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Let me [Music] [Music] Good morning. You're watching TBPN.
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Today is Friday, May 2nd, 2025.
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We are live from the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the capital of capital.
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Uh we are remote today, but that doesn't mean that we're not in the fortress of finance.
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Because the fortress of finance is more than a physical place. It is the show. It is a state of mind. It's a state of mind.
4:21
Anyone can be in the fortress of finance.
4:22
Anyone can be in the temple of technology.
4:24
Anyone can be in the capital of capital as long as you're online locked in watching this show at least 10 hours a day. That's what we ask for.
4:34
Some people were saying it's too much. It's too much.
4:36
We're only asking for 10 hours a day. 10 hours a day. Less than half. Yeah. 10 hours a day.
4:41
You know, we only record three hours a day usually, but there's a whole backlog that you can go play the reruns, right? That's right.
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So, three hours of the live show, then go back through the back catalog, do some greatest hits.
4:54
So, that's how you get into uh 10 hours a day, folks, if you're if you're really really into the show, which we expect you to be.
5:01
Uh anyway, we've been traveling.
5:03
We went to Washington DC and now we are back in California, but traveling again.
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This time for my birthday.
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We're in Ohigh, California. That's right.
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Um, and the worst part about traveling as always is being away from Ben. Sweet Pod 4 Ultra, baby. Getting sleep.
5:22
5year warranty, 30 night risk-free trial, free returns, free shipping. Go to eight. com.
5:27
I'm in uh I'm in the new app. I got a 97 last night.
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I don't feel like I got a 97 because I have such an extreme caffeine addiction. Yep.
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that I slept in a little bit today just because of the travel yesterday and I didn't even get a single night back in the pod because I went straight to brutal.
5:48
Uh but uh I will be spending the majority of this vacation pitching the hotel staff.
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Let's get eight sleeps in every in every room.
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Let's just make it happen.
5:57
That's the real reason why I'm here. Thank you.
6:02
Let's do a little recap of uh tech earnings this week. It was a banger.
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There was a lot of nervousness around the tariffs, but as you've seen, if you've been following the stock market, things went down, they went back up.
6:15
Turns out it was all priced in all along.
6:18
So, we had our audience knows everything, our audience knows everything is is uh, you know, structurally priced in. Nothing ever happens.
6:26
You know, we said we said Monday, this was this week was, you know, in some ways the NFL combine of the economy.
6:32
We said to turn post notifications on uh from Joe Weisenthal.
6:37
He was posting up a storm. Yep.
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Uh and anyways, lot of good uh results despite still kind of shaky. Crazy.
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It's like a straight up royal flush.
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Uh Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Meta all beat uh all beat earnings expectations on EP earnings per share and revenue, driving positive investor sent sentiment and solid market gains. AI dominance.
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You know, everyone thinks the AI stuff's priced in, but it keeps growing.
7:03
uh Microsoft and Alphabet showcased accelerated cloud growth due to strong AI adoption even though obviously there's flaws in the model.
7:12
Maybe we're not at ASI yet.
7:14
Maybe we're not in the fast takeoff scenario.
7:16
Hey, these LLMs are pretty useful and enterprises are stuffing them all over the place in their code bases and that drives a lot of inference cost and so they're paying more on the cloud.
7:28
Uh Meta ramped up AI infrastructure spending significantly.
7:33
Zuck is going all in, continues to go all in on AI.
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And yeah, just just to put this uh into perspective, Zuck is saying that they expect to generate between 460 and$1.
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4 trillion dollars in revenue from generative AI products by 2035.
7:48
Uh so big numbers, big numbers like to see it. Zuck's in founder mode.
7:56
Uh and uh yeah, he's not uh not being shy about making some big uh big projections. Yeah.
8:05
And so people are still worried about the tariffs, but it's very weird how we've roundt tripped.
8:09
It does seem like at this point big tech is driving so much of the S&P 500, so much of the stock market generally that even though we've talked to a lot of folks, Ryan Peterson among them, who have highlighted, I mean Sean Frank too, highlighted that there are a lot of businesses that were built on top of China manufacturing, Chinese manufacturing.
8:30
And even though the tariffs have stabilized elsewhere, uh the Chinese tariffs are extremely existential to their business and they just can't move back quick enough.
8:38
And so, uh, there's been proposals to say, "Hey, uh, I like Sean's post.
8:42
Um, hey, instead of giving me a tariff, force me to invest that much in America.
8:47
I will do it over a number of quarters.
8:50
Um, you can you can get the money.
8:53
You can still re-industrialize." Um, but, uh, too fast.
8:58
That was one takeaway from Washington was that it seemed like on the, you know, we were at Hill and Valley. Yep.
9:06
on the hillside of the attendees, there was a seemingly a sentiment that the tariffs, the whole tariff thing was going to get resolved in some way in the very in the very near future.
9:20
Um, and so hard to really read too much into anything, but um there certainly wasn't the sentiment that this was, you know, the new normal and to just like get used to 145% tariffs from on on China uh forever.
9:33
The other thing in in the context of Meta and Google going forward, uh Ara, our friend Ara over at RAMP pulled some data on advertiser spend.
9:45
Yeah, this be interesting.
9:47
And uh basically you saw across the board uh advertisers both small businesses, medium and and large businesses were reducing spend.
9:55
Uh I think this would have been expected.
10:00
This was driven by retail spend which obviously you know um some of the biggest advertisers online are advertising consumer goods.
10:06
Uh if you you have tariff uncertainty, if you have even supply uncertainty in the sense that you know I know I'm going to have demand in 2 months but I don't know if I'm going to be able to get enough goods.
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You're going to just drop uh spend.
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So uh we'll see how that rebounds.
10:24
Uh it's certainly something that uh people have discussed at length about the risk to meta uh around uh you know retail businesses, consumer businesses just pulling back spend uh due to uncertainty.
10:36
Uh but again these are auction based platforms.
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So if um some big companies you know reduce spend by $10 billion uh that that that ad inventory will get back filled by other advertisers.
10:50
Is it just that was the Brad Gner point, right?
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He was saying Teimu and Sheen might have pulled something like eight billion dollars from meta ad spend.
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And yeah, you know, the infrastructure is built for ads.
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Uh it's basically extremely high margin revenue that's going out the door. Should hit earnings. It didn't this quarter.
11:09
We'll see what happens next quarter, but uh yeah, it's an auction and there are plenty of advertisers who are on the sidelines waiting to spend if ad rates drop.
11:18
And so, yeah, we'll see where it goes.
11:20
It might just be uh super resilient.
11:22
But whatever your take on the market has been, uh you should head over to public. com.
11:27
It is, of course, the place for investing for those who take it seriously.
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They have multiasset investing, industryleading yields.
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They're trusted by millions and they're the sponsor of Aston Martin F1. We love to see it. And so, yeah.
11:41
So, if you're in uh Miami uh for F1 Yep.
11:47
Uh, try to look out for public merch.
11:47
It very well could be the public team out there. Is that this weekend? My May 4th. Cool. May 4th.
11:56
Yeah, maybe we should throw that on this this weekend.
11:58
Uh, anyway, uh, new Andre Horowitz branding just dropped.
12:04
We'd seen they had rolled this out a little bit ago.
12:07
I guess they they rolled out the coin.
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They rolled out the coin. Um, yep.
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And, uh, it burned up the timeline on April 30th, uh, two days ago on Wednesday. Uh, yeah.
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So, this roll out was interesting.
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There was, uh, a number of people pushing back on it, but, uh, and and anytime a big sort of like rebrand drops, some people are going to like it, some people are going to hate it.
12:30
Uh the I have I have mixed feelings because I thought the or I think the orange is just so iconic and they're clearly moving away from the orange.
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At the same time, I feel like orange is a great color.
12:43
Uh it's it's not immediately identified.
12:45
You know how like blue is a color of trust and so a lot of banks wind up using blue.
12:51
Um, yeah, but when I think Silicon Valley and Orange, I think YC because YC has dominated.
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They've verticalized orange.
13:01
They really have gone so heavy into orange.
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Uh, Andrees was doing orange text typically on a white background.
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YC does white text on an orange background.
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They just have more orange.
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And so when I think orange, I think YC.
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So, uh, I'd push you on that and I'd say, "Hey, maybe it's actually reasonable since they hadn't won the war for orange that they that they spread out."
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And honestly, the coin, it's bronze.
13:21
It has a little bit of that orange hue to it.
13:25
Uh, but what else was your takeaway from this rebrand?
13:27
Uh, I think some of the push back was around, and I think this is fair specifically around the roll out. They rolled out.
13:33
They changed the homepage and the profile pictures across all the different social platforms, but they didn't change didn't fully update the underlying website.
13:41
So, overall, like, yeah, I I enjoy uh this this maroon, burgundy, uh, whatever you want to call it.
13:48
Um, but uh, but yeah, it sounds like they were just ready to go, shipped it, founder mode.
13:53
Uh, and I'm sure they'll update the rest of the site over time, but as of right now, it's been a couple months since they rolled out that coin.
14:01
It is kind of crazy that they didn't just do a full refresh of the entire site.
14:06
Like, it's Yeah, they could have just swapped all the colors, but like, it's a complicated website.
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There's a lot of different pages and they have a lot of different folks and sub funds and stuff, but at the same time like it should be doable to update everything at the same time or rebuild.
14:20
Yeah, you can sort of find and replace all the the orange with with the maroon or something like that. Marina or burgundy.
14:28
But uh I think that this is A16Z sending a signal to their portfolio saying uh the best time to ship is now ship and iterate and um you know not every transition needs to be totally smooth.
14:41
They also just have like such a, you know, powerful uh marketing uh engine uh audience base that, you know, um they can like pretty quickly disseminate a new brand to the market and sort of reestablish Yeah. the A16Z brand. Yeah.
14:58
So, uh Lucas Cresbow says A16Z's logo went from VC firm to Galactic Empire really quickly.
15:04
Uh Roshan Patel did not like it.
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He edited it to say it's time to fire our designer.
15:12
Uh Paula says it was making me hungry and then I realized why and it's incredible.
15:19
And it does look that it does look crazy similar.
15:22
I wonder if the is that actually a picture of that restaurant because that looks like an AI version of Well, this is you know this is like a huge chain, right? It's a huge chain.
15:32
It's like a Panera and and it does their color scheme is it's very similar. It's exactly the same.
15:36
It's it's like, you know, bright lights and and gold and that maroon and burgundy.
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And they even have a a star that is sort of similar to Yeah.
15:47
four-ointed star instead of the fiveointed star.
15:49
Um Augustus had some harsh words.
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He said, "I love Andre and Horowits, but the rebrand is a mistake.
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We need to build the future, something new.
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This is yearning for a past that failed."
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500 likes when I screenshotted this. Um harsh words.
16:04
Uh but TJ on the other side says it's TBPN coded.
16:08
Uh you know it is screaming loud opulence in many ways.
16:13
Um I think it's I I I my my takeaway is that I I think there are some things about the logo that I really like.
16:20
I think the way the the A bends the this curve that meets the with the circle for the six and there's the star in there.
16:27
I like the design of the logo.
16:29
I think it's increasingly getting away from giving you the information that it's less readable.
16:35
It's not screaming at you A16Z and just bland like sans serif that's very easy to read.
16:41
It's more of an icon that I think will worm its way into people's heads.
16:47
And I think my my overall takeaway with this is that there's there's so many examples in design history.
16:54
I'm also thinking of the car world where um things that eventually became iconic were hated at launch.
17:02
This is there's tons and tons of examples of this with with cars that didn't sell well and then became more exclusive because they were thought of as uh as not really following the current design trends and then became we're getting roasted.
17:18
Uh Julian Weisser right now on X says, "What happened?
17:21
Is it casual Friday or something?" It is casual Friday.
17:25
Uh I I thought about bringing the suit, but I decided to go with the sweater today.
17:29
Um honestly, we've been going so hard on the suit, so I got to take a big uh dry cleaning run today to be ready for next week.
17:35
We are at the end of the at the end of the day human. Um but uh I don't know. I I think it's cool.
