switch your business to ramp.com today's episode is ASMR ASMR episode ASMR r. go to get ble.com buy a luxury watch you're you're watching tvpn it is Tuesday March 18th 2025 we are live from the temple technology The Fortress of Finance the capital of capital this show start now we got a great show for you guys today folks and we're kicking out Q&A I'm feeling pretty bad I was on a
flight for six out of the last 20 or 12 out of the last 24 hours and you were bummed because you didn't get any Paparazzi shots no right there was nobody there was no one taking pictures of me yeah I saw well that you know of yeah that I know of I I I saw some uh some Paparazzi shots hit the timeline but see I want to see a video leak from a from a Delta uh you know Coast to Coast flight
where you're arguing about how could you not have Don perryon on a flight just just Bering the is and then and then you get is then you get exposed for not flying private it just destroys my entire career yeah just get laughed out of the podcasting World hopefully it never happens uh well uh we had we we actually got some questions from viewers one of them was uh what was JN doing in
Washington DC yesterday and I just want to address you know people have been say saying like oh maybe John's like a political power player like a king maker people he's like pulling the strings behind the scenes and I just want to categorically deny those accusations there's no evidence for that and it's not true the accusations have been very widespread yes and seem to have a bunch
of you know independent sources all been sort of saying the same thing in different ways yeah Teddy schlefer at the New York Times has been sniffing around Julia black has been sniffing around at the information um but it's not true uh I wasn't in DC pulling strings although I was doing some lobbying specifically I mean we've been podcasting for you know a couple months now it's been going really well
um but recently I've been getting very very worried and very scared about the situation with podcasting mainly about you know what happens if the power that accurs to podcasters just keeps occurring exponentially could we be in some sort of like podcasting Doom scenario and I think we need the government to step in and regulate and create kind of a government sanction
Monopoly for podcasters and right you know normally normally I'm a free against regulatory capture specifically in AI lot of safety stuff was kind of over I don't believe in any of that but podcasting is different I mean it's it's right access to your brains neurons it's so important and so I I I was there on Capitol Hill call calling for Action saying regulate us make sure that you
know you need you need a government sanctioned license to have an RSS cost yeah it should probably cost $5 million a year to have an RSS you know like really bring in and you should have a a stamp an approval from a government organization like the FDA they should look at your content and say yes this is not slop this passes the bar this is good for America and Humanity uh and also that would stop a lot of people
from you know doing these sort of part-time podcast get rid of all that which would be great uh and then also I've been very very worried about uh you know just losing our domestic Edge in podcasting in America so I was also calling for a 10,000% tariff on International podcast exactly if it's not made in America we're non-ironically seeing this in the app store right now uh a lot of
the top entertainment apps are sort of SLO content from overseas and we need to put you know 10,000% tariffs on those I agree as well as all foreign podcasts we we simultaneously need to protect uh American the American podcast industry 100% yet also protect consumers from the long-term you know potential damage yes of you know certain certain podcasters with unsavory content you know getting
out of control yeah yeah it it it it might have some short-term pain but I think in the long term America will be better off uh with a with a with with a podcast policy that's focused on America putting America First who would be and it's possible that David Sachs could also expand into being the podcast Zar that would be great the only challenge is he's historically been against
monetization true which true uh could handicap the industry oh well well if you're planning a trip to DC it is beautiful right now you should book a place on wander find your happy place find your happy place book a wander with inspiring views Hotel great amenities dreamy beds top tier cleaning 247 coner service it's a vacation home but better folks um and yeah I mean DC's it's a
beautiful city and you uh one of my favorite memories as a kid was going with my family and seeing all the different museums it's a fantastic place it's overlooked I think because people say oh I gotta go to France I gotta go to Spain I gotta go to Japan we got we got it all right here folks stay in America go to the National Mall visit the Smithsonian uh and potentially we
might be we might be selling off some of these Smithsonian assets as part of do great take private yeah the take private of the Smithsonian is going to be great uh you so the the take private of the national you know other countries are nationalizing their energy Industries and and sort of computing we nationalize our relics or denational commercial priv privatize them yeah yeah and there's
going to be a huge uh much like in in Soviet Russia you know as all these sort of State own assets privatized you know it's going to be a huge wealth creation event for the American oligarchs that can sort of take these treasured assets private exactly and those are the future LPS of you know many Venture Capital funds so moon rocks dinosaur bones all of these things are up for sale in in a
more efficiently run government Tru truly the Smithsonian is uh the the National Air and Space Museum is like a core memory for me as a child because I just loved planes so much and uh was an avid uh flight simulator you know and so to be able to go around and walk around and sit in the sit in the cockpit or the cabin and now you'd potentially be able to own a piece of that if you bought
part of the private Equity Firm they took it private yeah or say we're going to fractionalize each asset I love that I love where you're going with that this is good add some leverage into the mix this is perfect this is more American then stuffing it all away in the dusty Smithsonian Museum let's lever these assets smithonian economy we need a market map exactly exactly anyway
somewhere out there somewhere out there there's there's somebody listening to the show for the first time they're just like what is going on what are they talking about we lost that we lost them but for the rest of you we'll move on to something a little bit more practical we got a call from a listener a question from a listener to say they they currently work at one of the most
profitable podcast in the world and they're commuting in and they need a car and so they're deciding between Tesla Model 3 or a Toyota Camry yeah and we were talking about this off mic we were kind of recommending like but I mean both of those are great cars model 3 is great self-driving which we're going to get into later with the mark Rober Scandal uh Toyota Camry also very
reliable very affordable not going to lose a lot of money on that but there is another way value yeah we were looking for deep value looking for something where you could stand out really impress your potentially two bosses at this podcast that you work at and our recommendation was go and get a Dodge Hellcat yeah and you know where you should get it you know some of the people are always saying okay what
marketplaces can you get you know sort of the best bank for your buck with cars right because if you look on like cars and bids or bring a trailer if you look on like duPont Registry prices are typically High they're more collector cars often but if you go on Facebook Marketplace and you and you just search for the term uh iyk YK if you know you know if you know you know you can find
cars um that usually aren't photographed super well they look like they're kind of like hidden away in some type of um you know parking garage or something it's a little bit of like a teelan secret like contrarian thing is that a lot of people say oh you need the title but really to drive a car you just need the keys yeah they're usually priced 80% lower than market and the one downside
is that they don't typically come with a title yeah and uh but for the for the potential savings but if you have a Dodge Hellcat do you even need a title always say when you're commuting to work like your your your tire should be breaking loose at least like three times yeah yeah but anyways I think people are you know you could go out and get a Model A model y long range for 50k on from the Tesla dealership y you
could go and get a McLaren yep for 50k you might have to pay cash and and bring it in a duffel bag and you might not get you might not get a title yep but who needs a title anyway are as long as the wheels aren't falling off you're going to be in a pretty good spot and um so yeah the just go on Facebook Marketplace search if you know you know find an exotic and worry about the title later I
I would say stick with your Dodge Charger you want to search for blacked out you want you want illegal tint on the front window on y on the front windshield for sure for sure because you want to make a statement if you're if you're new in an organization you're coming in and you're you're trying to you know let people know where you stand in the organization hear the screaming engine
of that of that there's actually an entire Facebook Marketplace apparently called no title cars if you know you know it has 44,000 members and I don't know what they're talking about but as long as the cars are in good condition yeah and uh you know it seems like seems like some potential opportunity there let us know in the comments if we're missing anything on this but seems like
some great value for sure uh anyway we're going to be having uh the dealership guy today uh on the show later today we can ask him and we'll ask him what this is all about yeah uh but he's going to be breaking down you know kind of what's happening okay today in the automotive industry fantas uh you know and broadly how they're applying you know everything from from AI to
fintech and a lot more cool so um well if you are looking for something that is authenticated and does come with proper paperwork uh maybe you should get a luxury watch from bezel they have over 23,500 luxury watches fully authenticated in-house by bezels team of experts go to get bezel.set of $$ 32 billion 64x annualized 32x projected 2025 Revenue they sold Google what was the purchase price in
Daytona think is probably I'm GNA run the numbers really quick hundreds of thousands of daytonas something like that it's a lot I'm G to run the numbers whz was founded in it's roughly 1 a young company 1.5 million daytonas okay 1.5 million daytonas it'd be hard to imagine y you know the entire you know maybe there's some stock considerations too but definitely in the millions of
daytonas that's great that's a great outcome for them uh so Google acquired whiz uh and uh whiz was founded in 2020 and markets itself as a seamless Cloud Pro Cloud security platform uh is this a smart move says Wasteland Capital Google is a distant number three in cloud with 12% share I don't know exactly how distant that is from AWS and Azure I'm sure it's like far but not that bad
Google Cloud's pretty good and in fact they were uh they were Supply constraint right this uh this last year when we looked into their cap everybody loves to say oh work Supply yeah and it needs to differentiate itself with just for some context so Google is a clear number three AWS this is as of Q4 2024 30% uh market share for AWS 21% for Azure 12% for Google cloud and then power law distri Salesforce has
2% Oracle has 3% yeah um Alibaba is up there number four okay uh in that context this is a strategically very solid move it gets a new Standalone product that it can sell to anyone and also probably offer faster cheaper and better plug-and-play integration for its own cloud customers security is of preeminent importance and hard to manage uh but the pr on the deal leaves a lot
to be desired it's not clear from the deal description on Google's site how this is going to impact their growth margin or Revenue profile they gave us a lot of stupid platform buzzwords nothing tangible how did they value this at such a high multiple plus with $50 billion in annual R&D one wonders why Google is unable to boost Cloud Security on its own they are they not able to release
products effectively no it doesn't look like it why can't they hire good people for all that cash and was Google Cloud security really bad before this I don't know they really need to work on this I'd fire the pr team the poor communication will cost shareholders a lot of money today also considering the recent crash in Google share price could this cash have been better spent on a
buyback let's face it 32 billion is only 1.6% of Google's market cap despite sounding like a lot of money it's Google's largest deal ever for a strategic move if that's what this is it's not much as such but some buyback support would have been nice you need it now shareholders are bleeding you have the lowest multiple among the mag seven and still choose to
spend on m&a instead and consider the struggles of their artificial intelligence let face it de Gemini sucks comp uh versus the competition uh it feels like many investors would have rather seen Capital allocated to a better product in the AI space like buying perplexity for example um but instead of Buybacks in AI public shareholders and Google product users get whiz okay now give us accelerated
Cloud growth targets give us the give the public something now for sure this is an incredible exit for the VCS here and I saw andron did 1 billion on 12 billion like a year or two ago and so they just made2 billion basic I think Thrive was in that round as well and small list of the cap table is a lit literally a Silicon Valley who's who so we got to ring the siis gong for um
involved um the they initially had a deal in 20124 whiz runs a secondary sale at 16 uh which was double their previous valuation uh and and initially the the initial deal was somewhere in the 20 billion range um and anyway so they put in uh basically all the investors into the new uh collectively Sequoia cyber starts index Salesforce Thrive Capital Green Oaks and two dozen others got um yeah
basically whoever invested at at 16 got a clean 2x in in Less almost less than a year I think what a cool what a cool uh company story too I mean incredibly quick five years I guess from 2020 to now uh founded by ASF Rapaport uh the the co-founders and the founders Asaf stand to make more than $3 billion each from the sale um it's the big exit for private for a private Venture back
company on record displacing meta1 199 billion acquisition of WhatsApp in 2014 so we had a real dry spell there for a decade we are so back but we are so back yeah and the market it's hard to say the market didn't I mean it's actually not very hard to say the market did not love this uh they they wanted buy basically in the last five days it wiped out roughly but it's hard to say because
this deal factors whole Market's kind of pretty meaningful drop in in share price at the at the open today um and they wiped off like you know 50 60 billion dollars in the last five days great so uh good good point from Wasteland basically saying that you know if if there was better messaging around this entire deal it would be potentially bullish people might like it right so we got some other news here
from the history of the company uh all the co-founders are alumni of unit 8200 part of the Israel Defense Forces known for its cyber security Savvy and intensity former unit 8200 members or 88,200 I'm not sure exactly how you say that uh members have been able to attract clients and investment money from Silicon Valley and Spades and The Whiz team is now among the ranks of unit
veterans that have founded highly valued cyber security companies such as Palo alone networks and fire blocks raport a 41-year-old Tel Aviv native often On's a hoodie with whiz's logo on it in keeping with the tech aesthetic or a white T-shirt joggers and sneakers and you'll love this part his shoes from the from the luxury Italian brand Golden Goose typically cost more than
$500 uh fantastic we love to see love to see some some some fine Itali even if you're going with this simple hoodie and jeans for joggers sneers you can still class it up a little bit uh let people know hey I'm running a$3 billion the beauty the beauty of Golden Goose too is is most of their shoes at least the the really popular ones uh with men are intensely worn in you know the the red and white
sneakers I wear no those are Golden Goose yeah oh there we go and they're and they and they look to the untrained eye like like a 10y like a 10-year-old pair of sneakers got it um uh dirty scuffed up um and so he's you know he's very they the the whoever wrote this article the journal really put him on blast year cuz he was flying under the radar uh prior to that they let him know
yeah did they did their research they clocked those from a mile away probably um he often brought his border collie MAA dubbed whiz's Chief dog officer to work at the company's offices in New York and Tel Aviv and encouraged other employees to bring their dogs as well M who died late last year had her own LinkedIn page that's terrible I'm so sorry unfortunate raport wrote when the
dog your dog ever have a LinkedIn page no he had an Instagram though it was popping yeah but what I should have gone and Linkedin really you you didn't want him to link and build and create value seriously do some thought leadership for that nothing happened on Instagram for dogs right they get enough attention in the real world y get them on LinkedIn I made the wrong platform choice for sure
for sure raap rep wrote when the dog died that they were a power couple and called the dog the love of his life oh oh that's sweet she a man man's best friend he can now take his billions and spend the rest of his life rear you know cloning the dog he needs to acquire he he I I don't know if he'd quite have the money to acquire uh what's the woolly mammoth one oh yeah um why am I blanking
on that I forget uh it's not Mammoth science or something Colossal yeah um and just say hey look uh Cool Tech I it seems this is a pure play dog reincarnation now we're reincarnating M my dog love it uh and uh we're going to use the dog to another $30 billion exit in 5 years and just sort of rinse and repeat it's fantastic uh so talks between Google and whiz fizzled last summer whiz started talking
to Bankers again in the fall about a fresh deal a posi of IPOs this year prompted rap port and co-founders Amy lwac uh yinon costia and Roy Resnik to explore deal conversations with several other parties according to people familiar with the matter none was willing to pay up as much as Google the companies were ultimately able to improve the terms of the deal again and
gain confidence that the Google transaction could overcome regulatory hurdles Google also views The Whiz deal as something that is in the best interest of America's national security The increased role of AI and Adoption of cloud services have dramatically changed the security landscape for customers um the acquisition is likely to test the Trump administration's antitrust appetite but if it clears whiz's
security features could help Google attract more Cloud customers and we're having Joe weisenthal on the show in about an hour or 45 minutes and it was very interesting I was listening to the latest episode of odd lots and he had the new the lenina con replacement I don't remember his name FTC Chief Andrew Ferguson on the Trump vision for antitrust and yeah uh it was fascinating
listening to this guy he was incredibly eloquent and could just take you on these like really long like Journeys in the history of antitrust like clearly had really understood the foundational texts and research it it it was a very interesting um conversation but uh maybe we'll get Joe to chime in on where he thinks this goes to him huge win for the Israeli Tech ecosystem uh
Sean Maguire uh called this out earlier they went by the Wizards which is a good name really often times startup uh sort of Team nicknames can be a little bit little bit rough a little bit rough but this one works uh and just good for Venture broadly to get this type of outcome we need our big asset managers gets now and then you uh keep the hose of capital com just like an IPO historic run with
the Trump pump and everyone was getting ready and the market was up every all risk assets were way up everyone's like well everything's going public now the the doors open and everyone's like okay like I don't want to be the first one through but like let's do it and then the mar crashed and now everyone's like let's stay private for another decade when when you look at uh you know
I'm I'm sure that whiz was pitched on on going public by a bunch of different investment Banks and I'm sure it was an option for them that being said uh you know selling uh to Google and uh you know probably much better lifestyle post than than post IPO yeah so it makes sense and and still a great way to to return Capital you know back ultimately into the ecosystem I don't know I'd be
curious to know some of those later stage rounds were they you know sort of made out of some of these funds were they special purpose Vehicles if they were in funds with that kind of timeline they would you know likely be recycled you know directly yeah uh back in uh but but who knows yeah redeployed we'll have to ask one of the one of the backers see what they think um well I'm sure all the
