TBPN LIVE | Monday, March 24 — searchlore

TBPN LIVE | Monday, March 24

Published Mar 25, 2025

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[Music] Let's go.

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You're watching TVPN Live.

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It is Monday, March 24th, 2024.

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We are live from the Temple of Technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. This show starts now.

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We got a great show for you today, folks.

0:15

Thanks for saving me there, John. How's your morning? I wasn't quite sure.

0:19

I was too focused on my routine this morning.

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I forgot to focus on the job at hand. Yep. Which is to do the show.

0:26

Uh, but I woke up morning at 5:50. You woke up at 4:50. That's right.

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There's a guy online who woke up at 3:40. He's doing 3:40.

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I mean, there's real alpha.

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If you're a morning routine guy and just getting up, if that's your identity, just be the be the boss. Be the final boss.

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If you're going to film it, you got to get up even earlier to talk to your cinematographer.

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Hey, can you get me in the building?

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Set up the cameras for every single shot.

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Uh but a fantastic very strategic to start your day at midnight. Yep.

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When you know the clock strikes uh you know 12:01 just just get into it.

1:05

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

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Just to be super ready for the next day. Yeah.

1:14

Uh, but we are of course talking about Ashton Hall, the viral influencer, fitness influencer who has a bizarre morning routine where he dunks his face in uh, ice water and rubs banana on his face.

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But uh, respect for the hustle.

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What we really care about is that he's moving markets.

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He's moving markets and he's also moving uh, views.

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He has pulled basically a billion views, become a celebrity overnight.

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He already had millions of followers on Instagram. It's now at 8. 8.

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I'm sure if I open it up now it's even higher.

1:42

Uh he posted what's interesting is that this broke containment.

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So this video he's been posting on Instagram for years. Yeah. This broke containment.

1:50

It it has you've probably seen some of his other videos where he's running with the Gwagon and it's always always great.

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But this video was art and so it broke out in a completely different way.

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It was actually not even posted by him on X.

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It was posted by tips for men fashion essentials luxury.

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Uh and it has almost a billion views.

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uh 100,000 quote tweets, something like that.

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And it's fascinating the way it's structured just to be the most viral thing possible.

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I mean, he's obviously very muscular and jacked and then you have this weird repeating like imagery of the Saratoga blue bottle of water that he loves.

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He dunks his face in ice, which which to be we figured this out.

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It's not it wasn't sponsored by Saratoga.

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He was just appreciating just a fan of it.

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Just appreciating business.

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Just wanting to put them on. Yeah.

2:45

Um there's a bunch of other funny things where as you dig into the video, there's just more and more Easter eggs like at at 6 a. m.

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or something, he dives into the pool, but as he's walking up to the pool, you can see that there's a no diving sign. Did you see that one? I didn't see that.

2:59

I saw that he was in the air for four minutes.

3:02

That one's really funny, too.

3:05

So, like the editing is genius.

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And clearly the the it's crazy because like the cinematographer and the editor on this is genuinely a generational talent in terms of social media.

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You don't think it's him? No, it's not him. He has a team. Really? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

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He he has a team of like three.

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I figured he was just setting up the camera. No. No.

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You can actually see the other videographer in there because he has a team of like three people.

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And in one of his Instagrams, I I went on a little deep dive. Yes.

3:29

I went on a little deep dive and he and he said like if you want to be a successful online coach, he referenced Alex Heroszi and he said you need to you need to build a team and of course his his the product that he sells is help you build that team to become the the the fitness coach or the online influencer, right?

3:48

This is kind of like a meta level of like he's the boss's boss. He's the coach.

3:52

He's a he's a he's a course seller who helps you sell courses effectively.

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But uh but he talks about you need to start by getting a social media team around you.

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Uh a great person that can film you constantly so that you're posting every single day.

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Then you need a appointment booker who just schedules appointments with clients like your leads.

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Then you need the closer who gets on with super high energy and is like yes like like this is going to transform you like get ready to put your That's not you. No, he's not involved.

4:22

Uh, and then and then they get them to download an app and then the app says here's where your workout routines are, here's where your diets diet is.

4:28

And then yes, Ashton will get on a Zoom call with you like once, but like he's scaling his business out and so he can't possibly be on Zoom with, you know, 50,000 fitness clients.

4:41

Uh, but they can watch his content and they can be in his program that he's overseeing as essentially the CEO of this training corporation, which is probably doing fantastically well.

4:48

He says he hasn't made $10 million yet.

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But he is uh well into the seven figures which so he's not building in public.

4:56

He's sort of like partially he's talking about it.

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I mean you never really know what these guys if they're lying.

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But I totally believe that he's making millions of dollars.

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Like I I think there's no It would be impressive if he wasn't making millions attention and he has deals.

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He has brand deals as well.

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Um I think he has a shoe deal already.

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Uh and I wouldn't be surprised if Saratoga Water partners up with him as well because he's done fantastically for that brand face of Saratoga.

5:18

The news today is that the morning LMO, the morning routine guy, really added 1 billion to the stock of the water he drinks.

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Uh it's up 10% before hours.

5:29

Saratoga is actually privately owned by another company, but people are still buying it.

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We bought I'm just looking now.

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It's actually basically flat. I guess it popped out.

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It popped out of the gates and then think that it's not going to be Lindy stick around.

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Uh it is a very interesting question of how do you seize the moment on mega virality.

5:48

Uh he is not like the hawka girl where he was unknown and then he went mega viral.

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He already has a machine to convert all this. Yeah.

5:57

So I wouldn't be surprised if we see him do a whole host of of interviews and podcast tour off of this.

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He already has millions of followers and a complete funnel with a team where he can capture and monetize.

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I think that was part of the problem with Haley Welch, the Hawk to a girl, was that she became famous and then had to go do podcasts and then go and set up a podcast of on her own and then set up a business around it and start making money from it.

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She wasn't equipped to capture all that attention and all that value immediately.

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And so that's why probably when she heard, hey, this crypto thing is interesting, she launched the coin and then that went very poorly.

6:32

So, uh, Lulu, who will be on the show later today, says she's sad to see the Saratoga X account sleep through this.

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Most posts, most recent posts are from 2022 in their hashtag soup.

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You're missing the moment. Get back in the game.

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You have three more hours before this vanishes vanishes into the sands of internet history.

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And uh, yeah, they don't even have their most recent bottle design on there. It's rough. Pretty amazing.

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You can get almost a billion views at this point with uh, for free. Yep. For your product. Yep.

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So my question for Lulu, which we'll get into with her, is does Saratoga actually need to do anything in this case?

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Like if if case in point, like the viral video of Ashton, the one that kicked all of this off, wasn't even posted by him.

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It wasn't even an example of him going direct. He posted on Instagram.

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Tips for men posted it on X and that's the one that went viral. Doesn't matter.

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The value still acrrues to him.

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Does Saratoga need to We need to go study the tips for men account because Oh, it's I don't know what the because they've posted other stuff and they get like 10 likes and then this one was like this.

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Yeah, it's one of those accounts.

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Yeah, it's just like it's kind of just like slop.

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Cool images sometimes some interesting stuff, but you know, it's it's very high volatility because it's just a an anonymous like out feed the algorithm account.

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Um, so my question for Lulu is like what do we want to see exactly?

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Let's try and concretize that more because if Saratoga just came out and we're like we're like, "Oh yeah, like this is cool."

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Like, you know, maybe that gets some virality, but it's not going to be a billion views.

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They've already got the billion views in their product.

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They've probably captured most of the value.

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Um, like what do we really want to see from them?

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This is a company that's been in business since 1872. Let's remember.

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Um it's not like the founder's gonna come on and be like, "Yo, yeah, like let me This is a whole other This is a whole other story, but uh at one point, one of my favorite bottled water brands is um uh uh Mountain Valley." Yeah. Popular. It's the green bottle. Sure.

8:27

I looked, they like at one point like filed for an IPO or something like that and they didn't go public.

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So, I looked at some of their numbers and however bad you thought the business of selling bottled water is, it's worse.

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Like they they at one point with one of their SKs did 10 million of revenue. Mhm.

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10 million like and they had $100,000 in margin on it.

8:49

Oh, that's it's like just just don't% yourself just stop that business activity, you know?

9:03

There there's got to be like better ways to make uh 100k.

9:05

But anyway, speaking of tips for men, uh I got a tip for men. Get a sleep.

9:11

Nights that fuel your best day is turn any bed into the ultimate sleeping experience.

9:15

If you're trying to wake up at 4:00 a. m. , 3:00 a. m. , 2:00 a. m. , 1:00 a. m.

9:19

, you're going to need an eight sleep.

9:20

It'll help you wake up earlier and get on your I actually did wake up on my eight sleep at 3:00 a. m. this morning.

9:26

I assumed it was time to wake up. I checked the clock.

9:28

I'm like, "Ah, got to go back to bed at least for an hour and a half."

9:33

Well, I'm glad you were up early because you got to experience the stock market open, which was fantastic.

9:40

Let's hear it for the stock market, folks. Let's hear it. It's fantastic. Um, a massive rally. Stocks are up.

9:48

The Dow gains around 500 points on tariff optimism.

9:50

This is from the Wall Street Journal.

9:52

Import investors are welcoming the latest pivot on tariffs uh with the US set to limit the range of import levies it introduces next week.

9:59

US stock benchmarks started the week solidly higher.

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The S&P inched up last week, snapping a four-week losing streak, partly driven by uncertainty caused by President polic.

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Many people are saying that this is related to tariffs.

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But, you know, on the other side of this, it is very possible that the market is reacting to Ashton's routine going viral.

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And if you can imagine if everybody just started, you know, uh, started consuming products at 3:45 a. m.

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versus waiting until it would be a big boost to consumer adoption. Yeah.

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Just a big consumer confidence for sure.

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consumer consumer confidence overall spending.

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It is hilarious watching his routine and being like, "This guy has been up for 5 hours and he still hasn't started work.

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It's like so much time before anything."

10:42

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

11:13

Yeah, he's probably taking it a little bit too far, but I do I do think there is some truth in there.

11:19

He actually laid out his reasoning for waking up so early and he said like you should be up from 4 to 8. You will be unbothered.

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There will be no one else bothering you so you can really get deep work done, which is probably true whether or not it's just this crazy morning routine.

11:32

Um, but even if you're just answering emails, it's probably productive.

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and he was saying that uh you will be self- selecting you'll be selecting yourself out of the the you know 10 pm to 2 am crowd which is usually filled with drinking and partying and all these things that kind of just set you back both physically and mentally.

11:51

So, I think there's some truth in what he's saying.

11:53

And if you follow his protocol, I mean, yeah, it's going to be a little silly rubbing banana all over your face, but you'll probably be, you know, closer to higher performance than the doing the opposite of what he's doing, right?

12:05

I think my point of view on it is that like it seems like willpower is one of those things that the more uh willpower you use, the more that you get. Yep.

12:15

But it's almost it's maybe not a perfect rule because if you spent all your willpower in the morning like hammering through this like you know multi-step routine and then you're like you get to the email and you're like actually doing my email is a lot less fun than like jumping in the cold pool. Exactly.

12:32

So maybe you should just start and do the stuff that takes a lot of willpower and then do the jump in the pool in the afternoon. Right. Yeah.

12:37

I mean he probably could get 90% of his workout done in like an hour instead of five. Yeah.

12:44

But I mean, he's a fitness guy.

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Like, he he needs to be doing fitness. Yeah.

12:47

And I also respect his game of of what is the most uh viral thing that I could do from 3:45 to then. It's fantastic. It's it really is art.

12:57

And I think it's it's just shows you how extreme the power law can be on social media.

13:03

I think that uh we should spend this week and make the TB version of it. I like that.

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And roll it out by Friday.

13:12

Uh well, back to tariffs.

13:12

The important thing um Trump said he would impo impose tariffs to match those aimed at the US by trading partners.

13:18

Uh the planned reciprocal action looks set to be more targeted than originally thought.

13:23

The Wall Street Journal reported uh the administration has narrowed its focus to about 15% of nations currently running persistent trade imbalances with the US.

13:35

Treasury Secretary Scott Bassant calls this the dirty 15.

13:38

The sectoral tariffs are now unlikely to be announced on April 2nd.

13:43

Though the measures under consideration still amount to a shock to world trade, they fall short of the worst case economic scenarios investors have been girding for.

13:51

And so, uh, another classic economic story where the initial headline news is very bad and then pull back and then you get to something that's a little bit more reasonable.

14:01

So, hopefully it shakes out.

14:03

Hopefully all of the companies that we're rooting for get through it and are able to make their products in safe places and deliver them to consumers affordably. That's right.

14:11

Well, if you're looking to trade the uh tariff news or get in on the action, head over to hedge. com.

14:21

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14:22

Multiasset investing, industryleading yields, trusted by millions. Go to public. com and sign up. Do it.

14:28

Anyway, uh 23 and me filed for blank bankruptcy. Yep.

14:31

Uh, we got some news from Delian, friend of the show.

14:32

He says, "Out with the old, in with the new."

14:37

Keon over at Nucleus is building the new 23 andme.

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And the old 23 andme has filed for bankruptcy.

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Uh, he Keon says, uh, Blockbuster has collapsed.

14:49

It's time for Netflix to rise.

14:49

The number one greatest detail with that is currently being missed from the story is the chart below.

14:55

When 23 andMe launched in 2006, it cost about $10 million to read all of someone's DNA, a whole genome test.

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So 23 and me, hence the technology 23 used missed millions of genetic markers that could dramatically shape someone's health and future family.

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23 and me use something called shotgun sequencing.

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They basically blast all the DNA away and use and use a bunch of averages to guess what your genome's like.

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They don't actually read out a single strand of DNA. Yeah.

15:19

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

15:26

Y um so we're glad to take the sniper approach. Yes. Yes.

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And uh so now this whole genome test cost a few hundred.

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We can now finally bring to everyone a true DNA health test, family planning, disease risk, and he starts shilling for his company, which we love.

15:42

So good luck to you, Keon.

15:44

Let's read from uh the co-founder Annie uh Ann Wjiki.

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Uh she says uh the 23me and me special committee released news today indicating their plan to take the company through chapter 11.

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While I'm disappointed that we have come to this conclusion and my bid was rejected, I am supportive of the company and intend to be a bidder.

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I have resigned as the CEO of the company so I can be in the best position to pursue the company as an independent bidder. She wants it back. I love it.

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19 years ago when I co-founded 23 andme, the direct to consumer industry did not exist and most people had no idea they would ever want to see their genome. So much has changed.

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There's now a thriving direct to consumer industry.

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Over 15 million people have been 23 andme customers.

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These customers are continuing to learn about their family relationships and how to optimize their health thanks to the incredible team of individuals at 23 and me.

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And this is a pretty interesting bidding process.

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So uh lots of people came out in support of uh Keon submit an unsolicited sort of bid.

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He was talking about bidding months ago.

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We'll see what actually happens.

16:43

I don't think he's quite at the scale where he could just buy this off of his own balance sheet, but you know, he is a growing company and there's always the chance of a bigger round and a bunch of big investors stuff. It's possible.

16:57

Bology came out in support.

16:57

Selene uh from Loyal came out in support uh talking about how inspiring the leadership at 23 andme has been and it really was a formative company in the you know 2010s basically.

17:08

Um what's interesting is that Wilmanitis has been beating this drum for a long time about hey 23 and me has a lot of genetic data.

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Let's not let this fall into the hands of an adversary country.

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So yeah um I'm sure there will be a lot of questions about uh who buys this and where the data goes.

17:27

And if you're if you have 20 if you did 23 and me maybe like 15 years ago as like a Christmas present like you might want to export that data and then delete your account and make sure that they remove it from their servers.

17:37

um just so that you're not your data is not up for sale at some point. I don't know.

17:43

It's not health advice, but it seems like a reasonable thing to do.

17:45

And I do believe that if you ask them to delete your genome, that is the I would imagine that the core asset value of the business is the genetic data of the 15 million people that have used it or I don't think so.

18:01

I I mean I think the core asset is really just like getting people to come pay 100 bucks for something.

18:07

PE fund is saying, you know, look, we can buy this, we can No, I don't think PE funds are thinking that.

18:12

I think maybe some venture investors might be thinking that in terms of let's train a custom.

18:16

I think Keon is thinking that, but I don't think private equity is thinking that.

18:19

I think private equity is thinking, okay, it has this much revenue, people kind of like there's a thousand customers that come in every week and buy this thing that's a hundred bucks and here and here's the profit margins.

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Can we strip out any of the costs?

18:30

Can we actually make this work?

18:32

Um, I don't think people are are are thinking about this trove of genetic data because it's it's it's very hard to monetize at this point.

18:40

It's not like, okay, Reddit is for sale and you can just take the Reddit data and immediately train an LLM and boom.

18:45

No, there's going to be so much scrutiny on this acquisition and who buys it, how what they what they intend to do with it.

18:54

there's millions of Americans and I guess people globally that are going to be uh have have you know want to have a say in what kind of happens.

19:04

So and so uh the Wall Street Journal reports that 23 andMe said that there will be no changes to how it stores manages and protects customer data.

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Any buyer of 23 andMe will be required to comply with applicable law with respect to the treatment of customer data.

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And then they immediately move on to the next segment uh in this in this Wall Street Journal article.

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How do I delete my 23 and me account data?

19:25

But saying and then it's very clear.

19:26

It's like log into your account, go to the settings section, click delete data, permanently delete data.

19:31

So you can go do that if you want.

19:34

Anyway, what will happen to the genetic data in a bankruptcy sale uh certain in certain bankruptcy cases, a judge can appoint a consumer privacy onmudsbin onbudsman who makes a recommendation on whether a bankrupt company should be allowed to should be allowed to sell consumers private information.

19:48

This happened when LA lab testing startup Ubiome filed for bankruptcy in 2019.

19:53

The courtapp appointed one uh who ultimately recommended approval of the sale of personal data. So watch out.

19:59

You might get your data sold.

20:02

Anyway, did you have something else to say?

20:04

Yeah, I I I was just going to highlight that.

20:06

It it seems like a very real possibility.

20:10

Yeah, I I think that an uh would have come out and said there is no scenario in which a company buys 23 and me to then sell your data to other companies.

20:21

She would have been very explicit about that. Yep.

20:23

So the fact that she's not being explicit about that and then they're highlighting this Ubiome uh case where they did sell the data case where they did sell the data, I would I would just I think that the safe thing to do is assume uh your genetic data will be sold uh to the highest bidder. Yeah.

20:36

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

20:48

That's that's my recommendation. Huge alpha there.

20:50

It's kind of like training an LLM.

20:51

You want to put out a lot of content online.

20:54

Put your genetic data in 23 and me. Yep.

20:56

Um do whatever you want to influence if you have to.

21:02

Uh well, if you don't want to go bankrupt, what should you do, Jordy? Run on ramp. ramp. com. Time is money. Save both.

21:09

Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place.

21:12

Uh don't go bankrupt, people.

21:14

Manage your expenses, manage your finances, get on ramp. It's that easy. Anyway, time is money.

21:19

Should we move on to the uh the drama that's tearing up the timeline?

21:24

Timeline timeline is was really in turmoil this weekend.

21:28

We got a post from Nico over at Default.

21:30

He says, "This is like Kendrick versus Drake for people who know React.

21:34

And it's because Amjad, who's coming on the show, is beefing with GMO from Versel, who's also coming on the show.

21:41

Uh, and we will try and take you through a little bit of this back and forth.

21:43

Uh, and I just lost power to my John needs a new battery. [Music] Um, yeah.

21:51

So, this you've got new batteries here, right? You're good. Uh, yeah.

21:56

So, this was tearing up the timeline over the weekend.

21:57

Uh we also tried to get um a third third party we did show Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince you're invited on the show please come on if not today maybe later this week.

22:11

Um but uh Amjod took some shots at Verscell.

22:14

So basically the the we we should start by setting the table with exactly what what's happening here.

22:18

Um it all started because there was a a vulnerability found in Verscell.

22:23

And so uh Versell is a uh web hosting service for uh Nex.

22:31

js apps which is an open source uh React framework that they maintain.

22:37

Um and so uh research suggests that Verscell faced criticism for unclear communications about the vulnerability.

22:43

The drama center centers around a critical vulnerability CVE 202529927 in Nex.

22:50

js disclosed around March 22nd. That's two days ago.

22:53

came out on a Saturday and uh this allowed attackers to bypass middleware authorization checks.

22:59

This affected versions of Nex.

23:01

js using middleware with next start and output standalone but applications hosted on Verscell, Netlefi and Cloudflare were not as were stated as not affected.

23:12

And so Verscell's CEO Gier Moro uh acknowledged communication missteps especially with key industry partners and committed to improving processes.

23:21

Cloudflare led by Matthew Prince released a tool to migrate product projects from Verscell to Cloudflare Savage possibly to capitalize on the incident.

23:29

So he's saying I think a little bit more than possible beaten beaten them when they're down saying hey there's a there's a vulnerability get out while you can.

23:36

Uh Replet under Amjad Msad uh highlighted their proactive scanning and patching of affected applications while expressing a preference for more open frameworks over nex. js.

23:47

And then of course there was a uh there was a back and forth there because uh Replet uses Nex.

23:51

js for their website and uh and so I was like how could you possibly come for us when you're using our open source framework and so uh public exchanges on X saw uh GMO accusing uh Matthew at Cloudflare of using quote childlike tactics and memes suggesting competitive tension.

24:09

Uh uh the CEO of Cloudflare often refers to GMO as the triangle boy or something like that because I guess the the logo for Versell is a triangle.

24:20

It's actually the aesthetics of Verscell are fantastic.

24:23

I I think we were talking about this earlier that the design's fantastic.

24:25

Um an ex post by Anselm IO noted attacks from Cloudflare and Replet on Verscell as being in bad taste, indicating a broader controversy.

24:34

Additionally, there was a mention of a significant customer switching from another company to Verscell, potentially heightening the rivalry.

24:38

Um, and so we can go into a little bit about uh the the the history here.

24:44

And I thought it might be good to give a little bit of an overview of Versel and then Replet and then Cloudflare all to tee up our guest which will be joining in 20 minutes.

24:52

So let's kick it off with Versel founded in 2015. Yeah.

24:57

One one other thing to highlight.

24:59

There was a post uh that you had flagged here from this guy Jer How do you know how to say this guy's name? Georgie Gurgley Olerars. I'm sorry. tried to say it right.

25:10

John John made no effort. It looks like gurgly. But uh is that gurgly? Gurgly or rose.

25:15

Up up up up up to recently.

25:18

If a vendor had an outage or security issue, their competitors would purposely not take advantage of this.

25:23

Would not badmouth the vendor or tell customers to switch at least publicly.

25:27

Feels like this is changing.