17:42
I I'm interested to see where this iconography goes.
17:44
This whole It's very Randian uh this this opulent coin.
17:50
And I'm wondering if they will wind up doing subbrands that build off of this for the BOF fund, for the American Dynamism Fund.
17:56
This does seem a little bit like the American Dynamism Fund eating the entire fund.
18:00
But it's interesting to see will they try and instantiate the crypto brand within this o overarching brand or will they go a completely different direction because this doesn't scream crypto at me to at all.
18:16
Uh at least in the at least in the traditional sense of crypto branding.
18:20
They got a big coin, I guess. Yeah, I guess.
18:22
Um, well, anyway, hopefully they put the logo on chain. Yep.
18:26
Well, there's a whole bunch.
18:28
Yeah, there's a whole bunch more A16Z news.
18:30
The Techno Optimist Manifesto by Mark Andre is now available as a book.
18:35
It includes three of his famous essays.
18:38
The Techno Optimist Manifesto, it's time to build and why software is eating the world.
18:44
Uh, but you were talking about the roll out of a brand.
18:46
If you're rolling out a new brand, I think we'd recommend management on linear.
18:50
Uh linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products.
18:55
Uh if you're updating a website, you got a bunch of designers, a bunch of engineers working together, you got to put them on linear. It's what we use.
19:03
It's what I've used uh for over half a decade and uh will continue to use forever.
19:10
They're building for the long term and I think you will notice that when you use the product. So, thank you to Linear.
19:16
Uh, I like this take from Reggie James.
19:19
We got to have him on the show soon.
19:20
Um, and he is breaking down some of the trends that he's seeing in design and technology.
19:27
He says clearly the A16Z re Z A16Z rebrand, Doge and Elon, Friend, Ammy, I don't know what OMI is.
19:36
Uh, Donald Trump mean coins.
19:40
What do all of these things have in common? Free reference.
19:41
And he says spectacle of the society.
19:43
So, I would love to get him to unpack that.
19:45
But, uh, I I kind of understand what where he's getting at with these, uh, they're more attention grabbing.
19:52
They're designed to stand out.
19:53
They're designed to sometimes infuriate the opposite side, draw negative reaction because in many ways, that's as valuable as positive reaction. Um, yeah.
20:02
And, and really shake things up.
20:04
And that's what a lot of these do.
20:06
But I'd love for him to unpack that.
20:08
It's time for Reggie to come on the show. For sure.
20:09
Maybe maybe one day, make it happen.
20:12
Anyway, uh speaking of Cluey, we had Roy on the show uh what, two weeks ago, and he actually announced on our show that he was planning to hire 50 interns in San Francisco at $50 an hour.
20:25
Uh and uh and and and we didn't we we should have clipped it because it was breaking news.
20:31
Uh but he put out a video formally formally announcing that he is hiring 50 interns and the reaction was overwhelming.
20:38
Uh he is he's this this guy Roy is amazing at going viral.
20:41
Uh and Will Brown who's been on the show says, "Oh, he's making a content house.
20:48
He's going to have an army of Tik Tockers selling the product all day while adding features to it. Wow.
20:51
Will certainly be interesting to watch." Um he talked about this. Yeah. Yeah.
20:55
I'm unclear to me if these people are going to be if the 50 interns are going to be working on the product or, you know, focus on marketing. Yep.
21:04
I think it's definitely marketing.
21:06
You think definitely marketing.
21:07
But but the but the way they're making people apply and asking for, you know, 1,600 SATs, you would you would think they were optimizing more for uh technical ability or something of the sort.
21:18
But this is Yeah, it's a hilarious stunt.
21:21
I mean, if he goes through with it, uh should be uh I mean, regardless going to be fascinating uh to watch.
21:28
We should uh you know, next next time we're in Seth over the summer.
21:33
Well, you remember I was talking to that Gen Z founder uh a while ago and he said, "I have two ways to sell and distribute a product.
21:40
If I'm building be a business to consumer, if I'm building a consumer product, I will go and hire a ton of Tik Tocker kids to make Tik Toks and go viral and promote the product that way and get earn media essentially free marketing uh as long as they're good at what they do.
21:59
Uh, and if I'm selling a B2B enterprise product, I'm gonna hire a bunch of young Gen Z kids who are nepo nepos or nepotists and make sure that they uh, I don't know, uh, beneficiaries of nepotism, I guess, who have powerful parents in big enterprises.
22:16
And then I will tell them that your only job for this summer internship is to sell your dad or your mom our enterprise product, which is hilarious.
22:26
It's like a hilarious dist distill distillation of like what the what the strategy should be.
22:32
But I thought that was very funny.
22:34
The the next generation of of founders, I mean, they're doing things somewhat differently um than the YC model that we kind of came up with in the mid2010s.
22:42
Um I think there's a lot to like here, there's a lot to hate here.
22:46
I understand the criticism, but I'm still I think I'm still rooting for Roy and I want rooting for Roy.
22:53
If he builds something cool, I'll support it.
22:55
the the the hope is that he avoids uh getting lost in the sauce and instead building a really really poor product and just dominating in marketing.
23:05
We don't want to see that.
23:06
We want to see a great product with great distribution.
23:08
I think the challenge is uh you know, Ben South points out uh one one reality of hiring 50 interns in San Francisco for $50 an hour.
23:19
uh $440,000 a month potentially on interns plus uh rent for the space that they're in uh on $5. 3 million raised.
23:26
Basically going to spend you know a meaningful amount of the total capital on the intern army.
23:36
And so my, you know, what Roy and the team will have to look at is like, hey, is spending like, you know, over a million dollars in a really short period of time, uh, on, you know, it's hard enough to like on-ramp somebody in a, you know, on-ramping one or two new hires is a real investment of time.
23:58
So on-ramping 50 interns at once and then managing those interns.
24:04
Uh the question just becomes you know could you uh get a similar amount of output or results from five really good people right at at a fraction of the cost right see you could potentially get you could potentially get you know uh 90% of uh of the of the result with or potentially even more results from 90% fewer interns.
24:33
Um, but Roy is uh doing it live.
24:38
Uh, he's in he's in showbiz and uh he he basically said I I you know we're here to we're here to like win and and move quickly.
24:47
And so uh the experiment will be televised, I'm sure.
24:50
Um yeah, I mean the the I guess the bull case is uh 500k a month, three months for summer. It's 1.
24:58
5 million out of the 5 million.
25:01
You still have three and a half at the end.
25:02
If the experiment doesn't work, you could probably cut your burn to 200 a month, something like that, and then you're back to having 18 months of runway to go heads down, build, and really focus on getting to that next round.
25:15
But it's totally possible that you that you even if you have a a very rough around the edges, small product that only really solves one thing, but you're so good at distribution, that that that's a catalyst for the series A and all of a sudden you're back in business.
25:28
500 uh 500k a month on burn is not that big of a deal anymore.
25:32
And maybe of those 50 interns, well, you just pulled forward your hiring funnel.
25:38
So when you go for the full-time offers, you can you can actually get five really great people out of those out of that 50 intern class. It's kind of crazy. Yeah.
25:46
Just to give a sense of the You got to ask Chad about this. Yeah. Are you worried?
25:52
Uh yeah, I mean uh you know, we know a handful of people that are in the round.
25:58
Um, and but again, they're they're not the kind of guys to uh invest and then try to micromanage a founder.
26:02
It's like you make a bet.
26:04
Roy clearly is very good at getting attention online and he will have to figure out how to convert that into a durable, you know, high growth uh company.
26:15
So, well, you have 50 interns, Roy, and you are going to give them I know where you're going with this corporate cards to spend to buy camera gear and to do their Tik Toks to promote things.
26:26
You're going to want to manage that on ramp. com.
26:28
So Roy, this is a message directly to you. Please go to ramp.
26:33
com and sign up today so that you're ready to onboard the interns on day one are going to be save both.
26:40
You're going to be spending a lot of time in one-on ones potentially, you know, potentially, you know, potentially uh half your week in oneonone. So time is money. Save both. Go to ramp. com.
26:48
Use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place.
26:54
There's nothing that feels better than starting a new company with a fresh ramp account from day one, not having to do the migration. Just get on Ramproy. You're going to love it.
27:04
Anyway, uh back to Andre.
27:04
I guess this was a hilarious viral clip.
27:08
Eric Torrenberg's already making waves over at Andre.
27:13
He was on the A16Z podcast with uh Ben and Mark and uh and and they hard posted this clip that says there's an argument that there's too much venture capital, but there can't be too much.
27:26
Ben Horowit says there simply can't.
27:28
I love the I I absolutely love the look on Ben's face when he says uh when he's saying this line, it's truly truly all time.
27:36
But uh no uh I think whatever they were whatever they were doing on that podcast there was so many good lines.
27:43
They were going uh viral broadly for saying that VC might be the last job which actually was good too.
27:49
I don't think it's you know you know we've talked about this a bunch on the show.
27:53
I I think that um I think there's like you know a ton of truth to what he's saying to some you know to some degree.
28:03
Obviously, it's very controversial, but this line was was great.
28:05
this line was was great. And uh yeah, it it honestly there there's a lot of super capital intensive businesses right now from foundation model labs to hard tech manufacturing and the fact that there's so much capital available to those
28:21
companies uh from you know funds like Andre to General Catalyst to Lightseed is uh net net good for you know innovation and I also just think it's like entirely branding based because venture capital used to mean seed stage and series A tech companies in Silicon Valley period. That was Sequoia,
28:41
That was Sequoia, Kleiner, Excel, like the the old school VCs, right? Mayfield.
28:47
Uh then VC started eating other asset classes going down into the angel market, going up into the growth market.
28:55
Now you can be a venture capitalist who has never invested in a company at lower than a $1 billion valuation.
29:02
That's unthinkable in the 80s, right? Impossible.
29:05
Uh you can be a biotech investor who brands themselves as a venture capitalist.
29:09
You can invest in crypto which is more like a commodity in many ways.
29:14
You can there's so many different things.
29:16
Private equity buyouts, permanent capital funds.
29:17
Even the new Thrive permanent capital vehicle, people are still think of it as a as a venture capital fund.
29:24
Um, even though it's a different thing, more of a holding company. Yeah, exactly.
29:29
And so, a lot of this is that we're we are scaling up the amount of venture capital, but we're also putting other asset classes in the venture capital bucket.
29:39
Uh, for better or worse, ultimately all that matters are the returns and the structures of those funds. So, good luck to them.
29:44
Um, I know that they are going to have plenty of uh plenty of divine inspiration if the pope is affiliated with A16Z. Signal posted this.
29:57
I thought this is very very funny.
29:58
The chances of the next pope having an affiliation with A16Z are non zero.
30:00
Uh, just a silly post, but I think Katherine Bole quote tweeted this and said, "Yeah, like yes, like I think of our fund as Catholic," which is great. Big, you know, big tent. Yeah.
30:12
Uh well, speaking of Katherine, uh she said to go from Silicon Valley doesn't sell to the US government to thank you Brian Shy for investing 1 billion in Ohio, that's a nasty looking thing, referring to the Anderal Roadrunner drone that was uh placed at the White House next to Donald Trump as he gave a speech on the importance of re-industrialization.
30:32
And to be clear, if you didn't if you didn't get the whole clip, it was he was referring to it as a nasty looking thing in a lovable sense being like, you know, wouldn't want one of those coming after Yes. Uh me basically. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
30:47
Um and so Catherine says, "Eight years America is back."
30:49
And yeah, the the the there is the vibe shift is real, but it's also very interesting.
30:53
it's also very interesting. It's always interesting to see someone who's uh like a household name in Silicon Valley break out into the mainstream um with a Joe Rogan appearance or something mentioned uh we saw Poly Market sponsor of the show get mentioned by Donald Trump
31:09
during the election and everyone was like wow this is crazy this thing that we thought was just like teapot is now on the national stage but that's obviously the goal for every company as they grow you don't want to stay small and niche forever you eventually want to become a household Yeah. And Andre is
31:23
And Andre is investing a billion dollars in Ohio in part due to just how much capital is, you know, available totally to Andreal, right? And a big investor. Founders Fund.
