:21:09
>> Thanks so much for having me on. We'll talk to you soon. >> You're the man.
1:21:12
>> Uh let's go over to Poly Market and check in on which company has the best AI model by the end of 2025.
1:21:17
Anthropic has jumped in the rankings.
1:21:20
Uh this is of course LM Arena, which is a different benchmark, but Anthropic jumped from 1. 8% 8% to over 6%.
1:21:27
Uh Google is in first and continues to be.
1:21:31
Open AAI was given them a run for their money towards the end of a of August, but Google is seems to be running away with it.
1:21:38
People on Alam Marina are really enjoying Google. >> Yeah.
1:21:42
It's interesting how you know this this continues to be the probably the most popular market on AI. Yeah.
1:21:47
And yet all the underlying labs are focused on different things, right?
1:21:54
like anthropic is values a bunch of different things differently than Google does, right?
1:21:59
Um >> and uh and XAI same thing, right?
1:22:02
So >> um anyways, >> well speaking of Chachi Petite, uh they launched a new brand campaign.
1:22:08
Each scenario features young people who are some of our most creative, proactive users.
1:22:13
We're showing their stories in ways that others can see and connect with.
1:22:16
Our goal is for people to look at these moments.
1:22:18
And Emily Sunberg said, "Part of the reason this campaign looks so good is because Heidi Bivvens is the stylist from Euphoria and Spring Breakers worked on it."
1:22:26
So, they brought in some heavy hitters for this, which is exciting.
1:22:30
>> This feels even the colors and the tones feel a lot like Anthropic's recent >> campaign.
1:22:37
>> And it it feels uh solar punky.
1:22:37
It feels a little bit like um the uh the drone delivery company.
1:22:44
>> How's this guy with this barbell set up in this like He's doing exactly what I do.
1:22:49
He's tracking his splits. He's tracking his lifts.
1:22:51
He's trying to hit a one rep max.
1:22:53
He's saying, "If I eat this much protein, consume this much creatine, can I hit this in?"
1:22:57
Well, I guess >> he only has 65 lbs on the bar, though, so you know.
1:23:02
Oh, I guess he's doing some dumbbell curls.
1:23:04
But, uh, you know, with the power of Chat GPT, I think he's going to be benching three plates in no time.
1:23:10
Um, but yeah, very fun campaign.
1:23:14
Uh, we're having Dylan Field join in just nine minutes.
1:23:17
He was uh getting in a tussle on the timeline talking about the definitions of software engineering.
1:23:23
Uh Elliot, I guess at Lovable said, "We just killed software engineering by the way."
1:23:27
>> Which is like I don't know if Elliot is rage baiting, but >> yeah, it is uh it is a little a little rage bay, but uh oh well.
1:23:38
>> Like who's that who is that post for? >> I don't know.
1:23:40
Uh in other news, Thrive has a new citation.
1:23:44
Sovereign under management.
1:23:46
I know you were all wondering about this.
1:23:48
This is from Preston Holland. Uh it's a nice touch.
1:23:53
So this is a private jet.
1:23:55
>> This is Thrive Aviation to be >> clear.
1:23:56
Everyone everyone thinks that this is Thrive Capital of course Josh Kushner's firm expanding into private aviation as he probably should but uh this is a different company I believe but >> different company.
1:24:09
It is funny to imagine the words big dog on the end. >> Big dog looks great.
1:24:13
dog with a D AWG the Turbo S.
1:24:19
>> You get a lot of flack for having a PJ for flying from, you know, Orange County to Burbank just to save a couple minutes.
1:24:25
Uh but if you put big dog on the engines, I think you get a free pass.
1:24:29
I think it's the way to do it.
1:24:31
>> Drive's uh tagline is above your standards, beyond your expectations.
1:24:36
>> Above your above your standards.
1:24:36
Is that not >> above your standards?
1:24:40
>> We're actually above your standards, John. >> Yes.
1:24:41
Whatever your standards are, we we're not going to ask you about your standards.
1:24:44
We're just going to tell you that this is above >> we're above you.
1:24:46
>> It's above your standard. >> We're above you.
1:24:48
>> Well, you know what else is above your standards? Julius. ai.
1:24:51
What analysis do you want to run?
1:24:51
It's the data the AI data analyst that works for you.
1:24:55
Connect your data, ask questions in plain English, and get insights in seconds. No coding required.
1:25:01
Um, in other uh AI news, it's a busy day.
1:25:03
Uh, chat uh chatbt is now integrated with both Stripe and Shopify.
1:25:08
We were kind of debating this like is the stripe integration?
1:25:10
We are having Jeff from Stripe on who worked on uh has been involved with with some of these new features.
1:25:17
So we'll have to ask him about this.
1:25:19
Unclear to me yet how the dynamic obviously shop uh Stripe powers Shopify.
1:25:27
>> Um but uh how do these different partnerships work?
1:25:29
partnerships work? But uh >> I think there will be companies I think there will be companies that that vend their essentially their product catalog into chat GPT maybe with like an MCP server or they surface it in a way that they can integrate directly with Stripe
1:25:45
and because all of their plans everything that they sell is sold through through Stripe and so there are plenty of companies that don't need an order management system and uh you know all of the features that you at with Shopify and they basically just run on Stripe. A lot of SAS companies do that.
1:26:02
A lot of SAS companies do that.
1:26:03
So you can imagine in the future if you're trying to buy something that doesn't need to track inventory.
1:26:06
Uh you could buy it in chat GPT directly with Stripe.
1:26:11
But then if you are trying to buy something that might be out of stock or has a bunch of variations and you're storing that data in Shopify and doing downstream marketing on that and all the different tools that Shopify brings to bear, uh you will benefit from the Shopify chat GPT integration.
1:26:25
So I don't know that there I mean they're clearly jumping over the the the precipice together.
1:26:34
>> I am very when you think about using products any any LLM how efficient it is to >> find the information that you're looking for >> and now how efficient it's going to be to find the products that you're looking for.
1:26:50
There's there's plenty of categories that I'm that I don't expect to use LLMs for shopping.
1:26:56
Like, hey, uh, you know, like I'm not going to go in here and like look for, >> I don't know, some jackets, right?
1:27:05
Like casual jackets, right?
1:27:08
Because that that to me is like >> I don't know.
1:27:11
I care a lot more about discovering a new brand and understanding what they're about and things like that.
1:27:16
But in the context of like purely functional goods, I'm looking to see what Amazon does in in regards to chat GBT because think about how terrible it is to search for products on Amazon. >> It's rough right now.
1:27:30
>> Uh I I'm an Amazon respector, Andy Jasse respector.
1:27:33
I'm a Jeff Bezos respector.
1:27:35
Uh, but whenever I if I could search on chat GBT, find me uh, you know, I don't know, a paper towel holder from companies that existed more than 100 years ago, right?
1:27:47
I don't want to go and buy a paper towel holder that's cheap$4 that's a knockoff of an American >> and they hack the SEO and they hack the star rating and they hack the reviews and they're paying for ads.
1:27:58
And so and so chat I' I've always wanted a to be able to shop on Amazon without any of the knockoff Chinese like uh >> and they should be able to do that.
1:28:08
They should be able to solve that pretty easily by vending an LLM just into the search box and letting you search with natural language.
1:28:15
Like you're already searching just let me query whatever I want.
1:28:20
>> But also I think the average Amazon user probably is like just give me the paper towel holder that's $3 direct from the factory.
1:28:26
But I think that LLMs will be able to provide a level of personalization that is >> Yeah.
1:28:32
So maybe those hundred-year-old paper towel holder companies will say now is the time to go deeper into Shopify or Stripe and Profound to get mentioned in Chad GPT, right?
1:28:43
And then from there uh assume that they're not going to be able to win the Amazon game anymore because it's being tuified. Yeah.
1:28:54
And so those brands will move over and and and like you know generate customers from uh chat users.
1:29:03
>> The question is I wonder if OpenAI has a take rate here. >> Mhm.
1:29:09
>> Um >> like because they will these brands in the example that Toby gives.
1:29:13
I'm looking for lightweight trail running shirts that's that stay cool. Can you help?
1:29:18
>> Historically that if somebody's searching that and buying historically Google is taking taking a cut, right, through through AdSense or if somebody's just scrolling and a brand on Instagram and or they get an ad for >> I would assume that it's exactly the same as the the Facebook and Google take rate >> and that you will look back on the commerce and you're like I I pay the Google tax, I pay the Facebook tax, I pay the chatbt tax. >> Yeah.
1:29:45
>> And companies will be happy to do that because the alternative is no growth.
1:29:49
The alternative is no customers. >> Yeah.
1:29:51
And the qu and the question is again this is where Mark Cuban is pushed back you know is is what if what if the best product is not on Shopify or not not not not set up in a way that you can buy it right. >> Yeah.
1:30:05
I mean the hope is that >> the only recommending products that they have partnerships with. >> Sure.
1:30:09
>> If so then that sort of violates the trust that the user has been developing.
1:30:13
So >> they have some stuff to figure out. >> Yeah.
1:30:15
The hope is that there's there's a division between the editorial and commerce teams and that the the the team that search that surfaces like knowledge retrieval results will focus on just getting you the most accurate information and then the commerce team will focus on monetizing all of those.
1:30:31
But >> yeah, >> we will see.
1:30:31
Um >> in other news, uh there's a post here from Oxon says, "God forbid men have hobbies.
1:30:38
It's Arkansas men arrested for taking turns shooting each other while wearing bulletproof vests after Why were they arrested?
1:30:45
This doesn't seem illegal.
1:30:47
This seems like top tier operator >> guys being dudes.
1:30:51
>> Yeah, give them a break.
1:30:52
>> I feel like this post has gone viral >> many times.
1:30:56
>> Many, many, many times.
1:30:57
>> Yeah, it's from 2019 and then somebody just found it and quote tweeted it when it went viral. Had >> no 200,000 likes. Wow. >> Um, interesting.
1:31:05
Well, gas station Barbie says, "Feels kind of weird that no branch of the government sends you a card when you have a baby.
1:31:11
Like that's a new citizen."
1:31:13
Social Security >> and yeah, they do.
1:31:15
They guess they literally do >> add it to the >> Yeah, it should just be a birthday card instead of something you have to apply for.
1:31:23
Uh, growing Daniel says, "J Vance, I know you see my tweets.
1:31:25
This would be a nice touch."
1:31:26
Uh, apparently in Finland, the government sends you a large box of supplies when your first kid is born. That's >> That's sweet. >> It's very sweet.
1:31:33
Um well, Elellaniano is describing the wide range of Palunteer all understanders with with uh Nick Fuentes and Tim Dylan on the left and of course a Palunteer insider on the right and Jim Kramer right in the middle.
1:31:47
I suppose he he kind of he kind of uh it seems like he's slightly edging to the right if you look at his shoulder.
1:31:54
His head is at like negative one, but his right shoulder >> we're going to have Jim on the show soon.
1:32:00
We'll ask him what Palanteer does.
1:32:02
I think I think Jim has a very good thesis for Palanteer actually.
1:32:04
I think he has a pretty strong understanding.
1:32:05
I would put him closer to a four or a five on this.
1:32:09
Um well, the oldest hotel in the world is the Nishima Onsen Kunan in Japan and has been in business since 75 AD.
1:32:21
It's still a family business for 52 generations. >> So long. Oh.
1:32:27
Oh, you thinking decades with your business?
1:32:32
>> Are you thinking generations?
1:32:33
>> Oh, you're going on a hundredyear run. That's nice. That's quaint.
1:32:35
What about a 1300year run? Uh, let's step it up.
1:32:40
Let's step up the ambition, folks.
1:32:42
>> I think they should make this. >> You're a founder.
1:32:43
They should make it an AON Sheil says in Japanese.
1:32:47
>> 53rd generation has the opportunity to do the funny thing.
1:32:52
>> Just turn it into a Motel 6 and bring in private equity. Lever it up.
1:32:55
turn it into a McDonald's or script.
1:32:59
>> I've been learning about finance.
1:32:59
I think we should play around with leverage.
1:33:03
>> What is going on that the 52nd grandson doesn't botch it? Like that's crazy.
1:33:08
So much tradition and reliability.
1:33:13
>> I hope Dylan Field does this with Figma. >> Me too.
1:33:15
That would be a fantastic >> We should ask him 52.
1:33:17
Can you Can you do 53 generation?
1:33:22
>> Where will Figma be in the year 3,300?
1:33:25
That's what I want to know.
1:33:25
Dylan, let's start thinking in millennia.
1:33:30
>> Uh, Shiel has some extra context here.
1:33:32
He says, "In Japanese tradition, you adopt a capable manager or have ar or or have arrangement to mar to have him marry your daughter to keep business in the family.
1:33:42
Otherwise, there's no way you'd keep something like this in the family for this long."
1:33:44
This is still common practice.
1:33:46
98% of adoptions in Japan are adults.
1:33:49
Almost all men 20 to 30 brought in for business succession purposes.
1:33:54
Among many others, Suzuki and Toyota have had multiple generations of adopted son-in-laws to keep them in the family business. >> That's crazy. >> Wow.
1:34:01
Well, >> let's bring this concept into enterprise software.
1:34:05
>> Dylan is in the reream waiting room.
1:34:06
Let's bring him into the TVP Ultra Dome.
1:34:09
His first virtual appearance, I believe, on the show.
1:34:11
He's of course uh hit a gong live with us at the New York Stock Exchange which is uh >> which we a slight upgrade from Zoomly retired the gong >> but uh but thank you so much for joining us Dylan. How are you doing today?
1:34:24
>> Thank you for having me back. Good to see you guys. >> Great to see you. >> Great to see you.
1:34:27
Uh what's new in your world?
1:34:31
>> Well, I've I've been deep in it this weekend uh with Cloud Sonet 4.
1:34:33
5 if I'm going to be real with you.
1:34:37
Yeah, >> in Figma make kind of still swimming in that. >> What? Well, yeah.
1:34:42
Give me your initial reactions.
1:34:44
Like, do you care about the benchmarks model card?
1:34:46
Are you tracking like the the meter, like how long a task can run?
1:34:51
Are you more like just chat with it like it's a person, have really short back and forth exchanges to get the vibe or the texture of the of the words that are coming out?
1:34:59
or you put it on a really critical business task and then benchmark it against one of your top developers or something like how do you evaluate a new AI model as a CEO? >> Well, okay.
1:35:11
So, there's the personal side and there's the Figma side and there's a CEO side maybe. >> Sure.
1:35:16
Um, so I'll start with personal, which I have not gotten into yet, but I love playing with these models, uh, testing them at their limits, seeing if I can, you know, get them into sort of weird headspaces.
1:35:30
>> And, uh, that's just like a hobby of mine.
1:35:33
>> What's a weird >> You're trying to oneshot them.
1:35:37
>> No, I I mean, look, it doesn't have to be a one shot or like single prompt.
1:35:39
You know, the longer you go, the more interesting it gets.
1:35:43
Yeah, you keep going in the models.
1:35:45
I'm seeing >> what's the weirdest uh what what's what's an example of like a you know, you don't have to name the model, but like what what kind of weird what's the weirdest headsp space you've got in a model in is they're just hallucinating, you know, more and more intensely type of thing.
1:36:02
Um, look, I mean, models are trained on the internet and the internet uh has some weird stuff on it and you know what do you find it in there?
1:36:10
It's kind of fascinating and uh I won't give examples or definitely not companies or model providers.
1:36:17
Uh what I do instead is I try to like if I find a good repro case, I send it over to the models and >> sure >> that way they can figure out what to do with it.
1:36:25
Uh yeah, it's funny if you think the models are the models trained on the internet that means like the models effectively trained on stumble upon you know like that that level of range right which is quite quite wide.
1:36:38
>> Uh there's a lot to the internet deep >> for sure.
1:36:41
>> So take the other specifically at the not even at the >> I haven't even gone there with 4. 5 yet another time.
1:36:48
Uh but I'd say that um for Figma for Figma uh that is where my attention's been focused so far.
1:36:56
>> And with Figma make in particular, we've been just trying to figure out, okay, how do we make it so that um we're able to quickly pull in Sonnet 4.
1:37:04
5 to make and then evaluate, you know, are we ready for it?
1:37:11
Do we have to do anything differently?
1:37:12
Is uh this a good addition, a good improvement?
1:37:15
And um the more we play with it this weekend, the more we used it, it was so impressive how it made make better.
1:37:25
Um everything from planning and just um thinking through and evaluating, understanding the code base that it was working on, whether it was like a shorter prompt or a longunning session.
1:37:38
um to thinking through uh just sort of like the way it should evaluate a prompt and uh giving better results and also you know we recently introduced this new feature where you can copy from make output into Figma design >> and we've since launch had a way to basically go from Figma design into make and basically copy paste in and that way you can bring your design uh into whatever you're coding and creating.
1:38:09
And the consistency that we're now seeing with 4.
1:38:15
5 on that part of it, that round trip, that's the part that's most incredible.
1:38:21
And it's so uh just kind of like gives me the chills a bit because we literally launched this feature where we copied from make output to Figma design last week, not knowing when we launched it that, you know, 4.
1:38:33
5 was coming, it would make it so much better.
1:38:37
And here we are and we're like okay well that's a good surprise.
1:38:38
Uh but I guess the general point is just it's really nice to be in a place where and I think this is an important thing for everyone to be thinking about in software as the models get better you need to get better.
1:38:51
So for us, we look at the models getting better at Figma.
1:38:52
We're like, "Okay, great. Figma gets better.
1:38:53
All of our users um are going to benefit from this."
1:38:59
And I think it's really important that you're always in that sort of headsp space of how to make sure that you're setting up your strategy that way.
1:39:08
>> How do you think about the Figma make user base, the community?
1:39:10
Uh right now there are so many different subsets of AI users.
1:39:18
There's folks who can tell you the difference from one paragraph. Oh, that came from 40.
1:39:23
That came from CL sonnet 3. 5.
1:39:26
Uh, and then there are people who are like, I got to try that AI thing out soon.
1:39:30
Uh, is is the Figma make community in a place where 4.
1:39:34
5 Sonic can just be like a strict upgrade that there's no resistance to or is it something where you have to think about model switching and and leaving some choice up to the user?
1:39:47
Are there cost considerations?
1:39:50
Like how much work are you putting on the user or the community and where's the right pivot point for that?
1:39:57
>> Yeah, I think there's to your question about um sort of the diversity of use cases and personas that might be applicable here.
1:40:05
There's so many different users on our platform uh and types of behavior that we see.
1:40:10
You know about uh you know a third of our users are designers, twothirds are non-designers.
