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Five good multiple journalists on the horizon. Denmark founder Mike. >> YOU'RE WATCHING TVN.

4:39

>> WOW, look at those flashes.

4:39

Today's Wednesday, February 4, 2026.

4:41

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Ramp's doing a Super Bowl ad.

4:53

We're doing a Super Bowl ad.

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4:55

Ramp's in our Super Bowl ad.

4:57

Um, we're very excited for the Super Bowl. Just a couple days away.

5:00

Uh, this was a very fun project.

5:02

Uh, do you want to take us through the the the thesis and sort of what what what we put together with this since uh I just got all the credit, but I had nothing to do with it basically. Uh, it was a very nice.

5:15

>> Let me pull up the the ade uh our friend.

5:18

There was a very nice post from Blake Schol over at Boom Supersonic and he said, "Uh, there's a there's Clever and then there's John Kugan and Jordy Hayes at TBPN Clever.

5:26

Behold, a masterclass in marketing and I had nothing to do with it and I get the credit. Let's go."

5:33

>> Uh, obviously this was Dylan on our team uh led the charge here.

5:36

Uh, this is something he's wanted to do for a long time.

5:39

We had done something similar back at Party Round.

5:41

We ran a billboard with uh a bunch of different uh friends, companies, customers, etc. did really well.

5:49

And so doing this is the final stage in terms of advertising.

5:53

>> Fun fact, Dylan also spoke this week at the New York Stock Exchange.

5:56

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5:57

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5:59

Very happy to be partnered with them.

6:01

>> Uh but Kendra Barnett over at Ade covered covered our ad. >> Yes, >> of course.

6:06

And uh she says the 15-second spot isn't selling anything.

6:09

It's simply what co-host Jordi Hayes calls a love letter to our community.

6:13

That's really what it is.

6:15

TVPN is nothing without uh the community, the people uh that join the show. Yeah.

6:22

>> Uh we made the 15-second spot inhouse.

6:24

We featured a bunch of our guests.

6:26

>> And then if you've been on the show uh as a guest, whether it was for 5 minutes >> or 5 hours, your logo uh made it in here.

6:35

So uh yeah, this will be a uh doing it a regional buy.

6:38

We basically looked at where the majority of our audience was and we bought uh bought uh segments around that.

6:44

So uh very excited for Sunday and I said in ad week it's completely unnecessary for a media company to buy advertising.

6:52

The nature of media is that you're constantly putting out things that are promoting the business naturally just through the content. So why do it?

6:59

>> Uh and we basically did it.

6:59

Uh I said we believe in doing things purely for fun.

7:04

So we're certainly having >> some people screenshotted that and texted me to that.

7:07

I thought that was a good quote.

7:08

Um, let me tell you about Finn.

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7:15

There was another reason be beyond fun.

7:17

I do think it's an important opportunity to to introduce the football community to technology, to business.

7:25

Um, and uh, and that's really that that's my goal with this ad.

7:28

Hopefully let people know if you're watching the Super Bowl, technology, it exists.

7:34

>> We got to raise awareness for technology and business. Uh, let's play the ad. >> Let's play the ad. >> Let's see. >> You're watching TVPN.

7:43

>> If you're watching this podcast, you've already passed the test.

7:46

>> It's a great question.

7:48

>> I think it's super important and awesome.

7:49

>> This is going to be one of a 100 bagger.

7:51

>> You guys are the number podcast in the world. >> The gong hit. This is great.

7:57

>> Short, sweet, and uh, we look forward to seeing it live on Sunday. >> Yes. 11 Labs.

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We have some massive news from 11 Labs.

8:10

Coming up on the show at 11:30, let's pull up the linear lineup.

8:15

Uh I will tell you that Linear is the system for modern software development.

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70% of enterprise workspaces on linear are using agents and we have a stack show.

8:22

Andrew Reed's back on the show.

8:25

Maddie from 11 Labs is coming on.

8:25

Uh we have Gerge from the pramatic pragmatic engineer coming on.

8:31

>> Super pumped for that one.

8:32

>> Uh D from Uber's coming on.

8:32

Mitchell Green, one of our close friends, is coming on to talk about uh all sorts of stuff going on in the market.

8:38

And then we have an awesome lightning round lined up.

8:41

So, uh is there anything else we should we should cover about the Super Bowl or should we move on to other Super Bowl coverage because we're not the only ones running ads, lots of tech people. >> Uh wild wild morning. Yes.

8:54

I was not expecting this out of Anthropic.

8:58

They basically took the vibe war was like effectively >> uh relegated to Axe. >> Yeah.

9:05

>> Uh it just felt like the same 100,000 people saying it's so over, we're so back. It's so over. We're so back.

9:11

>> Uh they're taking it to the main stage, right?

9:13

And it shouldn't be that surprising, right?

9:14

Anytime Daario gets on a mic anywhere, he's taking shots at Open AI.

9:19

>> But he's he's not taking direct shots. >> Not direct shots.

9:22

And this arguably is not a direct shot either.

9:24

They just said ads are coming >> to AI. the clock. Yeah. Yeah. You're right.

9:30

But but truthfully, like a lot of the previous anthropic advertising has been uh very in their own lane.

9:34

Uh they've run a number of campaigns that have above the critical thinking.

9:38

We're your thought partner.

9:41

This one does feel like it's a response to what's happening in the industry.

9:44

So >> yeah, we we'll get into why they took this approach.

9:48

Clearly, they I think uh we're just excited to spike Sam's cortisol.

9:52

And I think I think they probably >> they've definitely been watching some some height >> should we just play all four ads.

10:00

>> Let's play let's play at least one of them.

10:02

We got to play the height maxing one.

10:04

That one's particularly funny.

10:04

But uh are they here in the timeline?

10:06

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10:17

>> And you were saying earlier off the show you were starting to like Anthropic until they came out against ads. >> Yes. Yes.

10:22

I I I see this as an attack on me.

10:25

I see an attack on one advertiser as an attack on all advertisers. I'm pro ads.

10:30

And >> wait, this is not this is not the right ad.

10:32

We'll come back to this one.

10:32

That's another Super Bowl ad that we'll have later.

10:36

>> Anthropic uh the anthropic attack on advertising.

10:39

It does cross a line for me. It goes too far.

10:40

And I think that they should be supporting the advertising economy.

10:43

Almost 10% of the American workers. >> All right.

10:47

So, let's pull up this one.

10:49

The first ad is, "Can I get a six-pack quickly?" >> Okay.

10:52

And uh this one I immediately thought, okay, this is definitely not just watching clvicular, they're studying it >> apparently. Let's watch it.

11:01

>> I was not expecting this to be the looks maxing Super Bowl. >> Yeah. >> Uh but let's play it. >> Do we have it? No. Almost.

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While we're doing that, let me tell you about public investing for those who take it seriously.

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11:20

Without further ado, let's play it.

11:21

Yeah, this is does it say violation?

11:23

>> It starts out by just saying violation quickly. >> Yeah, >> perfect.

11:28

That is a clear and achievable goal.

11:30

Would you like me to tailor a personalized workout plan? >> Yes. >> Perfect.

11:36

Let me personalize this for you. >> The lag.

11:40

>> This is a whole meme on Instagram reels.

11:42

People will do impressions of ChachiBT voice. >> 140 lbs. >> Got it.

11:48

I'll create a plan that focuses on aesthetic strength. >> Pause for a second.

11:53

>> Like the the slight delay. >> It's It is iconic. >> It's so good. >> Yeah.

11:57

>> And clearly this was written with Chad GribbT. >> No, >> no, no, no.

12:02

I'm like like it's it's designed to sound like it was like it's it sounds exactly like got it.

12:07

I'll create a personalized plan.

12:11

>> I don't think that's actually how Chachi PD sounds.

12:13

PD sounds. I I I I think in fact when I've watched the Instagram reels they they do the chatbt impression and it's it's a little more like this is written for comedy and so the fact that he says abs uh what does he say absolutely twice

12:28

in a row like that's something >> isn't just built in the gym tricep boost max the insoles that add one vertical inch of height and help short kings stand tall >> what use code height maxing 10 for big Discounts >> ads are coming to AI. But not to collide

12:46

But not to collide is a great ad.

12:50

>> What's the difference between the light matching thing is so crazy.

12:54

>> So crazy to run an ad like this and not even do a call to action.

12:56

Yeah, >> that was probably intentional if they're ant like you know Google Cloud and you land on the ad. >> It's so funny.

13:04

It's just truly the the the the irony of being anti- ad and then just spending.

13:09

How much do you think they're they're running?

13:10

They have four individual ads. You can imagine them.

13:14

This will probably be one of the biggest buys of the Super Bowl.

13:18

>> Someone ran the numbers and if they did all if they aired all four, it would be something like $80 million or something.

13:26

I don't think that they're going to run all four. That seems like a lot.

13:27

Maybe there'll be some regional buys in there. I don't know.

13:31

$80 million seems like a lot to spend.

13:32

I mean, it's a big company.

13:35

They raised tens of billions, so you know, it's possible, but that feels like that feels aggressive.

13:40

There's also bulk discounting and there's again they could do they could choose to do regional.

13:47

>> And isn't there something where if you buy a massive ad campaign like this, you'll also have to buy in the Olympics as well. NBC sells both.

13:53

So we could see a rerun of these or or another buy later.

13:59

>> Yeah, Super Bowl has an insane amount of demand.

14:01

Olympics has way less, >> but this is clearly like a a particular moment in time and and uh it's just insane. It's insane.

14:08

I mean, it's it's incredibly clever.

14:10

It's also incredibly dirty.

14:12

Like, they're ent I think they're like trying to muddy the water around the ads roll out. >> Oh, sure.

14:19

>> As the ads the ads that are coming to CHBT are effectively display ads, right?

14:24

>> Uh, everybody in the industry by now should know this.

14:27

>> Uh, yet this this campaign implies that the influence will influence the response and that you cannot trust it, right? Yeah.

14:35

And so it's it's fair game, >> but it's it's like >> it's like dirty. >> Yeah.

14:41

It's it's sort of fake newsy a little bit.

14:43

It's a little bit uh it's a little spin on top of what will wind up happening.

14:48

Um and yeah, I mean the the the it wouldn't even make sense for the ads to really influence the content.

14:55

They're probably just going to wind up doing what Instagram does and just showing you things that you're actually likely to purchase no matter what you're looking at because that will just be what optimizes uh CAC and rorowaz. >> Yeah.

15:05

I mean I mean at some point I effect I I expect that the ads will be certainly targeted like if you search >> I don't know uh yerba mate. >> Yeah.

15:17

>> What yerba mate should I get?

15:17

It might show you like what it thinks you should get and then separately it will have like here's also another >> approach where you see a sponsored result and it's flagged and there's a little ad t ad tag or slightly different background color and people are used to that.

15:34

So I don't think anyone really expects you know ads as they roll out in chatbt to be some major violation of the social contract of what people understand ads to be.

15:42

Um, but what's interesting is that they don't actually say open AAI. They don't say chatbt.

15:49

This is just what comes with the territory when you're the dominant player.

15:52

Someone can just take a shot at the category. Yeah.

15:55

>> And it feels like it's a shot at you.

15:57

And it's sort of a it's sort of a champagne problem.

15:59

You know, if if Chacht wasn't in the position that it was in, they wouldn't everyone wouldn't be like, "Oh, this is a shot at Chad PT."

16:06

They'd be like, "Oh, this is a shot at the category."

16:08

Because there's seven players that are all equally used.

16:10

It's like, no, it's >> Let's pull up the next one.

16:14

>> It's a dominant uh app.

16:14

Yeah, let's pull up the next one.

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The mature dating site that connects sensitive feels so cougars >> for anthropic. >> Anthropic. >> Yeah.

17:02

They haven't It's not It's not It's not classy. >> Yeah.

17:06

Like it's it's I'm not saying I'm not saying it wasn't a good >> It feels it feels appropriate for the Super Bowl.

17:13

This feels like the level of humor that you would see in Super Bowl ads.

17:15

Like if this was a Bud Light commercial, I'd be like, "Okay."

17:17

But yes, I agree with you.

17:18

It feels like totally unexplored territory for them.

17:22

>> It's Yeah, it is a little spicy. It's spicy. >> It's Yeah, maybe.

17:27

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18:30

What >> would you like to make a quick credit check?

18:37

>> Incredibly well played and incredibly dirty. >> Yeah. Yeah.

18:41

>> Like th this I I >> it's the worstful outcome in in an ads world, but so easily avoidable and OpenAI has been messaging.

18:50

they would not for ages and they've stated this multiple times on podcasts and in blog posts and in essays like they they've been beating the drum on this for a long time um that clearly they will gate who is allowed to advertise what the context is, how these ads will be displayed.

19:08

There's a there's a million >> I was trying to find examples of these type of Super Bowl attack ads from like the history of Pepsi and and Coca-Cola, Apple and IBM. >> Yeah. Yeah. I'm a Mac. Yeah, I'm a Mac guy. Oh, yeah.

19:23

>> And none of them were as direct or effectively as >> the 1984 ad was saying like IBM is authoritarian dictator.

19:34

>> But less but still but still less it it it wasn't as as like the timing here is a big factor, right? Right.

19:40

When the ads were rolling out >> uh and just like really muddying the water. Mhm. >> I don't know.

19:49

Obviously, OpenAI is going to do is going to do fine, >> but this really makes their life a lot harder.

19:59

>> Yeah, >> that one was also funny cuz um like she's like uh Absolutely.

20:02

And that's what like Claude usually says like when the You're absolutely right. That's like a clawism.

20:08

>> Yeah, that's not Chachi.

20:09

>> What is What does Chachi usually say?

20:11

>> Uh I feel like there's >> I don't know if there's like specific phrases exactly like that.

20:15

>> Well, the specific phrase that I think of is like it's not this, it's that.

20:16

And I didn't hear that coming through. It was interesting. Um, but I don't know.

20:22

Do do you think these are going to be effective?

20:24

>> Do you think do you think >> that's the question?

20:25

So, so really bold campaign for a company that hasn't been able to consistently top crack the top 25 of the iPhone >> in consumer in consumer.

20:34

>> And so my question is like >> does this mean they're going into consumer or is this purely to piss off Open AI and make their life harder? >> Yeah.

20:43

I I like there's a world where there's where there's business leaders >> like is this like like somebody's walking by and you just stick your foot out and try to like trip them >> a little bit.

20:52

>> That's kind of what it feels like.

20:54

>> It feels like consumers so far gone. >> Yeah. I mean, we'll see. We'll see.

21:00

Maybe at the end of the Super Bowl, we'll we'll check the app store charts and Claude will be up at the top because so many people have seen this. They thought it's funny.

21:06

But it does feel like such inside baseball.

21:07

Like I bet a lot of I bet a lot of average consu AI consumers don't even know that ads are >> but again they're not even they're not even pushing they're not actually trying to push downloads with this or they would put a call to action. >> Yeah.

21:19

Or QR code like download the app now ad free ad free AI is here with claude like download this this thing. Yeah. >> Interesting.

21:26

I mean >> maybe that thing is that I don't even >> saying all this to IPO first.

21:30

I I can see it being uh beneficial in just terms of preparation for for the IPO, right?

21:39

There's a lot of people that are just retail investors that that aren't aware that that aren't really super aware of Claude, right?

21:46

They might have heard of Enthropic, but they actually aren't >> Yeah.

21:49

>> really aware of of their different products.

21:51

I just think like if you're if you're you know an an enterprise that's deploying AI APIs and LLMs like into your organization and like you're not worried about the ads product in chatbt you're like oh yeah like OpenAI codeex is is this quality Gemini 3 is good for this and claude 4.

22:11

5 is good for this and like my team will deploy and we'll look at costs and paro curves.

22:16

It doesn't feel like it doesn't feel like any any CIO or CTO of a big company is going to say like, "Oh, like I couldn't possibly, you know, use OpenAI in a business context."

22:29

>> Gabe says, "Ad Free AI is here with Claude.

22:31

Ask three questions before hitting limits." >> Yeah. Yeah.

22:36

>> Or use AD GBT and be able to ask a bunch more. >> Interesting.

22:38

Here's a Super Bowl ad they should run. >> MongoDB.

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22:47

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22:49

I would just clean ad read.

22:51

Clean ad read for >> Does this ever come back to bite them?

22:54

Because the idea that you're going to offer products to consumers and never monetize transactions, never monetize commerce, never run ads.

23:01

Like it hasn't really been done in the history of the internet. Even Spotify, right?

23:05

Netflix, they always over over look at look at Apple, right?

23:10

If if the claude app does go to the top of the app store, if they do wind up eclipsing chat GPT and become the most dominant force, like >> no, it is really funny.

23:18

You drive a bunch of people to an app that has pretty low usage limits and they try it for a little bit and they're like, h like >> they're not going to notice that the model might be better.

23:30

>> They're just going to be like, I'm going back to Chad GBT. >> That's funny. That's funny.

23:33

I want to see I want to see what the battle between uh Mac, Apple, and Windows looked like.

23:39

Uh, this is maybe back in 2006, 2009.

23:41

Uh, the I'm a Mac, I'm a PC campaign.

23:46

It's a It's a 10-minute compilation video, but we can just watch like the first one.

23:48

Uh, it's on it's on YouTube. >> Hello. Let's see.

23:52

>> I'm a Mac and I'm a PC >> cuz they get viruses. >> Inside, you okay? >> No, I'm not okay. >> His PC's got viruses. Max didn't. >> Yeah, there he goes. >> Oh, yeah.

24:04

>> In fact, you better you better stay back. This one's a doozy. That's okay. I'll be fine. >> No, no. Do not be a hero.

24:07

Last year, there are 114,000 known viruses for PCs. PCs, not Macs. So, just grab this.

24:16

>> I think I got to crash.

24:17

>> Hey, if you feel like that'll help. Good. >> Is this that far? >> Hello. I'm a Mac. >> And I'm a PC. >> And I'm a PC, too. >> And I What? >> Yeah.

24:26

See, now you can run Mac OS 10 or Windows on a Mac.

24:28

So, in a way, I'm kind of like the only computer you'll ever need. >> Oh, touche. >> Uh, no.

24:33

I don't think you're using that right. Touche. >> No, listen.

24:36

See, you can only say touch if you make a point that I make a counterpoint. You see?

24:39

So, I said I run Windows, but you haven't made a point yet. Let's try it again.

24:43

You can get a Mac and still run all your Windows stuff. Touche. >> Hello, I'm a Mac. >> Okay. What do you think?

24:51

I mean, they're not taking a shot at Windows specifically or Microsoft or Dell.

24:55

It's like all it's the whole category, but everyone knows it's really, you know, Apple versus Microsoft talking about viruses, talking about this other stuff. These are features. I don't know. It's not that far off.

25:10

>> It's It's certainly not edgy. It's certainly not edgy. Like it definitely fits. >> Yeah. So, Anthropic's edgy.

25:16

>> It's also It's also a timing thing where again >> they're actively trying to make >> their and and again, I'm not saying anything of this is is is >> not fair play technically, >> but the gloves are the gloves are off.

25:30

>> Yeah, it does feel >> and and there is zero.

25:31

I will go out now >> and say I would say there's effectively a 0% chance that OpenAI can win the Super Bowl this year.

25:40

They will be running an ad.

25:42

It would be insane if they didn't run an ad.

25:43

It'd be a huge >> just goes way harder.

25:48

>> Sam calling out Daario by name directly.

25:51

Just like Daario, you suck. >> Just a diss track. >> Yeah. I mean, mate. Yeah. Yeah.

25:57

just a bunch of Sora slop like >> Yeah. Just going >> Yeah.

26:03

No, I I I think like as the other thing is >> opening I I really doubt can react to this now. >> Oh, yeah. Yeah.

26:12

>> Like the right like if if this had dropped like a couple weeks ago, >> they would have been able to say, "Hey, we need to respond to this." >> But they can't now.

26:19

At least at least uh >> our experience buying an ad this year, we were the content was locked last week >> and there's a whole process, right?

26:30

There's subtitling all this stuff like they're not you can't just switch it up. Maybe opening.

26:34

>> Well, maybe maybe they win in the sense that like the vast majority of audiences have the reaction that you're having, which is like actually I don't mind ads and actually this is sort of a weird ad and I still like Chach.

26:46

and I still like Chach. And then Chachi comes out with an ad that's just like very vanilla like hey use it we'll help you cook we have health now you know we have a bunch of features that seems helpful like then they wind up >> has the right word is it >> he says it's propaganda IMO it really it really is it's it's not

27:02

it's not >> they're not being they're they're again they're just kind of calling out the category being general about it but they're implying that ads are going to impact >> it's fearongering fear-mongering that that that the that the AI that you're used to being truthful and accurate and not trying to sell you some product. >> They took like Mark Cuban's like main

27:20

>> They took like Mark Cuban's like main the things that he had been like going on and on and on about that everyone is like, "Hey dude, you can calm down."

27:29

Like that's not how it's going to work >> and then they just like went with his point of view. >> Yeah. Yeah.

27:33

Which is a little outdated.

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27:42

And then I want to go to Tyler.

27:44

Yeah, I was gonna say like it feels like the the vibe war is like really heating up, right?

27:47

Like over the summer there was talent war.

27:48

It was kind of a cold war, right?

27:50

It's kind of like okay, we got your guy, but on Twitter >> and it was all leaked behind the scenes like Mark Zuckerberg didn't even really give an interview during that whole time and and there was like that leaked memo from Mark Chen saying like I feel like something has been stolen from us.

28:02

something has been stolen from us. not coming out and saying >> at Davos like Daario is like basically he's still not saying open AI the words I think but he's saying like companies are doing ads there's only one company that's doing ads right >> yeah yeah yeah I mean it's sort of like the anti- there's these Ben Thompson has

28:19

this great formulation of like the anti-YouTube alliance between like Spotify and Netflix so like once one company starts pulling away in a category all the other companies sort of have a incentive to team up and right now it does feel like we're getting a little bit of an anti- open AAI alliance because everyone's like, "Well, they pulled away and so like, let's gang up on them." And they, you know, they they

28:38

And they, you know, they they they did so much stuff on the supply side, they locked up all these different all these different supply chain partners.

28:44

Like, we got to push back.

28:44

We actually got to team up.

28:46

And that's what you see at Davos with uh the the the buddy cop movie between Dario and Deis. Uh we will see.

28:56

And >> uh Katie, the CMO of OpenAI, fired back.

29:00

She says, "Chat GPT has more free users in Texas than it has globally." >> Boom. >> Yeah. Nothing like some stats.

29:07

They should run that in the Super Bowl potentially.

