I love when you're back I know so good you're watching tvpn live today is Thursday March 6th 2025 and we are live from the Temple of Technology The Fortress of Finance the capital of capital I'm your host John cougan right next to me is Jordy Hayes uh we got a great show for you today we got four people calling in Gary tan Augustus dero
uh Nicole wisoff and Billy thaler is calling in we're covering YC we're covering rain makinging we're covering early stage seed VC solo GP stuff we're covering flying cars that are regulated like boats sea gliders I love it uh we're going to go over some news first we're covering discord's IPO little
preemptive size gong for there go Jason citen uh one of the best to ever do it uh and then we're going to talk about Amazon's Alexa plus launch uh that's kind of weird I don't know we'll go through it anyway but we wanted to kick it off with this post did you see this post Jordy I'm pulling it up right now
uh this post is from Gabriel one of the top posters in the entire world he is and we were thinking let's kick it off it's towards the end of the week I think he locked it up I think he's brother of the week material what do you think I think so I mean just putting up fantastic numbers here for years unique
insights for years one of the greatest uh I mean I think I was introduced to him during Co lockdowns he's over in Australia I believe but uh just has never lost a step throughout his entire posting career y just absolute longevity no a lot of people hit their stride they put up 6 months seven eight whatever and
then they sort of fade exactly right they the unique insights are lost they stop reading books and consuming and they're just you know fully in the algorithm but uh something about posting you got to be out in the real world you got to be out doing things you got to be getting insights from places other than
the timeline other that otherwise you know gets sort of con recycled so being down under uh you know putting up big numbers yeah and I love his his 360 degree attack on his game you I know about his family because of his posting but I also know about his uh deep understanding of rats apparently yeah so
let's break this down I'll go so uh Gabe is quote posting Ali deau she says highest leverage things you can do in your 20s travel start a company join a company you love we're going to cut it off there because that's not what this segment is about why don't you read gab's post he says lots of egregious stuff in here but calling travel high
Leverage is insane it costs $1,500 to fly return New York to Tokyo for $1,000 you could buy 50 rats in a one to four boy girl ratio and release them in a competitor's Wei workor the iPad kids are cooked and uh this couldn't be more real you know we we would we would do this for competitive podcast stud but here's
the thing they all zoom in to record there's no Studio to release in we wouldn't do it in their home that would just be too disrespectful but before we get into the rest of the show I got a call out today so I was up in the bay yesterday evening and I was flying back this morning and uh I was getting on a
jsx flight yep and uh this guy approaches me uh and says hey I'm a technology brother I listen to every episode let's go just wanted to introduce myself so it was this guy Cole Rodman uh he's a seed uh to growth investor over at DST Global and an absolute dog and uh thank you Cole for stopping me uh it was a highlight of my
morning and I just wanted to give you a little call out he's been listening since the early days fantastic you know 50 plus episodes ago so he's an absolute brother then the other thing I'm not going to name this technology brother but a guy uh emailed me uh this morning you know that that's been listening to
the show also since the first week wow and uh he's going out for a seed round he said hey I'd love to have you involved I looked at the deck I committed on the spot uh and offered to make some other introductions and in less than an hour I introduced him to I think five separate people that that
immediately opted in uh all uh you know would be potential leads for his round so it's been a lot of brother Behavior going down this morning and I'm fired up to doing deals doing podcast get into the show building the community building the Brotherhood building the Brotherhood that's the goal uh anyway uh let's move
on I just wanted to you know really you know we call this the dojo of the dollar we want to respect the dollar and we respect our advertisers so I wanted to kick it off with an early ad foru.com Investing For Those who take it seriously multi-asset investing industry-leading yields trusted by millions keep you guessing sometimes
there's an amazing transition later in the show to an ad but now boom ad right at the think didn't think that was boom but the reason I want to talk about public is because I saw this great post from mad's Capital mad says I'm not sure I can hang I can handle a kangaroo Market Bros because there's new terminology there's
the bull market where it goes up bare Market where it goes down Kangaroo Market bouncing all around all over the place but I love it it does like this has been my entire 20s yeah like entire adult life Kangaroo Market the Cycles have felt shorter because we haven't been in this giv you something to you
know hope for to look forward to if uh you know if you're if you're down bad you know that a bull there's always a bull market somewhere there's always a bull market somewhere and what is a kangaroo Market if not just a bunch of bulls and bears all crammed together in a stable no and kangaroos are cute yeah
they're fun they're always bouncing around but they're also terrifying yeah they're vicious when they get all jacked if you haven't seen it go look up everyone's seen it not everybody's seen it everyone's seen the Jack look up kangaroo fist fights and uh you'll find a ton of content from Down Under I'm sure I'm sure Gabriel who
we just covered I'm sure he's gotten into his fair share of scuff ups with uh you know with with the kangaroos but um yeah they're tough like to have some fun tough uh well let's uh let's highlight Arena magazine Max Meyers newest uh drop we got these in a few days ago they're fantastic we a lot of people saw our ad
before full the magazine ever actually got out um so we're sorry to front run there but uh the actual magazine itself is fantastic when I read this and when I read Colossus review to me oh yeah profile on KY scandin good friend of mine she's amazing the J jenz capitalist Whisperer uh published a book very
highly reviewed by Tyler Cowan highly recommend picking it up uh has really mastered economics education in the modern era everything from Tik Tok to YouTube videos to newsletters really built like a multimedia Empire uh with with a very like sharp like there's just so much in in the whole like business
econ content world there's so much like just fake clickbait like Oh Black Rock actually owns everything like they're the most powerful company like that whole stuff uh and she just like stays away from that really well and like actually educates people properly it's great uh United semiconductors of America a modest proposal for American
industry I mean just look at this it's fantastic amazing um so highly recomend going and subscribing you just want this on your coffee table there's so many good stuff there's so many good things in here uh we'll probably pick an article out of here to to do a deep dive on the art of the Chinese let Max call
interesting yeah yeah we should have him call in it's great who wants to work in a factory oh and look we're printing tweets he he's printing tweets Luke Metro got featured everybody wants to expand industrial cap cap uh capability but no one wants to work in a factory kicked off an entire entire article and
the only thing is I I agree with Luke on most things but I would argue that there is entirely uh you know the new generation is actually very excited to be in factories totally totally yeah I mean there a major Vibe shift that's why we're having Augustus on Factory later today because he he has certainly made
sleeping in a factory cool y uh in in a very serious way sleeping in truck beds you know when he's out forward deployed all of the above uh anyway uh we wanted to highlight a post from Gary tan that I'm sure we'll discuss later he's coming out at noon uh for 25% of the winter 2025 batch of Y combinator 95% of lines
of code are llm generated that's not a typo the age of vibe coding are is here fascinating Vibe coding so I'm sure I'm sure get more into that but uh something to think about as we go through anyway let's move on to Discord unusual Wales has the post breaking Discord is an early talks with Bankers about an IPO
that could come as soon as this year and uh I think this was originally bro uh uh broken by the New York Times They don't have too much information here but we can kind of run through it a capital says not sure why Discord needs an IPO other than exit liquidity payday um because they're profitable uh yeah that would be a good
reason I don't know I mean Jason citran is a fascinating entrepreneur he is he truly like does not fit the standard mold of entrepreneur I think he's from Florida and then went to a like a very very small kind of game development school and was totally off of the like Stanford IV League track started one
company wind up wound up selling it and then just built Discord kind of outside of the Silicon Valley realm until it just became a complete monster and now has been very very profitable um but there's been a bunch of push back to this I saw some posts uh like every major Old Line Media company is now like super anti-tac and so the headline from
like IGN was like prepare for Discord to get even worse Bankers are getting involved and it's like I don't know that might not be bad but uh I guess people don't like like the monetization made Instagram better right I think so sure of course well the new yorktimes and yeah they're you know this all is going
to come down to price right yeah it's possible that that the Discord you know it gets kind of like turned into a bit of a meme briefly uh it's possible that people that buy the the stock on the first day you know or the first week or whatever don't end up doing that well but ultimately uh this is a robust
company with a massive user base uh I'm interested to see their actual financial performance but this is great for all the hardworking employees who spent you know decade plus now at this point I don't know when Discord was actually founded uh you know working pretty fasting story deserve some uh liquidity at this point Jason citen founded this
social gaming platform for mobile games called open faint and then he sold it to this company called greed which is a game development company Like A Holdings company j a Japanese social networking Service uh in 2011 for $104 million and I remember there was something weird about the ear out I I I don't I'm not
exactly sure what happened but uh then he founds hammer and chisel which is a game development studio in 2012 they launch a product fat forever released in 2014 there's a there's a crazy old video I wish we could pull up of him pitching it and I think Tech crunch disrupt and just being like I made this game and you
know it's going to be the it was basically a MOBA but mobile so do you do you know uh uh Dota 2 or League of Legends any of those was a Starcraft guy yeah yeah yeah so so uh MOBA but for mobile but it wasn't successful uh during the game development process he noticed how difficult it was for his
team to work out tactics in games like League of Legends using Voiceover IP uh because normally like back when you play a game you just hop on like a zoom call essentially or Skype call Rip um and so then he decided to build a chat service with a focus on user friendliness and Min minimal impact on performance so
deep integration into the game the name Discord was CH was chosen because it sounds cool and has to do with talking yeah how crazy is it that both uh Discord and slack the two most dominant sort of like workplace chat products both started as games that just built a decent chat functionality and then ended
up focusing on that totally really wild yeah it's like no one wants to just like go straight into chat um so in 2016 Discord raises 20 million from Warner media Time Time Warner and then uh Warner media was acquired by AT&T in 2018 Warner media Investment Group was shut down in 2019 selling the equity Microsoft announced it would provide
Discord support for Xbox Live users uh they raised 150 Discord raised 150 a two billion valuation led by Green Oaks with participation from first Mark 10cent ivp index a few others uh in December of 2018 and then um they kind of kind of kept growing from there and now they will um IPO so that'll be hot and if of
course if you want to play the IPO go to public.com and uh Nikita I'm sure will do well here right oh you think he still has prob I'm sure has you know solid position um you know based on whenever he joined hope it wasn't priced at 15 billion but 2021 uh yeah Discord was was priced at 15 billion but I mean you have to imagine
they've grown a ton since then yep in recent years Discord has tried to expand as a just one of those things like how do you what is what is how do you value the earnings of a network versus a SAS company right yeah like that that's going to be the big question here yeah it is it is crazy I mean they've tried
when when Clubhouse came out they Discord like copied the feature pretty quickly they have like stages so you can be in a Discord group and then I mean Discord was always like for a long time I felt like it was more full featured than slack just as a user uh and it just had like just felt cooler even just like
the dark mode by default just felt better but they also had other Integrations um but then yeah they launched they launched the clubhouse competitor but the thing that really took off was like during the AI boom like the the server for Mid Journey uh in 2023 had over 15 million members and like that's insane like I I just I don't
think slack is set up for that yeah and so they really figured out how to make these like communities like 15 million people like that that is a social network by itself and it's a social network on top of a social network so it it's almost like that DEC was just criticize constantly specifically
criticizing mid Journey for making it so difficult but to not use like a like front end regular front end yeah um but you have to imagine that uh yeah they they got a lot of benefit from that in in other ways by you know having it be centered around the community and shared learning and all these different yeah I
mean I I noticed uh we were talking about Sesame that voice AI app I tried to use it on my phone on Safari and it wasn't a great experience here's just an interesting comp because I feel like in uh you know a lot of the sort of online community activity we have our corner here x there's Reddit right which is
interest based there's Discord which is also interest based but you know company project uh game based Reddit is trading traded up to it's down 20% in the last month uh but it it was peing at me pull this up here it peaked at a $40 billion market cap just a month ago exactly 40 billion Ford 40 billion for Reddit and
they are losing uh they lost half a billion dollars in the last year wow and on 1.3 billion in Revenue so to me if Discord can come out and actually you know who knows I imagine they've been you know heavily focused on profitability it's very possible that they could be priced beyond their last
private Market valuation y uh what's your take on like the post uh like the the postmortem on Mid Journey using Discord because I feel like it's still an underrated strategy like we were talking about Sesame that voice AI I tried to use it on iOS Safari it didn't work for me it was kind of like breaking and I don't think Sesame has an
IOS app yet and one of the amazing things about mid Journey being on Discord was that it they instantly on day one had great Mobile support on every platform that Discord worked on and so it's like they didn't have their own Mac app but they had a Discord Mac app that essentially worked perfectly uh
and of course there were a lot of like narrow like problems um but I still think it's pretty good and then also I mean the crypto communities have been huge on Discord too and so I'm sure that's driven a ton of new trial and then once you're in that ecosystem you have your Discord username and you're
just going to kind of use it for everything totally yeah interesting it'll be it'll be fun to see like kind of when the S1 drops and where the Valu if they can get GameStops PE ratio they will be doing pretty well let's go um anyways what do we got next uh the company debuted an online shop in 2023 where users can pay to enhance the
profiles and add custom graphics to the digital Avatar I clearly remember when they decided hey we're going to start monetizing monetized super hard yeah they got me because I wanted to be able to upload like HD videos sometimes oh and there were certain files that you couldn't share in a Discord and unless
it was like you couldn't go over like 50 Megs or something unless you were paying and so I wound up paying and then just like probably forgot about it probably still playing anyway uh what should Jason citen do when he gets liquidity buy a million dollar watch exactly and where should he go bezel so go to bezel Jason if you're
listening go to bezel and we have an update so for the last month we've been telling people that bezel has 22 been information yeah we have to issue a COR not intentional uh sometimes people intentionally spread misinformation this was unintentional but they have uh they added over 1500 new watches to the
platform uh in the last month it's fantastic to see that's 1,500 watches that could be yours right could be yours uh if you move quick enough you could buy all of them I think after the Discord IPO Jason could buy all of them absolutely hopefully hopefully he does what is the um actually I don't know about that, 500 luxury watches fully
authenticated in-house by bezel uh founder uh co-founder he told me they had I think they probably have close to a billion dollars of watches listed on the platform right now so it's really going to have to pop for Jason to be able to acquire every watch on the platform um but you know that would just be pulling
forward like you know a couple years of their revenue um and uh you know it would it would hurt other but you're not considering leverage yeah that's true it's true yeah and some of these watches are in you know think basically investment assets yeah he should sell 100% of his Discord steak lever up and
just buy every 10,000 sub Mariners just walk around walk around just covered I want to I want to see a Submariner around his ankle yes exctly a little ankle a little ankle watch um that's the next trend for for beires like him for sure for sure well we'd love to have you on the show Jason tell the story of
Discord uh I'm a huge fan of I already made a huge I made a big deep dive on the on the company and video about it it's a fascinating story anyway let's Mo once these companies go public by the way we have to actually buy a big enough position to say hey I'm a major sh shareholder I would love to have you on the show to
discuss it's like a little you know saying uh you know it's a little um it's a more warm invite yeah yeah it's like it's like you should come on the show because I'm extra conflicted yeah all the other shows they're not conflicted the point CNBC can't do that what's the point exactly anyway let's go to Andy jasse
over at Amazon uh he says excited to be excited to be with the team in NYC today rolling out the new Alexa plus we've been waiting for this everyone's been waiting everybody's been waiting for this uh across Amazon we're harnessing the transformative power of generative AI to reimagine the experiences we offer customers and Alexa plus is the latest