1:40:16
Design's always at the core.
1:40:18
And I I honestly think that just from my reflections on this weekend, one thing I keep coming back to is like I think we're just entering this era of the 10X designer where the designer is going to be able to do so much more than ever before.
1:40:37
You know, designers have knowledge not only of aesthetic, UX, and craft, but also the value is just moving up the stack.
1:40:46
And the designer uh will be in this position of leverage where they're going to be able to do um a lot in terms of product building and creating products with craft uh that just create joy and thinking of the entire system and then pulling everybody else in and helping lead the charge.
1:41:03
And uh I think that it's just this time where good enough is no longer enough.
1:41:11
Uh good enough is mediocre.
1:41:14
You have to be great if you want to make it so that you can win.
1:41:20
And uh I think that the more power that designers have, the more leverage they have, then the more likely they are to be able to help a company win.
1:41:30
Um, and so that's just kind of like how I see things going in general.
1:41:35
Um, and on the implementation side, uh, I think it's like not as relevant.
1:41:41
You know, you just kind of have a variety of ways that people, um, want to interact or different cycles of AI adoption people are at and you need to meet them where they're at and you need to prog.
1:41:58
And so it gets back to the basics there.
1:42:00
How do you think about um the the vibe or the taste of the designs that are coming out of these models?
1:42:09
I keep coming back to the the midjourney example where it just feels like David Holes did something different from just take the average or like or like you know minimize the loss function.
1:42:25
It feels like there's his artistic vision in there in every generation no matter what your prompt is and then you can do a lot of different things on top of it.
1:42:36
And so it's almost this like collaboration between the artist David Holes and the artist who's the prompter.
1:42:42
And I'm wondering if you think that like like how does the flavor of design that's coming out of 4.
1:42:48
5 plus Figma make like where does the human opinion get inserted at each level and how does that like how much of that is actually happening like can you tell the difference in the flavor of design that's coming out of a certain model?
1:43:03
I I think um we're not yet at like a Dolly 2 moment for Z or a majourney moment for Z.
1:43:13
That's happened a relatively the same time. >> Yeah.
1:43:16
>> And uh you look at Dolly one compared to Dolly 2, you know, it's uh it's easy to dismiss and um I think design generation will get better.
1:43:26
At the same time, I think that the law of averages concept that you kind of mentioned um is sort of the reality today and likely will be the reality for a long time. >> Yeah.
1:43:38
And what is critical is iteration, the ability to push in a direction and getting to great.
1:43:45
And if you're able to do that and you're able to uh advance your craft, if you're able to have a sense of what the culture is and what the business problems are and what the engineering challenges might be, bring it all together with a great design, user experience, aesthetic.
1:44:05
Um it's it's like it's not just the style, it's the entire system you have to hold in your head and figure out.
1:44:14
um along with brand marketing point of view.
1:44:17
How is it all going to work work together?
1:44:20
And if you can do that, that's like where I think everything unlocks. >> Yeah.
1:44:27
>> How what's your read on sentiment right now in the design community broadly around AI?
1:44:33
around AI? Because on on our side as a business that that is constantly working with creative people externally obviously we have people internally but we have like basically as much demand as ever for like talent talented creative people like we don't we have a ton of
1:44:51
work that we want to do and uh >> but we also have an unlimited demand for Figma make and tools that help us instantiate ideas and there's a lot of stuff where we're like we just need to do the footer or the out or the buttons and like the faster we can get that out the better. >> Yeah. But but but there's this sense of >> Yeah.
1:45:08
>> Yeah. But but but there's this sense of um we have a insatiable demand for novel thinking and ideas and concepts and it's it's less a it's less a >> I can't tell if you're saying we humanity or we TVPN because >> I'm talking about both but but TVPN and
1:45:26
it's less of oh is this possible like is making this animation >> uh going to be you know uh uh within budget it's more it's more like well what animation should we willing to pay willing to pay a lot for that kind of original thinking. But I'm
1:45:41
But I'm curious like where where you see the >> um kind of where where sentiment is at today because on the software development side it seems very clear as as when you can build software faster and cheaper.
1:45:55
Well, we want more engineers to build more software because the world needs a lot of software.
1:45:58
And I think same thing for truly great novel creative work. >> Yeah.
1:46:04
Um, well, first of all, I'm hearing a strong advertisement uh on TVPN for TVPN that you all are trying to hire.
1:46:11
So, hopefully our viewers can like uh apply somewhere.
1:46:16
But the uh the thing that I would call out is I I think that um >> we're almost seeing a parallel to the AI talent wars with design right now. >> Yeah.
1:46:28
>> At least amongst the companies that are really getting it.
1:46:29
Um the ones that have internalized the design is going to be how you win or lose and that's the craft, the details that matter.
1:46:36
They are really getting aggressive.
1:46:40
Not like meta AI aggressive, let me be clear, but very aggressive.
1:46:47
And um it's I think just again value moving up the stack >> and uh that's something that all companies will eventually figure out.
1:46:58
I just hope that uh a bunch of companies don't figure out too late.
1:47:02
But yeah, I think Jeban's paradox as applied to talent that is adept at using models and uh doing amazing work and really pushing the boundaries of what's possible and what could be created and how much craft you can have, how much you can delight people.
1:47:20
Uh that's real and the demand for development is certainly not uh uh shrinking.
1:47:29
shrinking. I think that um you know it's never been met and at Figma I mean we're doing headcount planning like we're hiring almost all areas as we go into this next year and in big ways and I think just generally you know our point of view from the start about AI at Figma um is like how do you both lower the
1:47:49
floor make it so more people can come into the design process but also raise the ceiling make it so designers can do more and I think that's something that's a shared view maybe We were one of the first to articulate it if not the first but uh I believe that most of the products that are in the sort of AI space are trying to do the same thing. They're trying to make it so that more
1:48:09
They're trying to make it so that more folks are able to be part of uh this life cycle and also they're trying to make it so that people that are the experts are able to do more than ever before.
1:48:24
Do you have a view on like the shape of the design community as a function of maybe the amount of designers working in a particular organization?
1:48:37
Are there are there more design firms than ever?
1:48:40
Are there more solo design firms that are profitable and making money than ever?
1:48:44
Is the power law getting steeper or is the floor rising or both?
1:48:49
Do you have any idea on like the shape of the design community and and the shape of how designers work together uh or just make money independently uh in the age of AI?
1:49:04
>> Yeah, I think um there's a lot of work here we've done on the sort of company side and we're seeing there just more and more people getting involved in design and more design hiring.
1:49:16
Yeah, >> I think in that um more freelancer agency segment there's more research to do uh to understand is the same effect happening.
1:49:27
Um but I'll maybe think back historically um you know when there was this first wave of design hiring and people realized that design talent was critical to success.
1:49:38
One of the first things they did was they started to snap up the agencies and they would literally just start acquiring agencies of great design talent.
1:49:47
design talent. And so uh that's how like for example Tannon Lax um became uh involved in then Facebook then reality labs uh and John Lax ended up leading up reality labs for a while >> and uh they got someone who was legendary design talent to be able to be
1:50:08
at the forefront of their work on Oculus for for quite some time and um I I would not be surprised if similar things started happening Um but I also think that um you know back in the early days of Figma it was this question even of like how many designers are there in the United States in the world. I mean the Bureau
1:50:31
I mean the Bureau of Labor Statistics said that there were 250,000 designers.
1:50:35
It's like well that seems wrong in 2012 but like how many are there actually?
1:50:40
I don't know maybe it's like 500,000 not 250,000 but like is it like a venture scalable business? We don't know.
1:50:46
And uh but what we noticed was that values move up the stack and it was going to be the case that everyone was going to build up uh their design team and the design would be so important as this overall system changed.
1:51:01
And I I think that that same thesis we held then in 2012 uh it has not changed.
1:51:08
It is the same thesis we hold today.
1:51:12
And I really believe that uh sort of this era of the 10x designers here, it's um just starting in some ways, but it's going to be quite incredible and it'll require more designers to step up as leaders and uh for them to lean into leadership roles that they may have otherwise not considered.
1:51:36
Uh but you know if they don't then I think it's going to be a dynamic where everyone's trying to get involved in design and they don't really know the guardrails or how to do it exactly and um you have a lot of people with a lot of thoughts but not many like railways built tracks built um for folks to go down.
1:51:55
So that's the challenge I think that many design uh oriented folks will will have and the need for design leadership this time.
1:52:03
Shopify just acquired a design studio last month, by the way.
1:52:07
Someone someone in our chat mentioned this.
1:52:09
Um, what's your thinking around uh open source?
1:52:12
You obviously have a close relationship with with Mike over at Anthropic.
1:52:17
He's on on the board and and obviously Claude uh has consistently led on on codegen, so they're a natural partner for Figma Make.
1:52:27
But is open source something you're exploring or or um just given that they're not uh >> there was for a while that was like commoditize your compliments but maybe the LM yeah I'm super interested to hear what you think.
1:52:41
Yeah, I mean, look, there's um I think uh first of all, I mean, Mikey and I from the start of just looking at uh him being on the board, we had to make sure that, you know, it was clear we as Figma have to choose whatever is best for Figma. >> Yeah.
1:53:00
>> Um you know, as models get better, we get better.
1:53:03
But if we're not choosing the right models, then we're not getting better. >> So, yeah, >> on 4.
1:53:08
5, both of the eval choice.
1:53:08
uh you know roll it out to users.
1:53:15
There's gonna be a lot of other model improvements and of course open source is something we're always watching too.
1:53:20
>> And so uh it's exciting just how much is happening right now and I think that uh it's going to be just a fun next few months to see the continued model releases.
1:53:32
Uh I'm I'm pretty psyched.
1:53:35
>> What are your thoughts on hardware right now?
1:53:37
Um, that feels like a place where we're seeing uh a reemergence, a lot of hype around uh Meta's new devices, uh, potentially a new design surface as people design more um, more physical products uh, that are maybe enabled by AI.
1:53:57
It just feels like that could be kind of the next thing, some sort of like Cambrian explosion of hardware devices.
1:54:03
Or maybe it's all just just AirPods forever or something. Who knows?
1:54:08
But I'd love to hear your take on like how is is is there is there a demand from you for new hardware devices like the the Waycom tablet is obviously legendary in the design community uh but it's a completely proumer professional device.
1:54:23
Just what how are you thinking about hardware these days?
1:54:27
Well, I think in the Figma context, um, what we think about is, okay, what are the screens that we need to serve and our users need to design for?
1:54:38
>> Uh, and that's why I was so excited to be able to check out um, Meta's new glasses and uh, also the neural band.
1:54:47
They're the band is like underappreciated. So cool.
1:54:49
Yeah, >> people need to People won't it won't >> get a reaction until enough people have actually tried it because it's like >> it looks just like a whoop band.
1:54:57
Like there's nothing that looks crazy about it until you actually try it and you're like, "Oh, you can fully see what's going on." >> Yeah. >> Yeah.
1:55:04
And um but like let's be clear, I mean this was years in development uh many years.
1:55:11
I mean they've been at it for so long now.
1:55:14
Uh, and I think at the first time I got the demo was uh, almost a year and a half ago, year and a few months ago, and then I saw it again right before config.
1:55:24
Uh, but like the sort of new and improved version. >> Yeah.
1:55:28
>> And it just takes a long time to go build these new form factors.
1:55:32
Um, you know, the same thing is being true in auto.
1:55:38
It's true, uh, you know, in wearables in general.
1:55:43
uh it's probably going to become true in other surfaces that people will find.
1:55:47
And I I think that whether it's AR, VR, uh you know, curved glass, um you know, small screen sizes, large screen sizes, there's a lot of surfaces that designers now need to target.
1:56:02
And we haven't even gotten to, you know, AI and agents and what do designers need to do to create context in these places, too.
1:56:10
I think in many ways, we're just in the MS DOS era of AI.
1:56:15
Uh we are still figuring out how to explore this amazing uh laden space. You've got this LM.
1:56:23
It's your spaceship, but you're in this like n dimensional space.
1:56:27
And the best way to like figure out where you are, your compass is your prompt. Natural language.
1:56:30
It's like what interfaces will we built for that?
1:56:33
How will we be able to figure out custom bespoke ways to do dimensionality reduction?
1:56:40
Figure out how to help people navigate better as these models and the architectures fundamentally improve.
1:56:44
Um, and also, you know, what protocols between the models should exist and what's the best way to create those because I think that uh there's a reason MCP has really caught on so fast.
1:56:56
is extremely valuable and we just launched uh with Figma the uh Figma MCP for design uh as a remote service before it was only desktop and local and also we improved the capabilities and then we did it for make as well.
1:57:13
So we want to make sure that people know you're not trapped to make uh Figma make if you're going prompt to code and you're um making it so that you're getting to some great output and you're spending a lot of time on it awesome.
1:57:25
like you always had download code, but now you can just have your MCP uh connect to Figma make and pull all your code in.
1:57:34
>> How is how is MCP adoption going?
1:57:34
Uh it it it feels like uh there's a there's a world where like I was promised like the AI didn't need an API because it would just use the computer, right?
1:57:44
And I imagine that there's a maybe we're not quite there, but there's a world where my my AI just literally opens a browser, goes to think about.
1:57:52
com, does whatever it needs to do just like a human.
1:57:53
Uh, and yet MCP seems to be like what you're identifying with like the energy around it is immense.
1:58:00
Um, how are people actually using it?
1:58:02
Like are there is there a killer app, killer feature, some story where you've been really excited about like the impact that it's had on an actual like design project or designer or firm or your company?
1:58:15
>> I mean, you should definitely try it out.
1:58:17
Like >> it is a sort of magic experience when you go and you've got your design structured in Figma with auto layout.
1:58:24
you've got your variables defined >> and then you're able to just, >> you know, basically press a button and with MCP, you pull in all that design context into your codebase. >> Sure.
1:58:35
>> And you can use inference to basically go figure out uh how to map it.
1:58:36
And I'm not saying it's all one shot, but like >> with either oneshot or a little bit of it or a prompting, if you have your design set up in a structured way, >> yeah, >> it it's a pretty wild experience.
1:58:49
you know, Coinbase was telling us about how it's really improved their workflow and um you know, we've heard from many other customers that I'm not sure I have permission to name, but uh how much it's affected them and how powerful it's been.
1:59:05
And overall, yeah, people are super excited.
1:59:07
We've been thrilled with the response.
1:59:09
That's why we're investing so much time into it is because >> we really think this is a super important part of our story as a company is being more open and making sure that we really extend out to the greater ecosystem of AI.
1:59:25
>> Um there's so much that can be done in so many places and design is context and that context is valuable in so many different spots.
1:59:31
So I should think of of the MCP efforts as a almost like a business to consumer like a consumer benefit not necessarily just something like an API that that enables like better uh like B2B partnerships and integrations. Is that roughly correct?
1:59:48
>> Yeah, I think it's um uh you know I think everyone's still trying to figure it out for sure.
1:59:55
Uh but I think that yes um with the right MCP services out there the ways that they can affect um you know all sorts of places that you consume inference uh >> it's pretty pretty big and I think we're just kind of at the start.
2:00:16
>> So yeah for Figma uh we're very very excited about where we can go here.
2:00:19
Um and then yeah I think just you if you zoom out the bigger story that is being told is uh how do we go from idea to product >> and you know it used to be this very linear process but now we're no longer in that world.
2:00:40
uh we're in a world where instead uh people try various directions, various paths and you need to be able to generate a bunch of different ideas uh explore them with your team, figure out that option space.
2:00:54
We hope Figma make can be a big part of it, but even if someone has a different tool that they've they're using, um we also want to make sure that they're able to bring their design context in.
2:01:06
And um with that design context really help uh that other surface improve.
2:01:13
We think that's a win-win for everyone and it's most importantly a win for the user.
2:01:21
I'm so excited for today's middle schoolers and high schoolers to have access to these tools.
2:01:24
Like, can you imagine if you had had Figma make? >> It's incredible.
2:01:29
>> Like, when you at at that age, like you you you let somebody marinate with these kind of tools for a decade what they're going to be.
2:01:36
>> I mean, I'm pretty sure we've already seen posts about like a 15year-old sold a company for like $50 million or something like there's crazy stuff happening all over the place, >> but it's just going to be more and more and more.
2:01:46
>> Thank you so much for joining. Last question. >> It'll be wild.
2:01:48
Last question from the chat.
2:01:50
Uh, do you miss the ratty? >> Oh, uh, not really. No.
2:01:57
>> What is it at the university dining hall? Is that right? >> One of them. Yeah.
2:02:00
I was more of a V-dubb guy, but uh >> Okay, >> there we go.
2:02:04
>> Yeah, the uh uh the was um a great place to see people. Okay.
2:02:09
And but then again, I also like I I hate standing in line, so like I would time out everything so that I either arrive super early or super late so that way I wasn't in the long line.
2:02:20
Um but yeah, the food uh maybe not the best, but you know, good the vibes, right?
2:02:26
The >> memories good vibes.
2:02:27
Well, thank you so much for bringing good vibes to this appearance.
2:02:32
>> Yeah, massive week for you guys. >> Massive week.
2:02:33
We'll talk to you soon, Dylan. >> We'll talk soon. >> Have a good one. >> Good to see you.
2:02:36
Uh quickly let me tell you about fall the generative media platform for developers.
2:02:40
The world's best generative image video and audio models all in one place.
2:02:44
Develop and fine-tune models with serverless GPUs and on demand clusters >> for uh perplexity and many more.
2:02:51
>> And we have our next guest from Stripe in the Reream waiting room. We will bring in Jeff.
2:02:55
>> It's time to t Ultradome. Jeff, how you doing? >> Whoa.
2:02:59
>> Okay, >> we're purple.
2:03:00
>> I'm seeing some announcement lighting. What's going on?
2:03:04
>> We're here in New York.
2:03:04
We're finishing up uh some keynote practice for our event tomorrow, Stripe Touring, but I imagine you all want to talk about some uh Aentic Commerce today.
2:03:14
>> It's looking wild in there.
2:03:16
>> Uh yeah, give us >> I get excited enough about payments even without the neon lighting. Uh but uh better. >> Yeah. Uh yeah.
2:03:24
How uh give us the the actual news item?
2:03:27
It it seems like Sam Alman just found out about Stripe recently and decided to do some sort of deal or something.
2:03:32
of course like the companies go back a long way and so my my my question is like what's new about the relationship between the two companies today?
2:03:42
>> Yeah, really exciting.
2:03:42
So, uh, today, uh, for the first time ever, you can purchase where you prompt, >> uh, and inside of chatbt, you're able to discover products as, uh, lots of people are already doing, but now you can buy >> from businesses right in the chat.