29:10

Let's watch some of these other Super Bowl ads because I want to see this General Motors robot. What happened here? Did this just old? How did you find this? >> I was digging around.

29:22

>> Is this for the worst Super Bowl ads or the >> I would say this is the worst ad I've ever seen.

29:25

Okay, let's play let's play General Motors Robot.

29:30

>> And they they've tried to scrub this from the web, but we're bringing it back. >> Let's play it. Let's see.

29:41

>> Robot makes a mistake.

29:42

>> General Motors make cars.

29:46

We're going to make Cadillacs. >> Okay.

29:50

Robot makes a mistake, leaves the factory, >> gets fired.

29:54

Whoever produced this ad is uh not not going to do well in the singularity.

30:00

>> You did not consider Rocco's basilis. >> Oh, sign holding. Yeah. Cadillac going by.

30:08

>> Well, now it now the robot's trying to get a new job. >> Okay.

30:11

Robot's working at McDonald's or something.

30:16

>> Robot goes to the bridge.

30:17

>> This is this is like who approved this?

30:20

robot watches the Chevys drive by the General Motors cars and jumps into the water >> and then wakes up.

30:28

>> The GM 100,000mi warranty.

30:28

It's got everyone a GM obsessed.

30:33

>> Like how do you run this ad? >> Whoa.

30:35

So, it's saying like like we care so much about the 100,000 mi warranty that like we will end it all if it doesn't if we don't live stand by it. >> I think so. I'm still confused. Yeah.

30:46

And >> obviously they got an insane amount of push back from people saying like, "Hey, you're you're you're effectively advertising like the darkest thing ever." >> No, really sad. Like ridiculous.

30:54

Well, the bar has been lowered. So, don't worry.

30:59

Uh, let me tell you about Lambda.

31:01

Lambda is the super intelligence cloud building AI supercomputers for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousand.

31:08

>> One more ad we'll play for you.

31:08

This is a Bud Light commercial. >> Okay.

31:11

I like Bud Light commercials.

31:11

They usually deliver perfectly, flawlessly.

31:13

I feel like Bud Light is very uh very steady.

31:19

You can always count on them for pretty solid Super Bowl entertainment. >> How you brew it?

31:24

>> Um my king, this corn syrup was just delivered. >> That's not ours.

31:28

We don't brew Bud Light with corn syrup.

31:31

>> Miller Light uses corn syrup.

31:32

>> Let us take it to the >> By name. By name. Okay.

31:35

>> Because that's in the ingredients so they can say it. It did happen. >> Pause. Pause for a second. >> Yeah.

31:40

So, so if Claude had named Chat GBT and done this >> could have said like we are suing you for >> defamation defamation, right? >> Yeah.

31:51

>> And potentially >> Sure. Sure. Sure.

31:51

Otherwise, you just got to go with the category broadly.

31:54

Anyway, let's let's keep playing. >> Oh, yeah. >> Oh, light.

31:57

We received your corn syrup by mistake.

32:02

>> That's not our corn syrup.

32:02

We received our shipment this morning. >> You're joking.

32:06

>> Try the Coors Light Castle.

32:06

They also use corn syrup.

32:08

Oh, >> see this is still like a little bit more playful and and like classy.

32:15

It doesn't go to like an edgy place.

32:20

>> It's also not misleading because you can see on the ingredient list. >> Yes.

32:24

>> Like you can just look up and see they have corn syrup. >> Yeah. Yeah.

32:26

I mean >> like my my my >> Yeah.

32:29

>> Yeah. It'd be very different if it was like we're delivering your ads to the chat GPT castle and it's like oh we already got our shipment of ads like take that over to Google AI search overviews you know like >> take it over to GR >> they should have just done they should have done a direct rip of that yeah >> no I mean incredibly incredibly well played by anthropic

32:47

>> yeah so you think it'll be effective >> no I mean I'm >> to what degree will it be effective that's my question >> well that's I'm not even sure they care about it being effective >> okay it'll be this is effective like the fact that people are talking about it people that Right now on the timeline, people are dunking and being like, "Oh, good point from anthropic." Like

33:01

Like >> they're scoring points in teapot next and they're able to score some points in the real world and just make >> like like senators are going to see this and be like, >> "Yeah, >> that's wrong." >> Yeah. Yeah.

33:15

I mean, the whole like senator we sell ads thing in in Facebook, like they stealing your data, that whole thing is like very like >> it's still it's still a meme.

33:22

It's still it's still a thing in the general populace, which is unfortunate because um advertising is the greatest business model ever.

33:29

And uh companies don't want your data. They want conversions.

33:32

They want you to purchase.

33:34

They want a black box where they can put money and then get customers and get money out. That's it.

33:40

Like I've run businesses that advertise many times and I don't want to know anything about these customers.

33:45

I just want to know they're ready to buy and they're down and and send them the link. >> Yeah.

33:51

the the difference the difference when between like a Bud, you know, Bud Light going after some of their competitors is that they're actual competitors, right? >> Yeah.

33:59

No, no, it's a very very pure igopoly.

34:01

But maybe I mean that doesn't that doesn't that lend itself to like Anthropic is punching up because they're coming from behind because they're smaller company.

34:08

They have less market share in this particular market.

34:10

It would be like, I don't know, uh, uh, it'd be like if the, uh, athletic brewing guys ran an ad that was defaming all of the beer companies for all the bad things that beer can do to you, right? Something, I don't know.

34:25

Anyway, maybe >> uh, Railway Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider.

34:29

Use your favorite agent to deploy web app, servers, databases, and more while Railway takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security.

34:37

Yeah, according to app figures, >> Claude got around a million downloads in February, which was actually down from the month prior. >> Interesting.

34:49

>> So, not a real player in consumer.

34:52

>> Yeah, we'll see what happens.

34:52

I'm I am going to be watching the app charts like a hawk. I want to know. I want to know.

34:57

>> Yeah, the entire game while we're at the game, we're just going to be glued.

35:02

>> We're just gonna be in the back just >> probably.

35:06

Anyways, I'm so excited for all the other uh all the other tech ads in the Super Bowl. We got Mr. Beast and Salesforce.

35:13

We got We'll have a bunch more. >> That'll be good.

35:17

>> And uh I'm looking forward to it.

35:18

>> Anyway, we got to uh do we are are guests here yet?

35:21

We have We have guests joining in just a few minutes, but uh in the meantime, we got to bring down the mallet from the heavens because we got to ring the gong for Walmart.

35:29

They reached $1 trillion in market cap as e-commerce booms.

35:34

Let's bring it down from the lambda cloud. >> Hit it. >> First go of the day.

35:46

Let's let's understand what's going on with you.

35:49

What's going on with Walmart?

35:49

They've been written off.

35:51

Amazon was going to kill them, but seems like the retail behemoth is growing faster than ever. Let's see.

35:57

Uh the achievement places Walmart among a small but growing club of companies that have a 13 figure valuation Amazon, Nvidia, uh Meta, Microsoft.

36:07

In trading, Walmart stock passed $125 a share. Shares closed up 2.

36:13

9% giving the company a market cap of 1. 018 trillion.

36:15

Uh the stock has surge in recent months fueled in part by Wall Street's enthusiasm for the growth of the company's online business as well as in investments in automation and AI technology aimed at improving efficiency.

36:29

Sales have also ballooned as more shoppers have turned to Walmart for low prices, fast delivery, and broad selection.

36:35

The change at Walmart over the past decade, culminating with its trillion dollar valuation, quote, has been seen as a profound shift at a retail company that we've ever seen, said a retail analyst at Morgan Stanley, who studied Walmart since 2001. Wow, Simeon Gutman. Overnight success here.

36:53

Uh, 25 years studying Walmart.

36:53

Walmart's growth along with Amazon's creates challenges for competitors, he said.

37:00

Meanwhile, Bentonville, Arkansas based company will have to navigate the ascension of a new chief as longtime executive John Ferner took the helm this month.

37:07

Most of the 11 companies that at any point reached 1 trillion are technology focused, even though Bergkshire Hathaway is in there and Eli Lily is in there as well.

37:14

Uh, a decade ago, some Walmart investors didn't see the company's success as a sure thing.

37:20

rival Amazon was growing fast and uh the then new Walmart CEO Doug McMillan was ra was was in uh was investing billions to raise worker pay, clean up stores and grow online.

37:32

Investors wanted to see whether the investments would pay off.

37:35

Walmart's market value was $212 billion at the end of 2016.

37:38

Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway famously sold a large portion of its longtime stake that year and fully exited the position by 2018.

37:48

Retail is changing so much.

37:48

I don't think I understand it as well as I need to.

37:51

Buffett said during a call with the CEO about the Bergkshire stock sale.

37:54

He said, 'I don't I don't understand the the change.

37:58

What will e-commerce do to your business?

38:00

Buffford offered Buffett offered kind words about Walmart's potential to succeed, but the snub was motivating for company executives at the time.

38:08

Walmart sales have since soared propelled by e-commerce then the pandemic followed shop followed by shoppers more recent hunt for lower prices amid inflation companies uh company's investments played a big part.

38:21

Walmart made an effort to offer more items that appeal to higher income shoppers such as trendy small appliances and store brand foods.

38:25

The company accelerated home delivery capabilities and can now deliver orders the same day to 95% of US households.

38:32

So they've like fully responded to Amazon Prime which was the main differentiator for a long time. >> Yeah.

38:38

Yousef in the LinkedIn chat says Walmart is just super secretive about its capabilities.

38:41

He is a previously was over at Walmart.

38:46

>> Thanks for leaking it to us.

38:47

>> Sucks on X says, "Nobody talks about Walmart much in the age of tech giants, but if Sam Walton's fortune hadn't been split up, it would still be a fair bit greater than even Elon's and they're still the largest.

38:56

>> Wasn't that was true back then.

38:56

He posted this six months ago.

38:57

I think Elon's way above this now.

38:58

But uh it is interesting how how successful.

39:01

Uh, but yeah, Jim Walton, Rob, and Alice all over in the hundred billion dollar.

39:07

>> I mean, a lot of this a lot of this growth has to be because of the rebrand.

39:10

We got to talk about the Walmart rebrand. You've seen this.

39:13

>> Okay, let's pull let's pull up the graphic and see. >> Whoa.

39:17

>> That's probably stunning and brave.

39:19

>> That probably adds 600 billion to the market cap, right?

39:22

>> I mean, >> easily easily.

39:23

>> They really just did a a slightly bluer slightly bluer background and they called it a day.

39:30

>> Well, without further ado, >> Figma.

39:31

Figma make isn't your average vibe coding tool. It lives in Figma.

39:32

So outputs look good, feel real, and stay connected.

39:36

How teams build, create codeback, prototypes, and apps fast. And that's right.

39:40

We have Mati from >> 11 Labs, the man of the hour. How are you doing?

39:45

>> What's going on, >> Johny? Great to see you again. >> You look fantastic. This cover is iconic.

39:52

It's I mean, props to you, but also the photographer on this. Like perfect lighting.

39:56

I've always been a fan of Forbes photography.

39:58

It's so nice to see somebody just beaming too. Just having a good time.

40:02

Usually people people are on the cover acting all serious, mysterious, you know.

40:05

I like to see I like to see >> we are having a good time at 11 laps.

40:11

It's a good good good and happy moment building at the current age and everything is changing with AI.

40:15

We have a chance of building at the frontier of that change.

40:19

Uh but a little bit surreal to see the cover and a zoomed in picture.

40:22

So that's always a tip of the iceberg and reflection of the entire team.

40:27

So great, great to see it. >> Yeah, it's amazing.

40:29

How did the negotiation go with this current round?

40:33

I'm sure you had a sort of your interest was, you know, coming in at 11.

40:36

I'm sure that gave you gave gave some leverage. >> Couldn't do 10. 9.

40:43

>> Yeah, >> this was in in this round the the valuation was known far before the round even started.

40:50

uh with with our aspirations from the early days to get that and of course just surreal to be able to announce today that we've uh raised 500 million series at 11 billion valuation.

41:04

>> The next the next the next leg up will uh will be tough getting to 11 trillion but >> we're we believe >> we have it all planned.

41:12

It's going to be 11 squared next to 21 billion as the as the next proxy of valuation.

41:17

But this funding is great.

41:19

We we we think this is what we need to get and transform how we interact with technology.

41:23

SEOA is leading the round.

41:25

Android is joining the board.

41:27

>> A6V is quadrupling down.

41:30

>> Iconic is tripling down.

41:30

And alongside the around as always we are releasing incredible updates to our voice agents to make them more expressive, quicker, lower latency so people companies can build even better experiences and customer experience, internal enablement and sales.

41:44

So >> yeah, we were just we were just laughing.

41:46

We were just lot we were watching uh some of the new Super Bowl ads from Enthropic and and they intentionally put a bit of lag in there when when in the model and >> that's your opportunity and that's the opportunity.

41:57

It's like just reducing that latency to to human or or even uh superhuman. >> Yeah.

42:03

What has the% >> what's been the biggest driver of growth just uh just more growth on the core products, new products?

42:09

what's uh walk me through sort of how I would visualize the growth chart that went in the in the lead slide of this deck.

42:20

>> So we started in 2022 the first model was texttospech and then we continued expanding with incredible researchers in the team still speech to text with the best transcription model 11 music with the highest quality music model productions with dubbing.

42:33

But the real innovation that we brought in 2025 was agents and conversational models.

42:37

agents and conversational models. So helping enterprises build that uh um customer experience work internal enablement and in 2025 we got to 330 million in ARR at the end of the year powered by work with DA telecom >> amazing virtual telecom customer support square deliverable with training riders

43:00

and on boarding them into the ecosystem better or calling restaurants to capture what's happening with the menu what's happening with the opening hours um all the way through to Revolute working with us across 4 million of their users in Europe to be able to uh to bring that level of customer care that frequently wasn't possible. Um and we are seeing

43:17

Um and we are seeing that I think something that wasn't possible just a year prior.

43:21

You have a real time voice agent interactions.

43:26

Jord, you were mentioning Antropic.

43:26

We think all companies in the future will want to optimize that latency, will want to optimize that reliability so they can interact with the with the with the with their audience, with their customers.

43:39

Um, and whether that's in customer care, whether that's devices around us, hopefully some of the devices you have will be able to speak back to you and converse with you as the guys come in all the way through to the to the future robots.

43:49

And um, and that enterprise adoption over last year has been tremendous.

43:53

We grew to 330 million and it took us >> 20 months to get to first 100 million in IR 10 months to get to 200 and 5 months to get to 330.

44:02

So hopefully that continues >> and it's a good proxy of the value that we can we can deliver. >> Incredible.

44:09

>> Uh well, we have a special guest.

44:10

>> Yeah, >> we should bring him in.

44:11

>> Let's bring in Andrew Reed from Sequoia. New board member.

44:14

>> New board member alert. >> How you doing? >> What's going on? >> Hey guys. >> Hey, good to see you. >> Good seeing you.

44:19

I was uh I was enjoying when you were uh when you were bringing on Mati and I've realized that's very important for a Polish entrepreneur to become a oneame entrepreneur >> because no one wants to go for the last name and we're not brave enough to do it either. >> Yeah.

44:36

Much easier when you're >> uh so so so talk to us about uh like the surface area of the business now.

44:42

Uh there was someone in the chat saying that they were just using 11 reader last night.

44:46

uh I is that more of like a demo and a showcase of the product or do you see that as growing into its own sort of consumer AI application? >> Yeah.

45:00

And first of all, great to see you here, Andrew. Welcome to the board.

45:03

Welcome to 11 Labs after two and a half years knowing each other.

45:05

It's going to be a a great fun after serving on the board together. >> Oh, yeah.

45:09

Pleasure to have you with us.

45:12

>> And it was the last time we saw you guys, which is great.

45:14

So it's a full circle full circle moment.

45:16

circle full circle moment. But uh you know to your question as you think about our business we have the foundational research layer where we do everything across audio >> whether it's text to speech speech to text whether that's the expressive

45:28

narration expressive voiceovers the music work and on top of that work we have the agents work that we spoke about but also the creative use cases and really there is a great example of that of how we can let our community create the narrations create audio books and then serve them in an easier way. Mhm. Mhm.

45:42

>> You know what's crazy >> is that today Audible will block AI audio books. >> Oh, weird.

45:48

>> The only platform that allows you to serve the content on Audible is is is only the Amazon created AI content.

45:53

So, we need to find an alternative for of the community to serve that and similarly uh happily I have a partnership with Spotify to to allow our users to bring that and we have a lot of users.

46:05

It's 5 million users doing >> doing that work. >> There you go.

46:09

Uh, Andrew, how are you how are you processing the the SAS apocalypse, the turmoil in the markets?

46:15

Is this like a hey uh you know, 11 Labs needs a war chest, batten down the hatches, rip good times, or is this uh something else that's you know, you don't really need to worry about who's who's getting beat up in the public markets because you're the reason why they're getting beat up.

46:30

>> Well, I I go back to what Jason Jason Lumpkin was saying.

46:32

He was bringing up 11 Labs as an example last week because he said he has a lot of portfolio companies and they're like, "We're AI native. we're AI native.

46:38

And he's like, "Show me the numbers. Are you crying?"

46:42

>> 11 Labs is AI native and they're adding $100 million in new ARR every few months.

46:46

So like that's what it looks like.

46:48

That's that's what real pull from the market. >> Sure.

46:51

But yeah, Andrew, what what do you see in the market?

46:53

>> Yeah, I think the um you know, it's like the scorpion and the frog.

46:57

Uh uh the voting machine will be a voting machine.

47:02

And I think in the public markets with software um there is a lot of baby being being thrown out with the bathwater.

47:09

>> Um and I think as far as I can tell the only prerequisite for being an AI native company is being a private company.

47:15

Um and I'll leave that there.

47:18

and I'll leave that there. I do think what really matters is um are businesses accelerating as these models are getting better >> and are they delivering value in a way that's like differentiated and unique and we are seeing companies like 11 that are growing

47:33

>> faster with better economics better customer references um and just faster deployment than anything else we've ever seen um >> like I've uh going back to when I first met Marti uh 2023 uh I remember what like when I first looked at 11 um it was not obvious like what kind of company this is. Is it a is it a

47:53

Is it a is it a consumer company?

47:55

Is it an enterprise company?

47:57

Is it a foundation model lab?

47:59

Is it an application company?

47:59

And um it turns out it was all of those things.

48:04

And I think for like these truly like the the true AI winners um it's a you know like the phrase going from strength strength to strength.

48:14

It's like everywhere 11 has been competing, they have just been dominating.

48:18

And you know, like shame on me for not investing a zillion dollars three years ago.

48:23

Um, fortunately, we were lucky to invest a little bit and I got to know Motti.

48:27

Um, but yeah, these these like the new wave of these AI companies are just incredible.

48:33

incredible. Can you both talk about a little like take me through more of that focus because uh you're saying you know 11 is a is a research lab and a and an enterprise company and there's a consumer product and but there's still a focus on audio still focused on voice and we've seen you know the a lot of the

48:52

good vibes that are coming around anthropic is like they're focused on code uh you know we've seen this like midjourney focused on images and you get to this opinionated thing is that where you're narrowing or or do you see yourself kind of expanding out on all surface areas over time, >> right? And it it it is true like as we

49:08

And it it it is true like as we as we started the company, the one connective tissue from model through platform to application is audio and voice.

49:17

We know that we can create the best models, we know we can serve them, build for the users, understand those use cases and then bring them for production.

49:24

production. But of course to get most of voice frequently we'll stretch from other sister fields to bring those integrations into default with agents example you need the knowledge base to really integrate that you need telefony systems to make sure the agents interact in WhatsApp or can call the phone

49:40

numbers you need the evaluation testing and monitoring to really be able to understand that so as we think about this work voice audio is our superpower that's the one connective tissue across all those domains but if we can bring from other fields and elevate the entire

49:56

voice experience whether it's in voice agents whether it's in a voice uh a creative space uh we'll happily do that >> uh where where are you frustrated with slow adoption like where where is there a lot of potential that uh where companies are not kind of like they haven't fully processed that uh that the

50:15

models are advanced to the level that they have and you guys have the sort of feature set I I on a personal level as a user there's still a bunch of different like media subscriptions that I have that have just like really poor like audio functionality. It's like if you

50:26

It's like if you publish an article, you should immediately have like, you know, a mini podcast equivalent that I can listen to in real time.

50:35

It's shouldn't be like this doesn't seem like a hard problem anymore, but I'm sure you're seeing that kind of in other categories too where you want industries to wake up and say like, "Hey, voice is here.

50:44

You should be implementing it immediately."

50:50

Yeah, I can go quick quick quick one first on on things that we believe in and andre is uh helping us push as we think about that space.

50:55

The one audio will be default and all the content stories knowledge that's available. It will be global.

51:01

You will have all the languages all the voices represented and voice will be the interface of technology around us.

51:06

The big opportunity to to your question will be in the media entertainment space that we haven't seen on the agent side.

51:12

Today a lot of the use cases are reactive supportive but we'll see that proactive side where you have an AI concur AI assistant that can help you for the entirety of that journey.

51:23

Um and um and as we work with Andrew we frequently think of like what's that connective tissue between research and product how we can combine that experience together to deliver that.

51:34

>> Andrew I'm curious what you think.

51:34

We we spoke a little bit about this but what's top of all your mind for the next year? >> Yeah.

51:40

Um, well, I I think at a high level, uh, it's very hard to find like markets where voice is not taking off.

51:47

And I think I'm old enough to have lived through the initial wave of like chatbot voice agent companies in the kind of 2015 to 2019 era.

51:54

And for those companies, it was, you know, enterprise vendors foisting uh, forcing audio upon consumers and consumers, you know, asking for a real agent over and over and over again.

52:07

Like that was sort of I think >> talk to a human. Talk to a human.

52:12

>> One could argue that like the you know like the customer research that like created you know like voice agents was people asking for agents over and over and over again.

52:19

Um I think the difference now is uh if you look across like basically every sector um people like interfacing with technology through voice and audio like it's a it's there's a lot of uh end customer pull.

52:31

I do think there's a big gap between, you know, what people expect the voice agents to be able to do and how they communicate with them versus what they're actually capable of.

52:41

Um, like I think humans are very adaptable and I think once everyone used chatbt and realized, you know, what the um, chat bots can do, people started, you know, uh, start interacting with text boxes on the internet very differently.

52:55

I think with voice agents still like people think they're in a phone tree and are trying to talk to it like a phone tree when in reality it's this magical interface that overlaps all of a uh a company's capabilities and it allows you to express yourself and receive information back in a brand new communication style and a brand new interface.

53:15

I think once people realize what these agents are capable of, my guess is the way people interact with their institutions, with their governments, with their, you know, the the companies that they buy services and goods from is going to change very quickly.