example she's smarter more capable and personalized un and unlike chat Bots also takes action to help you get things done oh agent this is an agent which is at the heart of our mission at Amazon to make customers lives better and easier every day uh I can't wait to get so weird the first thing that popped out to
me so they they post some ads uh the ads are fine but they're using she which is a very odd choice I went to Chachi PT grock and Claude can you guess what those three llms want to be referred to as terms of pronoun yeah said all three want to be it it all three including Claude interesting says hey yeah like I'm not a
person don't morphies me got it uh it was just very odd to hear them it felt very old school like there used to be like this idea of like Siri is a her yeah and and then we kind of moved away from that and there's been so much talk about oh chat PT isn't that good of a name but when I heard them say Alexa
it's a her and I was like like it's not it's not you know one of the best investments you could have made yeah in the last decade or so was shorting the name Alexa as soon as Amazon introduced it in 2015 Alexa was the 32nd most popular name for girls born in the United States in 2022 Alexa's name uh
ranked dropped to 536 the lowest it's been since 1985 um and in 2023 it's uh down in the 600s uh so really really rough go uh tough uh tough to be named Alexa in the year you know 2014 prior to the launch yeah um because uh but then again it's becoming more rare so maybe there's value in that right yeah I I would just
prefer it if it was just Amazon like hey Amazon like I'm talking to you you're the company I want you to order something for me it's Amazon it's an it and I'm happy with that I don't need this like secondary thing I don't know it it just stuck out to me as like this odd this odd choice that feels more
natural Alexa feels like a better brand name than chat gbt which is like a mouthful or Claude 3.7 Sonet or grock 3 like these don't sound like names but when I actually like Pro sat with it for a second and heard the opposite I was like actually I would much prefer you know just to talk to it yeah uh and it's
just it's just less weird anyway uh let's go to Ben Thompson asery he's breaking down this announcement uh from The Verge Amazon is finally launching the long awaited generative AI version of ala Alexa plus that if it all goes well will make will take away much of the friction that comes with talking to a speaker to control your smart home or
getting info on the Fly some of the new abilities include ability to do things for you you'll be able to ask it to order groceries for you or send event invites to your friends I feel like the last version of Alexa said that it could do that uh anyway it's 20 bucks a month or it's free if you're a Prime member
and Prime is $15 a month so you save $5 by getting both it's very odd that comes with access to Alexa website where the company said you can go and do long form work uh Amazon also said it created a new Alexa app to uh go with the new assistant Alexa plus will work on almost every Alexa device released so far they're actually trying
to enter the consumer llm game yeah not even they're they're saying we want you to use our Hardware but we're also going to I mean they have all the infrastructure for it it makes sense that they would like kind of offer something uh Thompson level this video of the EV it's 2025 and they just did a live blog uh
moreover there was no video put up after the event Amazon does have a couple of promo videos is this pure vaporware uh Ben asks uh fortunately The Verge did come out with a Hands-On report a couple of days after the event so apparently Alexa Plus in does in fact exist in a state that is accessible by non-amazon
employees I was uh from the report I was also able to talk to the assistant myself and try out its new ability to follow multiple commands at once without needing to repeat the Wake word Alexa I dim I asked it to dim the lights and adjust the thermostat to make it a little warmer the thermostat adjusted
while the lights dimmed and Alexa said I dim the lights in the living room and increase the temperature by two degrees is there anything else you need then I said can you vac in the floor it replied okay and the Roomba just started the job not bad like that that does seem pretty cool uh of course this is probably one
of those things where you have to be really all in on the whole ecosystem uh because if you're using a uh you know Google home or you have an Apple TV all of a sudden it's not going to integrate but yeah Ben wanted to give a little bit of a brief history of Alexa that I thought would be kind of interesting um he says back to Alexa
though which first launched in 2014 where a decade into these like AI assistants and like the chat B the chatbot era the chatbot Renaissance was like a thing and people thought chatbots were going to be all over the place and then took 10 years to get here but now they are uh just a few months after the
disastrous Fire Phone which led to most people dismissing the voice assistant and its Associated Echo speaker out of hand however Ben says I was immediately intrigued precisely because Alexa and Echo he's always got the receipts too yeah totally oh yeah yeah yeah there's a link here you can prove it uh actually
had a potential Market the home the one place where you might not have your phone on your body and where it would be the least awkward to rely on voice interaction because you're not out in the world say hey good points I also think Amazon got two big things right with Alexa particularly as it expanded
its skills first Alexa was always very fast in my experience very good at understanding what you said this is a big distinguishing factor from Siri of course uh although Google quickly rivaled Alexa um second Amazon didn't attempt to do fancy fuzzy matching when it came to triggering skills if you wanted to use a device or service you
had to say the words exactly right uh so less errors but you had to be more trained so training the to get the right thing the second Point may seem kind of intuitive but I think it was a very smart product Choice given Alexa's capabilities instead of wowing users half the time and frustrating them the
other half with no clear feedback about why a particular command worked or didn't Alexa put the burden on the user again speaking anecdotally I would blame myself when a voice command didn't work because I didn't say the right words Alexa for its part understood what I said and told me whether it was
successful or not which allowed me to improve Siri to take the counter example would try to be smart which actually made it more frustrating good point and so this also gets to why Amazon's announcement of Alexa plus makes me nervous it feels way too ambitious Alexa plus isn't just going to turn on your
lights it's also going to order concert tickets and make a reservation at your favorite restaurant and plan a vacation and call the babysitter Alexa plus will have a memory and learn and the list goes on which is to say that Amazon every AI assistant product uses the same examples yet nobody has been able to
truly get product Market fit with those set of examples right nobody's getting nobody's using an AI assistant today on average like the the average consumer in America is not saying hey book me a flight to New York even though that's like been the default sort of example right totally or hey can you order some Advil yeah we're out even
though it's actually probably good at that but it's still not actually um uh it's it's never had in during traction the last time I heard the name Alexa I was getting a massage and the massage therapist said hey uh turn up uh the volume really Alexa turn up the volume and I was like okay that makes sense
like it's yeah um but I hadn't hadn't seen I haven't seen or heard of an Alexa in well I haven't had one in like probably six seven years haven't seen one in a friend's house in that period of time uh I thought that the the last time I got value out of the Alexa service was being like okay this is a pretty good speaker for like a hundred
bucks or whatever it was um uh well let's uh let's finish out with uh Ben tying it to Apple and what's going on at Siri uh he's quoting from Mark Gman Apple's inc's long promised overhaul of a Siri digital assistant is facing engineering problems and software bugs threatening to postpone or limit
its release according to people with knowledge of the matter the company first unveiled plans for a new AI infused Siri at its developers conference last June and has even advertised some of the features to its customers but apple is still racing to finish the software said the people who ask not to be identified uh some
features have been postponed to May or later uh the Siri makeover is a center piece of the Apple intelligence platform the company's effort to catch up in Ai and spur iPhone upgrades and so uh his main point here is that uh Amazon and apple don't need to be in a rush both both Alexa and Siri have a decade plus
Head Start in terms of Integrations with a host of devices and services Alexa plus and new Siri don't need to have capabilities that exceed even what the frontier AI Labs have yet to ship simply being better voice assistance for their existing ecosystems will will make them more useful and I should note is the
heavy is a heavy lift in and of itself Faithfully replicating existing functionality is a hard problem that's the power of being an ecosystem provider and I suspect both companies should have a little bit more confidence in their relative advantage and be a little more conservative about their Ambitions and
so I thought it was kind of interesting that like you know we we're frustrated that these products aren't better but once you understand the the the market Dynamic the ecosystem lock in it's like yeah you can one those like just because you have an extreme Advantage doesn't doesn't give you permission or or nobody's going to give you props when
you botch rollouts when you release lackluster products where where you're not creating massive you know sort of forward momentum yeah uh these companies have incredible access to Talent Capital every Advantage the ecosystem advantage and the services advantage and we should hold them to a high standard yeah that's
a good point I mean you go back to the uh the launch of the iPhone and I think I I the R&D number I mean everything about that project is insane uh I think the R&D number is like one 100th of what Zuck has spent on the metaverse something like that maybe a thousandth it was like basically nothing super fast
uh and obviously pulled forward like a bunch of technology that like we didn't really have like the glass screens and phones and all this stuff but there wasie pointed out Rec that that was an acquisition the the screen Tech in the iPhone was was a company that the core Tech was something that they had bought
that's cool yeah um they uh but but I mean at the time Apple had like crazy pressure right they didn't have an ecosystem that they could just kind of sit back on if they didn't do that someone else would have gotten there for sure Blackberry eventually kind of got there and I'm sure Nokia or Microsoft eventually would have tried totally
anyway um well the one piece of Smart Home Tech that should be connected to your Alexa is of course your eighth sleep nights that fuel your best days turn any bed into the ultimate sleeping experience go to 8sleep.com tvpn get a bed hook it up to your smart home tell it I actually would use that because you can prompt your bed to start
getting ready for bed exact sleep uh I have it set on on an autopilot because it knows I get into bed at 8:30 every night um so early I love it um but uh but anyways uh I can see they might actually have an Alexa integration but um uh uh go to eight sleep.com tvpn it's in our bios everywhere check them out um
I don't have a sleep score from last night so this is a good opportunity for you to potentially get a quick win uh considering I'm at a zero you're at a zero well that is brutal I'm zeroed out um let me see uh eight sleep where where we where are we oh wow awful 36 I've never had a sleep score so low
what happened 4 hours and 30 minutes that that feels like a bug or something I don't know I mean I was up late and I did get up up late yeah you were up late I passed I went to dinner with uh with some friends and so I was out I was out pretty late Dr I did actually I did have some wine that's it people if if you
love alcohol you're going to hate eight sleep because it just completely exposes how terrible alcohol is for your sleep uh which is common I had like two knowled nothing it was like nothing all right we got Gary calling in in a second uh I'm very excited for this yeah he's texting me right now sounds amaz uh
let's I think he should be hopping on in just a minute let's see in the meantime we should do a funny post or something let's see oh did you see this uh did you see this Olive metallic mybach of course really it really pops off the page in black and white but uh it's it's this beautiful green and I thought we could take a
moment to make a little announcement to the to the community that that green is now part of our official brand yeah and you might see in in the lower corner down there we actually have our legal team working on um you know po green patenting green you know there's a guy who owns black or something that
yeah vanta black have you heard about this interesting uh it's not named after the sock 2 compliance provider uh it but it is a black that is so dark that it's like the darkest black it doesn't reflect any light and I think the guy patented it and defends it brutally it's not very uh it's not very reflective
um anyway you should be able to make your own colors and patent them artial here's another Post open AI will be the first company to offer a 1 million per month subscription plan for AGI and then someone says Source it says uh it's a prediction uh yeah uh kind of a uh we call do we call post stuff
post kind of a PO meme post joke post having a laugh all the above it's it's certainly within the realm of possibility but the challenge is that if you can get an open- Source model for basically nothing per month that's nearly as good what are you going to choose right it's got to be it's got to be orders of magnitude
better I think uh it's it's it's like a status symbol you know you know why do you why do you pay for a luxury watch you know you tell the same time with a with a quartz $5 watch that's true but uh you know pek Philipe says something about you you use a$ million model that could have been yeah could have been the
Ecommerce course Bros are going to be pulling up like looking at their like page of open a ey nobody's going to be flexing Lambos and things like that Andrew Tate will be like yeah I don't fight private anymore but I just have the most expens agent cranking constantly servers on fire it's the new you know the the the founders that you
know develop an ego based on head count right so they're just like trying to grow headcount like you you actually are hitting up open AI saying do you have any more expensive plans I don't have any I don't have any employees at this point I just like want to be able to show that like I'm really uh you know
I'm really about it yeah uh did you see that HBO has green lit a uh unscripted unfiltered unhinged reality TV show about the Paul Brothers wow Logan Paul and Jake Paul now have a uh a show on HBO Max and wait is it live already uh no I think it's uh the trailer drops tomorrow this is on March 4th and Jake
says this company used to make The Sopranos so not not a great not a great reception but you know my my reaction to this was like I'm sorry like the market demands what it demands like this is going to do really well so here's the thing this is clearly a strategic move from Max to try to get a younger demographic that's that uh
they can pay more to get the show than Netflix because Netflix is looking at this and saying all the people that are really going to want to watch this already have access to Netflix accounts they're on family plans as a younger demo yep whereas Max can potentially pull in some new subscribers and so um
the deal the deal makes sense um and I'm I'm uh I'm not surprised at all to see it okay and it's easy for the brothers uh the Paul brothers that is because they've been recording pretty much every minute of their daily lives for a decade at this point yeah and um yeah now they're going to have to sit down in
front of a camera it's it's just nothing different yeah I mean obviously like deeply controversial people some people like love and hate the content uh but uh have you seen the slap that changed my life no it's a YouTube video but it's like almost like a documentary about Logan Paul challenging a Russian slap boxer to a
slap fight and it's edited so well it's edited by this guy Hayden Hillier Smith who's like this like YouTube Mastermind and it's like emotional like it's it's it's it's like art and it's so ridiculous because you're watching this Logan Paul like like slap boxing thing but it takes you on this emotional
journey of him like wanting to go and do this fight and it's like is this too risky will he have like brain damage from it uh and it's it's it's just really well shot really well paced really well edited uh it's exciting it's emotional you can see some of it here Jordy look at this and he he's talking to his mom and his mom's like don't do
this like if you get hit in the head you're GNA get one shoted you're gonna get oneshotted exactly uh and I mean look look it's it's it's rough yeah oh you can see it over there um and and and this was the moment I was like oh man guy's like he's a good Entertainer regardless of what you think of all his
products and and other content like the learn to be like just a master because he's just so I we we've talked about this I know we've talked about this offline I don't know if we've talked about it online but the whole slapboxing thing um Dana White went on um went on like this whole like podcast Road Show talking about how power slap is is the
number one sport in the world and he says we get more views than NF MBA MLB you know all combined and people are basically saying I actually just lost power oh you did some cool uh no my microphone anyways Dana White goes on this kind of very aggressive Road Show to promote uh Power slap yeah and people obviously all the
data is public so they immediately start factchecking it and first of all they're like one Dana this is not actually more popular popular than the NBA and the MLB and all these different things yeah and um apparently it's actually been really underperforming uh from a rating standpoint uh where it has a sort of
shock value that people are drawn to on social media because you see this guy about to slap this other guy it stands out people stop they watch it uh but then the comments are almost universally negative the ACT actually how people feel about it um and uh so so anyways we'll we'll see kind of what happens
there but um there was just a great uh profile on Dana White I think in Forbes I think he did the cover and so we should we should read that on the show that would be great we should then we should have them call in yeah no and and then again the challenge is um doing Combat Sports that involve um somebody
being completely defenseless yeah is uh is much harder to watch hey we got Gary here hey how's it going it's great how you doing good good there he is fantastic amazing to have you on we we wanted to have you on for a bunch of reasons I mean thank you so much uh it's fantastic to talk to you anytime uh but
it seems like YC is like completely transformed by llms writing code so uh break it down okay uh I mean I think we're just at the dawn of this technology and um it's the people who already know how to code who are taking the best advantage AG of it and you know I I'm seeing the haters on the internet uh coming at us but that's fine come at