2:03:57
And so, we partnered uh, with uh, OpenAI to build this as well as a open standard agentic commerce protocol to help more businesses get going of selling aically.
2:04:11
So, I'd love to get into all that. >> Yeah.
2:04:12
name every product I can buy today.
2:04:14
Uh I mean give me an example because uh I can imagine there are products where uh the company wraps in a different uh you know content management system or order management system versus there are other companies where they sell stuff and it's really just Stripe and a website and so that makes a ton of sense.
2:04:33
So what's the wheelhouse customer interaction look like? >> Yeah.
2:04:38
>> Yeah. So anytime uh you you you discover a product in chat GBT if that a seller is enabled on the agenda commerce protocol and is working with with open AAI you'll be able to purchase directly with any of the payment methods you've already saved with chat GBT for
2:04:54
subscription or be able to add one and what's really interesting is you know one of the big unblocks here is how do you scale adding merchants to Aentic commerce and how do you scale accepting Aentic payments and we have two big announcements that are going to unblock those foundations. One is the agent
2:05:08
One is the agent commerce protocol which is an open standard that we co-developed with OpenAI for businesses to make their checkouts agent viable, agent ready.
2:05:17
And so as a business you're used to, you know, first you're selling in the mall and then you're, you know, sold over the phone and then you sold at a website and now you're going to be able to express your checkout in a way that you want for agents to be able to initiate transactions.
2:05:34
And the second big thing is how do you actually move the money?
2:05:39
How do you get the payment uh from the buyer and have it sent to the merchant for processing in a secure way?
2:05:44
Which is why we built this shared payment token API which lets businesses on Stripe and businesses that might be using another processor be able to process Agentic payments.
2:05:57
And that those two things together are what really enable a launch like this.
2:06:03
uh getting more into the details if if for an e-commerce company in particular like where where does where's inventory managed is are you guys integrating I know Shopify had an announcement today too is that connected to this are these two totally different experiences like help me understand how like you know a specific company like an e-commerce brand is is going to uh can get started selling uh in online in in these LLMs. >> Yeah.
2:06:35
So, today's announcement for ChatBT uh has Etsy live.
2:06:36
So, today rolling out this morning uh you'll be able to purchase from Etsy sellers directly in the chat and Shopify is coming soon in the same in the same program.
2:06:47
So, these are the first two merchant partners, the first two e-commerce platforms that are uh are working with chatbt to be able to sell agent sell agentically through their um LM system and and their consumer base.
2:07:01
uh for merchants going forward.
2:07:01
You know, how do you at scale have a way to express your checkout as a merchant, as an e-commerce platform that isn't just um hey, have the agent like pretend to be on my site and uh click around to to do so.
2:07:19
How do you have a a uh standard API system for scaling those merchant integrations?
2:07:25
And that's what the Agentic Commerce protocol is.
2:07:26
It's a a way for any e-commerce platform, any business to be able to express their checkout in a way that an AI agent can then safely initiate the transaction.
2:07:38
Um, and we think this is a big unlock for how to scale Judge Commerce.
2:07:40
The world has already had lots of product feeds.
2:07:44
There are many atscale product feeds, but there isn't yet a way for a business to programmatically express their checkout in a way that they they can control um and have it be agent initiatable.
2:07:59
>> How does the standard that you built differ from MCP? Is it related? Is it compatible?
2:08:03
Are these two separate paths in the tech tree?
2:08:07
Yeah, we think that that that that uh the agent commerce protocol is specifically designed to help with initiating agentic checkouts online and it is it is dedicated to that type of commerce use case.
2:08:23
It shares a lot of the same principles of being open and LM first as MCP does for generic tool usage.
2:08:30
But checkouts are complicated.
2:08:31
They have all kinds of weird back and forths and coupons and SKs and inventory and payment failures and payment success.
2:08:38
You need a dedicated specification.
2:08:40
And that's why we're so happy to partner with ChattBT with OpenAI to both build the standard but also have it be the way that they're going to scale uh their merchants.
2:08:48
And so uh you can get started at commerce. dev.
2:08:51
That URL happened to be available last week.
2:08:53
So u bought it >> and uh and that's and that's what we went went forward with.
2:08:58
Uh h how did how does uh the Apple tax feature in all of this?
2:09:03
It seems like I use JGP on my phone and Apple usually tries to take a cut if I buy something digital.
2:09:08
If I say >> Amazon physical goods historically have been exempt >> exempt, but if I'm buying a digital good, do you play nice with that?
2:09:16
Like how do you see that all playing out?
2:09:18
Yeah, today today's launch is is focused on on physical goods and I think there's going to be a variety of ways that um these third parties third party services are a are able to charge in various ecosystems.
2:09:30
Um but today's launch works on web on iOS on Android and as rolling out to all uh US chat GBT consumers this morning. >> Very exciting.
2:09:40
>> Do you think uh people are are underestimating how much of a shift this trend is going to be?
2:09:46
Because we were explaining before you got on earlier, if I can go on my phone and describe in plain English the exact type of product that I want, be served a number of options and in one click buy it, that's incredibly useful.
2:09:59
Even I I was giving the example of even uh browsing Amazon and trying to just find if I'm trying to find a uh the example I gave is like a paper towel holder.
2:10:09
This is personal for me because I I was uh I I bought a really cheap uh direct to factory paper, you know, direct from factory paper towel holder and I was just like just give me >> That's not the place to skimp. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. You use it.
2:10:24
You use it multiple times a day, right?
2:10:26
Um but but I I've always wanted almost a layer over Amazon to just just products that have existed or from or from brands that have existed for more than a hundred years, right?
2:10:36
And this is the kind of thing that you can describe of I want to buy a paper towel holder, but I want to buy it from a company that's over 100 years old, right?
2:10:42
If they've been around for >> like it's like uh your your um your futuristic purchase is a I want the legacy provider. >> Yeah.
2:10:50
It's a perfect combination.
2:10:50
>> Yeah. It's a perfect combination. I think I think it you're expressing what many of us are all feeling in our lives is which is the modality for discovery has completely changed and we expect that commerce to get closer and closer to intent and it's certainly having tested having worked on and tested this for the last uh many many months it feels extremely natural to to purchase
2:11:14
where where you are discovering u my garage is full of things I bought from Etsy uh as we as we said over the over the over the last months Um, and this is just the beginning because with this type of foundational agentic commerce set of APIs and open standards, it's really unlock to both scale merchants, scale AI agents, scale all types of new um, consumer and business experiences. And so I think it's very much just the
2:11:39
And so I think it's very much just the beginning here, but we have, I think, unlocked, we hope, how to take these things from prototype to atscale production.
2:11:46
And I really encourage folks who are watching today to to uh look on chap GBT and try to um find something fun uh that you've always wanted to buy that might be have been on page 10,000 of your search engine but might be like right there uh as the LM really can can provide you very personalized um recommendations.
2:12:06
It's it's just very fun to on the- go >> buy in a tap in this kind of way. >> I love it.
2:12:11
Uh well, thank you so much for stopping by and >> tons more questions uh I have but but probably stuff you can't even get into, but we'll have you on again soon to talk more. Congrats. >> Congratulations.
2:12:20
We'll talk to you soon, Jeff.
2:12:22
>> Great to see you, Jeff. >> See y'all.
2:12:23
>> And in the financial news, Etsy is up 15. 83% on the news. It's a 7. 42 billion company. Head over to public.
2:12:33
com investing for those that take it seriously.
2:12:36
They got multiasset investing, industryleading yields, and they're trusted by millions. >> Not financial advice. our next guest.
2:12:42
Yeah, may maybe you want to go long, maybe you want to go short. >> 15%.
2:12:45
>> But uh big boost on Etsy products potentially being sold in chat GPT.
2:12:50
>> Well, we have Adam Draper in the reream waiting room. Let's bring him in. >> Whoa, there he is. >> Let's go. >> Let's go.
2:12:58
What's happening, >> bro?
2:13:00
Jordy John, so excited to talk to you. >> Let's go.
2:13:04
We're excited to have you.
2:13:04
Uh uh give us give us the news. What's happening? >> All right.
2:13:09
Uh well, we raised $87 million actually to Yeah, let's go. >> Let's go.
2:13:19
>> Actually, what actually?
2:13:21
>> Well, it was 87654321.
2:13:27
Uh because you know that's how rockets go off. 87654321. >> There we go. Boost VC. It's a rocket. >> Yeah.
2:13:34
And we get to we get to continue to do what we're doing.
2:13:36
Our our investors love our returns.
2:13:37
So, we just get to keep doing what we're doing for the last 13 years, which is backing found great founders on the fringe. >> Amazing.
2:13:45
Uh you were uh early to sci-fi investing or or maybe did it before it was was uh was so on trend.
2:13:54
Uh >> I was a early investor in uh Coinbase, a company called Virgin Labs that did Snapchat that became Snapchat Spectacles.
2:14:04
Uh, I've been investing in what any kid would dream of for the last 15 years.
2:14:12
Uh, I just flew a jetpack. >> No way. No way.
2:14:16
Yeah, somebody sent me uh somebody sent me a video earlier.
2:14:23
Uh, maybe it was the same company.
2:14:23
Were Were you flying with uh Jackson Moses?
2:14:28
Is that Is it Gravity Industries? Is that the company? >> I was fly.
2:14:30
So, okay, this is the coolest thing.
2:14:33
Uh I you know I I read my first Iron Man comic when I was like six and then about a decade ago we invested in uh Iron Man thesis which ended up investing in Gravity. >> There we go.
2:14:48
>> And I uh got to fly a jetpack two days. >> So >> there we go.
2:14:55
>> I I I >> heard there was some fundraising news. >> Yeah. Yeah. John's back. Hit that. Hit that gong. 87 million. >> There we go.
2:15:09
>> Adam's the most fired up.
2:15:09
You're the most fired up guest I think we've ever had. Nobody else is jumping.
2:15:12
You're at the standing desk. That's fantastic. Got to tell people.
2:15:15
Thank you guys so much for doing this.
2:15:17
You guys are just the greatest cheerleaders and champions of this tech world. Appreciate it.
2:15:23
>> We love Nobody loves techn I would hate if somebody loved technology more than more than us.
2:15:28
Maybe you do, but but break down the jetpack.
2:15:30
How does this like it's a good example of like a specific portfolio company.
2:15:35
How does this go commercial?
2:15:38
>> I I think that the promise of venture capital, the hope of venture capital is that you get to invest in all the dreams that anyone ever had as a 12-year-old and they end up coming true.
2:15:50
And I got to do that with a jetack.
2:15:53
I I like I invested in like exactly what my childhood self would have loved to have invested in.
2:16:01
Uh except it was seven years ago and then they made insane progress to the point where not only one person can do it, anyone can do it.
2:16:09
I was I just flew down to I I got to Bakersfield and then I got to fly a jetpack and so I am >> okay. Okay.
2:16:17
I love I love everything about jetpack.
2:16:20
How how does uh gravity specifically?
2:16:24
How are they looking to commercialize?
2:16:26
Uh, you know, what what are what are some of the use cases?
2:16:30
Is it is it going to be the kind of thing that that is more initially, you know, consumer?
2:16:36
It's just fun to fly a jetpack. So, people pay to do it.
2:16:39
>> By the way, one of the things I always noticed when you guys are doing your thing is that your cans pile up.
2:16:42
So, I wanted to make sure. >> There we go.
2:16:46
You got up >> double fisting.
2:16:48
So we uh so but first off we invest in all founders who are on the fringe of doing great incredible things.
2:16:56
Uh Gravity specifically we saw the I saw a man fly so he flew in my back parking lot back here in San Monteo and when someone flies >> you got to write him a check.
2:17:09
>> You write a check right there.
2:17:09
And so we wrote a check right there.
2:17:12
Seven years later, uh he's built a, you know, multi-million dollar business.
2:17:17
And it has two parts to it.
2:17:19
There's the defense part and the media part.
2:17:21
And also this training school so that people like I could become pilots. Jetack pilots.
2:17:26
And basically, I highly recommend We should go do a We should go. >> Sounds fantastic.
2:17:34
>> I've always wanted to have a jetpack in the studio in the Ultradome. >> Yeah.
2:17:37
For really big fundraising, right?
2:17:38
What's the what's the defense uh what's the defense use case here in your view?
2:17:45
Because I can imagine in in sort of um more controlled environments, this could be a cool way to turn a human into a drone.
2:17:53
But at the same time on the battlefield, I don't know with with a lot of drones, I don't know if I'd want to strap myself in and get into get into the air just considering you might be a target.
2:18:03
But how do you view the defense?
2:18:06
It turns out boarding boats, it turns out, is one of the best defense capabilities.
2:18:09
So, being able to go from one boat to another boat.
2:18:11
Uh, >> you see that with like the Navy Seals show up in the little >> That was the other demo they did, right? >> That was gravity.
2:18:20
>> Yeah, that was insane. So, gravity.
2:18:21
Every time I've seen a jetpack basically the last seven years, it was gravity. >> It's hilarious.
2:18:27
>> And it's really an innovation in vertical takeoff and landing engines.
2:18:31
People didn't believe there was a disbelief that you could build small enough engines that they would be able to lift an individual human off the ground um with enough fuel to live for long enough.
2:18:41
And so this has been a huge innovation.
2:18:44
Also, paramedic is a big deal.
2:18:47
Like if someone's lost on a mountain, you can just fly up there within a small amount of time and get it.
2:18:53
>> Uh and then the uh Yeah, dude.
2:18:53
I mean, I I've it was a lifelong dream to fly. I flew.
2:19:00
I'm going to be a I'm a jet pack racer, guys. >> Jetack racer.
2:19:04
>> I I don't know how to say this.
2:19:04
I don't know how to say this.
2:19:08
>> Just deploy deploy the fund in like the >> jetack stuff.
2:19:11
Yeah, >> like it could be bio jetack things.
2:19:12
It could be jetack things.
2:19:15
Just it needs to have jetpacks evidently. >> Amazing. >> Last question.
2:19:21
What what's the next category that is maybe if if jetpacks were underhyped seven years ago, what what what are you looking at today?
2:19:31
>> Uh these founders are coming into my office and they're saying I'm going to make you live 50 years longer.
2:19:35
I'm going to cure cancer.
2:19:38
I'm going to uh just cure all genetic disease.
2:19:41
Uh we're going to move from a world of treatment to a world of cures in the healthcare and science world.
2:19:48
So I would say bio is really the thing that I would say.
2:19:50
Uh and also one of the things we do as as boost VC is we actually put on a deep tech demo day with the entire deep tech early stage venture community and it's coming up on Wednesday where you can see some of these bio future forward companies.
2:20:06
Actually a bunch of the demo day companies have actually been on uh TVPN. Doug from Radiant. There we go. >> Incredible people. Gravity. There we go.
2:20:18
I expect to see you flying around the floor. Yeah. Of the of the demo.
2:20:22
>> Okay, we'll go down together. We'll do it together. Love it.
2:20:25
>> Yeah, you need a jetpack into the show.
2:20:26
The chat is demanding it.
2:20:26
Uh, thank you so much for hopping on the stream. We'll talk.
2:20:30
>> Great having you, Adam. Congrats on the new fun. >> See you soon. >> Hey, thank you.
2:20:33
We just got to keep backing the founders. >> Amazing. Incredible.
2:20:36
Talk >> a great rest of your day.
2:20:37
Let me tell you about Turbo Puffer.
2:20:39
Search every bite serverless vector and full text search.
2:20:42
Built from first principles and object storage fast, 10x cheaper and extremely scalable.
2:20:47
>> We puffing Simon Turbo Puffer >> tomorrow live in the TVP. >> Can't wait.
2:20:52
>> But for now, we have James Hawkins in the reream waiting room from Post Hog. >> Post Hog. Here he is. >> How you doing? >> Uh yeah, very well. Thank you very much.
2:21:01
>> Give us give us the fundraising news and then we'll figure out what you do. Let's amp it up. What you got for us? >> Sure.
2:21:07
Well, first of all, I'm very excited to announce that pineapple does not belong on pizza. >> Whoa. Shots fired.
2:21:15
>> I I I love pineapple on pizza.
2:21:15
That's >> I don't I don't I'm riding with James here. >> Okay.
2:21:19
Well, then you can hit the gong cuz I like this guy. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. >> He's my mortal enemy. No, I understand. It's an acquired taste. What inspired that?
2:21:27
What a timeline debating that?
2:21:30
That that that's a that's an eternal point of debate. Uh >> oh, it's fine. It's not a debate. is decidedly right. >> What about hot dog?
2:21:37
Hot is a hot dog a sandwich.
2:21:40
>> Hot uh is No, I don't think that's true.
2:21:42
>> What if you eat it like this? What if you turn it 90Β°?
2:21:44
Then it looks like a sandwich.
2:21:47
>> I feel like I feel like uh I'm not American.
2:21:49
I have a less strong opinion on this.
2:21:50
I think I think you guys are more >> If a dog wore pants, would it wear them with on the two back legs or across all four legs? These are the >> Wow.
2:21:58
You're not straying from the hard questions.
2:22:00
>> These are the hard questions.
2:22:03
>> I'll give you the actual I've got one more. I've got one more thing.
2:22:04
Um, so I'm very pleased to announce that we have raised our series >> E million 1. 4 million post. >> Congratulations. >> Massive.
2:22:15
>> Uh, what what unlocked it?
2:22:15
Uh, walk through the business, what's working, uh, the customers, the the problem set, everything. >> Sure.
2:22:23
Uh, so Postto is a very developer focused set of analytics tools and feature flags and stuff at the moment.
2:22:29
Um, we try and help you understand uh, how to build a better product basically.
2:22:33
basically help you understand your customers in lots of different ways.
2:22:34
Um like errors, analytics, we have 16 products. Um what's working well? >> 16 products. >> Yeah.
2:22:42
I think about 10 or 11 that are charged for and the rest in production. That's right.
2:22:47
Uh so yeah, we've been busy bees building stuff. Um what's working well?
2:22:51
We've got tons of engineers who we have really looked after.
2:22:54
We think there's been a big rise in product engineering engineers who want to decide what to work on.
2:22:57
Um, and so we've been able to sign up just an awful lot of them.
2:23:01
I think we have about 240,000 customers across like free and paid.
2:23:05
Um, and so we're kind of like a heavy productled growth.
2:23:09
Um, from engineers just installing our stuff basically.
2:23:13
>> What some of these tools I imagine would uh be fertile grounds for hyperscaler competition.
2:23:20
What's been the secret to uh maintaining differentiation against the big cloud platforms?