53:28

>> And I do think it's going to take like the leading the leading companies in the space to show people what's possible and the whole thing's going to flip. >> Very cool.

53:35

And you know on the last one you just to add a quick example we've seen that we work with the government of Ukraine on exactly that and one incredible case was they are breathing an effective voice agent for the citizen support where you can call and ask about the services and what's transpiring is that the moment you can call in and you frequently just don't know where to find information.

53:54

If you can just speak through and let the agent navigate through to the right help it uh it just open up so many more programs that were just not available.

54:02

whether that was in the how do I travel, what's happening around the country, how do I apply for certain um certain help um just opens up completely new ways of you exploring that information altogether.

54:14

>> Yeah, I I'm excited about seeing some new UI patterns.

54:17

Like I feel like the walkietalkie is potentially like a better even comp than like the phone call because if I'm like using a product and I have a question.

54:24

I don't really want to like place a phone call necessarily even if it's instant and quick and I know like an agent you know an AI agent will like pick effectively pick up the call immediately.

54:34

You can imagine like hey how like where uh what's the best document for like this part uh to understand this part of the organization.

54:43

and it can like pull it up and it's like having having these kind of new UI patterns I think will be very cool. >> Yeah.

54:48

Well, congratulations on the round.

54:50

Thank you so much for taking the time to stop by and chat with us.

54:54

>> Talk to you guys soon.

54:55

>> Looking forward to the next one.

54:57

>> Thank you very much for having us.

54:58

Congrats on the new Super Bowl ad. >> Thank you. Very excited.

55:01

>> Congrats to you to you both supporting us. We appreciate it.

55:05

>> Thank you for just make sure that make sure the ad's available in Polish, too.

55:09

>> We will we'll do a translation. >> Help us out. Help us out. Have a good one. >> Goodbye. >> Sentry.

55:15

Sentry shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast.

55:18

That's why 150,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working.

55:21

Uh let's go over to Gas Town.

55:24

What I wrote about in today's newsletter and I want to pull up this very simple to understand graphic.

55:31

As soon as you see this, Jordy, you will understand how Gas Town works. >> I get it.

55:35

>> Said Robert says, "Gast Town is the modern-day Temple OS.

55:37

You have to be on the spectrum to design something this insane."

55:40

And uh it does have a lot of layers of abstraction.

55:43

I'll try and take you through it a little bit.

55:45

Um basically my my my my theory is like there's a lot of excitement about this project.

55:50

You might already be familiar with Gastown.

55:52

Um but uh the the broader category is called orchestration.

55:55

How you orch how you orchestrate a whole bunch of different uh agents.

55:58

And Steve Yagi wrote a great breakdown of his new MadMax themed uh orchestrator.

56:04

It's he says it's a new take on the IDE. It's called Gas Town.

56:09

He dropped it on January 1st on New Year's Day.

56:11

So, he has been locked in.

56:13

He says that he's like having trouble sleeping because he's so obsessed with this thing.

56:17

He's he's really pushing a ton of code.

56:18

Um and uh now he's getting one call per day from VCs asking to invest apparently.

56:24

Um and so it's basically a continuation of the developer experience and he maps out how this evolved.

56:31

So uh you know you used to write code in in a text file save it execute it in a terminal then we got basic ideides with some code completion links to file systems ripples etc.

56:42

Uh LLM chat windows worked their way into the IDE eventually uh with a coding agent asking you for permission to run tools run code once models got better um developers trusted them more and the IDE sort of melts away and you're basically just interacting with the agent.

56:57

So Carpathy has put it he says uh your code writing skill atrophies but your code reading skill improves because the you're prompting and then you're just reading the review and you're saying okay yeah this is going to do what I think it's going to do we'll test it.

57:09

Um and so the most popular uh workflow currently is probably a single agent CLI.

57:14

So Cloud Code Codeex Gemini CLI are the most popular.

57:18

Uh they all have web and desktop frontends now but it's sort of too soon to tell how fast those will get adopted.

57:24

Um, and we we can move on from this slide.

57:27

Um, so, uh, Gas Town is like way way more aggressive going fall into vibe coding.

57:36

So, uh, Steve in his post just all caps says, "You will die if you don't know what you're doing." It's like very risky.

57:44

Uh, uh, the code base is only weeks old.

57:46

M, maybe it's over a month now. It's 100% vibe coded.

57:48

He's never seen the code and it's 225,000 lines of Go like not a very simple. It's >> Yeah.

57:59

He said you should only be using it if you're already at the stage where you're using 10 plus agents.

58:03

>> Um that's and otherwise like you will not be able to use it. >> Yeah. Yeah.

58:06

So um but uh so so there there's tens of thousands of people using this.

58:12

Uh some folks have dozens of accounts with the big labs because they're maxing out their subscriptions.

58:17

They're like I got the 200 month plan over here.

58:19

I ran out of rate limits, so I got another one. I got another one.

58:21

Some of them get flagged for fraud.

58:23

Like, it is boom time in gas town.

58:23

Uh, and uh, bills run into thousands of dollars per month.

58:28

Uh, and you're getting close to having basically a full-time software engineer salary on the line.

58:34

Um, despite all the warnings, Steve has created a delightful little little metaphorical taxonomy for how to explain how things work. The town is your HQ.

58:43

This allows you to work on multiple projects.

58:44

The projects are called rigs.

58:46

And then you sort of play, I guess that's the word, as the overseer. You're the boss.

58:50

But you also have a mayor who reports to you like a chief of staff.

58:54

That's an agent that you talk to.

58:56

And the mayor kicks off work convoys to different agents.

58:58

They're called like pullcats.

59:00

These are ephemeral agents that go and do like one little thing.

59:04

And then they write code.

59:06

That code lands in a merge queue.

59:06

But then you have another role, another agent called a witness that oversees all the pole cats to help them get unstuck.

59:14

And then there's a deacon that goes around, patrols the town, finds stuff that's like needs to be taken out or or or deleted.

59:19

There's dogs that do maintenance like cleaning up code branches that have gone stale.

59:23

There's a crew that are specific to a uh to a particular project and those are longer lived than pole cats.

59:29

lived than pole cats. So if you have like back into back and forth design work, you'll create uh a member of the crew who he says you'll love and you'll like develop a relationship with and you'll be updating their agent workflow

59:42

and their their skills so that they can so that you know days later you can go back to the same agent about how you're architecting the app and it has all the context whereas the poll cats are just off doing one little implementation at a time. Uh and so there's a bunch of

59:55

Uh and so there's a bunch of different roles.

59:57

It's all it's it's a lot.

59:58

It's very cool and it feels like a glimpse of what's coming this year.

1:00:00

Uh you still have to have an idea of what to build.

1:00:04

So, you know, we talked to I've searched around for like what are people actually building with this and a lot of people like like re-implemented this open source library in Rust.

1:00:11

It's like it's probably valuable, but that's not exactly like the breakthrough 1 billion individual solo developer project just yet.

1:00:20

Like you still got to have a genius idea, but then you can build it.

1:00:23

Um and uh uh and you still have to have a really good ability to manage agents and understand when things are going off the rails.

1:00:29

Uh but the rough edges are getting uh sanded down like as we speak.

1:00:33

Uh orchestrators, it feels like these are the next it's the next easy unhobbling that will cause another doubling in the meter software engineering time horizon benchmark.

1:00:44

If you remember that benchmark for how long a software engineering task can run without going crazy, it used to be a couple minutes, then it became a couple hours.

1:00:54

Like I if you set up your gas town appropriately, you could potentially do weeks of software engineering work autonomously.

1:01:01

Uh do do you have more context on the meter eval? I mean meter does LLM. >> Yeah.

1:01:07

It's not the actual model running for like four hours.

1:01:09

It's it can do a task that takes people four hours. >> Exactly. Exactly.

1:01:13

So, so now I think you won't just be able to slot Gas Town into the meter eval because meter uh has like Opus 45, Codeex 52, Gemini 3 Pro, and so you can't really just slot it in.

1:01:25

They might need a new category or something for orchestrators, but you could imagine getting a week's worth of software engineering work done with sort of a single prompt or a single setup.

1:01:36

>> Yeah, it feels very similar to um you know, you see people talk about like their custom Vim configurations.

1:01:39

Spend like hours working on these.

1:01:41

I've seen a ton of people on Twitter like build their own like orchestrator.

1:01:44

I mean, this is like very complex and cool. >> Totally. Yeah.

1:01:48

No, no, a lot of people are already building these uh these uh these orchestrators themselves.

1:01:52

Gastown is just one that's open source, but a lot of people are building these like various harnesses.

1:01:56

Uh and so orchestration and delegation uh they make sense even in a world where models are improving in capability and declining in cost.

1:02:05

Like a stock LLM just cannot spin up multiple instances of itself if you give it a huge task.

1:02:11

So imagine you're just like categorize every receipt in my company has ever processed.

1:02:19

Like an LLM can do it, but it's just going to take a long time.

1:02:20

You should use 50 instances of LLMs and you have to write some code for that.

1:02:24

An agent should be able to do that.

1:02:25

That's what you're sort of getting with this.

1:02:29

Um and so uh but there's obviously still a bunch of kinks to work out in 2026.

1:02:32

Uh it's a very interesting paradigm to me.

1:02:37

It's also sort of in hindsight obvious that we'd get here.

1:02:39

Um and I think we'll see all the major AI labs do something in this space.

1:02:45

I don't know if that means launching new products, but they they need to deliver on this experience in a more polished package soon.

1:02:50

Um I also expect a number of startups to try and own the category uh or carve out subniches.

1:02:57

you know, gas town for legal or something like that will probably be something we hear a pitch for at some point.

1:03:03

Um, and in the end, the multi- aent experience might be completely abstracted to certain end users.

1:03:07

Like most people using chat apps don't care about the details of a mixture of experts model.

1:03:12

They just want a good answer and they want the model to be good at math and poetry and writing and research and history and all these things.

1:03:20

And models succeed at that, but it's buried below the fold.

1:03:23

Um, and so even auto routing between different models, uh, I don't think a lot of people care about that if they're just in the consumer world.

1:03:30

Uh, and I think that this will be more and more abstracted.

1:03:34

So, uh, all of this will make 2026 more exciting than ever.

1:03:36

You have anthropic and open AI fighting over the Vibe Wars at the Super Bowl.

1:03:39

Uh, you got Elon and Sam under oath in an Oakland courthouse and another thousand startups just got funded to make something people want.

1:03:46

And so, >> so basically, if you were working on AI agents and you just pivoted to building a harness, pivot to >> orchestration. orchestration.

1:03:54

>> It it does feel like it might be like the next hot keyword that we're seeing.

1:03:57

Orchestration market map orchestration uh uh you know all sorts of stuff.

1:04:02

Anyway, Vanta automate compliance and security.

1:04:05

Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform and uh yeah, people are having fun with um with Gastown.

1:04:13

Will Brown got nerd sniped into finally reading the original Gastown post and wow, it's beautiful and terrifying and hilarious and probably a glimpse of the future that will feel normal in six months. I couldn't agree more.

1:04:21

Uh Steve Yaggi is a great writer.

1:04:24

Just very very very interesting to read all of what he writes and he talks about his his neighbors squirrel in a very fun way and how chubby the squirrel is.

1:04:33

>> His neighbor's squirrel. It's >> his 8.

1:04:34

He has an 82y old neighbor who feeds his local squirrel against the city ordinance, but but he's 82.

1:04:41

So he's like, "What are you gonna do to me?"

1:04:43

And and then he uses this like fat squirrel as an analogy for the gas town that he's building. It's fascinating.

1:04:49

And then uh people are having fun with this. Uh Tetsuo.

1:04:52

cc says, "Last month I was generating 15,000 lines of codes per day with cloud code.

1:04:57

Once I discovered the the Ralph Wiggum loop, my productivity shot up to 10x.

1:05:01

This week I finally set up Gastown and I'm generating 1 million lines of code per day.

1:05:04

At this rate, I'm mere days away from completing my mind sweeper clone.

1:05:09

And like there is there is something here where people, you know, you got to have you got to know what to build.

1:05:15

You got to have a good idea.

1:05:16

You got >> there's going to be a lot of people spending >> Yeah.

1:05:19

15 grand to recreate a game that's 60 bucks. >> Totally. Totally.

1:05:22

But if it has me in the game, maybe I'll play it. Who knows?

1:05:26

Anyway, Gemini 3 Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet.

1:05:28

State of the art reasoning, next level vibe coding, and deep multimodal understanding.

1:05:31

And without further ado, our first inperson guest of the day, Ger, correct?

1:05:37

Did I say that correctly?

1:05:41

>> The pragmatic engineer. Welcome to the show. How you doing? Grab a seat.

1:05:43

Please sit down and first time on the show.

1:05:48

Please give us an introduction.

1:05:49

>> Yeah, good good to see you in person.

1:05:49

In person, this place is even even better than on on the show. >> Yeah. >> Yeah.

1:05:55

So, just flew in from Amsterdam and I got you guys some some special stuff.

1:06:00

>> This is stuff that they don't know about in the Netherlands.

1:06:01

It's called Crowd Noten and it's best kept secret in the Netherlands before Christmas. >> Little mini cookies.

1:06:08

>> Mini cinnamony cookies.

1:06:08

Before Christmas, the whole city sells this all the time, but as per as per the Dutch, you can only have it before Christmas.

1:06:15

So, there's this one shop that sells it year round. Locals hate it.

1:06:16

It's kind of unknown, but I I I think it'll be all right.

1:06:21

And yeah, just some pragmatic engineer stickers for you guys. >> Thank you.

1:06:24

And how how do you how do you introduce the pragmatic engineer these days?

1:06:28

Securely Substack writer, a media company. What do you like?

1:06:31

>> I I like to say that I'm I'm a software engineer who who has been a software engineer for like 15 or so years. I was a manager as well.

1:06:37

And then I I just started writing for software engineers.

1:06:42

I didn't think there would be any demand for this.

1:06:44

I don't think anyone thought there would be any demand for this >> and and turns out there is ton of demand.

1:06:49

>> There was a ton of demand for for people writing about just like for for me writing about in-depth topics that I don't write for beginners.

1:06:55

I write for experienced folks talking about >> I started talking about stuff like how did Uber create platform teams like you know tech depth how to deal deal with that stuff and people were paying attention subscribing paying.

1:07:06

So it surprised me the most. >> That's amazing.

1:07:09

Well, and I feel like timing timing wise, what better time to be writing about software engineering than right now? >> It's a crazy time.

1:07:16

Like I >> I've been in the industry for about you know like 20ish years depending on how you count it.

1:07:22

And I've now luckily been able to talk with people who've been who are still alive like Grady Buch who is a legend who had been around since closer to the beginning of it. Yeah.

1:07:31

>> And I don't think there's ever been a time like I remember when I was working, you know, we were a software engineer like we were we still do, but what we were doing is kind of automating others people's jobs. >> Sure.

1:07:43

>> Like like customer support, we were saying how many savings we had, but we we and we kind of took this for granted and >> there's a bit of existential crisis now with uh with with devs because this is the first time in history where the stuff that we build >> could potentially automate our work and and there Maybe maybe more software engineers used to have the luxury of like I'm not going to I'm just going to do my work.

1:08:04

I don't need to really pay attention to what's going on and and the big changes that are happening.

1:08:09

And now it's like oh I should really pay attention uh just so I stay stay on the edge and and uh because if you're not getting efficiency gains right now I think you will be left behind.

1:08:18

That feel that feels obvious.

1:08:20

>> How wide is the spread of uh of experiences that folks in your audience share with you?

1:08:26

Because I imagine that there are some folks out there saying like I'm I'm using Gastown and agents and I'm vibe coding.

1:08:31

I'm doing everything and I'm my job is completely changed.

1:08:34

And then I imagine that there's some people that are like it's kind of business as usual at my company.

1:08:39

>> So interesting enough, you you would think that so first of all like the the people who are are using the agents and doing all this cool stuff and being on the cutting edge and you guys shut off a gas out on CVA.

1:08:48

I was just hanging out with him yesterday. No way. >> Yeah.

1:08:50

We we were together at at this place called the future of soft software engineering summit.

1:08:54

So 25 years ago there was the agile manifesto that back in 2001 it kind of shook the industry cuz it said like talk to customers iterate fast.

1:09:02

It was like four simple things waterfall >> anti-waterfall and there were a bunch of people who gathered at this uh resort in Utah and you know they came up with it and 25 later Martin Fowler one of the Ajam Manifosa founders who organized a retreat with like a bunch of thinkers of of today and we went there and we gathered and a lot of about half the people were like more traditional companies.

1:09:23

Think about like John Deere, 200-y old companies, enterprises, Cisco, etc.

1:09:28

>> Uh, and then some of them for startups.

1:09:30

And the crazy thing was that like I was thinking, you know, there will business as usual.

1:09:33

No, like this is the first time I'm seeing a technology where even in the kind of most old school companies, they're using it. They're trying it.

1:09:41

They know that they need to catch up.

1:09:44

And funny enough, some of those old school companies are a little bit ahead of like, I don't know, some mid-level tech companies because they kind of have processes to like approve vendors and all that.

1:09:51

they've been used to this stuff.

1:09:54

>> So like I don't see anyone who's who's not >> everyone's changed >> impacted by it.

1:09:57

But there are some people who are on the cutting edge and you know using Gas Town and and playing with Claude etc.

1:10:03

I think they're still the minority but the gap used to be massive.

1:10:06

It used to be like years or something a decade behind. Steve.

1:10:08

Steve, do you put him in the same kind of camp as Peter from OpenClaw and that like just loves the craft and just loves experimenting and is like non-commercial because it's just like we have this interesting dynamic right now where you have these like hyper hyper hyper commercial labs like anthropics which is like idealistic but like very focused on like let's make as much money as we possibly can from uh generating code.

1:10:35

And then you have the the Peters of the world and and maybe the Steves of the world that are just in it for the love of the game. >> Yeah.

1:10:40

So I I was hanging out with with Peter two weeks ago right when Claude was starting to blow up and then my podcast went out when it was like peak popularity and people thought I was talking with him that same day.

1:10:50

But >> I would say Peter is way more obsessed than Steve.

1:10:54

Like when I when I met him for two weeks, I was the first human that he met.

1:10:58

Like >> that that guy is is pulling it and but he's very clear that it's obsessive.

1:11:02

the thing that that both him and Steve share.

1:11:05

So, first of all, both of them are I think they're a little bit like on on the kind of like F FU category in terms of like they're doing what they want to do and they want to build. >> Yeah. Yeah, pretty much.

1:11:16

>> However, one thing that they both share and Steve was telling me this, I was asking how how are you, man?

1:11:20

Cuz like I saw him like about a year ago last time and he looked a little bit more pale and he said like, "Dude, like we need to talk about something that is is really getting to us like early adopters.

1:11:28

This thing is like a vampire. It drains you out.

1:11:32

out. you have trouble sleeping like a lot of people who are in this like a multiple agents mode they're napping during the day you know they're there's an email list of the kind of secret AI email list with these folks and they share this stuff and so both of them are seeing and Peter was telling me the same

1:11:47

thing it just really is draining this this so this might be I don't maybe this this will pass but back to your question like yeah I I think they're both they're just building for the the fun of it both of them are being chased by crazy investors like crazy amounts and they're at least for now saying no same same with uh Steve and I love it. I I feel

1:12:02

I I feel we're finally back. >> It's so refreshing.

1:12:07

>> This the last time I remember it was like 90 or 2000 when there was a hacker culture and this is it. >> Yeah. Yeah. I mean Yeah.

1:12:12

You go back to like the Linux folks and like there's so many uh open- source folks who did say no to the business community and wound up building great Yeah. Please.

1:12:21

Uh this one's empty, but we can have that one.

1:12:25

Uh so so uh yeah uh but but it does feel like a return because while the mobile platforms were so closed down there was less opportunity and now we're sort of migrating back to desktop and and you know open source >> and I think both what Peter and and Steve are doing the reason it resonates so much they're doing the stuff that the big guys will not do because it's too risky.

1:12:44

risky. you know Peter like Claude took off because he he himself connected to all these things and of course it's risky and security risk he knows that but like and I think one of his good >> read the disclosures >> read the disclosure but no one would do this because it's not ready Steve >> also the other labs would build it but

1:13:00

they wouldn't make it you wouldn't be able to use multiple models they would they would be like it would be pretty kind of clamped down >> and Steve was telling me that what he did with Gastown like so both both Steve and Peter are amazing software engineers they have built incredible systems Steve's had built a lot of Google's internal systems. He's been at Gra, at

1:13:14

He's been at Gra, at Amazon.

1:13:17

Peter, you know, built if if you see a PDF on the web or online, it's probably his business that seriously, it's so big.

1:13:26

>> And Steve said that the reason he built Gas Town is not because he believes that Gas Town will work. It's crazy.

1:13:30

You guys, the mayor, the mayor, the pole cats, all that. It's it's a mess.

1:13:34

The reason he did it is he wants to push the boundaries and kind of like wake people up that something will be coming.

1:13:40

It's not going to be Gas Town. This is just a start.

1:13:43

and he said to me that he feels that he succeeded because so there it's like Steve is I think Steve is a lot more provocative.

1:13:49

Peter is a lot more like I'm just gonna build whatever I want to build. >> Yeah. Yeah.

1:13:53

H how have you been reacting to Steve's uh position on like the death of the junior programmer?

1:13:57

The revenge of the junior programmer like what advice do you have for young people that are joining the software engineering community today?

1:14:06

>> I my position changes on changes so fast.

1:14:12

I used to be really really worried about junior folks like you know cuz you look at it like it's just it's just been like such a bad like 5 years co started no one start like I was at Uber when co started we just stopped hiring well we we still hired a we were paying people a lot more after we rebounded but we

1:14:28

didn't hire junior people because you didn't want to onboard them remote and it's difficult and we didn't know how to and then when remote was returning AI started and of course now there's a thing like why would you hire a junior when a senior can like pair with an AI >> now on the other hand what I'm seeing so it's was really hard to get a job. But

1:14:41

But when I think about back of when I started like my first job was around the financial crisis.

1:14:45

It was just really hard to get a job and I didn't realize at the time but >> there's so much else.

1:14:49

There's so many other things going on like there's Ukraine and like there's there's all this geopolitical stuff and the econ leaders are not we think of them as only focused on AI in terms of hiring but there's a million other things going on in the economy. >> Yeah.

1:15:03

But when I started out like I remember like a lot of people in my in my class university class they just dropped out.

1:15:08

They never became software engineers but I never thought of it that I would be given a job.

1:15:11

I knew I needed to earn it.