founders at whiz are sleeping well but they could be sleeping a lot better if they got an eight sleep go to AS sleep.com nights that fuel your best days turn any bed into the ultimate sleeping experience use code TBN at8 sleep.com go to.com off TBN um my eight sleep did its absolute best last night uh but I got four and a half hours of sleep four and a half hours it's telling me to it's selling me
in the app to pay attention I'm definitely paying attention to how po my sleep was last night got a 67 I need to rough yeah I honestly need to to to sort of just podcasting early to bed early to rise makes a man healthy wealthy and wise go to.com TVP they should update their website copy to that early to bed early to work rise makes a man healthy wealthy and wise wealthy and wise well let's
stay on the topic of Acquisitions and go over to ke Dickinson who says what's this $300 million tax benefit getting talked about in the pepsic poppy acquisition you want to break down break down this yeah just real quick the first yeah let's let's go through it so Pepsi Co announced yesterday they're acquiring Prebiotic soda brand poppy for 1.95 billion the soda make the Pepsi the
snacks and soda maker said the deal includes 300 million of anticipated cash tax benefits um and uh really eye popping number yep makes sense that sort of the big cpg Brands would would pay uh pay quite a lot to ultimately buy the products uh that are displacing them on the shelves right I think Poppy and ollipop uh these companies have very you know very quickly made a product that
was I would argue close to as good MH seemingly more healthy and consumers love them they they killed it on you know the merchandising side just delivering a bunch of different flavors iterating quickly I saw somebody joking um you know the backstory here is that ollipop start started um uh uh poppy actually started before ollipop that's right but was called something else I
think it was called mother something oh yeah they rebranded and uh they were an apple cider vinegar sort of tonic yeah ollipop comes out and I guess poppy allegedly was like that's a good idea and just immediately rebranded and I remember at the time I was living in Venice at the time which Venice is the Hub of uh many ways I feel like the Hub of you know consumer package Goods uh outside of Brooklyn
maybe and uh I remember there this was you know drama in that moment cuz poppy had come out and it basically like almost one to one copied the ollipop brown like I I'm sure there I don't know the whole sort of like legal backstory but I'm sure getting colors and you uh very similar fonts um and and very similar products like think the I think the main thing with at least poppy
is that they didn't go like soda might be over 100 calories a can obviously Diet Coke is calorie free zero calories Poppy and ollipop always played in this like 25 calories per can some calories but low calorie kind of just a different positioning and it's interesting that pepsic Co is feeling heat from the Prebiotic soda more than they did from the Seltzer because uh do you remember
spin drift was really putting pressure on them and I saw a lot of people switching to just chugging seltzers with because they have zero I mean you look at the ingredients on spin drip and it's just like lemon juice and water and zelzer there's like nothing there um but but the sales velocity for these Prebiotic soda brands just ended up being orders of magnitude totally more
than uh then the Seltzer Market people realize okay spuff was hot lacroy was hot uh Poppy and O came it just flooded the market and one one thing that's you know I won't say one way or another if if poppy was a direct you know copy of ollipop I just don't I don't know enough of the backstory I just know the sort of rumors doesn't matter now but really fantastic example of um it's rare that
you see a company sort of get get uh called out for copying someone else especially in cpg where the product is one thing but it's really about the delivery and the uh you know the brand the packaging and all that stuff uh but it's rare to see a copycat product do uh you know scale to a $2 billion outcome in you know uh in such a short amount of time so let's talk about why Pepsi did
this deal and then let's talk about those cash uh cash tax benefits first soda is under more attack than it's ever been I mean everyone knows that the you know Big Gulp at 7-Eleven is like a th000 calories and very bad for you um uh RFK Jr the the new health and human secretary uh Health and Human Services secretary has called soda poison uh and sales of of traditional soda has have
gone flat a little bit of a pun there y uh PepsiCo and Coca-Cola have jumped into the market dominated by Poppy and competitor ollipop with their own Creations Koch in February said it would launch a soda promoting digestive help called simply pop while Pepsi is formulating a version it aims to sell in the spring they'll probably cancel that because they have poppy in the portfolio
now uh unlike probiotic drinks such as kombucha and keier which introduce is that how you pronounce it I think so technically why I've always said kefir but maybe that's the Keir I I don't know kombucha and the other hippie one uh uh which introduced new microbes to the gut Prebiotic sodas cont dietary fibers that feed the bacteria already living in our systems ollipop and Poppy use inulin
Fiber often naturally derived from Agave or chory Roots so that is why they're putting pressure on it um I'm not we we we can go back to the the previous post break down Kea pretty prominent cpg investor says what's this 300 million of tax benefit getting talked about in the Pepsi Coy acquisition is the deal being done at 1.65 or 1.9 billion Y when you acquire an LLC you get to step up the
basis of the target company's assets to account for the difference between what you pay for the company and the balance sheet assets AKA The Book value in situations like poppy where a lot of what PepsiCo is buying is brand the Step Up can can be quite large often a majority of the value of the company Pepsi here is saying hey people love this product uh they're they're sort of
in these retail stores with our distribution Network we can get them in many more we can get them Global y we're really buying a product that people already love that has velocity that's competing directly with one of our core uh products which is their Pepsi Cola and I'm sure like Pepsi Zero or whatever they call it so uh Kaa says the acquir the acquirer can then amortise the value
of the step up over time and the same way they depreciate a capital asset they invest in that amortization reduces their earnings before tax thereby reducing their tax bill for years these future tax savings can then be discounted to reflect a present value presumably then Pepsi is saying they would have paid 1.65 billion if poppy was a C Corp but instead they were willing to pay an extra 300 million for
the tax savings that they will re over time say he has no Insight information but that's what he assumes is happening so interesting either way really big numbers uh good for uh the cpg ecosystem broadly this doesn't mean it's a good time to start a pre-out ex soda company uh even though it's a very impressive outcome the trap with cpg has always been that uh you know sort of these
simple tangible ideas right sort of oh I can make a beverage I could put it in a can I could get it in a store and what you don't realize is that it takes just a Monumental effort it takes a um you know really ridiculous execution over a long period of time uh poppy also uh poppy had like pretty much a pretty uh ridiculous they had done a sort of series of of party rounds over the years
that I think they they pretty well leverage if you look at their um yeah if you look at their um investor list it's it's kind of a very yeah it's tough because cpg it's it's extremely difficult to build distribution into the product yeah there's there are very few Network effects or fly wheels that you can build everyone does like a referral friend program but it just doesn't work the
same way as something that's like Dropbox that has a referal friend program where you get something like tangible that's free high margin um so it just comes down to just grit and sales and distribution and advertising and out of home advertising Made Easy and measurable you have to go on adi.com you have to say goodbye to the headaches of outof Home advertising only adquick combines technology out of home
expertise data to enable efficient seamless ad buying across the globe that's really what it takes to succeed and so that's what I would recommend to the poppy team and and the folks at Pepsi you know they're going to have a lot more money on there on in their marketing budgets and you know I'm sure you're listening Pepsi CMO like go to ad quick right now and just just full sent
just send it all on you know they have a flavor called Pepsi Max and so they could lead and you know literally buy every single billboard on adquick for Pepsi Max just sort of max out the platform Max it out Max it out and if you're a Founder that's working on a uh consumer good go buy a billboard go viral have some fun with it talk to the ad quick team they will get you set up
they will have I I have a buddy who really uh noticed that out of home demand uh in La dropped dramatically after the fires and so he just bought up pretty much he has a you know a nine figure Revenue cpg company he he bought up basically every grade a billboard in all of jery gon of billboard buying like special situations guy it and the amount of just like like attention he received
off of it was insane I mean every single day There Was You Know tons of people taking pictures it's one of those things like really really hard to measure because you'll get like text messages from people that just like your company feels more real it's similar to PR and press where it's hard to measure but that person who's considering joining your company they see the billboard and
they think like okay this is a more serious company or you know you know potential distributor potential investor it just makes you feel more like you've broken out of just oh you exist in this hyper targeted you know online flywheel that might might be working but the beauty of of out of home versus uh traditional media is you don't have to talk to journalist when you're add quick
you know you just sign up and do it uh anyway should we talk about this Mark uh yes we should so Mark Rober put out a YouTube video uh testing can he fool Tesla's full self-driving system uh and uh I mean it's a very funny idea he built a wall that looks like the Road straight out of roadrunner and Wy coyote and uh of course the Tesla which is using a camera is fooled uh and smashes
through the wall uh completely you know impossible situation not something that you should be worried about if you are purchasing a self-driving car but it was extremely controversial because I don't know if you have any enemies like uh likey style I guess the Road Runner is the one who puts it out right so if you're feuding with someone with Road Runner strategies and Aesthetics then
yeah maybe stay away from the Tesla but uh if you're not uh you're probably fine um but was there another was there another what was the other company that was luminar and so that's another interesting thing luminar founded by Austin Russell a teal fellow uh took the company public during the spack boom I also believe uh luminar Austin russle at one point he was trying to buy Forbes
and at another point I think he bought the succession house that burned down during the fire I think that was him right1 million1 million house or something like that and so the stock has been it fell from its back Peaks uh it's down at around uh $213 million now and I as a market cap and I think the company was one point valued in like the four billion range like most of these spcs um
and so uh luminar sells liar for self-driving car companies it was a very hot topic very hot product during the self-driving car boom there was a question okay if the if weo really takes off and or something like it and luminar is one of the providers well then luminar is going to be a really key component in the supply chain they'll be a very successful company obviously the
stock is down but since that Mark Rober video dropped the Stock's up 27% and it's very interesting the way it's filmed because they actually they're using a Lexus SUV for the liar car but they but they black out the logos so you can't like you can tell you just clear luminar has not really made progress on getting back towards its 2020 and what was the peak February 12th of 20 uh 21 it peaked at
$565 a share wow you're you're on public.com looking at that yeah and it's at six six bucks $6.7 right now wow it's down 99% still so if you loved luminar at $565 a share you're going to love it42 um wow no but this seems okay like an interesting strategy to potentially get retail investors re-engaged with stock totally totally uh and so it uh so so let's go through kind
of the story here so uh Alex Finn breaks it down in what is a pretty controversial thread I think pretty much every single one of these tweets that he posted got community noted um but he does do a good job of just kind of laying out exactly what happened he says uh you know Mark robers one of the strongest reputations on social media absolutely true uh I've talked to Mark briefly in a clubhouse room very nice
guy uh you know Mark's background is he worked at Nasa just total science Guru like you know just science nerd he just loves doing these little tests has has grown this massive YouTube channel uh where he kind of tests different scientific ideas um and uh and Alex Finn is claiming that today he obliterated it all with one 18-minute video it's a story of greed deception and cowardice
uh and you can tell from the writing like that this is you know this is as clickbaity as a YouTube video but it got 90k likes and 22 million views um so Mark is a you longtime YouTuber who spent years uring over 65 million subscribers that is a massive massive number he was the Mr Beast before there was a Mr Beast and then he says yesterday he let money politics and
greed get in the way of all that uh Mark put out a video called can you fool a self-driving car the concept is is simple uh drive a drive a Tesla in full self-driving mode on a road uh where there's a wall painted like a road there's actually six tests he does he does um one is just there's a there's a mannequin with a kid in the road then they sprayed some water then they sprayed some fog uh then they had the
the kid pop out at the last second they did a number of different tests to kind of show different scenarios and basically the the the gist of the video is like liar succeeded in six out of six and the Tesla suceed succeeded in I think only three out of six um but the Tesla Fanboys really came out in strongly against this and there are some you know reasonable critiques of this uh
so Alex Finn says wrong the video is filled with deception lies and illegal undisclosed advertising in the video Tesla does not detect a wall and goes right through it on top of that there's a mannequin that gets absolutely nailed it is very funny uh the but there are a few things Mark doesn't tell you first of all he lied about full self-driving he didn't even use FSD he used autopilot
which even Tesla admits is an older not a strong technology and this is where it gets really confusing because obviously in the context of like highly edited YouTube video Mark Rober is not giving you all of the details on like this is the exact Hardware I'm using this is the exact software I'm using I've updated the software here's how I'm engaging it like it's edited to be entertainment and
so it's pretty it's pretty hard to tell exactly what's going on there's there's actually a ongoing debate on whether or not he deactivated it by accident or on purpose before it hit the wall um as opposed to whether or not the system disengaged and technically if the system disengages you have to be ready to step on the brakes and that's the that's the car signaling to you hey I need you to
take over it's time for you to press the brakes and so if you don't press the brakes when the car tells you to press the brakes it's kind of on you kind of goes back and forth Alex's writing is really funny saying he sold his soul I know he betrayed his country by attacking by the most americanmade car company in the world he deceived his entire audience all for a paycheck it's
so so Sensational I love it um but um so so in the description uh they do uh Mark Rober does mention thanks to luminar for allowing us to test their liar equipped car they provided the vehicle for testing purposes but no compensation was given and this is not a paid promotion um and so uh it turns out that I I think uh Austin Austin Russell at luminar and Mark Rober are like independently
connected and like kind of friendly and Russell had donated to one of Mark robber's fundraising efforts and it seems like they're just kind of like buddies more or less and I think the other like subtext here is that Elon has just become such a lightning rod that if you are in the business of just getting attention and getting clicks you can get millions and millions of views on
YouTube right now with any video attacking Elon because the the the audience is just so ravenous for something something to push back against elon's new kind of political Arc and so I saw a video by a a live streamer who's just sitting there just talking about Tesla and what the Stock's done two million views and he normally gets like 400k views on a video but like the Tesla
stock crash got like two million views showing that like there's super high demand for this type of like anti- Elon content on YouTube right now everyone who's a YouTuber can see that and even if you're not anti- Elon like for a long time there was a whole sub niche of like you put Elon with a clown nose on him and you say like uh like elon's tunnel company is stupid ores doesn't make any
sense like or like Tesla just crashed or like why would you want to go underground yeah and then and then there was another genre of like Tesla glazing videos that got millions of views that were like the Tes Elon Musk just announced a nuclear reactor it's confirmed like like this changes everything and they would just produce completely fake videos but Pro Elon because there were like Pro Elon people
that would just click on anything that was Pro Elon and so elon's just become this like Vortex of content nonsense um but even the big YouTubers are clearly feeling that uh Johnny Harris this video essayist uh when Elon started getting political wanted to do a deep Dove on like how did he get here what's his Evolution like you want to just address the things that are in the news and Elon
is in the news um and so uh very very very controversial uh we have a post from Nick Carter here I don't know if you want to read that but uh he says I'm not a big r I'm not I'm not a big Mark Rober fan and not a Tesla fan boy at all have never own the stock or the car but Tesla's but Tesla has a case if they want to sue him for this video it's clearly deceptive with the aim to
disparage Tesla and that was kind of the the vibe on X um but uh overall wild story yeah it's an interesting position for Tesla to be in because suing a big creator not going to necessarily get you more fans totally it does feel like the right way to do it is to potentially have the engineers just do like an entire breakdown like if you did a two-hour breakdown of the video
and we're pointing out you know here's here's why the scenario you know we're not building these cars for the sort of Road exactly that it it it's literally just a trade-off between do you want a cheap self-driving car that is susceptible to Roadrunner scenarios or do you want an expensive car that is Road Runner proof and most people will say yeah you know what like I could I could wear a fivepoint racing harness
and a helmet every time I drive that would be safer but like I can also just wear a normal seat belt and an airbag and like try not to Crash Drive saf right like there there's obviously a spectrum of capabilities with every one of these vehicles the lidar thing I mean elon's been beating that drum for years saying anyone who's using lar is doomed like it it has its own edge cases I
think it doesn't work in maybe the rain or something like that the rain confuses it and so it has its own drawbacks but it's also very expensive and so unless you're running a wayo style business where it's fine if the comp if the car has 500k capex uh it hasn't made sense I've always heard that and been like but can't we just make lar cheaper over time like it has to be possible to make that
cheaper like Star Link's making million like Star Link's making millions of satellites or is the right system to leverage both because you want to manage all the different edge cases and be able to work in different environments you know knows George hot yeah I talked to him about thison and and he just said like look how does a human drive two eyes two ears two hands two feet that's
all you need ears yes yeah and no he even said like it has like like the comma AI self-driving kit that you attach to your windshield that adds self-driving functionality to your car it has a mouth because it breathes air to cool the CPU he sees it as like a human head it's very fun but yeah he he just says like fundamentally like we don't have lar and we can drive cars therefore software must be able to drive
cars with just two eyes and two ears and you know a couple other things and that's it so uh it'll be interesting to see where this goes it'll be interesting to see if any car companies see this demo and say yeah let's roll that out because I think everyone wants more competition and no one wants less safe vehicles on the road and so um the most my most disappointing thing was that