2:23:28
uh all the products in one has been the main thing. Um going very very wide.
2:23:30
Um because the way we think of it, there's lots of tools that help you you there are feature flag products, their experimentation products, their analytics tools, but it's the same customer underneath all of these.
2:23:41
And so we kind of felt it's just better, it is more important to our users to have all of their custom data in one spot and lots of things you can do off the back of that than it is to um buy like 15 point solutions basically.
2:24:00
>> What's your take on the idea of the compound startup versus uh iterating and adding one product after the other?
2:24:05
How focused do you want to be on a new product at one time?
2:24:09
Do you want to orient the entire company around the next product or do you want to have you know let's just get a bunch of things started we'll it will iterate towards greatness in all of them kind of simultaneously >> uh much more the latter.
2:24:21
So um we start a couple of products at a time um but we always have a small team that we leave behind on each product.
2:24:26
So back in the early days when we're smaller we would go hey new shiny thing everyone would move over y >> but then as the existing one got more and more growth um >> we'd start we just weren't very responsive to customers and so on.
2:24:37
it didn't feel like we're looking after people properly.
2:24:40
So we have tiny little teams like the average team size of postto is probably three people on each product.
2:24:45
Um it's just like three engineers deciding what to build.
2:24:46
Um we just try and get out of the way.
2:24:49
Um so we're fiercely anti- bureaucracy internally.
2:24:52
Um >> so yeah this this small team structure has worked great like very flat, very wide.
2:24:57
Um and a lot of autonomy for engineers. >> Yeah.
2:24:59
When you're when you're thinking about creating a new product, what is what is the bar in terms of turning something from an experiment?
2:25:05
you know, at what point would you would you launch something and maybe shut it down or or or if you're launching or by the time you're launching something, are you committed to maintaining it over the long run?
2:25:16
I'm curious what kind of the the framework is. >> Sure.
2:25:20
Um yeah, we really um we start at the bottom end of the market.
2:25:23
So the bar to us launching something's pretty low like we'll start targeting two person startups kind of doing YC for example is kind of uh start from the start is a phrase you hear a lot internally.
2:25:31
Um, in terms of retiring stuff, we haven't had to retire a product at this stage.
2:25:36
We've always built kind of products where we're going in with a late mover advantage. We consider it.
2:25:41
Um, so we're going in after a lot of the market.
2:25:43
This is actually behavior that we're having to change now um with AI in particular.
2:25:48
Um, because we're looking at figuring out how can we use like this sort of multi-dimensional data and all these different tools together.
2:25:53
Um, which is one of the challenges and that's partly why we did this round because we wanted to have the time and space and the ability to kind of go nuts.
2:25:58
ability to kind of go nuts. um trying to automate the way I'd kind of consider it is a bit like if you're trying to understand a painting and you can only see the color blue like one data type um you'll get a rough idea but it won't get a totally correct idea of what's happening and so we kind of think having all the tools and all the data is a bit like having all the colors um but this
2:26:15
is something that's new to us and it will take a little bit of time um and some confidence uh so that's kind of yeah it was probably the main driving force behind wanting to raise at this point >> last question for me um how has AI changed the business over the last few years there's so many different ways that you can launch AI products, you can use AI to speed up product development. There's a million different ways, but
2:26:35
There's a million different ways, but what's been the biggest thing that's actually uh worked for you?
2:26:40
>> Um, it's massively sped up product development and because we're building so many products at once.
2:26:43
Uh, it's given us a big it's just we already thought that was happening because there's more open source software available.
2:26:48
Um, and it's just ramped up that fully.
2:26:50
So now kind of we even have companies quite regularly emailing us like smaller startups being like, "Hey, would you consider buying a company?
2:26:56
consider buying a company? we don't know how to compete with compound approaches in our industry like we've become a feature of a bigger platform for example >> um and so I think we got lucky with that respect um we are targeting engineers and their workflow is entirely changing um and so we're trying to move towards a
2:27:12
world where we're generating kind of pull requests for people based on like error data their session like video clips of using their products um >> like their feedback and everything else that we're kind of feeding in so um that is a totally dramatic change for us um I think we've gone from honestly to like in complete excitement um about what's going on. >> That's great. >> That's great.
2:27:32
>> Uh one note, chat absolutely loves the website.
2:27:34
You should look at it, John.
2:27:36
It's absolutely stunning.
2:27:36
It's it's probably the best iteration I've seen of of take, you know, building like a desktop and making a website just like a desktop, right? Feeling like a system. Absolutely stunning. Uh, one question.
2:27:49
Was Postth Hog uh, a hot company at YC demo day or did it take time to to get people to kind of uh, come around to the team and the opportunity?
2:28:02
>> Um, we actually had I think relative to our batch we were doing quite well.
2:28:04
We had a lot of traction just free open source usage.
2:28:07
We just had an open source project to start off with.
2:28:09
Um, but our seed round was a train wreck to raise. It was like March 2020.
2:28:14
Um, and so I was like, man, we got this thing done in like 3 days.
2:28:18
And then I was like, I may not live to see the end of this round.
2:28:23
So yeah, we made like, you know, we made a bunch of people who put in like random little 5k checks, a bunch of money, which is actually one of the most fun parts if I'm honest.
2:28:29
Um, so yeah, the C round was very hard.
2:28:31
The later rounds it kind of got >> easier.
2:28:34
>> easier. um like the series A was um like Google Ventures um kind of preempted and we went with it because we uh there was so much kind of fear in the market fundraising at that time and then the later rounds all got much easier because we just had kind of obvious traction and we're quite an efficient business um
2:28:51
because we're inbound and so we haven't really needed >> money and that's our first rule of fundraising is do you not need to fund raise but we're not against fundraising and that served us extremely well later on but yeah the start the first round was the hardest by miles >> fantastic >> such a such an important lesson for anyone out there. It's like it's if your
2:29:04
It's like it's if your seed round is brutal, you know, it's not not necessarily can be an indicator that you're on the totally wrong path.
2:29:11
It can be an indicator that people just don't understand exactly the opportunity or or just how good the team is.
2:29:17
So, uh thank you for coming on and giving the update and congrats on on uh on the round. >> Thanks for coming. We'll talk to you soon.
2:29:24
>> Great to meet you, James. >> Bye. >> Cheers.
2:29:26
>> Let me tell you about Linear.
2:29:26
Linear is a purpose-built tool for building and planning products. You heard it from him.
2:29:32
They built a lot of products.
2:29:32
Meet the system for modern software development streamline issues projects and product road mapaps.
2:29:38
>> People forget they created modern they basically created the modern software as a service website. >> That's true. That's true.
2:29:44
>> How many how many thousands of companies have tried to emulate it?
2:29:46
But >> well up next we have Eric the CEO of Modal Labs.
2:29:49
He's in the reream waiting room coming in to the TBP and Ultradome. Welcome to the show. How are you doing? >> What's happening? >> Hey, how's it going?
2:29:57
It's great to >> It's great.
2:29:58
Uh >> great to finally have you. >> Yeah.
2:30:01
would you mind uh kicking us off with an introduction on yourself and the company? >> Yeah. Yeah.
2:30:05
So, so we build infrastructure for AI and so basically if you think about a lot of sort of traditional AI or sort of traditional infrastructure, you know, things like Kubernetes and Docker and things like that, uh really doesn't work well for all these new AI applications, you know, all whether that's, you know, generative media or like large language models or things like that.
2:30:23
So, we basically built a whole new software layer that makes it a lot easier for developers to build applications on top of that.
2:30:29
>> Where does that sit in the stack?
2:30:29
like are you trying to be the software layer at Stargate at like these massive massive uh data centers uh or or is there a different customer archetype that you can actually deliver value for at like a smaller scale?
2:30:44
What how does the market actually bifrocate?
2:30:48
>> Yeah, so we focus on slightly smaller companies.
2:30:50
Initially we saw a lot of PMF with with startups.
2:30:53
Uh but in the last year or so we've seen a lot of traction also with later stage companies you know public companies and enterprise companies.
2:31:00
>> What's the pricing model Stargate level? >> Yeah. Yeah.
2:31:03
What's the pricing model for something like this?
2:31:05
>> So it's all usage based uh which means you know sort of traditional basically like a traditional cloud vendor um like we charge per GPU hour essentially. >> Sure. Sure.
2:31:13
And then do you offer uh like abstraction layers on top of this?
2:31:18
Do you want to build a platform at some point or uh are you you are you happy vending it into another cloud partner that uh where the customer might not even be aware of you?
2:31:27
How do you how do you sit in the market over the long term?
2:31:31
>> No, we we we offer a very fat layer of like all these software abstraction that that focus on engineers uh writing code.
2:31:38
We we consider ourselves a a high code platform, right?
2:31:40
So it's meant for engineers who who want to write code and you know they they they need a better infrastructure that maybe traditional tools could offer them in terms of scaling up and down working with GPUs working with capacity all over the world. >> Sure.
2:31:52
>> And they want to write code.
2:31:54
>> What are the uh I mean have you what's the biggest like nightmare story from uh misconfigured infrastructure or like the the problem you're solving?
2:32:03
Have you seen just like millions of dollars go up in smoke? Uh is it pretty rare?
2:32:08
like what what's the shape of failure in the AI?
2:32:12
What are the stakes right now?
2:32:14
>> I don't know if I can recall anything. Okay.
2:32:18
>> Uh we're pretty good at like catching I mean in a couple of cases customers I don't mean with your software. >> Yeah.
2:32:22
More like company you know people coming to you having had issues in the past configuring this stuff on their own.
2:32:29
I I would say like the biggest thing right now is just like people wasting a lot of money on GPUs, especially I think a year or two ago like there was like this like kind of hyped up like scarcity of like you got to get like a thousand GPUs.
2:32:39
So So a lot of companies went out and made massive reservations and now they're sitting on them and like they're underutilized, right?
2:32:47
So they're like, you know, what can I do with these? >> Yeah.
2:32:49
Is there is there value for those folks just to like sell it back as spot instances for someone else?
2:32:55
like what what are companies actually doing when they wind up G a little bit too GPU rich?
2:33:03
>> I I I know there's a couple of other companies I think it's like Thrill is one it's not like a space we're like super focused on like we we kind of think that model is kind of broken like the idea that companies go out and make big reservation.
2:33:13
We think companies should just pay for is exactly what they use and so that's something Modal does really well is we scale up and down and you only pay for the time the GPUs are actually running. >> Yeah. >> Um and Yep. >> Yeah.
2:33:24
What's your view on the the GPU war?
2:33:26
Uh Nvidia is obviously dominant.
2:33:28
AMD has been in the the the year of the comeback.
2:33:31
Uh they're taking feedback from George Hots.
2:33:33
They're listening to Dylan Patel.
2:33:35
Uh what are uh what does the race look like?
2:33:38
There's also a lot of AS6 companies.
2:33:40
There's Broadcom's doing stuff.
2:33:42
Uh what does the shape of the industry look like in the next couple of years?
2:33:46
Uh where are you kind of uh where are you partnering up and like uh investing for the long term?
2:33:54
So I I think in the next couple years it's going to be all Nvidia.
2:33:56
Like our customers only want Nvidia.
2:33:58
Nvidia is like such a massive advantage in terms of the software ecosystem.
2:34:04
>> But I I think look a couple years beyond that like that's when it starts to get more hazy.
2:34:07
I'm personally quite bullish on TPUs for instance like Google's product but of course also AMD like you mentioned and other players. >> Yeah. Um are there uh Yeah.
2:34:14
I are are there other um like anything that you're looking at in terms of like uh abstracting away some of CUDA's advantages?
2:34:27
It just feels like we're in this era of vibe coding.
2:34:29
You should be able to take you know some sort of model and like just port it, but that doesn't seem to be working.
2:34:35
Um but people are certainly they have a lot of economic incentive to do that.
2:34:39
Are you bullish on on any of that kind of like breaking the CUDA lock in? >> I Yes.
2:34:45
It's funny because people are like CUDA is like a moat.
2:34:48
Like it's it's such an amazing but like I don't know like for anyone who's like actually tried to write CUDA it like sucks.
2:34:55
It's like very hard to work with.
2:34:57
>> So I I I don't know why like it's been so hard for AMD or or for other providers to like build a better software layer because CUDA is very hard to use. >> Yeah.
2:35:06
>> Um so yeah, give it a couple years.
2:35:06
Like I would hope that there's better ways to to write these kernels. >> Yeah.
2:35:12
I just remember the story of like Facebook was written in all PHP.
2:35:13
They wanted to move to C++.
2:35:16
They didn't want to re have everyone rewrite everything.
2:35:20
So they just wrote a compiler that compiled PHP. Yeah, that's it. Right.
2:35:24
And so it's like couldn't you couldn't we get to a world where you're just writing once and then compiling for any different GPU?
2:35:29
Like create a new abstraction layer.
2:35:30
I don't know how the economic incentives play out.
2:35:33
I haven't really dug into it, but it's an interesting industry.
2:35:35
>> Yeah, it it comes down >> sort of what modular is trying to do in a way. >> Okay.
2:35:40
>> Yeah, it comes down to >> be low, right? Sorry.
2:35:41
Yeah, I was just saying it's it's hard to be like extremely bullish on coding agents and also believe that CUDA has this like long-term hyper durable, you know, mode.
2:35:52
>> There does seem to be some cognitive dissonance there, right?
2:35:54
Like they both can't be true, but >> it's like why can't I run a 30hour claude code prompt at some point or claude code in the year 2030 and and just like you know >> rewrite this for AMD, don't make mistakes and it just doesn't.
2:36:06
I would I would hope that's how it plays out, but who knows?
2:36:09
We I mean we might be years away.
2:36:11
I genuinely like I've always uh enjoyed enjoyed your takes uh and would love to have you back on sometime when we have more time.
2:36:17
But congrats on on the fund raise.
2:36:20
John, did you want to do the honor? >> Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Give us the details. Uh what what's fun?
2:36:25
>> 7 billion uh million >> 87 billion 87 >> million series B. >> Yeah.
2:36:36
So So Lux is leading existing investors putting in a bunch of money to Yeah. We're super pumped. >> Great stuff, Eric.
2:36:45
Thank you uh for joining and uh have a great rest of your day. Talk soon.
2:36:50
>> Have a great rest of your day. >> Take care.
2:36:51
>> Let me tell you about numeral sales tax on autopilot.
2:36:53
Spend less than 5 minutes per month on sales tax compliance.
2:36:54
Go to numeral HQ to get started.
2:36:59
>> Well, on that note, I believe we have our first inerson guest of the day.
2:37:05
>> The day of the week >> from App Loving.
2:37:08
>> Welcome to the show, Adam.
2:37:08
Thanks so much for joining us.
2:37:10
Thanks so much for taking the time to come on down to the TVP Ultradome. >> Welcome to the show. >> Here we are.
2:37:17
>> Much uh great to have you.
2:37:17
Uh would love to have you kick us off with an introduction on yourself and the company.
2:37:24
Just kind of set the table for us. >> Yeah, totally.
2:37:26
We're probably the biggest company in the world that no one actually understands what we do.
2:37:30
>> That that's a good title thumbnail for some >> I guess it's bullish now if people don't understand what you do, right? Palunt. >> Yeah. Yeah. Same thing. So let's break it down.
2:37:39
So we started the company in 2012 um advertising inside mobile games and really the goal back then hasn't changed to now.
2:37:46
We wanted to give advertisers the opportunity to market themselves but do it on a revenue based pricing model so that they can come in and say look I want to generate $1,000 of revenue by day 30 be able to get me $1,000 of media spend against that so I can break even make a profit.
2:38:01
I'll scale unlimited if I can do that.
2:38:03
And I was I've been in ads for 20 years.
2:38:06
I hated the construct of selling someone to convince them to run advertising.
2:38:11
You don't know what works, what doesn't.
2:38:13
You try to convince them an audience was there.
2:38:16
It's all a bunch of makebelieve until you go to top offunnel revenuebased pricing.
2:38:21
And so we ended up working with a lot of game developers.
2:38:25
These are companies all over the world, a lot of smaller indie businesses.
2:38:27
And when you're working with a customer that where the CEO is the founder and they're on the front lines of marketing, it's a great dynamic because usually they're technical.
2:38:38
They want to actually understand the math around marketing.
2:38:41
And so we built our business really being inside this niche, working with these casual mobile gaming developers all over the world.
2:38:46
Well, business started growing a ton.
2:38:48
We were serving a video advertisement inside their games for other games. Yeah.
2:38:53
And over the decade that we ran up up until going public, um, this business super lucrative, super successful for our customers.
2:39:02
We helped these game developers really build their businesses, but no one had heard of us anywhere. We weren't VC, right?
2:39:08
>> Well, not not by desire.
2:39:08
I'll say we're one of the biggest misses for Sand Hill cuz we we couldn't raise a million over four back in 2012.
2:39:16
This was after we launched the product.
2:39:19
Business was growing like a weed.
2:39:20
We were we were doubling every single month for >> what was the what was the push back?
2:39:25
>> Do people just think like oh Google will take it all?
2:39:27
>> I think I'm a horrible seller. I don't know.
2:39:29
I I mean I've worked on the skills over the years, but it it the push back was Google will eliminate you.
2:39:32
If it's not Google, Facebook will eliminate you.
2:39:36
If it's not Facebook, here comes Amazon.
2:39:38
So it was why is this goofy named company going to be able to do well inside advertising?
2:39:43
>> Really quickly, you said you've been selling ads for 20 years.
2:39:44
2005 is the start of this.
2:39:47
What's the first ad you sold?
2:39:48
We we were we were affiliate marketers back in social.
2:39:50
So a couple of us one of >> and that's how that's the most hardcore marketers started out affiliate because it's just you you eat what you kill.
2:40:00
>> If you can make money in affiliate, you can make money doing anything. >> It is brutally tough. >> That's amazing.
2:40:05
Uh and and what was the mood in Silicon Valley or the the actual games that were uh the backbone of the launch? Is this the Zingga era?
2:40:15
>> This is the tough part.
2:40:15
It's a lot of casual games, right?
2:40:16
Like the the environment we have now is a billion plus daily active players playing solitire and puzzles and words >> match three.
2:40:25
>> Yeah, totally puzzles.
2:40:25
So if you walk down an aisle of a plane, you'll notice like puzzles on everyone's phone.
2:40:30
Those are the types of people playing.
2:40:32
It turns out it's a lot of middle-aged women. It skews female.
2:40:35
It's a really strong audience of people, but a lot of us don't relate to that.
2:40:40
So you think mobile gamer, well shooter games and like traditional gamer.