1:15:14

So what I did is I did a bunch of projects on the side. I entered competitions.

1:15:18

I built a bunch of things and honestly I was probably like a more impressive and I think like first of all like we don't need I'm not going to like when I remember this I'm not going to feel sorry for this generation cuz uh I did a study with like Jenz like I talked with a bunch of like you know Jenzer young folks and some of them were like freaking amazing you and so so the kids are going to be fine. That's one.

1:15:37

The other thing is >> the turns there's this I'm I'm going to spill it I guess to everyone who's watching TBPN there is a massive advantage of hiring young people and Shopify is the first one to figure it out.

1:15:52

Farh Huntavar, head of engineering at at Shopify, told me that he saw something interesting years back.

1:15:57

Shopify was sorely to AI.

1:15:57

Uh, you know, they they got co-pilot licenses, everyone, but and no cost limit and all that, but they didn't see many teams using it, but there was this one team >> that was using a lot of more, you know, they're tracking tokens and far looked what happened.

1:16:09

Oh, there was an intern on the team.

1:16:10

And so it's like, oh, what happened?

1:16:12

So they umbered the intern and gave the interne task and the entrance was done in a day and and you know the and he goes like, okay, what what what next, right?

1:16:21

And they're like, "How did you do that?"

1:16:22

It's like, "Oh, well, you know, like I I just like used this AI and did this like what next?"

1:16:25

You know, they're they're worried.

1:16:26

They want to get a return offer.

1:16:27

And suddenly the people on the team felt stupid, right?

1:16:32

So they started to like learn from the intern and use AI.

1:16:35

>> But the intern was not threatening them.

1:16:36

You know, the intern was never going to take a position.

1:16:39

>> So next thing Farhan did, hire an intern every single Shopify scheme.

1:16:41

So this is why Shopify had 1,000 interns. >> Oh no.

1:16:45

>> He's in some CTO groups.

1:16:45

So why do you think Cloudfare is hiring 1,100111 interns?

1:16:50

Why is GitHub hiring more interns?

1:16:52

Far and told this is the big the biggest hack in in actually getting your team more productive. Get an intern. >> Yeah.

1:17:01

>> A good intern you know from one of the >> Yeah.

1:17:03

The other the other thing is I I've heard I've heard stories of people saying like ah I've submitted a thousand resumes or thousand applications.

1:17:08

I'm like if you want a job as a software engineer build a piece of software without asking. Yes.

1:17:16

>> Just you don't need to be >> one week.

1:17:17

One job a week you should be applying to. Not 150 a day. >> Well, not even that. Or one job a day.

1:17:22

Like we we hired somebody last summer.

1:17:24

We hired somebody last summer that built us a guest directory that like in real time would take we' had an episode. It would scrape it.

1:17:30

It would put it into a little >> Shopify build.

1:17:36

There's so many different ways to plug in.

1:17:37

>> But yeah, you can every single company out there if you're want an internship or or a junior job. Yeah.

1:17:43

>> Just go build a product for the company.

1:17:45

Make it look make it match the brand kit. Exactly.

1:17:47

Make it look like something that you could ship.

1:17:48

Even if it's just built rebuilding something that's existing, that's how you're going to get for sure.

1:17:53

Yeah, >> you just completely agree. >> Totally agree.

1:17:58

And and also like you know one thing that I think was will happen with software engineering which has happened like for 20 or something years.

1:18:04

Software engineering is is not too different to like electrical engineering, mechanical engineering.

1:18:08

When I graduated a lot of my friends were in that domain.

1:18:09

in those domains to get a job if mechanical engineer you need to go to university and you go to one where you get a place.

1:18:15

So I think honestly this will probably return that that the the most straightforward way to get a job is go to a reputable university that has placement programs and has industry connections can get in there.

1:18:27

If you go to a lower rank one you can still get it but it'll be hard.

1:18:29

And if you're self-studied, you can also do it.

1:18:31

But now you need to do amazing work, you know, like like build something like OpenCloud and or some something like that.

1:18:37

But the the the lower like prestige like it or not, tech was this really special place where pedigree did not matter for years or decades.

1:18:47

>> This might be ending unfortunately.

1:18:49

>> Are you interested in >> Yeah.

1:18:50

>> Yeah. The the other thing is you don't need to I think you know telling somebody they need to if somebody can go out and create something like openclaw and go viral like amazing but you can also just look at a company look at a feature find a feature that their competitor has and just build the feature and say here you don't need to like create something totally novel just

1:19:06

build the thing share it and that's how you get attention I guarantee if you cold email >> four people in the org with like a link to the product you will get an interview >> yeah and don't forget I think the internet disclosure and like all of these like how to get things you a lot of people when when you do the thing that most people do you no longer stand out. There's a lot of advice. There used There's a lot of advice.

1:19:26

There used to be how to get into fang of like all right do lead coding and what happened is everyone is really good at lead code the algorithmical problems and those companies don't really look at that signal anymore because everyone is so good.

1:19:36

So I think any point in time you want to do stuff that others don't do and it will be a lot more effort.

1:19:41

It will be more risky but that's the way you're going to stand out.

1:19:45

So like you know if if if you're young just just do crazy stuff especially with AI.

1:19:49

>> Help me understand more about standing out.

1:19:51

I remember uh there used to be job titles for Django developer.

1:19:54

It's like not just backend, not just Python, the Django framework, right? Rails developer, right?

1:20:00

Front end in a specific framework.

1:20:02

Uh now it feels like every developer can use every tool front end, back end because of vibe coding and models.

1:20:10

Um do you would you recommend someone say okay yes you're a great developer you can use all the tools you can write any language whenever you want but in order to differentiate yourself why don't you add design or add finance or understand a little bit of legal.

1:20:23

So you know is there is there something else that you should pull in so you can be a dual threat?

1:20:28

be a dual threat? Yes and this is so this is what's happening when I looked at uh for example the job listing work OS work OS employs what they call product engineers they don't have a product they have one product manager for like 80 engineers and when I looked at the job description like I remember

1:20:42

this evolution where it started you know in the 2000s like a specific language then specific framework then a back end or something and the job description actually had things like you know like soft skills like emotional intelligence like good communication so first of all hiring is starting to like the stereotype of the >> gil foilm developer. It's just not going

1:20:58

It's just not going to get higher than a lot of companies these days.

1:21:03

>> And we're most places are expecting business sense, product sense, and the thing that almost every modern company from Linear to work OS to all of the other similar ones are saying is taste for software engineers.

1:21:13

Now, this is pretty pretty difficult.

1:21:15

Interesting enough, inside Microsoft, there's an internal course that they're trying to teach taste to people. Yeah. Crazy.

1:21:23

Scott Hansel was telling me this, but it's kind of hard to hard to define, but it's a mix of I guess do your own projects, try to do real work that actually like either like, you know, makes money or helps people or or or does things, keep trying and and you know, use use the latest tools.

1:21:38

It's it's it's hard to give universal advice because the thing has changed so much.

1:21:42

And one other thing that's happening, some companies like the big change we've had over the the winter is everyone has realized who is paying attention and paying side projects that us software engineers will no longer write the code.

1:21:54

The agent will write the code.

1:21:54

We will prompt it which is some people are griefing or grieving.

1:21:57

I'm kind of over that >> but a lot of companies have paused hiring for now cuz they need to figure out who are we going to hire cuz there's no point in coding interviews or much much less point when the agent is is doing it.

1:22:10

So there might be like a a cool of of like like 6 months to 12 months where there's a lot less hiring as companies figure out what is this new person.

1:22:17

So in the meantime though people looking for the job is like first of all like if you get a job offer appreciate it probably just take it get your door in the industry it doesn't matter where >> and then yeah keep pushing.

1:22:25

>> Yeah I wonder if >> I feel like a big opportunity right now is software engineers finding the companies of course the companies that are really beat up in the public markets right now the software there's tons of companies that people are just saying it's over.

1:22:36

Of course, many of them will recover and and you know, a few years from now be worth multiples of what they are today, but like doing the work to figure out uh which one of those companies have durable customer relationships, aren't just going to be fully ripped out.

1:22:50

And then you could have a situation, you know, not not that dissimilar from people that ended up joining companies in like 2022, 20 late 2022, 2023 when things were really corrected where then the stock just trades up 3x over the next two years and you look like an absolute genius. >> Yeah.

1:23:06

And one thing that companies are starting to hire for, but they're struggling.

1:23:09

I talked with a startup in Amsterdam.

1:23:11

They were looking for an AI native junior engineer.

1:23:13

They're like, "Let's hire junior engineers."

1:23:14

And their expectation was like knows how to use all these modern tools has built some some it doesn't have to be work, but some project with LLMs, you know, like built a a bot or something.

1:23:22

They couldn't find find anyone.

1:23:25

So like like go and use these tools, build some stuff, put it on GitHub, launch it on the app store, etc.

1:23:32

because and the reason they want to bring it in again they want like some of these folks will use it a lot better.

1:23:37

So there's a lot of opportunity I think you know we're might be overthinking this uh a little bit it's a massive tech change a lot a lot of existing folks inside the industry with like five plus years of experience are paralyzed because that skill coding it takes it takes faking hard effort to like get good at coding.

1:23:52

It took me you know like 3 years to like get okay and then 10 years to get really good and that's kind of down the drain on one end.

1:23:58

So a lot of people are grieving that.

1:24:00

So there's an opportunity for people who are kind of like stepping over this and like all right how I'm going to be effective with these. >> Yeah, this is great. Last question for me.

1:24:06

Um, how do you think about the like it used to be that software engineers would join a company because they were obsessed with the technology?

1:24:14

They joined 37 signals because they wanted to work on Rails or you know Shopify and there were a whole bunch of like rail shops and if you enjoyed Rails you would go there.

1:24:24

Uh now it feels like there's more opportunity than ever to find a an industry or a category like if you're obsessed with travel or you're obsessed with gaming or music, you can the tools are maybe less important.

1:24:36

But the willingness to be excited about the product that you're making is going to be the differentiator as opposed to just yeah I work at this company but I don't really listen to music so why am I at Spotify?

1:24:49

It's like, you know, you should, if you love music and you love advancing that industry, you should go there more than anywhere else.

1:24:54

Does that resonate with you? >> It resonates 100%.

1:24:58

Uh, at my brother's company, he's building a startup, Craft Docs. >> Yeah.

1:25:03

>> Over the the winter, he realized like these agents are really good.

1:25:05

And he just mandated his team, everyone using cloud code.

1:25:07

Everyone needs to do prompting and you need to generate your code.

1:25:12

>> And he said about 50% of his team got really demotivated.

1:25:14

And one engineer quit because he told him, I do not want to be a prompter. I love the craft.

1:25:18

That engineer was really in >> code was was was his kind of like >> identity. He was the go-to guy.

1:25:26

He understood the codebase better than anyone.

1:25:30

And what happened in this first week is people used to go up to this person asking for like, hey, how does this work, etc.

1:25:34

No one walked up to him because the AI could answer it.

1:25:36

And on this retreat uh in in Utah, I talked with a bunch of people even larger enterprises like big companies and they were telling me the same thing that the people who are struggling whose identity is the code and the craft and the people who are thriving their identity is less of the code. It's the impact. Let's build cool stuff.

1:25:53

Let's help the business or let's I love this industry and I I want to advance it.

1:25:57

So I think that that's going to happen like builders who don't care about the tools that much are going to thrive.

1:26:03

people who grew up with the craft there there might be niches for them and it's not going to go away but it'll be harder.

1:26:09

>> Yeah, you always see that in the video game industry >> or or I'm thinking of the uh the Dwight Dwight >> like every programmer loves video games and so I mean not everyone but a lot of them.

1:26:18

So they go there and they'll be like oh yeah pay me half as much as if I was doing ads because I I want to work on League of Legends or whatever. >> Yeah.

1:26:26

>> I'm reminded of the scene Dwight Troo trying to out out selling against the computer, right?

1:26:30

like immediately he's like doing fine and then the the website just steamrolls it. >> Yeah.

1:26:36

>> So, >> it's wild times.

1:26:37

Well, we really appreciate you coming by the show. >> Come on anytime.

1:26:42

We'd love to have you more. We'll >> do. It was great.

1:26:44

>> Thank you for the Thank you for the cookies.

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1:27:05

And without further ado, I believe we have Dar Koshari from Uber in the Reream waiting room.

1:27:09

So, let's bring him into TV Ultra. Dar, good to meet you. How are you doing? >> Nice to meet you. I'm doing great. Thank you.

1:27:16

We just had earnings and they were uh really strong, although the market is going crazy as we speak. So, who knows?

1:27:23

>> Well, let's let's start there.

1:27:23

break it down for anybody that that uh wasn't paying attention to your guys's fantastic quarter. >> Yeah.

1:27:30

What happened and maybe why did you uh have this particular quarter?

1:27:35

>> So, um the quarter ended a great year for us.

1:27:37

Uh in the quarter we announced uh trip growth of 22%.

1:27:39

Um we're now at a run rate of 15 billion trips. Well, there you go.

1:27:45

Uh 15 billion trips >> uh for for the year.

1:27:50

That's 40 million per day.

1:27:52

So the business is really scaling.

1:27:54

Gross bookings growth actually accelerated.

1:27:56

You know, usually as companies get bigger, they slow down.

1:27:59

We're actually accelerating.

1:28:01

>> Uh profits is defined by Ebida.

1:28:01

We're up 35% on a year-on-year basis.

1:28:04

And then we threw off almost $10 billion of free cash flow, 9. 8 billion.

1:28:12

>> Uh up 40% yearon-year.

1:28:12

So the business is really scaling.

1:28:15

And at the same time, you know, you've got the mobility business that's growing at really healthy rates, 19% and then Uber Eats >> that really we built like entirely organically now is uh over a hundred billion run rate uh solidly profitable and that grew 26% in the last quarter.

1:28:36

Really accelerating nicely since the beginning of the year.

1:28:38

So the business actually looks really really great.

1:28:40

And then obviously we've got the onset of autonomous and autonomous vehicles and we kind of in our investor presentation we had to lot a lot to say about autonomous which we can definitely get into if you guys want to. >> Yeah.

1:28:52

Be before we get into that like what what are the key drivers outside of obviously the business is you know uh maturing.

1:28:58

You've been in the driver's seat for long enough now to really start having clearly a tremendous impact but like what's really what what what's driving you know this acceleration? >> Yeah. Yeah.

1:29:08

So I tell you one in terms of uh the business is our business is really supply le.

1:29:13

So the more cars we get on the road, the more restaurants we have on the platform, our product gets better.

1:29:20

There's uh the the conversion of the product.

1:29:23

You know, when you open up your app, your ETA uh is lower, you have more restaurants available.

1:29:30

>> So the basically we are supplyled business and we continue to add supply onto the platform.

1:29:35

We've got almost 10 million drivers and couriers on the platform, well over a million merchants, and first it starts with supply and our selection and supply just keeps getting better and better and better.

1:29:46

I I'd say that's number one.

1:29:48

The second is we're the only platform out there that has both rides and eats and it's global as well.

1:29:57

>> And that allows us to more deeply embed with our customers.

1:30:01

About 30% of our eats uh first trips come from riders, so to speak, and we can promote crossromote from the rides platform to the Eats platform.

1:30:11

If you open up your Uber uh Uber app now, you see Eats being offered.

1:30:16

You'll see grocery being offered.

1:30:18

If you're looking to go to a restaurant uh for dinner, we'll also offer that restaurant for delivery as a reminder that it's available for delivery as well.

1:30:26

So, this crossplatform kind of promo that we can do, it's just no one else is doing it.

1:30:32

um it's taken us years to perfect it because any pixel that is promoting let's say Uber Eats on the Uber app, it can get in the way of your experience on Uber.

1:30:41

So you have to be very careful to have an optimal experience for your base business while at the same time nudging you over to the other product, you know. >> Yeah.

1:30:52

Was there a period where it just felt like you were running two very distinct businesses and now it feels like they're actually coming together and it's working? >> Totally.

1:31:00

and and and you know my philosophy is that when you're building businesses that are younger, you want kind of full stack teams.

1:31:07

So for example, what our technology team, we had a dedicated technology team for eats.

1:31:13

As that business got more mature and larger, we combined our tech teams, we combined our product team so that you could build one core infrastructure, one matching stack, for example, bring the customer data together and kind of create more commonality between the businesses.

1:31:29

Now, for example, uh the my I promoted our head of global mobility, Andrew McDonald.

1:31:35

He's been here for 12 years.

1:31:37

He's now president and COO.

1:31:37

So, he's running one P&L.

1:31:40

And essentially, we can trade off between benefits on one business for the other business to not to kind of grow the whole.

1:31:48

And there's no one else who again has the breadth and depth of offerings that we have.

1:31:52

And then on top of that, we've got the Uber 1 membership program. Mhm.

1:31:59

>> We got 46 million members.

1:31:59

Close to 50% of our gross bookings come from members.

1:32:05

>> Uh and that membership provides a real lock in.

1:32:08

Members spend three times more than non-members.

1:32:10

Customers who shop on both eats and rides spend three times than the ones who don't.

1:32:16

And so it's that combination of the whole platform coming together that lets us grow fast. It lets us accelerate.

1:32:22

It lets us gain category position versus the others while at the same time having a lot of profitability.

1:32:29

>> What's the biggest uh lesson from Expedia that you've been able to apply to Uber?

1:32:34

>> Yeah, it's a great question.

1:32:34

I I would say um and it was a mistake at at Expedia was not recognizing that the business is supplyled.

1:32:41

Uh so with Expedia, we were very much focused on the customer and bringing in more audience so to speak and then following with supply.

1:32:53

>> Uh and I think one of the regrets and you you have to kind of learn your lessons as a CEO.

1:32:57

It's like we're humans too. We make mistakes too.

1:32:58

We learn as well is that Booking.

1:33:00

com was really focused on more supply in Europe for example.

1:33:06

And because they had more supply, they were able to build a more compelling platform in Europe than Expedia was.

1:33:12

And so I took some of those learnings and then of course, you know, some tips from the OG Uber folk including Travis as well, that this is a real supply business.

1:33:22

And so it was to some extent learning from my past mistakes and then making sure I don't make those mistakes again in the new job, so to speak. >> Yeah.

1:33:30

Uh I remember when uh Uber came to LA, the push for supply on the platform was so aggressive that I was getting directly targeted.

1:33:38

Hey, do you want to drive for Uber?

1:33:40

I was employed at the time.

1:33:42

I wasn't signing up, but I haven't seen those ads.

1:33:44

Is that a function of better targeting or do you just have a more natural driver acquisition flywheel?

1:33:50

Like what's working on the supply side in increasing the supply of drivers these days?

1:33:58

I think supply is uh definitely cyclical.

1:34:01

So in the early days obviously it was kind of a new thing.

1:34:04

No one knew what gig work was.

1:34:05

So Travis and team had to introduce it to drivers.

1:34:08

Had to pull them off of you know driving for carry limousines or some of the traditional players onto the Uber platform.

1:34:16

>> It was very ads everywhere. >> Yeah. Totally.

1:34:18

And then we had to kind of grow >> uh the the overall marketplace as well because there are way more Ubers on the road now than taxis. uh etc.

1:34:28

>> Um but we have had kind of supply shocks in the past.

1:34:30

So for example with CO one of the great things about CO as it related to Uber was terrible event obviously was that we were able to move our drivers who are driving for Uber to make money on Uber Eats.

1:34:43

>> But then after CO we thought when the world would open up everyone would get back to driving cuz why the heck not.

1:34:48

It turned out that a lot of our drivers rightly so they were worried about their health.

1:34:53

They didn't want to catch CO.

1:34:53

I remember I was talking to a driver and I'll never forget this line.

1:34:57

I'm like, "Well, why don't you go back to driving people because you can make more money that way."

1:35:02

And uh she said, "Well, big a Big Mac isn't going to give me CO, you know, it's it's so safety was a big issue."

1:35:10

So, we had to reinvest in supply, >> okay?

1:35:13

>> Uh very aggressively postco.

1:35:13

We did so faster than our competitors, which which helped us.

1:35:18

Now we have a pretty finely tuned machine >> in that the retention of drivers is really high.

1:35:25

>> On average um drivers are driving more supply hours.

1:35:28

They're spending more time on our platform because they can drive, they can deliver, they can shop, they can even do >> um uh they can judge AI algorithms.

1:35:35

Now we have a group called Uber AI solutions where they can you know look at algorithmic answers and decide which is better etc.

1:35:45

There's much more to do on the platform.

1:35:47

So the position that we have in supply is pretty strong, but believe me, we're investing.

1:35:53

I guess we figured out that you guys are more consumer uh customers than drivers and um good for algorithms for that.

1:36:02

>> Good work on the marketing side.

1:36:02

Uh everyone's been able to make the bare case for traditional enterprise software over the last year as models have gotten better.

1:36:10

There's been some chatter about uh kind of risk to marketplaces with agents.

1:36:16

I'm not necessarily bought into some of those theories yet.

1:36:19

You know, you're operating this, you know, massive network of drivers and and supply and it's just a lot more difficult to sort of No, no, no model is going to oneshot that uh anytime soon.

1:36:32

>> I I'm expecting to go to my terminal and it will call people randomly in my neighborhood and ask them if they want to give me a ride.

1:36:38

That's the future I want to live in.

1:36:40

Uh anyway, so so uh we're we're not really quite seeing that yet, but how are you thinking about kind of risks and opportunities with uh with a more agentic kind of internet and consumer product?

1:36:52

>> Yeah, >> I I think that if you have unique fragmented supply and the global scope that we have, >> then you are safer than let's say others who might not have unique supply or they don't have the fragmentation of supply that we do.

1:37:07

like we've got over 9 million uh couriers and drivers on our platform.

1:37:12

That's very difficult for anyone whether human or agent to replicate as well.

1:37:18

>> So we are working with agentic platforms.

1:37:20

We've got a great relationship for example with open AI >> and so you will be able to call an Uber using chat GPT.

1:37:27

One of the things that we want to do is we want to get our brand in front of you as well.

1:37:31

So once you call it, for example, it's an Uber map, so you can track your car, do all that good stuff.

1:37:37

So I think like companies like ours who do have, you know, we're in over 70 countries, we set everything up.

1:37:43

The membership program is very, very deep and embedded.

1:37:45

We have a fragmented supply base that's going to be very difficult for anyone to recreate.

1:37:51

I think we can rest easier.

1:37:54

And for me, I want to make sure that my brand gets out to the customer.

1:37:56

And at the same time, I'm building those experiences within the Uber app.

1:38:00

So, a driver can interact with the app using voice.

1:38:05

They can they have an agent who can help them out if they don't know why they're not making more money.