me bro um what's happening is that like you know 100% of YC companies these days have Technical co-founders and then uh you're stupid not to use it like basically why would you subject yourself to you know spending a lot of hours on things that um you don't have to do and uh being able to go all the way to
ground and debug the thing and you know basically a prerequisite of using these tools well is that um you don't need the tools yeah that makes sense how long do you think the do you think the sort of advantage that technical Founders have in AI right now is going to be Perpetual or do you do you see a world in in five
years where the the the the playing field has been completely leveled um you know I still think like it's still it's not like product doesn't matter or design doesn't matter it if anything what it is is H it matters even more yeah the bar was lower before the bar is much higher now like back then if you go
back like 10 or 15 years for startups period you know when I first worked at YC in 2011 um almost anything that had really Technical co-founders and a real problem like you going to be you know at least a series a company like you know and then I don't think that that's I think that's become less and less true even today
like you know there are perfectly good very technical teams that have all the skills and you know are in pretty big problem spaces and then there's competition like the bar is just so much higher so I think the way to think about it is if you're not using it you're actually leaving um time and attention uh that could be used for all the other
things that you're going to need in a perfect comp competitive world and so it's you know all the people who are like you know F Vibe coders or you know all that it's just like it's cope it's like the world just changed we're just trying to help you and you live in that old world where you know you're sitting
there uh you know writing your own manual tests and banging your head into the code or you can embrace the future and uh you know get that Alpha get that edge talk to us about how the bar has been raised from a metric standpoint you know YC has always been about you have three months to make a tremendous amount
of progress It's really around you know preparing for for demo day the bars all you know anytime you take hundreds of super super talented people and put them under that pressure uh they're going to produce amazing results uh from a revenue standpoint from a traction standpoint you know it seems like the
bar has jumped uh dramatically but would love some more color there yeah uh I guess like y see these like we've been really uh intentional about um trying to go back to Founders who are actually at right at the beginning so you know the these numbers fluctuate but pretty much every time 70 to 80% of the companies have uh no revenue and uh you
know probably 70 to 80% generally are unlaunched so uh it's really during those 10 weeks like can you go from zero to say a 100,000 or several hundred, a year Revenue uh but even that is like you know sort of secondary like uh the funniest thing when you really think about it you think about a company that
actually does make it to 100 million or a billion dollars a year in Revenue like are you really going to look at the first 10 weeks and say well you went to you know well that company went to 50K ARR and that other company went to 150k AR it's like if you like play it all the way out like it's all these other
factors um so you know I I think basically if you can't get revenue or customers during the 10 weeks of YC like man that was the wrong idea or you don't got the skills um and even then like you can't count teams out like there are tons of teams that uh deferred demo day had nothing had had you know they took
their money and basically NOS to the grindstone like stayed in the IDM Ma and then they went on to create things like retool and you know these are things that everyone uses now so oh man I remember day wild passed yeah my my my favorite joke on the show is that like the the way to outperform as an LP is to
travel back in time and just give John as much money as possible to invest in in his early uh first and second YC B I remember yeah I remember being at you know demo day with retool and being like that company looks cool but I don't even know what I would say to them because I didn't realize you could just like yeah
just invest uh anyway um we we've had this uh thesis obviously like you know YC anything successful attracts like haters uh we've had this thesis that YC is like entering like a Renaissance like with the AI stuff like this is the best time to be running like the YC business model but can you talk a little bit
about um specifically like are do you think about yourself running YC in founder mode and can you talk about what that means and what you're doing and what's changing and how you want to take it to like the next level of course man I mean you know some of it is like I'm trying to do founder mode but you know shout out to the original
goat Paul Graham like and Jessica Livingston and you know Robert Morris and Trevor Blackwell you know like I I'm I it turns out you know you don't have to be the founder to try to run the founder mode Playbook and Brian chesky himself is on my board and when I came back uh to YC the first thing he said
was all right well if you were the founder uh what's zerob based accounting like what are you going to do and uh you know there shades of that in what elon's doing with the US government like you know I think uh I just stepped in it by bringing that up but hey like you know what this is actually how uh you should
be a leader like you actually have to think about things uh from first principls from zerob based accounting like if knowing what we know now would we do that thing that we're doing and you know the enemy of every bureaucracy is uh you know thinking yeah so what are the biggest decision making do you know doing the right thing so uh I think YC
was always the like Center the sort of like tree of prosperity uh you know I I left and spent seven years in my seven years in the wilderness uh running into initialized and uh I you know built an amazing team those guys are doing awesome um I realize that actually if I stayed at initialized and didn't come
back and uh heed the call of Paul and Jessica to write the ship at YC uh I would be out of a business I you know I at initialized would have been out of business if uh YC itself was not going in the right direction and here we are like I think that we're doing it and we're going to keep doing it and the
biggest thing that um you know it's it's just funny that founder mode was uh the meme that was born at the alumni uh conf top top alumni conference and you know um Brian chesky didn't even he wasn't even like scheduled to appear and I just kept texting him because he would always come to the YC batch and give his uh you
know it's funny for him he's like yeah I'm going to tell the um the uh selling serial story and he's so generous with his time he does that every single time but um I remember seeing him extremely animated uh telling his not his zero to one story but his like save the company pre-ipo story where he had to nobody
believed in him covid was happening you know and then he just buckled up he's like look I made a lot you know he admits like he made a bunch of different mistakes that um you the reason why at the top alum event that he spoke at that was such a like pivotal moment I think that uh we brought together about 200 of
all of our top Founders uh you know there're about 60 or 70 unicorns uh represented and I think that we unlocked you know easily 10 to1 billion dollars in New Market Cap like that very night because um there's just people who you know there is a machine in silcon Valley uh and it's not unintentional it it's
not um malicious like you know our our corporate governance and Delaware SE Corps are design boards are like designed to maximize shareholder value um but the there's a bunch of advice that people along the way tell you that like are self-serving that uh cause you to do the wrong things like you hire
people who uh did it at a big company before and then you're supposed to do it that way and it's like no no like well maybe like you know there are some things like maybe Finance and Accounting that you shouldn't innovate on right you innovate a little bit too much there and you go to jail yeah but do podcasting and about you you
know be founder mode yeah yeah uh what you what do you say to people that want to put YC in a box right you guys have had some high-profile hard tech deep Tech launches recently that seem like amazing companies and there's push back from people that that almost want say you know you guys are it's like
obviously completely BS because there's a long history um and the guy who's running the plays was a paler like it's you shouldn't be surprised that there's defense Tech coming out of this thing once Gary takes over I I don't want five eyes yeah yeah so I mean we we have strong opinions here around why this is
great because if you're a super bright you know engineer technologist and you want to build something YC can teach you how to build you know a company you have to build your product and sort of own your Market but yeah what do you say to people that want to put YC you know in a box and and say STI stick with SAS stick
with software oh man I mean YC was never just sass you know I mean boom is uh has you know astris is right across the street they're like getting satellites up there albo Labs like I mean albo is super hardcore because uh they basically have made spy satellites but uh you know they're they're better than what the US
government can do and you know they might just replace uh replace that market for that it's just nuts like you know this is a small team out of Colorado uh you know putting satellites up that are better than like the entire you know government waste machine it's like not I guess you know in some in some respects like it's not that
surprising actually so ok go through they're a nuclear company yeah we got nuclear companies we got you know helon a fusion company um I get it you know what like I think that we're it's a weird uh thing to sort of deal with for me cuz I always think of myself as the little guy but you know I got to realize
like hey I get it like we're going to take the arrows and it's fine we're just going to keep helping Founders um and the reality is like hey uh you know actually like it's I want to shout out the gundo Bros I want to be like you know what like you guys keep doing your thing like you're always weling at YC
like y you know that I know there was like a little bit of X beef uh but there shouldn't be you know like you know don't see it as the challenge the challenge with YC is for every you know 200 Founders you let in you got to reject a bunch of people right because there's just not enough space and not everybody's sort of qualified or it's
not the right sort of moment uh but the ultimate evidence of the value of YC is that you have highly highly successful Founders that go back for a second time right and so whenever I see drama on the timeline about YC uh it's never coming from people that have experienced the product right it's always coming from
you know people that just really aren't Live players right like people that aren't really in the conversation so um yeah so yeah be a be a player character man and if you're a player character it's just like you don't got to be like that yeah uh can you talk a little bit about uh just long-term trends in making
Hardware a viable startup at the 500k investment level I mean when I went through I see there was this whole like Hardware is hard it was always like oh it's going to be so Capital intensive and yet I think we're seeing people do the YC model and yeah you're probably not going to be shipping a million units of you know whatever boat you're
building on demo day like you could serve a million customers if you're building a social networking app yeah but I mean the reason why hard tech at YC can happen is like I mean kind of even going back to what we were talking about earlier like it's not necessarily just about you know SAS did you grow 10% week on
week like did you hit 100K AR like that's you know sort of weak like spreadsheet thinking and uh the hardtech companies that do super well they show up with like you know if you had a super crack team that was the team to do this what would they be able to get done in 10 weeks and sometimes it's a prototype
sometimes it's a demo like uh the other thing is I have more than a billion dollars a year in Capital that's basically just like hard allocated to YC companies uh not from us from like you know hundreds of VCS who now uh are all coming back to demo day in droves and uh you know name me another place that has
that actually like and they're not necessarily just like doing the plug and chug like you know they are actually meeting the founders they're actually making up their own minds they are um you know and they're funding hardtech you know I think about 90% Ai and uh you know the age of intelligence is here
dude like the machines are you able to do all knowledge work like that's you know insane and then simultaneous to that like I'm really excited about our hard tech stuff because that's I mean that's that's the built world like how do we actually create prosperity and abundance for one another and uh you know God knows in America we need it you
know like we don't even have we can't even make screws for ourselves it's nuts right you know I just saw bology in uh December in Singapore and he like super blackpilled me on you know American manufacturing we need you know a THX what we have right now and uh you know it's not it's not that we're missing
Capital it's not even that we're missing uh you know intelligence or people right like it's the will like we have to have the will to do it and uh you know so my message to everyone watching is like if you're thinking about it like YC is a great place to be it's not the only place right but like we think we're
trying to build you know one of the best places and um you know it is it is for AI it's for software it's for all kinds of Technology we are you know building abundance from here and we want to find the people who believe that stuff it's like let's leave all all the political crap on the side like that's not what's
important what's important is we're at the dawn of just like un believable Innovation and you know all the world's like you know being Rewritten by by code and Adams and you know what what brush stroke what line of code you know what what will you bring what you know yeah what Hardware will you build uh talk to
talk to us about happen stance you've I I've seen probably like 10 or 20 posts from you about the company it seems to be a a personal favorite it uh like I'd love to I'd love to hear the pitch uh you know uh from you directly yeah I mean I I just use it a lot personally I mean I get hit up for um you know I was
thinking about how Sam mman when he h had my role here at YC uh he used to have like basically a team of EAS and his email wasn't uh I think it wasn't even Sama it was uh sa- router and it was sort of a a nod to basically what I feel like I am now like I get you know dozens of requests every
day from all kinds of YY Founders and you know people I've run across and um that's pretty cool I you know I I relish the ability to be like a shelling point for people who believe in Tech and then um the best thing I can do is like oh yeah knowhow like Capital like you it's human capital all these things like
people are recruiting they're trying to sell like um if I think they are legit um I can Bas it's it's the purest form of uh creating value from information right and so happen stance just happens to be that thing for me um you know the world is way too big like my world now is uh I think my I have like 11,000 contacts in
my phone or something it's like I always hit the I always break Apple like apple my my iPhone cannot support 11,000 contracts you uh are you an inbox zero guy or do you just give up and try to make sure you give up it's a river that I waiting for an email for me right you know I don't know you might have to I'm
sorry you might have to's on tvpn come come ask the question in the chat uh one more question for you you put out a uh you know YC's you know um famous for your request for startups list uh wanted to highlight one specifically that you had uh called out which was a secure AI app store we want a new kind of AI App
Store an OS layer that sits on your computer or phone uh it should protect user data offer one shared memory help users find the best AI apps and help developers build and handle payments talk a little bit more about that are you seeing you know teams in that space yet that you're excited about or is this
you know coming down the pipeline hopefully I think it's coming down the pipeline um yeah in full transparency I don't know if I found one that like really quite fit my you know uh on my end yet um it also might just be too early um the tricky thing is it's pretty clear that uh open AI anthropic and uh
you know Windows Apple iOS Android like this is sort of how the OS almost inevitably will work assuming that people still make software um and it's just it it's more like a a thought exercise like I think it is possible for someone to do this right now and uh we'll see if it happens I'm I'm we're on the lookout fantastic uh well speaking of
gundo Bros you wanted to give a shout out to the gundo we got Augustus joining next we want say it's a party on this show uh one person after another well thank you so much for joining Gary we'll have to have you back talk more soon it's always a pleasure chatting and uh hopefully we'll see you at YC demo day
all right and look out for application tbn.com yes yeah you doing media where's the we're in there yeah fantastic thanks Gary yeah have a great day Gary we'll talk to you soon let's bring in Augustus how you doing Augustus what's new I'm blessed dude um I'm back in gundo for a spell rather than fantastic the the near East
or the mountains of the Rockies um so uh it's it's been a Vibe it's been sunny and warm which has been different for rain makers the last four months that's great yeah wherever you guys go it gets cold it starts snowing raining it's a it's a tough life yeah I mean this looks kind of like I haven't
watched thef Prison interview but you kind of have a prison Vibe going on behind you but uh I like it maybe we get some drywall behind you on the next one yeah but we were talking about you earlier because uh uh Luke Metro's in Arena magazine talking about how everyone wants to reindustrialize America but nobody wants to work in a
factory and I feel like you've made working in a factory cool uh can you break down your current uh Factory stack where are you sleeping uh can we get you on an eight sleep soon dude it's so funny you say that we um we decided like a month ago um okay we're big enough now we're hiring like serious scientists
we're bringing government people through no more bunk beds in the factory um so the room that I'm in now used to have four bunk beds in it the room over there used to have two bunk beds in it um a lot of the dropouts and Engineers were living here we had a tradition for a bit where if you moved from across the
country you either had to live in your car in the parking lot or in one of the bunk beds um so that well it lasted the peanut gallery on x is going to start saying oh it's time to short rain maker they don't sleep in the office anymore they're too legit they're too legit they have too many government officials
coming in to try to get their bit you know to try to work with them but at the very least we're staying in gundo like some other unnamed gundo companies that a little bit of drama sco drama we don't I I always thought that gundo was like the place that you could eventually graduate out of because once you need 100,000 square feet like it's