2:40:45
And so that was always one of the things we had to to that was a challenge in the business is how can that audience be good for especially as we get into e-commerce and talk about our launch for broader brands because people >> they control so much purchasing.
2:40:59
>> I was about to say >> it's all the heads of households. We're on the platform. We only have adults.
2:41:01
We we don't work on any child apps.
2:41:03
So you've got adults head of household skew female people with money.
2:41:08
These are people on a thousand phone playing for 45 minutes a day. It's perfect audience.
2:41:14
People just never realized it until we became more mainstream. >> Yeah.
2:41:17
How do you think about there there's this critique going around with OpenAI, doing deals with Oracle, doing deals with Nvidia, and there's this like circularity to the economy, but then of course there's outside demand.
2:41:27
People want to use the products.
2:41:28
How do you think about circularity within the mobile app ecosystem where a lot I'm I'm sure you have advertisers who are advertising mobile games and other mobile games and it feels like oh well like you know is this just all circular?
2:41:43
when does the actual money come in?
2:41:43
H how how have you addressed that throughout the the the the history of the company and like where do we stand now?
2:41:51
>> I mean again you got to find a purchaser at some point in that circularity, right?
2:41:54
So if we were just advertising mobile games to mobile games that were ad supported be a house of cards.
2:41:57
But at the end of that you have two inside gaming two things you're trying to do.
2:42:03
Take a user from a game where they're playing x time per day and take them to a game that they're going to be more engaged with and play 2x or 1. 5x. You can do that.
2:42:11
You create more ad inventory.
2:42:12
So the real growth driver in the category is increased supply.
2:42:14
It's not any different than social networking.
2:42:17
You get more ads viewed, then you got to make more use of the advertising.
2:42:21
So as the technologies get more powerful, you can match up the advertiser and the customer together for something that's transactional.
2:42:27
So you you get them going from a solitire to Candy Crush. They pay $2,000 a year.
2:42:34
You've created transactional value in the middle there that there's a lot more value than where the user started. >> Yeah.
2:42:40
H how did the company actually scale?
2:42:42
Like how how uh like meat and potatoes were the first deals and then I I imagine everything's like you know full tech platform now but were were the first uh advertisers who were onboarded on the platform kind of like a handshake and a contract or uh how do you actually inventory?
2:42:59
How do you solve video in your app at this moment and we'll give you you know >> Yeah.
2:43:04
How much of like doing things that don't scale?
2:43:06
There was a ton of wheeling and dealing actually cool being in your office because we were a garage made into an office and we had a gong and like it was a bunch of one of the guys who runs my business team and now runs growth slept in the office for the first six months.
2:43:19
So we were affiliates, right? Wheeler dealers.
2:43:22
So you'd go up to the early game developer and just give them a value prop of you can actually buy an install.
2:43:27
Back then there was not even the chance of buying an install.
2:43:31
Now I said sell them revenue.
2:43:33
You're talking about 13 years ago.
2:43:33
Being able to sell them an install on a pricing model was innovative.
2:43:37
And so when we went out to the market and pitched the Zingas of the world on instead of just buying ads and not really knowing what happens by installs, that in itself was, oh wow, that's great.
2:43:49
And then you pair that with video.
2:43:50
The power of the video clip on a mobile device is really understated.
2:43:52
35 seconds of average viewing time on our ads, you can't do anything else.
2:43:57
So, when you get a brand opportunity to place an ad on a mobile device and the user's not distracted, >> non-s skippable.
2:44:05
>> Well, it's a mix of skippable and non-s skipable, but half the ads the user actually, it's a great point, opt into watching the ad for currency inside the game.
2:44:12
That's up to 60 seconds of viewing time unskippable.
2:44:14
You can't do other things.
2:44:16
So, we live in add-rich environment.
2:44:18
This is the most nonad thing anywhere in the world.
2:44:21
You've got to watch that advertisement.
2:44:25
>> Yeah, that's fascinating.
2:44:25
Um, how do you think AI is going to change mobile gaming?
2:44:29
I I've seen there's these famous ads on Instagram where they show you this like character that's right.
2:44:35
I'm sure you've seen these.
2:44:37
And then people are like, "But that's not the real game.
2:44:39
It's a P three underneath."
2:44:39
And then I found someone actually built the real game because game development's getting cheaper.
2:44:45
It feels like we might be entering like a new there's a couple companies that have been pitching like vibe coding platforms for games that will uh you know like become their own app store.
2:44:55
It feels like we could just be entering like a new primordial or Cambrian explosion of gaming.
2:44:59
How are you thinking about like vibecoded games or more custom software?
2:45:03
Obviously they'll all need ads to power this but uh how are you thinking about >> I mean short answer to it for me right like like we we create discovery.
2:45:10
So the more content that's out there the better.
2:45:14
So if AI creates an environment where anyone can build a game and we're all creative and most people humans now today have played games at some point in their life, everyone can write an idea down, create a game, they're going to need discovery on the game, they're going to need monetization on the game.
2:45:28
So so that's a great opportunity for us as an ad platform.
2:45:30
More broadly, our system is predicated on our model actually working.
2:45:34
So we we always talk about AI as LLMs, but if you just talk about AI as modern usage of neural nets, recommendation systems are one of the most economically viable use cases for AI today.
2:45:46
Yeah, they power Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok, they power our system.
2:45:50
system. This is why we always felt like you know uh Zuck you know spending however many hundreds of billions like it was it was very easy to underwrite because you could just get there's a lot of ways to just get benefit from this infrastructure spend in the core advertising business right to
2:46:07
>> totally you get I mean there's a simple function to all these models it's more data more complex model more compute better output and if your whole business model is built on an advertising business that this technology continue to evolve at the pace it is is fant Fantastic. >> Yeah. >> Yeah.
2:46:22
>> How do how do you think about AI on the ad side?
2:46:24
Uh everyone's kind of predicting I mean there's already probably some tests out there that uh a lot of what Meta is doing will be uh just look at your product catalog, look at your inventory and then generate the video creative, generate the audio, generate the text.
2:46:37
Uh how are you thinking about implementing that?
2:46:39
Are you already running tests?
2:46:40
How how have the test gone?
2:46:43
>> This this is one of the reasons investors are super excited about advertising platforms like ours.
2:46:45
It's the the simplistic of you've got a shop, you've got a catalog, create an optimized appearance of that catalog through recommendation system. We already do that.
2:46:54
But more complex is today people upload a video ad into our platform.
2:46:59
Not always adapted for the platform.
2:47:01
We're we're new in the marketplace, especially in shopping.
2:47:02
So, a lot of times they'll bring a 10-second clip from Facebook, upload it to us.
2:47:08
Well, if you could have gotten 45 seconds of viewer time, that sucks.
2:47:09
As a brand, that's a total miss.
2:47:12
brand, that's a total miss. They don't have the resources at every level to go let us create a hundred ads a week for for this company now we'll rebrand as Axon and we can talk about that in a second but this Axon advertising platform they just don't have the resources to create that ad count at the
2:47:28
scale of the time that you need into our platform and so when you can apply LLMs to go here's a couple cool ads out there let me create a 100 versions of this a week and put it into the system that'll be a huge uplift in user response to all the brands products that are being marketed on our platform. >> Yeah. When you when you think about uh >> Yeah.
2:47:44
>> Yeah. When you when you think about uh we're very close with the the Ridge wallet team and so I got to early on in the Ridge days uh and I know that they they're an apploving customer, but early on I would just see the effort that
2:47:58
Connor the CMO is just this constant treadmill of trying to make more and more creative, never being able to make enough, knowing that the more creative you make, the more money you'll make, but still just not even having the time in the day. And so thinking about being
2:48:08
And so thinking about being able to multiply out creative across different user types, different games, being able to update it a lot more rapidly as games develop new features, bring back old users, etc. It's it's wild.
2:48:21
Uh wanted to ask how you're thinking about uh M&A uh this year, next year, in the future.
2:48:30
you guys market cap is has um you know grown tremendously and you guys are now in a position where you could there's there's a variety of different platforms out there that that have a lot of attention that are maybe undermonetized or at least not monetizing as well.
2:48:43
I'm curious if that's at all something you guys think about or the opportunity in in um you know gaming is big enough that it makes sense.
2:48:53
>> You're thinking specifically of like a Snapchat or a Pinterest or >> Yeah.
2:48:56
or I mean Tik Tok was in the news last week.
2:48:58
you guys were uh you know and that felt like a transaction that was more of like a political transaction than a purely economic deal.
2:49:04
But >> yeah, >> but I guess the broad question is like vertical integration.
2:49:08
Do you want to own games at some point or or where media is developed or social media platform or does that just make no sense for you?
2:49:16
>> Well, I mean like we bid on TikTok, so the industrial logic of we can monetize inventory better with our ads models than anyone else out there is is sound at least to us.
2:49:25
But there's a couple things that constrain us.
2:49:27
One, our culture is pretty unique.
2:49:29
We've got very few people doing an exceptional large amount of output.
2:49:32
Um, company is still under a thousand people.
2:49:34
So, you just don't tend to see scale like ours at that little um headcount.
2:49:38
The and so putting companies together into that is really tough.
2:49:42
The other piece is we're really excited about the organic growth opportunities in front of us.
2:49:46
We're we're at a point now, I mean, I put out a couple months ago that early in the year we were 11 billion of ad spend on our platform.
2:49:53
Plus, now we've grown a couple quarters, so bigger number today.
2:49:57
But and we only work with somewhere between a thousand and 2,000 advertisers on the platform.
2:50:01
We've been completely managed.
2:50:03
We haven't opened up the platform.
2:50:04
So, if you think about that, when Facebook opened up Ads Manager, they had five $5 billion a year revenue and we've got more than double that today on a very large platform.
2:50:12
We haven't even opened it up.
2:50:14
We're going to open up our platform, the Axon advertising platform in two days.
2:50:17
So once we take the average account from the very low thousands to the tens, hundreds and of thousands and then subsequently millions, we think the opportunity in front of us is many quarters to possibly years and that >> and so distracting you know it would have been it would have been cool to own Tik Tok.
2:50:35
It's a solid asset at least uh from uh from observing from the outside but the opportunity just immediately with the business is so massive that that it you know you may as well just focus on what you guys already do >> to totally and with a lean team we don't have the resources to distract ourselves.
2:50:52
So it's it's full speed ahead.
2:50:54
We we want to give our solution to all the advertisers in the world.
2:50:56
We know that we've made a lot of businesses inside gaming more successful.
2:51:00
We want to do that across the board.
2:51:02
We've seen it in a very small pilot in e-commerce over the last year.
2:51:05
The few hundred like Ridge Wallet and others that you you said um they're seeing a lot of spend on our platform comparable to what they're getting on Meta and it's on us to execute to get this in front of all the advertisers out there.
2:51:16
If we can do that and become another destination like Meta where there's a ton of scale and it's top of funnel to bottom funnel revenue priced all these businesses around us are going to grow.
2:51:26
So we don't want to distract ourselves from that opportunity.
2:51:29
>> How uh how are you rallying the team around Q4?
2:51:31
around Q4? I'm assuming Axon is timed with the the the you know championship season for every you know retail brand but like what does it look is it going to be people sleeping in the office more >> I mean there's been a bunch of that it's around the clock right now because we've been closed and managed right so opening up an ad platform at our scale is a
2:51:52
pretty complex undertaking you worry about like I mean fraud is an obvious case you don't want to see fraud you don't want to see scammy ads on your platform um that's the first thing that happens and like we're probably arguably the biggest ad platform that's ever opened up self-service in any sort of form um at this at this moment. Uh and
2:52:06
Uh and so when you've got that, you got to do a bunch of work building tools and controls to make sure the quality of advertiser and all the checks you have in place are as automated as they possibly can be and as good as it would have been in a human-managed environment.
2:52:22
So you've got that, you've got user experience, you need to make sure a customer can go live on their own all the way through to being able to pay you.
2:52:30
And so we had to build a whole bunch of tools to get this right.
2:52:32
We've been doing that for the last year.
2:52:33
We've been tuning it with the customers on the platform.
2:52:36
Um so the team is no joke working around the clock right now to get this out the door in a couple days. >> Yeah.
2:52:42
You can't you don't have the luxury of of missing Q4 if you want to open up an ad, you know, in the ad business.
2:52:49
>> That's the most critical time.
2:52:49
Uh how are you thinking about compute infrastructure?
2:52:52
I feel like we're seeing Meta build these massive clusters and it feels like maybe that's because they're going to be generating so many ads or doing so many so much Gen AI that they'll need a ton of compute.
2:53:03
They still need a ton of core AI just to do ad matching.
2:53:06
Um, have you had to do uh on premise deployments, cloud stuff?
2:53:12
Like what how do you think about uh building out your infrastructure for the long term and potentially like a very different just economic dynamic around how compute it like falls on the income statement. >> Yeah.
2:53:24
I mean, we work with Google Cloud, so it runs through our income statement.
2:53:27
So, it's easy for investors to understand because we're not capitalizing the cost. Yep.
2:53:30
um because we're so lean and we because we were bootstrapped maybe going back to the beginning.
2:53:36
We think about every dollar we spend anywhere across the organization as everyone's a founder, you're spending money out of your own pocket.
2:53:42
And this holds true with compute as well.
2:53:44
If I I went into my team and said, "Look, we're going to go spend $5 billion, buy a bunch of compute, and in our scale, we can't do hundred billion dollars of investment.
2:53:51
So, let's say five billion."
2:53:52
Um we we'd be wasting that money, and it would make them uncomfortable.
2:53:56
We try to constrain it to to trail or maybe be on par with revenue growth.
2:54:01
So it becomes a cost of your future revenue growth. But what does that mean?
2:54:04
If our engineers create a more complex model, they could consume more GPUs.
2:54:10
>> They if we had unlimited capacity, they just deploy the model.
2:54:12
Well, in today's world, if they see more GPU consumption and they go, "Holy crap, this is fantastic in result, but is going to consume too much GPUs. We just don't have it."
2:54:21
They've got to go optimize their code.
2:54:23
And you may get like you get it.
2:54:25
Okay, maybe we lose one point on accuracy, but the cost all of a sudden goes down 90%.
2:54:29
So across the org, we're we're wired to think about things that way.
2:54:33
Optimize and automate and cut costs as much as possible so we have the best business so we can fund our mission long term. >> Makes a ton of sense.
2:54:40
Partnering with Google makes so much sense given where they are on Nano Banana and where they are on Gemini and like just the cost per performance.
2:54:48
Even if you go crazy into generating a bunch of ads, it feels like a great partner there.
2:54:52
Uh how how did the Google will kill you like narrative?
2:54:59
It clearly didn't happen, but uh walk me through the various It seems like you were getting that criticism from venture capitalists early days.
2:55:04
Uh how did that actually play out?
2:55:07
Like how do you sit together in the market of ad buying because you do compete even though you work together on the cloud side.
2:55:11
Uh how has that relationship evolved?
2:55:13
like why did the market play out the way it did and uh and was anything were there any decisions where you think like we made a really key decision?
2:55:23
>> If you if you talk to advertisers let's use the Ridge guys as an example again you want performance and you want to constantly be experimenting and you want you don't want platform dependency.
2:55:34
don't want in a perfect world you would be spending like 10% of your budget here 10% of your budget here 10% so that one that as prices fluctuate based because they're all markets right you can your business isn't you know you know and we saw the businesses that were you know in
2:55:49
the DDC era that were dependent purely on you know a meta and and how bad things could get companies going bankrupt based on you know small changes in in price but anyways >> yeah I I mean Google is a is sort of a bottomfunnel channel for most dollars spent, right? If you're selling a
2:56:04
If you're selling a wallet, you go to Google, you search for a wallet, Ridge wallet appears there.
2:56:09
Well, the consumer already knows they want to find a wallet.
2:56:10
So, we were always going to be additive to the Google advertising story.
2:56:13
So, they did a really good job finding us early and betting on us across multiple business lines.
2:56:18
And it became a really, really good partnership.
2:56:20
Um, if you think about the business model we deploy, it's top of funnel to bottom of funnel priced on revenue. Facebook does that.
2:56:27
And if Facebook caught everyone's attention for every single ad um for every single product in the world where where there would be no other market, Facebook would capture all the topfunnel attention and Google would be bottom funnel.
2:56:38
Turns out not everyone in the world notices an ad on Facebook.
2:56:42
So along we come with these really immersive ads, capture users attention and we were able to go partner with a wallet company and sell more wallets.
2:56:50
So in a way when you do it this way they're they're getting an arbitrage.
2:56:54
They're getting a customer that pays them immediately.
2:56:56
They ship the product after the fact and they make a spread on that sale.
2:56:59
If they can do that, there's no budgetary constraint.
2:57:03
So, we don't have a sales force at all really at the company because we're not going and asking for for budget.
2:57:07
We're going and saying, "Look, if we you can sell more wallets and make money on us, you'll scale to infinite as many wallets as you can go get in inventory."
2:57:14
And so, with that business model, we became additive to these other platforms.
2:57:18
I think really that's the only way a small brand or niche company like us was able to have the large scale success.
2:57:24
If you're if you're advising a I don't know public company CEO $100 million in market cap but they have a platform and they're not monetizing with advertising and they're considering rolling their own versus partnering with you or partnering with someone else.
2:57:38
Like what are the trade-offs?
2:57:40
We've seen Uber's added a bunch of ads, Netflix added ads, there's uh GP is going to have ads soon.
2:57:47
Um what are the different uh levers that a CEO should think about pulling?
2:57:50
Have you done partnerships?
2:57:52
How do you think about uh partnering with like those large scale new platforms? >> Yeah, we haven't yet.
2:57:57
I think at some point in our our narrative, we're going to get to a point where we're going to want to take our demand out, but we don't have excess demand with so few advertisers today.
2:58:05
If we got 100,000 advertisers, we'd probably be able to take demand out.
2:58:08
But I think a lot of times people forget one, the technology is really complex.
2:58:12
You've only had in terms of a a model like ours is scalable, us and then obviously Meta, very large scale that's been able to execute on this this discovery type of product price on revenue. Yeah.
2:58:23
>> Um, and so if there's only a couple cases, it's not trivial and people overtrivialize it a lot.
2:58:27
The other thing is the ad format has to be similar to the ad format that we're really good at.
2:58:34
Otherwise, it takes a lot of work.
2:58:34
And because we've got such an immersive ad format, you don't tend to have that in other places.
2:58:40
Now, in television, you do.
2:58:42
And that's an area that's that's been interesting to us.
2:58:44
Um, you know, >> specifically like streaming or >> anywhere where you can see 15 to 30 second clip. Yeah.