1:38:09

Um, we've got agents for ordering.

1:38:11

We've got agents for ordering your rides, etc.

1:38:13

So, I think as long as the experience on app doesn't trade trail the experience off app, I think off actually can ultimately for players like us expand the the marketplace.

1:38:27

And that's definitely something that we're looking at.

1:38:29

>> How are you thinking about the next iteration of Apple Intelligence rolling out?

1:38:33

We were talking to Mark German and he was saying that we've been able to call Ubers from Siri for I think he said a decade or something like that. It's been there.

1:38:42

Uh obviously I'm sure you have the numbers and there's probably a lot of people in nominal terms that are using that functionality, but it feels like it hasn't broken through, but it feels like it's about to with the next iteration of Siri and Apple intelligence.

1:38:55

is that that's lower friction. That feels good for you.

1:38:58

At the same time, if I don't open the app, maybe I don't go and do other things and I lose a little bit of connection.

1:39:03

What how are you seeing that trade-off?

1:39:07

>> You know, my my view is um don't think too hard and build great consumer products.

1:39:13

And so if someone wants to if someone wants to get us through Apple intelligence chat GBT or they want to come to the app um I don't care you know as long as as long as we're we're we're getting used and we're getting used often.

1:39:26

Now >> yes there are considerations we have a $2 billion advertising business >> if that is subsumed underneath an Apple intelligence >> um that could hurt our advertising business.

1:39:39

But for me, like if if the north star is build out consumer experiences that are absolutely first rate and then we have this the multi-product category and the membership underneath, I think the economics can kind of take them uh take care of themselves over the long term.

1:39:57

And if we make a great app, you know, like people will keep coming to that app.

1:40:01

And and I remember when um uh Google Maps was at some point amalgamating Lyft and Uber content, people were worried about that.

1:40:09

You talked about Apple intelligence.

1:40:11

Our app is pretty damn good.

1:40:13

And my job is to make sure that it remains, you know, leading and keeps attracting audience because ultimately that is the most engaged audience that you can have that direct audience.

1:40:25

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

1:40:27

>> Yeah, I mean with food with the benefit with with with the Uber Eats business is like I don't really want plain text experience ordering food in chat and then yes, you know, Chad can generate images and stuff like that, but >> it's several jumps and eventually you're like, well, I can just pop over to the app.

1:40:44

Uh we got to talk about autonomy.

1:40:46

Uh I'm sure uh I'm sure you spent a bunch of the earnings call on that note, but what what were the highlights?

1:40:51

What should people be paying attention to?

1:40:53

I think the the biggest highlight um and and we have a big section in our supplemental materials that I that I encourage folks to look at is that what we're seeing with autonomy is that it's a net positive in terms of demand into the ecosystem.

1:41:09

So there's one view of looking at it, hey, autonomous is just going to replace humans and you know robot cars don't get tired, they don't get distracted, they can work 20 hours a day, they do need to get recharged and clean, etc.

1:41:22

So they will replace the workforce so to speak that I think a lot of people are talking about in other markets as well.

1:41:29

What we're seeing in markets in which we have launched autonomous is that actually those markets are growing faster.

1:41:36

There's a new audience segment that comes in our new customer acquisition.

1:41:40

You know overall now we have 200 million consumers coming to our front door every single month.

1:41:47

Uh growing 18% growing pretty quickly.

1:41:50

But in the markets in which we have AV, our audience growth is actually accelerated and we're gaining new customers because it's a really freaking cool product.

1:42:00

So one is that we've always had the hypothesis, hey, mobility is a trillion dollar marketplace, but autonomous can add more to that market.

1:42:10

It can be trillion dollar plus or another trillion dollars.

1:42:15

And the early signal is that yeah, it is actually additive.

1:42:17

it's not um replacement only.

1:42:20

The second I I would say big finding if you want to call that for us is we've always had the hypothesis that autonomous on our platform is going to take advantage of the platform to be much more h uh much more utilized than offplatform.

1:42:35

You know like to some extent a car is a box with wheels.

1:42:41

>> Um the autonomous car is super expensive.

1:42:44

So, you want to keep it running and you want to keep it earning money for as long as possible.

1:42:48

And we're finding that the utilization of those cars on our platform is 30 plus% higher than cars that are not that kind of are building their own platforms.

1:42:59

That utilization bonus is hugely important as it relates to the value of our platform.

1:43:07

And so, we're seeing that come through too.

1:43:09

So, one is it's additive, which is great.

1:43:11

And the platform is doing what it's designed to do which is bring more business to a driver where that driver happens to be human or happens to be a robot. >> Yeah.

1:43:21

So you're saying so the unit economics of uh AV provider can actually be better if they're if they're adding it to the Uber platform. >> Yeah.

1:43:30

I mean that that's how we have to earn our take rate, right?

1:43:32

It's it's uh if we're not driving higher utilization, we won't earn our take rate.

1:43:36

And right now the utilization premium that we're seeing um suggests that our take rate is you could argue too low but we have a very strong case to be made for the take rate of the platform.

1:43:50

>> Is there any role for Uber in the rest of the self-driving car stack from cleaning to service to storage.

1:43:55

There's a lot of these things that could be handled and they're currently handled by the sort of OEMs and the big autonomy companies.

1:44:05

other >> you could imagine in the future uh it being much more distributed but does it go full uh individual uh maintenance and whatnot. >> Yeah. Yeah. Totally.

1:44:14

So if you think about the the AV stack, >> yeah, >> there's the distribution, you know, that could be Uber, it could be Whimo, could be Tesla, right?

1:44:23

>> Then there's a driver and the driver we're partnering up uh with a driver.

1:44:27

Then there's an operator and the operator has depots, is cleaning the cars, recharging the cars.

1:44:32

We have a network of uh fleet partners now on a global basis >> because about 15% of our supply is provided by fleets today.

1:44:41

and you know they rent out cars to drivers. Yeah.

1:44:46

>> We're taking those fleet operators and we're saying hey we want you now to operate AVs.

1:44:50

So that those fleet operators in partnership with us we have investments in a bunch of them.

1:44:55

They are the ones who operate the fleet and they can do it in a really lowcost manner.

1:45:01

They're doing it with hundreds of thousands of cars and so AV is different but not that different.

1:45:06

So you got the operator then you have someone who owns the car. That could be us.

1:45:10

It could be Whimo, but ultimately I think it's going to be third parties like private equity players and all this stuff who are going to want to own these big assets just like they kind of do rental car fleets >> and then you will have um uh kind of debt uh out there.

1:45:26

So there will be the financialization of the marketplace as well.

1:45:31

But we are definitely playing in the demand side.

1:45:33

We're partnering on the driving side and then we can and are providing through our fleet partners all of the operations in a city including depots, cleaning, etc.

1:45:47

>> What kind of conversations have you had or what should people expect from other OEMs outside of Tesla on the autonomy side?

1:45:54

It's it's an interesting dynamic now where Teslas are getting the FSD is getting really really good.

1:45:58

Uh it's a meaningful differentiator if you're a consumer and you uh you either want to, you know, drive less on your way to work or one day be able to add your car to a platform uh like Uber.

1:46:09

Uh what what's come kind of coming down the pipeline in terms of just overall competitiveness from other OEMs.

1:46:16

So what's interesting is that um when I was having discussions regarding autonomous with OEMs, it was more they were more interested in L2, which is >> where FSD is now, than they were L4.

1:46:28

You know, the the prospect of every single car being sold uh with a $5,000 priced piece of software that has a cost of goods of zero.

1:46:43

It's like OEM's eyes, you know, went like this.

1:46:45

They were super super interested. >> Yeah.

1:46:48

>> As it turns out, I think that L2 is proving to be less interesting than people thought because you still kind of have to watch a road, etc.

1:46:56

You can't really turn off.

1:46:57

I think the great great customer product is just I can relax.

1:47:00

I can do whatever I want and I can get my time back the way that you get your time back in an Uber.

1:47:07

Sit in the back seat, do whatever you want, make a call, etc.

1:47:11

So the conversations with OEMs actually are getting a lot more constructive for us because they see L3 and L4 and we want L4 obviously as the big prize now and that was not true 3 years ago.

1:47:23

So we're having actually really great conversations with OEMs.

1:47:27

conversations with OEMs. We have a deal for example with Lucid who builds awesome EVs uh and one of our other partners Neuro and Lucid coming together uh and there are many other discussions that we're having with OEM partners and then of course now Nvidia is in the game right they were building the reference

1:47:47

compute architecture um now they're bringing in the sensor stack and now they are building uh self-driving as well the model as well so Nvidia will provide a full stack software software and hardware solution to any OEM provider and as you can imagine Nvidia brings a lot of heft um a lot of knowhow and then a lot of credibility to the ecosystem as well. So uh the direction

1:48:10

So uh the direction of travel >> you're sitting there as like a supply driven business just being like let's go I want every every car outfitted with this when when it's when it's ready.

1:48:21

Uh and you can imagine a world where you know the Uber wait time is 20 seconds every time.

1:48:28

It's just like >> I mean the dream is >> the dream is 10 years from now every single new car sold is L4 capable because that is obviously very strong prospect for a supply what I started with and hopefully you'll get that 22nd ETA or you'll be pissed off if uh you have to wait for more than a minute. >> Yeah.

1:48:47

If you step back from maybe the specifics of of Uber and just think about how autonomy might change the American landscape, like how are do you do you agree with the thesis of like the suburbs will become more popular, people will be commuting longer?

1:49:03

Like what what knock-on effects do you think are potentially underrated or under discussed of of moving in a more autonomous direction?

1:49:14

>> Yeah, it's a great question.

1:49:14

I I'd say generally in the US suburbs are growing faster than cities.

1:49:18

So this is a trend that started with co it continues and our growth in the suburbs and less dense areas is about twice our growth rate in the cities.

1:49:29

>> Um so it's been a really attractive growth driver for us.

1:49:32

>> I do think that it's going to create a lot of space in cities.

1:49:34

You know I think 30% of space in cities is for parking.

1:49:37

A huge amount of it goes unutilized.

1:49:40

Some of that will be taken up by depots, etc.

1:49:46

But I do think that it is going to increase the the breadth of where people get to live.

1:49:51

Um, and I think it's going to make transportation available for many, many more people as the cost, it's going to take a while and it's probably going to take two or three generation of cars, but the hardware cost for these sensors, for the computers absolutely coming down.

1:50:06

coming down. uh and this will result in lowerc cost mobility being available to many more people in the world whether they live in the city or they live outside of the city and I think it's going to have a great impact on society

1:50:21

having more transportation available uh more affordably to a higher percentage of the population yes it's good for a business >> but it will undoubtedly be great for society >> last question what advice do you give to someone who wants to be a public company CEO. >> Uh, one is, um, I would tell you like

1:50:39

>> Uh, one is, um, I would tell you like don't hunt for it.

1:50:42

Um, pick I I I'd say that the advice that that I give folks is people get way too hung up on what their title is or how much they're going to get paid, etc.

1:50:55

>> I have always, you know, what's worked for me is I have been very, very specific about who I want to work for.

1:51:03

Uh and when you pick the right people to work for one, you learn a lot from them.

1:51:09

But the one thing that I've seen in every environment, like environments are unpredictable, but people usually stay successful.

1:51:15

Like you look at Elon, right?

1:51:16

Like he succeeded in so many different areas.

1:51:19

And that's true for really exceptional people.

1:51:23

>> So exceptional people stay exceptional regardless of the environment.

1:51:25

You know, if you pick a company or you pick a position, that can change that that can go the wrong way.

1:51:31

If you pick the right person, you've picked the right person.

1:51:35

Not only do you get to learn from them, but they usually move up in the world. >> Yeah.

1:51:39

>> And so as they get promoted, as they build a bigger company, you kind of get to free ride off of them.

1:51:44

So you get double the benefit, which is you learn from someone who's awesome >> and you get to move kind of in their wake until you're ready to strike out on your own.

1:51:54

I'd say that's number one.

1:51:54

And then the the second thing I'd say is like you know advice for young young people in terms of learning just learn how to work hard like it's again your skill sets may change your profession may change people are like discussing is coding the right thing or or you know learning the liberal arts.

1:52:11

The most important skill in life is the skill of working freaking hard.

1:52:17

Uh and if you work for the right person and you learn how to work hard you're going to do just fine. >> I love that.

1:52:24

I love both those answers.

1:52:26

>> That's a fantastic answer.

1:52:26

Thank you so much for >> so great to finally have you on the show.

1:52:29

Congrats to the whole team on a fantastic quarter and uh we'll hope to have you back on very soon.

1:52:34

>> We'll talk to you soon.

1:52:35

>> By the way, I don't know if our IT people have been watching you guys, but we have ramp coming on to Uber.

1:52:38

So, there's something happening with your commercials that that are working.

1:52:42

My IT people are watching way too much PVP. >> That's amazing. That's great.

1:52:47

Well, uh congratulations and we'll talk to you soon. Thanks so much. >> Goodbye.

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1:53:13

>> I love public company CEO.

1:53:16

>> We have our dear friend Mitchell, Mitchell Greenge, Lead Edge Capital >> coming into the show. Let's bring him in. >> Oh, he's here. Mitchell, how you doing?

1:53:24

You should have had Dar and I on together. We're buddies. >> Oh, you are? That's awesome. >> Damn.

1:53:29

>> Yeah, we should if we we plan better.

1:53:32

We'll add you both next time. >> Yeah. >> How's life? >> Uh it's good. It's good. Uh u Yeah.

1:53:35

Uh it's we're going all over the place today.

1:53:40

We're talking about the market collapse, the end of SAS, uh but the birth of uh Agentic Coding and all these crazy things developers doing. Yeah. What's up?

1:53:49

>> I got a question for you.

1:53:49

If everybody, my partner actually came up with this idea.

1:53:52

He's like, "So, if all the if all the SAS company, if all the software companies are all going to disappear because you just like vibe code your way to building one of these companies, well, then can't the next AI company vibe code that AI company?" >> Yes. Yes. Yes.

1:54:06

And I mean, there is seriously a a push in the open-source software community now to loosely vibe code everything you need.

1:54:14

Like, you build all your own tools, you build your own all your own software.

1:54:18

This used to be the domain of programmers that would stay up all night for months on end to build a little to-do list app.

1:54:23

And now it's much more robust, but we haven't really seen where all of this goes. It's still pretty early.

1:54:30

And most people are just building like tools that build more tools at this point.

1:54:33

But uh yeah, I mean the iron law of the universe, I don't know if you agree, is like if it goes up quickly, it comes down quickly.

1:54:39

There's always, you know, you see these amazing growth charts and you get a little nervous because if it easy come, easy go. >> Yeah. It's funny.

1:54:48

I think people are people are going to be in for a a rude awakening.

1:54:52

I think some people >> I mean you were calling this you were calling this the last time >> Yeah.

1:54:58

>> The last time you were on the show, you were kind of more just kind of skeptical a lot of these valuations.

1:55:02

So >> yeah, I was No, what's funny is is like public market software is not cheap. We're buying it.

1:55:08

Like we think companies like work there are incredible businesses.

1:55:11

Company like Transfer Wise in the payment space.

1:55:13

remittently toast has been crushed.

1:55:16

We're not in a company called Apploving, but I a huge gaming company.

1:55:22

I have a good buddy who's made billions on it and is now rebying at it.

1:55:26

Like these things have just like >> Yeah.

1:55:28

The crazy thing I was like all sent out at the same time. So >> yeah.

1:55:32

And you I was looking at looking at PayPal.

1:55:33

You have a it's trading at seven times earnings now.

1:55:36

When I looked this morning, they have half a billion users.

1:55:40

It's it's it's a global payments network. Yeah.

1:55:43

It doesn't seem like anything you can just vibe.

1:55:45

You're not going to vibe your way to money transfer. Come on.

1:55:48

We're going to vibe code it. We're going to build it.

1:55:50

We're just going to make by the way.

1:55:51

Same with Workday as well.

1:55:53

We're just going to vibe code our way.

1:55:54

You know, only took Workday 20 years to get companies like Nike and Proctor and Gabble to give them all their ERP data.

1:55:59

Of course, you know, Mitchell and Jamie, John and Jamie, and we're going to like we're going to vibe code our way. >> Yeah.

1:56:04

I think I think people are undervaluing trust right now. >> Totally.

1:56:08

People forget how software companies like building code has never been the actual like hard thing about a software company.

1:56:16

It's not like building semiconductor chips. Yeah.

1:56:19

>> It is like distribution.

1:56:19

People forget you build a piece of software.

1:56:21

Y >> then you have to sell the software.

1:56:23

Then you have to maintain the software.

1:56:25

Then you have to add features to the software.

1:56:28

Then you have to you know you connect it with other systems. Those systems change.

1:56:32

You have to have user permissioning.

1:56:34

This stuff is really complex. You know, I'm sorry.

1:56:36

The dude sitting in, you know, in on in on Silicon Valley in in a shed on, you know, Sand Hill or in San Francisco who's going to vibe code their way. Oh, I'm sorry.

1:56:46

How about the other 10,000 software engineers that, you know, Salesforce has or the 3,000 software engineers at Workday has?

1:56:53

I mean, are they just like sitting around, you know, on their thumb? >> No.

1:56:57

Of course, they're going to try to innovate.

1:56:58

And what's going to happen is no different than what happened in 99 and 2000. >> Yeah.

1:57:03

If you look at the top 50 sellers on the internet today of like the largest e-commerce companies like yes Amazon is one but Walmart, Home Depot, you know, >> they made it through Macy's businesses really quickly.

1:57:17

You can actually test that thesis empirically by looking at R&D spend of tech companies and how much they actually spend of the money they raise before they IPO on software development specifically.

1:57:28

And it's shockingly low, way lower than you'd think.

1:57:32

you'd think. you feel like software company's like pod shops and all these hedge fun all these hedge fun guys and by the way the trade I there's a great chart I could wish I could pull it up which is like um you know it's like software >> exposure for hedge funds has gone like this semiconductor exposure has gone like this >> and you know usually if you do the

1:57:52

opposite of what everybody's doing you'll make a lot of money >> okay >> but like one one you know one one kind of test you could run is like uh if you're thinking about a company like Workday is if you went to all of Workday's customers right now and you said, "Hey, I can I can I can build this for and I'll sell it to you at 20% of the price." Would anybody actually

1:58:12

Would anybody actually change switch over?

1:58:16

>> Because it would be like, "Okay, it's going to be cheaper, but >> what if it's like way less reliable?

1:58:22

What what if I get what if it's so unreliable or has so many issues that I get fired over it?"

1:58:26

Yeah, you know, there are like multi-billion dollar revenue businesses that are literally built to sit on top of companies like Salesforce and Workday to help them manage the companies um to manage the software.

1:58:38

It's it it's it's now again, so then you think about like I think companies that are like selling to big enterprises >> are actually going to end up great.

1:58:46

Now again, you might have the Sears and Kmarts of the world that you know didn't innovate or were overlevered.

1:58:52

Look, I do worry about some of these private equity software companies that get way overlevered and if they try to drive too high ebaja margins and s and sacrifice R&D.

1:59:03

Now, there are other firms like a Vista like what Robert Smith does and he's actively like they're trying to be like no, we need to like double down on AI and like double down in R&D and these things, but I think there will be some people that are just trying to maximize eBay margins that'll be hurt. And guess what?

1:59:17

Somebody will go build the next competitor of that.

1:59:19

So then you're like, look, we think about like an area that's probably more right for AI disruption is companies selling into like SMBs because the software isn't nearly as complex.

1:59:31

But again, >> there are company it's not like companies like HubSpot, which is a great business >> that sells into SMBs.

1:59:36

They're they have probably a thousand software engineers.

1:59:40

They're sitting there trying to disrupt themselves constantly.

1:59:42

So it's not I don't know.

1:59:44

I think it's >> Yeah, it's definitely market by market sector by sector cycle for sure.

1:59:47

But I think it I think people just don't truly understand how like software companies actually sell. >> Yeah.

1:59:57

>> Um that just say that people are going to vibe code it away.

1:59:58

Now what is incredible >> is how fast some of these AI businesses have growing that are built off the tailwinds of some of these companies.

2:00:08

Even like a company like a click house which just raised at a big round.

2:00:09

We were one of the early investors in it luckily totally by dumb luck.

2:00:13

Um like you got like you know we have four investors in Graphana Labs which you know this software company but embracing AI and just had an incredible quarter and >> plan and so like >> you are you are seeing there are there going to be a bunch of companies in software that that continue to innovate.

2:00:32

>> Could you vibe code uh could you vibe code equipment share?

2:00:34

That was one of your They just they just IPOed. >> It's funny. I am vibe code.

2:00:39

I was going to vibe code uh car uh collection software, but then I decided since I actually have a job for a living, I'm going to hire somebody else to vibe code it for me.

2:00:50

>> Total software engineer victory.

2:00:52

>> Still getting another job.

2:00:55

>> Actually, some some 18-year-old senior at Center High School is benefiting from this to build me software.

2:00:59

Yeah, they're gonna have they're gonna have a job forever because they're never gonna stop buying cars.

2:01:08

>> They're gonna be maintaining this thing for years.

2:01:09

>> I'm gonna get you guys in on it as well. So, >> Oh, I like that. I'm down. >> No, on equipment. Equipment chair.

2:01:12

Look, I mean, it's up almost 30% from the IPO.

2:01:18

It's uh Look, my partners Tim and Zach, >> my my partners Tim and Zach led that deal.

2:01:23

Uh I take no credit for it.

2:01:23

They did a phenomenal job.

2:01:26

did a phenomenal job. Um it's look it's benefiting from you know the ongoing there's a massive if you were to isolate you know capex and infrastructure spend outside of like GDP you know driving GDP growth right now I think it's like a very meaningful part um highways energy products data centers um I think another

2:01:46

big thing that's going to drive a lot of capex is this this uh you know accumulated depreci this accelerated depreciation >> and the big beautiful bill that will benefit people like equipment share And to put it in perspective, I think companies like equipment share you in the S1 uh because they haven't filed results yet. I think last quarter, you

2:02:02

I think last quarter, you know, in the S1 result in the last quarter, the S1 and the S1 was like grow at nearly 30% a year.

2:02:09

Yet you have companies like United Hertz and Sunbelt that grow like single digits and yet these things trade at almost similar ebid margins.

2:02:17

Now the reality is is people that tend to buy companies like Equipment Share Hertz Equipment are not used to businesses that grow 30%.

2:02:23

So they need to just like continue to put up results and I think they'll they'll get the they'll get the multiple expansion over time.

2:02:30

But they are it is like a great second derivative play on AI. >> Mhm. Totally.