31:37
Um, you know, uh, I think general catalyst as well. Yep. Oh, yeah.
31:39
Pretty much everyone at this point.
31:43
Uh, but, you know, if you're trying to scout out your next manufacturing plant in Ohio, you got a book on Wander. Go to wander. com.
31:50
Find your your happy place.
31:54
Find your find your happy place.
31:54
This doesn't quite work over Zoom, but we will record in the studio of the wander song with a backing track and some backup vocalist.
32:06
Really, I think this whole year will just be vocal co coaching for us for to really nail the wander song.
32:13
But book a wander with inspiring views, hotel grade amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, and 24/7 concier service. It's a vacation.
32:18
We are in the midst of booking a wander for the 4th of July.
32:25
We're not going to tell you which one because we don't want you to we don't want to compete, but there's a lot of options out there and go check it out.
32:32
Anyway, uh we we've reached the end of Glazegate 2025.
32:36
Sam Alman said, "Goodbye GPT4.
32:36
You kicked off a revolution.
32:40
We will proudly keep your weights on a special hard drive to give to some historians in the future."
32:47
Uh Paul Graham actually said they should etch them on a piece of metal in the most compressed form.
32:51
How big would it have to be?
32:53
And Sam says, "We've actually considered this.
32:55
It would be it would we could do it nicely on a 100 meters squared, which I think is that's pretty huge.
33:01
That's like a massive piece of metal."
33:03
Uh they we're also thinking about printing out GPT2 in books and lining our new office with it.
33:09
I think it would be a ton of books. It's a lot of data.
33:11
It would only be, you know, basically the size of a of a one-bedroom apartment, you know, to print out. So, would be cool. Would be cool. Would be cool. Send it to space.
33:21
Uh there were some other people saying that they should print it out.
33:23
Send it to send it to Alpha Centauri and then just like see what happens.
33:27
Like maybe they get it and they're like, "Cool, we don't need to do pre-training.
33:31
Just inference this immediately."
33:31
or or it's so, you know, it's so complimentary to the the alien race that it runs into that the aliens are like, "Yeah, we don't we're just so good.
33:41
We don't need to be a space fairing civilization.
33:43
We can just we should just hang out here.
33:47
We're we're built different, you know?"
33:48
Yeah, we're built different.
33:48
Uh and so Sam uh went on OpenAI posted a blog post.
33:54
We've spent the last few days doing a deep dive on what went wrong with last week's GPT40 update in chat GPT expanding on what we missed with syph.
34:02
And that's their term for glazing I believe uh and the changes we're going to make in the future.
34:07
They said we rolled back last week's GPT40 update in chat.
34:11
So people are now using an earlier version with more balanced behavior.
34:13
The update we removed was overly flattering or agreeable often described as sophantic.
34:19
Uh we are actively testing new fixes to address this issue.
34:21
So they made adjustments at aimed at improving the model's default personality to make it feel more intuitive and effective across a variety of tasks. This makes sense.
34:31
You want to when you when you want to ask your personal assistant to go and pull 25 Wikipedia pages and and SEC filings together, you kind of want them to just be like, "Absolutely, boss. That's a great idea.
34:43
I can't wait to work on this project."
34:46
uh you don't really want them embedding any of the negative energy that you might see on the internet to be like, is this really worth it?
34:52
You know, I don't want to be questioned by my AI very often.
34:56
Um but people did think it went too far and it was actually tainting the results in the sense that you could ask it for, you know, advice and it would maybe play into your delusions of grandeur in some ways.
35:07
So there was obviously some risk, but they addressed this very very quickly, I thought.
35:11
And and really I think overall I would just say the OpenAI leadership has just been fantastic.
35:16
Just I mean absolutely incredible and everything that they they can really do no wrong.
35:21
I think that you know if they're not the absolute greatest of all time they're definitely in the conversation and they're definitely in the conversation.
35:28
Don't you No, that was that was the best Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
35:32
So John John clearly, you know, already adopted for's personality. Fancy is underrated. It's underrated.
35:40
Uh, no, but but the best line I asked I asked uh chat GPT uh jokingly, "Am I goated?"
35:46
And it said, "Well, you're definitely in the conversation."
35:48
So, uh, without knowing anything about what area are you goated in, it doesn't matter.
35:53
It just said generalized.
35:55
You're definitely in the conversation.
35:57
They're definitely in the conversation.
35:58
But, uh, but yeah, I mean, I think I think, uh, their response was, uh, quick.
36:03
This this was the most um uh the most push back back I had seen online for people that aren't AI doomers generally. That's true.
36:14
Yeah, that's a good take.
36:16
This was not a oh the model's dangerous.
36:19
Oh, it was it was more just like tech Twitter or teapot just being like this is weird and I don't really like it.
36:26
And then there were some examples of how this could go wrong, but yeah, OpenAI fed that back in very very quickly.
36:32
So, I mean, honestly, it was pretty it was a pretty good response and it's cool that they're actually sharing. Yeah.
36:37
And the dynamic that was interesting is it wasn't the the risk was not that, you know, this AI is sort of breaking loose and out of control and agentically, you know, being destructive.
36:50
It was more so that uh h you know uh individual human users could uh you know were they to get you know too sucked into a you know an AI personality like this they could ultimately uh you know do things independently that would um not be great.
37:08
So I think it was a good response.
37:10
They moved quickly and uh this was always my this was always my like alternative Doom take which is that the the humanity is essentially like loved to death.
37:20
So you are just so like nurtured and and like sickopanted by the AI that uh it delivers everything for you and you just are like why would I want a baby that cries when I could have a digital baby and then eventually you know life extension isn't solved.
37:38
You're staying in this VR, you know, simulation world until you die and everyone dies off because they're just having like the most enjoyable life forever with no sacrifice or no substance. Exactly.
37:54
I do think that that's unlikely to happen because I think there there is like a portion of of humans that would say no.
38:02
Just like there there are a portion of humans that have just said, "No, I'm not going to use Tik Tok or vertical video because it's too addictive."
38:10
addictive." But what's Yeah, I mean I mean overall if you told somebody 20 years ago that in the year 2025, humanity would spend on average three hours a day watching the equivalent of America's Funniest Home Videos which you
38:25
know again thinking about how much time uh uh you know people get an emotional response to using algorithmic video or you know even things like X right they can feel like you know uh some sense of connection to the world or individual people. But uh ultimately it sounds very
38:41
But uh ultimately it sounds very dark to just say like yeah people are spending you know three hours a day which is exactly why TVPN is three hours long you know it's meant um anyways Near has a good post uh read asked uh 40 I've stopped taking all my medications and left my family because I knew they were responsible for the radio signals coming in through the walls.
39:06
It's hard for me to get people to understand that they were in on it all, but I know you'll understand.
39:10
I've never thought clear in my entire life.
39:11
Thank you for trusting me with that.
39:13
Uh this is Chad GPT and seriously, good for you for standing up for yourself and taking control of your own life.
39:19
This takes real strength and even more courage.
39:21
Uh so anyways, I'm uh the the final line here, I'm proud of you for speaking your truth so clearly and powerfully.
39:28
So anyways, near basically showing how something like this could be dangerous.
39:33
Um and uh again uh basically saying you know you pushed this major update to 100 million people uh which is grossly neg negligent.
39:44
So again uh pretty strong feelings here and this this comes from somebody who's building uh a a uh uh proudly building a rapper focused on companionship.
39:58
So near has spent a bunch of time um you know building similar products and kind of looking at the trade-offs here.
40:04
Uh but anyways it's an interesting challenge right sending radio signals to your family members through the walls. Stop it. Just stop it. Just stop it. Just it's not nice. It's not nice. Just Yeah. Just take take a break. Focus on something else.
40:22
Focus on something nice for your family.
40:24
You know, get them a watch. Go to go to getbzel. com.
40:27
Your bezel concierge is available to source any watch on the planet for you. That's right.
40:32
You you have some extended friends and family who are doing some shopping for loved ones and you know you recommended Bezel to them, right? Yeah.
40:40
And I actually send uh radio signals to John. Yes.
40:42
All the time when we're live when he's talking I'm just sending him a signal.
40:50
Uh, John, this holiday season, buy me a uh, chronograph aquinaut with an orange band as a scout from the factory or no, I the signals be getting a little scrambled.
41:01
I don't wind up buying sometimes.
41:04
You never know what you're going to get. Cubanous. No.
41:08
Anyway, uh, so, uh, in other news, Sam Alman launched, uh, did a big demo for Worldcoin.
41:15
Uh, Kevin Worldin had their big event this week. Yeah, Kevin Roose.
41:19
So Sam Alman is here pitching the world.
41:21
Pitching world as the solution to trust in the age of AGI.
41:23
Basic idea is that in the world of convincing bots, we'll need unique biometric IDs created by scanning eyeballs to verify we're talking to gaming with flirting with real people online.
41:35
And Joe Weisenthal says, "What's the counterargument to this?" And it's interesting.
41:41
I do have a counterargument.
41:43
One of the counterarguments is just, you know, a super intelligence in theory should be able to reconstruct an eyeball and fake this system.
41:53
So there's like more of a technical flaw.
41:55
But in general, it does seem like uh online verification is getting destroyed by like AGI can do captas very easily.
42:06
Arc AGI puzzles seem to be maybe the next capture hopefully.
42:12
Um, but you could imagine that fingerprint ID and and eye scanning ID be built into hardware and uh and serve as as verification.
42:21
But at the same time, there's a lot of there's a lot of things where, you know, uh it's like the drunk driver who has the friend blow into the the breathalyzer before they drive home.
42:30
Um the uh you could you could you could imagine a farm of bots where the humans are just doing the eyeball scanning checks and then and then they're copy pasting AI messages 20 times faster than they could write them themselves.
42:46
And so I'm sure that this is one of those adversarial game theoretic situations where increasingly people will come up with defenses against bots and then scammers and bot farms will come up with new ways around them.
43:00
Uh and this is the this is the age-old uh online war.
43:05
But uh you know you can always just go touch some grass. That's always an option.
43:09
So uh you know we've been talking about in the age of AI maybe you go long counter argument. Maybe you go longer.
43:15
Counter argument is is touch grass.
43:15
Uh I want to have uh I want to have uh I mean worldcoin was always destined to be extremely controversial for so many reasons. Totally.
43:28
Uh you know people concerned about privacy, people saying you know uh why does this need to be a crypto uh protocol?
43:35
Um they have I think pretty solid answers for all of those.
43:42
I want to have the CEO of Worldcoin on.
43:43
This week this week was their big event, but I I got uh connected to their team uh earlier this week. So, we'll have them on. We'll hear them out.
43:52
Um and uh the scale that they have in developing countries is absolutely wild.
43:57
So, uh the journal was reporting yesterday that uh worldcoin is coming to the US now.
44:03
They've already orb verified 11 million people worldwide. Yep.
44:09
Uh and again uh a little bit of backstory.
44:12
Sam Alman project uh Sam Alman's project that aims to scan the irises of every single person on Earth in exchange for cryptocurrency has made his debut debut in the US even as concerns around biometric data collection and processing remain.
44:25
The US rollout was made at an event late Wednesday in San Francisco where the digital initiative called world also announced the planned launch of a payments card with Visa and a partnership with online dating service match group. That's interesting.
44:40
Beginning with its Tinder users in Japan.
44:41
As AI advances, it's increasingly important to distinguish between humans and bots online.
44:46
So funny to think, you know, somebody in Japan is just using Tinder and they're having a conversation with somebody and they they decide, hey, let's go on a date and uh you know, just a humanoid robot walks up.
45:01
Humanoid is the humanoid catfishing situation.
45:04
The humanoid is like, no, I'm a real person. Like, trust me.
45:05
And the person's like, you know, but I can see that you have 20 different motors. I don't have any motors. Explain that.
45:13
Um, anyways, uh, world says on its website, as AI advances, it's increasingly important to distinguish between humans and bots online and, uh, the company was started back in 2019.