just not it's just it is a small City so you know I I I'm rooting for the for the the the gundo incubations that go on to do greater things and eventually need to expand and eventually rename whole cities in Texas uh you know that's that's what I hope for you but can you give me the quick uh like the latest
pitch on how you're describing rain maker I know it's evolved a little bit uh what's the what's the core product that you're selling right now yeah so rain maker is making Earth habitable by making it precipitate more and more rain and more snow in Aid environments so Farms that don't have enough water
ecosystems that need to be restored and cities in Aid regions that need water um we're making that happen with Advanced remote sensing so radar liar satellite data we're using open source stuff and some own uh some things of our own that we're going to tease a little bit later in the month um our own radar uh to find
the right clouds to seed and then fly our own severe weather resistant and anti-icing capable drones into those clouds um spraying a mineral called Silver iodide that freezes the liquid in the cloud into big enough snowflakes so that they uh fall and stay as snow or if it's warm beneath the cloud melt back into
rain how many drones have you crashed uh between you me and uh not the Federal Aviation Administration um no we've crashed we've crashed dozens of drones um we uh we have one corporate value at rain maker um and it's that we like the taste of blood in our mouth um and that's sort of an extension of like
uh you know the Elon thing about chewing glass it's kind of just a bummer right and like building a deep tech company is especially hard but if you Pavlov yourself into loving interfacing with reality in such a way that you get like good feedback you learn how you failed you learn what to do better next time um
you end up with a bunch of people kind of like uh Rocky you know that like just fight harder and do better the the more they get punched in the face and so um we've crashed a lot of drones on Snowy wet cold mountain tops and uh everyone's better for it what's the balance like now for you in the field doing the
engineering work building the actual product selling and then government stuff you're in a suit you're testifying you're you know there's you're shaking your head when someone's you know espousing a conspiracy theory about you uh we've seen the viral Clips how do you balance those two things yeah I'm uh I'm going back to Tennessee uh this year
because they're actually trying to elevate the punishment for weather modification a criminal offense um and in addition to that I'm going to go to Florida's legal now but if you want to make it rain we're putting you in ja I mean I I I I think you'd be just as productive in prison like you're already kind of in prison you just be more
locked in uh it'd be a minor setback if they lock you up I'm sure I'm sure the rest of your Bros would like break you out in some heroic scheme or you can or you can make calls like a like a dawn from the prison right exactly exactly uh yeah I guess going off of that big question for me weather modification is
so charged you're in this beautiful situation where you piss off both you piss off people in the center sometimes you piss off people on the left people on the right you know people on the on the right might say you know that's you know it's just wrong to be changing the weather or have some concerns there
people on the left or just you know maybe anti-science sometimes uh how how has it been trying to thread the needle obviously you're not trying to make everybody happy but you need to get people generally bought into what you're doing to make things happen dude water is a nonpartisan issue whether you want
ecosystems restored or you want more water for your farm or you want Urban Development in your city we want to bring you water we can bring water more cost effectively than even desalination um and then when it comes to like the real Fringe edges uh because everybody in the middle is bought into that mission of abundance right for whatever
their uh particular issue is um you know I personally believe that like genesis 126 it's the first commission that God gives man at the beginning of time is to Steward the Earth the Seas and the skies rain maker is trying to embody that value set and be good stewards of the world as we take dominion over the skies
um and so that plays to some extent with the more tinfoil hat conspiracy theorists on the right and when it comes to the left some people think that like you know anytime you modify anything on the planet humans always make it worse um and that's just like not true um but even if you believe it to be the case
like we've we've messed up the planet so badly already might as well take deliberate action to try to repair it um and so people on the farle are generally more game with that yeah that makes sense uh has uh what are some of the most ambitious projects and and places uh obviously we went out to uh what was
that place out in the desert we went to Sultan sea the sultan sea uh that was a really cool case study uh are there other kind of like uh like long-term projects that you think uh are kind of on the bucket list that you want to make amazing one day yeah the Great Salt Lake is in a deficit of about 500,000 AC feet
of water per year um the be river is the primary tributary into the Great Salt Lake and it has mountains with lots of Juicy clouds from Utah to Wyoming to Idaho all that flow into it um I think that restoring the Great Salt Lake is like an American priority and a must and even more interestingly than that
something in the distant future for rain maker is um the Winter Olympics in 2034 we're going to be held in Salt Lake and China in 2008 had this whole Big Show and dance where they made it rain before the parades so it didn't on the Olympic Games we want to show a force a decade from now to make more fresh PO for all
the Olympic Games in nice uh speaking of tryina the first I think the first time I ever met you you mentioned you came in just like completely uh just aggressively telling me that China was reforesting the GOI desert by planting a bunch of trees that's obviously not your business but like is anyone working on
that that feels important if you're really thinking about like terraforming certain parts of America uh and like reclaiming and just improving different biomes like how does that play in is that just a different startup do we need another company to build that is that something that you would eventually
expand into how does that all play into this uh like whole plan yeah rain maker longterm is the terraforming company right we want to take any ecosystem and make it both symbiotically flourishing for human kind and uh the environment um there's no companies that I know of doing reforestation although there's a bunch of University Labs that are
spraying uh seeds from drones really cool weird clever thing where when the seed hits water um it unravels and sort of acts as like a little natural drill to drill the seed into the ground that's pretty cool but I haven't seen it commercialized yet and um someday I do want rain maker in the business of all
sorts of different terraforming stuff like planting trees literally boiling the ocean by the way if you boil enough of the ocean then you create more clouds um so we it here first is boiling the ocean boiling the ocean eventually we'll talk to you in 20 years when you're still grinding at this being like yeah I
I I'm I'm still trying to boil the ocean yeah uh one I just have to say you know I I feel like I've seen pretty much the entire Augustus Arc obviously met you at right after you're graduating uh in New York you were fixated on this problem from our very first conversation uh I I always uh you know
and it's been amazing to watch and and and be a small uh investor um you have found the um you've you've shown the the perfect ability to balance attention and progress right so many people would have said Augustus is so good at getting attention that it's almost bearish right because Founders can get on this sort of
negative feedback or sort of positive that uh feedback loop that becomes negative where they so so good at posting and they're so good at the internet that they just get sort of fixated on that and then that becomes their sort of uh dimension of progress uh how have you balanced sort of yapping and building um and uh you know I want
to give you credit for not being at a lot of the popular events over the last year right there was you know multiple of the events that we went to were places that I know you got an invite and I know you turned down um how what does the next you know two three years look like uh for you in terms of balancing
yapping uh knowing that you need to be making you know massive forward progress on the business as well to give credit where credit is due it was in no small part uh Cogan's shot that was called where he said like listen you guys are going to get out over your skis and seem like even more of a bunch of goofballs
than you actually in fact are um and so we we deliberately decided um about in the middle of last year just to kind of go like media Blackout um and I've talked to a bunch of my employees that have said like yeah I worked at other companies where the founder was a really big yapper and yes you need to be an
evangelist but then like the founder doesn't know some like fundamental Crux of the tech problem and the company blows up because of that um and so I uh you know we were talking about like our publication strategy and some Media stuff and we gave it to our PR people and they were like hey can you dumb it
down and make this less Technical and the funny part about that was like our science team already told us like you guys are gonna make us seem like idiots um and so we have we've done extraordinary things particularly in the last five months and I'm so proud to work with people that I do and um you know not to be like a coming soon guy
but um in uh the end of this month in April we're going to start to unveil the products and the progress that we've made um across the entire Western United States and then um I've alluded to online the Middle East a little bit we've done some stuff there nice progress the the Fox Business pod was taken from a Mountaintop in the
Middle East and I didn't share that lot that's amazing uh when I read your last investor update I genuinely was shocked because I people don't have any uh I I don't think the average person has any sense of how much you guys uh how much progress you guys um you know have made in in the last year and a half it's it's
really incredible yeah narrative violation not for not for Augustus not for Augustus but yeah I mean for the for the peanut gallery yeah the peanut gallery but we're that's why the show exists to what uh I want to get I want to get into some of the bigger sort of more important questions uh What uh what
are you benching these days oh dude I imagine I imagine it's G to be like the last time I lifted like you bring an intensity to weightlifting that is inspirational I don't even know if we've I don't have you ever gotten a proper lift with a gus like he's going in there seen he's bringing the same intensity
that he brings to building to every single set but it's hard when you're traveling it's always hard to get in the gym when you're traveling so break it down how's it going dude so yeah like I said this is a medium I'm like 37 pounds lighter than when I started rain maker um that's mostly muscle um so I I don't think my
one rep Maxes are what they used to be but we still have the smelling salts on the rack downstairs so I was telling John John woke up Monday like deathly ill and I and I was saying we need to get smelling salts just here on the set so that if we need to really you know we need to podcast with same intensity that
Augustus builds you know hard tech exactly of course I would I would rip Lucy smelling we we actually got some in the office uh back in like 2016 2017 when we were building the company and it's a it's a wild ride if you haven't done the smelling salts it's intense um what uh what area of the broader hard tech
industry are you most excited about obviously uh you're 100% locked in but uh yeah I'd be curious like what is the space that uh you know when when you're sort of looking left or right what what's most exciting uh I know that on a long enough time Horizon uh I'm sure you plan to enter many of those spaces but
uh in the near term what are you excited about uh Vision fion fion fion you might not be very surprised but um my dear friend Isaiah Taylor is uh absolutely kicking ass when it comes to nuclear and I think blowing the lid off a lot of people's expectations about how long it takes takes to build a reactor to get
power positive um I also think like a really important point you know when you you brought up before how you do publicity how you do media um The Valor atomics W zero unveiling was an incredible event and the Aesthetics were off the charts and like a lot of people said oh look at the facade like that's
so over the top but also if hardtech isn't cool I think something that people don't understand about the gundo is like it's been a very deliberately engineered aesthetic effort to make hardtech sick because if it's not then everybody's going to end up in finance again the Next Generation the lower class of
Zoomers they're going to end up doing software engineering so making things incredible and cool I think is really important and then having the technical chops to back it up and unveil a spectacular theral thermal prototype like that is is really sweet and um I'm excited to go hang out with the tailor in the Philippines to see War I come on
yeah it's the the future should look like the future and bringing those Aesthetics to Bear can can have a benefit uh as long as you're also delivering the real thing and it's not vaporware right uh is there a new class of gundo startups that are coming in because you built this universe this Cinematic Universe that was kind of
around you and whenever there'd be a profile Isaiah would be there a couple other guys would be there the neros crew the Pico grid crew a couple other folks dra right uh but is there is there a new edition that we need an update on gundo or is there just like a whole separate crew that you're not even overseeing as
The Godfather of the gundo dude yeah so the gundo book club is a lot of these dudes rather than being like I don't know 23 through 27 they're like 19 through 23 totally different cohort um a lot of cool companies Teddy cohort from finally made it to the gundo from Georgia really cool Aries is sick um Chris what's his last name otoman um
yeah yeah he is building subc Vehicles there's a whole new click and uh we're almost out of touch with as you know part of what made gundo possible and like the initial do Vibe real possible was we were all running like preed companies so we had a lot of time on our hands and kind of just like do around
and so we didn't even get to know these guys as well um but they're a super tight click like the original founding group of gundo bros that's cool uh what are you thinking about uh supply chain uh there's been a lot of debate over you know Chinese drone Motors and how hard it is I mean I've talked to andral guys
who are like yeah like there's all sorts of pieces that are just hard to get I was hearing uh I think you were at that talk where uh someone was highlighting that there's only like one tin smelting factory in America now and like it's just like there's all these weird things where like you just can't get americanmade tin or you can't get
American M so I'm sure you're thinking about that but uh also you know early stage it's not super critical immediately to be completely clean supply chain but what what what are you seeing as the supply chain develops and uh are are there any other gundo companies that you've been able to like
kind of build on top of I know at one point you were saying that like oh yeah you just walked across the street there was a drone company that was helping you build the drones could you talk about the supply chain a little bit yeah absolutely I mean it is definitely still tough rain maker has the luxury of not being a defense
company so the government requirements that we have are definitely different um I'm still a nationalist and a patriot though so in any circumstance where we can buy American or from an American colony like Taiwan I'm Pro um when it comes to like immediate supply chain and I think everybody has or has already or
is having a part made by rang view um from Cameron Schiller's company um and so like having an investment casting Foundry right there is pretty sweet um how you get someone to innovate and like winding Motors um not totally sure but like boards I think actually we are going to see if not just because of soft
Banks hundred billion dollars that they maybe do or don't have uh we will see a lot more of in the United States soon yeah that's cool there's one there's one American drone company that does small motors I think they're up in Seattle and I think they I think they might have got they might have been family-owned they
got bought by private equity and then they shipped off to China and so my dream is like someone goes in and does the PE and brings it back because like they clearly had some talent and some kind of core core competency here but uh I'm sure a lots of people are working on it uh Jordy you got another question
should we let guess this go no big questions I know you got to get back to work uh what are you hiring for right now now uh how can we help you find them who's the most critical next tier thanks um before even I answer that question uh I briefly lived in South Lake Texas um which is where quins is from um so yes
actually the the QB of UT Austin uh I was mistaken for multiple times I saw that reply oh yeah yeah that's right and so um I that was pretty funny but who am I hiring for go to make.com careers um what we're interested in most now are uh radar scientists so if you've either worked at the low level on board Tes and
qualification or meteorological weather radar um so that's more of like a university grad student position that never thought they'd be able to get into industry because nobody's ever cared about the weather in the private sector um those are the people that we want most uh after that though I would say
airol chemists so if you've worked at Jewel um if you've worked at large industrial facilities that are making a lot of smoke um that's of interest and then um government Affairs if you're a a seasoned yapper from the hill um then we'd love to talk to you fantastic amazing well thanks so much for joining Augustus you're always welcome on the
show whenever ABS man we need one of those uh quarter Zips there they look fantastic send them over to the studio wear them special episodes whenever it's raining we'll wear them yeah that's good got we'll have a great rest of your day we'll talk to you soon you're the man stay safe out there get some rest
awesome should we get into some timeline we should we should we should do a bunch of timeline we have what an hour and a half something like that until the next call in uh oh no we got like 45 minutes okay so did you hear that Italy has soured on starlink I have some reports here what their's ity doesn't want to do business
uh and I had grock rewrite it in a comically Italian accent and I'll read some to you uh the Italian G days are having some bigger doubts about finishing this 1.6 billion deal with Elon mus Starling Bloomberg she said Mama Mia people whispering that the worries come from the US pulling back
like a scared of lini from the Promises to Keep Europe safe bada bing bada boom Starling he's a god of some competation capish they're talking about satellite Communications right here in Italy it's like KN a secret pasta recipe the report she say Elon Musk he's he's taking a big risk hanging out too close with the