2:02:37

>> In the public markets when you look at a software company um it feels like a lot of people are looking at you know is topline accelerating that should be happening if you're a true AI company.

2:02:47

You're also looking at stuff like are you overleveraged?

2:02:49

Then you can also just talk to the management team and if that doesn't sound like they know anything about AI, you could be very, you know, skeptical of the company.

2:02:55

How do you think about when you find a new company, uh, what what research, what's your process for understanding how they'll be positioned over the next couple years?

2:03:06

>> Yeah, that's a great question.

2:03:06

I think what we should do is just count the number of interns they have correctly because uh you know 24 year olds and 22 year olds are going to know more about this than 50 and 60 year olds and 40 year olds like myself.

2:03:18

No, all kidding aside, we >> the way we think about it is we just think of how is this like squarely in an area that could be like very easily disrupted by AI.

2:03:32

We we just s and like how deeply is this product integrated?

2:03:37

how many people are using the product is it is a result of stuff coming out of do they own their own data um you and I think we just we think about how complex the product is to build um you know like we talked to a company that's growing

2:03:50

like a rocket ship >> and that makes um like software to help like voices in call centers >> and and for us it's grown like a rocket ship we're just like but they sell into call centers >> could the call center software companies just build this themselves

2:04:07

like and then it's like a function of okay well what valuation then do they want and then you dig in deep and it's like and I'm not saying this one way or another we have do they have like one or two customers that are 30 40% of sales >> concentration you know we were we were

2:04:20

looking at a company recently where like 40% of their sales is to a company that you know we're pretty skeptical on whether it should exist in 10 years and it's like you know 30 40% of their sales. >> Yeah, that makes sense. It's kind of

2:04:33

>> Yeah, that makes sense.

2:04:33

It's kind of like a dying gasp from that bigger company and they're sort of sneaking the money out the back through this new startup.

2:04:40

Uh talk about the IPO window.

2:04:42

Uh feels like it's been open.

2:04:42

There's a lot of rumors about the big company SpaceX uh OpenAI Anthropic, but what does it mean?

2:04:49

I mean, you saw Equipment Share like what what's your take on the IPO market and where it might evolve over the next year?

2:04:56

>> Good companies can go public at any time. Okay.

2:04:57

Except like, >> you know, equipment share is up 30%. >> Yeah.

2:05:02

Like boy, it was a great it was a good deal. >> Yeah.

2:05:05

>> Um I I think I think what's going to be very interesting >> about some of these giant I equipped show is like a billion dollar deal.

2:05:15

>> It's sucking liquidity out of the markets like we're going out and raising $200 billion. >> Yeah.

2:05:20

A lot of people seem super confident that that uh the the market will fully support SpaceX anthropic and open AI >> David Gogggins market. We shall see.

2:05:28

By the way, the money has to come from somewhere. >> Yeah.

2:05:33

>> So you have to say, is it going to come out of cash?

2:05:36

>> Is it going to come out of treasuries?

2:05:38

>> Is it going to come out of Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft? >> Yeah.

2:05:42

>> Probably the reality is is a company like a SpaceX or an Open AR, an anthropic or a Stripe or let's say let's use like Bite Dance.

2:05:51

So B and by the way, Bite Dance trades has massive amounts of earnings.

2:05:56

You know, the negative is it's China, right? >> Yeah.

2:05:59

Um but the positive error is it has massive amount of earnings and you know you can get to a giant number like valued like SpaceX of a fundamental earnings number. >> Yeah.

2:06:10

>> So you're like where is a $150 billion going to come from?

2:06:14

And so in that one you probably say well >> it would probably attract new money back into China. Yeah.

2:06:20

But then might people pull out some pull some money out of 10 cent and pull some money out of Alibaba or Google or Microsoft to get exposure to this thing?

2:06:29

I'm sure in the case of a SpaceX, it would take money out of a um >> you know it would take money out of Tesla because it's like Elon die hard forgivers.

2:06:39

But who knows, maybe he's just going to merge you know SpaceX and Tesla together.

2:06:42

They'll have to then change it to the Elon Musk company. >> Yeah. Yeah.

2:06:46

Yeah, I think I mean I think Tesla shareholders would have been uh very frustrated to get XAI merged in, >> but getting SpaceX merged in >> and maybe you got a little X. >> I know nothing.

2:06:57

Would it shock me if it happened? No.

2:07:01

>> Someone in the chat just said that AC the ticker X just got reserved at NY.

2:07:06

So, we'll see what that means. >> That's exciting.

2:07:07

Uh what do you think of the secondary market?

2:07:09

When when I when I moved to Silicon Valley, it was like seen as a total bare signal if a founder CEO was selling stock at the early stage.

2:07:19

Now companies stay private for so long.

2:07:21

There's mass massive secondary sales.

2:07:23

Elon's been a master of, you know, liquidity, keeping SpaceX private for 20 years.

2:07:27

How is the secondary market evolving? What are you seeing?

2:07:32

>> It's definitely evolved uh a lot.

2:07:32

When I started working at Bessmer in 2004, 2005, >> you know, it was a very, you know, it was very, >> you know, world-class venture funds were like, oh my absolutely not.

2:07:44

You should not let secondaries and I got into my first investment ever in 2009 in a company called Bizarre Voice >> doing a secondary.

2:07:53

Uh, now I will tell you most deals have a secondary component.

2:07:58

It feels a little bit frenzyish right now like the Facebook Twitter um back then.

2:08:03

Uh it it is I was just at an investor conference yesterday uh speaking in in Arizona and it shock I had multiple people come up to me like the institutional investors like like random companies pension funds that were like oh what do you think of anthropic?

2:08:24

We're like buying into it here. >> Yeah.

2:08:26

>> Like oh this doesn't end well.

2:08:26

Uh not just for like this I didn't mean an >> anthrop is one of those signals when like the the person who's not a professional investor is talking to you about things that feel like professional investments. >> Yeah. I got even a better one.

2:08:40

uh one of my big institutional investors, fantastic guy name will be uh not said, but >> he's like we you need to start a micro secondary fund that will buy secondary interests in these tender 30 act funds.

2:08:58

Uh you know, you have like you have like the co the new cotu fund and the vista fund and all these and there's a huge wave coming. >> Yeah.

2:09:04

>> And and basically they offer like >> quarterly redemptions like you can take out like five or 10% a year.

2:09:09

It's what like Bri was, right?

2:09:11

And then but occasionally if there's too many people that want to uh redeem, you have to gate them.

2:09:18

But you never want to gate.

2:09:20

>> But when do you think everybody's going to gate?

2:09:21

Like everybody's going to all the dentists and doctors are all going to pull out at the exact same time.

2:09:25

Y >> and my buddy was like, "Oh, you should start a sec a micro secondaries fund to buy out their interests in all these interval funds when they all when they put it when the gate comes up and all of them want out at the same time and they're like, "Wait a second. We can't get out. We're locked up. What do you mean?

2:09:42

I thought this was like liquid." >> Yeah, totally. >> It's coming. Don't worry. >> It's Don't worry.

2:09:46

>> What do you What do you think uh what do you think Ferrari the business is worth? >> Oh, boy.

2:09:53

I thought you were going to ask me what I thought of new car.

2:09:55

Lewis was Hamilton was fast at Dustin at preseason Dustin.

2:09:59

Um, >> it's an amazing business.

2:10:04

The stupidest thing I ever did was buy the cars and not the stock.

2:10:08

>> Um, I actually have several friends that I race for our challenge with >> that bought the stock at the IPO and now they slowly dribble the stock out to buy cars. >> Wow.

2:10:17

>> It's an amazing brand.

2:10:17

I don't know what it's >> only it only IPOed in 2015.

2:10:21

>> What is the stock like?

2:10:21

I mean, what's what's Ferrari stock price now?

2:10:22

Stock's down 10% in the last month.

2:10:24

It's a $63 billion uh billion building a Ferrari factory.

2:10:32

>> The nice thing is you can't uh Yes.

2:10:32

Do >> you can't vibe code, >> but it's up 500% since the IPO. >> Yeah.

2:10:39

Right when you got into cars, you should have been getting into the Yeah.

2:10:45

What what advice would you give to someone uh just getting into venture, private equity, raising a fund, looking at opportunities?

2:10:52

Uh we're seeing this like Kshape right now with the mega funds scaling up.

2:10:56

Feels harder than ever to start sort of a midsize fund.

2:10:59

What what what are you seeing that's interesting that new managers are doing?

2:11:06

>> That's a great question.

2:11:06

I'm going to steal a word.

2:11:07

I'm going to steal a line from Jeremy Levine who's a senior partner investment venture partners and probably one of the best venture capital gaps over the last 25 years.

2:11:14

You guys could ever get him on. He's incredible.

2:11:18

>> Um like an amazing investor was like the very early investor in Pinterest and LinkedIn and Yelp and like Shopify that with Alex Ferrar like the total stud.

2:11:25

He said to me, I would always complain about what they were paying me uh at the time.

2:11:34

And he's like, "But Mitchell, you're learning a lot."

2:11:35

And so, the most important thing is actually to go find if if you're trying to get into this industry, and I think there's too many people that are young starting funds and they're going to actually like or entrepreneurs and have actually never really professionally invested.

2:11:48

I I would actually tell you you're better off going to find the apprenticeship >> and like and literally go find an amazing venture capitalist or venture capital firm that you can go work for.

2:12:00

Convince Sequoia or Benchmark or Mike Maples or Josh compliment it first like guys that have been doing this gals that have been doing this Theresa G who have been doing this for a long time and go shadow him for two years.

2:12:10

That's how you're going to really that is honestly the best 10 or 10 >> like so so many >> Yeah.

2:12:18

A lot of people get into these funds two years later I'm I'm raising my own fund.

2:12:20

It's like you haven't seen a full >> cycle going like may maybe you're a good investor, maybe you've made some good angel bets, maybe you did a couple years at a fund already, but going and saying I'm going to do the the the path of doing the 30 to50 to 100 million to $200 million fund.

2:12:35

Like that is like uh >> it's tricky especially where prices >> I mean I I give Harry at 20BC a lot of credit.

2:12:42

Like he started off in the podcast.

2:12:43

He like hustles his way like I'm sure you guys are going to get to start to see like really interesting deals from doing this.

2:12:48

And that doesn't mean in like 18 months from now you're going to go start a fund. >> No.

2:12:54

>> Um yeah, I think it's people confuse angel investing and being successful at angel investing with all of a sudden if you get 100 million bucks you'll be really successful.

2:13:01

Um, it's really really hard and I think people need to find mentors and go work for people that have that have invested as you through cycles 100%.

2:13:15

>> What uh what does it take to actually be contrarian because it's it's a it's like whenever you know it's such a popular word in this industry now.

2:13:25

Everybody says they're contrarian and yet of course only >> that's consensus. consens. Yeah, exactly.

2:13:32

Um, and so I feel I feel like it's something like humans have an innate sort of instinct to kind of go with the herd and and% and and so you have to like fight that, but how do you fight?

2:13:43

>> Steve deep Steve Cohen has always told me if you want to know where the stock market goes, Mitchell, he's like, "Look, he's like you got a lot of smart hedge fun guys in your fund, you know, himself included.

2:13:51

Ask us all where we think the market's going.

2:13:52

Like eight of us tell you one thing and two say the other.

2:13:55

Please call me and say what the two said." >> Yeah.

2:13:58

>> That's where it's going.

2:13:58

like the market causes the greatest amount of pain to the you know greatest number of people. Well, yeah.

2:14:04

And to be honest, right now the re if you looked at at X, you would say the the consensus view is that AI is in a bubble and then we're going to have this massive correction >> and the contrarians are saying, you know, are the runes obviously he's very incentivized.

2:14:20

Dylan Patel is saying like people aren't prepared for the load. >> Yeah.

2:14:26

Well, my view is is my view on all that is good company and good investment can be two very fundamental things.

2:14:31

Like you may wake up in 5 years and anthropic is worth 300 $350 billion, right? It's $350 billion.

2:14:38

Uh I want to go back to the contrarian thing in a second.

2:14:41

Um >> people are underestimating over the next 10 to 15 years what AI is going to do.

2:14:49

Myself included, every one of your guests included. >> Yeah. in 2000.

2:14:52

I could have sat on your show if it was around and nobody would have talked about the $3 trillion of social media that's been created value.

2:14:59

Um yet people always overestimate the near- term.

2:15:03

The bubble will pro whatever bubble we're in will be different than 2020 and 21.

2:15:07

It'll be different than 99.

2:15:10

There will be some correction.

2:15:10

Nobody will be able to predict when it happens and the correction will just happen.

2:15:13

But then that is probably the best time to then buy a bunch of these names uh and hold on to a blunt grid.

2:15:19

How do you be a contrarian? I don't know.

2:15:23

You'd be like Lindsay Vaughn and tear your ACL and try to get now go win an Olympic medal.

2:15:26

You you know I I think people that have I think contrarians tend to be people that understand like how to take very calculated risks um and and are are not afraid of doing that.

2:15:40

So like what we look for in our analysts that come and work here, you know, cold call companies all day long.

2:15:45

You know, by the way, the good CEO doesn't call you back.

2:15:48

It's a CEO you call every 10 10 times and calls you back after 10 times.

2:15:52

Like that's it's it's like grit, persistence, not being afraid to be different.

2:15:57

So like you look for like athletes, I'm sorry, but if you drop the ball at the Rose Bowl like you have faced adversity.

2:16:06

>> I'm sorry getting a D on a test is not adversity.

2:16:08

Like you know, but like that's why I think like a lot we like a lot of like athletes. Yeah.

2:16:13

or like people like that were really big in like arts or music or just doing something different.

2:16:19

Being a straight A student is not different, especially with great inflation.

2:16:24

>> Talk about the differences culturally between the hedge fund guys, you know, and the venture capitalists.

2:16:29

I was reading uh Dan Wong was talking about how in the hedge fund world, you're wrong five times before breakfast because everyone has a different thesis and then it's immediately proved right or wrong.

2:16:42

So you get more used to being contrarian and everyone wants to find that edge whereas in Silicon Valley there's a little bit more in incentive to go with the herd because you can just ride the wave.

2:16:52

Um what else have you seen and do you agree with that take? >> Yeah. Yeah.

2:16:56

So hedge funds it's like I think a very very generalist view like extremely generalist view. Yeah. >> Um >> broad view.

2:17:04

What I would say is I think if you were to take the best hedge fund managers I know >> Mhm.

2:17:10

and the best venture capitalist I know.

2:17:13

>> We've been fortunate to like partner with a bunch of people, work with people, have people back us.

2:17:16

I would tell you that in three month or six month increments, I think the smart the hedge fun guys are smarter >> and like have a better sense of where the world is going.

2:17:27

But I think over like a a 5 to 10 year period, the the venture capitalist have a better view just in general like how they think. >> Makes sense. Yeah.

2:17:37

Kind of aligned with the business. uh contrarian takes. I saw one here.

2:17:41

The center of gravity is shifting.

2:17:43

More innovation is happening outside of Silicon Valley with countries outside the US producing category leaders earlier in their life cycle.

2:17:51

I read that I felt like I disagreed with it. Defend it.

2:17:58

>> I in a world if you believe AI is coming and it's easier to build software or build whatever.

2:18:03

Well, who says you have to be in Silicon Valley where it's really expensive to live?

2:18:07

It's really expensive to get talent.

2:18:12

>> You can be able to build it anywhere.

2:18:13

Look, people have built now public companies that are completely, you know, graphed by the way is a big business. >> Yeah.

2:18:19

>> And it's completely distributed.

2:18:19

Like there are other big companies like and if you talk to people like Dell and Microsoft, they will tell you that they've they've shut down a lot of like small small regional offices and just have people work remote.

2:18:30

So I think in actually the more you believe in AI, the more actually stuff could come out of application layer.

2:18:37

I think at the models at the at the model level um it becomes about recruiting the best like you know PhD tech level talent and stuff like that but just to build application companies I think you can build them anywhere. >> Yeah. Yeah.

2:18:48

That makes a lot of sense.

2:18:50

>> Jordan, anything else? >> Uh this is great.

2:18:53

>> What uh what's the update on on the racing side?

2:18:56

>> Did you watch the Rolex 24? >> Yeah. Any any reaction? >> Watch part of it.

2:19:00

>> Why weren't you why weren't you racing in the Rolex? >> Couple years. Couple years. A couple more years.

2:19:04

Um, we need >> I uh was so race season we had our first race for Ferrari Challenge kicks off in like the middle of March. >> Awesome.

2:19:13

>> Uh at the thermal club uh outside of Palm Springs where you guys have been. >> Very cool.

2:19:17

>> I'm actually going to race a support race at Lemons this year. >> Nice.

2:19:21

>> I'm going to race the Monaco vintage races in an old F1 car. >> Nice. >> Great.

2:19:27

>> My goal is to run Lemons in the next like five years. Okay.

2:19:30

>> Like 24 hours at lemons. >> Wow. That'll be amazing.

2:19:31

We'll be >> You know you got You know the guys you got to have come on here though cuz you like cars.

2:19:36

I don't really know him but George Curts is like he's a sponsor. >> He's very good. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. >> Yeah.

2:19:43

>> No, his his race at at Daytona was insane.

2:19:46

I mean from getting taken out in that opening >> corner to uh getting the win. >> Yeah. Absolute legend.

2:19:52

Well >> F1's gonna be F1. It was funny.

2:19:54

George Russell was talking >> that he thought F1 I thought I saw like a interview with him where he thinks it might be a lot closer this year because there's a bunch more teams that could be in the mix.

2:20:04

It's still obviously very early on, but like the car that Adrian Newi built at at uh for Aston Martin is totally wild. Yeah. So, it'll be fun.

2:20:13

>> We're putting we're putting together a market map of F1 teams based on the tech companies that are sponsoring them.

2:20:17

So >> that's that's amazing.

2:20:20

By the way, >> because there's I mean I think uh >> the easiest way to understand motorsports are definitely a beneficiary of the AI boom so far.

2:20:30

>> You guys got to come to you got to come to an F1 race. >> We're excited.

2:20:32

Yeah, we we were in Vegas. It was fun.

2:20:34

Well, yeah, >> I'm assuming we'll be at all three American races. >> I hope so. I hope so. >> Cool.

2:20:40

>> Anyway, have a great rest of your day, Mitchell.

2:20:42

>> We'll see you soon, Mitchell. >> Cheers. >> Goodbye.

2:20:44

Let me tell you about Graphite code review for the Age of AI.

2:20:47

Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software.

2:20:52

>> And I'm also going to tell you about Gusto, the unified platform for payroll, benefits, and HR built to evolve with modern small and medium-sized businesses.

2:21:00

And we have some breaking news.

2:21:02

Sam Alman has responded to the anthropic ads.

2:21:06

He says, "First, the good part about the anthropic ads, they are funny." And I laughed. I like it.

2:21:10

But I wonder why Anthropic would go for something so clearly dishonest.

2:21:15

Our most important principle for ads is that they is that we won't do exactly this.

2:21:19

We would never obviously run ads in the way anthropic depicts them.

2:21:24

We are not stupid and we know our users would reject that.

2:21:28

It I guess it's on brand for anthropic double speak to use a deceptive ad to critique theoretical deceptive ads that aren't real, but a Super Bowl ad is not where I would expect it.

2:21:38

More importantly, we believe everyone deserves to use AI and are committed to free access because we believe access creates agency.

2:21:44

More Texans use chat GPT for free than than total people use cloud in the United States.

2:21:52

So, we have a differently shaped problem than they do.

2:21:54

If you want to pay for Chat GPT plus or pro, we don't show you ads.

2:21:57

Anthropic serves an expensive product to rich people.

2:22:00

We are glad they do that and we are doing that too.

2:22:03

But we also but we also feel strongly that that we need to bring AI to billions of people who can't pay for subscriptions.

2:22:13

Maybe even more importantly, Anthropic wants to control what people do with AI.

2:22:17

They block companies they don't like from using their coding product, including us.

2:22:20

They want to write rules for themselves for uh for what people can and can't use AI for.

2:22:25

And now they also want to tell other companies what their business models can be.

2:22:28

We are committed to broad democratic decision-making.

2:22:31

In addition to access, we also are committed to building the most resilient ecosystem for advanced AI.

2:22:37

We care a great deal about safe, broadly beneficial AGI.

2:22:39

And we know the only way to get there is to work uh with the world to prepare.

2:22:44

One authoritarian company won't get us there on their own to say nothing of the ob other obvious risks is a dark path.

2:22:50

As for our Super Bowl ad, it's about builders and how uh and how anyone can now build any >> we are enjoying watching so many people switch to codeex.

2:22:59

There have been 500,000 app downloads since launch on Monday and we think builders are really going to love what's coming for them in the next few weeks.

2:23:06

I believe Codeex is going to win.

2:23:07

We will continue to work hard to make even more intelligence available for lower and lower prices to our users.

2:23:12

This time belongs to the builders, not the people who want to control them.

2:23:16

So he fires fires back more responses.

2:23:20

more responses. This is why I said in general like again I think Sam has to admit that the ads are like pretty entertaining and it's just such a wild move and uh unexpected from from Anthropic given that uh they've been uh

2:23:35

you know trying I mean I would say like from a brand standpoint going with like the sort of edgy >> uh adult humor uh was was uh risk >> uh unexpected but yeah ultimately it's deceptive like they're trying to mislead people about >> OpenAI's ad product. >> Yeah. It's not corn syrup. >> Yeah. It's not corn syrup.

2:23:54

>> Like the entire strategy of the campaign is clearly not to drive downloads. >> It's FUD. >> It's FUD. >> Yeah.

2:24:00

>> Um and uh yeah, I think uh they'll there will probably be a Harvard uh business, you know, case study on on this.

2:24:09

>> We should do TBPN business case studies. I think that'd be fun. Should generate those.

2:24:12

Uh also, it's just anti-ad, which I don't like. I like ads. Here's another ad.

2:24:17

Label Box, RL Environments, voice, robotics, evals, and expert human data.

2:24:22

Labelbox is the data factory behind the world's leading AI teams.

2:24:25

And we have our next guest in the reream waiting. >> Is it time to puff? >> It's time to puff.

2:24:30

We got Simon from Turop Puffer. >> Waiting room.

2:24:34

Let's bring him into the TVP Ultra. >> Simon, how you doing? Good to see you. >> Good. Good to see you guys. Hey, John. Hey, Jordy. It's time to puff. >> It's time to puff.

2:24:44

What's new in your world?

2:24:45

Were you thinking about doing an over-the-top attack ad on a competitor or are you locked in focused for this Super Bowl? What's the strategy?

2:24:51

How is the business growing?