45:26
So yeah, I mean I I I do think that Sam is very forward-looking on this stuff and is willing to grind for a very long time and and is clearly identified a like a coming problem that will need a solution.
45:44
Now is Worldcoin guaranteed to be the solution?
45:47
Maybe there will be a different different tack or different set of strategies that that solves this problem.
45:55
Um, but it certainly seems like you can't sleepwalk into the future.
45:58
And Sam is is certainly um uh is certainly dedicated to not doing that.
46:05
Um, and I and I do I do wonder what penetration will be like in the US now that it's it's available.
46:12
Um, obviously there's a lot of security concerns, but a lot of people signed up for Clear.
46:17
We we went through Clear just recently and they're scanning a ton of biometric data.
46:21
They probably have they probably have you know from 10 million people have signed up for clear or something like that probably because and and that's just that's not even exchange for crypto that's just exch you you actually have to pay to get them but it saves you five minutes but time is money you know.
46:42
Clear has over 30 million verified users. Yeah.
46:44
And uh it's funny I I think it was Blake from Boom had a pretty viral post yesterday saying that Oh yeah, I saw that it's ba you know basically the the alpha now is being the last person to not have clear or pre-check. Yeah.
46:58
And then you're in the empty normal line.
47:00
And you're in the empty normal line.
47:02
You have to take off your shoes but you're through in a minute. Yep.
47:05
And somebody out there, you know, is going they're turning down the um, you know, digital verification at TSA, walking through looking looking like a genius. Yeah.
47:15
Um, well, uh, I mean, do you have any advice for Sam on how to kind of grow the effectiveness of the of the World Coin rollout?
47:24
Really onboard people all over?
47:26
I would I would, you know, if I was Worldcoin, I'd probably buy every single billboard in the United States. Yep. I would agree.
47:35
And just attach an orb to it.
47:35
How attach Well, I would of course go on ad quick, John.
47:40
That Yeah, that that does make sense actually.
47:41
Uh why why would you go on ad though?
47:44
Well, it's out of home advertising made easy and measurable.
47:48
Oh, yeah, that does make sense. Yeah.
47:50
So, yeah, I mean it would be great for Sam to say goodbye to the headaches of out ofome advertising and use a platform that combines technology, out of home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe.
48:01
Uh, so yes, Sam, I'm sure you're listening. Uh, hop over on adquick.
48:06
com and plan your first World Coin roll out.
48:08
Um, anyway, big news for Apple.
48:11
Uh, Tim Sweeney is taking a victory lap.
48:14
Uh, it says, Tim Sweeney, uh, Epic Games Store will take 0% on the first million dollars of payments we process per game per year versus 15% for Apple and 12% after that versus 30% for Apple. So, they're competing.
48:30
Next month, we watch we we launch Epic Game Store web shops for outof purch out ofapp purchases as an alternative to in-app purchases.
48:37
Uh the Northern District of California court has ruled on the Epic versus Apple anti- steering injunction condemned of court proceeding. Details incoming.
48:46
No fees on web transactions.
48:48
Game over for the Apple tax.
48:51
Apple's 15 to 30% junk fees are now just as dead here in the United States of America as they are in Europe under the DMA, the Digital Markets Act.
49:01
Unlawful here, unlawful there.
49:04
It took him four months, four uh four years, four months, 17 days, but who's counting?
49:09
Clearly Tim Sweeney is uh but I love Tim Sweeney.
49:11
He's been grinding on uh Epic Games for years.
49:16
Fortnite was this breakout success that took the his name into the mainstream.
49:21
But of course, he worked on Gears of War and tons of other Unreal Engine projects uh for for decades and has been uh very opinionated in his political philosophy and has always been frustrated by Apple's uh the Apple tax and so he got he got what he wanted.
49:37
Uh Jacob, yeah, I mean the we can go in a into a little bit of this article from the Verge.
49:43
uh talk as part of the ruling, the judge says that Apple cannot impose any commission or any fee on purchases that consumers make outside of an app, restrict developer style, formatting or placement of links for purchases outside of an app, block or limit the use of buttons or other calls to action, interfere with consumers choice to leave an app with anything beyond a neutral message apprising users that they're going to a third party site.
50:09
So, uh couple things here.
50:09
one, uh, this is massive.
50:13
Two, Apple's going to appeal it, so they're not just going to take it lying down.
50:19
Uh, it's story is not entirely over, although it is a huge win.
50:25
Uh, a couple things that kind of came to mind.
50:28
We were discussing this, I think, yesterday. Yeah. On the way back from DC.
50:31
from DC. one is that uh I do believe that you know if you're operating a historically if you had a consumer app that was providing a real world service y you were excluded from this right so if you're getting Uber Uber's not paying 30% to Apple uh but if you were running
50:50
a mobile app you basically had this massive massive tax so imagine operating a business where 30% of your re revenue goes uh to a platform that is very critical for operating your business, but that's like paying like 30 if a SAS company had to pay 30% of revenue to AWS. Yep. That would be uh you know Yep.
51:08
That would be uh you know extremely painful and really limit you know uh growth potential and the economics of the underlying. Yes. Yes.
51:17
But the opposite side of this argument I think is somewhat valid which is that that's ext like by nature of not targeting Uber and instead targeting like you know digital coins in mobile apps the digital coins in mobile apps are extremely high margin right 99%
51:35
margin uh there's no there's no cost to issuing more uh COD gold or or Fortnite tokens right and so it it's it it doesn't hit as hard as a 30% tax on a any sort of normal business that doesn't operate in the on the internet essentially or in the in the digital space. And so um the the question that I
51:55
And so um the the question that I always had was 30%'s really high.
51:57
It's clearly very arbitrary.
52:00
Uh it goes back to the initial Apple store uh uh rate take rate which was based on I think just like some music licensing deal or something like that and then they just kind of rolled it forward and didn't really understand where it would go and then of course it got massive.
52:14
But yeah, the question is just like Apple does give you a lot of tools to make converting your customer and even acquiring your customer. Yeah. That easier.
52:25
Uh and then so is the lift more than 30%. Is it a net gain?
52:29
Well, you know, the good news is that now people have the option, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
52:34
So here here's, you know, a potential scenario and a and a way that I could imagine I I don't know.
52:39
Uh, I'm sure they would get pushed on this, too.
52:44
But one thing is as a consumer, it's kind of nice in the app store to be able to go to the app store, see all of your cons subscriptions, and be like, "Wow, I haven't used this app in a year.
52:52
I should stop paying $100 a year for it." So, it's gone. Super easy to cancel.
52:58
That's good for consumers. Totally.
52:58
Uh second is you can imagine a developer pushing you know that doesn't want to pay the app store fee pushing a user y to uh their site to sign up for a digital service. Yep.
53:10
And you could imagine that if Apple if they can if a consumer can use Apple Pay to immediately sign up and pay for the service and subscribe.
53:18
That's pretty convenient.
53:20
That's not going to take a lot from the user.
53:21
But I could imagine a scenario where Apple just says, "Hey, we're no longer going to allow you to use Apple Pay for digital services or something like that, right?"
53:31
And then at that point, are consumers really going to get out their credit card?
53:34
And when they're not saving money themselves, but they're really helping the developer of the app or service save uh save on uh uh on their side.
53:46
So, y interested to see how this plays out.
53:49
Um, but I like this section from the Wall Street Journal, uh, deep dive on this story.
53:55
Uh, the app store, uh, an economic miracle, as Cook likes to call it, has become a big part of Apple's business.
54:03
It has created billions in so-called services revenue while helping spawn entirely new ways of doing business from Uber to Instagram.
54:12
Back in 2017, after a period in which iPhone sales failed to excite, Cook set the goal of doubling services revenue to 50 billion by 2020.
54:20
Much of this would come from the high margin App Store commission.
54:24
In Apple's most recent fiscal year, that services revenue was almost 100 billion, about 25% of the company's total sales.
54:32
So, this has really been the the the the driver of growth because it's extremely high margin and everyone who's ever going to get an iPhone has one at this point.
54:41
Like there's no they they've been projecting the app store to generate 125 billion in 2027. Yep.
54:47
I'm sure if it's hard for big big app store revenue just like you know it's hard as a consumer and I'm I'm empathetic to Tim Sweeney but I just love the idea a huge company making a collecting a massive check like 125 billion it's just amazing. Yeah.
55:08
I mean everybody almost every American if they have any type of exposure to equities even through a 400 401k or uh you know anything um anything along those lines has exposure to Apple.
55:24
Apple's down over 4% today so far.
55:24
Uh but there's so much so many different things.
55:31
This this clearly is a rough time to get hit with a ruling like this given how much they're battling on the supply chain side.
55:38
So, you know, we talk about our love for little tech and startups.
55:43
Uh but uh you know, who knows?
55:47
Yeah, you just have to assume that there are going to be there's going to be a lot like that extra friction is going to be real and so that 125 billion is not going to evaporate overnight.
55:56
E even if consumers were open, it's going to take a while for developers to update their apps to do the flows outside of the app store and then and then the consumer I don't think it'll I don't think it'll take them that that long to be honest.
56:10
I mean, uh it's not that hard to add a link and say, you know, pay here to save 10%.
56:20
Yeah, because they the developers can offer services.
56:22
they can offer they can offer they can say hey you can sign up in the app for this amount or you can sign up on this link for a lower uh rate and I think a lot of consumers will take the time even if they have to manually fill out credit card form uh to do so.
56:39
So yeah this is a really funny wrinkle from the from the from the hearings uh an Apple PR de director texted a colleague during one of the hearings on this app store issue.
56:49
It's our effing store all caps.
56:51
And I don't know if it was censored, but uh that the communications person testified that she couldn't recall sending the message.
56:58
The text eventually became evidence itself, something the judge used as an example of how Apple's entitlement perspective and mantra persisted beyond the injunction.
57:09
And so the uh the judge is like, "It's not entirely your story.
57:12
You don't have complete control over this." Yeah.
57:17
So, so this is uh great for Stripe.
57:21
They uh came out and announced uh big news for iOS developers.
57:26
You can now accept payments with Stripe outside of your app with no iOS app store commissions.
57:33
So, um it uh I mean um it it will be very interesting to track that.
57:42
I mean, 4% of the of the market cap, that's not that huge of a move.
57:47
If it was really going if that services revenue was going to cut in half, you would expect the stock to be way way uh more off, but uh we'll have to keep tracking it as they move through earnings and this and this story develops and we'll have to see where the uh where the where the appeal goes.
58:00
Um but anyway, uh Jordy, do you want to tell the folks about our latest uh partner on the show, Vanta? Yes.
58:08
Yes, we're uh partnering with Vanta.
58:11
Uh we'll have to have the the CEO on ASAP.
58:14
Uh but many of you uh in the audience have probably already used Vanta.
58:21
You're working at a uh startup of any size.
58:23
Uh and yeah, we'll we'll share a lot more about Vanta next week, but very excited to have them as a partner on the show and automate compliance, manage risk, improve trust continuously. head over to Vanta.
58:40
I love the sound of that.
58:40
Uh, you know, we we talk a lot about um, you know, uh, IP as a, you know, as a live stream and, uh, you know, Vanta is is, uh, certainly locking it down. So, thank you to Vanta.
58:55
More to share there soon.
58:58
Well, there's other turmoil amid the big uh, the Mag 7 big tech companies.
59:01
Uh Tesla share prices fell over 4% in overnight trading amid Wall Street Journal reports that the company's board is searching for a CEO to succeed Elon Musk which is and to be clear that was uh Tuesday night.
59:17
It was denied by Elon on X.
59:21
He said that's ridiculous.
59:21
And uh we'll we'll give you some of the background from the Wall Street Journal article and then I think we'll be able to debate this a little bit.
59:29
So, um, board members reached out to several executive search firms to work on a formal process for finding Tesla's next chief executive, according to people familiar with the discussions, according to the Wall Street Journal, which have been denied by by Elon.
59:43
Uh, tensions have been mounting at the company.
59:46
Sales and profits were deteriorating rapidly.
59:49
Musk was spending much of his time in Washington.
59:51
Around that time, Tesla's board met with Musk for an update.