25:29

Riplet and Cloudfare are both doing this following the next uh JS CVE. Y and um yeah.

25:36

So anyways, I was talking to a friend and he said, "Open source and security fights always seem to lead to no winners and everyone looking worse." Yeah.

25:44

One one thing that I feel like is potentially broadly happening in tech is when when when there was so much internet to build and there was uh so many sort of like green field opportunities, it was very easy to have the sort of positive sum y mindset of there's plenty of market.

26:02

we're just going after these sort of legacy incumbents.

26:07

markets and then when you get into this sort of hyper competitive dynamic where there's a bunch of different substitutes yeah then you get like rippling deal issues right where it's like yeah we are going to spy and like try to steal customers you know that that our

26:21

competitors getting so I feel like this is just the evolution of software broadly where in other industries if a competitor has an issue their competitors will try to highlight it and use it to their advantage that's just business right Yep. Um, and it is it is

26:35

Um, and it is it is a little bit uh it's not necessarily win or take all, but it is kind of zero sum in the sense that like you're either on Cloudflare or Verscell.

26:43

And in many ways there's been this kind of upgrading process where maybe I mean the the story I think we'll get into is um you prototype and build like kind of almost like vibe code an app on Replet.

26:56

then you might take it a little bit more seriously and deploy something on Verscell which is going to be very fast and we'll talk about some of their clients but uh Mr.

27:04

Beast famously did a a merch drop on Verscell, drove hundreds of millions of of hits very quickly.

27:12

Verscell was able to manage it, but Verscell is on top of AWS and can be very expensive uh at scale.

27:17

And so Cloudflare might be the cheaper option when you go a little bit more professional.

27:22

And so they they play in similar markets, but they're all at different tiers.

27:26

and uh and so they they like to chirp at each other, especially with the coming wave of like AI and vibe coding and even less infrastructure, more abstraction.

27:34

Uh it's it's they they clearly are all coming for each other's markets.

27:38

And so, um over at Sharky says, "The Verscell team has been a great partner to WAP Engineering.

27:43

They are always available to debug and solve our complex critical issues.

27:46

Recently, we've hopped on several calls with their lead engineers.

27:49

They all care deeply about what they're building.

27:51

Excited for the future of Next."

27:53

And Paul Graham came out and supported Versel.

27:55

Uh, GMO said, "One of our main values at Verscell, iterate to greatness.

27:58

We're constantly learning, adapting, and improving.

28:02

We have an insatiable appetite for feedback.

28:04

The job is never finished.

28:05

Keep your asks and complaints coming. We're listening."

28:07

And PG says, "A sign of a sign of a company still run by the founder."

28:12

What hired CEO would solicit complaints?

28:14

And so, I think Vers I think Versell is doing a pretty good job of of managing this, but uh it's getting it's getting a little nasty on the timeline uh because people are are going back and forth.

28:24

Anyway, let's give a little background on Verscell. Uh, founded in 2015.

28:27

Uh, GMO Ralph Oh, he created socket io. I remember this. Socket.

28:33

io was a uh uh what what was it?

28:36

Websockets uh framework for doing like communication in the browser in real time.

28:42

So, you open a socket from my computer directly to yours.

28:44

So, instead of uh instead of going through a server and kind of roundtpping, I can communicate with you directly.

28:49

Great for chat apps, great for uh video and and anything where two people are communicating directly.

28:55

Lots of cool web apps came out of that around this time uh 20 2012 2015 era.

29:00

Uh he founds Zeit which was the precursor to uh Verscell with co-founders.

29:06

Uh the mission was to simplify global cloud deployments and streamline developer workflows.

29:11

So uh at the time you know you go to AWS and you have your application when you open up AWS you see a slate of like 75 different products that AWS has.

29:23

They have databases servers uh cloud storage S3 like long-term storage cold storage hot storage like all these different things and you have to decide what you need to build your app and so it's it's an infrastructure as a service infrastructure first product.

29:38

Now they do have Verscell competitors.

29:41

They have Heroku which is kind of a Verscell competitor in the sense that you Yeah.

29:46

And to be clear it feels like I mean Versel ate Heroku's lunch.

29:49

There was an era there was an era where I feel like every Y cominator company was on Heroku. I built on Heroku.

29:56

It was great and then it was okay everybody's building on for sale now and and basically it's a more expensive option but it allows you to come product first.

30:04

I just wrote the code and I want you to handle the scaling and I'm willing to pay hand over fist for it.

30:10

It'd probably be a lot cheaper to go direct and it's even cheaper to go below AWS at a certain point.

30:15

You wind up like you know these big LLM foundation model companies are building their own data centers right now.

30:20

They're not renting those from AWS because uh you get you save money as you go down the abstraction layer but you lose flexibility.

30:27

uh and so uh early product launches in 2016 they launched now a onecommand development service for static sites and NodeJS apps uh in 2016 October they released Nex. js 1.

30:38

0 0 which was an open- source React framework for serverside rendering and static sites.

30:45

Now React there was a whole battle in JavaScript frameworks around this time.

30:49

I don't know if you remember this but like jQuery was like the popular JavaScript framework.

30:51

People were debating should we use jQuery or or vanillajs and then um and then the the the JS frameworks got like more and more bloated.

31:01

Google came out with this great one called Angular which was it had the basically the model view controller like you could basically say on my front end I have an idea of data like I have on our website you have all of our sponsors listed there and there's like a row for ramp and a row for bezel and you pull those in and then as you're dynamically changing them the the front ends updating. Angular was really cool.

31:22

It allowed you to you had to learn it, but it was it was pretty performant.

31:26

And then Facebook came out with React and just like ate their lunch and and Angular went through this second version.

31:34

They came out with a new version.

31:35

It was it was much more complicated to use in my opinion.

31:37

And so React really took off. Next.

31:38

js is a framework for for React.

31:41

So they're layering on top here.

31:43

Uh and they wound up building an ecosystem around immutable deployments, preview environments, and serverless architecture.

31:49

architecture. though the idea that you don't need to think about what's happening on the back end and if a million people show up or a thousand people show up Versell will just send you a bill that scales but you don't actually have to go in and say okay I need 100 servers today instead of one

32:05

that's the whole that's the whole pitch and so in 2020 they rebrand to Verscell and they wanted to reflect a broader focus on developing preview and shipping uh they retain the triangular logo while adopting a name that suggests versatility acceleration and excellence and I got to Hey, Versel's website is the fastest site in the west. It is It is hilariously quick.

32:24

It puts every other site to shame and they're they're obviously just like flexing the power of their product. But go go go to versell.

32:33

com and just click around. It's almost addicting.

32:35

when I when I figured out these like CDNs and you could basically build the entire app and then deploy it onto a CDN so that when someone hits your hits your website for the first time, they're not pulling it from your server on AWS in Virginia, they're pulling it from the local server that's just like a couple blocks away from them and it's much faster.

32:53

from them and it's much faster. uh I was really hooked on it and but at the time if you wanted to deploy your whole site to uh CloudFront which is AWS's product or Cloudflare which we'll talk about later uh it it was a lot of work like you had to bake everything down into

33:07

HTML and make sure it was served just like a single file and there were no server calls uh and it was very difficult but it was a magical experience when you click when you click on the link and it just loads immediately it's it's amazing let's go

33:19

through some funding milestones uh Verscell does a series A so they were kind of grinding for like five years doing this open source stuff 10-y old company 10-y old company but in 2020 things start working they rebrand they raised $21 million from Excel and Nat Freriedman what do you know he's in

33:35

there early of course GitHub classic goat uh series B he they get $40 million from Google Ventures series C this was a that was that a was a co round too yeah oh yeah yeah I mean maybe announced m maybe I'm saying if it was announced in April it was getting done March Yeah. Yeah. Uh well, in series C, June 2021, Yeah.

33:54

Uh well, in series C, June 2021, $und00 million at $1. 1 billion valuation.

34:01

Series D, just six months later, they get 150 million from GGV Capital.

34:05

The valuation goes up to 2. 5 billion.

34:08

And then series E just last May, 250 million from Excel from from Excel. Uh company valued at 3.

34:12

25 billion and they hit over a hundred million in ARR and they have over a million monthly Nex. js users.

34:19

And so we can go through some of their uh technology.

34:23

Um they've you know they've built their whole their whole game plan is build Nex.

34:28

js into the best React front-end framework that everyone kind of needs to use.

34:33

Now this is a now that is a controversial statement. There's a lot of Nex.

34:36

js haters out there that say, "Hey, you should just be writing React.

34:39

Why are you why are you messing around with Nex. js?

34:42

It's going to lock you in a box."

34:43

Um and then there's a lot of people that might say, "Hey, uh you could use Nex.

34:47

js, but why don't you just host it on AWS?

34:48

you know, just figure it out, figure out the uh the actual uh implementation.

34:53

And so they also launched the vzero tool for generating UI components.

34:57

Uh they wound up partnering with AWS to bring in some AI features, which we'll need to talk to GMO about.

35:04

And in January 2025, they acquired Tremor, a React component library for data dashboards.

35:09

And so, uh, they've, you know, they've built their team.

35:13

They've made some acquisitions.

35:15

They've done some partnerships.

35:15

And now they have a pretty diverse, uh, list of customers.

35:20

Airbnb, GitHub, Uber, Nike, Washington Post, Under Armour, Fanatics, Hashi Corp, Century, AO, uh, OpenAI, Perplexity, uh, Chick-fil-A reduced build time from 25 minutes to 5 seconds. Love it. You love to see it. Wow.

35:34

And uh and uh Stripe developed a viral Black Friday promotional site in just 19 days. You'll love to see it. And Mr.

35:44

Beast, as we mentioned, also Absolute Dogs.

35:46

Yeah, I think uh most of the sites that I've been involved with building over the last few years were Versel. Yeah. Based. No, of course.

35:58

because you you want to just get your product out quickly, worry about the scaling later, and at the low end, optimizing your infrastructure is just not a key cost.

36:06

Like the server bill is going to be so much lower than what you spend on designers or implementations.

36:12

So, um you should just be able to to not really worry about optimizing your infrastructure or your servers.

36:18

And so, uh so that's so so that's kind of where Verscell is.

36:22

I'm very interested to hear where Giermo is planning to take the company because uh now they're they're talking about well we're going to host uh anthropic APIs.

36:32

We're going to host LLMs at the edge and deploy and scale those for you.

36:37

those for you. So, you should in theory be able to have a front-end website that has an interaction with an LLM and it's not needing to go call back to some anthropic server because one of the most timeconuming things if you're wrapping one of these APIs if you're an API if you're a wrapper is okay I take the

36:57

user's request the user said you know write me a funny joke I take it to my server and then I take from my server over to OpenAI server and then I get the response from OpenAI back to my server back to the client And that's that's just extra round trips and Verscell's all about speed and you can't have that. It's unacceptable. That's right. Well, It's unacceptable. That's right.

37:12

Well, let's should we move on to a company that's been going even longer, I guess.

37:19

Or I mean, I guess the story has been going on for longer. This is Replet.

37:23

They were officially founded in 2016, uh, basically the same year as Versell.

37:27

Very different product approach.

37:27

Um, but Amjad Msad has been in the development technology world for years.

37:34

In 2019, uh he wanted to build a browserbased coding environment, a Google docs for coding.

37:42

Uh he envisions a ripple which is a read evaluate print loop running entirely in the browser.

37:46

Normally you have to open up the terminal, get install Python, but what if you could just do all this in the web?

37:52

It would enable you to share these and then obviously like add a bunch of features over time.

37:55

Uh so he released an open source version in 2011 called JSRPLE to allow interactive coding in multiple languages.

38:02

uh brought some people on the team, brought some design stuff and then he worked for companies like code academy and Facebook he built development tools there.

38:11

Um then JSRP used uh used to power in browser tutorials at Udacity and code academy proving the concepts value.

38:18

So if you go to code academy and you were learning Python or learning JavaScript, you would be able to write the JavaScript and then also evaluate it and run it in the browser.

38:29

uh which was which was very fun and it definitely helped people learn this stuff.

38:33

Uh and so the platform grew to over 100,000 users primarily students and self-taught coders.

38:39

Uh he founds replet in 2016 with some co-founders initially bootstrap with personal savings and early comm community uh community trans uh traction.

38:49

Uh they received uh seed investment from Bloomberg Beta and initially targets both the education market coding classes and hobbyist developers.

38:57

And so Replet has always been about like democratizing programming much less about hey let's let's abstract away the complexities of AWS infrastructure.

39:07

It is abstracting away complexities but it's taking a much more product focused uh approach and and that's led to you know a lot of a lot of fans basically a lot of like solo developers indie developers have really come out in support of replet throughout the years.

39:24

PG's been a big supporter.

39:27

Um, and so, uh, in 2017, it's interesting, you know, both these companies, uh, felt like they exploded onto the scene in that 2020 era, but totally they actually had been toiling away for almost more than a decade before that.

39:42

So, it was like these sort of like 10-year overnight uh, successes.

39:48

I mean, he didn't get into YC until winter 2018.

39:50

Um and but then once he was in YC he quickly closed a $4.

39:54

5 million seed round from Andre.

39:57

They surpassed a million registered users and uh developers started launching hundreds of thousands of projects.

40:04

And so um the focus is really on these interactive multiplayer coding kind of like Figma for software development writing even backend code any scripting um multiplayer functionality was really new.

40:20

There's GitHub integration, support for many programming languages. They raised $20 million.

40:24

The big moment really came in in 2021 when they got the absolutely right.

40:28

That that just really put that's a turning point.

40:30

March 2021 counting the table saying let's replet.

40:34

com moving away from theit. Go to snag.

40:37

com and reach out to our friend Rob. You want a great domain. I love it.

40:42

Uh so they upgrade the uh from the ACE editor to Monaco in 2017 later transitions to Codemir.

40:47

The move to codemir sparks community backlash which is later resolved with rapid bug fixes.

40:53

Uh there's series B funding in 2021. Another COVID round.

40:55

I remember when these were happening.

40:56

He raised 80 million at 800 million valuation.

40:58

The user base exceeds 10 million.

41:02

Infrastructure is scaled to handle massive growth.

41:03

And there was always this question of like of like is Replet for learning and testing or will someone actually build a real business on top of a replet app or something that they develop in replet.

41:16

uh is it more for for practicing and prototyping?

41:18

Is it a tool or is it a an infrastructure?

41:21

And I think as we talked about who what is the long-term customer base going to look like, right?

41:28

Is it is it the you know indie hacker who wants to create their first one to 10 apps or is it somebody who's if you look at their website now it's really oriented around uh this this similar thesis to like lovable which we talked about with Harry last week turning your ideas into apps with AI.

41:45

What do you want to create a website for your dream business, a habit tracker, an education app for your kids, etc.

41:49

So, um, kind of, you know, long-term this feels like, uh, the the user base could and and he he might not like me describing it like this, but it could look like something like what what Squarespace did for websites.

42:06

Hey, anybody can make a website and other platforms like that, but more so with anybody can make a website that actually has like CRUD appality. Yeah.

42:16

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

42:30

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

42:38

So yeah, and so uh Amjad and and Replet have launched a few things over the past few years.

42:45

They had a bounties marketplace for freelance coding tasks.

42:49

You could just put up a bounty and say, "Hey, I need this built and they had this massive community of like kind of indie hackers, kids who are learning."

42:56

was like, "Hey, let's give people the their first time making money with co, you know, by writing code."

42:59

Yeah, I thought it was a really cool really cool thing.

43:02

Uh, in September of 2022, they debuted Ghostriter, which was a competitor to GitHub Copilot, uh, something to help you help you uh, AI powered coding assistant essentially, fancy autocomplete, but extremely valuable in the context of Replet.

43:15

Uh, and then they partnered with Google Cloud in March of 2023 and quickly res secured a 97.

43:23

4 four series B extension reaching a $ 1. 16 billion valuation.

43:26

So up there with Verscell in the unicorn club.

43:32

Uh they continued rapid growth to over 20 to 30 million users and uh then they fully removed the education product.

43:41

The free starter plan limits new users to three public projects and they're kind of going up market trying to be more serious in like the business world.

43:49

Um they relocated their headquarters from San Francisco Soma to Fost Foster City and now they are over 150 employees with a sharper focus on professional and enterprise development.

44:00

Uh it says they remain committed to innovating in cloud idees and AI powered coding tools guided by the founders's original vision.

44:07

And so that's the story of Replet. We have four minutes.

44:09

Should we try and do some Cloudflare?

44:11

We got the biggest one yet, but we can kind of rip through this. Cloudflare. Let's do it. Found in 2009. Oh, wait. We got GMA on.

44:19

Okay, let's just bring him in right now. We'll do Flare after. Welcome to the show. How you doing, my man? Great. Thanks for having me.

44:26

I've been looking forward to this. Me, too.

44:27

I think everyone's looking forward to this.

44:30

There's drama on the timeline.

44:30

We need to have a TVPN segment.

44:32

We really appreciate you coming on.

44:34

Uh can you uh can you just give us like a breakdown of what's happening in the world of Verscell right now? Well, yeah.

44:40

Uh maybe to introduce Verscell too for those that are that are new to our company.

44:46

Uh Versell creates frameworks and infrastructure to deploy great web applications.

44:51

Uh we're super invested in open source.

44:54

We created a framework called Nex. js. Yep.

44:55

That powers a lot of the internet and we're very proud about it.

45:01

But we also have investments in a bunch of other open source projects.

45:02

Uh I have a long history of being involved in the JavaScript ecosystem, TypeScript ecosystem.

45:08

So if you're building a new application, uh Versel and XJS are are a pretty good choice for people. Fantastic.

45:14

And what's going on most recently?

45:18

Yeah, I mean, if you go in X, there's a lot going on.

45:20

Um, maybe the thing that started a lot of this was we got a ping from a security researcher about a uh potential security vulnerability on NexJS.

45:32

We get lots of this uh operating at the scale that that we're in.

45:35

We have millions of monthly active developers on XJS.

45:39

Uh tens of millions of applications deployed to the Verscell platform.

45:41

And so we get we get a lot of pings, but this one in particular was interesting because it was a potential off bypass, which you know in the security industry it's as bad of a bug as you could imagine, like bypassing login, sign up, things like that.

45:54

Um, we took a look at it.

45:57

Uh we we uh processed it through the queue, we remediated it, and then when we disclosed it to the world, uh you know, we we we could have done a lot better in how we disclosed it.

46:07

So um we we filed the CVE in partnership with GitHub uh which is the standard mechanism for how you notify every NexJS user on the planet whether they use Versell or not about this this vulnerability.

46:21

But the awesome thing about NexJS is that once you use NexJS you're actually not just getting the open source project XJS you're getting a huge ecosystem of of products with it that you can use that integrate really nicely into NexJS.

46:32

There are there are a lot of off partners a company like clerk stack off better off luchia in the open source ecosystem is awesome products and I think we should have notified those people before that CVE went out so they could have had the opportunity to like look at what the impact would have been to their projects and things like that.

46:54

Uh on the other hand, we did test internally like okay is Netifi which is another deployment option for Nex.

46:58

js uh affected and again we could have done a much better job at partnering with companies like Netlifi and Cloudflare who host Nex. js as well.

47:07

Um but it kind of became like a Twitter thing you know that like uh it it got big and then Cloudflare got involved.

47:17

I think you guys were just talking about it before I joined and uh yeah, there's some banger tweets being exchanged here and there.

47:22

Uh yeah, you're entertaining.

47:25

I'm I'm curious to get your read on it.

47:27

You you've been in the game for, you know, you founded socket uh back in the day.

47:31

Uh do you feel like the environment now there's le you know there's still a lot of internet to build and there's still a lot of opportunity but at the same time we have these sort of scaled businesses like Cloudflare and Verscell and things like that.

47:46

Do you feel like the environment today is like more hostile or emotionally charged than ever before?

47:51

Because there's, you know, people are there's now like sort of like the market's established in many ways.

47:55

It's not maybe going quite as quickly as it used to.

47:59

There's new opportunities, but it's yeah, it's like it's it's starting, you know, is is sort of more zero some environment making things a little bit more charged today. I think not.

48:10

I do think that on X people get really spicy.

48:12

I was very shocked that the CEO of uh Cloudflare came I mean he's he's the CEO of a public company and he came guns blazing uh even putting out like some like cringeworthy memes against Purcell which is a company that is very developer loved.

48:27

Uh we invest not just in XJS but we power for example the AI SDK which is the most popular way today in the JavaScript ecosystem to add AI to your product.

48:36

It has a million downloads a week. It's provider agnostic.

48:40

is devel deployment platform agnostic.

48:42

So to come after in in such a uh uh aggressive way I was I was a little taken aback.

48:48

Our style has always been if you look at my ex feed the thing that I love to do is highlight great products.

48:57

If you create anything great especially if you use an Xray I just love to say like look at this really cool thing. Yeah. Yeah.

49:04

I never talk about competitors.

49:06

I never uh especially like in in in a diminishing way. Sure.

49:11

But in this in this case, I had a reply because he's because he's saying um oh, if you want security, come to Cloudflare and the record shows that if you if you want security protection, come to Cloudflare.

49:25

There's a very mixed bag there, right?

49:27

There's a mixed bag and like I had to recover from the from the analysts of Cloudflare.

49:32

I did bring up cloud cloud bleed. Yeah.

49:34

Which legitimately was one of the worst thing that has happened to the internet.

49:38

You could I don't know if the audience knows but you could Google and literally find off tokens of different companies like Uber indexed by Google.

49:47

So that was an or by the way our bug was bad.

49:50

I'm not here to say like oh like whatever make excuses for middleware or whatever.

49:54

Our bug was really bad but theirs was catastrophic.

49:58

And you could and the attack the impact of the bug was googling.

50:02

It's like accessible to every the impact of our bug is actually very you know nuance and I'm super thankful to the researcher because it takes a lot of like thinking and reverse engineering to arrive to these conclusions.

50:15

Um but yeah to your point I think that it was uncalled for.

50:17

Uh we've tried to I think and we could get into like the speculation of why he would do such a thing.

50:24

We tried really hard to use Cloudflare. We were a customer.

50:26

We tried it out for a new compute product which coincidentally was edge middleware and it didn't work out for a number of reasons.

50:36

So maybe there was some soured relationships there as well that you know we we had to piece out of the of as a customer we had to build our own.

50:43

Uh but I can only speculate.

50:45

uh let's let's get into more of the positive and talk about kind of the future and and what the biggest opportunities you know that you feel like Verscell has in this sort of new probably the most you know most exciting time of of my life.

50:59

Uh John's, you know, a few decades older than me, so I I the internet and AI. It really is.

51:07

No, but yeah, let's talk about Yeah, let's let's kind of ignore the drama for a second and and I'd love to talk about uh the future.