they Ed this uh this Lexus SUV to demo the ldar and it seemed to be a good system but you can't buy that car right now like if you if you're driving behind Alexus and they engage their autopilot like they're just as likely to crash into you as anyone else because they they don't have these systems engaged yet at least I I I don't think they have it on offer yet um there are some there
are some companies that are obviously working on it but we got a talked to Joe about Tesla oh yeah and the stock okay where does it go from here okay we had uh I'm just curious to get his yeah just like analysis on obviously he's not a uh you know hedge fund manager but it's such a stock that that trades on the future elon's elon's popularity yeah you're talking about Joe weisenthal
right yes yeah I mean from what from what I know I've only talked to him like once but it seems like he's a person that takes investing seriously and thinks about multi asset investing he prioritizes industry-leading yields you know he would only use a platform that's trusted by millions and that's why uh if I were talking to him I would recommend that he sign up foru.com
um that's right fantastic choice stocks bonds crypto options T bills you can get it all at public.com at public and uh yeah we're we're we've got a a video with with public in the pipeline that I'm very excited about um should we make that video overthe toop anti-woke potentially kind of do like the Sal thing one way to get a lot of attention with with an ad in 2025 is to make it so anti that people decide I'm
actually woke I'm actually I'm the liberal now uh so if you missed it yesterday salana put out an advertisement what was it called by the way the blockchain put out Sal the blockchain the foundation the foundation put out an ad uh and uh Sam Lon broke it out here he was an early salana investor uh and he says the salon ad completely comically misunderstood the 2025 media
assignment re authenticity I love salana and I actually agree with a lot not all of the points salana yeah wow uh but let's be honest it's a terrible ad hilariously terrible the tone is completely wrong they were right to take it down even if the internet and of course the blockchain in particular never forget LOL irony uh the reason it doesn't work is isn't the content it's
that they used actors in a Polish scripted scene that is completely wrong in 2025 interesting take I don't know how much I agree with that but I'm getting there uh what people care about what works in media's authenticity warts and all is real people in raw form speaking their truth I'm not suggesting it but if the salon of leadership had made the exact same points in a speech
on the street like them or dislike them the content would have worked when other Tech leaders make these points in their own voice it works but this these points packaged in pristine background with scripted actors it honestly just shows whoever made this completely misunderstands the moment in how media and comms Works in 2025 it's the opposite of going to your take on it was
that they just seemingly planned the ad like when Trump was elected and it took a while you remember when the Jaguar Rebrand happened and everyone was like oh they expected kamla to win yeah and felt like a very comma coded ad uh this is kind of the same thing where it's like oh they they green lit this the day Trump won and they didn't realize that there would be like kind of
a re-evaluation of things post and like there'd be a settling in Period uh but yeah I mean these these ads like if you go can find it because it's been somewhat taken down but it's still up there um it's uh yeah everybody was saying uh you you salana deleted it but they're like we will not let you forget this ad never forget uh I wish I I'd want to have the actor on the show yeah that'd be fun um but yeah I mean
the an ad like that it's like clearly shot on Cinema cameras professional lighting makeup hair script all this stuff like it takes months to get something like that made they didn't they didn't use just some some film school kid to whip it up which they probably should have uh it took a long time and so by the time it got through all the reviews and all the postprocessing and editing color grading
and sound mixing um it was it had missed the mark like it might have been edgy I mean really you got to go back to like coinbase in 20 2021 saying like Hey we're Mission oriented and even that was different because it the the the coinbase the Brian Armstrong piece about coinbase was they were not saying we are anti-woke they're saying we're just Mission oriented we're apolitical yeah
we're not it's not they weren't saying hey we're rightwing now it was like we're not leftwing we're not right-wing we're just crypto AOL political like and we're going to donate where we need to just on crypto stuff we're going to stay focused and I liked that and I think that was good and I think that and they were dealing with internal sort of mutiny you know people similar to what
happened at Google and a lot of big companies were experiencing that they had to kind of do something and I and I looked at uh cruso energy launched a a video yesterday uh kind of reintroducing themselves as a uh producer of of energy and Data Center capacity for brother brother Justin May's first Angel oh yeah that's right that's right Chase lochmiller uh the CEO over there and on
one hand like you watch this you watch this cruso energy video and it's like it has like a very corporate Vibe it's somewhat stock footage e but it's just very clear what they do and what they care about it's authentic it's authentic and I'm like this is amazing this is actually what business is about like they just care about their business and you know what I don't know what the
political statement is here because it doesn't need to be a political statement they're just saying look we want to build data centers that's the business that we're in we're going to do it and we're excited about what people will do on top of those data centers training Ai and they have some pictures of people in healthcare settings that could benefit from Ai and financial settings that
could benefit from Ai and you know all these different things that could benefit from data centers but at the end of the day they just say we're cruso and we're and we're building the next generation of data centers and I'm like I'm so here for this this is so refreshing and if you love big data you're going to get excited about yeah and I actually do so you love energy I love energy and I love big data so I was
very happy with that if you love leverage yes uh and yeah let's go to Dylan yeah so I can break this down so uh uh Dylan says this should have been the accelerate America ad salana is about Builders uh like uh a 22-year-old uh Dev born to Sri Lankan immigrants putting real world assets on chain still one of the projects I'm most proud of so uh and this is referencing a video you
can go watch it it's capital. XYZ Sounders uh we made this video in 2022 highlight highlighting uh Mary garate uh and uh Mary has a very very cool uh crypto company she's been building on salana uh from day one she has this amazing story uh and and this ad sort of breaks it all down and and not an this was this was very like incredible building yeah very real story um Mary uh is uh not not you know
doesn't bring politics onto the blockchain you know like uh let's keep politics out ofin F delivering um delivering value and uh I'm uh proud to have uh be an angel in her company let's keep politics out of the pump and dumps and out of the rug pulling and out of the meme coins and out of the pump. funds let's just keep it clean except except politics definitely got into onto
the chain through Trump coin Melania coin you remember Joe Bowden um we should just keep politics out of it keep politics out of everything I'm I'm over it um anyways uh I'm sure salana is already working on their next ad uh the comeback ad Y Cool opportunity for what it's worth like I i' I've done a whole Deep dive on the founders and uh although their marketing seems to be
missing the mark like I think that they're really really talented engineers and their whole story of of working on wireless networking and high performance Computing like I I don't even know how much we could say about like is it not decentralized enough like maybe that's a good argument for or against salana but I think like the founders are just interesting people but uh they they have
so much attention on them because it's such it's like it's not just a huge pool of capital but it's also like where people make the huge wins and huge losses here's a play yeah if you want to make a statement around innovation in the future take the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum private put it on chain all those planes on chain on on chain we need planes I mean callary
she's putting real world assets on chain right yeah this is Mary takes over the CEO role at at salana Foundation takes BEC it becomes a private Equity Firm and yeah yeah kind of rip out all like the decentralized I'm sure it would trade at like 400x Book value of the underlying planes and that is a real Financial Innovation there we we'll we'll close the last comment on the uh on the salana
thing Joe weisenthal who's coming on the show in 15 minutes uh he says uh he's he's sharing a post from 2020 I wonder how many Silicon Valley people are inspired by that Mark andreon post on now is the time to build to get working even harder on their next Generation decentralized stable coin protocol and Joe eisenthal said this is painful but also exactly what I joked about five
years ago especially if you make it to the final 45 seconds uh well uh salana could be in trouble they need to control their costs and so you know we' recommend that they get on ramp if they're not already on ramp time is money sa both easy to use corporate cards bill payments accounting and a whole lot more all in one place next time you see a bill coming through on a
credit card charge for uh anti-woke over-the-top marketing campaign you can just be like hey that's out of policy it's out of policy yeah not approved we we we want to do Mission driven content here that's right we want to stick to the basics uh well John do you have a battery real quick do you got some extra batteries I think we got saurin joining the team he is crazy nominative uh determinism
there he's Soaring Over the skies thank you can you bring him in let's bring him in let's bring him in saurin can you hear me we got saen from neros uh we have his post here I'm thrilled to announce that neros has raised a $35 million series led by Vi VY capital or VI Capital us with Sequoia interos D3 and Keller this funding is going straight into Mass manufacturing capacity that America
desperately needs my co-founder broke the news today in front of 800 DOD stakeholders and Industry leaders at manifest demo day in Washington DC um we're going to try and bring him in in just a second he should be here any minute AIO issue okay we're having an audio issue we're working through it have you actually had a chance to meet s before or will this be first not what's
his co-founder's name I met his Olaf Olaf pwa I met Olaf I don't know if I'm pronouncing that right and I just want to say uh they I mean we're going to get into some of this stuff they only announced both their preed and their seed uh less than a year ago back on May 20th of 2024 and so uh they've been act you know absolutely crushing um I got uh I got a breakdown on neros probably six or so
months ago from one of the partners over at long journey which are also having the show on tomorrow uh but but crazy crazy lineup of um you know investors and the traction that they've seen is pretty crazy I believe they're already um deploying some of their early they manufacturing now uh I went and toured his uh first office maybe small pretty small office in in Elsa gundo and I'd
heard that he was fantastic kind of like maybe the number one in the world or like world world renowned uh drone pilot and I was like look I've flown a DJI camera drone like how hard can this be like what am I really going to see here uh and we we go out we're kind of walking talking and we get to this park and he puts on the puts on the the fpv goggles and takes off and is the most
aggressive drone pilot I've ever seen and like there's this tree and he's circling it like 50 times a second and it's just the craziest like swoop swoop swoop soup soup uh it it was really really insane uh yeah he's fantastic drone pilot and uh and what a great demo like as like an or journalist or anything like that it's it's really really fun yeah few Founders have the advantage of
being able to go and give a technical demo that can display that level of capability right both in the operator and in you know the tech right so okay um then how we doing we can he can't see you we just gonna run okay so you can hear us guy uh sain I got you guys fantastic okay sorry for the lack of video we're we're building the plane as we're flying it you're building the
Drone as you're flying it giving us give us the update how you doing uh how was uh manifest demo day well uh yeah my co-founder Olaf was out there he he crushed it um I mean we we had a big announcement so we just closed our series a funding round $35 million going straight into more American drone manufacturing uh so really excited about that stuff um we also a few weeks ago announced our 6,000 drone production
contract so we are now uh officially making over a th000 drones a month which I believe is the highest rate of any drone company in the United States uh so our our vision of mass is coming together but there's still a long way to go what's the main use case for these drones yeah I mean primarily we're we're building drones that are going to be putting Warheads on foreheads uh it's
you know fpv Precision strike is kind of all the all the rage right now and you know our we have kind of two systems uh Archer and Archer strike uh Archer strike is the one where we're actually the Warhead integrator um it's basically a modular Warhead system and then we have Archer which is just the the plain fpv drone um and you can basically Mount whatever you want on there how do you
think about scale longterm I think that's probably the the the number one question on you know people's mind that are following the industry you see this sort of footage coming out of uh China of of you know not even drone specific manufacturing capacity but when you just think of you know China's scale and that being uh you know one of our uh most obvious adversaries you know
that's what you're up against uh you're clearly uh Not Afraid otherwise you probably wouldn't be doing this um how do we how do we sort of reach and exceed uh China's manufacturing capacity over the next 10 years given that they have a you know decades Long Head Start I think the question we need to be asking ourselves is what would happen if the Chinese supply chain was completely
cut off and we had to build say a million of these systems in a year what would we do what would that look like and right now the answer is uh you know the entire American industrial base I think would be um would be a disaster and the even the defense industrial base would be scrambling to to make that happen um and we really need to do whatever we can to make manufacturing cool again and get people excited about
working on this problem um I mean we've been sanctioned multiple times by China it seems like we're we're getting attention because we're doing something that is that is relevant uh but there's a long way to go guys 18 months into this very very long journey so you're saying neros has already been sanctioned by China we have yeah we were sanctioned a few months ago for the first time and
then recently they they reup it um I think we were in the list with General Dynamics and a few others it's more prestigious than being on the Forbes 30 30 yeah I I see that as a huge bull case um what about uh C can you give us a little idea uh little overview of like what's actually happening at various orders of magnitude of scale you said you're doing a th000 a month I think um
when I when I first met you and tour the facility it seemed like you were putting everything together by hand the founders were welding or soldering or doing everything uh now it seems like you probably have some Machinery in there but what does the path to like the lights out factory look like uh there was some debate on the timeline last week about you know you don't want to do
too much automation too early but obviously we want to get to high production value uh numbers so talk me through that yeah automation is definitely the last step in the process and the the first step is designing the product around this uh you know this High rate manufacturing I think that's one of the big problems that a lot of the existing drone companies in the US run into is because they're basing off
of one these pretty Exquisite compo components that are you know tough to to Source in high volumes um and they're really expensive and then two they just didn't actually design the airframe around uh you know these really scalable manufacturing techniques or having low human labor to be able to put it together so that was kind of the uh you know first thing we looked at when
actually designing Archer um was how can we reduce the amount of human labor that goes into this thing so even if we're not automating yet because things are still in flux and we're not at crazy high volumes uh we're you know still spending say like less than an hour of human time per drone that goes together so that's really really critical I mean we've been in our current factory for
about a year and in that time it's mainly been about optimizing the the main assembly line and it's still it's still a very manual assembly line but there's a lot of uh Tooling in place to make everything really repeatable and easy and then just the design of the Drone itself uh is very intentional yeah it's one of those things that you know people might say oh like they're putting
these together by hand but that could actually be the right decision given where you are uh can you tell me a little bit about uh supply chain I've heard it's basically impossible to find an americanmade drone motor is that still the case is there a change there and are you leveraging any of the cool companies we've talked to like the hadrians the range views the the 3D printing companies like what what do you
see as like really beneficial to you Motors are still a big challenge in the US uh I got asked on on on X the other day like oh are you guys winding your own Motors um and the answer is no we're not doing that yet we definitely want to be part of solving that problem and you know know there there are some things in the works but motors have been historically really tough a lot of us
companies are still using Chinese Motors because it's not mandated by the government to to avoid them um and same thing with cameras especially low cost sensors we've seen there's just they're they're primarily dominated by China um and in our world and the fpv world really everything is kind of built on top of architectures that use Chinese Chips so our you know long time
challenge um until we we finished the work and got onto the Blue uas List was rebuilding all of all of these components um from the kind of chip level because you'll you'll look at these open source projects that a lot of like drone racing technology is built off of and oh look at that it's it's off of a Chinese microcontroller or like every video receiver uh for analog fpv
in the world uses this Chinese radio module um so you have to get rid of all that do all the engineering up from a a clean sheet which has been a big challenge but um you know we're we're getting there and it's great to see these companies that are working on the kind of like fundamental manufacturing challenges like that's what I would put um you know range you into the the
bucket of like America needs investment castings um where we're we're sort of one level up where we're we have to be really smart on our component design but we're not actually you know making the chips sure do you think uh a lot of these suppliers over time uh can and should localize to a specific area you know China has a massive advantage you know with shenzen uh and you know a lot DJI being
a lot of being able to Source a lot of you know components locally do we need that or is is it not necessary what's your vision of of how these things you know how we get to producing you know millions of drones per year that's what Elsa gundo should be baby let's make the American shenzen let's go let's do it um do you feel like you know you've been very successful at you know raising a
significant amount of capital you know very quickly um how much um you know is there enough uh private investment into drones broadly or do we need to you know do do a multiple more I I posted um probably a couple months ago at this point that it felt like we needed a sort of project Stargate for domestic drone manufacturing like it seems like such a you know critical national security
issue that you know potentially there needs to be an order magnitude more investment in the category or do you feel like there there's an adequate amount of investment yet I'll say that uh you know the capital is available to you know two companies um but it has to be directed really well because uh both on the you know private Capital side and the government side uh like my main ask to
the the dod is not to spend more money it's to spend money in a different way it's to mandate higher volumes of systems that are lower cost um so it's not just about throwing money at the problem I think we have to uh set the expectations and those expectations might be in order of magnitude greater than you know like billion dollars goes towards buying a thousand loitering