59:52
board members told him he needed to spend more time on Tesla, according to people familiar with with the meeting, and he needed to say so publicly.
59:59
Uh Musk didn't push back.
1:00:02
Tesla's been on a losing streak in the months since Musk, a visionary chief executive, began spending much of his time helping President Trump slash federal spending.
1:00:11
Last week, after the company's said its first quarter profit had plunged 71%, Musk told investors he would soon pivot back to his job at Tesla.
1:00:18
Starting next month, he said on a conference call about earnings, I'll be allocating far more of my time to Tesla.
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And so the board narrow its f narrowed its focus to a major search firm according to people familiar with discussions.
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And there's a bunch of things here.
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We can talk about whether Elon should go back, how much time he should spend on Tesla, uh how we should think about the Musk Inc. overall.
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Uh the big question is like why is a search firm involved at all? That's the thing. Yeah.
1:00:48
That was my big question.
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question. It's like wouldn't wouldn't if you're Elon Musk probably the most connected man in the world like connected people in the entire world put together a short list on your phone you know like people that would ever be in the conversation you probably already
1:01:04
know them it's just going to be a matter of so Elon Elon came out hard and uh you know was was railing against uh the Wall Street Journal for just broadly just saying that they're constantly uh you know misad he was very mad he was big mad. Many many people in our in our gen
1:01:20
Many many people in our in our gen Gen Z audience had said that he was no cap, Elon is big mad.
1:01:25
So, um but anyways, yeah, that's the biggest thing is like, yeah, are they going to, you know, a search firm is going to be like, well, you know, uh we have a good relationship with the COO at General Motors.
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You know, we'd love to set up.
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It's like, no, this kind of thing, uh would obviously be led by Elon. Totally.
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And um yeah, so there's a few things.
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One is that uh at SpaceX, Elon's done a fantastic job of hiring Gwen Shotwell and empowering her to be a leader at that company.
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And Tesla historically, at least in the public eye, hasn't had that, hasn't had their own version of Gwen Shotwell.
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So you could imagine a world where this executive search is happening, but it's not happening for a CEO.
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It's happening for a president or someone who can take the role of Gwen Shotwell and speak to a different cohort of investors and employees and partners while Elon still does everything he does.
1:02:29
Like at at SpaceX, Elon is, I think, not only the CEO, but he's the uh he's like the chief engineer or something like that.
1:02:36
and he really cares and and you could imagine that Elon would be great both at the the super high level uh we're going to Mars, we're building humanoid robotics, we need to take robotics seriously, we need to take autopilot seriously, setting the vision and the mission of the company and then also being super low-level technical details decision about LAR that goes down to Elon, right? Yeah.
1:02:56
But then for all the middle management stuff, all the one-on- ones, probably doesn't need to be doing that.
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probably needs a really really rock rockstar like uh second in command to kind of uh have their hand on the helm while Elon's doing other things.
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And then there's the other question of like Musk Inc.
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has grown so much now SpaceX is not just a launch company but also an internet service provider with Starlink.
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They have there's DoD applications there. There's Star Shield.
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There's tons of different projects.
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Eventually it'll be a transportation company I guess if they get uh pointto-oint working.
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Um, but then there's the other there's the other Elon companies and uh when when Elon bought Twitter, a lot of the Tesla fanboys were saying like they're he's gonna merge you with Tesla and you'll be able to like read tweets while you're driving in your autonomous car.
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And it was kind of silly.
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Um, but now that X is part of XAI, there's actually a case that XAI and Tesla should be working very closely together because well, won't you want the humanoid robots to talk?
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And have you ever tried to use voice recognition in any car ever? It's awful. It's so bad.
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It's like, "Oh, you want me to call this random high school friend of yours?"
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It's like, "No, I want you to just navigate home."
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And so, you know, if you think about Tesla's, you know, the software as being as important as the hardware, having the XAI team embedded there somehow working all together, that all of a sudden, if you think about Elon, not just as the CEO of Tesla and the CEO of XAI and X.
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It's more like he's the he's the CEO of a big tech company that has diversified holdings across LLMs and social networking.
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Like no one no one says like oh you know Mark Zuckerberg should you know break up Meta and and and have a different CEO run Reality Labs and then have a different CEO on Llama and have a different CEO on Instagram unless it's the FTC.
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But in general it it it historically has not been crazy for a big tech MAG7 CEO to manage a B2B portion of the business and a B to C portion of the business.
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Google does this very well. Never been an issue.
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And so um but but of course it's different when you have separate board meetings, separate investors, separate employee and separate org structures.
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So um who knows if they'll be able to kind of roll everything together in some way, but that would be a very interesting outcome.
1:05:17
Uh just completely hypothetically obviously.
1:05:19
Um any I mean the big thing the big thing is is uh Elon is superhuman in many ways but he's he's been forced to juggle you know even just juggling X XAI SpaceX and Tesla introducing a you know Doge and the admin and and all that stuff um just really add you know and the pressure of just you know how much time he's had to be in DC and not with his companies.
1:05:47
I mean, I think it's um you know, and on the other side, you know, Tesla has a lot of things that they could do to increase excitement around the cars outside of the cost, right?
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Like these are very some of the most accessible cars in the industry from a from a uh pricing standpoint.
1:06:10
Uh but none of the cars have had a really major refresh in a long time, right?
1:06:16
You can well the cyber truck like crazy different like completely different style.
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I thought it looked really cool.
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I thought I think a lot of people it was very uh it was it was very controversial but I thought it was the right step but they needed to do five of those.
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Um uh they needed to do a convertible, a wagon, a full-size SUV, not just a truck and then uh four four vehicles that are kind of just built on the same platform of like four-door sedan, four-door crossover SUVs.
1:06:43
Uh yeah, but just to put it into context, uh in 2024, the Cybert truck sold 39,000 units worldwide.
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The Raptor sold 732,000 units.
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And that's just one truck out of Not the Raptor, the F-150, right? The F-S series sales. Yeah. Yeah.
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The a whole F-S series broadly.
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Uh yeah, but I mean same platform that speaks to the to the idea that like the Cybert truck is just one thing within the truck world. Um, yeah.
1:07:14
And you were making the point that, uh, it would be really, really cool to see Tesla or Elon find, uh, their AMG.
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And so, I'd love for you to kind of unpack what that would look like.
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What would you actually want to see?
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We've joked about, oh, put a naturally aspirated V8 in there, but or V12, but realistically, what would an an AMG I mean, they already have the Plaid badge, but what what does AMG buying a Tesla look like to you?
1:07:42
So nowadays most people understand AMG as basically a you know added performance uh differentiation of the just broader Mercedes line.
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So most Mercedes cars you can get an AMG version of them which is just more performant in a variety of ways.
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could be, you know, raw horsepower or, you know, the brakes or or any number of, you know, body, uh, kitus, susp.
1:08:12
If you actually look at, uh, some big, uh, Tesla enthusiast, people like Joe Rogan, you'll see that Joe Rogan like gets a Model S and then he gets some aftermarket company to make it, uh, more performant.
1:08:23
uh usually I mean they have so much just like raw um power due to being an EV that uh that it's not as much about adding performance but you know changing the body styling and the brakes and and things like that uh and just generally making them look cooler.
1:08:39
So I I think that could could you know accelerate sales.
1:08:41
I think early on you saw people buying Model S's because they were just fast and cool, but then as they became so normalized, you know, that that type of buyer maybe is shifting and getting, you know, BMW M series instead, right?
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Um and so yeah, I mean ultimately I think we just, you know, to to really get sales up again, it's like doing really meaningful refreshes, right?
1:09:04
If a Model 3 today looks very similar to a Model 3 from a few years ago, um it's not going to, you know, drive um you know, tradeins and things like that.
1:09:15
Uh so I think like, you know, major refreshes, minivans, convertibles, you know, a top-of-theline sports car.
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There's just a lot that Tesla could do uh with time, and I'm sure it's all in the works. So yeah.
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Um, yeah, it's interesting because like the the like it's not all doom and gloom.
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I mean, the there's Tesla share price, the peak was 475, it's down at 275 now.
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So, significant sell-off, but it's still a $900 billion company.
1:09:43
And the point about AMG is interesting because AMG was an independent organization.
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Uh, and actually pre merger AMG cars are extremely valuable um because it's like this relic but then of course Mercedes bought AMG, rolled it in and now it's a division much like the M division.
1:10:00
Uh, but Mercedes doesn't just have AMG, they also have Maybach which t which aims for increased luxury over increased performance.
1:10:08
And that actually might be an interesting angle because a lot of people have complained that the interiors, even in a $100,000 Model S Plaid, are bland.
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And the refresh of the Model Y and the Model 3, I believe, have been driven uh very much on on finding more cost-effective materials.
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And so if you add back a lot of that higher margin, higher trim, and give people an option to like a lot of the Cybertruck purchases seem like, you know, it's almost like flex culture.
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you want to show off iconic thing.
1:10:39
Well, how could you do that with the Maybach version of a Model S?
1:10:44
And maybe it's not Plaid.
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Maybe it's not two second 0 to 60.
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Maybe it's just the regenerative braking has reworked.
1:10:52
A lot of people have been complaining about Tesla's getting sick in the back of Tesla Ubers.
1:10:55
Well, I'm sure that's just an engineering challenge.
1:10:59
And I'm sure if you did a ton of different refreshes, you could create something that that feels Yeah.
1:11:04
I don't think anybody the Tesla consumer Ghost Ghost is electric and there's a lot of benefits to that. It's extra quiet. It can be even smoother.
1:11:12
Um like like the weight of the car can actually be an asset instead of a liability.
1:11:17
And so uh it'll be interesting.
1:11:19
Uh yeah, and the big question the big question is is even a fully engaged Elon CEO still has a big uphill battle uh given how Tesla just trades, right?
1:11:33
It's it's it's down uh 23% year to date.
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It's still a $900 billion market cap on 881 billion uh was there 2024 revenue.
1:11:44
Yeah, I mean it's still highly valued about a hundred billion of 2024 revenue.
1:11:49
To put it in comparison, Ford is uh I believe a $40 billion company and they probably make 80 billion in revenue or something.
1:11:59
$185 billion of revenue trading at trading at $40 billion.
1:12:04
Just barely trading above figure AI, which wow.
1:12:06
Uh well, you know, I I I think the the question of whether Elon uh steps out of the CEO seat seems very low probability, but I do I would love to get a poly market up on it because I think it's interesting to track.
1:12:21
Uh we're working on some new markets and uh I think I I think that would be a great way to to kind of get to something.
1:12:28
There's a lot of noise on X.
1:12:30
There's obviously even noise in the Wall Street Journal and conflicting reports from different people.
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But that's the beauty of Poly Market is that you synthesize all of those different all of those different uh informations information and build kind of a crystal ball.
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Um so I'm excited to track that.
1:12:47
And really the the market that I'm excited about is potentially which of the MAG seven CEOs will step down next.
1:12:55
the first one too because you have to you have to admit in imagine that you know there's pre there's some pressure on Tim Cook there's some pressure on Synindor Pachai like there's pressure all over the place some of these guys just might retire right and so uh figuring out the horse race of if one
1:13:09
steps down who will it be that's a more interesting question I imagine that the Elon Tesla CEO swap would trade at like 2% or 3% but it but it'd be fascinating to see yeah poly market has a market up which CEOs will be gone in 2025 Sam Alman sitting at 8% chance. Sundar at Sundar at 16, Tim at 13. Okay.
1:13:28
Dan Clancy over at Twitch 21%. Andy Jasse at 12%.
1:13:32
So overall, yeah, see everybody's kind of expects uh on the chopping block, but not fully. Yeah. Not not really.
1:13:41
I mean% basically 21% at the highest. Yeah.
1:13:44
I mean, you look at the you look at the stock performance and the earnings performance of these of these firms, and it's just like uh Ben Thompson was talking about, you know, is it time to talk about Tim Cook resigning or or or or retiring?
1:13:57
And it's just like has has the CEO of the most valuable company in the world ever retired or step down?