51:12

Everyone loves drama, but my message to all the vendors and partners and people in the ecosystem would be the pie is about to get as large as we've ever seen in the history of technology. Mhm.

51:24

Verscell doubled the number of signups year-over-year, mostly due to the introduction of Vzero, which is our coding agent.

51:35

I don't think we've ever seen a technological platform shift of this dimension where every piece of software will be rebuilt and reimagined with AI.

51:45

and the pie is about to get so big that being paranoid about the size of your slice and taking cheap shots at your security competitor to me does signal shortsightedness on this AI opportunity.

51:59

In fact, um the ISDK is powering competitors to VZO. Mhm.

52:03

So today we uh one of our one of our partners announced um new email is like the B 0 for crafting email campaigns all built on open source technology that we've sort of taken from the zero and given back to the world.

52:18

And so and I also had a you should check it out.

52:21

I had a banger thread on X the other day.

52:26

Every single day I'm thinking here's a bunch of ideas of amazing products that you could create with AI that customers are so willing to buy.

52:32

I just actually interviewed uh we're at a company offsite orbo and I interviewed one of the greatest public company CEOs of our times.

52:42

I can't disclose who and I asked him what are your priorities for AI.

52:46

It's like oh we're completely reimagining the company across these three dimensions with AI.

52:50

I want to buy AI for this AI for this AI for this.

52:52

So to your point about the positivity is there is room for everybody.

52:57

uh uh there's all this amazing open source technology that you can use to create new products and new ideas.

53:02

I also believe part of my optimism is that in the beginning two years ago the there was maybe a belief that there was going to be one gigantic chatbot to rule them all.

53:14

uh like a sci-fi movie, you go to one computer or you talk to the room, hey computer, everything is computer or what I believed at the time and we actually this is why we started creating a lot of open source technology that there's going to be expert AIS focused products that cater to specific requirements and that's actually what's ended up happening right so onell we host companies like open evidence which is the chubby for medicine uh getgc.

53:40

medicine uh getgc.ai I which is like the chubbyd for lawyers um amazing products for finance like heavilia and so what's actually ended up happening is that there is a redistribution of wealth so to speak that's happening with AI there's also I call it sometimes the unbundling of

53:58

Google it's no mystery that a lot of companies or a lot of consumers sorry are not going to Google for certain queries and they're going to specialist products to answer like when I think knowledge I might go to perplexity or I might go to grock and do a deep search, right? So that unbundling of the one of

54:13

So that unbundling of the one of the largest companies and and information technology services in the world will create massive opportunities for startups and companies of all sizes.

54:23

So I really do think I share your optimism and and positivity beyond the drama uh that that happened.

54:27

One thing I always think about with Verscell is just like the focus on speed.

54:32

I feel like that's almost like the core brand tenant is just like I mean Jordy pull up Verscell. com.

54:41

so fast and that's the whole brand and I want to know uh what's the importance of like speed in AI deployments I know you're hosting AI but are you hosting AI at the edge or kind of delivering it in like a like a CDN like how how does that

54:56

work and how does that what impact does faster AI usage uh happen in like the consumer experience there's a couple things if you're running a business that you should know right off the bat number one a lot of traffic will shift towards answer engines. Mhm. I reported recently Mhm.

55:10

I reported recently that we see uh 5% of our versel signups that also happen to be some of the highest intent signups coming from Chad GBT. Mhm.

55:21

Which is up from being like 1% or less than 1% six months ago. And it's growing.

55:27

I didn't share the growth metric, but I'll share it now for you guys since I like you.

55:29

30 30% um month over month. Wow. Wow. That's insane.

55:35

I mean, so so so walk me through that.

55:37

people going to chat gpc asking how should I deploy this how what should I build it's recommending js recommending versel sama had a really good take and and also if you want to see a fast website I am very proud that we host openai.

55:49

com sama recently shared you might not want to learn so much coding or only coding you might just want to learn how to use AI which one of the artifacts of that and I love the claude artifact name I think it was one of the most important inventions as it hap has happened in AI in recent is that coding and writing code is an output of what you ask the AI.

56:12

So what's happening is people are asking what is the best way to build a website?

56:16

What is the best way to deploy?

56:17

I actually posted so we have a little tool at little playground. You can check it out. It's SDK. pell.

56:22

ai and you click playground you can ask a bunch of models what they think about you and that'll give you a glimpse into how the AIs are thinking.

56:33

M but not only how they're thinking, how they're directing the world's behavior and choices. I was very proud.

56:40

I shared a screenshot that I asked like four frontier models in parallel.

56:44

parallel. what's the best way to deploy and they all said verscell and I actually constrained it to like you can only you know like the classic thing you can only do one thing or I hurt myself like okay versel burcell versel verscell and so to me that was I actually didn't

57:00

know at the time I was just like like messing around in the weekend with the tool I think that's the canary in the coal mine of how you should be thinking about AI sending traffic to different places the consequence to our business is number One, SEO still matters. Sure. Sure.

57:17

So, one of our one of our customers, for example, sponsors this fantastic show, uh, RAMP, let's go.

57:21

They're in the business of being found.

57:23

And so, it's going to be through Google searches or it's going to be through these agents.

57:31

And so, the agents are still performing a web search.

57:33

So, you still want to be in good terms, so to speak, with the people that are like retrieving and crawling the internet, right? So, that's one thing.

57:42

And Versell really helps companies with SEO.

57:43

That's an interesting thing to think about.

57:45

Like it's interesting to think about Google over time.

57:49

If nobody's searching on Google, they just every link is paid for.

57:53

They sort of still have this sort of like I do wonder has the train left the station on SEO or is there still an opportunity for new companies to kind of bootstrap their way into AI recommendations?

58:05

And I also want to hear your second point.

58:07

Sorry for cutting you off.

58:09

No, no, it's it's totally fair.

58:09

off. No, no, it's it's totally fair. So I think what's still relevant is that quality content facts proof these agents will be I actually like also Elon's truth seeking AI goal because it really matters that you train a model that is subjective and is posttrained and truth

58:28

seeking right during pre-training you throw a bunch of data at it during post- training you like sort of like orient its behavior and this models and this is why I'm a big fan of open AI in the sense of open source And also in giving developers choice the AIS SDK lets you very quickly swap models. I think it's going to be very

58:46

I think it's going to be very important as a community as I'm not talking about entrepreneurs or business people.

58:51

I'm talking about as citizens of the internet we have to be very vigilant of the behavior of models the decentralization of AI.

59:00

decentralization of AI. Something that Versel deeply believes in is and we have a we have a template you can you can clone you can basically roll your own chat GPD within two clicks and we recently partnered with XAI to power the default model so you can go to chatellai

59:15

and you can basically clone and deploy your own chat GBD in your own domain name and so what would be great for society is if we all invest in massively decentralizing intelligence so that we're not at the behest of like the one truth center or or truth uh uh company of the world. Sure. Sure. Yeah. Sure. Sure. Yeah.

59:35

I mean it's one kind of question that comes to mind.

59:38

So you guys are powering openai. com and openai.

59:41

com somewhat recently has like very much reoriented around being a sort of like you know search bar answer engine.

59:48

And OpenAI right now is being priced like it's the next Google right at at $300 billion plus like that is the next Google.

59:56

You talked about sort of Yeah.

59:58

By the way, one comment on that because it's been super top of mind.

59:59

I actually think that's a brilliant design.

1:00:02

So I talked about how every piece of software will be rethought and rebuilt as an AI product.

1:00:06

What people will expect is that when they go to your product, there's an interface like that.

1:00:15

And I actually think that's really good design because they blended marketing content, which is what typically we think of as a website.

1:00:20

I sometimes dismissively call them e brochures. Yeah. Yeah.

1:00:24

To remind the team that we're not in this world to take a magazine and plaster it on the internet. The whole point of Nex.

1:00:30

js and Verscell that we bet on 10 years ago was a more dynamic web, a web that powered products.

1:00:37

And so what's brilliant about that design is that you're immersed immediately into the product experience and it's AI native and I think that's just a sign of things to come.

1:00:45

You're going to go to so many other products.

1:00:47

I mentioned the email one but and open evidence there's so many of those where the interface will be okay what do you need what do you want when you go to vzero.

1:00:57

dev dev the question that we ask you is what do you want to ship because we want you to convert an idea into an application.

1:01:04

So talk talk about uh the line between uh developers and non-developers, right?

1:01:10

It seems like it's sort of blurring today.

1:01:12

Versel's entire brand has been around building building products for developers that is the core of the mission.

1:01:18

Uh but is there a point in the future where uh and you have your coding agent now, right?

1:01:26

There's there's this full sort of like stack.

1:01:28

Is there a world in the future where you know you land on versell.

1:01:30

com and somebody that's not a developer can just type in what do you want to build a prompt right because like it seems like you know part of the drama if you extrapolate it out it's like there's you know real whoever becomes the aggregator for building new websites and apps will be incredibly valuable.

1:01:47

Yeah that was going to be my third point actually.

1:01:50

So the other huge opportunity for us is what we call agentic deployment infrastructure. Mhm.

1:01:55

So there's going to be all of these agents that create for every user on the planet.

1:02:00

And also to your question, I think that the TAM of what a developer is is going to so m I mean we're already seeing it in the numbers.

1:02:08

I'm already seeing it in the customer interviews.

1:02:10

I was chatting with a lady yesterday on the Xplatform, the everything app.

1:02:13

She was reporting feedback about VZ.

1:02:14

And at one point in the conversation, she goes like, "By the way, I want to be very clear.

1:02:18

I have no idea how to code.

1:02:19

idea how to code. I use BZero and I if I get stuck and I need some other like another another expert's opinion like go to another doctor I ask rock and she brings it back and forth between the two products and she's creating the reason that she was giving me feedback is she was saying like the app has gotten so

1:02:37

big what do you recommend and so people are like just having the the best time of their lives being able to create when they couldn't code before but going back to the agentic infrastructure think of it this way v0ero is automatically calling out to Forcell to create deployments to assign domain names in the future to even buy domains. Visual

1:02:56

Visual might even just say, "Hey, I thought of a banger domain name for your product. What do you think?"

1:03:01

Uh, and so we we're very excited to see the growth of this infra and and by the way that there's a defensibility to it that's really interesting, especially for people that are working in infra that are that are listening to this call.

1:03:14

I I'm very convinced that Viva coding will eat a lot of the world of creating front-end applications.

1:03:24

Meaning this AIS are so good at writing React and Tailwind and Nex.

1:03:28

js, it's actually shocking to me.

1:03:32

And I've been a front end engineer.

1:03:34

I started front engineering when I was 11 years old in Argentina.

1:03:37

And so I had my ego tied up to this thing of writing front-end code.

1:03:43

I contributed to a library called mood tools when I was 15 years old.

1:03:45

I was like like the kid that could do broad uh and and now I'm ready to like give up on part of my identity of like hey vzero is creating an opportunity for a lot more people to be like me and experience that joy of creating front ends. Totally.

1:04:00

Now what I'm not so sure about and you've seen all this uh conversations on X about security and vibe.

1:04:07

You can vive code but it's hard to vive debug. Yeah.

1:04:12

Yeah, I believe I believe that you don't want AI in your infrastructure just yet. Mhm.

1:04:17

We operate in 20 regions worldwide.

1:04:21

We reach dozens of cities through our pops in our CDN network.

1:04:24

pops in our CDN network. We have to maintain uptime for the world's most valuable properties from you know AI companies to cryptocurrency companies some uh presidential meme coins whatever you think of so much is going on on Verscell every second of uptime everything that can happen at this

1:04:48

platform is absolutely mission critical it's life critical so many healthcare companies banking on Verscell and so I don't want AI to necessarily messing with the foundational sort of infraend software that needs to ensure that these things run perfectly the train runs on time on the other hand and this is why

1:05:08

Karpathy I think coin vibe coding when you're exploring when you're creating when you're designing when you're crafting the interface that's where AI is completely dominating makes sense and now it's gaining full stack power so where it can integrate with that infrastructure So we recently partnered with companies like Subabase and Neon

1:05:28

and Upstach that they also hire those fracters that you know they might be using some AI but you know hopefully uh for our partnership they're very careful and but and and the and that creator that new creator is getting the best of both worlds that you you vibe code and you're working on rock solid foundations. Yeah, that makes sense. Can Yeah, that makes sense.

1:05:48

Can you talk a little bit about uh value acrruel in AI?

1:05:51

I know that there's been this debate over the model layer or the application layer.

1:05:56

You could even abstract that and now people are just saying I either want to be the aggregator, the chat GPT app that's installed on 100 million phones or I want to be an energy and get me get me shares in a nuclear company because I think everything else in the middle is going to be commoditized.

1:06:11

Uh you don't have hardware yet or or or your own infrastructure.

1:06:17

Uh does what you're seeing in AI change any of those decisions over time?

1:06:21

uh how are you thinking about just the different opportunities?

1:06:25

It seems like you're obviously going up market to be more of an aggregator where you could come to develop apps, but are you thinking about going down the stack further build training your own models, developing your own chips or like what does the far future look like for Verscell?

1:06:41

I really believe that the best metaphor for AI is what happened with the cloud, okay, and mobile, but it's going to be much bigger. Mhm.

1:06:48

And so if you look back at the cloud and we in this room have all studied it, there wasn't a particular player or category that had a lot of upside. It was all over.

1:06:58

It was the foundational infrastructure and hardware obviously and and we're very proud to partner with AWS to provide sort of that quote unquote hardware layer to Verscell as a global network.

1:07:10

There was a lot of upside for developers that quickly changed their behavior.

1:07:13

So this is very important by the way.

1:07:16

When I noticed AWS, I was very quick to dis luckily for me, I was very quick to dismiss the other DIY options that were available to me because I got so excited by the automation potential.

1:07:28

And there's merits to all solutions, but being an early adopter and riding the right wave can be transformational to your career.

1:07:38

Later on, it happened with React.

1:07:38

React was open source by Meta.

1:07:40

I believe it's one of their greatest inventions.

1:07:42

And I was also quick to adopt and I noticed its potential as the engine for what later became Nex. js.

1:07:50

And so I think my advice to people would be you know just adopt AI and see where you can add value.

1:07:57

I think the application layer is extremely exciting because the interfaces to AI as I mentioned will decentralize and unbundle.

1:08:04

There's going to be a lot of upset for agentic infrastructure.

1:08:08

So companies that know how to work well with not just humans but agents.

1:08:13

And that's a very that's a remarkable shift, right?

1:08:16

A lot of products have been so far created for developers, not for the agent.

1:08:21

You think of it as a representative of the developer.

1:08:25

You have to create products that are good for the representative of the developer. How do you uh Yeah. Yeah.

1:08:33

I was going to say how, you know, as a leader, how do you work with your team?

1:08:38

uh you know the a lot of people the sort of like highle leadership advice is like the CEO helps the team focus but then in the case of Verscell there's so many different areas of the business now and it seems like you're very focused on on serving your customers the developers and the sort of you know companies

1:08:56

building on Versell but at the same time you have like all these different bets uh how how do you kind of like prioritize internally and it seems like you're okay with just doing things in the way that you know Facebook releases React, you know, they've benefited from it, but they haven't nearly captured all the value from it. And so, it seems like

1:09:12

And so, it seems like you're okay with sort of you're very open to sort of releasing things and not it's less oriented around we need to, you know, capture 100% of the value that we create or Yeah, I think short-term obsession over value capture is is not the right recipe to build a generational company.

1:09:29

And I'm obsessed with growing the the size of the pie.

1:09:32

My number one allegiance is the web.

1:09:35

So when I was in Argentina, I was able to and this I you know when you're a kid and you try out lots of different programming languages, the thing that blew my mind is the URL.

1:09:46

In fact, if you look at the success of Versell so far, it really is about the success of of a URL.

1:09:51

Is that I thought, holy crap, Kubernetes is so hard, CDNs are so hard.

1:09:57

What if people could just deploy with one click or one press of a button and get back a URL of what they're working on that they can share with the world?

1:10:08

Look at other companies that have been massively successful like or products like Google Docs or Figma.

1:10:13

They've essentially done that like a thing that didn't have a URL before now has a URL.

1:10:18

We're doing that for every application on the planet.

1:10:21

So it's primarily an infrastructure business.

1:10:26

And then on the other hand, we know that in order to cast the widest possible net and attract the widest num biggest number of people, open source is the only way. It's non-negotiable.

1:10:34

And in addition to NexJS, like I mentioned, we created Nex.

1:10:39

js, sorry, NexJS and AI SDK and Turbo.

1:10:42

And uh we we acquired a bunch of companies like Shadz Cenne and and so the more we can you know cast this message out of the world of the web needs to win and also it needs to win because we have the best products.

1:10:56

I I you know I you can think of our competition as all these other products in the developer ecosystem.

1:11:02

Another reframing that is perhaps more interesting is think about Apple.

1:11:08

Apple is holding an entire world hostage. Yeah.

1:11:10

To a lot of arbitrary rules. They make all the calls.

1:11:13

You know, the web that I experienced when I was a kid was a web that is completely permissionless. Yeah.

1:11:20

Which is also why I'm cryptoeilled and we could get into that and whatever, but permissionless is actually the most important.

1:11:26

It's like freedom of speech is up here and then right up there is also permissionless which is also increasing the form of speech is that you can get something into a URL without asking Tim Apple for permission.

1:11:40

And so that is the true enemy so to speak and I think my message to all the other comments would be like let's band together and make sure that you can publish without going through an absolute review process.

1:11:49

You can launch crypto companies without asking Apple what they think about crypto.

1:11:53

whatever you want, you should be able to and and AI, right?

1:11:57

Like AI models need to decentralize and get into the hands of developers as quickly as possible so that we build defensibility against the sort of like monolithic AI systems.

1:12:07

I think I'm trying to think about like how 9,000 or whatever that is like or Sky.

1:12:11

I just I don't want to go to one interface.

1:12:15

Bracell needs to decentralize and democratize URLs and interfaces to the world.

1:12:20

And by the way, my other point is going to be I'll give credit to Apple They have a culture of quality and they've managed to permeate that culture of quality to that to their ecosystem and and I want that for the web as well.

1:12:35

I want to make sure I actually don't even have a particular force in the race.

1:12:38

We don't we not only support NexJS, we support another 35 frameworks.

1:12:43

Whatever framework allows me to go to a website like a blind tasting and be like oh this website is freaking great.

1:12:49

you should be able to work backwards to oh they use some technology supported by Versell.

1:12:53

That's my that's my fitness function.

1:12:55

Uh curious did anybody ever uh come to your office with $5 billion in cash and tell you to you know ask you to train a foundation model and how did that conversation go?

1:13:08

Because I'm I'm sure like you know in all the craze of the last couple years there could have been an opportunity to just like you know I'm sure there's a bunch of people that would have been happy to say hey you're really well positioned to build Yeah.

1:13:17

When's the humanoid robot coming?

1:13:18

Yeah, not that people seem to be very obsessed with the V 0ero data.

1:13:22

So I'll tell you I also haven't shared this before but so many companies have come and asked for because by the way like the interesting thing about Vzero is and going back to the design mindset and quality mindset is we're trying to produce things we're proud of. Mhm.

1:13:36

And and nested we're proud of our customers are proud of end users of the internet say okay now there's a better web.

1:13:42

I think we should also bend against AI slop like we shouldn't create a web that has this overly brushed texture images coming out of like like lowquality models and whatever.

1:13:55

And so a huge inspiration for me was actually Mid Journey. Mhm.

1:13:58

Midjourney, speaking of which is a Nex.

1:14:00

js user that self-host Next Nex. js. Extremely proud of that.

1:14:03

And they there's something about like the taste that gets embedded into this models.

1:14:07

So it's not just the data that you want, it's also infusing your preferences and tastes and it's almost like casting an opinion into the world.

1:14:18

Like this is what I believe products should look like.

1:14:21

And by the way, you also want and this is why the conversational interface is so fantastic.

1:14:24

You can still leave the customer to their own creativity.

1:14:26

So you can say you go to vis and you say build me a product for travel like one there actually also a versell customer.

1:14:33

And then you're like well I don't like it.

1:14:38

uh make it more yellow um you know and like the model will follow. Yeah.

1:14:42

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

1:14:48

So I'm like completely convinced on the strategy of uh bringing in new developers allowing even non non-technical folks to build and deploy websites.

1:15:00

But uh some of your companies some of your clients are absolutely massive.

1:15:05

And one of the critiques is like, well, you're abstracting this AWS infrastructure.

1:15:09

It can get kind of expensive.

1:15:10

What what are the conversations like on your side to keep a Nike or an Uber on Versel long term?

1:15:19

And what how do you see those relationships going and how important it is it to not only enable someone to show up non-technical prompt build an app, but then scale it into that one person 1 billion dollar company and they're saying, "Yeah, you know what?

1:15:32

I'm sticking with Versell forever. Yeah. Yeah.

1:15:36

Uh your question also contains the answer because you said you know Verscell has been getting a lot bigger. Yeah.

1:15:41

And because we've been getting bigger which you know comes with it challenges like extra and whatever but the ultimate privilege is the amount of incredible infrastructure optimization that we can do when you're starting a company a little company like you're not thinking about optimizing.

1:15:55

If you're thinking about optimizing you're probably not doing the you know we we have this motto that we introduced at Nex. js.

1:16:02

Nex.js. as conf that is a famous there's a famous essay in the software engineering industry of like you first make it work you then make it right and then you make it fast and I would add a fourth and then you make it cost efficient sure and actually from a computer science point of view fast and

1:16:19

cost efficient actually almost come together we've done so many optimizations of the infrastructure I think this year we've already announced eight price decreases or like last quarter and this year and we continue to announce price decreases because we're passing on the cost savings that we realize in our infrastructure at on all sides. That's great. The CDN is getting That's great.

1:16:40

The CDN is getting more efficient.

1:16:43

The compute, we just announced fluid compute.

1:16:45

It's staggering what we've done in terms of uh compute efficiency.

1:16:49

Some customers saw an improvement in efficiency of 85%. Wow.

1:16:55

So, so what I would say to the '90s of the world, the previous story of Versel, which is still fundamentally awesome, is you won't have to worry so much about DevOps and platform engineering and on call and and those human costs which are ginormous and now you'll be fighting for like infra high quality infrastructure engineers with all the AI companies as well.

1:17:16

So like the human cost is very real of doing something like versell.