Munitions that should probably be a 100,000 um you know two orders of magnitude difference so it's not necessarily about spending more money I do think there is private Capital that is ready to go that's excited to get into this industry um on the government side I think there are really positive shifts happening in the direction I'm describing but that's where a lot of this will be driven from how's the
transition uh gone from drone pilot to CEO I know you were running a a sort of uh drone oriented company in high school uh so you had a little bit of experience but uh does it feel like you're playing a video game when you're in slack and you're uh you know just sort of Manning the ship uh has it been pretty seamless yeah do you use slack in the fpv goggles uh that would be really locked
in it's not slack it's iar he's on teams sure teams guy uh we we we we're actually uh we do use slack but not in the goggles I wish um but it's been an interesting transition I mean uh you know sometimes I do kind of look around and I'm like wow I you know used to just be flying drones off my back porch and now I'm now I'm doing this but I think I've always had this uh you know really
strong natural inclination to start a company and I've been interested in startups for a really long time so it feels very natural like I understand the exact progression of why I'm doing what I'm doing but certainly a ton of learnings I mean we're also just moving really quickly um and so that comes with you know at times a lot of pain and a lot of uh a lot of lessons but it's it's
been a great journey I'm I'm super grateful for what I get to do every day that's amazing last last tiny question will we ever see a neros consumer product uh we're I think dgi's number one haters over here we've been trying to get on the sanction we've been trying to we do a lot of cinematic things we want to film them with drones but we want to be American about it it's
tough yeah I think the the market Dynamic right now is is in defense and that's where the most critical need is but um our mission is to fix the American drone industrial base so that doesn't just uh you know that doesn't just mean defense right I think way in the future there's a very good possibility that we'll be able to replace DGI on the the consumer shelves I would love to that'd be great amazing
well thanks so much for stopping by we'll have to have you back next time there's a big announcement uh we really appreciate you calling in thanks so much congrats on the Milestone thanks guys see you we'll talk to you soon uh I want to go to Andrew huberman for a bit I mean unless you have something to debrief on that no no let's get into it uh because you got a shout out rora so
out of nowhere out of nowhere on uh it was Saturday woke up uh I guess yeah it was around noon he says I find it weird that most of all the countertop reverse osmosis water filters are made of plastic the same industry that is built on keep contaminants out of what you ingest ethos puts clean SL cleaned water into plastic glaring contradiction I'm excited that rora water is metal so uh
he's of course referencing to uh this product here uh I don't know if you can see it on the camera now but it's in the it's on the set here with us uh yeah we developed this product extremely intentionally to um eliminate as much plastic as possible from the system because we saw that uh the vast majority of filters that were supposedly filtering out microplastic
um had uh you know huge amounts of plastic used in uh the process so unfortunate appreciate the shout out uh Andrew and uh yeah we we saw a massive uh pop in sales from this post alone as you can imagine um and uh it was very cool to see that's fantastic uh well there's other big news from Dan primac he says VCS always tell me they can't talk about active fundraising on advice of lawyers but that may be about to
change the SEC has issued new general solicitation guidance that makes the process much less owner as for private equity and Venture Capital we may not see Times Square Billboards advertising new funds but we should uh but at least it's theoretically possible they say uh firms would also be able to discuss fundraising rep efforts with reporters that's huge uh so next time you're doing
your big fund raise call into tvpn live announce that you're raising 10 billion doll micr fund to rip checks into 100 million companies yeah this has always been sort of done indirectly you know the somebody will leave a fund and they'll be announcement oh they're coming out but um yeah we want to see oneone Billboards of all the big Asset Management 100% I mean we talked about
Scout funds you know you're you're a scout at a venture capital firm you find a company take some of their money put it in there I want to see Scouts on the lp side I get comped when I when I go and solicit a bunch of rich friends to write LP checks to you that's what I'm interested in anyway we got the perfect person to talk about this we got Joe weisenthal from Bloomberg calling in hi
Hey Joe how you doing it's our financial brother I'm thrilled to be here with my uh with my technology Brothers thank you for having me I'm so glad to have you on the show this guy professional I'm not used to this you know what the last time I did any sort of like video call-in show my producer kale who is in the room with me he scolded me cuz like you look like garbage in that video that you did cuz I
just went down to like the basement here at Bloomberg and I like propped up my phone and it was a weird angle so he said next time you do anything just let me know and so he got me set up shout out to kale in this really nice this really nice Studio here I have like a proper ring light and everything in front of me so uh can we give can we give the viewers a little background on
you as I understand your your passion is for uh Finance podcasting but you have to make ends meet by playing in some sort of band is that right that's right you know uh yeah you can't really live on finance podcasting it's uh alone and so I'm in a country music band called light sweet crude Y and yeah we pass a bucket of tips around after each show and I think the last show uh I probably
after netting it out with the opening act and the other members I think I got about $10 that was the key boom there we go yeah there you go it's fantastic uh well yeah I mean yeah thanks for joining um I did a couple months ago it was a great show um we had a buch of stuff we wanted to talk about today I mean did you see this SEC news uh that VCS will be about to they
should be able to advertise their active fundraisings this was an axios today oh did did this I I I missed that today but I'm sure I'm sure this will be wonderful many retail investors convinced that they're getting on getting in on the next big thing this can only mean good things I'm sure that's a more wired checks to you guys well I think I think the idea is that if you can put $100,000
into a fund or if you can put a million dollars into a fund it sort of implies that you're accredited right I mean it could be less risky than some spaxs I guess like you know you get into some Diversified fund that's professionally managed doesn't seem that crazy I love that well there are riskier things that are conceivable so therefore yeah no I get it hey look you can advertise
literally anything else right so so I I I I I want to know uh you got to break the news here you uh posted yesterday I have a good idea for something I want to write in the newsletter tomorrow I'm so tempted to just waste it as ay tweet right now uh you put it in your newsletter we're going to encourage people to go subscribe but can you break us down what was that good idea I hated
that salana ad and I I know everyone hated it and I hate just like if someone follows me on Twitter I don't usually like jump on the thing that everyone's jumping on that's not really like my style but I hated that ad it had nothing to do with it being like anti-woke or whatever it was just like I hated the premise y that like investing in crypto that like investing in meme coins which is the
primary use of salana is somewhere along the L be in the same conversation like we built the railroads we landed on the moon and we trade coins on salana it's like no I'm sorry I don't accept that premise it's not part of it and I was going to make you know like there's this I the joke when I was GNA I could have just done it in a tweet which is the real s which is you know it's like what
would your job be on the um you know the Soviet commun and everyone imagines that they're the poet it's like what would your job be on the um you know the Martian landscape and probably your job's going to be miserable cuz it's miserable up on Mars and it's cold and there's no climate you're probably doing something with like trying to mine ice or something like that but everyone
imagines that there the guy who's going to be like Oh I'm going to like set up the decentralized payment platform to finance like everyone the Martian mecoin artists yeah it's like I'm going to be the guy posting dank memes to like motivate the workers who are out on the out on the mar Martian landscape I hated that ad I hate the whole premise it could have been a tweet but because I am
employed because I need to make ends meet here at Bloomberg I was like you know what I'm going to write it up in slightly longer than 280 characters for my newsletter today yeah I mean you know the the Steelman the salon on Mars we're going to need to fractionalize that ice get it on chain trade it like this is going to be important I think yeah no I like who has the one token you got to
tokenize the ice I get that EXA maybe all right well then I'm slightly openminded we've got a we've got a working Theory we want Doge to let us privatize the smith Smithsonian Space Museum and put the planes on chain we want planes on chains yes so that's that's our that's our political platform uh I'm I'm curious what you think the the whole play was with Mark uh in the
Tesla video yesterday do you have do you have any sort of comments on that it felt weirdly sort of conflicted in the sense that you know luminar I don't know what the I'm sorry I'm so online and I'm embarrassed I miss who is Mark Mark Rober I toally I missed it yeah yeah anyway U yeah Mark Rober put out a video testing uh the Tesla self-driving uh which is camera based against the lidar
uh system from a from a rival company we're going to we're going to switch this interview we're going to we're going to pretend like we're interviewing a country music Superstar just ask me about country music you ask me about like Tesla I don't know anything about that stuff well well what about uh your your recent interview with Andrew Ferguson uh on on the uh FTC antitrust
thing I I lik that I thought I mean my take away from it was that he is very eloquent and a great Storyteller he did a really good job of kind of going back multiple decades talking about Trump one and Len Khan and stuff and like kind of just taking me on a tour of what's going on but um and also it very interesting that he kept coming back to like worker harm as well that was uh your term might you know it's so
interesting because obviously everybody remembers there was the huge Market rally immediately after Trump won and one of the narratives was that you know the FTC under Lena Khan had taken this really strict line on mergers and mergers weren't getting done and so it's like okay we're going to finally get this green light on merger wave I think there's two things here so one is like
when markets are down and uh risk is off obviously that's it that's a main driving force for declining mergers right when people are uncertain Etc so that's one factor why we haven't seen this big merger wave happen just because actually Market volatility came fairly quickly as soon as the new uh uh Administration hit for various tariffs and reasons and we could talk about that
or maybe the general economy even prior to tariffs but you know I think that like this expectation that the new Administration was going to be sort of this like at least on the regulatory side or at least on the deal side the sort of like libertarian green light everything is not really uh panned out and so it's interesting we did a live show down in DC just last week and um it was a lot of
fun we had uh the new FTC chair Andrew Ferguson and it's interesting because he's keeping lenina Khan's merger guidelines in place he does have philosophical disagreements as he puts it and you know he did this like fantastic history of like what the consumer welfare standard was it was actually funny because uh so early in the interview um he actually there was a point I forget exactly what the question
was but something about Trump and the rule of law Etc and the whole audience like started laughing you can hear it's in the audio and I was like all right I like I your producer like turned down the volume on that so I just heard like a gap and I was thought I thought they might be booing him and he's like laughing got a little H it was a got a little hostile it was kind of crazy it
was like I was like oh boy like this is going to go off the rails it didn't go off the rails and then to your point in the next question uh he sort of walked through the history of the consumer welfare St standard as it's been understood by like theorists and conservative jurist Prudence over the years and he did a very good job at that and actually the same crowd that had
laughed at him before gave him a round of applause for that part so they did the the sort of like history of some of this stuff is really interesting but to your question itself like I think his point was there is more to Consumer welfare than just lower prices we don't need to expand um the you don't have to expand Beyond consumer welfare we just have to sort of have an expansive
definition of the term and so as he puts it if there are issues that are going to slow down Innovation because something is anti-competitive regardless of the price that could be a harm to Consumer welfare he did talk about um the idea of harming workers is a harm to Consumer welfare so I think like I don't know yet like it's really hard to say because the next time if we get a sustained Market
rally at some point we might see a bunch of deals get announced until there's a bunch of deals announced and they actually have to go through and green light or red light them I don't think we really know how uh tough this new cop on the beat is but you know he's made this point and now public and private he's like we're not we take this idea of corporate power as a harm very seriously
and if you think this is going to be sort of like a bush era FTC you're mistaken which I think is really interesting and probably relevant for investors both in private and public markets yeah it's interesting in terms of consumer harm we it almost feels like people are they're not saying consumer harm but people are frustrated with the pace of AI Innovation at Apple and just
the fact that Apple can kind of just sit there and Siri is free they're not raising the price but it feels like it's underperforming relative to if it was true what do you think I'm actually curious your take on it like why do you think that is cuz couple must feel some angst about that or maybe they don't because no one is going to switch to the green I think they feel angst after John
gruber's article last week because they got really taken to task um but but anyone it seems but this is what I don't get like I get the impression it's not that hard to build a pretty high quality llm because everyone seems to be able to do it so what is it just about like turning it into a Siri quality product million bucks uh so I I think it comes down to you know Apple wants every they
have this insane standard for every interaction has to be perfect uh you look at what's going on on Apple TV and and and they're having trouble getting through the like awkward stage of what Netflix did where there was a lot of just like background laundry TV on Netflix just reruns of you know sitcoms and stuff and apple everything needs to be polished almost like a ward level and
so they you know they've gotten close but they're they're they're kind of trying to play HBO's Game and I think with the with the AI summaries yeah they could easily just vend in an llm but then they're going to get hallucinations those screenshots are going to go out on X and people are going to say look at what Apple did it's crazy but this is why to me it makes me wonder whether
like I so much of this conversation has centered around the Apple question why can't Apple get this right Y and I keep wondering it's like maybe this is an AI thing thing which is that like all of us who and I use llms every day for sometimes work but sometimes just out of curiosity I'm simultaneously every day blown away and I'm also every day like well this is the dumbest thing I've ever
seen and the idea that this is approaching human intelligence is a joke Y and so the fact that like it can't be productized to like a real like for a company that really is like takes the consumer experience very seriously as Apple does like I wonder if that's like a oh this is here here's here's an angle it seems like llms are good at delivering sort of human intelligence which is not always reliable right
sometimes you're working with somebody that's smart and they give you some work and you're like this sucks do it again and so people are used to that Dynamic whereas with a machine if you click on you know Chrome and it opens uh Spotify you're like what are you doing you know and so like that's that that kind of our systems to be deterministic possible yeah it's possible to be blown Away by
an LM when you're using it as a co-pilot to write stuff but then if you're using it to order an Uber it just does you know it's not going to do it right yeah I mean I had a great hallucination the other day I was using per perplexity to um prepare for an interview I was like and I you know I find them useful anyway we were interviewing some of the founders of dimensional funds and I said
what are some interesting aspects of dimensional lore that would be just sort of interesting to bring up and it said oh ask them about their famous low volatility coffee that they serve at their headquarters where they claim to have like developed the perfect mix of caffeine and taste okay complet does not exist it doesn't completely made complet and so I'm thinking like I'm a
responsible journalist I'm not going to just like ask a question that an llm but somewhere or Some Day Some reporter you're going to see on TV asks is going to ask an insane question with an insane premise and it's because someone along the lines I gave them a list of questions generated from Ai and I'm just waiting for that moment cuz God if I had just like asked that question what's the
deal with your low volatility coffee like what professional humiliation yeah I mean like an offhand joke that the CEO made yeah right one point no I could bu zero also the clue was they say it said they serve it at their Santa Monica headquarters they're headquartered in Austin so I knew there was something off about it from the beginning but anyway yeah so going back a little bit to m&a
we're purely technology Focus we were covering the whiz acquisition today which is obviously good for the private markets it's good for everyone from the big asset managers that you know got a nice 2x in in less than a year it's good for you know broadly you know SAS Broadley you're less focused on that type of m&a and more focused on um stuff like the uh the sort of Capital One uh
and discover like is that the m&a market that really you know if Capital One and discover can happen does that mean that m&a is really back on the menu it's a really good it's a that's a really good question and actually one of the things I regret we we we only had so much time with Ferguson is we actually so much of it was talked about tech and tech power and concentration of tech power because
like you know everyone on the right and the left is in some degree anxious about that in retrospect had we had more time I wish we had actually spent more time on non-tech things because that matters too um it just doesn't get as much attention or people don't think about power to the same agree in some of these areas but I do think that interesting and it's if you look at that spread um
my colleagues I think flagged it yesterday if you look at that spread on that deal that's been a complete round trip since the election so if you want to see like one chart that sort of encapsulates the sort of changing mood since the Euphoria in mid November mid December Etc and then the sort of turn around essentially when Trump took office which was basically the turn you know I think like the crypto high was
literally the day he had that ball that makes sense the Trump meme coin followed by the Trump dump which is perfect I mean it's so perfect because of course it was I think if you look at that that spread chart for Capital One and discover you kind of just see the whole like oh wait the rethinking of you know how sort of markets friendly this Administration is going to be on on
economic data I I love following you on days that are like you know the jobs numbers and stuff but I I I want to get kind of like a high level for someone who's Maybe in Tech and not as embedded in finance like what is the Super Bowl of Finance like what are the important days to watch for because I know that there's data dripping out there's oh preliminary CPI data then there's fed
funds data and stuff like what what is the one day that like you can't miss or like what and what's kind of noise that you can kind of write off yeah well I'll say like the Super Bowl is always going to be jobs day because it's a really good high quality survey if you want to understand like our business is in a to invest Y and are they feeling good I mean there's no better measure than are