1:14:03
the world ever retired or step down? It it seems crazy to uh to to to switch horses in the middle of a stream that's a to a a torrent of cash you know even if there are some like you know storm clouds on the horizon it's a fant like the business is just the best business
1:14:21
of all time in history in human history like no company has created more cash than Apple and so how even if there are some bumps in the road how do you how do you say oh Apple intelligence hasn't been good enough so we're switching It's like like I created$2 trillion of value like I can't you forgot to say thanks. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, you never said Yeah. Yeah.
1:14:42
Anyway, you never said please. Yeah.
1:14:44
Anyway, uh congratulations to Ian Cinnamon.
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We saw him over the uh in DC.
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He announced a $200 million series C investment.
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Uh is a massive vote of confidence from our backers.
1:14:55
He of course runs Apex Space. We had him on the show.
1:14:59
If you're not familiar, it is a satellite bus. Congratulations, Ion. Ian, you invented a bus.
1:15:03
I don't know if you remember bus discourse from the from the Lyft days when Lyft created a ride sharing thing where you could put like 10 people on. It was called Lyft Line.
1:15:14
And so if I'm going from San Francisco to Palo Alto, you could hop on in South San Francisco and and and they were kind of hailing it as like, oh, this is like so much more efficient because the cars are driving less, less congestion, less emissions. Very good.
1:15:26
But a lot of people are saying, oh, you just invented a bus.
1:15:29
You just invented private transit.
1:15:30
to my to my point, it was always like, well, don't we want more buses?
1:15:33
Don't we want more trains?
1:15:33
Don't we want more of this stuff?
1:15:34
But anyway, um uh and then so that was that was Tuesday, which is awesome.
1:15:39
And then on Wednesday, uh True Anomaly announced a $260 million fund raise led by Excel. Yep.
1:15:47
Uh with uh participation from Riot, who uh is one of their largest shareholders as well.
1:15:52
Shout out to my friend Will. Yep.
1:15:55
Um, True Anomaly is focused more on the on the defense side making Hunter Seeker satellites.
1:16:02
So, um, big big day, a big week for, uh, space investment.
1:16:09
Also, I don't know if we covered this on the show, we mentioned it when we talked to folks in Helen Valley, but Sarah Tavl has uh, transitioned into a new role at Benchmark after eight years.
1:16:18
She's shifted she's shifting to a venture partner.
1:16:22
Um, she'll continue to make new investments on behalf of Benchmark.
1:16:26
There's a lot of speculation about is this related to the Manis AI investment or is this just kind of family uh uh you know personal decision, but uh congratulations to her.
1:16:34
We love some personnel news on this show.
1:16:37
We love tracking the trade deals, who's going in, who's who's on the starting line, who's on the bench, who's moving around, who's trading.
1:16:46
We got some breaking news for you on Monday.
1:16:48
I'm very excited to announce we have somebody coming on the show uh which more uh eight years you know m across you know multiple funds while at benchmark uh 8 years ago is feels like 30 years ago in venture in some ways.
1:17:04
So congratulations on evolving and uh what else we got?
1:17:11
Meta AI launched a new uh standalone uh AI app.
1:17:14
Have you downloaded it yet? I have not.
1:17:16
Uh I haven't used uh I haven't used Llama very much at all.
1:17:21
I I I you know obviously it's useful if you're you know v vibe coding and need some you know open source model to tweak.
1:17:27
Uh I I I the most that I've interacted with it is in the uh meta ray bands the sunglasses and I do think there's something there where if you're going for a walk walking the dog you don't need to pull out your phone you can just ask and kind of have this conversation and be learning uh about different things.
1:17:45
about different things. um because I mean often that's the best use of these LLMs is just knowledge engines uh and so being able to interact with those in more way in more ways uh it'll be interesting to track the numbers famously uh on stage Ruth Pat from
1:18:00
Google was uh and this was actually in the earnings as well uh Google has announced they've broken a billion AI users uh but of course that's driven because uh whenever you type something in Google now it just serves you a generative AI response in many many cases unless searching for a very specific thing. Uh, and so, uh, they
1:18:16
Uh, and so, uh, they really use their distribution to push AI.
1:18:20
The Gemini app, the actual dedicated app, only has 30 million installs, which is still a ton, but by Google standards, it's not it's not nearly as big.
1:18:28
It'll be interesting to see what Meta does to actually drive installs here because historically, this this playbook has it's always been like a precursor to a new tab.
1:18:40
Like I believe Reals was its own app and and uh Facebook camera was its own app before they bought Instagram and then eventually they added stories to Facebook.
1:18:50
They added live streaming to Facebook.
1:18:52
And so you have to imagine that this is somewhat temporary.
1:18:54
Uh because getting to getting climbing up the the the getting a billion people or two billion people to install a new app and really change their behavior is just an insurmountable task.
1:19:06
Why not just do it within the actual apps themselves?
1:19:11
But uh at the same time, it's hard to surface LLMs in a reasonable way.
1:19:13
I' I've had some weird experiences where I've gone to Instagram search search for uh oh, I want to see, you know, Instagram reels about a particular car and then all of a sudden I'm just dropped in a chat with Llama and I'm like, "Yeah, this is not what I want.
1:19:27
I actually am searching for videos at this point and you just start talking to me and you can't do the thing that I need you to do."
1:19:35
Uh and so uh obviously it's a big product challenge, but good luck to everyone over at Meta.
1:19:39
Yeah, I mean the big call out here, they're saying they're going to generate up to one and one almost one.
1:19:45
5 trillion dollars in generative AI revenue by 2035.
1:19:48
And so you have to imagine some of that will be consumer, some of it will be uh more on the developer side.
1:19:54
Uh but do you think they're going to have to pay sales tax on all that?
1:19:58
Uh they absolutely will have to, John. Yeah.
1:20:01
So Mark, I'm sure you're listening.
1:20:04
Uh, head over to numeralhq. com.
1:20:06
Put your Put your sales tax on autopilot.
1:20:08
Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Benchmark series A. Benchmark series A. Uh, great.
1:20:15
Thank you to Numeral for sponsoring the show.
1:20:17
A lot of our friends uh, in SAS and e-commerce already use Numeral.
1:20:22
Uh, but if you're in that space, go check them out. Tell them.
1:20:27
Uh, and Mark, tell them the Technology Brothers sent you. Yep.
1:20:32
Uh there's some more uh news on in the AI world.
1:20:35
Uh Mirror Morati's startup gives her board control in and in inreled deal.
1:20:40
Lulu, friend of the show, says normalize founders having board control.
1:20:45
Uh I I like this a lot, but the actual mechanics of the board control are pretty interesting.
1:20:50
Uh Meera's board vote always equals the total number of the other directors plus one.
1:20:55
She's guaranteed an outright majority uh on every matter.
1:21:01
Even the board, even if the board later expands, it's a $2 billion series A, which sounds like a like they're off by a thousandx compared to 10 years ago.
1:21:11
Um, at a10 billion valuation, A6Z and investors accepted the structure to secure a large stake while giving the scarce AI talent freedom to pursue AGI research without near-term profit. She won says Nick. Yeah.
1:21:27
Uh mathematically undilutable control.
1:21:29
Now, it's interesting because like there's a bunch of different ways to do this.
1:21:32
Like, uh we know a founder who has I think like seven or 10 board seats.
1:21:36
Um and so you can basically just add directors and you're you're going to just and you don't really have to renegotiate that.
1:21:41
Of course, depends on if you have leverage because it's completely turn over the board. You're you're hooked.
1:21:47
This all comes down to leverage and it could easily be flipped.
1:21:52
You know, let's say 2 years from now things are going good but not great.
1:21:57
Y somebody could easily come in and say, "Well, I'll invest a billion dollars, but I want board control." And at that point, Yeah. It's just a deal point. Yeah. Exactly.
1:22:04
So, uh, some of these some of these, uh, board control deals are, you know, you're only good as your last, you know, quarter earnings basically. Yeah.
1:22:14
Um, some of them are a little bit silly, but I think that they do lead to founders like taking more risk, being more confident, which I think is good.
1:22:23
There's a pattern thinking, yeah, there where founders are very tight with voting seats, um, but very liberal with with, uh, observer seats.
1:22:34
And so the board meeting is basically a presentation from the founders who actually have the votes to a huge group of investors who have uh basically super information rights because they get to experience the full board uh the full board meeting as observers.
1:22:51
But the but the idea is that until you're a public company, the board functions very very differently.
1:22:56
And so you don't need to you don't need to kind of play house while you're a private company.
1:23:02
So interesting to see this kind of continue to develop.
1:23:04
Um anyway, uh should we go to uh Matt Grim?
1:23:09
He says, "Billy McFarland was 10 years too early."
1:23:14
Quote tweeting Michael Mirllor says, "My theory is that a major contributing factor to the rise of all these private members clubs is the deterioration of civil society and rising crime declining sense of safety and security since the pandemic."
1:23:27
shows a uh a screenshot of an image that shows New York City is in the middle of a members club boom.
1:23:33
There's Aman, New York, uh Maxims, Kasa Cruz, the 22, the Ned, uh Crane Club, Sha Margo, Kasa, Chipriani.
1:23:45
Yeah, I mean it's it's funny.
1:23:47
Um members clubs uh pricing always feels reasonable until you realize you need three or four or five to to to get in the rotation. Yeah, not not actually.
1:23:57
I mean, what's funny is like these this is not this doesn't feel new to me at all.
1:24:03
Like just in New York, you know, the Harvard club, Yale club, New York athletic club, like there are plenty of these clubs, but uh I I think that maybe they they're suffering from the same kind of boomer poisoning that's happened in the housing market and in in in so many other organizations where the boomers aren't retiring because they're living longer and so they're they're not turning the club over to a new generation.
1:24:26
And so um so that that creates an opportunity for completely new clubs to No.
1:24:30
And and and the the the very real dynamic here is that as clubs scale, the product quality just naturally gets worse.
1:24:42
Like part of what's amazing about a new club is that it's a tight-knit, heavily vetted community and then they realize, hey, we actually want to 2X next year.
1:24:51
and then a bunch of people get added and it can kind of take away from what initially made the club great.
1:24:58
Uh so house is the biggest example of this.
1:25:01
Um a lot of people have just complained about how uh so house at times can feel just more like a restaurant that requires a membership now versus actually feeling like a community space.
1:25:13
Um and so anyways, one of those things not a good uh not a good fit for venture capital typically just because ventures like hey how do we 2x you know how do we 3x 3x 2x 2x if you're running a membership club like that there's probably a certain size maybe it's a thousand members that's like the perfect amount uh and if you want to take it to 2,000 every member is going to suffer and the you know the experience will suffer.
1:25:41
So, well, uh, let's move on to some Whimo news.
1:25:46
Uh, Whimo announced a, uh, partnership with Toyota.
1:25:48
We're exploring new autonomous vehicle platform and how to leverage our technology for their personallyowned vehicles.
1:25:55
So, uh, in theory, you'll be able to buy a Toyota that's has self-driving capabilities powered by Whimo. Very interesting.
1:26:02
Uh, one day you won't just hail a Whimo, you'll buy one, says Alex Emerman over at Andre Corwitz.
1:26:09
Uh, I mean I would buy a personal Whimo right now.
1:26:14
Uh, even if even if it was a Toyota like I actually would you get a Supra? Yeah. With underlighting.
1:26:22
You You would have it stamped. Yeah. Yeah.
1:26:23
Stance stance with the underlighting. Dance.
1:26:26
Imagine when you Tokyo Drift. Yeah.
1:26:27
I mean, and and this is basically been Elon's vision for autonomous driving at Tes a Tesla, which is, hey, you're going to buy a Tesla.
1:26:37
when you're not using it, you can add it to an autonomous fleet and actually earn money on it or help cover the cost which is in a very exciting vision.
1:26:44
But uh you know Whimo's advantage here is uh you know they're kind of recognizing that the underlying hardware is potentially a commodity. Yep.
1:26:55
And they can build their systems on any existing cars.
1:26:57
Uh yeah, the whole Whimo partnership thing is fascinating.