2:58:51
So streaming is a great great uh example.
2:58:53
Um pre-roll video is a good example, but a native ad that someone's scrolling by and probably misses or a little banner ad, those aren't going to create a lot of intent.
2:59:04
So if the ad format isn't going to create intent, that's not a great matchup for us.
2:59:08
But it's something we can execute on over time.
2:59:09
And I think that'll benefit the publishers because really these third party publishers, they shouldn't build their own ad tech for the most part.
2:59:16
And they there's not another solution out there that's really that focused on them with Google maybe depp prioritizing their thirdparty ad stack for them. >> Yeah. Yeah. What about Apple?
2:59:24
I feel like there was a Rumble years ago about a you know a developer kit and SDK for adding ads into mobile games and uh it certainly hasn't stopped your growth.
2:59:35
So what yeah how did that play out?
2:59:38
>> Yeah, I mean they they have ads on search.
2:59:39
They can monetize their own properties presumably.
2:59:41
I always say, look, if there's more ad inventory and more discovery, the P&L of the businesses in the market swells.
2:59:47
So, let's say Apple rolls out a great ads product and you go to Apple Music, you discover a game.
2:59:53
Well, you weren't going to discover that game before.
2:59:54
So, now that developer who will almost always be an arbitrage marketer, got a better arbitrage, their business, their P&L grows.
3:00:02
What happens when that happens?
3:00:04
Well, they have more money to reinvest in us.
3:00:05
They have more money to reinvest in meta.
3:00:07
And so if performance is there, that's fantastic for the ecosystem.
3:00:10
If it's non-performant, then that the customers are getting ripped off.
3:00:14
And these customers in these categories, they don't have the business model or the brand to get ripped off.
3:00:20
>> I had seen a few pitches uh over the last couple years for businesses that were trying to effectively create apploven specifically for LLM type products.
3:00:31
Why or why not is that an interesting opportunity?
3:00:34
Because I would assume the app loving for an LLM is apploving.
3:00:39
>> You you probably never thought you'd be saying that statement.
3:00:40
I think the day people started saying I want to be the app loving of this was when we knew we made it.
3:00:45
I guess um like LMS they don't have a lot of space.
3:00:48
So like you don't want to interrupt the user experience.
3:00:51
You can't alter the output.
3:00:51
The referral program you guys were talking about a few minutes ago. >> Yeah.
3:00:55
One one thing though is like a deep like if somebody put in like a deep research query somewhere >> waiting 10 minutes waiting 20 minutes accelerated.
3:01:05
You really sit in front of everyone's bailing. Come on.
3:01:08
>> Yeah, everyone's failing. True.
3:01:09
>> Yeah, that's a non viewed ad that's totally worthless. >> Yeah.
3:01:13
>> So, yeah, I think it's going to be a lot more referral and embedded into the output and automated transactions, which again for us is good.
3:01:18
If you think about dollars spent, a lot of dollars today go to search when the user already knows what they want.
3:01:24
If they go to the LLM and they they get an output that's something that they want and they can click purchase, all that's going to happen is those dollars are going to shift around from search to these LLM outputs.
3:01:32
And that's good because that's already bottom funnel.
3:01:35
The user knows that they want it.
3:01:36
And in theory, it's good because it's just going to be cheaper to the advertiser.
3:01:39
So again, if it's effectively cheaper, that wallet company now has more money to go spend on a platform like ours where they're truly getting discovery from the customer. >> Yeah.
3:01:48
Uh talk to me about the company culture, the type of person that succeeds.
3:01:51
Do you have economists on staff that are understanding the the nature of the market?
3:01:56
Do you have a lot of data scientists?
3:01:57
Is do you do you expect everyone to be able to think in statistical ways? >> Yeah.
3:02:03
To so it's engineering first for sure.
3:02:05
Um research science runs the models.
3:02:07
Those are those are typically like very intelligent math math people alongside they're also engineers.
3:02:12
Um so they can implement their own research.
3:02:16
And then on the business team, most of the business people are math, econ, um they know how to do Python, SQL queries, like so we're we're mostly more technical across the board.
3:02:25
Now core advertising business, our business and engineering teams are around 300 to 350.
3:02:32
So if you just slimmed it down to what drives our the 98% of the value of the the company, it's a very very small team. it.
3:02:39
I always liked when I I listened to Steve Jobs talking about the original Mac team.
3:02:43
It's A players like to work with A players and then they they despise that like everything dilutes when you go to B and C's. Yeah.
3:02:50
And we've got a really cutthroat ecosystem where you're either an exceptionally strong IC where you can output a ton or you're not going to make it.
3:02:59
And so we we end up churning through a lot of people who can't cut it, but the core team that remains loves working with each other because everyone's an A player. >> Yeah. Makes sense.
3:03:08
How how do you think about, you know, what's uh what's your headcount plan look like over the next few years?
3:03:14
Is is it >> I mean >> I'm assuming you want to multiply revenue by a lot and >> without adding heads.
3:03:20
I mean look, I'd love a world where we could run with 20 people, but we're probably not getting back to that world.
3:03:24
But like I I remember Yeah.
3:03:26
I mean up up until 100 I knew the story and the name and every every everyone that was at the business and so we've surpassed that.
3:03:32
But being run this lean allows us to maintain a really high quality.
3:03:37
really high quality. So even our go to market team on e-commerce which every investor looks at as a huge opportunity it's 30 people today it's really hard to add a players if you maintain a high quality bar and you don't need to go into the state of look we've just got
3:03:51
hiring quotas second you do that I think you blow up your culture in your organization so we're slow and steady now the the company's built on automate first hire second and so LLM let us do a ton most of the coding at the company is done by LLMs now a lot of the business functions are done by LLM. So, we now
3:04:07
So, we now are in a world where that culture is perfectly paired with this technology that's evolving so quickly.
3:04:14
So, we should be able to do more with less.
3:04:15
And if we can do that, we're going to be able to scale the revenue without having to add heads.
3:04:20
And then it's nice that the product's also so good, it sells itself.
3:04:25
>> Well, thank you so much for coming by the TVPN Ultra. >> This is fun.
3:04:28
Nobody Nobody loves ads more than maybe than than us than you maybe.
3:04:31
So, >> yeah, the the the chat says because you're a gong respector, a gong ally, we have to hit the gong for you. There we go. There we go.
3:04:40
[Music] >> We'll we'll talk about Axon later this week. Excited.
3:04:46
>> And in uh before we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about Finn.
3:04:48
AI, the number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bakeoffs, number one ranking on G2, and let me also tell you about Adio, customer relationship magic.
3:04:58
Adio is the AI native of CRM that builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level.
3:05:03
We have David Senra live in the TBPN Ultradome.
3:05:06
We have a video that we're going to play. Bring him on down.
3:05:12
Let's play the video of his newest addition to the collection to the history to the world of business and podcasting. Welcome to the show. What are we see? >> 24 hours post launch. >> Yeah.
3:05:27
What are we watching here? Oh, it's it's a drill. What is this?
3:05:28
You have >> Explain this video. the text. >> Yes. Yes, I played it. >> Okay.
3:05:34
That's the video, but do you have the text that Rob uh put above it?
3:05:38
>> What did What did he say?
3:05:38
He said, "The right way is the hard way."
3:05:39
Jerry Seinfeld uh intro for Yes. They bought a Rolodex.
3:05:44
This is for your new show. Break it down for us.
3:05:46
>> So, this is why I was excited to partner with Rob Moore and Andrew Hubman on this because I've been friends with them for like three years. Yeah.
3:05:53
>> And I know um he said, "I just wildly so don't break your new microphone."
3:05:58
>> Um so, I knew how serious they take their work.
3:06:01
The first time I ever met Rob was in they invited me to Malibu to check out their new studio.
3:06:04
We talked podcasting for nine straight hours.
3:06:07
>> Yeah, >> that's not an exaggeration.
3:06:08
Um, we stayed at the same restaurant.
3:06:09
We sat there for lunch and then we started talking podcasting and like four hours later the waitress is like, "We're serving dinner now. Do you want to stay?"
3:06:17
And we're like, "Yes, we had lunch and dinner."
3:06:18
So, um, I didn't even know they were doing this.
3:06:21
They they know that I was like kind of anti-intro for a podcast.
3:06:24
I just like want to get right to it.
3:06:26
They're like, "We're going to make a bumper for you."
3:06:27
I was like, "I don't even know what a bumper is."
3:06:29
So, that's what they call this.
3:06:29
And it's like I was like, "It's gotta be short though."
3:06:32
>> Wait, that's the Oh, that's that's from the video, the intro video.
3:06:35
Oh, it all makes sense now.
3:06:37
I remember seeing that and I thought, "Oh, it's just CGI or something." >> No, it's not CGI. That's the man. They bought a drill. They bought a Rolodex.
3:06:45
Then they printed out all a bunch of companies and the founder names of people I've covered on Founders.
3:06:49
And then they did all the like the editing.
3:06:53
And so the whole thing is like the idea behind it was, okay, you turn on Netflix, you hear that sound, right?
3:06:55
Or HBO, you hear that sound. I'm cool with that.
3:06:59
I don't want a super long intro.
3:07:00
Like I want a very wealthy audience and we got to get to the goddamn point.
3:07:04
>> Um so yeah, I just love that.
3:07:04
It's like an indication of like how serious we're taking the new show. >> No AI.
3:07:09
>> The first made it with a drill. >> I'm I'm a human AI. >> Yeah.
3:07:12
The first episode dropped uh Saturday. Sunday. Sunday.
3:07:15
>> They're coming out every other Sunday. >> Every other Sunday. How's the response been? >> Uh I'm like wired.
3:07:20
I couldn't sleep last night.
3:07:22
>> You couldn't sleep Saturday night, too. I saw I saw Dave.
3:07:25
David I called David yesterday. sleep eight. com.
3:07:30
>> Yes, >> get a pod 5 5-year warranty free trial.
3:07:33
I actually enjoyed your eight ad integrated into the Daniel A episode.
3:07:38
>> I guess I was I guess I was in solidarity with you last night, David, cuz I put up a 55.
3:07:44
>> I didn't even see I'm staying at a friend's house in Malibu right now and I don't even have my eight sleep.
3:07:48
>> We got to we got to correct that.
3:07:48
But um yeah, it was so funny.
3:07:51
Yesterday I called David.
3:07:52
We're just catching up and we realized we were like 30 30 seconds on the same on the same row on the >> like 500 ft from each other.
3:08:01
>> So, we were like, let's just pull over and and hang out.
3:08:02
So, I I got to get the the immediate reaction.
3:08:05
But, no, it really is there's there's uh to me one of the most satisfying things is watching ultra talented people do a new thing and and just demonstrate the le the level that they're on.
3:08:18
And you and Rob and Andrew have done that. No, I appreciate it. >> Congratulations.
3:08:23
Uh, on the note of like you gota you got busy people, you got to get right into it.
3:08:27
Uh, talk to me about the decision for how you think about the first question.
3:08:32
I was listening to Daresh over the weekend.
3:08:34
Uh, he kicks it off with like a pretty quick intro, but he does he does introduce the guest.
3:08:38
Uh, my guest is Richard Sutton.
3:08:41
He's the one that >> he's very Daresh is insanely talented.
3:08:44
>> Insanely talented, >> especially for a young kid.
3:08:45
He's >> And you know who else is a talented podcaster?
3:08:49
Chris Williamson, friend of >> Oh, he's text me today.
3:08:50
And Chris uh kicks off with no introduction. >> Thousand episodes.
3:08:56
>> A thousand episodes >> came out today with me. >> Wow. That's amazing. Uh what a run.
3:08:58
Um but uh they but they do introductions very differently.
3:09:03
Uh they do Chris kicks off with one short punchy like ungooable question basically like there's no right answer to the question.
3:09:13
He'll just say you know uh what is the value of hard work or what is your life's goal?
3:09:16
And then the person just tees off and it gets you right in the episode.
3:09:20
Darkeesh gives you a little bit more of an intro and they go back and forth and then he hits them with a question.
3:09:24
Uh, how do you think about opening an episode?
3:09:26
Do you like the way you're doing it?
3:09:27
Do you think it'll evolve?
3:09:28
We obviously open with one of the most over the top openings. You're watching TVN.
3:09:31
Uh, and it's like this crazy thing that just evolved.
3:09:35
Uh, how do you think about it? >> All right.
3:09:37
I think the important thing is like I have I'm not interviewing anybody. Yeah.
3:09:41
>> And so like that the the tagline is like conversations with the greatest living founders.
3:09:44
I have zero energy to interview anybody.
3:09:47
I have unlimited energy to have long form deep conversations.
3:09:51
You guys have been on the receiving ends of this.
3:09:53
Like when we have dinner, it's not like, "Oh, we're going to talk for 30 minutes."
3:09:55
No, we talked for like four goddamn hours.
3:09:59
>> And so that's why I think a lot of some people came out and they're like, "You're talking too much in the Daniel Ek episode."
3:10:03
It's just like a conversation.
3:10:05
I like it's important though.
3:10:07
I I think the your opportunity is to not be >> It's tough if you're a podcast and people only watch for the guests. >> Yeah.
3:10:17
>> That's that's not a good position to be in, right? People watch Joe Rogan.
3:10:20
There's a cohort of people that watch Joe Rogan just when they're just when Donald Trump's on, but but a huge amount of people are watching it because Joe Rogan, they're like, "Oh, who's he talking to?" >> Exact.
3:10:30
So, like I think somebody I saw they did analysis on like 2,000 of Joe's episodes and he spoke like you know 45 or something% of the time. Yep.
3:10:38
>> It's just like the the whole genesis of this and I think I talked about it on the Daniel Ek episode.
3:10:43
>> It's because you know Patricky who again I think is the best business interviewer in the world.
3:10:50
Like if I'm going to start an interview show and compete with him like that's just stupid.
3:10:53
Like the main message of founders the founders podcast is like the importance of differentiation. Yep.
3:10:58
So, like there's been a million let's interview, you know, business people shows.
3:11:01
I'm not I'm gonna lose that game.
3:11:03
I only want to play a game that I can be the best in the world at.
3:11:05
Y um and so >> what Patrick, you know, we've been really close friends. We're brothers. We talk every day. We've have a ton.
3:11:11
He's in these dinners with me.
3:11:13
He's in these conversations and it happens over and over again.
3:11:15
And he's he's mentioned to me for a few years.
3:11:18
He said it before I was on Colossus.
3:11:20
He's just like, "Man, I really think, have you ever thought about doing a show where you talk to other people, not just you sitting in a room reading books and doing the crazy that you do?" Yeah.
3:11:28
>> He's like, I've been around this like no one can have these conversations.
3:11:30
And so what really pushed me and I said it on the Daniel episode was me, him, and Daniel had this super intense 4hour dinner.
3:11:38
I don't meet with anybody.
3:11:38
When I the first time I met Michael Dell, I flew to to to Austin. Five hours.
3:11:41
We talked for five hours.
3:11:45
You think I sat You think I sat silent?
3:11:46
I can't sit silent for anything.
3:11:48
And they don't want me to sit silent.
3:11:50
The whole point is like you're like this weird like human AI with all this knowledge and they want to like prompt and like get me going.
3:11:56
So, um, we get in the car cuz I'm we're leaving New York.
3:11:59
I'm going back to Greenidge.
3:12:00
I'm staying at, uh, Patrick's house at night.
3:12:02
And the first thing he says to me when we get in, uh, with his driver, he's like, "You have to start recording these." Yeah.
3:12:09
>> He's like, I He goes, "Uh, I've known Daniel for four years.
3:12:12
You got more out of him in four hours than I did in four years."
3:12:15
He goes, "I talked 2% of the time.
3:12:17
He talked 49% of the time.
3:12:17
You talked 49% of the time."
3:12:19
He's just like, "No one can speak to the soul of the founder like you.
3:12:22
You have to start recording these." >> Yeah. It's fascinating. There's that story. It's the whole idea. There's no interview.
3:12:26
It's just like I'm going to talk to the greatest living founders and we're going to have insane conversations that are not predictable. >> Yeah.
3:12:31
There's uh there's that story about Mark Zuckerberg that he has like extremely high uh question to talk ratio like he lets other people talk a lot and that was seen as like you know bullish on his ability to like hoover up information.
3:12:44
Uh, at the same time in the content world, I feel like there is a natural urge.
3:12:49
Like I noticed somebody sent me a short that we didn't post that someone else posted of me and Jordy talking to Mark Andre and it was clear that it was like Mark had a funny take and so that was what would get the views and so we were there kind of as like a cooal to the main event.
3:13:05
And there's uh like window dressing doesn't get uh like window dressing and and so there's just like there is a natural pull in the algorithm for if you're starting an interview show I should just get someone really No, that's the point.
3:13:23
But I'm saying I'm saying >> like did you not just No, no, no, no.
3:13:26
What I'm saying is that is that if you're just purely viewaxing, it's like go get a viral clip machine, point a camera on them and say go and then just film and then and then say what's next?
3:13:37
what's on your what's on your mind and and and those two things you have to actively resist the view capture the algorithm capture and that's what you're doing >> before I didn't even know you know I don't VMAX I didn't legitimately before we did the giant ramp deal for founders right I did not know how many people
3:13:55
listen to founders >> you didn't look at the analytics it's great >> what does that tell you I don't give a I want the best audience not the biggest reason the ramp deal came about because somebody we cannot name who If you know, if you're elite in tech, you know who this person is. Whatever the
3:14:08
Whatever the opposite of a public figure is, this person is.
3:14:12
It's interesting that the probably the smartest and best one >> maybe the smartest and best person in tech behind the scenes.
3:14:16
Like no one knows like invisible.
3:14:20
>> Literally came because he's like, >> I was at Michael Dell's house.
3:14:22
He wouldn't stop talking about your podcast.
3:14:25
He didn't know we were friends.
3:14:26
I know 10 to 15 billionaires personally that listen to your show.
3:14:29
We have to find a way to work together.
3:14:30
That's the genesis of all this.
3:14:32
It wasn't how many downloads you get.
3:14:35
It's you have the attention and the trust of the elite most elite people in the world.
3:14:39
Look at the guest list on the new David Center show. >> Yeah.
3:14:43
>> It's like >> David Center by David David Center the when you pull it up on Spotify in your car.
3:14:48
It says says Daniel David Center David Sandra David Center. It said it three times. >> Are you ready? Are you ready?
3:14:53
Some somebody in the chat says, "Hey David, I saw you at Malibu Country Mart yesterday.
3:14:58
You're quite tall and handsome. >> Let's hear it.