Trump ad rtion forget about it already to stat in Europe they show Tesla sales dropping faster than a meatball off the plate Bloomberg she say Wednesday that Tesla shares in China or do me down 49% that's a no good like overcooked spaghetti but a wait uh musk might have pick up some extra business in the US at
least for Starling salute word on the street they say the Federal Aviation Administration might a ditch a Verizon like a bad de Bach Roto and go with starlink instead that's a spicy meatball amazing so thank you to grock that's the first like belly laugh that an llm has Prov that might be a world first yes grock grock is undefeated
humor I really I really enjoyed that uh anyway uh yeah so the news uh Italy does not want to do business with Elon Musk because he's close to Trump and Trump is not supporting uh I guess Europe grock actually fall by the way and said How's a d e you want me to cook a the pizza next a ridiculous character you know you
know funny story so uh the domain party round.com yeah was a domain owned by a a catering company in Milan and I had my buddy who lives in Milan negotiate for the deal and they we ended up you know settling on a fair price but it's uh thought it was hilarious that party you know party round this sort of word that
was uh you know such a part of of Silicon Valley lore was being you know operating a catering a pizza company fantastic um party round speaking of party round did you see do you know Andrew Edinger of course okay so did you see this breakdown he did with your company you're you're the stuff of thread guy lore now well so and Andrew
worked oh he worked there he worked he uh he was on the team uh running a bunch of brand uh stuff so yeah do you have that pulled up yeah I thought this was a cool post I feel like my I'm concerned that my version of the deck is out of order uh you want the you want the hard posts I'll take some hard posts hard
post here you're gonna have to skip through to find the uh the Andrew Edinger post it's towards oh I found it found it it says Capital was founded on the premise that b backstory Andrew tinger as a good buddy joined the uh join my team in 2022 I want to say um and so he was breaking down a lot of the work that uh
that went into uh as we transition from party round to uh Capital XYZ he's breaking it down so he says Capital was founded on the premise that banking is commoditized and a great brand can win uh early signs pointed towards that hypothesis being true Capital was an evolution from the cult followed
fundraising app party round known for an allout assault on Twitter and appointment viewing drops uh quote from py but after a year and a half of Bill I got to say with pachy yeah py almost every single day for over a year straight would would repost our stuff it was an unbelievable ask most people
would have folded yeah but we had Josh on our team that would just message him and say py please and he would basically Guilt Trip him into it every time py Packy always delivered and that was when repo still actually carried a little bit of weight right yeah totally um he says but after a year and a half of building
that brand party round was uh evolved into Capital positioning as a bank for Founders raise holds Ben send and send funds all in one one place and uh Andrew highlights here uh we we launched this founder series which is still available uh capital. XYZ very rare footage of will menitis in that R yeah that's
actually the only video of him online I think so it actually might be um anyway so we we the idea for that campaign was um you know uh whenever you thought of financial institutions making con video content it was always about you know some small business owner or things like that um I wanted to make the sort of
like Chef's Table of you know highlighting Founders and so we we made this series that highlighted Wilman itis and a number of other uh early stage Founders uh ended up getting nominated for a shorty award which was cool I don't think we won I was annoyed about that um and uh and then uh we had a couple sort of rough uh instances we had
FTX collapse and we had a bunch of crypto uh related sort of customers we also had stable coin functionality in our product and we were we were building a uh hybrid Fiat and stablecoin Bank yeah and so when FTX collapsed the entire sort of Legacy Finance World went really really sort of bearish against crypto
for obvious reasons and so we had to shut down all the stable coin functionality uh and come out as sort of a more commodity uh neobank and then a few months later svb collapsed and we did we only had uh we only had 250k of FD coverage and our you know our most important customers had Millions ofar in
deposits because they were um obviously you know Venture back startups uh and so they they looked at us they looked at our underlying uh banking partner which their stock dropped like 80 90% because there was this sort of regional run on the bank and ended up doing a deal uh with row you know very quickly to uh you
know move our customers over there um but anyways uh cool story I'm really proud of the work that we did there and then I've worked with Andrew since then Andrew uh was uh heavily involved in rora uh and now does a bunch of other great work for for companies so and and the whole team went on to do I didn't
realize the team that you like we keep seeing these people in like the Jordy Cinematic Universe it's like the Gund Bros but seriously it's like you know we're talking to uh so Brandon jacobe first ever hired jacobe he's at X now dominating timelines um so helpful to have someone at the company that you're like building
the stream on that we can just text Brian Armstrong Brian Armstrong are our CTO is over doing meta AI stuff at meta now awesome Dylan our head of marketing uh started a company with two other Engineers on our team sold it to Unis swap which you can play it uh today they they have this whole like uh online Survivor game that's cool um you know
there we have another one of our designers is at ramp now yep uh that that went viral recently because he sort of like fix something you know in an hour as they tend to do so uh and then you have um Spencer who's over uh one of the founding engineers at Deli so uh I'm very proud of the team that we built and
um yeah they're all doing uh fantastic things we'll have some breaking news Elon Musk replied to one of our Clips no way yeah very cool uh it's about Sean McGuire uh Sean McGuire was talking AGI plus robot Tesla lets you do unlimited work in the real world foundational model at xai lets you do unlimited
knowledge work and neuralink lets you merge uh we really enjoyed talking to Shawn yesterday and Elon Musk says pretty much I'm open to the other ideas but it seems like that's what's going to happen so thanks for engaging Elon uh we'd love to have you on the show uh anyway Let's uh let's keep going uh what do you got
wander sponsor W of course of course wait wait one two three find your happy place find your happy place at wander uh find your happy place book a wander with inspiring views Hotel great amenities dreamy beds top tier cleaning and 247 coner service it's a vacation home but better uh if you're going to Italy
you're putting the pressure on them to bring starlink over book of wonder uh fantastic uh stuff we love wonder over here I mean you got to follow uh follow at wander follow uh John Andrew the founder but follow Kyle Tibbits he's our dear friend and every single day uh he is just racking up the Impressions he is
a CMO over at wander but he's also delivering totally uh delivering you know uh Impressions himself so he's the time to book a summer vacation look at this look at this house in Cape cot fantastic fantastic unbelievable yeah uh we we we gotta have Chris Williamson on the show at some point but Chris has this
fantastic uh philosophy about the it's like the vacation dividend or something like that it's like this funny mental framework where basically if you book like if you just spontaneously go on a vacation or you go go to the Super Bowl you get all the Joy from that and then you also get the Joy from thinking back
to like your Super Bowl experience or you're stay in a fantastic wander but he thinks that you should book a a trip that's like two years out so basically you're looking forward to it for two years or like you know you should always have you should always have a vacation booked like a year or two years out and
also not only is it like obviously cheaper and easier to book and there's more inventory when you book far out um but your schedule's clear and then be I've had this book for two years I'm not going to pass this up I'm going to I'm going to stick with it as opposed to it's very easy when you're in the flow of things to just be like I'm never I'm
never doing it I'm never I'm I'm never doing a birthday weekend or something and uh so yeah get on wander set those dates far out and book something with you your friends your family your company do something to reward yourself treat yourself uh should we go to vorio some news we got to have them on the
show to explain all this cuz it's a bunch of scientific mumbo jumbo I don't understand yeah but vorio says it's here got on the show and say okay break down this news like you're explaining something to a podcast exactly yeah yeah I know you already broke it down for like the ex user uh and like and like X
TW like like Tech Twitter what about somebody that that talks for a exactly who like basically can't read and just talks the whole time anyway we have a friend who's very smart he can't read but fantastic intelligence is it's kind of a separate thing you know uh literacy is not for everyone uh you can still do
great things uh Victorio says it's here cortical Labs just launched the first commercial biological computer human neurons directly integrated into silicon chips programmable and adaptive living computation synthetic biological intelligence uh traditional silicon based AI has a fundamental limit huge energy demands rigid structures and
limited adaptability AI today consumes massive computational resources yet still struggles to mimic human intelligence biological intelligence bi he's coining it Cogan's law says doesn't have these limitations real neurons inherently adapt and learn have high efficiency around 30 watts per unit
natural self-organization and have more flexibility perfected over billions of years and so congratulations to Victorio on the launch if you want to learn more he has a wonderful thread here that goes on for 20 posts does he work for this company I'm confused actually don't know or he's just sharing um he's just
posting maybe I don't know I think it's his thing but he's got a million views on it and that's what we really care about here he got 8K likes on this that's really what matters so Victorio call into the show break it down for us congratulations and if you need to promote it to an even broader audience
why don't you go buy a billboard on adquick adquick delivers outof home advertising Made Easy and measurable say goodbye to the headaches of outof Home advertising only adquick combines technology out of home experience and data to enable efficient seamless ad buying across the globe so congratulations um we're I really think
that Jeremy we We've joked about this a few times but Jeremy gon needs to do the one1 billboard at camp we mocked it up for him uh so if you didn't listen to the show yesterday Jeremy gaon has a fund that is uh buying he specializes in bu buying companies that are are good businesses that that have been over
capitalized exactly have extreme rebuilding the cap table reinen diviz the management team the founders figuring out who can actually get the most value out of this company and and and and making sure that the VCS can move on to another kind of home run swing uh and so our idea was to do personal injury style ads where it says
accident you know call cap table accident call Jeremy John's amazing copy was cap table accident cap table accident it happens sheet accident it happens all too frequently uh we have some Personnel news let's go Kristen McDonald is thrilled to share that she has joined eniac Ventures uh she says I moved to venture because I wanted to
work and with and enable bold entrepreneurs who are willing to pushing the boundary of Technology forward when I met the eniac team I it was obvious they shared that Vision The Firm was built from the ground up to be a trusted Ally and support system to Founders at the earliest stages I'm honored to
continue working alongside had Hadley and the rest of the team as you may know they are some of the best people you could ever have in your corner and I have a funny story because uh I'm I'm not super close with eniac or Hadley but I in college I interned at a uh startup that was about series B uh called vingo
it was a competitor to Siri Siri was originally an independent project sounds like a company name from Silicon Valley the show totally totally uh and so uh Siri came out of the Stanford Research Institute SRI that's where they got the name Siri Siri uh and vingo started uh there's the Nuance is a voice
recognition company they make Dragon Naturally Speaking one of the first voice recognition companies and um they had uh some of the smart kind of AI ml Engineers had had left Nuance started this company vingo Stanford so these guys were like MIT guys or yeah out in like we were in uh like Harvard Square
Cambridge Square something like that and then Siri was out in Stanford Apple buys Siri pretty early and so we were basically cut off from the iPhones the whole business plan was like get on Android and get on BlackBerry and you want to be installed as a default app and they it was just like a very fascinating thing they were doing doing
all the cool things they actually ran a billboard campaign this is hilarious I'm not doing another ad read but um they did a billboard ad campaign but they did it outside of uh Rim's headquarters who makes Blackberry in Canada yeah specifically to get the attention of blackberry Executives because it was a
consumer app it was anything that you could download I think they had like a $20 version a $5 version a free version Etc it was something you buy and you use and then you could and then you could use a voice mode just like Siri uh on your blackberry but um they wanted to be installed by default and they wanted a
big deal done with Blackberry so they bought Billboards outside to make it look like they were like a big company you know right outside and then all the all the the uh uh the executives at Blackberry would like drive in and be like oh vingo like they're they're a good company like I gotta do business with them and Hadley worked there as
this like kind of Business Development uh MBA type and I just remember him coming in and he was super young and and during like the All Hands meeting he would stand up and kind of break down what the business was doing and I was just like this guy's the man cuz I was like a kid I was an intern at the time
uh and the CEO they they the founders were like these MIT scientists uh but they' brought in a kind of corporate CEO who was a he'd been in war like basically he'd been in Iraq deploying uh like mobile technology basically like like cell phone towers and he was so like hardcore he had bullets on his desk with like the names of the Rival
companies on him it was a really it was a really crazy like experience but it was really cool because like a series a series B company 50 people building a tech product growing like it's just a unique thing to be in I it wound up being like an okay outcome they sold the company I think everyone did pretty well
it wasn't like a generational company or anything but it was just cool to see like okay this is what a startup looks like at this scale uh and it was really cool and uh and I remember that we did some deal and uh and and and Hadley like uh got like bottle service and he let me come and drink at his table and that was
huge to me as a college kid so you know it was great so one thing uh yeah congratulations to Kristen McDonald this is huge um the the the title partner has been diluted over time uh but getting partner at a fun like eniac really means something and uh it's it's awesome to see it's great should we go to Evan
Armstrong let's do it Evan Armstrong says people are not ready for what's coming anthropic published a post today that casually announced the upending of the social order by 2027 if llms can do all listed below the vast majority of American labor is automatable we are entering an economically politically and
emotionally dangerous period buckle up and the and the quote is from uh this blog post as our CEO Dario writes in Machines of loveing Grace we expect powerful title by the way uh it's reference to all watched over by Machines of Loving Grace which is a hline book I think um we expect powerful
AI systems will emerge in the late 2026 to early 2027 powerful AI systems will have the following properties intellectual capabilities matching or exceeding that of Nobel Prize winners across most disciplines including biology computer science mathematics or engineering the ability to navigate all interfaces available to a human doing
digital work today including the ability to process and generate text audio and video and the ability to autonomously control technology instruments like mice and keyboard like mice and keyboard and the ability to access and browse the internet the ability to autonomously reason through complex tasks over
extended periods hours days or even weeks seeking clarification and feedback when needed much like a highly capable employee would the ability to interface with the physical world controlling laboratory equipment R robotic systems and Manufacturing tools through digital connections what do you think 2027 is it
over we're just getting started just get it started no I I mean this is challenge no mention of Comedy interesting think that uh anthropic is crushing software engineering yep struggling on the comedy side yeah and that's okay not everybody has to be funny yeah I I you know you read this and you're like oh
massive job displacement but the the question is like is there just a thousand times more work to be done and when I think about Mars and when I think about Dyson spheres and when I think about like all the crazy things that we want to do as humans um I'm thinking like yeah yes and like let's have every
human piloting a thousand AIS and let's all work together and let's all work going back to freedberg had a really great point which we covered last week around you know if you have these incredible uh incredibly powerful AI systems what are the sort of massive you know uh incredibly daunting sort of large scale projects that could be
accomplished by just having a lot more intelligence um so anyways I don't think um I think we need to go into this with uh you know generally with optimism and then still I think I I still personally reference people like Tyler Cowen who I think are less conf directly conflicted y on these things because
he's not out there trying to sustain uh you know um you know evaluation evaluation right he's just sort of focused on uh what he believes is uh is the truth uh and making predictions based on that so we'll see but it's certainly the most uh I would never I wouldn't have wanted to be born at a different time no totally it's uh it's
truly truly incredible completely unrelated pretty soon we're going to see people joining X not not pretty soon but but isn't it funny to see somebody in 10 years when people are like why do these Boomers call everything tweets yeah and quote tweets like what are they talking about because like they will not have
they wouldn't have ever experienced Twitter it'll just be like the most obvious way to out yourself as as a boomer yeah uh or maybe an llm that's just trained on a bunch of uh content from you know the early 2020s yeah yeah that's funny uh well regardless of whether or not AI takes every job you're going to need to use Ai and use software