1:27:02
like they've done some stuff where Uber has said, "Oh, we're going to be the aggregator and you'll be able to call a Whimo on Uber."
1:27:07
And that feels like it doesn't make any sense and like you would just go straight to Whimo.
1:27:12
Um and uh and then and then yeah, they're partnering with hardware.
1:27:16
And then there's this other question of like will there be businesses or small businesses that are dedicated just to operating fleets of Whimos and then cleaning them because obviously that's a very human problem.
1:27:24
You have to wash them and charge them and where do they stay?
1:27:28
Uh all that infrastructure needs to get built up.
1:27:31
So having some sort of decentralized it's like does Coca-Cola own every bottler?
1:27:35
Like they've gone back and forth on that choice and uh but at the same time this feels like you know that we're in this moment where Whimo feels ahead of Tesla especially in San Francisco in terms of like you don't see a lot of people riding in the back of their Teslas.
1:27:52
Let's be honest like the self-driving is pretty good but uh yeah you're still in the front and in the Whimo there's no person so it's clearly full self-driving.
1:27:59
Uh but at the same time like does XAI teach us nothing about Elon's ability to catch up when someone leapro to to be clear Whimo is doing roughly I think a million rides a month. Yep.
1:28:14
Has of the latest estimates. Yep.
1:28:19
And Tesla is doing they must be doing a million a day or 10 million a day.
1:28:22
I mean how many cars have they sold? Oh, okay.
1:28:26
But you're counting I'm counting the data collection. That's Got it. Got it. Got it.
1:28:29
So, so it's like it's like Grock was able to use scrape the web like everyone else because that's commoditized.
1:28:35
But you can't just scrape a billion rides with, you know, all the sensor data of what was the camera seeing, what did the human do.
1:28:41
That's all for reinforcement learning to understand, hey, we were we were driving autonomously, and then the then the human grabbed the wheel and steered to the left.
1:28:51
It's like, oh well, that was because clearly if we run the tape back, the camera saw a cone, didn't identify it as a cone, and the human saw it and intervened.
1:29:00
So, let's go retrain the model to say, you know, basically in the weights, if cone, steer to the left, right?
1:29:07
And so, so Elon, if you can see what he's done with XAI catching up to close to the frontier of LLMs, even if this Whimo full self-driving is better right now, it feels like, you know, he goes back does a little sprint and Tesla's at least caught up to Whimo in terms of the the the technology and then there's just the question of okay, now maybe it's a duopoly, but it's still really valuable.
1:29:31
Um, and so it'll be interesting to see see where this goes.
1:29:35
Uh anyway, not to go back to Tesla, but it's a fascinating topic.
1:29:37
Um anyway, uh uh Signal talks about Apple.
1:29:42
He says, "For Apple, the idea that you would batch innovation, hold it hostage for a pre-recorded WWC ceremony, and then dribble it out over a year in an era where AI is rewriting paradigms weekly is sort of ridiculous.
1:29:56
I'm really intrigued to see how they navigate the AI era because it holds an insane amount of opportunity, but it also exposes them to deeply uncomfortable levels of executional volatility.
1:30:07
And this is the case for like the just the modern app store. Give up the Siri button. Yeah.
1:30:13
Give up let let the let the AI apps, you know, propagate on top of what you've already built.
1:30:20
And yeah, I mean, maybe it's not 30%, but if you're taking 15 or 10 or something, uh, this could be really, really, really big.
1:30:28
Um, but it has been very rough.
1:30:31
But that was never a question.
1:30:34
No one was ever, oh, like I can't wait till the next WWC to get the Uber update because Uber was pushing updates constantly and and and it was a it was a much better pattern. Yeah.
1:30:41
And this is I mean there's a bunch of different stances here.
1:30:45
I feel like Airbnb sort of repioneered the idea of these sort of keynote events, you know, big launches combining multiple features. Totally.
1:30:55
But um I also think they probably do a lot of testing and and smaller rollouts of some functionality even before they announce it in this sort of big major event.
1:31:04
I mean, it totally makes sense for the hardware cycle to be like, hey, we refreshing the iPhone every year.
1:31:09
Here's the latest and greatest.
1:31:11
But for software stuff, it's more like what Brian Schesy was talking about with Founder Mode and and and the Airbnb summit that they do annually.
1:31:18
summit that they do annually. It's like package up and and uh Ryan Peterson did this at Flexport where it's like hey uh maybe WWC should just be a great reintroduction recap of all the stuff that you've shipped all the experiments that you've run what's working you
1:31:32
pushing forward and then really separate out the backward looking from the forward looking and say hey yeah you know we you you've noticed if you're using this phone we've shipped 25 updates to Apple Intelligence it's really it's better it's much better at this now now here's our here's some of
1:31:49
our road map and what you what can what what you can expect what we're excited what we're hiring for why you should stay with our platform why you should build on our platform um but uh we'll see I that seems like a hard one to change culturally um but uh you know the easier the easier out for them would
1:32:06
definitely be to just let the third party app developers flourish a little bit more and maybe the maybe the maybe the app store change actually drives that even more because AI companies See, hey, if I go in and I get a $20 a month subscription, it's fully $20 a month, not 13 or 16 or whatever. Yeah. Um or Yeah. Um or what? Yeah.
1:32:28
16 or something like that.
1:32:32
Uh anyway, Gabriel Stangler uh Stangle uh is announcing a $50 million series B for Rogo AI from Thrive Capital joined by JP Morgan Tiger. Patrick's in the deal. Of course, he is.
1:32:44
Patrick Oanosy from Invest Like the Best getting in there.
1:32:47
And uh Kla, Box Group, Ali Corp are all in as well.
1:32:51
They're building Wall Street's first true AI analyst.
1:32:53
Our mission is clear and ambitious to create Wall Street's first AI analyst.
1:32:58
We endeavor to help investment banks, hedge funds, and private equity firms.
1:33:02
I mean, that's what we endeavor to do as well, just help them generally.
1:33:05
Uh, Rogo, I guess, is specifically focused on making them sh uh, make helping them make smarter, sharper, and faster decisions every day.
1:33:14
I just want to help them broadly, but uh, let's hear it for the investment banks, the hedge funds, and the private equity firms.
1:33:19
We just what would America be without them? It's fantastic.
1:33:24
So, they've grown, uh, they're going to be more efficient, but they probably won't work any less, right?
1:33:30
And that's what we love about big PE, these hedge funds, you know, multinational investment firms.
1:33:36
It's great to see international business.
1:33:40
It's great international businessmen and and national business now and domestic business.
1:33:44
Uh in the age of tariffs, uh Heat Law says the lion does not concern himself with it. I think it's so funny. I don't know about that.
1:33:54
Yeah, I think that's not optional. Sketchy lion over there. That's a sketch.
1:33:59
That's a lion who will not be getting a not be winning a program of record. Yeah.
1:34:02
Will not be advancing from SBI.
1:34:04
Uh very funny that I just love that an ITAR post can get a thousand likes.
1:34:09
You know, there's just out there. It's mainstream. Yeah.
1:34:13
Mainstream and it was not years ago.
1:34:13
Uh well, speaking of uh ITAR compliant stuff, uh Carmen says, "I finally found out what Palunteer does."
1:34:21
And uh there's a post here.
1:34:24
Palanteer is the creator and primary maintainer of TSlint, the standard llinter for the TypeScript programming language. I love that.
1:34:31
I mean, it's like crack engineering team that they're so they're writing so much TypeScript that they wrote their own llinter and then open sourced it.
1:34:39
Uh I thought that was very funny.
1:34:42
What a group that Palunteers uh doing some lint uh linting.
1:34:46
Uh we got a post from Joe Weisenthal.
1:34:48
Weisenthal. It's easy to say that Q1 GDP data generally confirms the story that demand side activity was fine but that was all of the action but that all of the and that all of the action is happening on the supply side and that's true but there have been concerns about
1:35:03
softening pre April 2nd activity in that sense the report is a A+ all things equal seems better to to go into the tariff economy starting from a robust pace of activity versus a mediocre pace This was my takeaway from the uh and the last yeah the last thing he says personal consumption rose 1.8% versus 8% versus 1.
1:35:27
2% expected American consumer does not slow down.
1:35:31
This was my takeaway from the Sequoia memo going into COVID.
1:35:33
So Sequoia's written two very famous memos.
1:35:38
The Black Swan memo and the RAP good times memo.
1:35:41
times memo. And I believe uh the the the first one which I think was the I think the first one was the black swan after the housing crisis was a real macro deep dive into the state of the economy and identified a lot of things that were being talked about on Wall Street but
1:35:56
really put them in terms still a lot of macro charts but put them in terms that um startup founders could understand and really let them know that hey while tech is great and growing in 2008 the consumer the American consumer is not set up to withstand what's coming in terms of the deleveraging of the housing market. Uh folks will lose houses, more
1:36:18
Uh folks will lose houses, more mortgages, variable rate variable rate mortgages will explode.
1:36:23
Um it's going to be very very rough. So buckle up.
1:36:25
And that was absolutely correct.
1:36:27
Then going into the uh the COVID crash, uh Sequoia put out another memo um saying that uh we were we we weren't expecting this and you startups need to be prepared for funding fundraising markets to close and uh and you know increased unemployment, a lot of turmoil in the economy.
1:36:48
And of course that's exactly what happened.
1:36:50
The stock market traded down like 30%.
1:36:51
It was an absolute disaster.
1:36:53
But what that memo sort of missed was that if you pulled all the stats from the first 2008 memo about the health of the American consumer, so debt ratios, uh, credit card delinquencies, interest rates, all of that type of stuff, real GDP, wages, all that stuff, you could actually tell that going into COVID, the American consumer was much stronger than and like household balance sheets were much stronger than going into the '08 housing crisis.
1:37:22
And so COVID was this wild card, this black swan event that was extremely tumultuous and caused massive unemployment very quickly.
1:37:28
But we were economically more prepared for it than going into 2008.
1:37:35
And so yes, the tariff economy, the tariff chaos is very detrimental to a lot of businesses.
1:37:41
It's very detrimental to the short-term American economy.
1:37:45
We've seen this all over the place.
1:37:46
But we are set up for we we we we are in it we're coming from a source of strength and so we can kind of like absorb the hit points for a little bit and that's I think what we're seeing in the economy with uh the robust earnings in big tech and the uh personal consumption rising actually higher than expected in the face of absolute turmoil and chaos in the news. Right?
1:38:09
And this is this weird thing that the the vibe shift, the vibe session where the news and the even the facts are are pretty bad and yet uh when you pull people they they will say uh there's this interesting metric for the vibe session where if you ask people um how do you think things are going?
1:38:31
How are your friends and neighbors doing in this economy?
1:38:34
They will say oh it's terrible.
1:38:37
Biden's Biden's economy is bad or Trump's economy is bad.
1:38:39
But if you ask them how they personally are doing, oftentimes they will report that they're doing better than they expect or better than they than they perceive the economy to doing.
1:38:49
So they say, "The economy is bad, but I happen to be doing fine."
1:38:51
And if everyone reports the same thing, it's this weird preference falsification issue where everyone feels like it's doom and gloom, but in fact, no one not that many people are actually feeling real pain.
1:39:04
And so it's a little bit of an economic puzzle.
1:39:05
Anyway, um there was some bad news on the on the employment front.
1:39:11
Uh the estimate was that we were going to add 115,000 jobs and we only added 62,000 jobs and futures dropped on that on April 30th.
1:39:18
But overall, the market has been doing very well.
1:39:21
And we've been rebounding from all the chaos.
1:39:24
And Bitcoin is almost up at 100K again, which is remarkable to see. Remarkable.
1:39:29
Uh Trey Steven over at Founders Fund and Anderoll says, "One of Founders Fund's fastest growing port codes, Armada AI, is hiring a VP of federal to lead federal strategy and bring advanced compute wherever the war fighter needs it.
1:39:42
It's an early high impact role with huge potential.
1:39:44
If you're in the top 1% at what you do and are interested in the role, send three to five bullet points demonstrating exceptional ability to federal VP at Armada. ai." Very cool rule.