2:24:56

>> I mean, you were so generous to give us a front and send logo uh to the Super Bowl.

2:25:02

>> Um as as a new entrant. Yeah.

2:25:02

As a new entrant to the new world, I can't >> I don't really understand American football. >> Um >> Okay.

2:25:12

But it seems right up your alley because when I think of it from first principles, it seems like a sport that has been designed to show ads. Yes.

2:25:20

>> Which I think that is a great American invention.

2:25:23

So I have to respect that. >> It's beautiful. >> It's very beautiful. Yeah. >> Okay.

2:25:27

Uh how has the uh the agentic coding boom been processed to you? What what's the effect?

2:25:34

Are you seeing any slowdown?

2:25:35

There's been hype waves and selloffs and all sorts of turmoil.

2:25:38

Uh has the recent uh sort of reaceleration uh taken you to surprise?

2:25:44

Did it hit you like a flashbang?

2:25:49

>> I whatever is going on right now is hitting us like something. >> That's good. What is going on? Break it down for us.

2:26:00

>> You've been waiting to use this effect all day. >> Yes, all day.

2:26:02

And the chat demanded it.

2:26:06

Anyway, >> Bobby says billions billions must puff.

2:26:11

>> Yes, >> we need a puff one. We need a puff one.

2:26:13

Like a puffer fish that sort of just like >> you know when you want me to get off camera, you get a puffer fish that counting down.

2:26:20

>> Well, we have a smoke grenade.

2:26:20

We have a smoke grenade that kind of issues puffs of smoke.

2:26:23

But maybe they need logos all over them. That would be good.

2:26:26

>> I mean, look, the world the world's puffing.

2:26:27

Uh, I think >> you asked about coding.

2:26:30

I think coding was the first vertical that really started puffing really hard.

2:26:33

And I mean in general the way that we look at the world is that we can certainly take all of the knowledge in the world and we can distill it into a few terabytes of weights and those terabytes of weights are extremely useful at reasoning over data.

2:26:49

>> But in some way they have to reason with the data and uh to reason with the data you need a search engine right that has all the canonical data and is that tool to search through the data.

2:26:58

>> Um and I mean that's what cursor and cognition and other coding tools are doing with turbopuffer.

2:27:02

um is to search through the code.

2:27:04

And so I think we're seeing that in other verticals now.

2:27:06

We see it in legal, right?

2:27:07

And we see >> every vertical sort of starts by just pushing a bunch of things into context.

2:27:14

But then really what they want is to allow the agent to search by itself.

2:27:17

And that's where Turboer comes in as that as the search engine.

2:27:21

It can index pabytes and pabytes of data to allow these agents to search.

2:27:26

>> Yeah, we were I mean we were talking about ads.

2:27:27

about ads. uh is do you have a burgeoning ads business or not not ads in turbopuffer but powering ad tech systems because I can imagine a lot of new platforms they have a lot of content they have a lot of ma ads they need to match those and so uh your system should

2:27:43

be valuable there is is that a stretch or is that a good application >> I think most of the ad businesses already have extremely sophisticated systems for this I'm thinking new generally it's yeah >> yeah no we we haven't seen that vertical really come alive for us yet? >> Yeah, I imagine I imagine uh it becomes

2:27:59

>> Yeah, I imagine I imagine uh it becomes important uh uh and and uh what about other uh sort of uh applications or sectors that are growing in terms of uh this technology adopting this technology puffing broadly >> something that we're seeing that's puffing pretty hard right now is that people want to basically build their own Google.

2:28:24

They want to take the entire web and make it searchable and allow the agents to reason over either literally the entire public internet or data sizes that are that um internal data that's of that kind of volume, right?

2:28:36

Hundreds of billions of documents.

2:28:38

Um and recently we we we launched some product to support that where you can basically now build your own internet index on top of turbuffer for an extremely reasonable cost.

2:28:49

So what we showed is that we can take 100 billion documents and make them available to you with a P50.

2:28:53

Um so that's the immediate latency of less than 50.

2:28:58

>> So this is pretty remarkable for an offthe-shelf SAS product and something that we're seeing um that some of the most sophisticated customers in the world uh need and I don't think there's any other easy way to do it than to puff.

2:29:10

Yeah, we talked a little bit last time on uh on just compute bottlenecks, AI bottlenecks, anything that you're that's keeping you up at night in terms of uh data center buildouts, semiconductor buildouts, even if it's not directly related to your business.

2:29:27

Is there anything that you see that could potentially put a damper on the growth of the booming AI industry?

2:29:36

I mean, I think everyone is everyone is is struggling to get compute once you when you get enough scale.

2:29:39

Um, and I mean that that's it's it's good news in CPU land.

2:29:45

Um, I'm I'm not contending for the GPUs yet.

2:29:48

Um, but we are starting to see I mean you have to do that at any scale, right?

2:29:53

You have to start requesting from the cloud providers, hey, I want hundreds and hundreds of this machine in this particular region for these customers.

2:29:58

Um, so I think that's something that everyone's facing.

2:30:02

Obviously, we're watching the DRM prices and things like that like everyone else.

2:30:06

Um, but uh hopefully hopefully that gets that comes down.

2:30:11

>> Are there any any kind of like nar you have an interesting view into the usage of pretty much every popular AI product?

2:30:19

Obviously you can't talk about uh individual uh the the sort of usage of any individual product but is there any sort of narrative violations that you're seeing broadly every single day depending on new products getting announced people are saying you know it's over for this company it's over for that company or I just turned from this product but uh overall what are you

2:30:39

seeing >> I think I mean what we see is that the companies that are building the most exciting product are trying to operationalize very very large amounts of data and that's difficult difficult to copy and so I mean we have survivorship bias in the businesses that we see but they come to us because they want to connect more data to AI um than anyone else. I I would say yeah if

2:30:59

I I would say yeah if you're a thin layer and you're not trying to vacuum up a lot of data then it's it starts to get really difficult.

2:31:06

So I I mean I I do see as with how powerful the models are now, you you have to be investing in some pretty pretty deep tech um to to make it um Yeah. >> Yeah.

2:31:19

Are you doing anything on this on the on this uh on the front of like making Turbo Puffer intelligible to agents?

2:31:28

So, uh, if someone goes to a vibe coding app or a CLI tool and they just say, "Solve this problem for me."

2:31:38

The agent pulls Turbo Puffer off the shelf.

2:31:42

>> I mean, we we we try as much as we can to make the docs very easy to read.

2:31:45

Um, I think it's not completely clear how the LLMs make the decision of what the best database is, but I think that we're trying to do what we can to make sure that the LLMs like like Puffin as well. >> Yeah.

2:32:00

>> Um, I I we have made API decisions around what it would be easier for the for the LLMs to guess. >> Yeah. Yeah.

2:32:10

I heard an interesting anecdote about uh someone building a CLI tool.

2:32:16

They wanted to make it easy for an L an LLM to grab or an agent to grab.

2:32:21

And so basically they just uh rewrote the CLI to include every possible hallucination or mistake that could be made.

2:32:30

And people often do this with with URLs where they will say, well, you know, some people might type the wrong URL sometimes, but LLM hallucinate in a slightly different way.

2:32:40

they don't necessarily fat finger a single key, but they might, you know, drop the wrong token or use the wrong phrase or use the wrong term.

2:32:48

And so they rewrote their CLI to include like every possible permutation that that that an LLM could could think about in terms of like update, edit, quit, exit, uh you know, all the different keywords.

2:32:59

They just created hooks and functionality for all of them.

2:33:02

So even if the LLM shows up and is like kind of clumsy, it can still use it and so it still likes it. But I don't know.

2:33:08

I don't know where all that goes on the on the commercial side.

2:33:09

This is more for like open source.

2:33:13

>> Yeah, I think I think maybe it's a little overblown how much you have to design for this.

2:33:16

I think it's the same with humans.

2:33:18

We fat finger stuff and the LLMs are a lot more resilient now than they were even just 6 months ago.

2:33:23

So to me, it's this just always good API design.

2:33:28

If you're designing a good API or a good CLI or good interface, you should sort of be able to predict like, oh, if I did this, it's probably going to work this way.

2:33:35

And I think the LLM treats it exactly the same way.

2:33:37

So I I I I would maybe take back that we're doing anything super intentional for the LLMs because I think the same design that's good for humans is good for LLMs. >> Yeah.

2:33:46

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

2:33:48

>> Uh what if anything has changed since the funding round?

2:33:52

>> Yeah, >> not much has changed.

2:33:54

Uh we got logo rights to ramp. So that's exciting. >> Congratulations. Second ramp mention.

2:34:02

>> They were like finally you raised a bit more venture capital.

2:34:04

We'll let you use our logo. >> There you go.

2:34:08

>> I mean, you know, it's uh it's in and it's it's uh yeah, I think we're we're really really happy to work with that team and I think there's lots more logos uh waiting beneath the surface to be on Earth.

2:34:20

Um so, the Murderers row will will continue to to evolve um as we earn the trust of more and more of the lovely companies that we that we work with.

2:34:31

What was the what was early on when companies were discovering Turppuffer and realizing, hey, this is really good and this is going to be sort of key to enabling all these different features and functionality that we want.

2:34:42

Was it actually a challenge getting logo rights because they didn't want their competitors to be super aware of it, right?

2:34:49

You want like, hey, if I can have an even an extra month before >> another uh company that I might have some overlap with, I'll take it. >> Yeah.

2:34:58

I mean, we have some verticals in um like there's a headfront that doesn't really want us to talk about uh um because they they see it as like a competitive advantage, right?

2:35:07

Um and so I mean I we like that tension. Um, for sure.

2:35:12

I think honestly in the beginning it was just um I'm sure that some of the companies that bet on us early were like, "Okay, this is like uh three or four people in Canada and we're betting our whole business and search on on them being able to make it."

2:35:30

Um, and I've certainly heard from one of our early customers that that kept them awake at night.

2:35:36

>> Now the company is 10 times that size, right?

2:35:38

and of a of a different caliber and we owe them everything to have bet on us that early on.

2:35:42

Um, but it was certainly a challenge in the beginning, not just because they saw it as a secret sauce, but also because they were afraid of what their customers would think, right?

2:35:52

Here's this like little like dinky company in the woods of Canada.

2:35:56

Like what do they know about ranking search engines?

2:35:59

>> Uh, and I think they were concerned what their customers thought.

2:36:00

And we've just tried to do everything that we can by keeping keeping our uptime as good as possible and walking everything carefully and building good software to earn that trust.

2:36:10

But I think every startup that gets logos, I think the founders have to really fight for it.

2:36:16

Um, and they have to build the relationships to make sure that people trust they're going to use the logo in good hands and they're not going to plaster it all over contexts um that they wouldn't feel okay with.

2:36:27

>> How are you guys approaching vendor selection today?

2:36:29

when are you running the calculus of should we build this ourselves or pull something off the rack?

2:36:39

>> We were we were just discussing this recently where we've started our our data stack now is just using like cloud code or cursor agent in a repo and just giving as much information as possible what's going on.

2:36:53

we've ditched we're we're starting to more and more ditch just the tools because it's so easy to compose the charts and things like that with agents.

2:37:00

So the the shallow SAS software I think it's it's it's dire there because it's just so easy to replace it now.

2:37:08

Um but I think there will also be a bit of a hangover from that right there is real value here in like permissions and enterprise like all these enterprise features.

2:37:15

Um, so it will probably go very much in the in the direction of everyone's going to build their own little shallow thing and then some of them are going to realize that this is a this is a bit of a nightmare to maintain and then pay for it again.

2:37:29

Um, could be dire for a little bit, but I think that that I don't think it's going to swing.

2:37:33

I I I I still think there's a lot of value in that. >> Yeah.

2:37:37

What's the uh what's the worst like logo crime that you've ever seen someone do?

2:37:43

Is that just uh go in the customer database, search has any employee from a hyperscaler uh signed up for a trial account and then slap the logo on the landing page.

2:37:52

Uh what what would you tell a young founder not to do in terms of throwing a logo on a landing page?

2:38:01

>> I think we we like I think logo crimes is actually great diction.

2:38:05

I think we see this a lot where you see like just you go on a page and it's like Microsoft, right?

2:38:11

And it's all these it's like okay like >> we were talking about this internally because so for example um there's a there's one small team inside of Verscell that uses Turbo Puffer >> and I think a lot of companies might then just put the Versell logo on the website and say Versel's puffing. >> Yeah.

2:38:30

>> But I don't think that's fair right.

2:38:32

It's an accilliary use case.

2:38:32

It's one person who's using it for go to market and doing a phenomenal job over there.

2:38:38

And so what we're trying to do is like okay that's that that logo might not make it to the front page because that would not be an honest association.

2:38:43

And then on the use use case page we're going to be having a tag that says core and accelerary.

2:38:49

And then under accelerary right it will say okay it's this particular team at this enterprise that's using it.

2:38:54

Um just to be completely honest about it.

2:38:56

And I think that's and then I think just sending a note to the teams that you work with of like hey is this a cool uh place to use your logo.

2:39:03

You have to be very respectful about it. >> Yeah. Ask for you.

2:39:08

>> Yeah, you can't speedrun it. It takes time.

2:39:10

>> The chat the chat's saying Verscel's puffing. >> Breaking news.

2:39:12

Put up a TBPN trading card. We got the scoop here. >> A case study.

2:39:20

>> Yeah, >> case study will come out.

2:39:20

But as I said, it's an accillerary use case and and we love the trust, but it's not like V0 is puffing or something like that, right?

2:39:30

>> That makes a ton of sense.

2:39:30

Well, thank you so much for hopping by.

2:39:31

We'll talk to you soon and have a great day.

2:39:36

>> While we were live, Google reported earnings.

2:39:39

Revenue grew 18%, search 17%, Gemini has 750 monthly users, and the stock is absolutely nuking.

2:39:45

So, >> say just don't don't look at your portfolio. Stay in Slack.

2:39:52

>> It's just barely a$4 trillion company, though. That's so rough.

2:39:55

When are you coming when are you coming to California next?

2:39:58

After >> hours or Southern California?

2:40:03

I'm going to California next week. >> All right.

2:40:06

>> But when are you when are you coming up to Canada?

2:40:08

I keep like every time we talk about this and you guys are like, "Oh, it's so cold. It's the whole country."

2:40:15

>> I just feel like the whole country is unAmerican from my perspective.

2:40:16

It's just it's just >> Have you met American Simon? I'm right here. >> Okay. >> I'm ready for you. >> Okay. You got me. You got me.

2:40:23

Well, >> we would love We would love to go fishing.

2:40:29

>> Uh >> we need to do a weekend weekend trip.

2:40:31

It's too hard to bring the show. >> Honestly, yeah. Family trip.

2:40:34

>> Yeah, that'd be great. Let's do it.

2:40:35

>> Realistically, we bring great bring in everybody. >> Awesome.

2:40:40

>> You You dumped them in the lake and you have a great time.

2:40:44

>> Sounds like risky with some one-year-olds, but we'll give it a try.

2:40:49

>> Anyway, thank you so much for stopping by. See you, Simon. We'll talk to you soon. >> Great update. >> Goodbye.

2:40:54

>> We talk about Phantom Cash.

2:40:54

Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with a Phantom card.

2:41:01

Uh chat says we need red suits. >> Red suits.

2:41:04

Yeah, we were talking about that today because we've been wearing the white suits a lot and now uh it's time for the red suits.

2:41:10

We're going to have to call the tailor.

2:41:13

>> Capital says Alphabet sees 2026 capex 175 to 185 billion versus 115 billion expected. >> We go there.

2:41:23

Uh, for the past decade, Mag 7 were free cash flow monsters who poured money into buybacks to support their stock prices. That era is over. >> Over.

2:41:33

>> Well, let me tell you about Vibe.

2:41:33

co, where DTOC brands, B2B startups, and AI companies advertise on streaming TV.

2:41:38

P channels target audiences and measure sales just like on Meta.

2:41:44

>> Powell says SAS is dead is probably oversold and sleepy companies get wrecked in technology shifts is probably undersold.

2:41:51

I think that's a good take.

2:41:54

There's a lot of people talking about the SAS apocalypse.

2:41:55

Uh Patrick Oshanaughy shared a clip from Gavin on uh Gavin Baker on Invest Like the Best saying uh why it's a mistake for SAS companies to resist AI because it has a lower margin structure.

2:42:08

We can pull this video up.

2:42:11

When there's a transformative new technology customers are demanding, it's always a mistake not to embrace it. Let's play this clip.

2:42:17

I want to see what he applications ask companies are making the exact same mistake that brick-and-mortar retailers did with e-commerce.

2:42:23

So brick and mortar retailers, they looked at Amazon and they said, "Oh, it's losing money.

2:42:26

You know, e-commerce is going to be a low margin business."

2:42:30

And so they did not invest in e-commerce.

2:42:32

They they clearly saw customer demand for it, but they did not like the margin structure of e-commerce.

2:42:38

That is the fundamental reason that essentially every brick-andmortar retailer was really slow to invest in e-commerce.

2:42:44

And now here we are and you know Amazon has higher margins.

2:42:48

So margins can change and if there's a fundamental transformative kind of new technology that customers are demanding it's always a mistake not to embrace it >> and that's exactly what the SAS companies are doing.

2:43:00

They have their 70 80 90% gross margins and they are reluctant to accept AI gross margins.

2:43:08

You know the very nature of AI is you know software you write it once and it's written very efficiently and then you can distribute it broadly at very low cost.

2:43:16

>> Such an underrated point that they like the CFO just knows my company has 30% gross margins.

2:43:23

So that's what I'm building my entire business around.

2:43:24

My company has 90% gross margins and that's how I'm informing every business decision.

2:43:30

When the whole structure that you've built the foundation of your business on changes that can be a little tricky.

2:43:36

Uh quickly, yesterday we went to the Cisco AI Summit. I'm sure you saw it.

2:43:41

Let me tell you about Cisco critical infrastructure for the AI era.

2:43:44

We had a lot of fun talking to the team at Cisco.

2:43:49

They were very hospitable. I had a great time.

2:43:51

Absolutely enjoyed talking to everyone and we had a really wild wide ranging conversation with Dylan Patel at the end.

2:43:57

Uh that's in the RSS feed if you didn't get a chance to listen to the full thing.

2:44:01

We go all over the place.

2:44:02

space data centers, uh what Google's doing, what Apple's doing, what Microsoft is doing. We we went everywhere.

2:44:08

It was really, really great.

2:44:10

Um anyway, we can go through some more of the timeline. Uh what is this?

2:44:12

OMG Cap says he died doing what he loved, aggressively buying the dip on SAS like a guy averaging down on Blockbuster video in 2010.

2:44:25

>> I'm averaging in >> averaging down >> to zero. >> That is not good.

2:44:29

Um there there there are a whole bunch of different takes on the SAS apocalypse. Pier Richelson has one.

2:44:36

Why would I pay for SAS if I can prompt the software and run it myself?

2:44:40

My brother in Christ, have you heard of open source businesses?

2:44:42

The last thing people want to do is be in charge of development and maintenance of software.

2:44:47

You got to get an intern.

2:44:47

It's a bull market in interns. The interns are back.

2:44:52

The interns you heard from Mitchell Green uh lead uh over at Lead Edge.

2:44:54

He's hiring interns to build stuff for him.

2:44:59

It's a bull market intern.

2:45:00

>> Everybody wants to be the oneperson billion dollar company.

2:45:02

No one wants to be the billion >> billion intern company of America.

2:45:05

Yeah, that's the business.

2:45:08

Uh I really I hadn't actually heard that about Cloudflare. Over a thousand interns. That's crazy.

2:45:13

I didn't even know that about Shopify. That's very cool.

2:45:14

Uh Clo got mocked for having 50 interns.

2:45:17

Maybe they were just early.

2:45:19

We we at one point it felt like we had a ton of interns.

2:45:21

We don't actually have that many interns, but uh interns are underrated.

2:45:24

It's a it's a it's it's a good time and it's a particularly good time with the new tools to let someone uh loose with a with just a fresh start.

2:45:32

Like they don't have to they don't they don't have to maintain the old system.

2:45:36

They come in and they're able to start completely fresh with fresh tools.

2:45:38

They can pick anything off the shelf, whatever is the most cutting edge.

2:45:41

That's what they bring into the organization as opposed to saying, "Hey, you have to maintain this particular workflow or this particular technology or you have to plug into those rest of this ecosystem."

2:45:51

Change management takes a long time.

2:45:51

in turns allow you to kind of pull that forward which is a lot of fun.

2:45:54

Let me tell you about Cognition.

2:45:57

They're the makers of Devon the AI software engineer.

2:46:00

Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team.

2:46:05

>> Unemployed capital allocator says wait I'm confused.

2:46:07

Is it the software engineers that are obsolete or software companies or is it the software users or the software users employers?

2:46:17

>> Take Kim says all of the above. >> Yeah.

2:46:19

Buco says you're not confused.

2:46:21

None of these things will exist in 5 years.

2:46:22

Everything sell everything and and quit all the jobs. >> It is interesting.

2:46:27

Uh Bloomberg had an article yesterday that shared that Google is expanding their footprint in India, planning to big headline, right?

2:46:38

They they'll have the capacity to add something like 10 to 15,000 new employees.

2:46:43

And uh you know I don't you know I would say like the the >> probably the catalyst there sort of um changes or unpredictability to US immigration law potentially you know being a factor in that.

2:46:56

But it was kind of looking at it from a a Tyler Tyler point of view just being like hey how how AGI build is is Google broadly you know is deep mind if if they're planning to scale headcount. >> Yeah like that.

2:47:12

Yeah, the headline was from Bloomberg.

2:47:14

Uh, it's millions of square feet.

2:47:17

Uh, so that can accommodate somewhere between 10,000 and 30,000 employees per million square feet according to Gemini here.

2:47:26

The industry standard is 60 to 80 square feet per person.

2:47:31

I wonder how we're doing here in the TBPN Ultra.

2:47:33

I feel like I have way more than 60 square feet to myself.

2:47:34

Um, standard tech office is 100 square feet per person.

2:47:40

India is also going zero tax on data centers until 2047.

2:47:44

>> Well, what would the tax implications be of that >> property tax?

2:47:48

>> You don't get Yeah, maybe no property tax because you can't possibly not pay income tax on the revenue that's generated from a data center.

2:47:53

That would be a crazy crazy thing. Um, but we will see.

2:47:58

Uh, but our next guest is in the reream waiting room.

2:48:00

We have KJ from Lotus AI. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing? Good to see you. >> I'm doing great. Doing great.

2:48:09

Good to see you guys too.

2:48:11

>> Thanks so much for hopping on. First time on the show.

2:48:12

Please introduce yourself and the company. >> Yeah. My name is KJ Dollywal.