to close your books using ramp time is money save both easy to use corporate cards bill payments accounting and a whole lot more all in one place I actually have a cool post from AR kazian who we've talked about he's an economist over at ramp so he looked at the top SAS vendors ramp for March so far and uh
I'll run down the list here so by new customer count open AI top the list LinkedIn was second cursor was third canva was fourth and then fifth was anthropic uh by new card spend was elastic LinkedIn HubSpot Zoom info and Salesforce um so that was interesting to see I'm going to read out some of the
standouts so elastic was a stamed out they were the the top um Vendor by new card spend is an AI search company that builds software for businesses to build their own AI driven search platforms like personalized e-commerce searches for consumers or AI searches for customer help centers um they're a public uh company so their stock
recently surged uh following an earnings beat um so narrative violation AI company with earnings that's public let's go uh wild to see I'm looking it up at um looking it up on public right now um but jumping back to the post they so xai was a standout um and uh so they seem to be pretty doing pretty well had
a surge of signups in February and then uh the Claude 3.7 Sonet launch also drove um quite a lot of new volume um and they can see here so ramp data shows that as of February 2025 only 4.7% of us businesses have adopted anthropics model compared to 19% for open AI yeah um so kind of like doesn't seem super
surprising I'm actually surprised that anthropic has that much adoption yeah uh but I think it's the developer usage that's driving that y i I was thinking last night about the question of like acceleration because we're not seeing it yet in certainly GDP but all like like to the uh to the sain Nadella point but
also uh there's a very interesting abstraction layer for like the progress of humanity just around the amount of energy that we're generating yeah idea of like kardashev 1 uh which is I believe 10,000 we're at 6 right now I think it's 18 terawatts of uh electrical capacity globally and uh if you you it's
hard to find a time in human history when we were generating 10,000 times less so if you forecast how long will it take to get to 10,000 times more where we would be essentially consuming every every amount all the energy that's coming to the earth from the sun essentially is like kardashev one and then kardashev 2 I believe is like the
Dyson Sphere on the and where you're where you're capturing all the energy from the Sun in every direction right yeah um and if you and if you forecast it out based on the base rate which I believe is 2.7% growth pre 1970 stagnation it takes like 500 years to get there which feels like forever uh especially given like I I think that
this anthropic post is maybe a little aggressive um but it does feel like we're on the cusp of something like we're going to be able to do more things um and and so my my base case is maybe like we go back to uh 2.7% growth whereas we've been at around 2% energy growth for the last uh five decades but
even if we grow at 2.7% for the next 20 years by 2020 by 2045 will only be double the total energy capacity which it'll be a lot it'll be 38 ter or something like that um but it's but it's interesting to see if if that becomes the main bottleneck for all of this is like doing things in the physical world Nat fredman has this
take that's like yes the AIS will be super intelligent but they won't be gods in the sense that they still have to obey the laws of physics so no time travel no teleportation all of these things don't happen so so at a certain point when they want to to build a new nuclear reactor like they do need to dig things
out of the ground and move them and there's there's like a physical cost to that uh and so uh we like it's you know there's that whole hum for the mines we can help the AIS yeah yeah I mean there's a whole meme of like feel the acceleration and I feel the acceleration in the in the in the llm progress Arena
a little bit although you over the past few years it it felt like we were really accelerating going from gpt3 3.5 to four and now it feels like we're kind of tailing off and hitting some sort of local Maxim yeah we need some major breakthrough he doesn't care about benchmarks and then we need to build a
lot more capacity because I I I think even if we have the pH super PhD researchers like we don't have enough servers we don't have enough data centers there there's still just more to do as as Humanity to really like unlock something that feels dramatically different in terms of like oh this this world is like true post post industrial
revolution post industrial Ru whatever anyway uh let's move on to something um completely unrelated Conor McDonald over at Ridge Conor McDonald he says direct a consumer cut out the middleman and replaced it with an endless Labyrinth of deteriorating ad channels and organic reach uh and I'll give some backstory
here so I uh my career sort of came online during the height of the DDC sort of boom I remember uh I actually had a college class that was about D Toc and that and that almost basically the professor was fixated on what was happening over at Wharton and how all these big consumer Brands were coming
out of Wharton uh the MBA program there um I think uh war is a good example I think maybe some haries or the Shaving like something was happening at Wharton to generate these companies and there was this sense like Facebook ads were very cheap at the time in comparison they basically got generally more expensive um year over year uh and
people were realizing uh working with Distributors you know this from Lucy working at Distributors is a nightmare for every every company right they they sort of sit between you and the retailer the retailer sits between the distributor and the End customer and so there's these layers and there was this
idea ofy if you could sell products online uh Facebook ended up being the best distribution channel for products probably in history you could scale uh Brands tremendously fast overnight and a lot of these businesses ended up just raising just obscene amounts of capital uh on the idea that that um basically if
uh ad uh rates didn't go uh price prices for ads didn't go up a lot you would have been able to just print money it was like a money machine where spend $100 on Facebook get $500 back you could just do that perpetually so I became close friends uh with Connor at the time and and uh we we um you know helped him
out with Ridge and then uh you know got to work uh out of their office for a while and uh Connor's daily life was just finding uh you know basically navigating the Labyrinth which he describes here of you know optimizing existing ad channels trying to test and find new ones um even you know Connor and the ridge guys were smart early on
to not put a huge emphasis on organic social it was never uh sort of a huge priority for the company and that ended up being the right decision because all these brands that had built big businesses off of organic social media uh Facebook at one point was just like yeah like you don't this is not this
reach isn't real your reach is not reach you know uh we're basically going to take this away and from uh and from that point on um there was a period where organic social almost didn't matter at all um and um um so anyways uh if when I see you know I'm invested in a number of uh different sort of consumer product
companies uh people like um Pat Uh Pat um uh py brother Dan McCormack who's intensely good at this similar archetype as Connor he's just sort of constantly focused on optimizing um paid acquisition um uh the rora CEO Brian Brian Keller uh my business partner is uh like world class at this too and so
the brands that are doing well right now are ones that are hyper fixated on like performance optimization and it really is this uh scientific process of experimentation and you know you know proper IM you know balancing these sort of super super complicated task where like the idea of e-commerce is so simple
you make a product you put it online you you run ads against it but then the reality is like this constant uh stressful Labyrinth of um you know trying to make the equation of e-commerce work you got two that means you should shotgun one John's got a couple Celsius I mean we we we really got to do the Deep dive on Celsius
because uh born in the D Toc era and yet not a DC play at all and I think I I think that's kind of the the next I mean Ridge is certainly uh still heavily e-commerce focused and they've developed a fantastic team around that but they are going into retail and growing that category and I think more and more teams
are realizing that Omni Channel early makes a lot of sense but it's a very different skill set uh it's very very hard and it's it's just a completely different culture motion I mean I remember reading this book by Mark rampa the high hanging fruit this guy uh started V Coco this coconut water company that he sold I think to Pepsi
for a lot of money did very very well and uh he was telling the story of how he got uh a distributor Network in New Jersey on board and he went to the distributor and was just like showed up with an F-150 whichever one of you guys sells the most coconut water this week gets this F-150 and that was like the
best money he ever spent that's wild and that is just so different from let me look at the spreadsheet and see what was our row as to CAC and click through ratio on this ad and what was the two second retention on this video ad and how do we get more ugc like the D Toc Playbook is just completely different
from like oh you know a guy you know which is the very much like the retail uh old school uh so blending those together really difficult but when you get it right the company can really really rip uh anyway should we move on to uh arow on this arow on that my grocery store has a stolen phone laundering laundering machine and lets
me open carry post from Sam Austin uh you're a big aan guy are you gonna be switching I might I need to find out where this is this is wild I I don't understand the stolen phone laundering I guess it's a it's a machine and it says safely and securely an iPhone XR could net you up to $65 you just dump the
phone in there and it immediately gets you instant cash uh pretty crazy business model I wonder who's behind this I wonder if it has any way to figure out if the iPhone's actually unlocked or factory reset you would hope that they require you to have a factory reset yeah I wonder if this is I wonder
how much I mean obviously they're joking that oh this is about laundering stolen phones but clearly stolen phones would be an issue with a system like this and I wonder what safeguards the company has in has in place for that but I thought it was funny because they're taking shots at airan and I just wanted to
highlight it defend aan anyway back to Tech back to business back to the serious stuff on the timeline uh epis La announced a$ 250 million doll series dund raise to hyperscale leonitis production capacity leonitis is a solid state softwar defined high energy high power microwave technology that delivers unmatched counter Electronics
capabilities tested and proven as a scalable counter swarm solution another uh another answer to those drone swarms that we keep seeing on the timeline uh very cool defense tech company Joe laale project I believe and uh yeah yeah and so there's a lot of reasons why this company is uh there's been um there's been uh some
naysayers around this Tech right so that this is non-kinetic which means it's entirely using uh energy y directed uh uh towards these sort of swarms the reason that this is so important is there's a lot of places in the world that need to be secured Against drones that you can't shoot into the air so a picture at a um you
know so Allen control Allen Control Systems makes a ton of sense on a b Battlefield right a sort of turret that you uh you know can put on a truck or a tank or you know stationary gun on a truck B gun truck um but the challenge is you can't put that on top of a um NFL stadium because it would just involve
firing bullets into the air you know into a city right it just doesn't completely doesn't work so if we're going to have uh effective defenses against drone swarms in these sort of non Battlefield environments also there's a volume there's like a volume problem too right if you have a drone swarm of a 100 are you going to be able
to reliably hit uh you know a 100 of these and so we need both kinetic and uh non-kinetic Solutions and um uh huge vote of confidence for epis and I believe uh this is an 8C company uh Joe laale had a post he said directed EMP is becoming a critical part of Warfare and deterrence Duty bases ships Vehicles
planes satellites and other defense systems will all use these capabilities to dominate the battlefield and to protect War Fighters and civilians in various contexts so cool uh uh both um wartime and civilian applications it's great let's go to scha she says your fear of being cringe is limiting your the sealing of your
potential well said yeah uh everything you want is on the other side of cringe and a phone call that you don't want to make which is which is a form of cringe cringing thinking about making that phone call in the Jeremy gon parlance yeah I see Julian weers commenting here saying we're killing cringe yeah let's just stop everybody
just let's put a year-long pause on cringing both the act the word and the word the word did get played out very quickly right but yeah you got to put yourself out there take risks I mean the beauty is that I mean I I felt this very deeply when I I started the YouTube channel during uh during uh co uh because it's
so awkward to be on camera the first time and you're putting being a being an adult man saying I'm going to be a YouTuber there's a million things that are wrong with it right uh so I just didn't tell anyone and I just put it out on YouTube and then the bad ones didn't go viral so no one saw them real the
Thea's argument here is that you should have just been promoting them aggressively uh I guess I guess but there is something too uh like at least on YouTube like letting the algorithm sort it out and figure it out and and just getting the Reps in and stuff and yeah maybe I don't know maybe you'd be at 10 million by now yeah maybe
maybe who knows but uh yeah I mean the the the beauty is that you have to be really really bad to get to go viral in a negative way most of the time if you do something that's received as cringe or or negative or or dumb like it just doesn't get views and so it's doesn't matter so put yourself out there uh
let's go to Robin Robin says when SF realizes their waterloop pipeline is actually just a pipeline from like four high schools in Canada they're gonna go nuts yeah to be honest Sean the smartest VCS I know are actually going even further they're offering to fund the Middle School eer schools that go to
those high school so they're going to these these um you know uh middle schools and saying 100k cap note just take it now uh and we just want to look once you get through waterl once you're starting a company yeah you know people people have copied so much of like Peter Teal's stuff no one's no one's done the
more aggressive teal Fellowship of like drop out of Middle School drop out of lower school like stop everything yeah we'll give you $200 to to to to to skip third grade and and try and build a company I wouldn't be surprised um but yeah probably stay in school kids I think our kids are listening to
this I think you can wait I think you can wait until you graduate high school at least dad I saw the episode back in 2025 you said that there could be some potential in dropping out of middle school I want to make the leap yep uh did you see the mCP meme going on yesterday I didn't see the meme I mean people are just posting about it but uh
Greg here says Benchmark idea you fund a model an AI model with $200 in a stripe account uh and you give it access to the internet and a large list of mcps measure increase in balance at 14 30 90 180 and 360 days no developer intervention most models wouldn't even be able to spend their first dollar this
is the universal or not Universal basic income it's the uh uh what is it artificial economic intelligence just once the model can make money then we're in business because that's very quantifiable it's a new it's a new Benchmark yeah and I like this yeah it's it's uh it's going to be very funny when there's just like online activity that
does not make sense to humans or it's like some equivalent of these sort of Nigerian like Prince scams or some of these like you know you get DMS from nft projects saying Hi boss I'd like to you know promote you know whatever uh this sort of spam there's going to be this sort of AI slop uh money-making sort of
running that that you're just going to see as a human and you're just like like come on but then it works like one out of every 10,000 times and so that then it becomes a sort of viable uh economic model so oh man I saw a great AI scam I got to break down for you so me uh it's a 30 minute AI generated deep faked lip
sync video of like a a priest and then a number of different pitchmen and celebrities telling you about a special prayer and if you say this prayer wealth will come to you but they just keep talking to you for 30 minutes telling you all about this prayer and how valuable it is and how it will transform
your life and then at the very end after 30 minutes of watching this AI slop that's very clearly like the mouth isn't aligned properly but it's like close uh it there's like a add to cart button and the add to cart button is just like you pay them and then you get like this prayer that you can say and it's so
funny because they they walk through the pitch and they're like like oh yeah like I saw this in a corridor crew video uh like oh yeah like you know uh like we we have to we have to pay for like our servers and stuff to host this prayer and so you you you have to pay a little bit we can't just give it to you for
free uh I don't know it's probably 20 bucks or something uh but uh the corridor crew has been doing great great uh videos they're VFX artists uh but they also work with all the frontier AI visual tools and so they they they they highlight a bunch of these AI scams one of them that was really funny that I saw
was uh they AI generate an image of like a sweater that's likea a cable knit sweater and it looks all like uh like Irish and like Regal like you're out in like the forest or something and it's on this like you know uh blonde model and they run an ad on that and then when you go to buy it what they ship you is not a sweater
it's a t-shirt with a sweater printed on it no cuz they clearly have the Machinery not to make the sweaters but just to print anything on a t-shirt no way and so you get the AI design that they sold you but it's just printed on a t-shirt it's so funny uh but at the same time the C crew guys were talking about
hey they're they're actually going to do some like AI generated camo t-shirts the only they're uh disclosing this hello do we have someone joining perfect perfect timing welcome to the show let's go uh what is it Nikki Wiki oh my God Rory I kill we' we've we've I think we've mispronounced your name so many times is it whiskoff wish
off I'm sorry well now now we'll know so anyway uh thank you for joining uh give us a little kickoff introduce yourself uh tell us about your fund tell us about why you're here today oh my gosh uh yeah so one thank you so much for I'm a huge OG fan uh so Nicole wish off um solo GP I run wish off Ventures which is a fun
focused on pre-seed and Seed stage companies North America and super unsexy businesses which happy to unpack uh started in 2021 have three funds and about 80 million in assets cool and just trying to freaking build this thing as I fly it so how' you raise the first fund first one was 5 million I was still