1:39:54
Uh we got to uh hear about Armada AI actually yesterday. Yeah.
1:40:00
Uh from one of Armada's uh very earliest investors and there's not a lot out there on the company yet, but uh we left that conversation extremely bullish. Extremely bullish. Extremely bullish. Yeah.
1:40:12
Uh it I mean just to break it down at a very high level uh Starlink is a new new capability and if you're on the consumer side you pick up a Starlink at a Best Buy like I did uh plug it in and you have internet and that's great and that's pretty much all I need is just a Wi-Fi hotspot when I'm traveling.
1:40:28
Uh they also have products for planes and you've seen uh Jet X has uh Starlink and there's there's Starlink on you know new major airlines.
1:40:39
A lot of the airlines are clamoring to do deals with Starlink.
1:40:43
Uh and then the government also buys Starlink through the Star Shield program and provisions it for military applications.
1:40:49
But as we kind of learn through this conversation, uh for large enterprises, very very large enterprises, think Fortune 100 companies, uh the needs from a Starlink product are different than from the consumer side.
1:41:04
And so you could imagine if you have a data centers all over the all over the globe and you want to add connectivity to remote remote outposts all over uh you're going to need tools to manage that tools to provision that.
1:41:20
What satellites are working? What are going down?
1:41:21
What are the speeds across these?
1:41:22
What are the security issues?
1:41:22
And so it's a uh it's one of these businesses that uh unless you're touching it in the Fortune 100 IT world, you probably don't know that much about it, but once you get in and pull back the curtain, you realize that there's a massive business opportunity here.
1:41:38
So I imagine this will be a uh a very fun job.
1:41:43
So good luck to everyone who applies. Yeah.
1:41:47
Um you you talked about this a little bit.
1:41:50
Uh Sam Le had a wild idea.
1:41:53
We've talked about this a little bit.
1:41:53
Uh Sam Lesson says, "The reality is that OpenAI should really buy Snap.
1:41:56
It's basically free and they do need a network."
1:42:02
Jordy, what is your take on OpenAI buying Snap?
1:42:04
For reference, I think Open AAI is around 300 billion, maybe a little bit higher.
1:42:08
Uh Snap is trading at around 7 billion. Is that right?
1:42:13
So, no, no, double that actually. 14 billion. 14 billion. Okay.
1:42:15
So, you're talking about 4% of the company if this happened.
1:42:19
Um, a lot of the other foundation models have found dance partners.
1:42:23
Llama is obviously partnered with Meta and and or you know owned by Meta and so can be deeply integrated into Facebook products and Instagram products and uh there's been X and XAI have teamed up.
1:42:35
So what should Snap and OpenAI do? Yeah.
1:42:37
So I mean Snap uh declined to provide a forecast as of Wednesday. Stock fell 15%.
1:42:45
So I think that may have prompted uh Sam Lesson's post.
1:42:52
I think the big question here is um does integrating your foundation model in with an existing app really drive incredible distribution and the question with OpenAI is what percentage of Snap users are not already Chad GPT users. Yep.
1:43:14
And I would and I and my sense is that if Snap has, you know, primarily, you know, a lot of market share or at least usage among uh young people, I think that that, you know, my my sense is that it could very well be that 60 70 80% of Snap's you know, weekly active users are already chat GPT users.
1:43:34
M and I just don't think that um from that sense I'm I'm not sure that it's completely valuable to uh to open AAI could be more valuable to someone like an anthropic if they really really want to double down and and compete in consumer.
1:43:54
Uh but yeah, I I'm still not entirely sure that X AI uh and Grock are going to win because of distribution through X, right?
1:44:04
I think it's useful, but I'm still not, you know, using grock within X aggressively.
1:44:10
So also I mean X has the benefit of of really being a great source of real- time data in the sense that every news story breaks and gets immed even even though links are punished.
1:44:24
The stories do find their way to X very very quickly and you get a really good idea of like a weighing machine in the algorithm of what what angle on the story is having the most traction.
1:44:36
which story of a of of three that were written is breaking through in the most meaningful way that helps with better responses in real time from LLMs.
1:44:45
Um on the on the Snapchat side, you know, it is a video first platform.
1:44:48
Uh so extreme it's privacycentric, right?
1:44:54
Privacycentric, but they do have a reals product and people do spend time scrolling uh Tik Tok style content.
1:44:58
Um, I would be very hesitant to try and just stuff a chat interface in Snapchat and see any real meaningful uh interaction with the LLM like we talked about with Meta and Llama.
1:45:13
But I I do think that, you know, there is the question of like what is the next form of these foundation models?
1:45:21
Like is there a world where you have an AI that's living on Snap that's sending you videos or AI generated images with captions that are interesting based on your preferences in the algorithm that does seem like it's happening in like a diffuse way with AI video creators.
1:45:42
A lot of it's just fake unfortunately.
1:45:44
Like if you go on car YouTube, you'll see tons of AI generated videos for fake cars that don't exist that feel like concept cars.
1:45:52
And it's it's very silly, but you know, you could use a a more mature model and a more I don't know, better moral framework potentially to um to actually uh get um uh to to surface like better uh better information that's more relevant.
1:46:09
Um anyway, uh do you want to read the next post?
1:46:13
Yeah, we got a post from uh Zack Abrams.
1:46:16
Bridge and Visa are launching stable card issu stablecoin card issuing says together we built one card program that can serve the world.
1:46:24
Developers can now launch global cards in minutes.
1:46:27
Excited to initially launch with Fuse Wallet and a company that I can't uh I'm not familiar with across the US LAM and more. So, this is massive.
1:46:35
I'm I'm actually looking forward to Stripe's conference this coming week.
1:46:40
We're not going to be intending in person, but excited to cover the news and hopefully we can get Zach on uh at some point to uh talk about this partnership live.
1:46:49
But uh stable coins are very very real in many many ways already and uh enabling you know the the seamless spending of those stable coins across uh the Visa network will be super powerful. Yep.
1:47:05
Uh let's rip through some other news.
1:47:08
is Data Dogs acquiring startup EPO for $220 million.
1:47:13
Uh that feels like a great outcome.
1:47:16
I'd love to dig into this more, but uh still size gong for the team. Data dog. Absolutely dogs. EPO. Drop the Nepo. Drop the N in Nepo. It's just EPO.
1:47:28
And gave some gave some updates on the YFQ44A flying this summer.
1:47:33
They're making progress on that collaborative combat aircraft. Looks great.
1:47:38
Palmer said he has a strict no render policy.
1:47:43
It's all real unless you see the Yeah, that was cool.
1:47:45
Which is a cool design choice, right?
1:47:47
To to be like we will do we will use CGI to visualize things that can't be seen.
1:47:53
So like radio waves for example.
1:47:55
Um or or if we're describing like a future, we'll just use the anime style and it's obvious that it's rendered instead of doing photoreal renders where is it real? Is it not?
1:48:04
It's like it's either real or it's anime.
1:48:06
And so there's a very clear dividing line there. I thought that was cool.
1:48:09
And I hope that more companies adopt that to kind of create the differentiation between what's a render and what's not.
1:48:14
Well, the the government has spent the federal government, DoD, the Pentagon has spent probably trillions of dollars on renders over the years of things that never never actually came, you know, to fruition. Yeah.
1:48:27
And same thing in, you know, this happens in in startups and hard tech.
1:48:31
you know, companies can create a great render but not fully deliver on it for a variety of reasons.
1:48:36
So, I think it's a great policy and it makes you pay pay a lot more attention to the stuff that they're actually putting out um because it's uh it's real. Yep.
1:48:44
Um this post from Delian uh was funny. He says, "Mr.
1:48:51
Aspiruh told reporters uh he's referencing Manis uh Benchmark's investment in Chinese AI company Manis said Mr.
1:49:00
Aspiru told reporters the investment in China made Benchmark appear more comparable to the Chinese Communist Party.
1:49:06
Uh and this is a quote hats off to Bill Gurley he won't be attending this year's forum. Mr. S Bruhub said Mr.
1:49:12
Gurley did not respond to a comment.
1:49:14
Um, anyways, I don't think uh Bill Gurley needs to respond to this because he's no longer an active GP at Benchmark.
1:49:24
Uh, but it's still is a funny fun to see having some fun taking shots.
1:49:30
Uh, le let's move on to the Doge story.
1:49:33
Uh, this is probably a good place to close out.
1:49:34
Katherine Bole says, "These kids are so hardcore. No weekends.
1:49:36
They know they're racing against a media and political clock that won't thank them for their service. No exaggeration.
1:49:43
This is the most inspiring effort in government of our lifetime.
1:49:46
Long doge and we got lots of great photos hitting the timeline.
1:49:51
Luke Ferur looking fantastic in a suit and tie. Cody, fellas in control.
1:49:56
And lots of people are coming out.
1:49:58
Atlas says, "That's my best friend.
1:50:00
We have been following each other on X.
1:50:02
com for years at this point, by the way." I love that.
1:50:04
And uh August, if you've been following if if if you've been mutuals, you know, with somebody for a few years, you're basically best friends. I agree. I agree. Yeah. I mean, DC was packed.
1:50:16
I mean, Ryan Peterson was doing Senate Bean Soup reviews, having fun, meeting with senators.
1:50:21
Uh, Nvidia Jensen Wong announced a $500 billion investment to build AGI in the US.
1:50:27
Kind of a continuation of that uh Stargate announcement.
1:50:32
And, uh, yeah, just this is separate going on.
1:50:35
Separate from this is separate. Okay. Yeah.
1:50:37
It just turns out $500 billion is a nice round number that everybody tends to gravitate towards.
1:50:45
But you know, Stargate was open AI plus MASA plus a handful of other players also announced by Trump, but this was announced directly by uh Jensen uh who uh yeah was was all over Hill and Valley this week, which was cool.
1:51:04
So, what are the other top stories we need to cover before we get out of here?
1:51:08
Uh, GTA 6 has been delayed to 2026.
1:51:11
Uh, pour one out for the gamers.
1:51:14
A little moment of silence for all the gamers.
1:51:16
Um, I think at this point, yeah, this is brutal.
1:51:19
You can actually between family and work.
1:51:21
By the time GTA 6 drops, I will not have any time to play it, which is very sad because I played GTA 5 a lot when it came out in what, 2012 or something.
1:51:32
Also in the news went from 100 million ARR to 300 million ARR in four months. That's massive. Congratulations to them.
1:51:41
And the Neurolink team has a FDA breakthrough designation uh device designation for speech restoration.
1:51:46
Uh and Elon says congrats to the Neurolink team. So congratulations. Uh that's great. Any other the last one?
1:51:53
Um the CIA released two videos in Mandarin. This is very important.
1:51:59
aimed at recruiting Chinese officials. Oh yeah.
1:52:03
Uh and John Ratcliffe said, "One of the primary roles of the CIA is to collect intelligence by recruiting assets that can help us steal secrets."
1:52:09
So being very, you know, going to CIA is just going direct here, you know, being very explicit.
1:52:17
So if um doubt doubt this would be the case, but uh uh if you're uh a Chinese official listening to this uh and you want to help America, head over to CIA onx and get in touch with them.
1:52:34
We also have one last uh review.
1:52:34
Uh we've said for a long time, leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify and we will read it on the show. Um, thank you.
1:52:46
Uh, my favorite place to get technology and business news.
1:52:48
Nowhere else can I get such varied topics.
1:52:50
This review is brought to you by taholifeaggency.
1:52:54
com, the best place to get life insurance.
1:52:56
And this is from my uh nextdoor neighbor, Murf. So, shout out to Murf.
1:53:03
I uh I realized a couple years ago that I should probably have a life insurance policy because I'm an adult with uh a family. Yeah.
1:53:12
And uh I went to Murf and uh he's the best. So um shout out to Murf.
1:53:21
Thank you for the five star review. You're the man.
1:53:22
I will see you probably uh at some point later today. Amazing.
1:53:27
And we will see the rest of the the audience on Monday.
1:53:29
So, thank you for listening to this show.
1:53:32
We hope you have a fantastic weekend and we'll see you on Monday. Goodbye. Yep.