2:48:16

I'm the CEO and co-founder of Lotus Health AI. >> Yeah.

2:48:22

>> We are building an AI doctor powered by real doctors.

2:48:25

>> What's the go to market?

2:48:25

How how much do you like who do you want to sell to like the hospital network, the individual doctors, even the individual consumer? >> Yeah.

2:48:35

No, we're actually direct to consumer.

2:48:36

Um, so one of the big things that we believe in is going straight to the patient >> because innovation in healthcare sort of has always lagged at the hospital systems or the insurance companies.

2:48:46

My background is in consumer.

2:48:48

I built the largest South Asian dating app prior to this. >> Oh, no way.

2:48:52

>> And uh so we just, you know, we thought what are things that people actually need? Yeah.

2:48:57

>> America's struggling with healthcare, so we decided to just go direct to consumer. >> Yeah.

2:49:00

Walk me through some of the I mean the most basic could be you know diet plan, exercise plan all the way to a doctor can refer you to a lab to go get an MRI and surgery and all sorts of stuff like where what do you see as the the early go to market the uh the landing zone like what do you want to be excellent at and then grow from?

2:49:22

>> Yeah, we're really focused on primary care today.

2:49:25

>> So when you think about America today 100 million people don't have primary care doctors. >> Wow.

2:49:28

Um, so that's sort of this huge sort of opportunity to really give people um, you know, basic care.

2:49:33

So that means, you know, sometimes you need a prescription, sometimes you need a referral or even a lab ordered if you're going to go see a specialist like a cardiologist and you don't have a lab ready.

2:49:45

That often times that visit is a waste of time for the cardiologist and for the patient. Yeah. Right.

2:49:48

So we can do a lot of that preliminary primary care virtually. Yeah.

2:49:52

And it turns out 80% of all care in general is actually, you know, possible virtually within the primary care setting.

2:50:00

>> How important is image processing, you know, oh, I got a mole like you look at this like that's like a cl or I I got a scab and it's not healing and I is it infected.

2:50:10

Is is AI ready to handle that sort of use case? >> Yeah, definitely.

2:50:15

So, like, you know, we're seeing um we're already seeing AI being implemented in, you know, obviously the the imaging space and the MRI space. Mhm.

2:50:23

>> Um but what we're focused more on is really getting the information from the patient, distilling it and summarizing it for a clinician to look at and make the final call. >> Sure.

2:50:33

>> So that's really where Lotus is able to give Americans free primary care essentially because we brought the cost of care down by a factor of 10. >> Yeah.

2:50:42

>> So you can upload images, you can um you know chat with Lotus for hours, it will do the intake similar to how you would answer questions on that clipboard when you go see a doctor.

2:50:51

uh and then the doctor can review all that quickly.

2:50:53

And the big thing sort of that we did is we um uh sort of created this what we call the personal health record which is the richest longitudinal record on a patient.

2:51:04

So when you sign up the first thing we do is we ingest all your health data.

2:51:08

So that's from all the EHRs, every doctor you've ever seen, um your wearables data, your insurance claims data.

2:51:15

that allows us to build sort of the foundation of the patient and then we can really unlock a lot of the sort of agentic workflows and the clinical workflows on top of that that just make care delivery a lot more accurate at scale.

2:51:28

>> Years ago I remember this company Zach do was sort of like help you find a doctor nearby almost like a Yelp for doctors.

2:51:34

I don't remember what their business model was, but is there any overlap in or learnings from that type of business where maybe there's a referral fee to a specific doctor?

2:51:43

Does that make any sense or do you just want the customer to eventually pay or ads like what how do you see monetization evolving?

2:51:53

Yeah, Zachdoc did I think something interesting which they they would basically have doctors pay some sort of affiliate fee to be listed on their platform.

2:52:01

But um actually getting paid for referrals in healthcare is is a big no no and kind of illegal.

2:52:06

That's why doctors, >> you know, shouldn't be paid actually for referrals because then you can be incentivized to refer to a particular you know part.

2:52:15

And so what we really believe in is in terms of if you think about the largest tech companies in the world, they're consumer companies um and they make money through sponsored content.

2:52:25

So we actually think uh if we focus on premium content within fitness and wellness, which is a you know multi-t trillion dollar sort of industry already um that's sort of how we'll be able to monetize.

2:52:37

But really what we're focused on today is is bringing the cost of the care down.

2:52:41

So, Anthropic's attacking you like you're the w they weren't talking about Open AI.

2:52:46

They were talking about you respond. No, no, no.

2:52:51

But, but I mean, how you you are going to have to have the talking point that responds to that ad.

2:52:56

I'm sure that Super Bowl ad will blow over.

2:52:58

Everyone will talk about it in the chat context, but you're going to have to have a strategy for how you, you know, don't do the, "Hey, we're recommending lifts or we're being weird or creepy with your ads."

2:53:10

like how do you think about messaging and setting the tone, the mission, the values of the company now so that you never have a PR crisis in the future? >> Yeah, absolutely.

2:53:19

And I think that's so important to do that right.

2:53:21

You know, trust and safety and privacy is is very foundational to what we're building here at Lotus.

2:53:26

And and being, you know, we we want to not only stand for the patient, but also for the doctor, >> right?

2:53:33

And so when you look at the industry today, doctors are burning out, right?

2:53:37

We don't have enough doctors.

2:53:37

So, we're really giving them the technology to supercharge their capabilities.

2:53:40

And yeah, in terms of, you know, advertising, it'll be optional.

2:53:43

And, you know, there'll be a premium subscription.

2:53:47

If you don't want to see ads, you can sort of opt out. Yeah.

2:53:48

Um, or there's other avenues we're exploring like your employers, uh, right?

2:53:52

A lot of large employers that are self-insured, um, struggle to get their employees really good health care or at least primary care.

2:54:01

So, the employee has to take time off for work, you know, drive an hour, go see a doctor.

2:54:05

half of the times they're not seeing the doctor or seeing a nurse or a PA because we have such a shortage and it ruins their day and and it, you know, reduces productivity for the company.

2:54:14

So, we have companies reaching out to us saying, "Hey, like we'll pay you $50 a month.

2:54:19

Can you just give this to our employees for free?"

2:54:21

You know, so there's a lot of different revenue models we'll explore, but really what we're focused on is, you know, how do we get to a million 10 million patients and grow this company to scale because that's really how we think this sort of primary care crisis can be fixed.

2:54:36

Essentially, fee for service doesn't work in primary care, >> right?

2:54:39

And even value based care doesn't work because we don't have enough doctors. >> Yeah.

2:54:42

How how are you reacting to the major LLM providers potentially going into this category?

2:54:47

A lot of them have already made announcements.

2:54:49

They've rolled out features.

2:54:51

They have massive user bases.

2:54:52

What's going to be the key differentiator that allows you to go the long haul? >> Yeah.

2:54:58

I know we think that's actually net positive for the for the industry because you know people are starting to trust AI with their health data.

2:55:06

>> Um the one thing they can't do is they can't actually treat patients, right?

2:55:08

Um so we can actually because we have real licensed clinicians. >> Sure.

2:55:14

>> Giving treatment, we can actually close that care loop, right?

2:55:15

We can give you that prescription, order the lab, refer you to the specialist, give you a diagnosis.

2:55:21

>> Um and you know, in fact, you know, one of our investors is an executive at OpenAI.

2:55:25

And so we've been sort of following that sort of product that they've been building for a while.

2:55:29

But I think it's net positive.

2:55:30

I mean I think there's you know there's you know healthcare is a $5 trillion market >> um in terms of spend um and a lot of that is just waste right that can be sort of cut out and and tax.

2:55:41

sort of cut out and and tax. you do you think lotus is is really a threat to urgent cares where let's say uh somebody has like a skin issue uh and they're used to the flow of like I want immediate care I want to get uh uh like if somebody gets I don't know like

2:56:00

poison bad case of poison oak and they want they need to get some treatment for it they'll go to an urgent care be able to get like a prescription or a steroid or something like that whereas with Lotus you could just get you know basically as long as you have your phone you could immediately like get get treatment. Is is Lotus uh threatening to

2:56:14

Is is Lotus uh threatening to those kind of businesses that rely on people just needing like convenience? >> Yeah.

2:56:22

>> Yeah. No, actually it's it's the quite opposite because what those urgent care centers today and even emergency rooms at hospitals uh their biggest problem is they're overwhelmed with patients coming in that don't need to come in um for you know things that can be treated through tele medicine or tellahalth right um we actually refer you to urgent care because we we obviously recognize and

2:56:43

our clinicians recognize that there are obviously certain things that can't be treated you know virtually and need to be done in person and that's where we refer you to inpatient or urgent care uh sort of you know care where the doctor needs to touch you or you know do a procedural thing but it turns out like I said earlier you know 80 to 90% of care can be done virtually and and that's sort of the big bottleneck. So what ends

2:57:05

So what ends up happening is all these patients end up going to urgent care or you know hospital ER rooms and then the patients that actually need that care end up not getting it because you know these systems are overwhelmed today.

2:57:19

>> Well we are in the lambda lightning round. You raised some money. Tell us what happened. What's the deal?

2:57:25

>> Yeah, we just raised uh you know a total of 41 million in our seed and series.

2:57:33

>> Congratulations Perkins and CRV code led that round and we're very proud to have these guys.

2:57:43

>> Well, congratulations on all the progress and I'm sure we'll see you back here soon. Great to meet you. >> Cheers.

2:57:48

>> We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye.

2:57:48

Let me tell you about Crowdstrike. Your business is AI.

2:57:51

Their business is securing it.

2:57:53

Crowdstrike secures AI and stops breaches.

2:57:56

And we will continue our Lambda Lightning round with Nick Sharp from Adio.

2:58:02

He's a co-founder and CEO. Welcome back.

2:58:06

>> Hey guys, thanks for having me.

2:58:06

Um, excited to be here again.

2:58:09

>> Yeah, good to have you back.

2:58:10

>> Give us uh the update uh on the last few months.

2:58:13

I feel like uh the the timeline has been loving.

2:58:17

Adio feels like there's a ton of momentum. >> Yeah. Well, that's good.

2:58:21

We've had a um it's the end of a busy day here in London and um it's been it's been a long one, but an exciting one.

2:58:27

So, I think it was about 5 months ago that I was on the show when we when we raised our series B.

2:58:33

>> And uh since then, we've been busy deep in R&D land.

2:58:36

Um, and today we are uh we're we're showing the world the the fruits of our labor and launching a product called Ask AIO. >> Amazing. Break it down. >> Yeah.

2:58:47

So, it is a entirely new way to interact with ATIO with your CRM and it is a new conversational AI interface um which essentially does um does something which has been the holy grail for CRM for a really long time which is making sense of all of the ton of data that you're generating all the time.

2:59:03

So that's uh that's calls, that's emails, that's all of the interactions you're having with customers, product data, etc.

2:59:11

And essentially makes it intelligible um and allows you to take action on it.

2:59:15

So good example might be um I I now run a workflow at the end of every day which essentially goes through all customer calls, all customer emails, and just flags things that are important for me. Yeah.

2:59:28

Um >> it's like customer feedback or a place that you need to step in and and have a conversation with a customer yourself etc. >> Exactly.

2:59:37

But imagine you know we have like 30 40 people in our customerf facing team now.

2:59:41

So to do that previously when we have hundreds thousands of customer interactions a day would be impossible.

2:59:48

Um and so it's yeah it's a very very exciting step for us.

2:59:53

Uh what's been your reaction to it feels like even uh even this year a lot of people have been saying AGI is here and yet there's a bunch of net new CRM companies being uh being formed.

3:00:04

companies being uh being formed. Do you guys have the benefit of of having been around long enough to have a very strong foundation yet not necessarily be fully kind of cemented in your ways and still a lot of functionality and so feels like

3:00:19

you were already an AI native CRM and so it must be kind of funny to see other CRM coming in that that are uh trying maybe trying to claim they're more AI native >> totally and what's what's funny for us is that um there seems to be a level of consensus now that something's going to happen in this market. Um, which has not

3:00:38

Um, which has not been the case, right?

3:00:40

So, the consensus seems to have been building more and more and more and then the last few months we've just seen a um we've we've seen things fully flip in the other way where everyone now believes that that these kind of incumbents are going to be disrupted.

3:00:52

Um, so we're we're excited by the by the by the excitement of everyone else and the kind of belief in the market.

3:00:59

Um, and you know, we we have the the job now of making sure that we continue to to be at the front of the pack, which is uh sort of, you know, lots of short-term um just being very paranoid in the short term, very optimistic in the long term, and just kind of keep keep building, keep going.

3:01:18

>> What uh what are you paying attention to on the sort of sales agent side just in general?

3:01:24

This is, you know, big opportunity for Adio, but I know you guys will want to integrate with a bunch of players as well.

3:01:30

So far, we've been hearing, you know, people are using a bunch of different agents on uh on that front, but what are you seeing? >> Yeah.

3:01:39

And and the way that we think about this is um I think when the market is as when when there's as much innovation and and turmoil, etc.

3:01:46

, um as as we're seeing right now um you kind of want to see um you want to see how play things play out a bit.

3:01:54

So we're taking some pretty big bets, but equally we're not building a closed platform and we're letting uh we really want people to integrate with our platform and we we want our customers to go in whatever direction is right for them and make sure that we can we can support that.

3:02:07

So we took a huge bet on ecosystem and uh building a really strong um SDK.

3:02:12

We've we've kind of quietly uh put out an MCP server in beta. Um so mcp. atio.

3:02:19

commcp um but we're we're basically um we're you know CRM is always going to be the center of of a GTM stack.

3:02:28

And so as well as doing our own things um in Agentic Workflows and that kind of stuff, we've also taken a huge bet on uh on supporting all the other great companies that are doing stuff there as well. >> Awesome.

3:02:42

Uh, what can we expect from you guys this year?

3:02:44

Is this Are you're calling it now?

3:02:47

This is the last thing you're going to ship for the year. No, I'm kidding. >> Yeah, exactly. Job done.

3:02:53

Uh, well, like, you know, for for us, this is this is day four of of FY27, so we're we're we're just at the beginning.

3:03:01

Um, and honestly, it's going to be it's going to be a bit of an onslaught.

3:03:03

Um, we have a huge huge amount coming.

3:03:05

Um, we're going to follow up with this launch pretty quickly.

3:03:09

um uh in in in sort of just over about a couple of months with another really really big launch.

3:03:16

Um and and then of course um we we're in this interesting phase as as as founders or as company builders or whatever where you now have to do two things.

3:03:27

You've got to scale your company and you've got to hit all of your really ambitious targets.

3:03:31

Um but at the same time you're everything needs to be rebuilt every 3 months.

3:03:35

So the way that you do go to market, the way that we think about product, etc.

3:03:39

We're in kind of deep R&D mode across the company.

3:03:42

Um, and so you're you're trying to be simultaneously be a extremely um scrappy early stage company, but then also trying to kind of compound uh you know, compound growth and uh and serve a a growing number of customers.

3:03:59

So we're we're up to about 7,000 customers now. >> Wow.

3:04:03

um which is triple uh triple this this time last year.

3:04:07

Um and so yeah, lots of lots of things going on at once.

3:04:12

>> How are you thinking about uh outbound actually sending emails draft like like like going into more of like the AI agent for sales rep, replace a sales rep.

3:04:24

That's a that's a space that feels like people are trying stuff but nothing's really caught.

3:04:28

Like how how far away are we from that?

3:04:32

the the interesting thing is that um that the the I mean you might have seen this the the ramp post that was making rounds. Yeah.

3:04:41

And these channels are getting saturated and it's it's it's a constant game of cat and mouse right because the more emails that get sent the better the the the uh the Gmail or whoever else is detecting them and shutting them down etc.

3:04:56

>> So um we take an ecosystem um bet on those things.

3:04:59

Again, you know, especially when it comes to outbound, we really want to be um we want to be the place where the customer contacts live, where your your team live, etc.

3:05:05

Um we do we integrate with with a lot of these players.

3:05:10

Now, over time, um you want to be able to provide your customers with a pretty out the box solution to a lot of these problems. So, never say never.

3:05:17

Um but right now, we're we're mostly focused when it comes to outbound, we're focused on just partnering with with the best people we can. >> Amazing. >> Awesome.

3:05:27

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

3:05:30

>> Thanks for staying up.

3:05:30

>> Thanks for staying up late. We appreciate it. >> Exactly.

3:05:34

>> And we will see you soon. >> Yeah.

3:05:35

We'll uh see you back on soon. >> Yeah. Have a good one. >> Cheers. >> Goodbye.

3:05:40

>> Uh we have one last story that we should get through before we get out of here.

3:05:44

Uh Citadel's Ken Griffin says Trump White House has quote enriched family members.

3:05:49

The Wall Street figured Republican donor offers rare public criticism of perceived administration selfdeings.

3:05:57

They're calling him Ken doesn't like Griffin, >> the billionaire investor. >> Sick of Griffin.

3:06:02

Uh this he said, this is a direct quote from Ken Griffin, the founder of the hedge fund Citadel.

3:06:06

He says, "This administration has definitely made missteps in choosing decisions or courses that have been very very enriching to the families of those in the administration."

3:06:17

He said at a conference in West Palm Beach, Florida on Tuesday that was hosted by the Wall Street Journal.

3:06:21

He added, quote, "That calls into question, is the public interest being served?"

3:06:25

Uh, the only in response to Griffin's comments, well, uh, a White House spokesman said, quote, "The only special interest guiding the Trump administration's decision-making is the best interest of the American people.

3:06:38

The fact that major stock indexes have hit multiple all-time highs, real wages have grown, and inflation has cooled since President Trump took office is proof that this administration is delivering for every American.

3:06:49

Uh Trump and his family members have profited since he took office last year.

3:06:53

This is the Financial Times.

3:06:54

An FT investigation in October found the president's rapidly growing cryptocurrency empire had already reaped more than 1 billion in pre-tax profits over the prior year, partly attributed to a digital currency boom, booied by the White House's own crypto friendly policies.

3:07:09

Companies backed by Trump's sons have been awarded contracts with government agencies and benefit from administration policies on cryptocurrency and prediction markets.

3:07:18

Um, and a lot of this goes into the decision to sell Nvidia chips to the UAE, right?

3:07:23

And uh, and an >> I meant to ask Dylan about that yesterday.

3:07:27

yesterday. this idea of like where do you think any lab CEOs or or hyperscalers were looking at that the reporting that came out over the weekend that uh >> uh the the spy chic in the UAE had bought half a billion dollars of world or sorry half a billion invested half a billion into World Liberty Financial

3:07:48

>> bought 49% of the company right before the inauguration and then quickly we approved a a pretty massive sale to China and I wonder how many People were kind of reading that story and being deeply frustrated just given hey like I would have bought I would have I was a happy buyer. >> Uh Trump of course Trump of course said

3:08:05

>> Uh Trump of course Trump of course said he didn't know anything about >> uh anything about the investment.

3:08:10

Um >> yeah yeah there's a big question.

3:08:13

I mean obviously the the Wall Street Journal I think had a piece on like the timing being suspicious.

3:08:18

The Trump administration's denied that there's anything wrongdoing going on.

3:08:21

anything wrongdoing going on. Maybe there'll be an investigation at some point, but uh the the the the question that's in my mind aside from that one is just um is is the UAE suitable for selling GPUs to because if it's something that's like really obviously a thumbs up and everyone's

3:08:40

happy about then it's a lot less controversial to do it I would think because we're now at a point where many folks that I look to for guidance on uh like the geopolitical chip issue have come around to the idea that hey maybe we do want China to actually be buying

3:08:57

Nvidia chips and there's maybe some good arguments there initially it was like cut everything off now the ball has moved to don't sell them ASML equipment don't sell them lithog yeah come around to we want people sovereign AI to be on the American AI stack is it better for the UAE to be running on Nvidia versus

3:09:15

Huawei >> yeah I mean yeah Dylan's point was like not this these things don't happen in isolation so if you if you don't sell Nvidia chips to China, it's not that they're going to, you know, retaliate specifically with with Huawei or Smick or SME. Uh it's that you could like they

3:09:31

Uh it's that you could like they could like, you know, do something in a completely different part of the world.

3:09:38

Like Dylan's example was like be more aggressive about Africa or something like that.

3:09:42

Like or the the rare earth element.

3:09:44

So So there's like a million different debate points going on and all of those sort of come together.

3:09:48

But with regard to the UAE, I I I mean, I guess that there is there's a risk that you you you send a bunch of NVIDIA chips and they just stay on the they stay on on the container ship and then they just get forwarded straight along to someone who's maybe even less friendly.

3:10:03

Uh but I don't know that that's been a historical risk.

3:10:08

There's been a lot of chip smuggling.

3:10:10

A lot of it's gone through Malaysia.

3:10:11

I don't exactly know how much of a risk the UAE poses.

3:10:13

So, I' I'd love to talk to Bill Bishop about how that fits in.

3:10:19

We'll have to keep we'll have to keep digging in.

3:10:21

But, uh, obviously, um, I I think we're fans of, uh, of Jimmy Carter's approach to leading the American people.

3:10:31

>> Divest, >> divest, stay focused, lock in. It's the great lock in.

3:10:36

>> It's the great lock in.

3:10:36

You got to stay focused on the on the job at hand.

3:10:40

>> Anyway, >> uh, anyways, crazy day.

3:10:41

Mike Isaac over to New York Times says, "By the number of OpenAI employees I see tweeting about Anthropic Super Bowl ad, Anthropic should be paying OpenAI earned media fees." >> It's funny.

3:10:56

>> Oh, also related to Ken Griffin, I like this post from High Yield Harry where uh it's Mr.

3:11:01

Beast with Kim Kardashian and Ken Griffin's just way in the background and High Yelled Harry said, "Guy like me would have taken a photo with Ken Griffin instead."

3:11:07

And I don't know who he's who he's imagining him being like, is he imagining that he's Mr. Beast or Kim Kardashian?

3:11:14

But it's funny to imagine being at this party and saying, "I got to get I got to get a photo with Ken.

3:11:19

I got to get a photo with Ken." >> Whoa.

3:11:21

Okay, we got to close with this this G Wagon. >> Look at this G Wagon. You mentioned this.

3:11:27

I did not I did not see this.

3:11:27

It's uh it's right after the Yeah, look at this. >> This is going Blake.

3:11:32

Uh I'm going to pull up I texted him to get some more context.

3:11:37

So Blake runs an account called Found Objects on Instagram and he is selling a very special Gwagon that's effectively like a it's it's one of 10 ever made.

3:11:51

>> Why is Vladimir Putin seen next to it?

3:11:54