they actually willing to like hire someone and take on new payrolls so I think like just sort of like on if you want to like understand the business climate that has got to be the gold standard and there's so much to chew on it there's so many ways to slice it there's so many ways to analyze it y there's a lot there H you know it's a what I guess the first Friday of every
month typically that's good you know the other things that I think are really worth watching right now um all several of the regional feds have a monthly survey of the manufacturers in their uh uh in their district and I think you right now you really be want to be watching specific questions about are you how are you feeling about investment right now Capital expansion plans capital expenditure plans to me
that is like the sort of billion dooll question right here which is there's this hope right that we're going to have this reindustrialization or further industrialization or you know that's kind of what the administration is banking on the sentiment right now is that there's too much chaos to like make any big choices and no one really knows what the final tariff arrangements are
going to be Etc but I would say in terms of like the sort of second tier data beyond the jobs report I'm really interested in those sort of like business surveys that sort of ask a bunch of different questions about are you you know what's happening with your uh your costs what's happening with your you know various various business planning as they see it out the next six
months are you looking at any um kind of like alternative data sources like we were talking to somebody who was looking at true flation data instead of kind of CPI or are you like a purist you got to go straight to the source like no I love all all it there's no uh the truth of the matter is that the government data is very good quality by and large there are a bunch of other surveys you know
it's like I remember like during Co you know looking at like those like measures of like d dining out Etc and when is that coming back or airplane uh sales which were actually that's another sort of like yellow flag or red flag for the market some of the airlines I think Delta last week or two weeks ago they said they're already starting to see ticket sales tail off it
could be because there were a lot of uh crashes you know travel incidents in the news so it's not totally clear I love look there's no data I won't uh look at I'm really but I think right now the question is like is the sentiment data the business sentiment data the consumer sentiment data going to translate into hard numbers and I don't know if the answer is yes or no to be honest because
we had pretty terrible sentiment data the last several years you think back to 2022 when inflation peaked terrible sentiment numbers consumers kept shopping and dying out so for all they told survey surveyors that things were so bad they were still active uh as consumers the Kyla scanland Vibe session yeah I mean it really like it really did seem to be a disconnect between how
awful everyone was saying things were and what they were doing which was going on cruises and record numbers and all kinds of things like that yeah uh question for you people have joked about you know there it used to be we had bull markets and bare markets and now it seems like we have kangaroo markets I I grad I which is just like you know going going up and down like this is just sort of a fun fun
analogy I was I graduated I graduated college in 2018 you know very we had you know very quickly it was Co and then the co crash and then Zer and then interest hikes interest rate hikes and then you know everything it's been this sort of kangaroo Dynamic yeah is the is a kangar market just a obvious byproduct of the internet where just information is just traveling so quickly where you know
sentiment can change so quickly and trade on you know you know I joked historically like now we have group chats where like yeah friends are just you know from all over the world sometimes are just like talking about what's happening and trading against that information and trading against the sentiment in the group chat right yeah and historically it would be like oh
yeah you go to your College reunion and you're hanging out with your buddies that you know maybe you got some guy you know and everybody's like oh yeah it's actually we should be really bearish and then you sort of make these sort of long-term decisions yeah you know it's funny like um because I am a journalist in financial markets people think I know something you know like oh is now a good
time to refinance my house I was like I have no idea if I if I knew which way mortgage rates were going I'd be maybe uh in a different business but I do you know typically get a few texts after a when the Market's down and people are like Hey Joe how you been it's been a long time what do you think about the market and that's often like okay maybe we're getting close to a bottom here so
just for what it's worth I haven't gotten any I no old friends have reached out in the last several weeks so if you want to use that as an indicator of something maybe that means we have more to go down but I think look like markets are volatile because the world is volatile I mean there's a war going on there multiple Wars that the US is in some way connected to yeah but isn't the
argument that we directly ex we feel like we're experiencing that volatility yeah because we're seeing it live we're seeing the war in Ukraine we're seeing something happen in you know Syria or Libya or or you can sort of like yeah I mean during the war on terror like it was pretty smooth sailing until like a massive crash that lasted years and then a massive buildup for years and now it
does feel more vol bull market in I think that's real I mean I I think that like in terms of like the emotional vandalism that everyone experiences every day because they're just scrolling how can it not be having an effect on things totally uh do you do you see a world in the you know are spaxs doomed because they have such a bad reputation right now or could they be great could spaxs be great uh you
know what specs have come and gone multiple times in their history so I would I would never bet against return of this back it might take a while I think you know it's like maybe even like every 15 or 20 years or whatever but I am confident that in my lifetime there will be another spack boom I I will I will I will make that prediction whether it's in a year or five years or 10 years
but like uh you know yeah I believe that this idea of like you're going to put money into a box and something magical is going to happen that will never stop being tantalizing to investors I think we will the specs are not dead capital finds a way like sand through Pebbles it just needs to find its way uh I want to talk to you about uh your like you post on X but you also post on Blue Sky and I
see some posts do really well on X some of them do on Blue Sky are you using other platforms use x you know when like the Market's down I post on Blue Sky because crowd is like sickos for bad news under the Trump Administration like I'm going to throw I'll throw them some Chum about like how the NDA is down 2% I you know I love Twitter I'm so addicted to it I'll stay on you know it's like
Donald Trump and Dad Coke like I'll like keep like but are you using any of the other platforms are you on threads you're the only person that I follow use Tik Tok I don't use threads I don't use Tik Tok my Instagram is private um but we have a Discord and the odlaw Discord 10,000 members it's like a really so I'm in there a lot it's great people are like posting book
recommendations like that much higher signal I imagine much less nois and like you yeah so it's mostly a little bit and then I'll my Discord and yeah that's great it's fun that's awesome uh what about prediction markets uh oh yeah yeah can you just give me like how you're experiencing them pros and cons values this is like my co-host and I Tracy we have different perspectives on this
which is good but um look the way I see prediction markets is like threefold which is like I think it's good to have a price on the news in many cases because people make a prediction they be like oh you know I think AI is going to eliminate all white color labor within two years I would like to see some like price on that I would like to see people put their money where their mouth is
rather than just that being said with tweets I think what it's a good way of knowing what people are interested in at any given moment and the other thing I'll say and I've said this before which is that the US Treasury Market is literally a prediction Market because us treasuries at any point in the curve are The Ensemble prediction of what the FED is expected to do over the course of any
given time so five-year treasury is what the next five years of fed short-term rates are going to be you could decompose it and the FED makes its decision on like you know what whatever 12 voting members and so the treasury market is literally a prediction Market on what 12 people at the FED are going to do eight times a year over any given term so the idea like that it's not like
a prediction Market it is a prediction market and so they're clearly validated as one of the core pillars of the um Financial system so hopefully I don't know I'd be into it if they have more liquidity and people can have more specialized bets on things I think it be a cool thing yeah it does seem like they need to figure out how to do longer dated prediction markets yeah right
because you don't want to tie your money up forever on some 2032 contract exactly I was talking about like the the the the last election was so exciting I was like I'm ready to start betting on the next elction like you don't want to like make a bet that it's like you're exactly and and they're just like yeah that that's not a product that anyone wants um it's uh yeah yeah it's very funny but sry I
got to run fellas I got to run to a uh recording but uh I'd love to come back i' love to come back with the technology brother so much for go get on the Ted Cruz podcast I know you were and I would love to go on the Ted Cruz podcast one day too it's between you guys it's between you guys and him fantastic well thanks for stopping by thanks for having me take care have a good one we we'll
talk to you soon that's great okay up next coming in two minutes Joe's Voice by the way makes me very uh nostalgic oh yeah yeah he just it's it's it sounds sounds like he could could could easily have been recording about uh you know the Great Depression you could hear him chattering over the radio no he's a great podcaster I love odd lots that was like one of the first one of the first
podcasts I listened to I think they've been doing it for almost like 10 years it's fantastic and he's held the line on not going independent I'm sure people have dangled a million dollar preed over his head hey why don't you come over here and you know but he he reps Bloomberg yeah reps Bloomberg it's great well we got Scott woo from cognition coming on the show in a couple minutes
uh so many questions for him obviously highly we got to start with AI what is AI what is this whole thing people have been talking about it we want to know about it I mean when everyone was saying like the AI like massive job displacement stuff the the the bet I would try and formulate with people was uh over under 10% us unemployment by 2030 and even that it sounds like not
that crazy like we've had unemployment higher than 10% in the past but a lot of people who were who I would talk to they say oh yeah AI is going to like take all the jobs when I tried to get them to concretize it in 10% higher or lower than 10% unemployment in the United States in 2030 it's like not that far out it's not that high we've had higher than 10% before um a lot of people would
say ah like I don't know maybe we'll still maybe it won't roll out that fast uh and so like that's the prediction Market that I want you know there was always that headline of you know humans will be having more uh sex with robots you know by 2025 do you remember that one no oh yes yes I see that vir and then uh Tesla Optimist just did a campaign with Kardashian Kardashian uh being very silly very
scintilating um very very silly yep um and it seems that that feels like a big campaign by Tesla totally to go and work with the Kardashian that's sort of the final boss of influencer marketing right um and so I saw people speculating on that um but uh it'll be interesting to see where it goes uh well we have Scott l in the temple of Technology welcome to the show Scott there he is f good to see
you guys how are you we're great how are you good good good busy couple days for us but oh yeah what's keeping you busy oh there's always I mean there's always so much stuff going on I feel like there's there's there's there's new products that come out every week There's new models that comes out every week and then you know we obviously have a lot going on with uh with Devon so
well we appreciate you taking the time uh could you give us kind of just an over way real quick uh Scott and I talked on the phone I think it was maybe 5:30 or 6 Friday night and he was like yeah everybody will be here until probably you know what what did you say what's your normal you guys have a pretty intense we're usually we're usually still around past midnight yeah
yeah busy schedules for us hopefully it's fun you clearly haven't put yourself out of a job yet uh but can you give us the update on kind of like where is cognition now obviously like massive launch huge like going direct moment uh great launch video uh and then you know you kind of went into build mode we kind of haven't heard that much from the company so can you give me an overview
of where the products are where the company is uh and kind of set some uh some some ground rules for for Where You Are yeah yeah yeah absolutely so we had our initial U announcement about a year ago actually at this point um and uh and from then a lot of it was was basically just going through all the all the frictions of software engineering you know the the truth is engineering is
just so messy in the real world if you think about um you know what has to get done obviously there's some pretty hard logical problem solving type uh work that has to be done but there's also a lot of practical stuff um and so you know figuring out how to to to to have a clean experience that slots in figuring out how to work with all these Enterprise customer code bases um um
figuring out the the the capabilities and working with logging and documentation and tooling and things like that um and so you know for for a decent chunck of time our main work actually was with larger Enterprises um and so we would work with a lot of these these different groups you know um bigger tech companies um you know Financial Services uh or or things like that um and work with them on on a lot
of these bigger projects and more repetitive projects and have Devon um basically come in and and speed up the job for a lot of this stuff um and then in December we uh we rolled out our our general availability um and uh you know it's a self-served plan where you can just put put down a credit card and get started and plug in your code base and have Devon um and we were super super
excited about that obviously because it's uh you know really the the chance for for everyone to just get to try it out and see how it is and um it's it's been a fun last few months for us it's been a lot of iteration and a lot of growth and so on um we've had users talking about how how Devon's Now quickly become uh become the number one committer in their code base and so on
and so it's it's very cool to see yeah c can you talk to me a little bit about the decisions you made early on on where to kind of put your AI efforts like as I understand it you didn't train a foundation model you didn't do one of the massive runs you you work with different model providers but what considerations were made in the early stage and are you still sticking with those or have those evolved over time
yeah yeah yeah absolutely so so we had you know I I would say two two major bets that we really um started the company with and I would say the first one was um you know that that reasoning and and this whole RL Paradigm was going to work um and this is you know this is a it was a pretty controversial thing I think around the end of 2023 because most of what you know the first generation of AI
was um or or you know the first generation of of of language models was was more like imitation learning right it was basically like read all of the internet you know read every Reddit post and talk like somebody on the internet right and and obviously I mean it was pretty incredible you know we passed the Turning test Chachi was a massive you know and for a while all of the work
that was being done and all of the products that happened in particular vertical were much more um in that style which was basically you know I'll call it text completion basically right and so um you know you had had these you had product like that in marketing right you had a product like that for for customer support um and similar things for code where it's kind of like here here's the
code so far and just predict for me what line comes next right um I I think we had a strong view that uh um yeah that that this reasoning was really going to work and was going to enable a lot of new use cases um and then the other thing that we felt really strongly about was that the product experience was going to shift from this kind of more Q&A text completion style product to um
basically an agent you know and practically I think what that means is I honestly I think a lot of folks today still think of AI as kind of um you know a better Google call it like you have a question and you want to go search it up you know you ask your AI and your AI has a better answer which is Big obviously I mean Google's not a small company right but but I think the um I think the
actual Vision that we're going towards with AI is actually even bigger than that which is basically you know your your buddy that does your chores for you right um and and the the the obvious difference between those two is the ability to actually interact with the real world and do real tasks and so on right and so you know there's there's a big difference between having a a a
legal Q&A for example versus having a lawyer that can actually go submit things for you that can go and you know um um interact with all these different surfaces and the same is is obviously the case in code right where it's you know this is how we build software right it's is you you you you write code you run the code you see if it worked or not you run run the test you look at the
documentation you know you click around on the product yourself um and this is how we this is how we iterate and build right and so the the ability to do that is is is a big step function difference yeah how do you think of getting Devon to go from sort of this reactive experience where you talk to Devon like you wouldn't uh you know a teammate or employee and say like hey can you help
me sort of execute on this specific thing it goes into does it you know maybe comes back to get you know feedback at different points to I imagine longterm you want the sort of proactive sort of like high high agency agent and yeah how you know I'm sure you guys are already experimenting with that kind of thing internally but uh you know what are your plans along sort of that
route yeah yeah for sure and so you know the way that we kind of think about it is um turning all the Brick Layers into Architects is almost you know as how I would describe it and um you know I think the the beautiful part of software engineering I would say is getting to do this core you know problem solving and decision- making around what do you want to build right it's it's like you know
let me understand the problem let me understand what's exactly what exactly is going on and then let me figure out here's exactly the solution that I want to build for this right um the thing is you only spend about 10% of your time doing that you know as a software engineer in practice you probably spend about 90% of your time you know dealing with your kubernetes and fixing your
unit test and upgrading your your thing to the new version and all of this other stuff you know fixing these bugs that come up right um and so a lot of it is the way I would kind of describe it is is working with Devon as um as the implementer that allows you to be a really great architect right and so um there's there's a lot of detail with that because naturally you have to be in
you know all the same flows that that humans use for software engineering if you want to do that right and so you have your logs on data dog so like you know deon's got to go look at those logs right you're you're talking about issues on slack so de's got to be in slack right and a lot of it is is really kind of figuring out the work flow where um where it's it's very natural and very
easy that as you're talking about this idea that you have or this new feature that you're trying to build or this bug that you're trying to fix or whatever you're able to just tag Devon and just say hey at Devon can you take a look at this and uh and and make this fix or do this thing yeah yeah talk about you know specifically I can imagine that Devin because it's so embedded in in in these
different workflows uh you know there's every single day we see you know conversation on the timeline from somebody that says I'm switching from you know this code Editor to that code editor or that code editor back to this code editor how do you think about you know sort of long-term Moes and sort of lock in as you know you're You're Building Devon for yourself but then you're also you