1:17:19

But then the scale cost of like versell actually gets more efficient the more I use it is awesome and we we're committed to continuing to sort of share those uh infrastructure savings with our customers and by the way the inspiration here is AWS I think sure when I started

1:17:35

using as it was quite expensive and then they just announced so many price decreases because and by the way that's kind of the dance we manage NexJS for people you can also self-host and manage it yourself and we're actually also partner with companies that are even

1:17:50

competitors of oursel to help them manage NexJS better when they want to create an offering like that and we know that there's work to do there but the nice dance is that if we if you let up and and let us manage your workload we will be able to optimize it to a level

1:18:04

that is sort of unbelievable well it's noon we'll let you go I'm sure you have a bunch more to day having you on uh please call back in when you have more news uh a really fun conversation I love your show thank you so much for having Yeah, thanks for coming. This is This is fantastic. See you on next. See you on next. Yeah, that was fun.

1:18:22

Always a good excuse to use drama to get the real story.

1:18:25

I feel like uh you struck the balance there when when somebody's able to speak with more than 144 characters. Yeah.

1:18:32

All of a sudden the nuance just comes in. It's amazing, you know. Emerges. Yeah. Fantastic. But very very cool. Yeah. Very cool company.

1:18:41

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

1:18:49

You go to OpenAI right now.

1:18:52

This is relatively recent.

1:18:52

I don't know exactly when they searched it.

1:18:54

It just says, "What can I help you with?" Yeah. Yeah. And then Yeah.

1:18:58

There's no landing page anymore for learn about OpenAI jobs.

1:19:03

It's like you're here to do Yeah.

1:19:05

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

1:19:09

Anyway, uh we got Lulu coming on to break down the uh the drama and the comms.

1:19:16

We're going to talk to her about a bunch of stuff, but we got to uh ping her because she's not in the waiting room yet.

1:19:24

So, let's ask uh let's see. Okay. Uh good. Uh, we do have her on. Uh, okay. Maybe I should send her. She's extremely busy. She is. She jumped on. She only had 30 seconds. We weren't ready. She bailed. No, I'm kidding. I I believe it. Yeah.

1:19:52

Um, anyway, let me try and send her this uh thing.

1:19:55

And in the meantime, we should do some posts. And she is back. Is she back? Let's see.

1:20:06

Uh, well, I mean, to tell you about Bezelan. That's a great time.

1:20:09

I got a I got a beautiful Vasheron Constantine on purchased from Bezel.

1:20:13

Highly recommend you go pick something up over there.

1:20:15

They have over 23,500 luxury watches, folks.

1:20:17

Uh fully authenticated in-house by Bezel's team of experts.

1:20:23

This watch right here, it's shipped from the seller to Bezel.

1:20:25

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

1:20:32

If they went or no, if they just went and they browseed around bezel together for an hour talking about what they like and what they don't like.

1:20:40

They would find common ground squash the beef.

1:20:42

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

1:20:48

I believe no a lot of people said, "Oh, we got Lulu in the chat. Let's do it." Hey, there she is. How you doing? Hey, good to see you.

1:20:58

Welcome to the Temple of Technology. We're live. You're live. The Fortress of Finance. The fortress of finance. The capital of capital. Great to see you.

1:21:04

So much surprised it took this long to to get you on the show.

1:21:08

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

1:21:15

I had to make sure the show was good. Oh yeah. Okay.

1:21:17

I I big dog in us is reasonable. Fair.

1:21:20

But we're glad you could take time out of your incredibly busy day to sit down with us, chat.

1:21:26

Uh there's so much to talk about.

1:21:28

I want to talk about the comms around Saratoga water.

1:21:30

I want to talk about uh morning routines.

1:21:33

Did you wake up at uh 3:40 this uh this morning and dive directly into a pool or are you taking a little bit slower today?

1:21:40

No, every morning I dive for five minutes. Yep.

1:21:42

In the medium midair suspension is four.

1:21:45

I like to go for five, sometimes seven. Fantastic. Average five for me. Great.

1:21:50

I duck my face like every once every 10 minutes, I think.

1:21:54

Just got to go a little bit above and beyond.

1:21:56

Uh stay ahead of the pack. Rub the banana peel.

1:22:00

I don't just do the face.

1:22:00

I do the neck, get behind the ears.

1:22:01

So, fully ready for this show.

1:22:04

Always taking it always taking it to the next level.

1:22:06

Uh what what do you uh you had critiqued that Saratoga Water uh their their last post was a bunch of was hashtag soup? You described it. Yep.

1:22:16

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

1:22:23

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

1:22:28

You might be getting a call later today. Yeah. Yeah.

1:22:30

No, I'm not I'm not fully diversified yet. I thought I was. Um, okay.

1:22:34

I I think they just have to wake up here.

1:22:37

There's somebody whose job is to run social for them.

1:22:39

I'm sure there's like a person whose area of responsibility is this.

1:22:42

And they were just completely out of the game.

1:22:44

Like some people said they were on Instagram, but on is pretty generous there.

1:22:48

Like they were uh present on Instagram with a check mark.

1:22:53

The posts weren't actually that good.

1:22:54

I I think there there's some brands that are like boycotting X because of Elon, whatever, but you're just kind of hurting yourself.

1:23:00

Like it's um like you're owning your own balance sheet to try to own Elon.

1:23:05

You're owning your own cash flow because you're mad at Elon.

1:23:09

Just like go on X, make money, do what you need to do, forget about your personal feelings.

1:23:14

I don't know if that's actually the reason, but if it is, it's a bad reason.

1:23:16

It does feel like it's a bit of a 15 minutes of fame moment for them.

1:23:19

And so I I wonder like what is the good ending here?

1:23:22

like they quote tweet the video, they lean in, they're making jokes, they capture a bunch of, you know, attention, maybe they grow their account from a thousand followers to even like 100K because it's such a viral moment and a billion people saw the morning routine.

1:23:36

Uh, but then what do they do with that after after that?

1:23:40

I think they have to Okay, I think the gold standard for this before the famous rug was the Hakua girl.

1:23:45

like she took the 15 minutes and just extended it beyond what the laws of physics seem to suggest was possible. Yep.

1:23:54

And um I think what the water company could have done here to to extend would be like lean into the routine like partner on some routines.

1:24:03

Uh lean into the unhinged.

1:24:05

Like I know that they're this sophisticated fancy type of person but still sometimes you just got to roll with it.

1:24:11

um strike up some partnerships, have like follow on content, like lean into the funny, just do the bar is like literally anything.

1:24:18

And then it's like getting creative, and then it's like something really enduring.

1:24:22

And if they want to do something really enduring, maybe it's like a program, maybe it's like some popup stuff to just stay top of mind.

1:24:28

But the the actual bar of just like showing a pulse was not that hard to hit. Yeah. Yeah.

1:24:34

I feel like the challenge is I have no idea what Saratoga's brand stands for, but now in my mind it stands for getting up at 3:45, putting the banana on your face, having four minutes of air time.

1:24:45

And so it's almost like they they they I'm I'm the most water obsessed person that I know by a long shot and I didn't know what they stood for before.

1:24:54

It's almost like the right thing to do is that the the right deal to do is you hire you just say, "Hey, we're going to kind of scrap our our brand from the last 200 years."

1:25:04

I think they're a very old company.

1:25:05

We're now the Ashen brand.

1:25:05

Uh, you know, we're signing we're signing him to a maxed out. It's just 150. Yeah, it's 150 year old. 1972. Well, listen, it's time.

1:25:15

It's time for a re do a brand partnership with Chaita Banana. That'd be great. Do the banana collab.

1:25:22

You could be doing like some people commented when he opens up the journal.

1:25:26

He's on page one of his journal. Oh, yeah.

1:25:28

like a notion partnership that like the world is your oyster here.

1:25:35

There's a lot you could do. Yeah.

1:25:36

Uh let let's talk about uh you created a meme going going direct.

1:25:40

Uh I I feel like it's one of the the most powerful. Yeah.

1:25:46

Like basically memes trend of the year potentially trend of the year.

1:25:52

I mean that and founder mode are the two when you think about when you think about things that have sort of influenced founder thought in the last 5 years.

1:26:00

It happens to be in my view going direct in founder mode totally and they go they go hand in hand.

1:26:05

Uh h have you I'm sure you're already thinking about sort of what what the next play is.

1:26:11

Is the next is the next play going indirect sort of like it going getting puff pieces you know getting puff pieces and stuff like that.

1:26:19

Um but no but what what do you think is uh now that sort of this sort of like way of comms has become the standard is this just the enduring approach for the next however many years until we get better institutions or you got to you got to always outrun yourselves.

1:26:36

I'm really glad you brought this up.

1:26:38

We did not coordinate by this by the way like you guys gave me virtually nothing to prepare with and no touch points.

1:26:43

I came like fully unprepared. Thank you.

1:26:45

unprepared. Thank you. Um so we didn't coordinate but I actually had been thinking about this because rot rastra launched around a year ago almost exactly a year ago and in that intervening year founder mode has kind of become part of the cannon like it's here it's not evenly distributed maybe deoid is not going direct but like

1:27:04

founders going direct is now part of the default playbook for comms like any YC company that's coming out into the world today they're thinking the founder is going to go direct um but the thing is you have to outrun yourself like once something becomes the thing that everybody does that becomes the new norm and you always want to be standing up above the norm. Like I remember for a

1:27:21

Like I remember for a while last year I was doing manifestos.

1:27:25

I was having all of like my founders and my companies do manifestos and then for a three month span it was just like every other week a manifesto.

1:27:31

It actually be I kind of got like manifestoed out and same with like the secret plans. Same with vibe reels.

1:27:35

Same thing kind of burned through them.

1:27:38

That one happened really fast. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry everyone. Yeah.

1:27:43

Well, well, so how do you how do you think so? Montage wheels, guys. Yeah.

1:27:47

So, we we just had uh GMO on Versel creates Nex. js.

1:27:49

They release it to the world and then they say, "Yeah, we'll manage it for you if you want or you can just use it by yourself."

1:27:57

You basically open source the concept of going direct, but then you have sort of playbooks that you run with your founders.

1:28:03

Is there anything else that uh you know the thing about something like going direct is you can tell somebody exact any any sort of like highly specialized skill set. Double fisting Celsius.

1:28:13

What is that in front of your hands?

1:28:15

I go I go y John goes Celsius.

1:28:18

That's uh that's pretty reflective of our brand. Sorry.

1:28:24

It it triggered me cuz the uh week before last I had two.

1:28:26

I didn't know how caffeinated.

1:28:28

Oh, they have a lot of caffeine in there.

1:28:30

I needed like a defibrillator. Well, Red Bulls 400.

1:28:35

Yeah, it is six Red Bulls, I think, technically.

1:28:37

Um, who's counting though? Yeah, got to be careful.

1:28:39

No, but but the idea is like is there other things that are that maybe fall outside of that that you feel like you can sort of like open source?

1:28:48

Like things that you can just tell the world they're very hard to execute, so they should still go to uh your firm to actually pull them off.

1:28:53

Um, but what else are you thinking about kind of like open sourcing? Yeah. Or they can just do it.

1:28:59

I I like the concept of open sourcing.

1:29:01

concept of open sourcing. like in fact you you um should be able to do it by yourself whether I get hit by a bus or your team get hits by the you know gets hit by a bus there it should never just like rest on any one person I think the next era so so going direct was probably the big thing for the last year I think

1:29:16

the next era is in shorthand attention is all you need like in a world where AI can just do anything all the time you can see people like shipping and launching stuff it used to be monthly then weekly and now daily there's just like huge drops all the time and It's a tree falling quietly in the forest unless you can get people to actually care about it. So the two things are

1:29:34

So the two things are number one, how to get the attention and just like focus it for a small period of time.

1:29:41

And then number two, how to harvest it and turn it into something like the big mistake that founders make is they'll do something to catch a little bit of attention and then it goes away.

1:29:49

Like we're talking about Saratoga water.

1:29:51

It goes away and you didn't do anything with it.

1:29:53

So, you're doing like attention catch and release like like uh like uh California with illegal migrants or like sports fishing.

1:30:02

Like don't do the catch and release.

1:30:03

Hold on to the attention and turn it into money.

1:30:05

Like your job is turning attention into money.

1:30:08

I mean that's the beauty of the Ashton Hall thing.

1:30:09

He he went super viral but he already had been on Instagram for five years, had millions of followers over there. He goes super viral.

1:30:17

He already has a whole business set up on coaching and fitness stuff.

1:30:21

like there is a funnel and if you found him from this expost, you're going to be paying him if you if you like him very quickly.

1:30:27

Whereas with Hua Girl, we were talking about this like she had to spin up a podcast and then I'm sure at a certain point she was like, "Well, this crypto thing seems like a good way to make money."

1:30:36

Whereas Ashton already has a business and can just go capitalize on.

1:30:39

Oh, we got a delivery here. Thank you. Thank you, brother. Here we go. We got the Saratoga.

1:30:42

You guys should do the dunk lives.

1:30:44

The new ice bucket challenge.

1:30:46

We also need bowls to dunk our face in.

1:30:48

Uh so so here's a question for you that I that I think is actually an interesting one.

1:30:51

So uh the three of us are are are dear friends with David Senra.

1:30:56

Uh and David has sort of studied all these entrepreneurs that were able to build these massive careers or massive sort of family empires completely in silence, right?

1:31:06

He made a post he made a post two weeks ago that was something to the effect of like I talked to this family.

1:31:12

They had written biographies about the family and he asked if he could do an episode on them and they were like absolutely not.

1:31:17

We're not giving away our our sort of secrets.

1:31:22

Is do you think that, you know, do you think that that the playbook of just sort of like building in silence and you're sort of in the shadows and nobody, you know, and not really sharing what you're working on.

1:31:32

Do you think businesses like that will will there seems like there's tons of examples throughout history that was pre- internet, right?

1:31:39

If you take if you take the strategy of of we're gonna kind of like build in silence, you know, be very secretive.

1:31:46

Does that playbook work when you have 10 competitors that are going to be extremely loud constantly sort of like accumulating attention?

1:31:54

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

1:31:56

So the the thing here is right, you know, one day soon maybe you'll have the one person billion dollar company, but for now the company that wins is the company that can recruit and attract the best talent.

1:32:08

And the pool of super elite differentiated talent is pretty concentrated and they're all being head-hunted by like the same firms.

1:32:14

And so the way to get ahead is to get that talent before your competitors can.

1:32:19

And they'll join you if they know you and trust you and believe in you.

1:32:23

And so if you're someone who's already a household name, like if Palmer Lucky went silent for a while, it'd be fine because people know what he's about.

1:32:30

Ilia Sitsker has been silent for quite a while.

1:32:32

and people know, you don't have to try to figure out like what am I going to get if I try to go work for them.

1:32:37

Um, and they have like demand knocking down on on their doors.

1:32:41

But if you don't have that, then you do need to build it.

1:32:44

And um, I think where your question is coming from too is like we see a lot of founders get dunked on for like yapping too much and posting too much and it's like when are you when are you building your company?

1:32:56

You're tweeting like every hour.

1:32:58

And I think the the one thing to know is it's not about how much you yap.

1:33:04

It's about the shipyap ratio.

1:33:04

You have to respect the shipyap ratio.

1:33:07

And if the ratio is right, you can get away with anything. That's great.

1:33:12

Uh I Yeah, Elon Elon's a perfect example of this.

1:33:16

Nobody's like, "Hey, what you bro?

1:33:18

You're posting, you know, 20 times an hour. Relax." Okay.

1:33:20

The rockets are are being caught.

1:33:23

The rockets are being caught.

1:33:25

It's sitting in the chopsticks.

1:33:27

He's he can post what he wants out.

1:33:27

Uh on ongoing direct, I've always thought that there's a little bit more nuance there.

1:33:33

Obviously, it's it's it's really key to tell someone that like, hey, it's okay to start posting and and going direct and and h doing, you know, founderled communications, but that doesn't mean that you should close off the indirect channels.

1:33:46

And I see it almost as like uh like tiers or levels.

1:33:50

So, level one is like you start telling the world what you're building, build some credibility, maybe there's some posts on X from the founders's account.

1:33:59

Then you start doing new media like podcasts like this calling in telling you know you're using other people's platforms but you're accelerating and then eventually the traditional media comes in and writes like the big profile and that still has a lot of benefit.

1:34:10

Can you talk to us about how founders should think about riding up that curve and where the value is across all three of those? Yeah.

1:34:18

So roughly you want to think of it as ex uh as like concentric circles going outwards. Sure.

1:34:24

And you cannot mess up the order.

1:34:26

So the inner the innermost circle is your co-founders and executives and the people who work for you and they have to believe and you have to fully saturate them with the propaganda and the sense of mission before you go out to the next circle.

1:34:40

Next circle maybe is investors board and then you get to customers and then you get to maybe regulators, maybe other people.

1:34:46

But the problem with trying to skip one of these in the sequence is let's say that you didn't brief let's say that you're launching like a new mission and you didn't um brief your employees on this refreshed mission, but you go to the press and now your employees are reading it in the press and there's a disconnect. Two things can happen. One, they're like, "WTF?

1:35:04

This isn't what I signed up for.

1:35:06

Now you have a world of pain because any pain coming from inside the house is like a thousand times worse than external."

1:35:11

and two, your employees have freedom of speech and they have Twitter accounts and they can go on X and post like,"Well, wait a second.

1:35:18

I'm not Are you sure this isn't this doesn't seem right?"

1:35:20

And then all of a sudden everything um everything downstream of employees has lost credibility because people figure if it's true, employees would know about it.

1:35:30

And so se sequencing it correctly and not getting too greedy too fast is really important.

1:35:35

Like always go from the smaller circles to the outer circles. That makes sense.

1:35:38

circles. That makes sense. How do uh in terms of getting uh every every company wants to get attention the challenge is that there are some sort of cheap things that you can do that get massive amount of attention that are sort of like you know basically like slop like I I won't

1:35:55

name it but there was a launch video in the last 30 days that was just in my group chats was like super cringe but then it got like millions of views and I was looking at it I'm like all right like this seems like cheap attention But then maybe it just got so many views that it works. Talk about um maybe talk

1:36:12

Talk about um maybe talk about like taste when it comes to getting attention and is there more longevity if you're sort of building that sort of slower ba base of sort of like tasteful releases and messaging and comms versus like the cheap high attention moments. Yeah. Tasteful tasteful vids.

1:36:32

Um so there's there's two things.

1:36:36

One is there, you know, the the crazy hot chart.

1:36:40

Yeah, the crazy hot chart. Of course. Yeah. Who doesn't?

1:36:44

There's like there's like a company hot chart where if you're really hot as a company, there's a lot that you can get away with.

1:36:52

But if you're new and people don't know a lot about you, then every single thing you do or say is like disproportionately affecting how they think of you.

1:36:59

And so if you have a 10-year history of just like wins and bangers and you have one thing that is kind of weird or a flop or a little bit cringey, you can kind of get away with it.

1:37:08

It gets absorbed a little bit better.

1:37:10

But if your company is launching for the first time and the one thing people see is 100% of the data points that they have about you, you can't really afford that.

1:37:17

So I'm not saying don't take risks.

1:37:19

I'm saying that the importance of taste goes up like even even more when you're new and there's not a lot of data points about you.

1:37:26

And then the second thing about um just taste versus quantity is a lot of things that get a ton of likes and engagement are just total garbage.

1:37:41

And the responses are all like bots.

1:37:43

Like if you go to a TechCrunch um X post and look at the replies, it's just straight up bot replies.

1:37:48

Um if you go to these uh these like framework bros or I don't know the like mental model bros. Sure. Sure.

1:37:56

Sure. Sure. here's what happened this week thread bros um had a lot of engagement but I would not trade that for the world and so the thing to look for is like who is in the replies and who is not in the replies because replies are usually really positive too but it's positive from people that like it's a counter signal if they like Yeah exactly it's all about signal right signal do you think the best sort of

1:38:22

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

1:38:48

Um, there are different archetypes of super cracked, impressive founder that you want to just throw your life to the side and go follow them and and do whatever it takes to get on that rocket ship kind of feeling.

1:39:01

There's different archetypes of founders who can inspire that feeling.

1:39:05

But the key is you can be in an archetype, but you can't be between archetypes.

1:39:10

You can't be in the cringy uncanny valley of here's the real you and here's the online you and you sort of like make it halfway there.

1:39:18

Um you can be the like super brash uh controversial loud um type.

1:39:24

You can be the meme funny type.

1:39:28

You can be the strong silent type of founders and just like one thing once a year.

1:39:32

But if you're type three and you're trying to force yourself into type one, it's going to be painful for everybody.

1:39:38

like most of all you and people can tell, right?

1:39:42

So, so I I think it's less about there's one type and you have to be it and can you learn it or do you have to be born it?

1:39:48

It's more like there's different types and you can fit into one of those types.

1:39:52

Um, but you can't try to jump from one type to another and kind of like fall into the abyss halfway in between. Yeah.

1:39:58

I think about the difference between like a David Holes and a Justin Mayers.

1:40:01

Like Justin is doing threads, but they're very detailed on health and breaking stuff down.

1:40:05

David Holes just shows up once a week and tweets something like about the future and how AI will like change like alien civilizations.

1:40:13

Yeah, alien civilizations.

1:40:15

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

1:40:21

You sometimes see people like um online laring as Palmer. Yeah.

1:40:24

They're trying to be someone else. Yep. Exactly.

1:40:28

They're like I want a chip on my shoulder.

1:40:29

And and I always say this for the going direct thing is like how do you communicate?

1:40:33

Because there are some people who their their authentic communication is best in a blog post or a long post.

1:40:40

Other people can be really piffy and just post bangers.

1:40:42

Other people are really great on video and should just do a podcast circuit.

1:40:45

Other people are great on you know national TV and so figuring out where the founder sits and then accelerating that instead of being like well X is the popular one so I got to figure that out. You it can be very hard.

1:40:58

we were talking about and you were you were saying I should describe it as default out. Remember? Oh, default out. I don't remember that. Explain that. Weren't we? You and I were talking. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Standard out. Standard out.

1:41:10

You were talking Oh, right.

1:41:10

So, in programming in programming standard out as the way as like a as like a um a metaphor for the the default uh the default type of medium that somebody should use.

1:41:22

And if they need to go outside of that, they can, but everybody has like a strongest like a default medium.

1:41:27

And um you can you don't have to like only stick to that like you can go outside of it.

1:41:33

Some some of these like Andre Karpathy posts are actually a blog post and just dumps it into the Xbox and hits post and it's fine. Yeah.

1:41:39

hits post and it's fine. Yeah. I mean, a lot of that's about the flexibility of the X platform, but there are definitely great CEOs out there who's like their default out should just actually being going and sitting down with, you know,

1:41:49

Andrew Ross Sorcin and doing an interview and they will they will crush that and if they and then and then that clip should live on X and someone else should, but they should not try and turn it into a banger hilarious post because like that's just not authentic to who they are. Uh, I have a I I have a prompt

1:42:03

Uh, I have a I I have a prompt for you.