3:15:00
>> Are you ready to be Are you ready to be Are you ready to be a household chat?"
3:15:04
This is a live chat, you know, >> okay, this happened twice.
3:15:06
So, first of all, I land cuz I came out here just for you guys, just so you know.
3:15:09
Like legitimately, I was like, I don't want to You guys are really important to me.
3:15:14
>> Uh, I want to like do this in person.
3:15:16
>> We got to talk about the how much has changed since here, >> but >> yeah, this it's kind of I don't like to think about this because I walk in some I don't know which case this is.
3:15:25
One happened at the Tesla Supercharger and another at I walk into Sunlife and get a smoothie and like I walk in there's only three people in there and two guys turn like David Sun and I'm like what the wrong?
3:15:37
>> Um and then another guy was charging and >> you used to only get recognized that Aman properties.
3:15:41
Now now now it's about to be everywhere.
3:15:46
>> I have I can't tell you >> everywhere.
3:15:48
>> Oh well, >> the new show is going to be the first one that's associated with Iman. >> That's very exciting.
3:15:51
Yeah, I shouldn't say anything yet, but like we're 99% sure that this >> your your personal brand's already associated with uh >> how much variation do you think there'll be in episode length? >> A ton.
3:16:05
>> A ton because like again I'm not there's no formulaic. There's no formula here.
3:16:10
So like the way I think about it's like founders is just the books that give me energy that I'm excited to learn about and in many case they're aren't even books.
3:16:16
Like I think the the the Colossus profiles that Patrick and his team are making are so remarkable.
3:16:20
I didn't know who Thomas Pery Perty is.
3:16:21
I read that pre uh the the article just came out.
3:16:25
Do you guys know about this guy?
3:16:28
>> He's worth $80 billion. He's 83 years old.
3:16:31
I think he owns 80 >> the AI will not make you rich article. >> No, no.
3:16:34
This this is a guy I think he started Interactive Brokers. >> Oh, wow. 80% of it. >> Okay. It's legit. >> Okay. Yeah. He's >> size chat. >> Yeah.
3:16:42
He's >> He's a Hungarian immigrant.
3:16:44
But you read this profile.
3:16:46
I'm like I couldn't put it down. I I called Patrick. It was midnight.
3:16:49
I like I literally got on the phone.
3:16:51
I was like, "These things are incredible."
3:16:52
And I was like, "Okay, I'm so excited to that I read this even though it's not a book.
3:16:55
I have to make an episode."
3:16:56
So that's the episode I'm working on, right?
3:16:58
So that's how we think about Founders. >> Yeah.
3:17:00
>> David Senro by David Center by David Center. >> Hosted hosted. >> Yeah.
3:17:04
Why did you pick David Center to host the David Center show?
3:17:06
You could have you could have any.
3:17:07
You're leaving a lot of room to slot other hosts in. Easy. easy.
3:17:13
>> The funniest uh response was by uh Christian Keel.
3:17:15
I think he used to be at Astronis. Yeah.
3:17:17
He's like, "Where'd you come up with the name?" >> Yeah. Yeah. It's great. Great.
3:17:20
But but with with with the Founders podcast, I feel like you have uh you your thinking on on episode length, how you divide up the episodes has changed and you have a philosophy around it and and you've kind of narrowed the aperture a little bit as you've become more laser focused on what it takes to deliver a quality episode.
3:17:39
Do you think that will happen over time?
3:17:41
>> No, because this is the thing, okay? I am a control freak. Yeah. Right. As you both know.
3:17:45
So like the Founders is a oneperson thing. Sure.
3:17:47
Like I to the point where I'm now hand editing the transcripts. Yeah.
3:17:51
Everybody's like outsource it.
3:17:52
This is why I wanted to play this thing because Jerry Seinfeld way, the hard way is the right way. Right.
3:17:56
It's like I'm complete control.
3:17:59
It's like permissionless.
3:17:59
I feel like I'm like, you know, >> creating a statue or like some kind of art.
3:18:04
It's like a very intense love affair that I have, an irrational love affair I have with that show.
3:18:08
affair I have with that show. this one I'm now I have a partner and they're like I didn't even mean I have an entire team now have a team of founders what I mean is like there's some I don't have control over what that person's going to
3:18:19
say whether they're going to be interesting or not and so what we've noticed is every single person that we've recorded with and they're we have a crazy guest list they all came from the audience the founders audience
3:18:30
because that way at least they have like they know what what I'm into who like what I like to talk about they're more prone to say yes for an unreleased show But there's wide variance between like some in many ca in some cases like they're we've recorded some with
3:18:46
incredible people and they halfway through I'm like oh they want me to do a founders episode for they just want literally they like just I'll ask them a question like hey what about this and then they'll like look at me and like want me to talk. >> I mean that has to be the same case for
3:18:58
>> I mean that has to be the same case for Joe Rogan.
3:18:59
It's like if you're getting invited to the mothership you're like yeah I want to hear I want to hang out with Joe Rogan today. >> Yeah.
3:19:04
So, no, I I I have to like what I'm learning. >> Yeah.
3:19:08
>> And you know, this is new to me is just like >> loosen up a little bit.
3:19:13
>> Like obviously the quality stuff has to be good.
3:19:15
Like we have to edit ruthlessly.
3:19:16
We're not going to There's a bunch of different ideas.
3:19:18
Most of them came from Daniel E.
3:19:19
I can talk about like uh one example he gave me.
3:19:20
Um and again like the guy is most powerful person in podcasting.
3:19:25
He's willing to just counsel you.
3:19:27
You should take his advice.
3:19:28
So he's like listen you need to build up the original feed, right?
3:19:33
and then maybe a year in, whatever the time frame is.
3:19:34
He's like, "You need to have a bunch of separate feeds."
3:19:37
So, he's like, "Have the twohour conversation that we had and then edit it.
3:19:41
Have another feed where you edit those conversations down to like 30 minutes." Interesting.
3:19:44
>> And then he's like, "Then you need a third feed where it's just, hey, Daniel had 10 clips that were incredible." Just that.
3:19:52
>> Isn't that uh something that he should be solving on the product side?
3:19:54
Like when I when I went to your show, I saw that I could do in Spotify.
3:19:58
I could do I watched it on Spotify out of respect to Daniel.
3:20:03
Uh but I noticed that I could switch as the artist as the host and the guest intended.
3:20:08
Um and I also left a comment and it I had fun in the comment section.
3:20:11
But uh you could watch video, switch to audio, but then there were also short form video clips that were all linked to the same profile.
3:20:17
I didn't have to go find Davidson shorts. Yes.
3:20:19
Uh why will there be different feeds when that's something that they could solve on their side?
3:20:26
>> That's a really interesting I don't know. I'd ask them. I'll ask them.
3:20:27
Um I'm not sure but uh but this was we were in Stockholm together this he told me this in January so a few months cuz the original idea >> I I I I guess I should back up too >> the original idea was to launch in April >> because again like you guys have a deep relationship with RAM just like I do.
3:20:46
And you know, I had this idea, give credit to Eric and Kareem for the level of trust they put in me where I was like, I want to do this where I have long form conversations with starting with the people that are in my audience and like I think it'll be good, but like I think I would love if you guys are the presenting sponsor like done like immediately, right?
3:21:04
And the original idea was to launch in April. >> April of next year.
3:21:08
No, this past April, but me and Daniel couldn't sync schedules and I'm like, I'm not launching until >> he's got to be number one. Yeah.
3:21:16
Because of >> the pod father.
3:21:19
>> Not that it's like the respect I have for him.
3:21:20
Uh the like I just knew like out of every I'm friends with a bunch of people recorded, but not to the level of like I've spent hours and hours talking to him.
3:21:30
I just knew he's just so wise and he's not I just knew I could get stuff out of him that, you know, I hadn't seen him talk about anywhere else.
3:21:36
And so we recorded that like a few months ago, but it was like the beginning of the summer.
3:21:40
And then I talked to the head of business at Spotify and the head of product and they're both like you don't launch a show in the summer.
3:21:46
And so that's why I got put pushed back to uh end of September. Yeah.
3:21:51
Because everybody's like they're just distracted.
3:21:52
It's just like you want maximum impact. Yeah.
3:21:53
And so we we waited for a while. >> Yeah.
3:21:56
I mean the launch >> you expect to to record and scrap episodes entirely.
3:22:00
Do you think that'll be frequent or do you think that if you bring the right energy, you can always get >> I the unfair advantage we have is that like I do a monologue podcast and maybe better than anybody else in the world and so like if they're going to sit there and listen to me talk I can I can go forever like forever.
3:22:17
>> No, I don't think I'll scrap it.
3:22:17
I just think you have to be again you have to respect >> the the the the time of the audience and so but this is different.
3:22:24
So you you mentioned the founders the formula for founders like I don't like doing them longer than an hour. Yeah.
3:22:29
So that way you're listening on 1. 5.
3:22:30
So it's like a 40 year 40-year career, 40 hours of reading, right?
3:22:35
That you can listen to in 45 minutes. Yep.
3:22:36
That's the value prop of founders. Yep.
3:22:38
And that will give you a very high-end audience if you just just idea after idea after idea. Yeah.
3:22:44
This other one like if if I can have an interesting four-hour conversation, they're going to be four hours long. I don't think I can.
3:22:47
I think I could talk for we could talk for four hours and you should edit it down to probably like two.
3:22:54
>> You going to do Gaston Glock's daughter?
3:22:55
>> We should do the first. Did >> you see her? >> No. >> She's on X. >> No. >> Yeah.
3:22:59
She took over the company.
3:22:59
I believe it's his daughter or maybe granddaughter.
3:23:02
But >> did you listen to that episode?
3:23:04
>> Oh yeah, it's one of my >> We could do the three of us could do a 24-hour podcast on >> podcast >> business podcasting for sure. >> We could do that.
3:23:10
It would be boring as hell for the audience, but you guys have invited me before.
3:23:13
You're like, do you want to be here for the whole show?
3:23:14
And I was like, I don't think that's a good idea. >> You can do it.
3:23:18
>> Like I I can't live stream for three hours. I will get in trouble. >> It's easy. It's easy. Watch.
3:23:21
There's a woman in San Francisco charging $30,000 to name your baby. What do you think? >> You're using that? Were you using that?
3:23:30
>> No, you shouldn't have a kid if you need somebody else to name it. >> Good take.
3:23:32
See, it's easier than you think.
3:23:34
>> No, but I will get in trouble.
3:23:34
I will literally get cancelled because I don't have a filter. I can't do live.
3:23:38
Remember, I can edit the out of >> I think the only thing you do is swear.
3:23:41
You're very you're very very tame.
3:23:41
Other than that, you just always divert.
3:23:46
You're just always any you naturally divert to history and talking about >> Okay, so that's that's the key where it's like if you go back to differentiation, right?
3:23:54
This is somebody said the funniest thing where there's like a um Red Bull futurist. >> Yeah. >> Okay.
3:24:00
He's like somebody ripped literally said we're going to be the TPBN of Europe and then he quote tweeted them and and no disrespect to them.
3:24:06
I don't know them but like he's like of course like the TB Europe works two days two days a week.
3:24:14
>> To their credit they leaned into it and they were like which I really appreciate.
3:24:17
>> No but that's the point.
3:24:17
It's just like >> God bless your soul.
3:24:20
It's just like then you're you want to avoid direct comparison.
3:24:23
And I can tell you right now, >> they haven't asked me for podcast advice. Yeah.
3:24:27
But there's I can't think of other people in the podcast industry that I'd want to avoid direct comparison than you two.
3:24:32
It's like you're going to lose that because everybody's going to be like, "Let's compare this to TBN." What is this thing? >> What is this? >> The Ultra Drum. Go to the wide. Go to the wide. Go to the main. Go to the main wide. >> The big wide.
3:24:42
>> We're here in the dome.
3:24:43
>> The I don't know where the what camera I should be looking into.
3:24:45
There's like 10 of them in here.
3:24:46
You don't understand how serious >> because someone just copied our last set and we completely changed the set.
3:24:53
>> You don't understand how serious these two guys take it. It's just stupid.
3:24:55
And there's a great line in 0ero to1, right, where Peter Thiel says, "If you're copying Mark Zuckerberg, you're not learning from him." >> Yeah.
3:25:04
>> You copy, you don't copy the what, you copy the how. >> Yeah. >> It drives me insane.
3:25:08
So my point is like I'm not going to start another interview show.
3:25:12
I'm gonna say, "Hey, I'm gonna have conversations and the for >> conversation show."
3:25:17
>> No, no, not even that.
3:25:17
But there's other conversation shows like Joe Rogan what you just said, I can't help myself.
3:25:22
Everything I hear, read, >> anything, it all ties back to the that I learned from founders.
3:25:26
So, it's like, oh, like the first time uh I met Michael Dell when I flew the first time, you know, we were talking, we went through uh Zack Dell's base power, we're going over and they were showing like me these these dashboards, everything else.
3:25:37
Within like the first five minutes, I'd made references to like Jim Casey, Fred Smith, Brad Jacobs.
3:25:40
This is like this just comes naturally. >> Yeah.
3:25:44
>> Um so it's like the important thing about podcasting or in I think any kind of business has to be like natural to you.
3:25:50
>> So in our private conversations we pull ideas from Olga all the time or anybody.
3:25:54
Um so yeah that's exactly what I want to do.
3:25:56
And so people are like I liked it but you should do this.
3:25:58
I don't know what to tell you because it's like this is just who I am.
3:26:00
I can't I'm not acting like I can only be who I am. >> Yeah.
3:26:04
I think the thing that's so I think I think the conversations that uh giving people the experience of you being at dinner with Daniel or oitz these people >> like I I feel like incredibly blessed that I get to go to dinner with you and hang out with our friends and get get the David Center experience of like having a normal conversation but then always you're always pulling it back and like contextualizing it with history.
3:26:32
It's like incredibly addicting.
3:26:32
I could just I could do, you know, go to dinner for 6 hours because it's still going to just be wildly interesting.
3:26:38
But now creating that product, I saw somebody uh somebody in the chat was looking earlier.
3:26:43
They were looking at the first few guests and they were like, I might need to come back to this podcast later after I've made a few billion.
3:26:47
But it's actually the exact opposite of that.
3:26:51
It's like no, just giving this product is something that's completely free.
3:26:55
anybody can just go listen to it and you get to be get the experience of being at dinner with you and and somebody that's created a $150 billion company, a10 billion dollar company.
3:27:05
>> So there's two things on that.
3:27:05
So I did this like uh my very first viral episode of Founders because I don't obviously don't try to go viral is when I did the I had dinner with Charlie Mer episode.
3:27:12
I remember that >> and it like it went so viral put Founders to the top of the charts over for all podcasts.
3:27:18
for all podcasts. Funniest thing about that was that uh didn't you get some inbound from journalists who were like he he didn't want people to write about it and you got scoops like because reporting on it or something like new information
3:27:32
>> Birkshshire's so again reason why people love Munger and people people I admire it's like they're chaotic uncontrollable people I am one of those people right it's like Rob is not going to Rob Moore is not going to be like we I'm going to try to box this guy just like there's just no way. So Bergkshire was
3:27:45
So Bergkshire was they're they're very like they understand the power of story.
3:27:50
They control everything and Charlie was uncontrollable.
3:27:55
>> And so it was not like I I they knew I was a podcaster.
3:27:58
They knew like I was going to make a podcast about it.
3:28:00
I wasn't going to record anything. >> Yeah.
3:28:03
>> Um and so Bergkshire's PR was super mad >> because they kept not because of the episode.
3:28:09
They actually the episode was very positive. >> Yeah. It was amazing.
3:28:11
>> But what they were upset about is then you had all these journalists hitting them up.
3:28:15
They're like, "I thought >> What did you mean by this?
3:28:17
>> I thought Charlie didn't give interviews. I'm a uh >> this one." >> Yeah. No.
3:28:21
So, he's like, "Uh, he's not I thought he doesn't give interviews."
3:28:23
I'm like, "I'm not a journalist. I'm an enthusiast. I This guy is my idol. I have a bust.
3:28:28
I have a bronze bust of Charlie in my house. >> I'm not a journalist. I'm an enthusiast. Enthusiast." That's true. Enthusiast.
3:28:38
>> And so then I feedback.
3:28:38
I was like, "Listen, if Charlie if Charlie says delete the episode, I will delete the episode." But some lady at Brook.
3:28:46
>> No, that's not going to happen.
3:28:46
Like I'm very proud of that. >> Have him call me. Have him call me. Here's my number.
3:28:51
>> And and then we found out Charlie didn't give a because he doesn't he didn't give a He's almost 100 years old.
3:28:55
So to answer your question or to to piggy back on your comment.
3:28:57
So I was doing all these like I had dinner with episodes where I'd have dinner and then I'd summarize in an episode but you didn't hear anybody else.
3:29:03
And so the original idea I had for David Center by David Center by hosted by David Center >> is record.
3:29:09
There's this there's Jay-Z is one of the most fascinating people to me. Sure.
3:29:14
Um, episode 238 of Founders is his autobiography and he doesn't ever do podcasts and he did a podcast that was a title exclusive when he was trying to build up title and the podcast was fascinating. It's called Rap Radar.
3:29:26
They rented they were in a private dining room in Beverly Hills.
3:29:30
So, it's the two hosts and then Jay-Z and they just have lunch, >> right?
3:29:35
You don't he's not like chewing that.
3:29:38
So you edit that stuff out and I'm like that's that's exactly what I want.
3:29:42
Like because what you just said, how much would people pay >> y >> to have dinner with Brad Jacobs? Yeah.
3:29:48
Or Daniel E or Mike Oitz.
3:29:48
I'm going to New York again in like two weeks to have dinner with Oitz again.
3:29:52
OIT's come like a crazy friend.
3:29:53
Like he texts me all the time. He just booked a guest. I can't tell you who.
3:29:57
Let me tell you the funny Oitz experience I had this this week.
3:30:00
>> Uh he goes, "Hey, I just had dinner with X."
3:30:02
Okay, I'm not I can't say who. >> Elon Musk's son. >> No kidding.
3:30:05
And he goes, "He's unbelievable.
3:30:08
You should get him for the new show."
3:30:09
And I was like, "Do you think you can help convince him?"
3:30:11
He goes, "That's why I'm texting you." >> Two hours. No, but give him credit.
3:30:16
He's like, "What's your email?"
3:30:18
Like the email to the person that can book this for me.
3:30:20
Two hours later, >> date done.
3:30:23
Like he's a he's a shark machine. >> That's fantastic. >> He's crazy.
3:30:27
So, I do want to say one other thing about being free.