know trying to build a you know you're already a billion- dollar company eventually you know uh I'm sure you have uh much much bigger Ambitions but how do you think about sort of long-term Moes and and you know uh around the sort of like software engineering agents sure yeah you know I I I think in the the short and medium term it's um there's a lot of different experiences in code and
and you know I think a lot of folks building kind of different different product experience for for for different verticals or use cases within code um I think in the short and medium turn it's you know things are just changing so quickly that the natural thing is just whatever is able to help folks the most is is what they're really excited to use right and and I think there's um um
there's just you know when when the pace of development and also the pace of progress in AI is as high as it is um I think that's going to be to continue to be the case for a while um you know I think with that said in the long term I think these things naturally do kind of converge to a point and there are a few particular pieces I would say that that really kind of cause that and one of the
big ones that I'll just point out is you know there really is a lot of um in most spaces you know we would call this personalization or something of that sort but but there's a lot of it in in code right I mean if you imagine you hire you know the smartest software engineer in the world uh and you know you get them to work on your code base day one it's they're not going to know a
lot of these little details about here's why we chose to do this architecture here's what this function does and that function does here's how you do this database migration or whatever it is right so you know they have to learn all these things from the ground up as opposed to somebody who's you know just as smart but has been at the company for you know 10 years and built half The Code by themselves and you know they
they wrote all of these files themselves and so on right then you know you get to a point where you really just understand the code base you're making the same decisions and trade-offs and you're working with it very tightly um it's the kind of thing where um and we see this already where it's you know a as as folks start using Devon more and more one of the really cool things is you
know you can have one of your engineers ask Devon a question and Devon is drawing on the knowledge that it has from all of the previous sessions it has with everyone on your team right uh and it's able to learn all these things and you know if someone says hey you know we got to we have to go do this uh this version upgrade and Deon might say oh yeah I remember this I actually just did
one just like this like last week um for this other part of you guys code base and so let's let's figure out this one and let's do this right um and so I think there's a lot of uh um that's kind of the shape I think of of of what we're going to see a lot in AI actually over the next couple years where you know this is this is a bit of a hot take but I would say a lot of the problem solving
is actually good enough already you know a lot of the reasoning and the problem solving I mean AI has has been shown to be capable of solving some pretty hard stuff I I think actually what we have left to do is a lot more so just understanding the detail and the complexity of the real world right and you think about all these tasks that we spend our time on you know they they
there there's some amount of problem solving but there's also a lot of just pulling in the relevant context and you know understanding what is the common sense what are the common sense considerations you're working with and and that's a lot of what we spend our time working on with Devon's capabilities can you talk a little bit about uh I like I have this take that we're almost in an AI winter for
consumers even though AI feels feel like it's moving so quickly the chat GPT moment was so big because we passed the touring test that for most average people it's just Google search as you mentioned um but over the last year obviously if you're following this stuff there's been incredible break down models have gotten bigger context Windows have gotten way bigger uh has
have there been particular milestones in in just AI research and development that have been more transformative to your business than others uh over the last year sure sure yeah you know I I think the uh at a high level you know I think all the the continued progress that we're seeing everywhere in AI actually is is primarily due to essentially like reinforcement learning RL that's that's
really working and it is a very different Paradigm right where we're saying how in the past it was all just imitation learning and it's get as much of the internet as you could possibly scrape up and just train on all of it you know and hopefully you get something that that knows a lot of stuff right whereas this is kind of you know this whole reinforcement learning Paradigm is
you know if you have a clear problem space where you can knew the problem 100 times and you know this was right this was wrong this was right this was wrong you know it's it's a little bit more like alphao you know this self-play learning um but in a language model right and and I think that's the the biggest Paradigm and you know folks like open AI anthropic and and and and lots
of you know Google X and so on um have have have have shown a lot of real progress um through this whole RL Paradigm um to your point on consumer you know I actually think that uh I think that we'll probably see a Resurgence actually in consumer over the next uh the the next few months or so and I think one of the big things I think that will actually flip that switch is um is like a really great
consumer agent experience you know it's there's talks about this we haven't had the we haven't had the moment of of just chatting with with a sort of generalized agent that can just book you a flight in a hotel and it's like super seamless and like that that's like what I feel like we've all been waiting for we've had that preview since Siri 1.0 back in a
decade ago and it still isn't here and we're still waiting for it but it feels like now it's actually just a couple months away yeah yeah exactly it's like I I want to buy this pair of shoes and just go and look on all those websites and find which one delivers and which one is the best price for that and just go buy it for me right like things like that where it's uh I I think that'll be
that'll be a pretty big moment for folks because you'll really feel I think the difference of of how did you process the Deep seek moment uh obviously that that took over the timeline earlier this year uh it was it was very controversial in a bunch of ways but uh what was your what was your deep seek take away from that development yeah yeah no I mean I I think at a high level it's uh it's it's
a competitive world out there you know I think there are a lot of a lot of really smart folks going after this problem and it's it's it's the kind of thing where it's you know if you think about like what what what people even not not just what was possible a year ago but what even people even imagined could even work one year ago or two years ago or three years ago I mean every year it's
basically totally it's it's totally flipped right and now it's kind of like everyone in the space is talking about agents and the future of Agents you know when we were doing this like year ago no one really even believe that agents were like a thing you know and I think that uh um yeah no I mean it's it's it's the case I think everywhere in the stack and you know we'll see you know I mean
there's the there's there's the GPU layer there's the hardware layer you know there's the foundation models and so on but but I I I think I think all throughout the space you know you have these these really really smart folks and really smart teams that are going after the problems and um and and basically pushing things forward you know I think we're in a very high
velocity period where um it it really does feel like every month in AI is is like a year you know in a lot of these Tech Industries in the past and so um so yeah how is how is AI adoption what's been your takeaway from AI adoption within the Fortune 500 right you see all these companies are spending billions of dollars on like Genai Consulting contracts with Accenture it feels like the Consulting companies are
probably doing more revenue from generative AI than like all of the software companies combined maybe ignore you know uh open AI um is it happening sort of Bottoms Up like an engineer sort of comes to their team and they're like you know it's they're they're in uh you know not not on not in San Francisco or New York and they're saying hey guys I got this like guy named Devin he's 500
bucks a month and like I think he can do you know what what you know our next 10 Junior Engineers can do or is it happening more so top down where execs are super you know kind of clued in and following the stuff or or or both like we need an AI strategy yeah yeah yeah I mean I think the interesting thing with the these times is um there's a lot of both you know and
and Executives obviously and boards for example I mean everyone is thinking about how do we get AI native and how do we make sure we're on top of this wave and how do we make sure we're ready to to just accelerate as fast as possible uh and that we're ahead of the curve on this rather than being too late on it right because um obviously these things are moving so quickly and then at the
same time you know it's like you have individual developers and and folks like that who who are are just really excited to use these things I mean it's you a lot of these painful tasks I mean if you're if you're doing a full code-based migration and your your your code Bas is you know 50,000 files and you got to do the same migration on every single one I mean it's it's not a fun task you know
and and and figuring out how to H how to go quicker on those things so you could spend more time on um on the problems that you really care about and on uh you know figuring out what to build is is really exciting for folks as well but yeah I mean I I think it's an interesting time for us where it's you know it's it's buly I mean it's I think most of our waves and Tech you know
there's always been kind of a a hype phase I'll call it and also you know a phase where basically you know this adoption really comes in and you saw the same thing with Cloud you saw the same thing with mobile I you saw the same thing with the internet itself right and yeah I mean I think it's an exciting one for us because I think with AI I mean I I think the um I think if anything you
know I think the capabilities and I think what will be possible in AI are are are are just getting exponentially better and better every year but I I think what I would say is you know I think there's a lot of different uh the there's there's a lot of different areas um you know of generative AI where it seems very clear it's like you know this is getting better by the month this is
you know this is uh uh this is clearly going to work soon and we want to be uh you know ahead of our time with this and get get ready for this and you know there are a few spaces I would say and and code is one of those where it's you know this is actively working right now I mean if your team is not using any AI code tool you are just heavily behind right and so it's it's kind of interest
and I think we'll see each of these kind of come online at uh at different points in time and I think there are a few reasons why code is one of the first to really get there but but uh but yeah yeah it's going to be an exciting few months for us what what advice would you give the young Scott woo you know uh the younger version of you that's that's learning that's just starting to learn
to code uh and and how do you sort of FastTrack to be kind of at the bleeding edge obviously you can learn from the models themselves they're great sort of instructors but um you know I think we went from this period where maybe a year ago everyone was like oh all the software Engineers are cook they sort of like made their own replacement to now it's very clear that if you're a
software engineer today you have a massive you have more leverage than ever and you have this massive sort of edge because even if eventually all this work goes from you know code to natural language you know there there's still the sort of uh it's possible to be on the bleeding edge but but how would you if if somebody sort of uh 22-year-old uh coming out of college today what would
your advice to them uh be yeah for sure no I mean really think I I really think we're coming up on the Golden Age of software engineering here and and I think the main thing you know as we're saying I mean I think it's always going to be up to us to decide what to build obviously right and a lot of the core of Computer Sciences I would just just say is that question of understanding and
deciding what to build and so if anything I think the theory of computer science is going to be even more valuable you know understanding the the layers of abstraction and knowing you know the basic model of how computer works and how to break down problems logically and how how to reason with these um with these systems it's going to be you know even more valuable the other side of it I would just say is
there's no shortage of demand for software you know and one of the things that I think about all the time is like um you know I I think today even still it's It Feels So outlandish but I think a couple years ago couple years from now this is going to be common place is single use software actually right and and you know you you can imagine a world where it's like hey you know I got to go
look at these um these these 10 LinkedIn profiles today and I got to click through each of these and I'm looking for this and that and whatever and you know I got to go like search and get a bunch of data online and then put that into an Excel sheet and run some numbers you know a lot of these things are naturally code works just as well for these tasks if not better right but
obviously it makes no sense at all to go hire some some some engineering team to go build you you know this this massive script that you're only going to run one time for this use case that you have today right um but I think I think we will get to a point where basically you can just ask Deon hey here's the thing that we need to do let's just go build this real quick right and and software
will do that for you and will solve that problem for you um and I think there's just you know there's there's there's so many more products out there to build that's that's that's the main thing that I always index on it's it's crazy to think about but I think it's like um you know you can imagine all these products out there that are Niche products for for a thousand people or 100 people or
even just for you but but you know they have the the level of quality and the level of execution as um you know the the the biggest products in the world today you know YouTube or Instagram or or whatever it is so yeah talk a little bit about you know there there's been a bunch of these uh sort of platforms apps that have popped up lovable. dodev I think bolt. bolt. new or bolt I forget
what it is where you know these sort of products that allow you to just generate an apps immediately and and they're showing this tremendous Revenue growth you guys seem to have focused on the potentially much harder problem of sort of building durable software products but is there a world in the future where Devon goes more Downstream and is actually you know somebody comes on and
creates their very first you know application ever with Devon because you know I see a lot of these companies pop up and and I have no idea what their long-term road map is but I can see why it's easy to generate a lot of Revenue quickly to just generate apps or generate websites but then you know maybe that's not you know the you know it feels like potentially a good wedge but not a super durable
business necessarily which is like do I need to generate a new app every month like probably not but maybe you know yeah yeah no I mean I I think a lot of different product experiences in the space for sure I think the way that we've always thought about it is you know I I kind of think of self-driving as the parallel where it's you know there was first it was all manual and
then eventually there was you know there's automatic shift right and then there was cruise control there was Auto parking you know and and and basically I guess the the kind of the thing that I would point out here is you know up until the point where it was true full you know it could do every single thing you wanted it to do you still needed a driver's license for all of that middle era
right and and you know there was a point at the end where it's kind of like yeah you could just sit in the back seat and and just have the car do everything for you right and and so I I think we kind of have this this similar Paradigm I'd say in code um where it's maybe maybe not so um uh maybe not as much of a of a kind of like single step function switch but you kind of have this gradual
Spectrum where you know there are a lot of tasks I think where you know yeah like you said building a cool website or something like that where it's yeah you know you don't have to have any experience with code at all and now you can just do this right um and then I think there are a lot of these kind of like larger and more complex tasks you know working on a big code base or
figuring out things with your existing product or you know building as you're saying like a lot of this really kind of these bigger uh projects where um you know you still want to be an engineer and you still want to be really deeply technical I think to be able to to to make the most out of these AI coding tools and to to use that but with that said I mean I think that uh every month
the capabilities change right and I think there will be a time I think where you you you're able to it's it's just as easy as kind of looking at your product and talking and complain English about what you want and that's it do you like the innovators dilemma framework and uh do you think AI is more in the sustaining ad uh sustaining Innovation camp or disruptive innovation Camp
there's been a lot of uh debate about this people comparing it to mobile where the really large companies were actually the best position to take advantage of mobile a lot of people are saying Google even though their product road map has been a little lumpy there're they still have amazing talent amazing Hardware amazing software lots of talent to kind of reap the benefits of AI over the long
term yeah yeah it's an interesting one I mean I think there's going to be a lot of interesting second order effects and you know one of the the the maybe the most obvious ones to call out is is basically a lot of these um a lot of these switching costs you know that exists especially in these B2B businesses are just going to go way down you know and I'm sure we can all think
of these these companies that you know they only really Thrive today because it is so painful to to to to switch off and to migrate off right and I think that's going to change a lot I think on the hand I think a lot of as we're saying you know this deep personalization and um you know the ability to use data and to to Really build customer experiences for um for your for your users or your
customers I think that is going to um only become more and more powerful uh and and so I think long story short is you know I think that I think that a lot of the the existing great businesses are going to do very well um in the age of AI I think there will be um you know in the neighborhood I would say if kind of like um you know the 10 to 20 power LOB businesses of the new ones that come up
from AI you know and I mean I think we already kind of see it's there's there's the foundation Labs themselves and then there's some of the you know each of the big vertical of the application layer right there's code there's law there's you know customer support there's sales and so on right um there's there's image and video um and I think there'll be kind of like yeah like a handful of
businesses kind of from each of those categories I think that that really make it to the really massive outcomes but yeah I mean as is always the case with these things you know a lot of it is it's it's very hard to know in advanc which ones will will be the winners um I do think that uh um yeah I I mean I do think with the richness I think of the space of AI you know I think one of the
big differences is is there's just so much um difference in technical execution um where it's you know you can in in AI you can be doing things that other teams or other products just cannot do right and I think that difference kind of means that I think really great really talented new innovators will have a a meaningful Edge and the best one will be able to create
some what's your take on the various walls there's been this you know deep learnings hitting a wall scale might be not all you need now it's everyone's pretty scale pilled then we got in the reinforcement learning Paradigm as you mentioned are you worried about a data wall or an energy wall or just some sort of wall where we hit and we kind of stagnate and uh and we and we're not
seeing the like the breakthroughs and the acceleration that I think people are kind of expecting if you're W if you're following AI closely are you worried about any of those walls yeah I actually so I actually have the opposite take which I is in some ways optimistic some ways pessimistic but what I would say is stagnation is actually the default you know it's it's by default it's not the