operating so that's my background and I met a ton of VCS raised a few hundred million at on the startup side of of the world and learned about VC fund funds so Bane Thrive Foundation all of those guys want access to Great companies early and so got a call from a VC friend that was like you should raise a fund you're
Angel Investing let us give you like half a million bucks the rest is history so I raised um five million pretty quickly I think like 20ish LPS was doing it on the side decided I loved it and then in 22 raised 20 last year raised 50 um so it's like it's actually such a such a Nar such a narrative violation
one solo GP that didn't have a Twitter account before you like like the the fund came before the Twitter account which is rare yeah two started in 2021 and and have delivered you know uh from from all the data that that I've seen uh phenomenal performance uh and so it's just uh no it's it's been amazing to see how did you
so many people never find their voice online it felt like you did quickly and it's just was natural and and you know I we know people that spend five hours a day to try to produce X content that just completely flops yet it seems like you have this sort of effortless ability to just I think you treat it like a like
a personal like notes to self almost but it just resonates how long did it take you to kind of find that voice I I would say it was from the start uh though wasn't intentional and I to this day don't have any drafts like I could I think but maybe I have four in there from like drinking too much and like you
know maybe I should wait until tomorrow I have rules I tell my LPS I have three rules for Twitter uh I can go through those but so I was in a group chat with like Alex Cohen who like posts and like you guys know Alex and Aon Frank who's now an investor at light speed Aon don't kill me um and we're in this group
chat was never on Twitter not even as like a I'm scrolling just to see what like lurking um so I actually didn't know how uh insane people are to each other on it so I came in and I was like cool this is like a cool app um in 21 because Aon was like Nicole you're a VC now you have to like use Twitter and so
I hard launched with the $5 million F I have like my first viral tweet probably like a week later and it was something like I don't know if you guys were even follow you probably know who I was this was like a couple years ago and I said something like Canen confirm that it is 10x easier to raise a $5 million fund
than to get 500 Twitter followers on X like for now X and Alex Cohen retweets it and is like you guys tacle a bone like she's a loser and anyway like totally takes off so I always say like the first thousand was tough yeah um and since then honestly like I think I think a few things one I keep them super short
I try to never say like start them with I and I'm like hey you know had a thought last night blah blah blah and then have an opinion on whatever I'm talking about and then the shorter they are the more they rip and so I've stuck to that I try to just say what I think it is absolutely backfired if I don't have one one order
that like doesn't like Bury Me Alive in VC brags is like taking it to the Moon that I'm not doing it right and so I just have to like I just lean into it but that's like kind of the motion that I've that's been happening what do you advise your portfolio Founders around using X because there's no perfect way
to use it there's downsides to everything I'm sure me a lot of your top of funnel deal flow I'm sure is through your network but I'm sure a similar amount is through X and so I'm sure you you invest in companies and they're like okay Nicole teach me how to sort of unlock the platform how often are you
advising them to just focus on your business and just ignore the platform versus when are you telling them uh you know hey you can get some value here so honestly because I'm doing preed seed and it's so early there's so much other crap to figure out that like if they're focusing on getting like you know 10
followers a day which you guys know you're building this thing too like in the beginning it's slow and then it's not but like it takes a commitment it's daily they could be doing so many things to deris the business for the first at least two years so I typically don't want to have that conversation until honestly series a series B um they've
got like more of a team and I've by the way I've advised plenty of companies and try to get it going and like it just there is no time for it there's no consistency so I think it's largely a distraction though what cave you got this with some people are just Naturals I think you have it or you don't I don't
think it's like this learn skill like look at Nikita like ask him if he ever got help with like tweets you know it's just he's just a natural at saying what he thinks and having skin and it just works so if my Founders are asking me for help on building a Twitter strategy it usually means they shouldn't be doing
it and that's most people generally not even my Founders uh how sharp are your elbows your preed seed you're you're I'm assuming you're trying to get you know 10% uh ownership uh I'm sure there's some flexibility there uh you put out like a uh wouldn't say an AGG you don't have an aggressive persona but but you
know we can tell you're really like a an athlete right like uh are when you're competing for rounds are you trying to take as much as you possibly can or do you take a more collaborative approach these days I I'm a firm believer that it takes a village to get a company off the ground so I would argue something
totally different if you're a series a take the whole round you're adding like strategic value you have a platform and like One Fund can do that so if my Founders are like hey One Fund wants to take the whole a I'm like go for it I think if your series like if you're preed seed you want all the Strategic Angels they're like One Call Away from
to Walmart or like a huge brand that you want or like those little things that people like do for you early on like actually I think do do help the business first customers first hires so I always try to take let's say for fun two is I wanted to get 5% typical dilution at preed seeds like 20% maybe 15 and so I'm
I'm never usually having issues like getting that by the way I hate hot deals they're they never were I've done all the deals all the multi-stage funds at preed se they're like my worst like it's I shouldn't say they're it's they're still in business and it's going well but like they're not standing out and
Shining any brighter than other companies like this is super hard and also I paid 2x what I should have um and so I hate noise if there's a ton of funds running One Direction I just run the other so like sharp elbows no but I try to be super realistic about rounds and structures yeah and and really
collaborative is the short answer where have you made Investments that you're still excited about that you're done investing sort of broadly in the category so well I feel like I'm I'm dipping my toes back in even though I left for two years I think look lending is really hard in the high interest rate environment right like your facilities
are so expensive that like your burn is like through the roof so for a lot of companies that were trying to build insure teex or lending businesses they got and they only had maybe 2 million in the bank they just never raised another round or I was looking at those businesses thinking like if I even seeed
this you're not going to be in the clear for at least two to three years or another fund is comfortable underwriting this type of business and so like I mean I got my MBA I feel like right when I started my Venture Journey on like great markets and horrible markets because fun one is 2021 and I was like oh my God I'm
so good at this and then like 23 I was like I am so bad at this and then 24 I was like you know what I'm gonna stick around and like you know figure this thing out so I think lending's dicey but now I'm getting excited about it again so um yeah what's the vision for the fund uh going forward I I saw
you just hired two people is that right is that how big the firm is yes so there are three of us full-time and then like outsourced agency and all that which is really expensive actually um and so yeah I want to keep the team super small I want to stay Scrappy I think you start to get lazy when you start building layers the team
like I want to be fresh I want to be on calls like I want to be in the ground like just doing the work with companies longer term look I want to be the fund uh in North America and the categories we invest in that like preed and Seed stage Founders like want to work with first above anybody else and that takes
time like that's a lot of that's brand like how do we build this repeatable motion of like everyone knows who I am and everyone wants to work with me and I reference well because I like do the work um so what about super longterm private Equity arm asset manager wealth manager going public we're Catalyst you know why not you I
think I had a a tweet once that was like listen may I be so successful Adventure that I have like a PE arm I have a growth arm I'm doing like roll ups I have a fund of funds and I think the last high frequency yeah I was like I have every single thing that absolutely no one knows how they're performing because we
like no one can manage it all like which I would say are a lot of these platforms like no one could tell you how their fun to funs are doing like guarante maybe you know honestly like I I I'm a big fan of small and nimble like I think if you realistically if you want to put up great returns and I think USV has been
amazing at this like if you as them and they're doing series a and their funds are sub 300 like they that keeps them up at night and like 50 million that doesn't quite keep me up at night I'm excited but I think like going over 150 and you can guys can pull this up when I hopefully if I don't ever do it but if I
do and be like Nicole but we'll have you on for the news and then we'll pull up this this this clip and we'll say no like Nicole did everything wrong um no but look I I think there's value a lot of value and if we want to say that we can legitimately ideally more than 3x I always try to aim for let's say 5x plus
which by the way not even $10 million funds 3x ever uh it's just really hard um then we need to stay Nimble and it's all portfolio construction so just follow the math and then yeah well we have five minutes I I I want to hear about the company what's going on oh my gosh you guys so I was not planning to do this but I was like John I might just
like hard launch a company I just uh co-founded so this is the exclusive this is like no joke so um raise money for it no one knows about it except the person that funded it and like my LPS um so uh I have been investing in just to like to T this up um in software companies serving data centers I think if you follow the
power you and the infrastructure you'll know where AI is going so um and then my partner was simultaneously Consulting data center a guide building data centers in waterl so we're both like wait there's something here um so we uh co-founded a business called Kratos which I think is a good name but you
know cratus AI um and we are building NextGen uh AI data centers not great Venture bets so there's founder shares in the funds um but no check from the fund in it though we've raised money from strategic family offices more of like a private credit think like 75% debt 25% Equity um and we're making the
case that there's tons of capital going towards hyperscalers if you're a hyperscaler you're saying look we're going to own the market and there's only going to be a few of us and everyone's going to use our data centers and we totally disagree um I think if you're for training it makes a lot of sense for
inference you need you don't need as high latency so we could be like 100 miles or less from like the tier two tier three cities um and still have solid latency for inference so um if you start asking around and hopefully people are listening in like I had a Founder tell me in like the YC uh like alumni
Channel all these companies like are like hey like who has data center like collocation capacity for us like we want to like like save costs from hyperscalers like where can we go from here either there's a huge market for these like 10 to 25 megawatt data centers so um work on our first location 20 megawatts you guys this is like the
craziest thing I've ever done um I don't have an active role because like the funds are the baby but I can certainly help with distribution and fundraising and the last thing I'll say is these are really expensive projects so these are a 20 megawatt facility net like brand new constructions around 100 million um and
so and again we don't want to give up too much on the equity side but there's something here and uh we're going for it so I like it too because even if it's even if it's not a traditional Venture bet if there's uh common shares in the fund or however you structured it you could return your fund I imagine off of
just this one company which is amazing uh you've done the last question I have you've done you do a bunch of stuff in supply chain uh you're a venture capitalist so obviously you're also a geopolitical expert uh comes at the territory um how are you do you think these sort of trade Wars are are um are are good for number of your portfolio
companies specifically focus on Supply Chain management just because they there's going to be uh Suddenly It's it's sort of the the thing to talk about it's sort of this pressing issue uh what what and and more broadly what advice are you are you giving to those uh companies in your portfolio yeah I'd say
that there's really like one or two that it could directly impact significantly one being a company that's like literally in logistics Freight between Mexico and the United States so like part of me is like holy crap like what's the impact there look ultimately we have to show dominance so like I'm very Pro
every every type of flex that the administration is putting on both Canada and Mexico which are most relevant to what I do um and so let's can go honestly like I think ultimately I'm hoping that we're bluffing um to get what we want so my bet is like oh my God keep delaying I think I just saw the headlines of Canada that like like
Trump's delaying it like 30 days or I don't know what it is um so anyway I'm I I love the flex I hope it's only a flex um but it would impact what's going on at least for for a couple of our companies so I'm like keeping my fingers and toes crossed but again we have to exert dominance so I'm happy with the
administration and what we're I love the energy gustus Doro was on the show earlier and he called Taiwan an American colony so you guys are both in the same camp uh Nicole it's so great to have you congrats on the new we would love to have you on whenever you have portfolio news whenever you have fun news uh
you're always welcome on the show uh you are a brother to us technology brother love you guys thank you so much for having me thanks so much bye talk soon and now we have uh Billy are you there Billy he guys how's it going it's going great I'm going to read your post and then you'll uh kick it off uh enter the
sea glider era the world's first seag glider has hit the water room for 12 passengers and 100% battery powered the test vehicle is human crew from day one 65t wingspan 15,000 lbs trials are underway you're in the back of a car break it down what' you launch uh how's it going and to be clear this has always
been John's vision for the show is that you could just basically anywhere you are in the world you just pull up your phone and you're on the show so welcome to the show thank you so much for call exactly what it is no thank you guys you know the uh the startup grind for sure so we're we're hustling right now but um
awesome week for Regent so we're we're four years old as a company uh building sea gliders which are all electric flying boats for Regional Transportation dual use uh so we're doing Regional routes imagine like Manhattan to The Hamptons and under an hour for 60 bucks going in Miami out to the Bahamas or Key
West all around the world so this is the first prototype vehicle uh this summer when we fly it it'll be the largest electric flying machine in history 15,000 lounds for now first big milestone was just getting it on the water and starting some testing that's amazing uh can you talk about the advantages of being regulated I believe
it's regulated as a boat but you still get the speed of something much faster than a boat and that seems to be maybe the key Insight here that allows you just move faster bring this to Market and deliver kind of a flying car almost or a new plane a new mode of transportation in a way that's just uh
so much easier and faster and more like a startup Pace break that down yeah that's exactly right um my background was in uh the Aviation Space and so I was Engineering in sort of the beginning of the EV toll hype cycle which I think we're still very much in uh we're starting to see some consolidation there
but you know I I drank the Kool-Aid we were building those Vehicles we even flew a few um but the sort of the I kept hitting my head against the wall was The Limited range of an electric aircraft flying on batteries you can't really go that far uh and also this billion dollars decade long certification pathway and so we realized that if we
sort of brought this electric aviation technology and put it in the maritime domain we actually solve both problems the the first is that as long as we stay within a wingspan of the surface of the water and stay over the water there's actually a special class of vehicle called a wing and ground effect vehicle
uh we made up the word seag glider because Wing in ground or wig is very difficult to Google you don't get vehicles when you Google wigs and so but there's this regulatory regime where they stay under the Coast Guard jurisdiction because operationally you're in the waterways anyway so you're not going into air space or DEC
conflicting with air traffic and then on the other side flying low altitude on this cushion of air like birds are flying over the water you're actually uh really aerodynamically efficient so we can go much longer range than any other electric flying machine so we solve both problems that's cool can you break down
some of the advantages of going electric I remember when we talked it's not just about saving the planet and avoiding emissions it's also about efficiency and uh and uh like actually being maintenance in less parts can you break all that down for me that's exactly what I told bellan in our first pitch meeting
it was it was exactly that right it's um you know we need to build this business around sustainability of the business model not necessarily sustainability from an emissions perspective of the product so um the drivve and cost in short Hall Aviation if you think of how an airplane ages uh it's actually the
maintenance costs they age by the Cycles you take off and land and you're impacting your landing gear you're expanding and Contracting your fuselage when you pressurize it you're heating up and cooling your engine so the driving cost on the short Hall is actually maintenance and the shorter the route the more Cycles you do the more you age
it so it's sort of this runaway effect if you switch to an all electric system now you have very few moving Parts they age by the hour there's not a lot of heat generated and so for short Hall electrification makes ton of sense and that's actually where the the range sort of buys you with electrification I don't
need to cross the ocean I'm trying to connect people to the Metropolitan centers and there's this huge hole in the market because we're talking about routes on the order of 100 to 200 miles today that can get up to three to 400 miles with with better batteries so these are routes where it's too far to