1:42:05

Uh, one of our one of our 2025 goals is to get a glowing puff piece in a mainstream journalism outfit.

1:42:10

Uh, what's the strategy for getting TVPN on the cover of the New York Times or the New Yorker? What should we do?

1:42:17

Oh, the journal would be Yeah, the journal would be ideal.

1:42:21

So, how can we reverse engineer this?

1:42:23

Take us through the steps.

1:42:24

I think Financial Times, too, for you guys.

1:42:28

I I see you um looking really nice with that salmon pink backdrop. Oh, yeah. That'd be fantastic. Okay. Yeah, financial times.

1:42:35

How do we get the profile done?

1:42:36

Okay, so the first question is um what is the business goal here?

1:42:41

Like how do you convert attention to money, right?

1:42:42

And you guys convert Okay, let's just work through it live.

1:42:46

You guys convert attention to money by getting a lot of listeners so that you have leverage with advertisers and then the advertisers pay you and then it grows and continues being the most profitable podcast in the world.

1:42:54

That's the business, baby.

1:42:55

Number one question is who are those marginal listeners?

1:42:58

is who are those marginal listeners? Are they people in tech that you haven't reached yet and you're going to get more bang for buck by um converting like people in tech who have been living in a cave and don't listen or are you going

1:43:12

to go out and reach a new community that you haven't gotten into yet or you going to go to some like in between like adjacent community where it's people who in uh let's say it's people in DC who now understand that half of Silicon Valley is in Washington DC and they need to understand tech better. So it's like

1:43:26

So it's like policy people who want to understand tech.

1:43:29

So, so here's my first question to you is like who is that next um group of listeners that you're going after?

1:43:35

It's probably slightly older public markets investors.

1:43:39

We we're pretty big in the private markets for tech, but moving or are we we like to think of it as like YC Demo Day was our NFL combine.

1:43:45

Uh earnings season is our Super Bowl and so we want to deliver on you know a Super Bowl level event for TBPN covering public company earnings mag seven that. Okay.

1:43:58

So you want to go to sellside analysts, you want to go to um uh the big banks, you want to go to probably the exchanges have some events um like New York Stock Exchange has events.

1:44:09

You probably want uh things that are like Citadel adjacent like DEI adjacent to get into that community.

1:44:14

And also there's a lot of overlap between young tech people and young um hedge fund and quant trader people.

1:44:21

Obviously like the young Jane Street people just go back and forth.

1:44:24

And so if that's the audience then I would work backwards like reverse engineer this whole thing and think okay where are they getting their information and what do they already care about that we can tap into?

1:44:34

Like it's it's it's hellishly difficult to make people care about some new thing that they've just never heard of. Yeah.

1:44:39

Whereas and Derek Thompson had this insight too.

1:44:42

The best viral thing is something that's a little bit new but a little bit familiar. Yeah. Okay.

1:44:48

Let's say that we're talking to those people.

1:44:49

You're probably gonna aim for I mean they'll read Wall Street Journal, they'll read Financial Times, let's just say journal because the payw wall is less strict.

1:44:59

Um now you want to think about how do you fall into one of the coverage areas like are are you in tech, are you in culture, are you in finance or something?

1:45:09

So there for example um uh New York Times has a guy who is like between tech and culture. Yeah.

1:45:14

And so maybe someone like that or let's say it's the journal and um their tech honestly their their tech desk their tech team is in like shambles right now because they had this super bizarre layoff a few weeks ago and there's just like a crazy management decision to lay off a bunch of AI and tech people the cusp of it was crazy. where you're Yeah.

1:45:41

So maybe you want to aim for like culture, finance, and then now you're putting together two pieces.

1:45:45

One piece is like what are the uh what do those young hedge fund analysts or whatever care about and what are they thinking about?

1:45:53

They're probably trying to understand what's coming out of the tech world and which companies are worth watching versus which are not.

1:45:57

watching versus which are not. and they can see publicly available information which is very scant but they're trying to read behind the scenes of like which founders are respected and how good are they really and can they recruit that kind of thing and then what does the paper cover and the paper probably covers big trends and what's happening

1:46:14

in the world of AI like uh as we approach AGI what are changes happening in the world so and then the third circle is like the unique perspective that you guys bring so I would start by not doing a pitch at all just vibing networking, going out for drinks, chilling, and starting to talk about what's in the middle of that ven diagram, which is like you have the unique experience. It's interesting to

1:46:35

It's interesting to the people you're trying to reach and it's interesting to what the journal has been covering.

1:46:39

been covering. do that like for three months or so and then figure out one hook that's in the news and then offer to do a deep dive into the hook and then have somebody who's not you like have somebody else that they respect who's in

1:46:53

your network and their network tell them or like like a me or like a founder like an Eric Lime you know uh go to them and just tell them like this is the thing blowing up in tech and they should really take a deeper look and at that point you're familiar to them. Familiarity

1:47:05

Familiarity breeds affection, positive feelings, but it also breeds credibility.

1:47:09

Um, so people who are told a fact 10 times tend to believe that the fact is true just because they've heard a lot.

1:47:14

So at this point, you're familiar, you have the story dialed in, you have your unique area of expertise, and then you have some third party validator telling them to look deeper into it, and that's how it begins.

1:47:25

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

1:47:29

I know you we've got a minute left.

1:47:29

uh are we try not to swear on this show because swearing is vulgar and we're very short bearish uh using cuss words online right now.

1:47:40

How are you advising your clients in a world where you know big names are thrown around mean words?

1:47:53

Um, I think it's the same thing as before, which is like whichever bucket you're in, stay in the bucket.

1:47:57

And if like if there's a founder who just talks like a sailor and that's how they are.

1:48:06

Um, you can try to ask them to clean it up.

1:48:09

I've never seen that work. Okay.

1:48:11

I've just never had an experience where someone tells the founder like, "Clean up the potty mouth and talk different and they actually do." Yeah.

1:48:14

And so it's just that's your archetype. You stay there.

1:48:19

But I will say the big takeaway if people are trying to figure out like what is the next era of comms and just if there's one thing I as a founder need to know about about building a cult and a movement around my company, it's we're we're entering the era of personality hires with respect and affection.

1:48:34

You guys ultimate personality hires. I'm one too. Safe space. It's okay. Cheers. Cheers. Cheers. Cheers to that.

1:48:44

But in a world where AI is better than us at pretty much everything, every human is going to be a personality hire.

1:48:51

So just figure out what your lean is is and lean into that.

1:48:56

And if you have that fire in you and you get into fights once in a while, it's not the worst thing.

1:49:00

And if you don't, don't try to LAR as Palmer Lucky and find the fights just so that you can have something to beef over. Just find your lane. Be in the lane.

1:49:10

Don't try to jump into a lane that is disingenuous and unnatural for you because people sniff it out.

1:49:15

Yeah, that's really good advice. I like that a lot.

1:49:18

Authenticity, as silly as it sounds. Great.

1:49:21

Well, I have to say, thank you for coming on.

1:49:22

Uh, when your clients have historically that I'm aware of, have come on the show.

1:49:25

I'm sure there's been some that I'm not aware of that have come on the show.

1:49:28

I always come away and just tell John, ah, he was too too he was too media trained.

1:49:32

Like, he's just too prepared, too good.

1:49:34

Uh, so you're doing great work and uh thank you for for uh for being a a the former brother of the year and a friend of the show.

1:49:45

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

1:49:46

You might be Just be clear. Just be clear. It could be two times. The ceremony.

1:49:49

You need to do the ceremonial where I go and put the crown and then we all cry and we have Yes.

1:49:55

Well, I mean, we're going to have a black tie event this year for the awards show and I'm sure you'll be invited. That's it. Perfect. All right. Fantastic. Amazing. Thanks for stopping by. Take care. Bye. That was great.

1:50:03

Uh, lots of great insights from Lulu as always.

1:50:08

Um, what's your review of the Saratoga water?

1:50:11

Is this gonna Is this going to put Rurora out of business?

1:50:13

Is this going to put every water company out of business? They're getting so much. Let's do a taste test. Tastes good. I mean, it tastes fine. It's okay.

1:50:23

Uh, this just screams to be the restaurant that a mid restaurant or the water that a mid restaurant would stock. Okay.

1:50:30

Trying to be like, "Oh, yeah. We have bottled still." Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, we have Saratoga. Okay, Saratoga.

1:50:36

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

1:50:40

No, I'm I'm happy for them because I'm I enjoy and appreciate value creation.

1:50:44

So, I'm glad they're they're doing I'm sure their numbers today. Fantastic. They must be so happy. Yeah.

1:50:51

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

1:50:59

They should buy some ads on buy every billboard in the United States.

1:51:01

really should just take advantage of this moment. Go on adqu. com.

1:51:05

They have out of home advertising made easy and measurable.

1:51:09

Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising.

1:51:10

Only adqu combines technology.

1:51:12

Out of home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. It's great.

1:51:16

Uh do do you want to dive into cloudflare or should we just move on to some timeline?

1:51:21

What what are you feeling right now?

1:51:23

Um how much did we actually get into of Cloudflare?

1:51:26

I feel like we didn't start Cloudflare.

1:51:28

Um, but they are the third player in this uh in this debate.

1:51:32

We're going to have Amad Msad from uh Replet on in 30 minutes and I thought it'd be good to kind of show the three companies that have been duking it out on the timeline.

1:51:42

Uh we we we broke down cover it and then we'll go into the timeline. Fantastic.

1:51:47

And then so it's an older company.

1:51:49

It's a public company founded in 2009 by Matthew Prince.

1:51:53

That's the CEO who has been chirping at Gummo on X.

1:51:55

Uh the goal was to build a globally distributed network to improve website security and performance.

1:52:00

And so when you run into Cloudflare, it is a CDN.

1:52:04

And so when you're scaling, you're getting a ton of traffic.

1:52:06

The idea is instead of those hits triggering database queries and all the stuff that's going on wherever your server is on ABS, they hit Cloudflare first.

1:52:14

It can mitigate DDoS attempts because it's uh it's just delivering the front-end web page first.

1:52:22

And Cloudflare is uh a product that helps your website similarly to Verscell be very quick and fast.

1:52:30

And they started with a $2.

1:52:30

1 million series A round in 2009 to develop a prototype and kickstart operations.

1:52:36

Uh they launched a techrunch disrupt what a throwback 2010.

1:52:38

Uh they had core services CDN DOS protection which I mentioned performance operation and it was all a premium model.

1:52:46

So you get onto Cloudflare free for a little bit and then quickly as you start scaling they start charging you more.

1:52:53

But as the the tenor on X has been, Cloudflare is still pretty affordable even when you scale up.

1:52:59

Amazon AWS has a lot of Cloudflare competitive products.

1:53:04

CloudFront I think is literally a direct competitor to their CDN pro uh product, but uh Cloudflare is big price competitive roughly and so you get a lot of stuff.

1:53:13

And then we'll go into kind of what they're doing to add features and functionalities to their product uh catalog.

1:53:19

So in 2011 they raised a series B by NEA.

1:53:21

Uh they wound up hitting billions of page views, millions of domains served.

1:53:26

They're scaling pretty quickly after only two years.

1:53:28

They get to that $20 million series B.

1:53:30

Then the next year I mean they were basically five yearsish ahead of Verscell. Yep.

1:53:38

But it's interesting how Versel's series A was 20, you know, so it's like everything just kind of pulled forward around that's just standard.

1:53:47

And now a $50 million series A is common. A $20 million series B. Yeah.

1:53:51

That if a company does that and doesn't say, "Hey, we we intentionally raised, you know, less money than we could have, you're like, okay, they're they're probably struggling."

1:54:02

Fred Wilson, Union Square Ventures comes in for the series C.

1:54:06

That's $50 million in 2012.

1:54:06

That's $50 million in 2012. and they added more points of presence uh which means more local servers that can deliver content even faster because the whole name of the game is if you're in Chicago you want a server in Chicago that's delivering that website so it's extra fast because the speed of light

1:54:25

and physics come into the equation when you're going even just going across the US and back is you know at at light speed is several milliseconds and that matters I think it's almost like 30 milliseconds I don't know for sure but it's It's It's significant enough that a content delivery network makes a lot of sense. Roughly. Is that roughly how fast Roughly.

1:54:41

Is that roughly how fast I was running this morning? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

1:54:44

When I smoked the whole team. Yeah.

1:54:46

We had a little ra a little foot race this morning with the team and uh Jordy came out on top.

1:54:50

He's a fast fast brother.

1:54:52

Uh in 2012, they reached a1 billion dollar valuation or close to it based on rapid growth and network expansion.

1:55:00

Uh in 2013 they added DOS mitigation and they successfully defended against high-profile high-profile attacks.

1:55:06

The spam house incident, you know, that's going to be a good story when you dig into spam house.

1:55:12

Uh but I'm sure uh there were there were a lot of DDoSing going on.

1:55:14

Uh I mean basically anytime someone was I means the backtory here.

1:55:19

Yeah, the back story here.

1:55:22

In March 2013, Spam House, which is a nonprofit organization that maintains block lists of malicious IP addresses, experienced a massive DDoS attack, which experts called the largest in history that knocked their website offline and broadly disrupted the internet.

1:55:38

So, hey, let's, you know, the guy that's trying to stop us from doing what we do, let's let's stop him. Oh, yeah.

1:55:45

I mean, DOS DOS stuff is serious.

1:55:47

I mean a lot of nation states use it to knock off different uh services that they think are not aligned.

1:55:52

Uh X has been the subject of DOS attacks.

1:55:55

Elon's talked about this.

1:55:58

Thought it was a nation state potentially, but it's happened.

1:56:01

It it's happened all the time and it can happen on a very small scale too.

1:56:05

If you're just running a small company and there's some kid who's a script kitty and gets upset with you or just wants to do my dad's right from our own home.

1:56:15

I'd set up I'd set up a computer. Yeah.

1:56:16

And and it's basically I mean DOS sounds mess with I'd mess with him and I'd go like, "Dad, why is your website down?"

1:56:21

And then you'd go spend like 10 minutes being like, "I don't know."

1:56:24

But it's really as easy as just going like like in the Python code while one like infinite loop request this website.

1:56:31

They just request it millions of times and it can just be done so quickly that if you don't have something set up, you can be in a lot of trouble.

1:56:38

Um and so they doubled their domains to 1.

1:56:40

5 million, servicing roughly 5% of global web traffic, getting really really big.

1:56:45

Uh then they go I love the best thing is when companies do the meme.

1:56:49

It turns out these generational companies they do the meme and that's the lesson always do the meme.

1:56:53

Whatever whatever percentage of your TAM that you put in your preede deck that you want to achieve just do it. Just do it. Yeah. You'll be a big company.

1:57:01

They resolve scaling challenges.

1:57:04

Uh then on 20 in 2014 they go on this acquisition spree.

1:57:08

They acquired stop the hacker. What a great name.

1:57:10

In February of 2014 to boost threat detection.

1:57:13

They acquired Crypto Seal in June of 2014 to enhance encryption and certificate management.

1:57:19

Cryptoceal I believe founded by Ryan Lackey, good friend of mine.

1:57:21

Um, uh, great just kind of genius programmer honestly.

1:57:27

Um, major initiatives they launched project Galileo to protect to protect vulnerable public interest websites, introduced universal universal SSL free HTTPS for all customers and keyless SSL for high security clients.

1:57:41

And then they expanded their global network to over 30 data centers.

1:57:42

Uh that set them up for their series D $ 110 million from capital G, that's Google, Microsoft, and BU.

1:57:50

They got three of the hyperscalers essentially in the company.

1:57:54

Uh they expanded to China.

1:57:54

Uh and then they adopted a bunch of other technologies, web application firewall, introduced the I'm under attack mode to counter layer 7 DOS attacks, and at this point in 2015, they hit 62 points of presence worldwide.

1:58:09

So they're continuing to grow and whenever you're deploying fast applications on the edge, we saw this with Verscell.

1:58:14

Verscell going to something like 30 points of presence, uh, Cloudflare's up at 60 in 2015 and that's the name of the that's the name of the game with when you're trying to deliver the internet very quickly.

1:58:25

uh in 2016 they acquired eager platform company to build out Cloudflare apps platform and we'll talk about that because that's kind of the product that will compete with the Replet and Verscell stuff is actually being able to run your entire app on Cloudflare instead of just deliver content.

1:58:40

So the traditional CDN is images take a long time to load.

1:58:45

Let's put those on servers that are close to the people requesting them.

1:58:48

Netflix is a great example.

1:58:48

You want to put, you know, Squid Game, the video for Squid Game, you want that to not come from far away.

1:58:53

You want that to be up close unless you're caching it.

1:58:57

But in general, you want it to be close so that when someone clicks that button, we explored high, you know, people talk about high frequency trading.

1:59:02

We had explored high frequency podcasting trying to get, you know, I mean, at the rate we're growing, we'll probably have to build our own Cloudflare, honestly, and just buy our own hardware.

1:59:11

We'll probably have to set up our own nuclear plants for to run the facilities, create our own our own chip fabs, uh, and ultimately design our own chips. Yeah, exactly.

1:59:22

just completely vertically integrate down to the mining and extraction of nuclear file material. That's right.

1:59:27

Uh but that's the that's the modern media game you play. Yeah. 75 person company now.

1:59:31

I'm sure we'll be at thousands in a couple years. So that's right.

1:59:34

Uh Cloudflare in 2016, they hit 100 global cities.

1:59:36

Uh they had some outages and operational errors.

1:59:39

It's it's a it's a rough and tumble game that they're in.

1:59:43

2016 uh they expend uh this is what GMA was mentioning the cloud bleed incident.

1:59:48

a security bug led to data leaks quickly identified patched and mitigated.

1:59:52

I don't think there was a huge uh huge impact on the business.

1:59:54

I don't think information and we didn't get a chance to talk to Gamma about this but I think both with the Verscell uh security issue and with cloud bleed I'm not sure that there was a lot of like you know customer credit card data that was stolen but it was the potential for harm was was really significant and that obviously hurts reputations and needs to be addressed with open communication which is what all these CEOs are trying to do now.

2:00:19

Uh there was also a little bit of a little bit of like a a political content debate because the Daily Stormer, which is a very controversial right-wing website, was using Cloudflare and obviously was the subject of intense DDoSing constantly.

2:00:33

Uh Cloudflare had taken a stance of, hey, we're just an infrastructure provider.

2:00:37

We we abide by the first amendment, free speech.

2:00:40

If the government wants to shut you down, they can do that.

2:00:43

But we are not the arbiter of what should and should not be on the internet.

2:00:47

We're just an infrastructure provider.

2:00:48

Um, but in in 2017 they did drop the Daily Stormer after public pressure and internal reviews and they and they had to kind of rewrite and figure out where is their content policy, what's acceptable and what's not.

2:01:02

Of course, they're a private company.

2:01:04

They can decide what is appropriate to use their server for and they have the right to refuse uh service.

2:01:10

They had this happen later.

2:01:12

They had they had 8chan with customer. Yep.

2:01:15

So they they dropped them at some point.

2:01:17

And so that that's always been kind of a hot button for all these infrastructure platforms when Alex Jones got deplatformed.

2:01:22

Uh it it was all the way down to like you know the Shopify plugin that he uses for reviews wants to not let him use that review widget anymore.

2:01:30

And uh and it's all it's all a nested bottle like bag of worms basically. It's very frustrating.

2:01:37

Uh yeah, and uh and I mean we saw this with Trump where he got to platform from like Pinterest and stuff.

2:01:42

So uh sometimes these things can become like big hot button issues.

2:01:46

But back to the interesting tech stuff, uh they launched Cloudflare workers enabling serverless code exe execution at the network edge.

2:01:54

So what that means is that if you do have something that needs to be computed on the server side, you're not just delivering your content on the CDN anymore, your your HTML and your images, you're also allowing the user to interact with your app and and create actual server side functionality through these Cloudflare workers.

2:02:11

Part of the whole serverless trend.

2:02:13

Uh they acquired New Mob to optimize mobile performance into implemented creative entropy generation lava lamps, pendulums, geer counters to enhance security. That's crazy.

2:02:23

Have you seen the lava lamps thing? You familiar with this?

2:02:25

So, basically there's this big question on when you're working in security.

2:02:28

A big piece of that is how do you generate random numbers?

2:02:33

And so, one of the ways they do it is they create a wall of lava lamps that all move in a completely random and not predictable way.

2:02:41

And so, they take a video of that and then they compress that image and that generates a random number that can't be predicted.

2:02:51

Because even if you're even if you're just like we're going to use, you know, some random number generator from the computer, there's sometimes vulnerabilities in there where you can actually truly predict.

2:02:59

They're all pseudo random number generators.

2:03:00

So there's this like race to create the the craziest. Yeah.

2:03:05

Look up Cloudflare Lava Lamps.

2:03:07

They have a picture of the actual wall. It's so cool.

2:03:09

It also just like a great vibe. So I love that.

2:03:11

Uh 2018 they launched the 1. 1. 1. 1 DNS service.

2:03:14

This is a free privacy first DNS resolver.

2:03:17

Uh they did they they expanded into do domain registration wholesale cost domain registration with no markups.

2:03:24

Uh formed an alliance with major CR cloud providers to reduce data transfer fees which can actually get really crazy expensive.

2:03:32

Um zero trust enhancements.

2:03:35

Cloudflare access and Argo Tunnel setting the stage for comprehensive security suite.

2:03:38

So they're taking security seriously. Oh yeah.

2:03:40

Putting the screws to Google and they set themselves up for an IPO.

2:03:44

So in 2019 they go public uh right before they did preipo funding.

2:03:50

Series E that's $150 million at around three uh. 2 to 3. 5 billion.

2:03:53

Uh they dropped more controversial clients as you mentioned 8chan.

2:03:58

Um and they had a few operational hiccups around this time.

2:04:03

Some outages some software deployment issues but nothing that stopped.

2:04:07

This is what GMO was talking about.

2:04:09

The number one thing y is uh you know mitigating outages. Yep.

2:04:12

And so they filed their S1 in August, went public on September 13th, 2019 at $15 a share.

2:04:21

They raised over $525 million. Let's go.

2:04:24

Historical size gone for them. There we go.

2:04:26

Uh they launched Cloudflare Warp, a VPN mobility service.

2:04:27

And then they went on another acquisition spree.

2:04:32

They acquired S2 Systems for browser isolation technology and link to bolster developer tools, leading to Cloudflare pages, getting more into the application layer.

2:04:41

Um uh and then they appointed the co-founder uh Michelle Zatlin to as president marking a milestone in tech leadership.

2:04:50

Revenue reached $431 million in 2020 with significant growth in enterprise customers because again even though they are competing with AWS they they famously have built their own servers own their own hardware and can be much more competitive on pricing.