case that we're gonna have this you know the next and I think we've kind of like we we felt it for so long at this point that it's like yeah the next model is going to be even better and the next product is going to be even better and the next GPU is going to be even better but but but I I think more what it speaks to actually is is kind of the just yeah how how amazing the the the
the kind of the flow of innovation is you know it's like and just to give simple examples I mean it's like you know gpt3 wasn't just more of gpt2 it was like uh you know it was a step function different and there there were a lot of things that that had to be figured out and gp4 wasn't just more of three it was like you know and the same is true I think with with reasoning the same is true with the advancements that
we're making in Hardware it's the same as true with the advancements that we're making the application there so in some ways it's kind of you know I'm saying it's like there's there's no single kind of like force of nature that we get to rely where it's just like these things will get better all on their own at the same time it's it's it's it's it's truly remarkable I think that over the last
few years you know we have we we we we haven't slowed down in figuring out the new Innovations and the new categories that will get us there so what is uh one thing that you learned from Eric and Kareem uh from your from your sort of ramp days that you feel like you you've really focused on uh making sure that you guys Implement at cognition yeah yeah you know it's a they they
they've I've known them a long time I'm super super tight with both of them they they've given me a lot of incredible advice I'll share one which I think was hilarious which you know we were we were just getting started um and I I called Eric and I was like hey you know we're um we're we're starting this company um you know obviously like ramp is incredible I have so much respect for
you and and what you built and I just want to get your thoughts on um basically yeah what what is the thing that I should really uh that I should really focus on today that I'm not thinking about right now and Eric said you know take a lot of pictures and it was it was I mean it was it was actually great advice it was funny because you know it's I would talk to these people and and all the you know
they would say oh you know you really you got to really nail in on on hiring and you got to really like figure out these and all all these things are also true obviously and Eric has helped with all these other things but I I I found that funny that that was the first you know the day the companies founded don't forget to take those pictures and it's like the you know it's it's it's only
been I don't know 15 months for us right but but it's uh I I am actually really grateful that that uh that we have those and that we did that and I I think there's a lot of things where it's just you know just just being in it and going through the experience and um and knowing what you what you miss and what you don't miss I I I think Eric and cre understand that better than anyone
honestly well thanks for joining it's 1:30 uh we won't take any more of your time where can people sign up and and who should who who's kind of the Wheelhouse client right now yeah yeah for sure it's uh it's devon. and um anyone who's you know I'd say engineering teams all over the world so so you know we have we have teams that range from uh one or two person startups
all the way to to the biggest fin Financial Services firms in the world um and so um yeah would love to hear folks feedback on Devon as they're shying it out awesome thanks for joining for coming on Scott thank you guys so much for having me have a good one have a good one very interesting I always love talking to an AI founder there's so many things you can peel into we didn't even
get into AGI timelines P Doom all the fun things that you can go from there you want a pen computer charger what oh charger here you go um and uh we're in we're in we're in demand today there are multiple guests trying to call in right now we can only let one in at a time or maybe we could do a debate between uh do we have two guest scheduled that would be cool I think we have yeah do we
should we do a a VC and a car dealership guy at the same time I think there might have been some confusion over scheduling uh but let's try and in uh well there's two people in the waiting room right now we're we're not sure who joined but we want to let in the car dealership guy because that's who is scheduled next hopefully we can get him in the temple of technology and pick his brain about
what's going on in the car World should be a fun conversation um but we got to figure out some some Zoom details yeah I love how the entire entire like stream infrastructure right now is melting down melting down yeah we're pushing this to the Limit folks we're building the plane as we're flying it but I think we're having uh I think we're having good streams back to back
uh it's been a lot of fun and I I like these little conversations take us on a little tour go over into Finance land with Joe drone land defense Tech with saurin some AI with Scott woo now some car dealerships hopefully uh Ben how we doing with the car dealership guy is he ready to come on down to the Temple of Technology he left he left uh he says trying to join why don't you send him
another message and uh I will I will pull up some info on this on this uh card deal oh he said uh he does a lot of these stuff so he says we didn't let in his main camera oh he has two cameras okay okay well let's see Nissan has a profitability problem that is determined to fix how a mix of product pricing and placement interesting Honda is sidest stepping some tariff uncertainties by
reworking its battery sourcing strategy beginning in April Honda will Source hybrid batteries for nearly 400,000 vehicles from Toyota's 14 billion North Carolina plant he's in he's in hey can you guys hear me yeah we can hear you you look fantastic you sound fantastic tvpm that's the least I could do if this is what I do all day this is fantastic uh great great to have you here uh can
you can you kick us off a little introduction what do you do what's your name who are you well it's great to be on the on the Fortress of Finance thank you um no I'm so I'm the founder of card dealership guy you probably seen me on Twitter if you're if you're listening to this right now uh we are the leading uh content news and insights platform for car dealers cool uh didn't start that
way we were very consumer based but it's been you know a couple years where I've really um just shifted to focusing on the industry and today you know we're pretty much you know offering anything for dealers to come and you know learn kind of stay informed get ahead really just trying to make a better industry with the kind of ultimate Vision that if we can if we can create a better
dealership experience and educate the dealers and you know kind of democratize knowledge then the consumer experience would be better and everybody wins so that's kind of like the utopian Vision I know very little about uh car dealership so I bet my questions would silly maybe give us the crash course history your personal history industry leading up to this because this is not not the kind of
business that you start uh you know just because you had a good good X account uh I imagine you you experienced a lot of the you know the the turmoil of the industry and the good and the bad yeah so it's quite the opposite uh but I'll give you like the short version so I was a dealer I grew up in usar business uh father had a small Ed car dealership so that was where I spent
most of my time uh in 2018 I got the bug I said there's no way that we're still selling cars this way right everything's done online why do I have to why do people have to come to my dealership you know why can't I expand virtually and whatnot and so I took this traditional dealership and I said we're going to build a better way to buy a car we're going to do it 100% online at the time
carvana had just gone public but it was still kind of a aent thing you know selling cars online and so I actually raised capital and we transformed into a venture-backed online auto retailer you know we started building out our own website our technology our platform and I spent five years doing this so we were completely vertically integrated this entire time so as we were building this
business you know we were acquiring the warehouses building up the logistics Network and actually retailing Vehicles online from what was a small use car dealership um it was a crazy experience I mean you know we raised lots of capital throughout the time and um grew the business to close to like a hundred million do in annual sales and in end of um I want to say was 2021 when rates
started Rising you know we kind of things got really tough uh we spend the next 18 months you know we couldn't raise more Capital business was obviously you know the burn was accelerating and we kind of had this like existential we're facing this exist existential point in our life and the next 18 months were just brutal we ended up shutting that business down we tried to Pivot to private Equity we almost got
acquired but that didn't work out and in the meantime I sort of had this like you know Anonymous Twitter account where I was just tweeting um you know just trying to stay sane be a little creative uh but really just sharing kind of my thoughts and it blew up like crazy right so I I I don't remember when I launched a Twitter account exactly I think it was like early2 for anybody just on audio uh
he's got almost half a million followers on on X which is the equivalent of 50 billion followers on Instagram pretty much no it's a big big yeah I mean it was it was definitely very like you're right it's it's very difficult to today it's completely much more difficult I would say even unless you're putting out slot but I mean like high quality followers is a very tough thing to do
you got to put Insight but that's essentially what I was doing I was just sharing my knowledge and experiences that I've gone through and then after we ended up we ended up closing down the business completely this was like you know like I said 18 21 24 months later I said I don't exactly know what's in store for my next thing but I do know that there's a thirst for this knowledge
right when I launched this account people didn't understand what the hell is going on with prices and inventory was all over the place and it wasn't just consumers it was dealers themselves as well yeah and so I said there's something here and so I formed a B2B Media company and um and we can talk about like I went down the holdco route and you know all that stuff that Sean
pory spoke about on your podcast the other day as well we can talk talk CH chat about that as well but that was essentially how I fell into this business so I went from like a traditional family business to a venture back tech business right raised like $60 million and all that hoopla and now we're like a bootstrapped media brand it's completely different things but it's been a fun fun learning learning
experience yeah yeah so one of the reasons I wanted to have you on uh now is just to get a sense of of you know really on the consumer side how are how are people behaving in the market what are what are the deal you know you guys get a lot of data from dealers that are you know in your community and I think it's a good signal of of sort of how consumers are feeling it's obviously
sort of this like shaky time broadly in the market but uh how are dealers doing broadly what what is you know consumer sentiment looking like uh and then I want to kind of get into some individual Brands and and you know potentially ask you about the EV market and some other stuff as well as uh later I'd I'd love to get your thoughts on on the war between you know platforms like bring a
trailer and cars and bids and all that stuff but maybe start with a kind of a market update uh what's happening uh sort of on the ground today yeah so look the market has been I would say very consist consistently improving and just becoming more Pro consumer right it's we're definitely in more of a buyer market today although it's still very divided like if you go
to a Toyota dealership they are still at like 30 plus day supply which is roughly half the the level of Supply they should have uh for you know current demand and so Toyota and Lexus are sort of the anomaly here i' say the majority of the brands out there are over supplied right now which is simply a good thing for consumers um because it means you have more negotiation leverage and means that
Brands will put more incentives on these vehicles so that they'll they'll sell them faster um and I would say they're roughly like 30% oversupplied so it's not you know these numbers are not low um we're sort of in this phase right now where it's the incentives are only going to keep getting better because the reality is the inventory is out there and it needs to move now it is spring
season which is typically a pretty good time of year um for dealers right people get it most people are getting their tax refunds and whatnot and they're going they're shopping so there there has been a bump in business over the last couple of weeks but you know other than that I mean I don't expect the spring bump to last that long it never really lasts that long and um you know it's a very
temporary thing look a nutshell go ahead oh yeah when is the best time to buy a car if you're a consumer and like are there any like tricks to getting a good deal it feels like a very opaque process that question look yes you you might get luck out if you go like you know end of month end of quarter because there's these things called stair step programs where you know it's like hey you sell
I'm just making it up 100 cars uh you'll get an extra you know x amount of dollars as a dealer right so if I'm trying to get that stair step you know if I'm trying to unlock that um uh you know that that benefit from the deal from the automaker then I'm going to maybe even sell a couple cars at a loss at the end of the month because I want to hit my number now many manufacturers
have moved away from those many dealers don't even participate in them um but yes I mean in theory you could do that I would honestly tell you that a better way would simply would be to Simply see what brand right now is most oversupplied now you might not like that answer because maybe you don't want to drive a uh you know an infinity or whatever you know is the most oversupplied at that current moment but
reality is like that's where you will have the most negotiation leverage as a consumer yeah that makes sense that makes sense uh What uh you know Tesla as a stock has been down tremendously uh over the last month even I think it's down like 35% um as you know at the same time we're seeing more than ever on the roads uh but there there obviously you know the stock pressures in part you there's
probably a political angle there's a uh you know broadly the sort of moat they had around EVS has been eliminated as other manufacturers have have entered uh what what do you see in store for you know Tesla I know they're they're verticalized so you know there's not like Tesla dealer owners on your platform but what is the future of the Tesla brand in the near term uh in your
view uh are you see sales performance you know continuing to slide or is there you know John has joked joked a lot on the show obviously you know completely joking that like they should come out with a gated manual transmission with a combustion engine naturally aspirated V12 ideally in the Roadster the Roadster has been delayed so so much let's just put a carburated V12 in there let's get
the Kosh engine in there look I think first if you look at e in general right the SW the this the pendulum swung too far over the last couple of years so these manufacturers went you know had all these crazy proclamations right we're going to do x amount of EVS you know or whatever X percentage of our production will be EVs and sales and the problem was that EV demand simply was
way behind y so you like Ford was the prime example um where they were kind of make producing all these vehicles and people didn't want them right now demand has been growing very consistently and and linearly like it hasn't gone exponential like their demand is still growing if you look at simply you know how many EES are being sold but relative to the
supply that was produced and what was out there didn't make any sense so what happened well all these crazy incentives started happening and the all the Legacy automakers started to sell all their EVS but again they didn't sell them because there was the demand out there was oh wow this is such a great car I want it they sold it because wow the price is so incredible this is all I can get or
maybe this is simply the the cheapest monthly payment in the market I think we forget like how you know consumers are are are practical right like I have a budget and I need to fit into my budget and if an EV is going to get me within my budget I will consider an EV I don't care like the average American doesn't care if it's an EV or a gas or it runs on freaking water right they need to to
be able to afford something so I think that's kind of what happened in the big picture over the last couple of years now look there's no doubt about it that Tesla has some of the most incredible technology um I don't think that the I don't think the actual interior is anything um you know extravagant it's actually pretty basic and and in many cases SAR but the tech is incredible the
driving is amazing um I love driving Teslas and and I know that you know many dealers that I I personally know Drive Teslas themselves um many do it just because they want to you know see what it's like others just do it because they genuinely enjoy it and so I I think that there's the EV Market has been very volatile it's you know the the swings have been very um just very rough up and down uh I I can't
say like I'm too concerned long term I still think that it's going to continue Rising very slowly I think dealers that put focus on it and and make the Investments to serve more EV customers will do well obviously it's Market dependent you know if you're in the mid Midwest it might be 10 me behind because they simply don't drive as many EVS out there um but in general I think it's a
it's still a smart investment Tesla stock price is just it's so hard to know right because like what is even driving that is it like the Elon political like you know um like overhang I mean there's so many factors going into that price the price of that stock and so it's really hard to tell uh what's next for it but I would I would sort of kind of you know quiet out Den noise and I still
think that we're EVS are going to continue Rising albeit a lot slower than anyone has predicted expected because that's just how you know consumer adoption takes time outside of Tesla who's on a tear and who's in trouble in terms of the big car brands right now um well you know I actually just had um one of Nissan's top Executives on the my podcast today his name is um um I
forget shahani is the last name I forget the first name but long story short is Nissan is in trouble um or they've been in trouble recently right they've been really losing a lot of money Vana honey that's what it was so they basically Nissan has sort of been the culprit here um and you have to understand the auto business is very it's you know it it just it cycles and it comes and goes so
like if you look at 21 it was like Ford was in the spotlight like they were in The Penalty Box then the last couple of years it's sort of been stellantis right Chrysler Dodge G pram um you know now it's sort of Nissan because they over supplied their vehicles dealers are not making any money on them there's way too many dealers for the market share that the brand has and on top of all that
because the over Supply because they put all um because they've been selling these you know wholesale to like rental car companies and whatnot all the consumers are left with lower residual values right so now your the veh the Nissan that you purchase is worth a lot less so you're you're pissed you don't want to buy another Nissan I think loses value very quickly so they're prob
they're one of the brands that's really struggled recently um and all that you know sort of accompanied by a sales decline uh but they are you know they have new leadership in place and you know the hope is that they're going to kind of come out of it um I I think that their leaders are very convincing and have just like I said haven't spoken to V on the podcast I mean he he sounded
like he he knows what he's doing I mean the guy's been around the block worked at Toyota uh very very smart and sharp but it's it's not an easy thing to get out of I mean do they have the resources to really get uh to get claw back a significant amount of market share so that the brand is sustainable or will they have to do some merger like they tried to do with Honda which it didn't
really work out and because of that they actually ended up switching CEOs at Nissan corporate uh so that's one of the brands that's that's struggling pretty bad um you know Infinity is included in that as well it's it's Infinity is under the umbrella but for the most part I would say like that they're probably the the biggest uh the biggest corporate right now in the market talk about the
durability of the dealership model you know your audience a lot of people that are working in the industry working at dealerships obviously uh but you know you you had a a you know SMB dealership then you had a venture backed you know online you know Car Sales platform something about cars it feels like the sort of final boss of e-commerce and that you know with a car you're going to