drive anyways you get caught in traffic uh we don't really have highspeed rail in America or even around the world but it's too short to fly because you're sitting in the airport longer than you're in the airplane itself yeah I've never seen a plane with 10 propellers on it why 10 not two big ones yeah yeah so
um so we had uh our quarter scale prototype that had the the eight propellers on the wing our full scale now has 12 propellers across the W so what we're doing uh this configuration is called a blown Wing uh it's not that clever a name we we blow the wing with the propeller wash uh coming off the the props and so we're basically tricking
the wing into generating high lift at low speeds because the sees fast moving air even when the vehicle's moving slowly and sort of the whole unlock of the seag gliders if you're like you know this isn't that new we have SE planes why are we doing this um you know the whole point is that se planes and flying
boats in the past have these uh planing holes and so if you've gone over like 10 miles an hour on a boat in any sea State you'll know how bumpy that ride gets so sort of in the best case scenario it's bumpy and uncomfortable worst case scenario you can't take off at all that's why SE planes have never really
scaled and sort of restricted to lakes and rivers uh so we needed to solve the wave tolerance problem we do that with Hydro foils so uh if you're familiar with uh you know America's Cup sale GP the E foil looking at going with s GP here in in La have you gone I haven't yet we're thinking about going it seems
awesome you need to go it's it's so it's like you and you will intimately understand how the wave tolerance of the hydro foil works because it just lifts you off and it's like a magic carpet and it's kind of surreal so um it also makes you appreciate what our flight control system is doing because balancing
yourself uh takes a little while and you fall onot um but the point is we get wave tolerance up to 5 feet on this vehicle so the model is if your commercial airplanes are flying the sea gliders are going too we can take off in five foot Seas uh hydrofoils have a limited top speed because of the drag of
the water uh and so we needed to lower the takeoff speed to overlap with that Hydro foil that out this design we slow down the takeoff speed enough to take off from the hydr foil so that was actually the other reason why we electrified again the the sustainability is is a nice benefit but it's secondary we electrified because
it's economical and we electrified because it's a pretty good way of Distributing propulsion on on a wing rather than a bunch of different engines or gear boxes yeah yeah that makes sense uh longterm are you planning to own the entire traveler experience from booking to operating the routes to obviously
making the aircraft I can imagine this as kind of a jsx that actually owns and you know develops um certainly in iar can you hear us yeah we definitely thought about it yeah do you got me yeah we're good I'm on the road still got me yeah we're good cool um we definitely thought about it uh in the early stage um the the Evol companies
are sort of doing that end to-end thing for us we said like this is a brand new mode of transportation people are going to need to build trust on it and what better way for both passengers to build up trust and candidly investors to build up trust in this wacky electric Flying Boat Company uh than to have sort of
established brands with all already existing operations be our customers so our customers are Airlines our customers are Ferry companies our customers the Marine Corps in the high-speed Logistics Mission um but those are the entities that are buying sea gliders and operating it we're we're the the Boeing
our Airbus here I I when we founded I said we're the the Boeing of sea gliders that's become a little taboo so now I say we're the Airbus of sea gliders which makes me hurt as an American but here we are oh well that's amazing uh can you give us a little background on where the company is how big you guys
are what you've raised what where you going next uh who you're hiring that type of stuff yeah we are based in the Silicon Valley of the East yes of Rhode Island yes uh so you know it's actually a a growing technology andel's moving into town There's a few uh drone boat companies and underwater company so we're really seeing a growth in Rhode
Island you know the ocean state awesome test environment for us some of the best boat builders in the World Newport Rhode Island home of the America's Cup so um it was a really great place for us to set up um we're about a hundred people now we actually just broke ground on a 255,000 foot manufacturing facility also
in Rhode Island so we're going to be building seag gliders here we're going to be scaling to another few hundred uh employees as we School up our manufacturing expect to uh open that facility in early 26 and deliver sea gliders and enter service uh probably starting in Hawaii or Miami are some of
the top two that our early customer wants to go to uh and that entry to service in like late 26 early 27 that's fantastic amazing Jord you have anything else we got to host the show in one of these bad boys as soon as we can uh it's been a dream of to do it from the air I want take it out summer in RH Island got
to come out yeah yeah yeah we got to go out there uh well I mean thank you so much for calling in give us giving us the update firsthand uh we'll we we'll share the video and repost the clip uh it's uh it's fascinating stuff and uh we really appreciate everything you're doing so thanks for calling in and we'll talk to you soon give us a call back
when there's more news you got it I'll see you at Ro we'll go on on SE glider fantastic see you and Ro we'll see you bye that was great that's wild yeah uh I don't know I don't know if you can pull up the video Ben but uh they have some video of the of the plane and it's uh yeah I mean it's it's remarkable like it
just feels like I mean we talked about this with Gary like the the pace of play and it's maybe just like the capital markets are more mature or something but like it just seems more doable to get a you know like 10 20 million 50 million together and then go and build a big you know prototype and actually fly it
around and people are figuring out how to do the right lobbying how to do the right uh yeah all the regulatory stuff and finding the regulatory Arbitrage that's my favorite thing about Regent like I think that the tech is cool obviously but it's so fascinating that they were able to build something that
operates in the maritime domain and just accelerate everything that they do so uh I loved that as soon as I heard that I was like a this is like this is something that I really want to follow and it is such a futuristic feeling craft that is perfectly practical yeah yeah you can take a look at it here uh I mean it's pretty it's pretty
sick the biggest people on Apple podcast are having a bad time right now they're having a bad time well we will describe it uh it's a cool plan and do you see they christened it with champagne and they didn't have to use one of those terrible machines they use in Europe America undefeated I love it uh
but yeah I mean 12 I guess three engines on each Wing uh and it just coasts along the uh the surface and we had a friend of the show asking us uh when are the when are the billionaires going to start building hydrofoil Yachts I think this is the the beginning of that Trend we've talked about the the land yacht that can
dig with a massive drill and uh yeah this the this is the next Evolution anyway um amazing let's go back to the timeline we love to see it and then close out the show that's our first time having a guest call in uh while in the back of a an Uber yeah and it worked we had AEF moment but he's uh yeah no I
mean that that is my goal for the show someone post something they're announcing it uh you know you'd go on you know you want to amplify it just come and talk about it on the show and so uh we'll I'm sure we'll do a lot more of those uh I love this post by Alexander Wang over at scale AI he says reminder of American exceptionalism us
companies make up 74% of global market cap returns of the S&P since 2008 are 200 197% versus the rest of the world at 44% it's pretty ridiculous and it it it's F it's funny because like hit the gong John yeah hit the gong for America uh I mean it's funny because like the the narrative in in so much of the media
is like things are more chaotic than ever we're so divided everything's terrible and it's like you know the when when the right Wing's in power the left wing says it's all terrible and when the left Wing's in in power the right Wing's in terrible but when you zoom out even just you know 15 years you can see that
America's doing pretty well pretty well and uh I I remain extremely bullish on America but there's not more much more to say about that all of our guests today have been extremely long America exactly uh as they should As Americans um there was some bad news about the American economy there was a big Miss on
ADP payrolls you saw this from Joe weisenthal right yeah uh they expected 140,000 new jobs added it came in at 77,000 this is just one economic indicator uh but if you've been following the markets and kind of the back and forth the Kangaroo Market right is it that's what it's called right uh bouncing around uh this is one of the
data points that people have been pointing to uh we don't go too deep into the the economic data but uh you know everyone is everyone's worried about uh you know job prospects and job growth but let's go to Jeff Lewis he says overheard at Blue Bottle technology brother a I love that he's using that
term uh hadn't heard anything from mock since that hit piece thought they were dead technology brother B says n dog it's called show don't tell don't tell mock reference to new Mack had a new video Drop I think it was Tuesday yep very very cool they seemed to have made a bunch of progress um and uh you never
let a hit piece get you down just keep building they're not they're not uh they're not uh you know given in to the to the negativity so love to see it Jeff was an early investor uh in Mock and he has is building a reputation for sticking with Founders when the media has turned on them yep and I think that that is one of the most important
reputations that you can build because it's easy for an investor to yeah be your best friend when everything's going great but to double um you know double down on on supporting somebody when they're in the sort of darkest period of their company is what is what really matters very cool and I and I um talking
with Jeff's team right now about having come on the show uh very soon so excited for that yeah I hope he's wearing a a tank top looking absolutely shredded and uh absolutely DIC Jeff's always known that it's underpriced to be diced he is um and uh open uh we want we would host a temp check uh weekly for Jeff segment
on the show weekly segment we need every single week Jeff you don't have to do any production well well I mean you do have to continue working out yeah that's it that's the key thing you got to but you could do the temp check while working out spam the delts and get the shoulders popping and get the biceps
going uh cuz yeah we we we don't want we don't want to scrawny Jeff Lewis on the show that's unacceptable disaster but you know as long as the takes are hot and uh he's sporting Founders it's great yeah I I hung out with Ethan uh I want to say like a year or two ago and uh I mean obviously the company's been like
up and down there's been this hitpiece that everyone's mentioning uh but uh he just seems like someone who's like really really driven and is going to do something at some point very cool and it's just like a good person to have on the America team yeah and I think they're iterating on product too yeah
totally they also to be clear they announced a US Army contract and that they're building a weapons Factory it's great yeah we need more people building more cool stuff so you know I'm I'm excited to see Ethan get through the the the rise and fall and rise again and I hope that he's successful uh let's go to
David VCS are living out again Vibe shift I didn't put that in you didn't put this in I I don't we don't talk about politics um I don't know who who they're talking about but it is hilarious it is clear that if you wanted to be contrarian you had to um VC's for kamla yeah that that was contrarian move was to sign the list even though
although Gavin Nome people are saying like he's completely Vibe shifted his way and went on some uh Charlie Kirk show did you see no that was him having Charlie Kirk on his show wait Gavin Newsome has a podcast he has a podcast no way really oh okay interesting well I mean clearly there's going to be a uh
there's going to be a Vibe shift and uh uh but but everyone's lost on this everyone's like I don't see it elaborate like who nature is healing uh people have having fun with it who knows uh anyway flock safety is Raising uh Katy roof has a scoop Andre's leading around Jeff Lewis company yeah it is it is we should have on to talk about when the
when the funding finally breaks uh 7.5 billion for flock safety they make cameras that sell to police departments and a bunch of other equipment uh kind of the paler of local governments that's been like a big question is like is that possible it's such a different sales motion because you're not just going
lobbying in DC you have to go District by District but when you get in and when you're installed it's very very sticky very low chart yeah and so uh think they great finances uh great great cohorts great company uh interesting team and I want to get to know them more because it seems like a really cool company and it
seems like like a very important task obviously anyway let's move on to autism Capital uh they say if Steve Jobs were alive were still alive he would issue a letter to all stockholders saying he's about to dump all of Apple's extra cash into perfecting augmented reality because we have an imperative as the
steward of innovation to drive Humanity forward and build the tools of Tomorrow interesting rare like hard post I feel like uh this account mostly posts like news and clips and stuff but yeah breaking also his his post on X would be fire he'd be arguing and calling people the r word all day long I don't know if
that'd be that good but here's the here's here's the main thing is that Steve Jobs wouldn't need all of Apple's extra cash which is an incredible amount you talked about this earlier I think they have 60 right now 60 billion but they have returned over a trillion over the past 15 years yeah apple spent an
estimated 150 million over 30 months to develop the first iPhone million oh million 150 million so so cra Steve would have uh seen what's possible you know obviously there's been inflation and you know whatever you could come up with a bunch of excuses but um you have to imagine that that he uh would be running it like a startup internally and
saying you know and and sort of going founder mode um yeah it seems like the algorithm would probably just you know make make like crazy aggressive decisions and compromises until you find something that actually has product Market fit with yourself like do you believe that Tim Cook daily drives in apple Vision
Pro or do you think he's ched from it churn for sure I think everyone kind of ched yeah except for uh that one guy I forget uh yeah there was one writer who who who mentioned that he was still using it I have a friend who still uses it every once in a while and I I I I want to be using it it's it's so close
to being to being good but it's not quite there um what else should we close the show out with oh this is a great one from Matt lasi uh wife just taught me the professional way to say told you so is this was identified early on as a likely outcome going to be using this a lot I love this one I just thought it
was funny yeah I put this one in you put this one in uh we got to start we wouldn't honestly use that because our our our culture is well no our cor our culture internally is we we try to make uh yeah you know uh you don't take a Victory lap on a to and I told you so yeah yeah yeah but if you're working and you're trying to you
know take the job of your CEO yes this is a great line this was identified early as a likely outcome and uh you know really take the Victory lap on a on a poor outcome yes where else should we end up there's some other news uh Apple unveiled uh Mac Studio with M4 Max M3 Ultra every time I see one of these I'm like ah it's like
nothing but then I'm like I want one um I always just want the latest thing even though pachy was making fun of them for the new iPad that looked exactly the same I was like that would make me happy for five minutes for five minutes exactly unboxing an Apple product still feels good and then you're like oh okay
it's just like I'm not using it or I don't notice once I open up the Chrome tab um and the other news is Alexis Ohanian is now bidding for Tik Tok with a blockchain immigration plan yep so we he's coming on the show tomorrow to talk about it he also is relaunching dig with Kevin Rose which is which is awesome uh
I actually got a reminds me I got to email back his team yep um yep we're going to be on he's going to be coming on at 12:30 tomorrow to talk about everything he's cooking on he was going to come on uh today but he was traveling I said he's got this amazing home studio told him wait wait till you're back home
come on then uh so I'm excited to have him back on I say we save some of these posts um let's end on a joke okay from Bas Baron yeah uh who's been an early listener of the show we invested by following him when he had 200 something followers yeah it was like buying Bitcoin in the 90s and yeah exactly um
or salana in the in the early 2000s yeah uh Bas baren says I love ramp so much that I broke up with my ex-girlfriend because she used someone else for expense management agement call that my brecks I've read this it's still funny when you read it it's still funny silly uh good one anyways uh great show today I I thought our guests were were
fantastic I thought it was a lot of fun and good mix I think we're dialing in the format little news little timeline we got to put in the invites for the guests that you might join and you might be interrupting another guest but it like think of it more as like you walk into a house party I don't know if we
want to keep the house party Vibe going or maybe we want to use this the waiting room which is like a feature on Zoom but uh we'll keep dialing it in stay tuned for more We're Never Satisfied we're going to keep changing it up keep you guessing uh this was uh just two weeks ago we' never had a guest and we' done
something like 60 episodes and now we've had uh more guests than most people have in a year of podcasting uh I think we had like what 15 already this week or something like that uh oh wow anyway um by the way we got some breaking newss uh from the chat Rory shared that uh intuitive machines Athena lunar lander
landed on the moon this afternoon but the company has no idea where it is what oh uh and this is live I'm on the New York Times famed technology publication New York Times say intuitive machines a Houston company aiming to repeat a 2024 Landing said at spacecraft Athena has power and is communicating but may not
be upright it's unclear how that might impact the mission um imagine going all the way to the moon and then kind of botching the landing and then you're on your you know your Rovers turn to the side um that is uh that is rough so this story is unfolding well good luck to them if you need somebody to go up there
in a spacit and tip it over I'm happy to do that I'm fully expecting John 68 by the way I'm fully expecting to go to the Moon within my lifetime yep that's something I'm very confident of Y it's going to happen yep anyway that's our show thanks for watching thank you stay tuned for the next one we'll see you tomorrow