2:05:04

Um this so they enhanced workers for with support for new languages uh launch cloudflare pages and R2 storage which is S3 compatible object storage but it doesn't have egress fees.

2:05:17

So if you're storing a bunch of images or text or JSON files on S3 you can just move right over to R2 which is I think wait isn't that the one one letter one letter more and one number less. It's a very funny name.

2:05:30

Um, and so they're they're all about, you know, getting people to migrate more and more stuff off of AWS onto Cloudflare.

2:05:37

Uh, and then they acquired Zuras to improve thirdparty integrations.

2:05:42

Revenue grew to 656 million in 2021.

2:05:45

They surpassed 1 billion in annual revenue in 2022.

2:05:49

Uh, in introduced D1, a serverless SQL database.

2:05:54

Um, and went on some more acquisition sprees.

2:05:57

uh navigated complex issues during the during the Russia Ukraine conflict, balancing service continuity with policy adjustments.

2:06:04

They block Kiwi Farms, which is another uh controversial website.

2:06:08

There were harassment issues there.

2:06:10

And so they're they're constantly scaling and then dealing with the fallout of, you know, having a whole bunch of companies on their on their uh platform.

2:06:17

Uh launched workers AI in 2023, partnered with Nvidia Nvidia to deploy GPUs at the edge.

2:06:26

So if you want to do AI workloads in an actual city, very low latency, Cloudflare now offers that.

2:06:31

Um, more acquisitions, uh, zerorust networking company, secure infrastructure access company, cloudnative security company, uh, just tons and tons of acquisitions as they go.

2:06:44

And now they are aiming for net profitability and targeting $5 billion in annual revenue in the coming years.

2:06:50

They're expanding enterprise sales and enhancing zero trust and edge computing offerings.

2:06:55

And they're deepening their AI integration, broadening the developer platform. Yeah.

2:07:00

And one thing I love about Cloudflare is they sponsor the uh US ski team. Oh, that's great.

2:07:06

And uh so if you like skiing, you might also like uh their set of products.

2:07:11

Um and this is a Cloudflare at the moment is a $42 billion uh public company.

2:07:18

Uh, and they've actually, you know, they they've suffered, you know, much of the same sell-off that other firms have, but it's just wild to think about whatever that preIPO round was, the series Eion 3. 2 billion.

2:07:33

So, they're up, those those IPO buyers, something like that. That's great.

2:07:37

Um, and certainly a good outcome for Union Square and all the early early investors that got in at those $10 million, $20 million rounds, but took a while to get here. 15 years ago. It's interesting.

2:07:50

Um, one thing that's fascinating, so Cloudflare is a sort of scaled uh, platform has plenty of pages comparing itself to other providers. Sure.

2:08:00

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

2:08:09

I would expect a Cloudflare versus Versel landing page.

2:08:13

And there's no mention of on Cloudflare's website.

2:08:15

Who are they comping themselves to?

2:08:19

Um, Versel does mention Cloudflare.

2:08:19

Um, but uh but but I'm sure Cloudflare does not. Interesting.

2:08:26

Maybe that changes after today's spicy.

2:08:28

I mean, I just think like, you know, uh, who knows what's going on behind the scenes, right?

2:08:35

GMO didn't mince words when he said like, "We tried to use Cloudflare for a pretty important project internally. It didn't work."

2:08:42

And so now I can imagine uh there very well could be some ego involved. Yep.

2:08:47

be some ego involved. Yep. Um but uh anyways so yeah it does feel like a little bit of like a big dogging going on just like hey little bro like you don't even have servers you know Versel like you know we have our own infrastructure we compete with AWS you

2:09:03

you're not even in the conversation like that's kind of the energy Matthew Prince brings but you know hopefully everyone can benefit from a rising tide and a growing pizza pie and the pie slices will get bigger for everyone because that's what we want to see we want to bull markets. Do you know where uh where

2:09:18

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2:09:35

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2:09:42

Inspiring views, hotel grade amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, and 24/7 concier service.

2:09:46

It's a vacation home but better, folks. That's right.

2:09:51

Anyway, we got 8 minutes.

2:09:52

Should we hit the timeline? Let's hit the timeline. Uh, let's go to Sheil.

2:09:56

Yeah, great post from Sheil here.

2:09:56

He's pulling up uh he says, "Venture capital in the 90s was wild.

2:10:00

Good funds had tripledigit irr."

2:10:02

And he's pulling up uh so KP here.

2:10:05

Vintage, their first vintage.

2:10:08

This is why they're in the holy trinity. Yep.

2:10:10

This is why they're in the holy trinity.

2:10:11

So their first fund, $8 million fund, they only got a 31 multiply a 51% IR. But why? Yeah.

2:10:17

Why is the IR so low given the multiple?

2:10:21

Is that just because it was such a long fund?

2:10:25

It took them a long time to get liquidity on those.

2:10:26

Like because they had a 32x fund, fund 7, but it's 122% IRRa for Yeah.

2:10:32

for Kleiner Perkins fund seven.

2:10:36

I wonder what's going on.

2:10:36

There's no other there's no insight.

2:10:37

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

2:10:42

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

2:10:50

They IPOed everything in that portfolio.

2:10:52

So they have a 17x multiple, but their IR was 286%. So they crazy.

2:10:55

I mean, they turned 300 million much bigger fund. Yeah.

2:11:00

They So they turned it into like almost $6 billion. Yeah. Wow.

2:11:04

And then there's a bunch of other funds here.

2:11:05

You got Mayfield, which I feel bad.

2:11:07

that I should know better my venture history better. It's legit.

2:11:09

Um very old school though.

2:11:11

I mean you can see in in the 80s they're already on fund form.

2:11:14

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

2:11:23

What's also interesting all three cities they just were like we do $150 million funds like that's what we do.

2:11:29

They were very but the fascinating thing is they have their first fund from 1972 $8 million.

2:11:35

They don't raise their their second fund until eight years later. Oh yeah.

2:11:38

The $55 million fund probably so slow and took so long for those companies to get to liquidity.

2:11:44

It's funny the pro the learning is like they do this huge we don't have any data past their 96 fund because I think it just switched to being KP at a certain point.

2:11:52

But um it's funny that like they didn't learn their lesson on like upsizing the fund because they just put up this ridiculous performance on on the biggest fund that they have outlined here.

2:12:05

So yeah, I mean I wonder what's in that 72 vintage.

2:12:07

It might have been like Intel maybe. I don't even know.

2:12:10

Apple kind of something like that.

2:12:13

Yeah, get a couple of those. Lot of bangers in there.

2:12:15

Sequoa also doing quite well putting up big numbers.

2:12:20

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

2:12:31

I want to talk I mean if they're they're still in the game or they're still maybe probably retired probably skiing where they don't have chair lifts, let's be honest. That's right.

2:12:38

Uh but we'll get them on the show.

2:12:40

We'll have them break it down.

2:12:41

We'll have them toast to the good old days when you could put up a 31x multiple in a couple years.

2:12:48

I want to find somebody that was doing venture capital in the 70s.

2:12:50

Send them a bottle of Dom and a bottle of Saratoga and say, "Hang out with us for three hours straight." Yep.

2:12:57

And let's just let's do it.

2:12:59

Talk about the good old days.

2:13:01

Anyway, should we go to some nominative determinism? Yep. I love this one. Uh it's Andre Carpathy.

2:13:06

And if you break down his last name, it's Car Path.

2:13:10

And of course, this is the man who worked at Tesla on self-driving cars, an AI pioneer.

2:13:15

And DJ Cows says, "I think about this every day."

2:13:18

And I think about it too a lot. Not every day.

2:13:19

We do think about this for but I love this. Yeah.

2:13:21

Uh the the Bill Aman is really into nominative determinism.

2:13:26

That's why he's a man activist man. Sure. Yep. Makes sense.

2:13:31

Um yeah, it's a it's a great one. It's a good one.

2:13:34

Uh should we go over to Super Dario talking to Yeah, I just thought this was funny because it's been this ongoing sort of thing that we talk about on the show.

2:13:42

So Arvin uh Shrinavas from Perplexity says we're building uh why explaining why they're building a browser.

2:13:50

He says it's the only way to create AI agents with enough control over multiple apps especially on iOS.

2:13:55

The goal agents that can book travel, buy things, and act as a personalized assistant.

2:13:59

So we're just waiting some for one person to build an agent to book um uh private jets.

2:14:06

You know, this is this is a very silly bridge to what's basically an ad read, but ramp travel is fantastic.

2:14:14

I I like it is a magical product.

2:14:18

And I'm not I know I'm saying that I'm super conflicted, but honestly, like you go there, it it aggregates all the flights.

2:14:25

It saves all your information perfectly. Yep.

2:14:27

You you click it and it's just automatically expensed, automatically put into like you just you just show up to the airport and oh wow, my TSA precheck is in there. cheapest. Yeah.

2:14:38

No, it's it's a flawless product.

2:14:40

And then you can also book the hotel right there.

2:14:42

It is such a good product.

2:14:44

And of course, like as a as a as a you know, a manager of a company, you can decide what's in policy, what's out of policy, how much you want to spend and stuff.

2:14:52

Um but uh you know, for for us, it's more of like you put a minimum on how much you spend on the hotel.

2:14:59

Um so that yeah, we're not staying anywhere rough.

2:15:02

But uh for some companies that want to save time and money, they could put the cap on that as well.

2:15:08

Um but it really is it really is a magical product and I and I wouldn't be surprised if the first time I have an agent book for me.

2:15:13

It's in RAM obviously because they they've they've built all of the like the harnessing to actually plug in in a really uh really seamless way and there's no like ads or upsells.

2:15:24

It's it's so much better than booking. No ads in there.

2:15:26

So we'll put one in here.

2:15:28

Um we got a post from Austin, friend of the show.

2:15:31

uh has been giving uh me a bunch of just, you know, he built the morning brew into a monster.

2:15:38

Uh has been very helpful on TVPN. He's retired.

2:15:42

And I I put this in here because I want to call him out. Stop it.

2:15:48

This is like one of the worst things I've ever seen.

2:15:49

I wow really really hate the idea of someone with as much talent as Austin retiring.

2:15:54

It's like get back in the game, create some shareholder value, build a massive business.

2:15:59

you should be working a 100 hours a week week. America needs you.

2:16:02

And I saw this and I was just disgusted. Okay.

2:16:07

But it was it was revolting honestly.

2:16:09

It it's it's really really depressing.

2:16:11

But okay, but clearly he's a marketer.

2:16:15

He's a media man and he's retiring so that he can unretire, come out of the gates with the max. I get it.

2:16:21

I still I just have a lot of sensitivity around our word specifically. Yeah.

2:16:23

I don't think we should be talking about retirements.

2:16:26

I think we should be working to the bone forever. Well, he's staying busy. He's staying busy. I love it.

2:16:34

He's got a bunch of things that he's doing and uh we're gonna have him on the show soon.

2:16:37

I'm trying to pull him out of retirement.

2:16:39

We're going to pull him out of retirement. We'll convince him. We'll give him a talk. We'll give him a talk. Come get on the show.

2:16:42

We'll give you a dedicated spot. Yeah. Yeah.

2:16:45

I mean, it is funny because he's like, I'm in I'm in retirement and here's my focus.

2:16:48

I'm training for a half iron man. I'm investing.

2:16:51

I've written five angel checks. I'm tinkering.

2:16:53

I'm playing with dozens of AI tools. I'm growing.

2:16:54

I helped uh 3X Oceans talent monthly growth rate to two in 2. 5 months.

2:17:00

Obviously, he's still in the game.

2:17:00

He's merely in his Michael Jordan playing baseball era, I believe. He's getting back.

2:17:07

I was looking for the right sports analogy.

2:17:09

I was like, did I just don't know I don't know these things, but did did Brady Brady retired at one point briefly? Did he? I don't know.

2:17:15

Is that not even correct?

2:17:16

It's more like uh doesn't Bo Nichol retire in between every UFC fight, right? And then he comes back. Is that how that works?

2:17:23

It's technically a retirement. Amazing.

2:17:24

You always find something new to not understand.

2:17:30

Well, come out of retirement.

2:17:30

Come on the show and announce your life's work and get to work.

2:17:34

Austin, you're on notice.

2:17:37

Um, let's skip the humanoids thing because that's a bigger deep dive.

2:17:42

Uh, let's do just a funny funny post because we only got a couple minutes actually. How we doing on Omjad? Is he in? No.

2:17:49

Okay, we will do this Ashley Vance post.

2:17:51

Uh, Dan Primac shares, "Remember when Elon and Zuck said they were going to fight in a cage and lots of people believed them?" Uh, I believed them.

2:17:59

And Ashley says, "I heard somewhere that Italy wanted to charge them $300 million to use the coliseum.

2:18:06

Not sure if it's true, but I think it is, and I think it killed the brawl." What a miss.

2:18:11

Uh, it would have been so good in general.

2:18:14

It would have been amazing.

2:18:15

Uh, cash grab, not not usually a good idea.

2:18:18

and a missed opportunity to make Italy the center of celebrity grudge matches, pay-per-views, things like that. Huge miss.

2:18:29

Also, they had a rough weekend.

2:18:32

Who do you think would have won?

2:18:34

Because there was always the thing about like Elon is just much physically is physically bigger, but Zuck had been training more.

2:18:40

And so, it felt like if the fight had happened like that week that they were beefing, Zuck would have won.

2:18:47

But if you gave Elon a year to train, Elon could learn enough of the basics to put his size to work and win. What do you think?

2:18:54

I think in a pure play boxing rule set, it was going to be mixed martial arts, right? Oh, it was. Yeah.

2:19:03

This is something I know about.

2:19:03

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

2:19:07

It's actually so funny because I do think that Zuck could nerd out enough on technique and get the right and and Elon would go into it being like, "Yeah, I'm just gonna rely on my size advantage and just try to not work out at all." Show up.

2:19:21

Um, and then Zuck would just be nerding out.

2:19:24

He'd get some like super technical submission.

2:19:25

I mean, the weight alone, I mean, there has to be like a 40 lb gap or something.

2:19:29

It's like pretty significant, right? Yeah.

2:19:31

Um well, speaking of the Italians, they had a rough go in F1 this weekend coming in at uh what happened?

2:19:38

Uh both both didn't uh didn't finish.

2:19:41

Um no, and Hamilton um they've had a they've had a rough start to the year.

2:19:47

People are saying that was it mechanical issues? Is it the car?

2:19:50

Well, it's always something with Ferrari.

2:19:52

Ferrari. always Ferrari and people people are saying like Lewis has gotten like a full season of like the typical Ferrari stuff just in in you know barely starting the year two races um it's unfortunate it's rough but um predictable well should we go to Zach

2:20:09

Glabman I don't know how to pronounce that might be Zack G Labman says crazy ad placement try ramp and uh it's a uh United worker at an airport and in the middle of his in the middle of his uh bright yellow vest, it just says Ramp. And this just makes a lot of sense

2:20:26

And this just makes a lot of sense because you have a bunch of business people traveling.

2:20:31

Ramp has travel products.

2:20:32

Uh I actually saw this and I was like, wait, is this actually Do they actually do this? Yeah. No, of course not.

2:20:38

It's a joke that the guy works on a ramp.

2:20:39

I guess we got a chart here from Orin Hoffman.

2:20:42

Uh he says, "Insane growth.

2:20:45

What an amazing company."

2:20:45

And he's showing the flock safety ARR chart from Sakura.

2:20:50

We got to have the soccer guys on sometime because they have some of the best insight. We got to fact check.

2:20:56

Uh Adcock came out and said that um Oh yes.

2:20:59

Uh Figure is the number one most in demand stock in the private markets which I think is uh categorically incorrect uh based on my insight into the market.

2:21:10

But I would like to have soccer on to talk about what are the sort of um they do this research uh heavy research on private companies kind of pulling out random different data sources and putting it together nicely and um yeah I would I would I would imagine they would have something to say about that but um yeah I mean YC company Flock Safety we've talked about them before 200K in revenue in ARR in 2017 growing to 285 million in 2024. Wow, that is a lot.

2:21:42

And I wonder what they do next.

2:21:46

Um, I can talk briefly about uh Persona, who's the founder of Ripling.

2:21:54

Sounds like he had a was really in a pickle over the weekend.

2:21:57

Uh, this was yesterday at 6:00 a. m.

2:21:59

A lot of people sent this to us.

2:22:02

Uh, I like when there's just something extremely dramatic, people send it to us.

2:22:07

I'm like, "Yeah, I get some of these texts and I'm like, is this a tech story?

2:22:13

We'll cover it, but it's not necessarily top of our list."

2:22:15

Uh, but it sounds like he was had some uh But you got to pay attention when there's a billionaire on the run.

2:22:21

That's always an interesting story on the run. Something like that. I don't know.

2:22:24

At least um we just spend like 10 minutes an analyzing like dilution ownership.

2:22:34

Well, well, Green Oaks came in at this valuation.

2:22:36

They wanted 10% delution.

2:22:36

the SV thing and they had to take kind of an emergency round of sorts.

2:22:41

Um, and were they 50/50 when they start the company? We don't know.

2:22:45

We don't we don't really know.

2:22:47

Um, but uh anyways, he's going through divorce.

2:22:51

Had a bunch of issues over the weekend, but they've been resolved, I think.

2:22:54

Uh, so I was happy to cover that now.

2:22:56

He sent an update uh post. Yeah.

2:23:00

Um, so I mean the high level here is that uh Persona posted a massively viral thread, 17 million views, 68K likes.

2:23:08

Uh, he said that he's going through a divorce and he's on the run from the Chennai police hiding outside of Tamil Nadu.

2:23:15

Uh, he had a rough go with his wife who he was married to for 10 years.

2:23:21

They have a nine-year-old son.

2:23:22

Their marriage broke down and his wife was having an affair.

2:23:28

He uh was accused of a bunch of crimes. The police came for him.

2:23:31

Um but it sounds like he's been more or less exonerated from all the accusations and is now uh and is now safe and sound and fortunately the kid is unharmed.

2:23:43

And I think that's the silver lining of what really matters here. Yeah.

2:23:47

Uh we got a post from Will Brown.

2:23:50

He says, "Bro, this is why we do the show.

2:23:53

Last night was a deepseek moment.

2:23:57

It's funny because like that makes sense and the whole Deepseek thing, the whole reason that that phrase makes sense is because people were saying deepseek is a Sputnik moment. Yeah.

2:24:04

It's like now last night it was a Deep Seek moment. I love it.

2:24:10

The internet utterly snapped.

2:24:10

Did we kind of miss coverage a little bit on Deep Deep Seek?

2:24:15

There is a new version of Deep Seek out, but I don't think it was as revolutionary.

2:24:18

It was much more incremental and it didn't have the narrative of, oh, it was built for $10 in a shed with, you know, screws and hammers. It doesn't hit the same. Doesn't hit the same.

2:24:29

Uh, you have a bunch of fake news around it.

2:24:31

Yeah, they uh there's also the new BYU model that they're they're training, right? Or no, it's Jack.

2:24:39

It's Jack Ma with uh with an Well, speaking of someone as handsome as Jack Ma, we got I'm John Msad in the building. Welcome to the show. There he is. Crazy intro. How you doing? What's going on? How are you? Good.

2:24:54

I just dunked my head in a a bowl of ice.

2:25:01

We got the Saratoga here, too.

2:25:01

I hope you use Saratoga, man.

2:25:03

I hope you got your banana on there, too. The banana is key.

2:25:07

You You can't get You can't start your morning without banana on your face. I know.

2:25:12

Just some banana all over, you know.

2:25:17

Are you still lifting like crazy?

2:25:17

Last time I saw you, you were deadlifting like 500 lbs or something like that.

2:25:20

I lost a lot of weight, you know?

2:25:23

It's just like you get you get to a point where it's unhealthy. It's it's not exercise.

2:25:29

It's it's it's killing you.

2:25:31

It gets it gets a little risky.

2:25:31

The risk of injury gets up there, but uh you got to be able to, you know, break a sweat every once in a while.

2:25:39

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

2:25:47

Yeah, because you just, oh well, if I want to get the number to go up, I better bulk more and then I'm just put eating so much. Yeah, exactly.

2:25:52

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

2:25:57

Anyway, uh thanks for joining.

2:26:00

Can you give us just like a brief overview of like where Replet is, what you're working on, how's it going? Yeah.

2:26:08

So, uh, Replet kind of like the, uh, genesis of it, uh, has always been how do you make it so that, you know, programming is more accessible to more people.

2:26:20

It's had a profound effect on on my life.

2:26:22

my life. like uh you know coming from uh from Jordan uh growing up there you know lower middle-ass family being able to come to the US come to New York uh initially and then move to the Bay Area and be able to build a billion dollar company that's outrageous uh and it

2:26:41

shouldn't be possible but uh the reality is that you know we have this ma massive wealth engine machine that's called the internet and for a long time you know hasn't really been uh possible for a lot of people to to kind of take part in that. There's the I think Peter Teal

2:26:57

There's the I think Peter Teal said like the paradox of the internet.

2:27:01

Uh it was supposed to sort of decentralize wealth yet somehow concentrated into into Silicon Valley.

2:27:08

But I think what we're seeing now is finally the tools of creation are uh becoming more accessible and that's really been my my mission.

2:27:15

And so initially reput was about let's get people learning how to code and um I think that was a good pursuit but people don't want to code.

2:27:27

The reality is I spent months uh whatever working at code academy and replet. I mean it's good.

2:27:33

I think we taught a lot of people how to code and at replet we built a ton of infrastructure around how do you set set up a virtual machine the runtime install packages automating all of that and all the way to deployment.

2:27:45

But the really the big unlock was the agents.

2:27:46

You know putting an agent on top of all of that.

2:27:51

We were the first agent in the market to be able to configure uh services, databases, deployment and go all the way to uh to deploying uh deploying an app and it kind of transformed our business just in the past seven months.

2:28:05

Can you talk a little bit about the the benefit of knowing how to code and how that collides with vibe coding?

2:28:12

I see a lot of people that are like, "Oh, I vibe coded and it didn't really work."

2:28:16

And then Andre Karpath is like, I vibe I vibe coded it and it worked great.

2:28:19

And I'm like, there's probably a little bit of a difference between when Andre Karpathy is vibe coding and when someone who's completely non-technical is vibe coding.

2:28:28

Like is there still value to learning to code in 2025?

2:28:32

I I I I think there I think there is, but I mean it depends, John, about what is your prediction about where AI is headed, right?