3:30:28
I um >> I just retweeted my own tweet. >> Here we go.
3:30:34
>> Because I think this a pat on the back.
3:30:36
No, because I I I think this is important what you just said about the fact that it's like a miracle self is free.
3:30:41
And I was feeling this today because like the message I've been getting for the for the Daniel episode and it's like podcasting is a miracle.
3:30:47
You can receive a world-class education on any subject you want on demand while your eyes are busy for free.
3:30:54
>> And I understand that I've been doing it for almost 10 years.
3:30:56
It's still a miracle to me.
3:30:57
I still cannot believe >> that I can listen to these conversations.
3:31:03
I can it just I I I never >> I I still I still I I still feel that uh podcasts were much more important to my education than my traditional education.
3:31:17
I I thought back of of uh I was lucky to discover like Tim Ferrris when I was 18, right?
3:31:23
And and being able to Yeah.
3:31:23
You just did the show with Tim.
3:31:26
Um, and just like being able to sit on on those conversations and learn about different perspectives on life and different ways to live and and how to work and how to be healthy, all these different things were were incredibly formative.
3:31:36
And I just thought I was never growing up, I was never in an environment where I was in any of those rooms at all. Right.
3:31:43
I had a you know uh uh uh there's some people that are that benefited from that and I just feel like it is the greatest public uh public good. >> You nailed it.
3:31:54
Like, okay, if you went to Harvard or Princeton or Ivy League, like my parents didn't even graduate high school.
3:31:59
That was just never going to be an option. I had to work full-time.
3:32:01
Like, maybe you get world like there are a small percentage of people that get world class education and they're surrounded by the crazy network.
3:32:08
Like, think about like the majority of my friends were all at Harvard. They're all like Jewish.
3:32:11
These these like Jew Jewish genius Harvard people.
3:32:16
They were all at school at the same time.
3:32:17
And then you fast forward, they've been out of school for like 15 years and they're all completely like absolutely dominating.
3:32:21
Like I couldn't imagine what that experience would have been like to have that when you were 18. >> Like lifechanging.
3:32:27
And they're still doing >> you go you go you go to your friend's house for the weekend and the dad just the conversations at the dinner table, right?
3:32:34
But now those conversations are actually widely accessible to everyone. >> Exactly.
3:32:38
And so like I've learned more. I'm looking for this.
3:32:39
We you know you were one of the first advertisers on Founders years ago and I'm actually looking for this text now.
3:32:45
text that you sent me probably like 2023. >> Um >> Oh, way back. >> Yeah.
3:32:53
But you were just like, "Founders is essentially like the only show that I'm listening to these days." >> Yep.
3:32:58
>> Um >> we go >> and I want the response though cuz my response was kind of arrogant. >> Well, no. I tried it.
3:33:04
I I asked if you were open to being acquired, I think, and you were like, >> "Yeah, and then you wanted you wanted to buy all Oh, no.
3:33:11
Um you're like the only podcast I listen to religiously." This is Hold on.
3:33:16
This is going to be funny.
3:33:17
Do you think this is an act?
3:33:17
So this is back in March 22, 2023 is when this is happening. Okay.
3:33:21
So you text me only podcast I listen to religiously. I go, "No days off.
3:33:25
I'm coming for everyone." >> Fact check. True.
3:33:30
>> Like narrator, he did come for everyone.
3:33:32
>> How do you uh explain your approach to work?
3:33:38
because I know you my experience you're working around the clock like you're you're you're always on but it doesn't always look like being in front of a a you know a computer you know editing an episode or whatever but what what and and what have you kind of pulled from the greats to kind of inform your own process?
3:33:59
So I I think like man sometimes so I just did Tim Ferrris and sometimes like I think I said this on Tim Ferrris like I say stuff and I'm like I should not be admitting to this.
3:34:14
Uh but then every time I do people are like man I'm so glad you said X Y or Z because like I feel that exact same way.
3:34:19
>> What that you procrastinate sometimes? >> No no no.
3:34:22
So my issue was I think for years episode 222 of founders Ed Thorp and if you look at the subtitle of that episode it's like my personal blueprint.
3:34:31
And what I thought was interesting about Ed Thorp was like oh this guy like mastered life more than almost anybody ever come across out of the 400 episodes I've done.
3:34:38
And what I mean by that is like he actually was like balanced like he you know he has a he lived crazy adventurous life.
3:34:43
He um invented the system for counting cards in blackjack.
3:34:48
Built the world's first wearable computer with Claude Shannon.
3:34:50
created the world's uh first quantitative hedge fund, made more money than you could ever spend.
3:34:55
Uh he but he he like took care of his health.
3:34:57
He was a good family man.
3:34:59
And so that's what I meant.
3:34:59
I was like, "Oh, he's like all well balanced."
3:35:03
And I was like, "This is my blueprint."
3:35:05
And the closest thing I have to like a mentor, I would say, uh like an explicit mentor and kind of like an older brother is Sam Hinky.
3:35:12
>> And I was on the phone with him recently, I mean recently, was probably like nine months ago because I I kind of understood this about myself for a while.
3:35:19
And I'm like, man, I think I'm lying.
3:35:20
Like, I think I'm lying when I say like that's my blueprint.
3:35:24
Like, I don't like I don't want to be balanced.
3:35:26
Like, I don't like I like I think I'm much more like Enzo Ferrari than I am like Ed Thorp.
3:35:30
And, you know, I think Sam's point, he's just like he's a way better person than I am.
3:35:34
Like legitimately better human being than I am.
3:35:38
And his point is like trying to pull me back in that direction.
3:35:40
And I just think that's like not going to happen.
3:35:43
So to answer your question is like if my eyes are open then I'm thinking about work and I'm only thinking about work and it doesn't feel like work because I just have this irrational obsession.
3:35:53
Dude, I don't want to talk about this.
3:35:53
I literally like this sounds so so terrible.
3:35:58
I literally like had tears in my eyes when I woke up yesterday because this is so important to me and I knew it was I knew that yesterday was like a a big turning point in my life, but I woke up from a private message from Daniel and it's like I read it and like immediately started crying like not like sobbing, but like tears in my eyes because to have somebody that you respect so much say you're like you you're I'm really proud of you.
3:36:22
Like what you're putting out is excellent, really great.
3:36:27
And to have that and also love it the way I do.
3:36:30
It's like the reason I said Enzo Ferrari because he said a man dominated by passion such as mine like can't be cut in half.
3:36:36
His whole point was like he wasn't good at anything else but thinking about Ferrari.
3:36:41
And so my work thing is just like I'm in infinitely curious.
3:36:43
And so like today, you know, I worked out and then every other thing was just reading and like I'm reading two books at the same time.
3:36:54
I'm working on founders episodes.
3:36:55
I'm trying to respond to messages about the Daniel episode. Like I don't know.
3:36:59
And then I just come over here and like we're friends but this is kind of work too.
3:37:02
And then after this like I'm going to go back and work some more and like that's all I want to do.
3:37:06
>> I have a follow-up question but first I'm going to tell you about adquick. com.
3:37:10
Out of home advertising made easy and measurable.
3:37:11
Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising.
3:37:13
Only ad combines technology out of home expertise and data to enable efficient seamless ad buying across the globe.
3:37:19
>> I don't I don't mind the ad.
3:37:19
I love the ads and I love how they're weaved in.
3:37:22
But if I'm sitting here it's got to be a ramp ad. >> Okay. Run it back. Run it back. >> Uh, time is money. Save both.
3:37:27
Corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Go to ramp. com.
3:37:33
Uh, my question, do you think that there is a material difference between retired and live player, active CEO, post FU money, posteconomic in terms of the shape of an interview, what you get out.
3:37:49
If I if if you took a random listener and they had no idea who Daniel E and Brad Jacobs and uh Michael Dell and all these different folks who you're going to interview were >> I'm not interviewing them. >> What? Yeah.
3:38:04
Talking to um >> do you think that they would be able to tell okay this person's still in the arena this person is post economic checked out?
3:38:14
>> It's not it's not a money thing.
3:38:14
It's not a retirement thing.
3:38:15
It's like a personality thing.
3:38:17
Wait till you see the Brad.
3:38:20
I cannot believe some of the stuff we got on film that Brad Jacobs does >> because that guy just can't help himself. He is who he is.
3:38:26
And obviously like he's a public company.
3:38:29
I don't know if he's a CEO of he's definitely a chairman, but like a lot of these happen to be public company CEOs.
3:38:34
So like I have to be, you know, they have they have comms people and they have all this crazy stuff and I'm not going to I'm not intentionally trying to get in in trouble with anybody.
3:38:41
You know, again, I'm an enthusiast. I'm not a journalist.
3:38:44
I just think, hey, you're brilliant.
3:38:44
Can I pull something out of you that other people I benefit a lot from talking to you?
3:38:50
>> And so it's kind of selfish that I get all these lessons and this inspiration and this education from you.
3:38:53
Are you cool us sitting down and just recording the conversations we have any anyways?
3:38:58
And so person like Brad >> doesn't give a He is 68.
3:38:59
He's got the most energy of anybody else I've been around.
3:39:03
He also has nothing to be insecure about because he started eight separate billion dollar companies and he's a >> he wrote the book on starting billion dollar companies >> and he's and I guess you're also not asking for you know like are you bullish on this particular market that you may or may not have bags in. That's not relevant.
3:39:18
>> I don't we don't talk at all about current affairs. >> Sure.
3:39:21
>> Current events like >> which is this is why we're beautiful yin and yang because obviously we're focused on >> what's happening.
3:39:28
Another huge point of uh differentiation against like a Rogan is like you go in Rogan it's going to be like well let's react to the news right now. It's very different. >> No.
3:39:36
And my point like I'm not you know I'm not we talked about this be John was like will you do a podcast with me?
3:39:40
I was like what are we going to do?
3:39:42
He's like talk about tech news.
3:39:43
I'm like talking about tech news.
3:39:45
No I'm not going to talk about tech news.
3:39:46
Uh >> would you uh RAV is asking would you interview David Senra on David Senra by David Senra hosted by David Senra. >> Okay.
3:39:56
>> Would you interview yourself? >> Okay.
3:39:58
So, the the the the hold on the reclusive genius that we all know and then we can't name his name.
3:40:01
Literally called me yesterday. >> Yeah.
3:40:04
>> Um and had a long conversation about this and he had a I'm not I can't say I'll tell you guys off here, but he had a great idea and he's like once we we should do this for episode 100. And I'm like, >> yeah.
3:40:16
>> Well, there's another great idea. Go to getbzzle. com.
3:40:18
Your bezel concier is available to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. Get a look.
3:40:24
>> Uh last question I have on my side, then we should we should grab lunch. Uh, >> I'm sorry.
3:40:28
>> Do you think we're exiting the hobbyist era of podcasting >> era?
3:40:36
We had this conversation yesterday.
3:40:39
>> It was I mean there was a there was a beautiful there was there was a there was about a a a decade and a half where you could start a podcast and have a you know >> I was doing media part-time.
3:40:51
>> I was one of the worst >> Yeah.
3:40:53
But we had this conversation.
3:40:53
No, we had >> You convinced me.
3:40:54
I I had this conversation when I came in because uh >> it it was just obvious.
3:40:58
We'll talk about this later.
3:41:00
Like it's the first video I saw of yours.
3:41:02
I was like, "This guy, we had to be friends.
3:41:04
He's a generational talent." Like, it's just obvious.
3:41:07
>> We had a we had a guy stopped John while we were at breakfast this morning.
3:41:09
Had no idea about TVPN, but was obsessed with John's videos.
3:41:13
And John's like, "I haven't published a video.
3:41:16
I haven't published a video in like over a year." Yes.
3:41:20
I was like, I want to think it was that early, but I came in really years early.
3:41:24
Um, so anyways, we we me and Joy just randomly talk about this because we can't help ourselves.
3:41:28
Um, yesterday when we randomly ran into each other.
3:41:30
Uh, this is where I like >> I don't mean any disrespect to other people. So, >> we are live.
3:41:40
>> I know this is I have to be very careful.
3:41:42
So, >> and that's a great place to end it. >> No, no. So, um, okay. No disres.
3:41:44
There's no way this guy's watching. >> No, no, no, no, no. It all gets back. >> Okay. Okay. Right. Okay.
3:41:51
I was induced into a state of rage because I was I was at a dinner and I was introduced to another podcaster and they mentioned like again they're from like the old school right when you can like come in and like it's just different and basically his point was just like yeah there's like I have to figure out like a new form.
3:42:14
There were a lot of people that saw podcasting as just like a marketing side hobby.
3:42:19
>> But but you can't say I need like I need to fix my show and I need a different like I need like a new like take on my existing show and also tell me >> that I'm going to take three months off to do something else that's not the podcast.
3:42:31
And I told him, I go, "You're going to get up."
3:42:35
>> Like, because what's happening now, this is exactly what I said, though.
3:42:37
But this is what's happening now is people used to come in and they're like, "Oh, I'm just going to like I can do three other things."
3:42:43
Podcast could be your third, fourth, fifth most important thing in your life. >> Yeah.
3:42:46
It's just 90 minutes once a week. >> Yeah.
3:42:48
But now you have people that act like founders and entrepreneurs coming in.
3:42:51
And the conversation we had, it's like, so I think of like obviously I approach this as if if an Enzo Ferrari was doing what I was doing, if a Munger was doing what I was doing, if a Steve Jobs was doing or Edwin Lamb was doing what I was doing, what would they do?
3:43:04
That's exactly how I think.
3:43:04
And then I come into this and I'm like, oh, and I knew you guys think like this anyways, but what I was just telling them because I was like, where did the rest of you had like 15 people last time I was here?
3:43:13
The interns went back to college. Yeah.
3:43:15
>> I'm like, no, they're going to learn more.
3:43:16
I go, these two >> or one of our interns didn't go back to college, >> but I go, this is what I said.
3:43:20
I go, "These two are going to take this as far as it can possibly go."
3:43:23
There is no way if you have a front row seat to that. Skip a year of college.
3:43:29
They're going to take this as far as possible.
3:43:32
You guys are not at You're not p you are podcasters, but you're entrepreneurs and you just realize like this is the product. Look what it's got.
3:43:38
Your one-year anniversary is what?
3:43:39
4 days from now, >> I think. So, >> yeah.
3:43:42
We need to figure out when >> episode 365 probably.
3:43:44
But look at what you guys we didn't start.
3:43:50
>> We didn't Well, we didn't Yeah.
3:43:50
We didn't start doing >> daily until I cornered you at the Fina in Miami and started yelling >> out of love.
3:43:58
>> That's the real That's the real founding date. >> Yeah.
3:44:01
>> But my point being is like we were just looking at episode one right before I came on and look what you guys you're entrepreneurs.
3:44:08
You've iterated tremendously in a year. >> Yeah. Yeah.
3:44:11
>> And so yeah, good luck competing with John and Jordy.
3:44:13
You're not going to do that.
3:44:14
Yeah, it's also I mean the function of you know John spending years building up figuring out how to create great content online.
3:44:23
Me starting my career basically selling ads on the internet.
3:44:29
Just a bunch of different and then >> I don't know it's uh would not have been possible if we hadn't each spent a decade doing what we did prior.
3:44:35
But then there's also something that is not copyable, which is the chemistry between you two, which is why I was so like emphatic about you need to take this more seriously.
3:44:45
Not that you weren't, but like you you had there's just you can't buy that chemistry.
3:44:49
>> What do you mean chemistry? We're mortal enemies.
3:44:51
>> No, you just play the amount of time.
3:44:53
>> Yeah, we're just great actors. We're here in Hollywood.
3:44:55
>> There's so many times where like >> I remember when I went to casting and they were like, you're going to play this guy. >> This is a lie.
3:44:59
You don't lie to your audience.
3:45:00
There's so many times when the character the friend a character that's friends with >> for the other there's so many audience they're lying there's so many times when I'm with one >> and the other one calls the other one and it's just like they love each other like I can't hang out anybody as much as you guys hang out and then still like them.
3:45:19
So like >> nobody I just >> Nobody likes talking about >> 225 is not going to match itself. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We we can't.
3:45:27
>> Who else will I get to shily spot me while they're on their phone and I'm dying the sex threat?
3:45:34
>> I've I've definitely I've gotten better at spotting.
3:45:36
But but when when in the morning when we're working out, it's uh it's going to be a couple times John almost lost his head because I was locked in on the news when he was bashing.
3:45:46
>> Dude, your back the joint workouts are working.
3:45:48
I saw the pictures of you at the beach.
3:45:50
Your back's getting >> big. It's way wider.
3:45:51
You guys are on the juice. >> Look at this. >> No juice. I do. I do that.
3:45:55
Here you know the secret.
3:45:57
I eat a ham I eat a double smash burger every morning every >> secrets stuff anyway secrets. Uh this is a lot of fun.
3:46:06
>> Let me tell you about wander.
3:46:06
You want to sing with us.
3:46:09
>> Find your happy place. Find your happy place.
3:46:12
Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel, great amenities, dreamy beds, top cleaning, and 24/7 concier service.
3:46:16
It's a vacation home but better. Tory case.
3:46:18
>> I just have to say uh I'm so happy for you. I'm so proud of you. >> Congratulations.
3:46:22
Uh I feel lucky to have met you before you became a household uh name and nobody in my career has done more for me than you with zero financial incentive anything anything along those lines.
3:46:40
Um so it's one thank you very much.
3:46:44
The second part I think is really important is because at the end of the day if you're insanely talented is like people chase money when you should really be chasing relationships.
3:46:50
Like that is all like Outside of work, I care deeply about the friendships that I build and like I don't purposely, you know, I talked to Kareem about this.
3:46:59
He's like, "Man, you're selling all these ads for other podcasters.
3:47:02
You're doing all sort stuff."
3:47:03
Kareem from RAMP, one of the gene, maybe the most brilliant mind working in finance today, technical mind working in finance today.
3:47:09
Listen to the Daniel episode and you'll see how he's similar to how Kareem's working style is very similar to Daniel's.
3:47:14
Um, and he's like, "Why don't you start like a, you know, business doing this?"
3:47:17
It's like, I don't I do it because I love the PE.
3:47:18
I love podcasters and I love super talented people that take their work very seriously and it's like I like seeing my friends win >> and no side hustles. >> Yeah.
3:47:27
Then that's another reason >> never side hustle.
3:47:30
>> Well, uh let's ring it for the first episode of >> Thank you. >> There we go. Great hit.
3:47:36
Uh thank you for tuning in folks. We love you. We'll see you tomorrow. >> See you tomorrow. Thank you. Cheers.