2:28:41

If you know in the up case like you know what Dario just said recently all code will be I generated you know I assume this optimization path we're we're on where agents are going to get better and better and better you know the answer

2:28:56

would be different the answer would be no it would be a waste of time to to learn learn how to code um but like you know you could have different predictions and I think different people will will make different assumptions I I I'm at this point like sort agents pled. You know, I I the the

2:29:11

You know, I I the the progress we're seeing with agents, we just we just are rolling out V2 agent.

2:29:19

I've never seen a sort of like an AB test as we're rolling out.

2:29:22

I've never seen metrics in my entire life.

2:29:24

I worked at Facebook, other places.

2:29:25

We're moving metrics like crazy just by improving the agent like 100% 500% on certain metrics on on success that users are having.

2:29:35

on on success that users are having. And so uh I think where vibe coding goes wrong is when a a beginner is using cursor some other platform great product but they don't give them guardrails like you know that there's the guy that lost six months of work on on Reddit there's the guy on Twitter that uh leaked his API keys like onlet we do get commit for you don't have to worry about that we hide the API keys in like a secure vault

2:30:05

and so I think a lot of it goes to like hey these beginners should not be using a lot of these tools and instead they should come to places uh like like replet uh but that being said I'm I'm very bullish like you know I sort of changed my answer even like a year ago I

2:30:21

would say kind of learn a bit of coding I would say learn how to think learn how to break down problems right learn how to uh communicate clearly uh you know with you know as you would with humans but also with machines. Can you tell me

2:30:34

Can you tell me some stories about like success stories from Replet maybe like the the what's possible as a solo dev today?

2:30:41

I mean we're seeing Peter Level's io do crazy stuff, but what are you seeing from the from the most uh successful Replet users?

2:30:53

Let me start with the with the business cases because I think those are are kind of really profound because we've always had like micro entrepreneurs like make money and you know it's certainly accelerated massively but 100 plus year old company uh Sears um I don't know about you I didn't know they they continue to exist but they they have this um uh spin-off called Sears Home Services.

2:31:17

About a year ago, they hired a team to like a more trendy uh sort of uh tech team to get them off of Cobalt, which is whatever 100-y old programming language.

2:31:30

And they were able to do it very quickly.

2:31:32

And then after they done that, you know, basically most most companies as they're modernizing, they go adopt a bunch of SAS tools and no code tools and low code tools and to become like a modern company.

2:31:42

They actually skipped all of that and went to went to AI and their operations team which manages the kind the kind of field workers that go out and every day kind of do house repairs and all that.

2:31:54

Uh they start they started building AI tools.

2:31:59

tools. So one AI tool that they have is like the worker would would go and would talk to the AI and it would optimize it their route and would you know that made it so that they're making a lot more money and now that team everyone in that

2:32:13

team started building AI tools and so you have this ops team that's highly levered that are able to move business metrics uh and and they leaprogged an entire era of computing and and landed on on AI agents and how they these are

2:32:30

the generalists that are building the business and I think this is a view into into the future where firms would not be made of like you know SDR and like account whatever it's going to be like I'm a sales generalist right I can do

2:32:48

all that stuff because I can spin up AI agents that can do all these things that makes sense how how do you think about um balancing the sort of needs and demands of the different types of people uh and customers of the of your platform, right? You have somebody that

2:33:03

You have somebody that comes on uh they're sort of early in their sort of like entrepreneurial journey.

2:33:10

They build something, but then suddenly there's this moment where they become a business and once you become a business and you're sort of like servicing.

2:33:17

So like you have the challenge of having so many people on your platform and they and some of them can end up wanting different things. Uh what what is Yeah.

2:33:26

what what is Yeah. just what does it look like in terms of you know you want to be able to continue to service these um users over time while still making sure that replet is the best place for somebody to sort of like start their journey we we've taken u a a a difficult

2:33:45

approach approach and perhaps not not the smartest right the reason I've been working on it for my entire life is because uh you know what I try to do is like um build a an end to-end experience where we infuse a lot of taste and decisions and choices on behalf of customers. You actually you had that in

2:34:09

You actually you had that in the past where like the Apple ecosystem kind of makes a lot of decisions for developers and even Windows as much of as we we uh you know look down on it but you know Visual Basic was a great product.

2:34:22

It made a ton of decisions for you and like you know a lot more people were making things at the time.

2:34:26

were making things at the time. And so then you had the open source movement and the open source was was this radical disruptive you know bottoms up thing where uh there's 100 competing libraries and 100 computing ways of doing things

2:34:43

and that created a lot of mess and um created a lot of power but now getting started and doing things programming became a lot more difficult like imagine setting up a modern web uh you know app, let alone trying to set up like a Python environment. Like if you mess up your

2:35:01

Like if you mess up your Python environment, the best thing you could do is throw your laptop in the garbage and get a new one. I've been there. It's miserable. It's terrible.

2:35:11

So, you know, so so you had this, you know, bottoms up innovation kind of like the early hacker lingo.

2:35:16

You had the cathedral versus the bizarre.

2:35:19

So the Windows ecosystem is the cathedral.

2:35:21

The open source ecosystem is the bazaar.

2:35:23

And so in my mind, well build let's build cathedrals ma made of bizaars.

2:35:29

Like I think open source is awesome, but let's actually build tasteful experiences on top of that.

2:35:36

So uh my work at Facebook, I was part of the early React team.

2:35:38

Uh you know, I was working on the tooling there and especi especially like React Native, we made it so that in five minutes you can spin up a hello world app as if you're trying to do it using Apple and iOS.

2:35:53

that would take you, you know, hours perhaps.

2:35:56

So, you know, now fast forward uh to to Replet and we built basically that you all the way from nuts and bolts to the UX of what it means to to make software.

2:36:08

And so that's been uh a lot harder, but but I think you end up with this general purpose horizontal tool that can satisfy uh a lot of needs.

2:36:22

Um the challenge of course is like positioning and marketing this thing.

2:36:26

You guys know as entrepreneurs like people like to do to pick one product on the market.

2:36:32

But look back on the history of computing typically the the the best products that end up being a core part of our lives are the general purpose horizontal products.

2:36:45

Uh there's kind of a narrative that's floating out right out there right now that companies that are aligned with the AI growth trend are seeing extremely fast rates of adoption.

2:36:58

You're seeing companies get to 100 million ARR faster than ever before.

2:37:03

The risk that people are kind of worried about is that maybe churn rates are going up as customers test a new AI tool and then kind of bounce around.

2:37:14

They're using cursor one week and then claude code the next week and then they're bouncing to this one.

2:37:19

um what are you seeing and what do you think's happening and do you think there's any uh any merit to that fear in the market or on X right now that maybe the AI revenues that we're seeing are not as sticky as previous SAS installation cycles is certainly suspicious uh I mean it anyone who tells you differently is sort of and I was a little worried about our growth like is it is it going going to go away. What's going on?

2:37:49

Like this is like a little too fast.

2:37:51

Um and I think uh you know we really start focusing on the on the metrics that really matter which is the revenue quality retention things that more advanced companies are thinking about like net dollar retention.

2:38:05

like net dollar retention. we actually have above 100% net dollar retention even for our consumer plan which is probably unheard of but um uh you know I I think that uh I think maybe ARR is becoming a bit of a vanity metric like

2:38:23

how fast you can grow the ARR I think you want to make sure you're buying an awesome service and also make sure that people just want to stay on your platform I think especially on the VS Code Wars the switching cost being so low is is gonna be a challenge for them. You can go from copilot to wsurf to

2:38:42

You can go from copilot to wsurf to cursor in like five minutes, same project. Yeah.

2:38:47

Quite like it's one click.

2:38:49

You got to open the project.

2:38:49

And so they're going to have to find a way to differentiate.

2:38:54

The great thing about Replet, we provide this really great convenience.

2:38:59

And so if ain't broke, don't fix it.

2:39:02

you deploy something on replet and people people really tend to stay. That makes sense.

2:39:06

Uh internally I'm I'm sure the entire team is using replet all you know all day long.

2:39:15

Uh h is there still a place for traditional prototypes or are you is everyone across the team sort of like doing rapid prototyping of features which is obviously something that your end customers use or is there still like hey let's just you know make this in in Figma and kind of a line around it uh first.

2:39:36

There's certainly uh a place for for Figma.

2:39:38

Figma. Um I think there are uh first of all there are things that are tough to prototype and there are things that you want to do very very quickly even even faster than than than sort of any kind of software prototype and it depends on

2:39:55

how people think like I think designers still would want to would want a canvas to to think I think products might end up growing in that direction where maybe you go to rep you initially have some kind of canvas and that kind of results in a in a piece of in an application. But right now I I still think there's a

2:40:16

But right now I I still think there's a there's a place for Figma.

2:40:18

But the way I think about what Replet is doing to to our organization, I hope more and more companies is like everyone is highly levered like um we just built you know agents are new and part of the exciting things is that no one knows how to build agents.

2:40:38

Yeah, there's no tracing tool, you know, like an APM, like a New Relic or data dog for agents.

2:40:43

So, we built our own internally and, you know, a a couple uh people on our team spent like a week using Replet and VIP coding uh this really a great infrastructure tool that has saved many many hours of engineering.

2:41:01

We have even more exciting story.

2:41:03

or we have someone in HR that couldn't find an org chart tool that really fit what she wanted to do or it was too expensive.

2:41:11

She spent three days she spun up this org chart tool with like uh connection to ADP and and and sort of versioning history and it's amazing. She never coded, right?

2:41:22

So I think the way to think about it is like um how to increase the productivity in your company and less about like oh what should we displace you know I think I think these these tools still have their place. Yeah.

2:41:36

How do you um how do you think about sort of buying software as someone that enables the creation of software when you know you've obviously been building replet for a very long time.

2:41:49

time. 10 years from now you guys are in market for a new CRM you're talking to the big players is is building it yourself just become uh a part of that sort of like RFP process where the team is like okay well we can build this like this is you know what we think is going

2:42:08

to it's going to cost to you know basically build it maintain it used the biggest bare signal if a startup was building their own CRM it was like oh no you're way over your skis this is going to get terribly ly wrong and you're going to be maintaining this thing for

2:42:22

years and you actually don't have a special you're not a special snowflake in this case just use Salesforce or something but as an like NIH not invented here syndrome Yep totally so um yeah I agree I so I think I I I thought quite a bit like the future of SAS I

2:42:40

think that the the question is like uh if you can conjure up a SAS product can like is there even a future there and we do see this every time I wake up on on Twitter, I see someone using Replet and replacing a piece of software that costs them 15,000 100,000. I just retweeted

2:42:54

I just retweeted one this morning.

2:42:57

Um and uh so there's a lot of I think vertical niche specific SAS tools that are generatable very easily even with the today's technology let alone like a year from now.

2:43:15

I think you'll be able to kind of generate them especially on a platform like Replet which gives you all the cloud services involved.

2:43:20

I think there are ecosystem SAS products that are fairly hard.

2:43:25

So I think think about Ripink how embedded into your company as like the u what do they call the the like system of record. Yeah. Yeah.

2:43:35

And and Salesforce think about the ecosystem and the developers that they have. Yep.

2:43:40

So I think if you're starting a SAS business today, you want to go against the Silicon Valley dogma of focus.

2:43:47

You want to build a Chinese style company, which is I think what Rippling is doing.

2:43:51

And I think uh I think this idea of like uh being generative and m you know having larger pieces of software I think is going to become more important in the future.

2:44:04

So I think I'd be really worried about vertical specific SAS but I think I would bet on those horizontal SAS companies. Yeah.

2:44:11

Well, we got to ask about the Verscel drama.

2:44:12

We talked to GMO earlier this show. What's going on there? What's your take?

2:44:18

Can you break it down for us?

2:44:20

Well, you know, I uh someone asked me um do you do you plan on supporting Nexus and and Replet agent?

2:44:28

I said no because uh we want to bet on something like Vit that is open like community built uh and the way Nexjs has been trending is that it's optimized for Versell they disagree but it is actually not a controversial statement in the larger community there's a project called open next that makes it so that you know uh nextjs is deployable on more platform Matt the CEO of Netlifi commented uh agreeing with me.

2:45:01

The larger community feels like, you know, Nex.

2:45:04

js is is perhaps more tight of herself than they would like to admit.

2:45:09

And I think they overreacted to my comments and and and they and they striened my my comments.

2:45:14

I think it would have been a le less of a a story if they, you know, didn't overreact to it.

2:45:22

And and look uh uh Burcell is an amazing product. It's an amazing brand.

2:45:26

They've done a great job managing a lot of open source projects, not just Next. js.

2:45:31

And for me, water under bridge like you know I uh you know I think you know emotions get get high on on Twitter and you start name calling and you know I wish them really the best. Yeah.

2:45:42

H how is how is Next different than the React relationship with Facebook?

2:45:47

I mean with all these big main core frameworks you're kind of if you're in Angular you're aligned with Google.

2:45:53

If you're with React, you're aligned with Facebook, but uh has has Facebook or Meta done a better job of kind of releasing that into the community.

2:46:02

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

2:46:08

Look, I worked I exclusively worked on open source uh at Meta and the the advantage and disadvantage of working in open source at Meta is that there's no direct tie-in to to to the bottom line, right?

2:46:23

So, uh we were not trying to monetize uh React.

2:46:25

Um so far they haven't monetized Llama in terms of like selling an API. Sure.

2:46:31

Um and so generally as long as they are um sort of they're using it internally they're going to maintain it and support it and get some value out of the community and mind share support.

2:46:45

Now the disadvantage of that we actually weren't ever able to like make a complete product because like if you go to Google uh and you know use now flutter I think that thing is actually much more polished of an experience because they have a direct uh incentive to advance the Android ecosystem for example.

2:47:08

Um and so Facebook we built really cool pieces of infrastructure but the UX around them were bad.

2:47:12

So you have companies like Expo building on React Native to make it a better experience.

2:47:21

Companies like Versell building React to make it a better experience.

2:47:23

And these are amazing companies and I think that's how it should be.

2:47:26

I think where it gets tricky is when you end up also maintaining the the core core software and really tying them together.

2:47:32

Um, what do you think about kind of the Ben Thompson aggregation theory around there might be a new company to emerge from the AI boom that is the hub for these vibecoded apps and websites and games?

2:47:50

Obviously, it for a long time it's felt like web development services, if you could call it that, were very much it was bifurcated.

2:47:59

like there was Shopify which is a power law winner but then there was also Squarespace and Weebly and like dozens of other companies that did quite well.

2:48:06

Um but if there's a new aggregator emerging and Nikita Beer's written about this like maybe there will be one company to really break out and be the the hub for vibecoded N64 level games that would be very valuable.

2:48:20

It would also be more of a winner take all environment.

2:48:23

How do you think that that plays out in your category?

2:48:28

Look, I I don't really that's not the model for for for our business.

2:48:30

Like the the way I think about it in the early computing era, you had the mainframe.

2:48:35

It was the domain of the expert and then you had the PC and it became possible for anyone to use computers and that ended up eating our economy essentially because that's how disruptive technology work.

2:48:50

And so in you know the modern era the modern software engineering is also the domain of the expert and now it's become so that anyone can can make software.

2:49:01

Initially it looks like a toy vip coding game games and things like that but I think it will fundamentally change and transform the um uh the economy and and my model for what we're building it's let's build and excel. It should be fun.

2:49:18

You know, we do a lot of things uh that you know make it fun.

2:49:22

We actually build a 3D gaming stack, but but the model is like can a billion people use it to um you part of their their everyday work uh to to build businesses to to really be a core piece of the infrastructure in the economy.

2:49:40

And the idea that you know it's it's going to be Roblox I don't see that as as interesting.

2:49:45

I mean, Roblox is a great company.

2:49:47

You know, maybe Roblox is the aggregator for for uh vibe coded games, but I think it's really not the the the big prize.

2:49:54

It's like you want to build a trillion dollar company, you got to think a little bigger than that. I love it. Uh yeah.

2:50:01

Do you do you have any do you have any words for your doubters?

2:50:07

Something you said is like the next big thing looks like a toy.

2:50:08

It's been this idea within Silicon Valley that you can apply to you could have applied it to crypto.

2:50:14

This was Chris Dixon's, I think, original thesis.

2:50:16

It still feels like, you know, Riplet is this billiondollar company now, but I still think your doubters and your haters would say, "Oh, it's just a Oh, it's just a toy.

2:50:25

Like, it's, you know, kids making apps or whatever."

2:50:29

But, uh, do you do you like that that people still kind of underestimate this potential?

2:50:33

Is that part of what creates the sort of uh the the opportunity for the next 10 years is people not realizing like the tsunami that's kind of about to hit uh the industry. Yeah.

2:50:46

Uh I think I it used to bother me but but now I think it's it's actually an advantage and I think um you know um when you know when we're at the height of like AI trendiness and replet obviously was early you know we were the first outside of core pilot to train a code model we're like this company in the city and we're growing fast and you know hired a bunch of executives that I think are part of the the sort of the hype kind of Silicon Valley.

2:51:14

hype kind of Silicon Valley. they jump from one company to another and um you know last year you know I did the founder mode I uh cut the team in half wow now like 65 people I moved us out of the city we're now in in Foster city literally there's no other sort of

2:51:31

there's actually nothing out there sort of a desert um and and so we have this nice sort of uh kind of office that we're turning into a campus we have we have food we have all that and um and and the team here is sort of a tight-knit uh team, there's a selection effect on who joins Replet. If you are

2:51:48

If you are smart enough to figure out that Replet has this amazing potential in the future, uh then we would want you on the team.

2:51:57

If you think uh if you really think it's a it's a toy, it's not worth uh it's not worth your time, then then great.

2:52:03

And so I I think these things that just sort themselves out. Awesome.

2:52:07

Well, thanks for joining. Love having you.

2:52:09

We'll have to have you back soon.

2:52:11

Yeah, it's I'm I'm incredibly excited to watch what you guys do for for the next year, the next two, the next five, the next 10.

2:52:17

Uh and uh yeah, I would love to have you on again in the future sometime soon. Yeah, this is fantastic.

2:52:21

Thank you for for doing this show.

2:52:23

It's it's been it's been really cool.

2:52:24

Thanks so much for joining the man. Cheers. Awesome.

2:52:28

Do we uh do we have another guest?

2:52:30

We have a surprise guest for surprise guest, folks. Is he ready?

2:52:32

Uh I just sent him the link.

2:52:35

He's jumping in in just a minute.

2:52:37

Um, and uh, he should be all queued up.

2:52:41

We'll we'll we'll go through some more posts while we wait.

2:52:45

Um, oh, Bryce Roberts bought two cars. We got to talk to him.

2:52:49

We got to have him on the show, figure out what he what he bought.

2:52:52

Bryce Roberts, uh, over at INDVC says, "Bought two cars today.

2:52:54

One dealership wanted me to come down to the lot, get on a bunch of calls, and refused to send me basic info over text.

2:53:03

The other was willing to send me anything I needed and requested o requested over text and email.

2:53:07

Can you guess which one got the sale? And it's not a Tesla.

2:53:11

He went he he said he's done being a Tesla customer.

2:53:14

Not a political statement, just that his lease is up in his Model X was absolute trash according to him.

2:53:20

I wonder what he did to the car, but uh we'll have to talk to him about what car he chose.

2:53:25

I'm hoping it's a Dodge Demon and a Lamborghini LM2.

2:53:30

I think that would be a perfect fit twocar garage for Bryce, but we'll have to talk to him about it.

2:53:36

But it really is a an interesting take.

2:53:37

I We talked to the car dealership guy, and I've wanted a car dealership that Yeah.

2:53:42

I mean, sometimes I just want to buy a car and just want to click a button and I don't really care.

2:53:48

Jordy likes to go to the dealership and take a look at everything. I completely disagree.

2:53:51

I want to just push a button and have it arrive.

2:53:54

Uh, which is maybe stupid, but I don't know. I I certainly enjoy it.

2:53:57

And let's see if I'm ready when you are.

2:54:00

So, we are going back into the 23 andMe news and we'll give some more context on this, but I like that we're able to be responsive.

2:54:14

It's actually crazy that Keon singlehandedly bankrupt.

2:54:22

Yeah, he was barely in market for Well, I mean, it doesn't it's not a surprise because he did the TBPN interview and I'm sure I'm sure the market saw it very well and said, "Hey, you know, if he's going to be in the temple of technology every week, let's just get out of the stock. Let's just call it.

2:54:37

So, let's bring him on down." Keon, how you doing? There he is. What is up? Welcome to the show.

2:54:45

Are you guys celebrating?

2:54:45

I mean, it's kind of it's kind of uh depressing.

2:54:49

It's kind of macob to celebrate on when your when your rivals go bankrupt. But what happened?

2:54:54

Listen, let's put this tweet up, John. We got a tweet up here.

2:54:57

I put up late last night.

2:54:57

I think it was around 2 a. m. Eastern or so. Maybe 1 2 a. m. Eastern. I saw the announcement.

2:55:03

The first thing I have to say to 23 and me is thank you.

2:55:05

Because the reality is, you stand the shoulders of giants here, right?

2:55:08

We stand the shoulders of giants. Old companies do.

2:55:10

You know, you go from Blockbuster to Netflix.

2:55:11

You go from, you know, Blackberry to the iPhone.

2:55:13

You know, go from MySpace to Facebook.

2:55:14

And now you're going from 23 and me to nucleus genomics, right?

2:55:18

The industry is wide open.

2:55:20

Nucleus is years ahead and we're going to seize the moment.

2:55:22

But before I talk about that, thank you to 23 and me.

2:55:25

Did a great job building the foundation and now it's time for something new. That's the reality.

2:55:29

So yeah, talk me through the key.

2:55:32

It seemed like your post was really focused on the on the technology and the price to sequence and the difference between shotgun sequencing and full sequencing.

2:55:41

Uh talk to me about that.

2:55:41

How different is the technology?

2:55:43

And also, why can't 23 and me just use the same tech as you? Yeah, great question.

2:55:48

So, pull up, I have another tweet here, John, that actually I just put another tweet thread out here that I think I should pull up on the screen.

2:55:54

Give some further context on what's going on and what 20 users should actually do.

2:55:56

It's currently riding high on Twitter.

2:55:58

Uh, but no, difference between micro genome sequencing. I mean, it's massive.

2:56:01

It's like a horse versus a car, right?

2:56:02

You're talking about T technology missing millions and millions of genetic markers.

2:56:07

effectively it's not actually useful for any really disease risk assessment.

2:56:12

assessment. So it's fundamentally different here and the same question is the classic innovators dilemma's problem right why can't this big company do this thing well because imagine you know 23 means a castle they have to pull out the foundation of their castle everything has to change technology product regulatory infrastructure every single

2:56:28

part of 23 had to change to actually embrace whole genome sequencing this is capitalism at work we love capitalism around here 23 means dying because we couldn't adapt nucleus is sending because we are embracing the newest genetic technology but actually I think even goes beyond technology yeah go ahead John, you have something to say? No, I I I I just want to push on that

2:56:43

No, I I I I just want to push on that more because like if I'm like I I I like you.

2:56:47

I'm not going to compete with you, but if I was a potential buyer, I would buy 23 and me, rip out shotgun sequencing, drop in, you know, call up, I don't know, aluminina or something and figure out how to do whole genome and you would independently derive nucleus. That's the beauty. Yeah, exactly.

2:57:04

You have to change all the models. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

2:57:05

May maybe the denovo approach is is correct and and I mean that's why I'm bullish on you, but you know at the same time it just it I I'm still not really understanding like why is it such rocket science for them to just offer all hey we're on V2 now we we're we're like you still spit in the tube.

2:57:22

You still pay a hundred bucks. You mail it to us.

2:57:25

We just put it in a different machine.

2:57:26

It doesn't seem that complicated to me. No offense.

2:57:28

Well, it's a massive informatics change.

2:57:30

It's a massive regulatory change.

2:57:32

It's extremely non-trivial.

2:57:34

It's like kind of like being like, you know, horses both get us places.

2:57:37

Why can't they just make an engine?

2:57:39

It's it's fundamentally different, you know.

2:57:41

Uh but really the thing that 23 got wrong, it wasn't just technology.

2:57:44

It was also actually the philosophy of the business.

2:57:46

They really viewed data gathering as a means to make drugs, but because it's such a small sliver of your DNA, you actually can't really make drugs off of it, which ended up making that such that the customer wasn't the customer.

2:57:58

The customer is the pharma company.

2:58:00

And and I want to say here something really important which is a lot of people ask me right now what should I do with my 23 data?

2:58:04

What should I do with my 23 data?

2:58:06

Well, first and foremost you should move it to a HIPACO compliant environment right like what one of the most shocking things about 23 means it's actually not HIPPA compliant right it doesn't follow the gold standard clinical regulations that ensure your data is safeguarded.

2:58:17

So Nucleus for example we are HIPO compliant.

2:58:20

We are a physicianordered clinical grade test.

2:58:22

We make sure no genetic or protected health information is shared with any third party.

2:58:25

It's very similar to like going to your doctor's office.

2:58:28

doctor's office. Another thing to know and I hope you have the thread up here which is you know we outlined some of these things is we you know 23 and me the reality is that it's actually been illegal since 2008 for any insurance company any health insurance company as well any employer to use your genetic information that's been illegal for two

2:58:45

decades it's very very important to say that so there are some safeguards in place even though not 23 is not HIPPA compliance but if you're a 23 user and you're listening to this you should do two things one is you download your genetic data secure your genetic data and then two which is micro data small snapshot of DNA, but two, you should probably put them in a hippo compliant environment. You can actually DM me. I You can actually DM me.

2:59:01

I can help you doing that.

2:59:02

Uh some customers are currently uploading their DNA to nucleus currently because they know that we're going to take very good care of their DNA because it is of course ultimately all about the patient.

2:59:12

Talk about uh there's not total clarity right now.

2:59:18

23 and me is not HIPPA compliant.

2:59:18

I'm trying to understand in a in you know 23 million in a bankruptcy environment is the value of them as an asset. It's pretty damaged.

2:59:29

It's pretty damaged brand.

2:59:31

There's not a lot of brand value necessarily.

2:59:35

Uh what are what are some of the risks of of the types of buyers for that business?

2:59:40

And it seems very possible from our initial research that somebody could buy it and with the explicit intent of not even rebooting the business but just monetizing the underlying user data.

2:59:53

So is the value the data or just the revenue stream because I'm sure that they have marketing campaigns running.

2:59:58

I'm sure they're bringing in customers and charging them 100 bucks a test or something.

3:00:03

There's some there's some normal business going on there.

3:00:05

might not be profitable but like maybe you could cut costs and get to profitability or is this is this nightmare scenario of someone buys it just for the data is that at all credible? Yeah. So it's a good question.

3:00:17

I think one thing this nucleus actively is looking into right now considering whether it makes sense you know earlier I'm sure you remember you know we explored the possibility of acquiring 23me and we're looking into right now whether that would make sense to go and see what we can do and how we can help in this situation.

3:00:32

I think the thing to remember is that again this is microarray data.

3:00:35

It's a small sliver of someone's DNA.

3:00:38

A lot of the most critical genetic markers that you wouldn't want someone to know about simply do not exist in the data.

3:00:43

And that cannot be overstated because it is microade data.

3:00:48

It is a small sliver of your DNA.

3:00:50

It misses the most fundamental health risk that someone could have.

3:00:52

So in some respects it's a little bit overblown when people are worried.

3:00:55

But sometimes there's this funny narrative.

3:00:57

People are like I did 23 me.

3:00:57

I learned that you know my pee smells like asparagus.

3:01:00

you know, that if that gets out, I mean, that's bad.

3:01:02

It should never have gone out, but like, you know, not that big of a deal. Yeah. Yeah. It can't be both. Yeah. Yeah.

3:01:08

It can't be both doomsday.

3:01:09

They're getting my DNA and also the product isn't that good and it's not that reliable. It can't be. Exactly. Exactly.

3:01:15

I would encourage you think about this.

3:01:17

You can do there's there's two really extreme narratives about 23 minutes.

3:01:20

Actually, start looking at it.

3:01:22

It's like, oh, I learned nothing.

3:01:23

It's like, why did you think you learned nothing?

3:01:24

Because it's a small sl of your DNA.

3:01:25

That's like one narrative.

3:01:26

Then it's like, oh, it's the end of the world. My data shared.

3:01:28

It's like, well, actually, you know, the reality is that it's a smallest of your DNA.

3:01:32

Obviously, no data should ever get breached.

3:01:34

No, no one's saying that. Of course not.

3:01:35

But, of course, it's it's micro data.

3:01:36

And so, what I recommend is download the data knowing that one, there's f better regulations that protect you and protect all people who do genetic testing and that there are actual regulations that exist in clinical genetics companies like Nucleus that can safeguard your data, right?

3:01:50

It's like going to your doctor's office.

3:01:51

So, that's the thing I think that should be top of mind uh for consumers right now.

3:01:54

You you mentioned that that they were potentially selling data to pharmaceutical companies.

3:01:59

Again, that's kind of this weird narrative where if the data is not that valuable, then who are they selling it to?

3:02:04

But this is also this this is one of the again this is a great point.

3:02:08

This is one of the reason why 20 me failed because originally the founder Ann, she said, "Okay, listen.

3:02:13

We're going to use this data.

3:02:13

People are actually she has a quote on the record.

3:02:15

People are going to donate data to 23 and me."

3:02:17

In other words, one of the reasons why 20 me failed is they never wanted to build a true consumer health application.

3:02:22

He was never actually about, hey, can we provide you with life-saving or medical insights.

3:02:25

He was about, hey, because he was doing the genealology business for a long time.

3:02:31

Hey, we're going to get ancestry on.

3:02:32

We're going to get as many people as possible.

3:02:33

We're going to take this data and then go to GSK.

3:02:35

They worked with, you know, GSK, for example.

3:02:36

The problem with that is this is the thing they underestimate because it is a small slip of your DNA.

3:02:41

It's fundamentally not useful for drug discovery, which caught up with them because then if your business model is based off collecting a lot of data to then make drugs, but it's microwave data, it's kind of it doesn't work, right?

3:02:51

the customer doesn't want what you're buying which is why eventually 23 collapsed.

3:02:53

eventually 23 collapsed. So in some sense it's a technological problem which is again it's the smallest bit of your DNA but also I think it's a philosophical problem they didn't the customer wasn't the customer the farmer company was the customer right and so that's why people say I didn't learn anything about from 23 me 23 didn't really their goal was not to actually to really help you in your health and and

3:03:11

that's another big shift from 23 to nucleus right we're hipaco compliant our techn is far more advanced we actually want to give you medical grade insight that helps you live longer helps you have healthy family as well and then also we want continue to build out that platform beyond just genetics, blood, wearables, urine analyses, full body MRIs and beyond into a true consumer health application. Imagine 23 we

3:03:32

Imagine 23 we shipped, right?

3:03:34

They how far ahead that they be?

3:03:36

They'd be 20 years ahead of everyone, right?

3:03:37

Consumer health has just recently hit the zeitgeist.

3:03:38

By 20 would have had a head start, but that wasn't the customer.

3:03:42

And so, it's not just technological difference.

3:03:43

It's actually a very strong philosophical difference as well.

3:03:46

difference as well. How uh how are they such a you know they they have the sort of one-time purchase problem uh that that could contribute to challenges from a business standpoint uh becomes much harder if you're sort of get this upfront you know payment and

3:04:04

then you know I'm assuming the average 23 and me customer just like you know gets testing done you know maybe references back at some point but uh why why don't you think they were able to avoid bankruptcy given the scale that they were at, right? This is a company that

3:04:20

This is a company that does hundreds of millions of topline revenue.

3:04:24

You would think they would be able to figure out some e economic like they've been in trouble for a long time.

3:04:31

You would have thought that they would have gone found, you know, Ann would have gone founder mode and and like figured out a way.

3:04:36

Well, it sounds like she tried and and is now bidding on the business to go founder mode.

3:04:39

Maybe I I always say that there's no such thing as a genetics company.

3:04:44

There's only such thing as a healthcare company.

3:04:45

And the reason why people always say 23 is one time, 23 is one time, right?

3:04:49

There was actually no difficulty for 23me to add in other diagnostic tests and build a more consumer health application that was vertically integrated.

3:04:56

But again, their customer was the pharma company. Yeah.

3:05:01

They actually they didn't care that it was one time.

3:05:03

They got your DNA and that is the fundamental difference.

3:05:06

23 could have solved that problem.

3:05:06

I mean, you look at some companies today, you know, some blood testing companies are building on top of Quest Diagnostics.

3:05:11

23 could have snapped their fingers and launched that product in one minute. Right?

3:05:15

But of course that wasn't the cost and that wasn't the business model.

3:05:18

That wasn't the strategy.

3:05:18

So this is a great example where strategy meets technology which eventually results in failure. Right?

3:05:23

You have the innovation problem.

3:05:25

The genetics has really changed the 20 million has been around since 2006.

3:05:27

2006 the cost of being a genome was you know 10 million a sample.

3:05:30

Today nucleund it's one of the greatest technological ships ever right.

3:05:34

And so all these pieces together you have you know 23 collapsing which is sad but I also think it's the sign it's time for something new.

3:05:41

It's time for a true health consumer health application.

3:05:42

Can you talk a little bit about ancestry. com?

3:05:45

They were acquired for by Blackstone for 4. 7 billion.

3:05:47

It seems like that business is doing pretty well.

3:05:53

Again, not a genetics company particularly.

3:05:55

They have their little niche in ancestry. People really love that.

3:05:58

They become experts there.

3:05:58

But how does that business play with you?

3:06:01

And great question 23 me.

3:06:04

You know, it's interesting because one time a very very wise investor of ours said he said retention isn't about the product, it's about the use case.

3:06:11

Okay, it's a very sharp comment and I think ancestry is a good example of that because genealogy is a very super high touch point uh uh business. People love genealogy.

3:06:21

They love looking at who their ancestors are.

3:06:25

People like literally spend their entire hobby actually around this, right?

3:06:26

And ancestry capitalized on that.

3:06:28

They realized that genetics was a mean to do better genealogy.

3:06:32

better genealogy. 23 and me never realized are they a genealogy business are they a health business are they a drug discovery business they never got that right for nucleus we use genetics to help people live longer and have healthy families the value prop is very clear it's not about DNA DNA is a means

3:06:50

to accomplish some end goal for the user which is namely better health and having a healthier family right that is a fundamental uh uh difference and to your point answers is a multi a multi-billion dollar business nera people say genetics business don't work nera a clinical genetics business. It's about at 20

3:07:03

It's about at 20 billion dollars. Okay.

3:07:05

So, genetics is in its absolute infancy stage here.

3:07:08

And I really do think in the next decade, you're going to see the rise of a consumer health behemoth.

3:07:14

And that consumer health behemoth is going to have a whole genome, the entire someone's DNA at its foundation.

3:07:19

And it's going to impact not just someone's health, but again also their family.

3:07:23

And nucleus is building that future.

3:07:25

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

3:07:46

there is that part of why they well the pharma companies worked at 23me but because the data is such a small sliver they realized that there was something to be found the The the most important thing for drug discovery in a genetics context is finding rare genetic markers because those actually elucidate mechanism to identify novel rare genetic markers. You need a whole genome file,

3:08:04

You need a whole genome file, right?

3:08:05

Because a micro again is such a small bit of your DNA.

3:08:07

If your DNA is a thousand page book said one pages you one page, you can't actually get anything out of that.

3:08:12

So it didn't work from a drug perspective business.

3:08:14

It didn't work from a consumer health business. Hence its collapse.

3:08:16

U there's a great actually chart here.

3:08:19

I don't know if you guys It's an old tweet Peter of mine.

3:08:22

Maybe you guys pull it up later. It's from bedrock.

3:08:23

Uh does does screen sharing work? Can I share my screen?

3:08:27

I think you can actually. Oh, here we go. We're going to try.

3:08:29

This is a technology first here.

3:08:31

Whatever you screen share is live. So, do not It's live. Ignore the tabs.

3:08:39

There's a lot of tabs up there.

3:08:40

It's actually small perfectly. Yeah, it looks great. Okay.

3:08:43

So, here we have uh you know this great thing.

3:08:45

Shout out to Bedrock, right?

3:08:47

They have this narrative violations, right? Clean tech is dead. You have Tesla. Day naps always fads. You have Tinder. Consumer is dead. You have Canva.

3:08:54

And then of course the most recent artificial intelligence has been overhyped under for 10 years. You have open AI.

3:08:58

I will tell you what is next in 2024.

3:09:00

Popular narrative right now is consumer genetics is dead.

3:09:02

And then right now Nucleus is open AI. That is what's going on. Let's go pump the bags.

3:09:09

Let's ring the size gong for on nucleus.

3:09:12

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

3:09:22

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

3:09:24

Listen, I'm out of rubbing his hands.

3:09:27

Some of our some of our big boy investors is in my, you know, they currently text me saying, "K, what can we do here?"

3:09:34

And, you know, you know, we we tried for a quarter of a billion dollars, you know, what's $50 million? Hey, you have to ask.

3:09:40

Getting cheaper every day.

3:09:40

getting cheaper every day. There we go. That's great.

3:09:45

Well, good luck to you, Keon.

3:09:45

I hope you can pull it off.

3:09:47

I know you'll be successful regardless of what happens. Thanks for jumping on. Love it. Great.

3:09:52

I hope this gong is going to get hit for a very specific reason soon. Absolutely. Good luck to you. Thanks, guys. Talk to you soon. Thanks for coming on. Bye. Breaking news.

3:10:03

I love some breaking news and I love having founders hop on to help us break it down because we are going full golden retriever mode.

3:10:08

I don't understand anything about that, but that's why we get the experts on.

3:10:13

That's the way the show works. Experts.

3:10:15

Trust the experts, folks.

3:10:15

Trust Trust the Seedstage founder pumping his bags.

3:10:20

Don't even trust yourself.

3:10:20

Don't even just the Exactly.

3:10:23

Um, do you want to you want to finish out the timeline right now? What do you think?

3:10:28

Yeah, we can do a little bit.

3:10:29

Uh, I thought this one from Liz Wessle.

3:10:31

This has to be the frothiest VC market for seed and preede I've seen in my tech lifetime, 2012 to present.

3:10:38

It's becoming truly absurd.

3:10:38

Uh I ramp investor seed stage. Wow. She did the seed round. Crazy. Yep. Goed.

3:10:44

Uh I haven't seen anything crazier personally. I mean then 2022.

3:10:52

I was going to say crypto stuff was really crazy.

3:10:58

Like the last the last company that I committed to was like a $60 million post seed round, but the founder had sold his last company for hundreds of millions and I don't care.

3:11:09

But again, I'm not an institutional fund that's trying to, you know, cares about ownership targets or anything like that.

3:11:18

This is good context from Jason Lumpkin.

3:11:20

Uh he says, "I would be fine with it if public multiples were higher."

3:11:22

And so, yeah, I mean, this is why, you know, we had Logan Bartlett on the show to kind of break down what's happening in the public markets because there should be some sort of tracking between these two.

3:11:32

Uh, and and it's when there's a really crazy disconnect that you think, hey, maybe the public markets are uh a leading indicator on what will happen to venture valuations.

3:11:41

Um, but at the same time, there's a lot of companies that are getting to higher ARRs faster than ever, and it'll be interesting.

3:11:47

The weirdest outcome I think would be that, you know, seed and preede deals, they get overpaid for and they don't produce the same number of power law outcomes.

3:11:59

Like maybe there's not a a single trillion dollar company that comes out of this vintage, but all of those companies wind up producing like a hundred million of IBIDA and they're like good businesses and and then like the funds kind of perform anyway.

3:12:13

Like that would be a very strange outcome.

3:12:18

would look nothing like venture has ever, but to see a to it would be very interesting to see a venture fund vintage 2025 produce a reasonable irr without a power law winner in the portfolio.

3:12:32

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

3:12:35

the the to steelman that there's potentially we've accumulated in the last 25ish years the knowh how to repeatedly build valuable software tech just technology businesses generally and in that scenario paying these expensive prices because you have this incredible team. Yep.

3:12:59

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

3:13:09

That'd be very interesting.

3:13:09

And that there's nothing if if that happens and I don't I can argue against it easily. Yeah. as well.

3:13:16

But if that happens, it's not necessarily bad because ask any dude in private equity that has like, you know, uh has just been doing these sort of 2x funds for however many decades, they've done very well. So yeah, of course.

3:13:31

Um and yeah, we want higher success rates for founders and teams, too.

3:13:36

Even if it's lower terminal sort of like exit values.

3:13:39

It's also interesting that I mean Open AI is maybe positioned itself as like potentially the power law winner of AI.

3:13:48

Like people are clearly underwriting that deal at a future valuation of like a trillion dollars.

3:13:53

They think it's going to be a big consumer tech company.

3:13:55

And no one's really concretized how like what the source of monopoly power will be in that com in that company.

3:14:04

Like there's not really a network effect yet.

3:14:06

At least there's no the value is it becomes it's just an aggregation theory thing.

3:14:11

aggregation theory thing. it becomes a verb and it's it's like Google competition is always a click away but you accumulate so much customer support that you just data and by nature of the usage the product gets so much better I would think so too and then you know so

3:14:26

maybe we're bullish who knows um but I mean it's certainly not cornered resource because the LLMs are you know commoditized now it's not really scale because everyone can serve these all the hyperscalers can serve these it's really just that that attention uh anyway we should have Augustus on to talk about this next one soon. Yeah. Uh from Lee Yeah. Uh from Lee Zin.

3:14:46

I actually want to have him on to talk about his uh Oh yeah, the debate with Did you listen to Ronda Santis or or Yeah, his his he was debating Ron.

3:14:55

Well, Ronda Santis has been trying to ban cloud seating.

3:14:57

has been trying to ban cloud seating.

3:14:58

And RFK recently came out saying, "I support what Ronda Santis is doing."

3:15:03

Like part of the Maja movement is anti-cloud seating.

3:15:05

And Augustus came out very strongly saying like, "No, RFK, like don't do that."

3:15:11

like like this there's more nuance to this argument and so we should unpack that.

3:15:14

We should unpack his uh testimony which was uh very interesting and we should also have him talk about this which is that China is erasing deserts from its map.

3:15:22

The first time I ever met Augustus at Josh Steinman's house having some cigars was he could just comes up to me and he's like oh yeah did you know that like the Gobi desert is going away and I was like what are you talking about dude?

3:15:34

And he's like, "Yeah, China's erasing their deserts." And I was like, "How?"

3:15:39

He was like, "Yeah, they're basically just planting tons and tons of trees."

3:15:43

And that's exactly what this video shows.

3:15:44

Uh he says, "By far 65 million mu of desert has been greened.

3:15:51

That's around the same area of Denmark."

3:15:53

And you can watch this video and it's crazy because it's just like literally just sand dunes and then the most verdant lush greenery you've ever seen.

3:16:03

And it just looks like wow.

3:16:03

Like I would never want to live in the desert, but I would absolutely live on this beautiful lush farmland.

3:16:08

Like imagine plopping like a nice farm farmhouse on that.

3:16:10

And that's just like the American dream.

3:16:12

And we could do that with our deserts in America. And so yeah. Yeah.

3:16:15

And so we talked to Augustus about this earlier saying, you know, after you do cloud seeding, like is there a tree planting startup that needs to be built or will that be your company?

3:16:26

and he was kind of saying, "Maybe it'll be a different company, but uh but I want this to happen and I want to figure out what the economics of this business are.

3:16:32

Is it just a handout from the uh from the Chinese government?

3:16:37

If so, do we need to do that in America?

3:16:39

Uh if there is there a way that you can do this just with the free market, that would be amazing, you know." Yeah.

3:16:45

And this ties into the terraforming stuff with the uh what's that the salt and sea? Yep.

3:16:49

If we can get water back into that bad boy, then everything around it.

3:16:53

But uh we have some uh breaking news. I wanted to pull it up.

3:16:57

Uh it's not actually breaking, but well, it is breaking.

3:16:59

It's the nucleus genomics team. Oh, yeah.

3:17:00

Uh they were all posted up watching uh Keon uh come on the show.

3:17:06

So, Ben Ben, pull it up if you can.

3:17:07

Look at the team here locked in.

3:17:10

All meetings were cancelled, but shout out to the team.

3:17:12

Uh thank you for keeping our thanks for watching genetic data safe. That's great.

3:17:17

Uh it's great having uh Keon on the show.

3:17:19

He's he's definitely built for television. We talked about this.

3:17:24

We talked about this earlier with Lulu like what is his format? What's the format?

3:17:27

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

3:17:38

Well, that's a great place to end the show. Thank you for watching.

3:17:41

Go leave us a fivestar review.

3:17:44

Put an ad for your business or your fund on the show uh into that.

3:17:46

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

3:17:54

We'll have you on the show.

3:17:55

And we have a number of founders this week coming on to break their fundraises. Uh I can't wait.

3:18:00

Yeah, it is a beautiful We're going to have to set the minimum threshold and then just raise it.

3:18:05

It's like, oh, 50 million that's, you know, that's a Tuesday for us. Yeah.

3:18:09

Call us when you're raising 80. Exactly.

3:18:11

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

3:18:18

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

3:18:23

So many interesting stories.

3:18:23

And if we keep up this pace, we will be doing a Dom episode probably next week. I can't wait. We're at 26K. I can't wait. 6K out. Let's go.

3:18:30

Thank you for everyone who's