spend a lot of money it's one of the most expensive purchases outside of your home and so it's really nice to just go to the deal you know I like going to a dealership even if I'm not actually you know necessarily in Market just because it's fun to look at cars and and and stuff like that but you know do you see 50 years from now are we still going to dealerships to buy cars my personal bet is yes
because I would rather even if even if an online platform says yeah we'll we'll send you the car they'll put it up on a truck you can drive it you can buy it there if you want it I'd still like to go and just see more inventory right and experience you know more Vehicles so what's interesting is I mean I learned so much selling cars online like strictly online first of all I learned that
uh online car buyers by a large percentage are subprime car buyers right subprime consumers they can't otherwise get approved anywhere else and this is sort of their last resort carvana Carmax have built such a great mouse trap that it's attracted customers who are also not subprime right and I would bet you that if you looked at a graph from when they started till today and just how
their customer mix evolved I would guarantee that you know it started out a lot more subprime than it is today um but you know that's an example of a brand that's evolved so look the dealership is evolving there's no doubt about that and if you're a dealer that doesn't think that your head is in the S um people what we learned through covid and after covid is that people still
want to interact in person uh with a dealer and it's not for the purposes necessarily being with the dealer but rather you might be making a large purchase you know you want to go in you want to talk to someone you maybe want to test drive that thing I mean there's several things you want to do uh in person and so the dealer is simply going to continue evolving just to meet the
needs of the customer there's certain things that the dealers are going to do which I think are very durable such as service the service department is the highest margin uh profit Center in a dealership because you know for those that don't know how dealerships work right you have many different profit centers you have Parts you have new car sales use car sales service service is
the highest margin um you know Revenue streaming a dealership and that is simply something that you know won't go away you're always going to need to get the vehicle serviced somewhere even if it becomes more fleets right if we have all these autonomous vehicles on the road they're going to need to be serviced somewhere or you know if it's sort of like turo where people are actually acquiring fleets that will need
to be serviced somewhere so service is a very I think it has crazy kind of stting power and it's it's not going to go anywhere and the margins are strong I think new cars is It's Tricky right because if you look at Supply levels right now of new cars in the market we're not right we're not quite at 2019 levels yet but we're we're inching up um many dealers are already breaking even
on new cars you depending on the brand some are taking losses um and so new cars has never been like a real profit center right it's a commoditized product the good thing about new cars for dealers is that it brings the customers back right so if you lease a new vehicle then they come back to you for service right maybe they trade in their vehicle then you sell it as a used car right you
get another client and so the dealership is going to continue evolving AI is completely shaking up things now um I would say for the better if anything for dealers because they're simply able to offer a better experience offer more targeted products and services for customers waste less time consumers are getting a more consistent experience so AI has definitely been doing a lot of
good but it's just moving all so quickly and we don't really know if dealers will become you know kind of new car fulfillment centers eventually and just you know then you'll also do service there and maybe buy some used cars or what that future really looks like I don't think the dealership model is going away other than the fact that lobbying is super strong and all that like let's put that aside for a second
even though it's a super important one I simply think that manufacturers sometimes underestimate what it takes to be a successful retailer you know they do they really want to carry all that balance sheet risk on on or inventory risk on their balance sheet I mean there's many considerations and it's been you know tried many times and frankly Tesla is the only one that has really done a
great job at it or sure maybe rivan as well but there's been other plenty of examples um on the Legacy side that they simply have not been able to do it successfully with launching like a d2c or something direct consumer or something like that on the service side are there exciting robotics companies that you think are going to get meaningful Traction in the service departments of these
stealerships I imagine you know we we cover the the robotics companies the 1xs the uh the figures the Tesla Optimus things like that uh do you know I'm not convinced that humanoid robots are going to be the ones in the sech sort of service Bay doing the work but maybe it's they already are they already well not doing the work so I actually invested in a company called Robo tire
which went out of business so that wasn't a good one um but they were literally replacing tires on um they were repl placing tires on vehicles in like I think firestones or something I guess the economics didn't work out there but there's a company now uh robotics company and I shouldn't say now I'm pretty sure they're public already they're part of a bigger company called richtech um which I had them on my
podcast and they're literally transporting um they're literally transing Parts in the service center right from the parts counter to the techn and this is live you can lit see Rich Tech robotics it's pretty incredible but again saves a ton of time think about it to technician you know these These are skill trades maybe you're making like 50 bucks an hour I don't know how much
you're making like and to go each time grab the part I mean it's it's it's extremely inefficient and so these robots now are in service centers uh transferring Parts um I would say uh you know I I'm I'm a fan of like the whole um you know vertically integrated kind of low NPS high margin I think I think Keith Rob boy is the one that was spoke about is I think um but you know asking
yourself like what is the uh you know what part of the business has the lowest NPS and the highest margin that's right for disruption and it's pretty crazy how true that is because if you look at the car business the lowest NPS in our business um you know net promoter score is actually service right so the service department and it's use car auctions surprisingly Now Auctions are dealer to
dealer right and those are also extremely both are high margin businesses um now if you look what's happening on those two fronts we're seeing a lot of just attempts at disrupting those two different businesses so on the auction front you're seeing all these kind of um auction substitutes that have spawned up over the last couple of years you actually mentioned um a couple right
there bringer trailer uh for example I wanted to get your kind of opinion and by the way that's not new bringing Trail they've been around for a while they' they've gotten a lot bigger um but just to kind of finish my thought there so the point bottom line is like you're also seeing a lot of disruption service now where all these AI companies are trying to create tech for dealership
service departments to make them more efficient more profitable the better customer experience and so I think that that's going to kind of work itself out over the next couple of years that makes sense uh talk about the used online used car Marketplace specifically around Collectibles I don't have a good read right now on market share between you know I've had success on bring a trailer
uh everybody every car enthusiast you know looks at the platform and they're like somebody needs to disrupt this right it's it's uh got a great community and this sort of Rich data and history but um actual exper yeah it feels very dated cars and bids has a sort of amazing YouTube driven marketing engine and Doug deuro what is who's winning there right now do you feel like cars
and bids uh is gaining a real foothold it's it's once you actually get it working it's like the best business ever because you don't have to hold inventory and you're just clipping fees over and over and over yeah uh but it's certainly highly competitive you know it's crazy that you said that it feels like it's aging because I just spoke with a dealer maybe like three days ago who just
discovered selling on bring a trailer right like let that sink in not like it's like it's crazy how adoption in this industry with you know these auctions I it just takes time because people are you know are s under waste things are working um and these auctions are like the original Network effect right if you think about the auction is all about how many people can you get
can you get a the highest concentration of the right type of dealers right the right buyers to purchase now again bring a trailer is consumer facing as well so that's different um but you still need that really you know High concentration of of of the right Choppers to to buy so look my take is that um I think I don't know the specifics behind uh cars and bids today because it's it's
evolving and bring a trailer I can tell you like anecdotally I hear about it the most from dealers um take it for what it's worth it just you know if I tell you what's the buzz it's I I always hear dealers mentioning bring a trailer bring a trailer um I think that it's going to uh it's like it's unclear to me how the these Brands not bring a trailer but like the upand commers that came after
like cars and bits it's just unclear to me how they how how they could um maintain their margin long term and avoid really losing their business to the bigger players like the bring a trailer in the market uh because I just don't see like you can only pump so much demand from your you know having a having an audience is great because you're able to you know send over demand
and and community and all that to your product but that's not sustainable at at a certain point you have to kind of you know the business has to stand on its own feet and you know that might get you started I don't know how far that takes you so I think the real question is you know are they able to really solve a problem in the market in in a unique way long term I I don't know like I haven't
bought cars and bands I've played around with the product um but I just I don't know if there's enough if there's if there's enough demand for all of these because they they're not the only ones there's other ones that have popped up it's sort of like go ahead the re the real Network effect would bring a trailer for those that aren't familiar is it it has the longest standing you know most active
community and if you're a collector and you have a unique car you want to get it in front of the biggest possible audience to get the best possible price and bring it trailer has so much leverage that people will sign up their car to sell and it won't even necessarily be slated for auction for months sometimes and so cars in bids has an opportunity to say hey we'll list your car next week but then the
challenge is if they don't have the same level of you know collectors on the platform you're just not going to get the best price and so they technically offer the same service but they offer a worse service because they won't necessarily get the the best price so it's still just a fantastic go to market strategy to seed a marketplace with a huge YouTube audience but yes there's
the question like how do you grow from there like you are kind of T constrained he only has a few million viewers and only so many of those can actually convert onto the platform but I mean he's done a great job just going full send and every single video I would say the biggest physical auction or traditional auctions what they've done is you know they've integrated other
businesses now I'm not telling you here that they've kind of given up on margin on the sales front but you know they become they become lenders right so they floor your cars a line of credit um they do other services as well uh which helps you kind of you know build a mode around your business um but it's it's just it feels like every Automotive YouTuber that gets an audience runs to like
launch this you know auction Marketplace and I just don't know how many of those will really have staying power long term or if you know it's gonna end up being kind of like a winner takes all or Winner Takes most we will see we we'll have to check in with you in a couple months and see how it's yeah anytime uh anytime there's Big C news it' be great to have you back on to break it down uh
and this is fantastic thank so much now you guys you guys are doing great work seriously you guys are definitely cutting through the noise and I can tell you um it gave me a lot of like early CDG Vibes when I like you put up that like breaking news stuff the other day and like that's how I got started people just started sending me they're like oh by the way this dealer is out of
business and I just started posting that people were calling me like the Gossip Girl of Automotive which I never wanted to be but um it's uh it's it's this thing where like all media in the future in my opinion or the winning media will be like expert-led media which is sort of what you're doing here um you know you're in the game you're bringing people that are in the game to talk
about things that are relevant to them so I think it's really great and um it's exciting well thank you so much for joing for stopping by great to hang we'll talk soon we'll talk to you later what a background very setting the bar on backgrounds totally oh yeah yeah I mean fantastic clearly know Joe both pred last week yep uh you you can tell like the early stage Builders who aren't
just on the podcast circuit constantly you know you get a little bit more plain background but they come with a different set of insights you know that's true that's true so we got like the show we got a we got uh got some breaking news we got some breaking news I believe I got to pull this up but we're gonna get Chad buers let's go here he is um yeah so he should be in the waiting
room any second hey how you doing Chad up what's up welcome to the show Welcome to the temple of technology how you doing doing fantastic that's great uh good to see you good to see you guys too Chad before before we dive into it I got to highlight some uh facts for you so uh until the 20th century Chad was rarely used as a given name it first entered the top thousand names for male children
in 1945 ranking at 997 actually peaked in popularity uh in the 70s reaching rank 25 um but but now because uh you know it it it comes with so much symbolism it's now uh 1 1600 on the US burst charts and I was telling John earlier you're a Chad like by by sort of definition right you're you're uh slinging checks you're uh very uh grinding on the fitness front you're sort of skiing in exotic destinations I
feel like there's an incredible we talk about nominative determinism on the show and it's and it's almost like your parents bled you with that name and now you're now there's not a lot of new Chads entering the market you almost have a monopoly on it I just wanted to give you a little hat tip for that so that that was the best intro I've ever gotten to something um let me give you
let me give you a funny data point though please I'm after I'm named after two people one is my great grandmother who is Granny chadam wow and the other was a gay wallpaper salesman that my mom fell in love with when uh she was pregnant with me wow wow so talk about what I was supposed to be yeah named after and then my Fall From Grace as you know this you know Chad was dragged
through the mud as a derogatory name yes yeah and you know then Giga Chad and you know all these things kind of like came out so um it's not lost on me that I've unfortunately kind of like grown into the exact stereotype in a way no but but you rode the you rode the you know it's like the M you know the Masa famous MSA slide where like it's like the of disillusionment trough of
disillusionment then you came out of it now you're you just get to be a gigachad but great to have you on the show uh you've been a long long uh I feel like a long time uh supporter so thank you and uh you got some news today I hear yeah yeah so so big news like we just dropped this a couple minutes ago but um we are announcing SS Adventures 5 so this is our fifth early stage fun I'll talk a
little bit about what we do as a firm and everything but wanted to drop in here New Media you guys are the size gong don't even know the size what if he says it's a $2 million fund got take it I got the scoop I got scop okay so preemptive side yeah so so really quickly um Su started in 2013 um and we've been an early stage Venture fund based in San Francisco since then look our our general belief is that
entrepreneurs are a lifeblood of progress broadly defined in the world like they are the most important people in the world and so we exist to to serve them and we're 10 years into this and you know fifth fund 175 million and it's a return to what we did at the very start so only preed and seed and I think that makes us probably one of the largest of this exact focus and so in a
moment when Venture is changing a ton and I'm sure we'll talk about that we are kind of going back to specialist and try to do one thing and this comes from my core belief in the world that I think you guys are embodying too which is like if you want to be the best at anything you just have to focus and try to do one thing super well yeah and so that's that's the big move on this this new
fund and excited to to talk about it with you guys fantastic no it's amazing uh one I I wish we had the data point on how many Venture funds make it to fund five it must be it must be like uh harder to do than getting to your 50th podcast episode you know or something like that it's very very challenging so so um you know congratulations on the Milestone but yeah maybe walk us through
kind of your your full Journey you know it sounds like you went from super early stage to sort of expanding scope and now you're you're sort of fully refocusing with this fun but it'd be great for for the audience to hear the backstory 2013 started with 25 million it was kind of a past the Hat type fund no institutions all individuals family offices 75 LPS like horrific to manage wouldn't
wouldn't recommend that to to literally anyone um 2016 we did 50 million fund two and that was really on the back of the two breakout companies we become known for which was Robin flexport and I can kind of go into those stories um and we got our first institution in fun two so horley bridge I still am grateful for them we're like we'll take a risk on you you guys are not the shape and size of
fund we typically do but we'll put in 10 million of the 50 and then kind of the rest is history LPS look for those types of signals Etc um in 2019 raised 90 million and this is what you were alluding to in terms of like strategy I think there's this General thing Adventure but it's true of the whole world right you get a little bit of success you start to think you're you
know you're on to something and then you get feature creep yep and so feature creep Adventure is like oh maybe I'll do other stages or maybe I'll do these other things I'm gonna launch a program or I'm GNA do this thing and everybody that's like the natural inclination of the world so we started doing other stuff and then we in 2021 raised 125 seed 250 op fund I looked around shortly
after that I was like you know so happy we raised all this money that felt like a badge and then I was like wait a minute my day is like materially different than what it used to be I used to just meet seed stage Founders which I love the stage I love our average dollar goes in after the seed like we can call ourselves a seed fund all what but we're not like just definitionally like let's
not lie to ourselves and so that evolution of really just deciding like what do I want my day to be like what is a stage I love working at and fun five is just a testament to like refocusing that entire realization back on what I think we're the best at what I think I love the most um and that's been our journey in evolution and as I said like the backdrop of that personal you know
realization was what's happening in Venture Broadley and that's bigger you know I call them Buffet venture capital is my term now like all you can eat right you get any cuisine there there's three starters unlimited bread sticks you get like for desserts and like you can go fill up on you can go fill up on that it's not the best individual dish of your life but uh you know we're trying to be like
the single Michelin star like we're not you know hovering over you but you know hopefully if you know what you want it's a it's a good product right that's great so you had you had flexport and Robin Hood in the first fund so you know generalist from the start what what was the sort of tech Trend since 2013 that you were closest to going all going feeling like you know going all in on uh
we've seen a number of venture capitalists you know fall so get so excited about a trend that they make themselves you know we're a defense Tech fund or we're a crypto fund or things like that uh and I feel just like the feature creep you're talking about oh let's add growth investing uh or that there's that same thing of oh maybe we'd have an advantage if we were just doing
this one thing and and that's historically you know it's worked out very well for some but makes Venture I think a lot harder given that this is a people game totally um we have yet to go all in on something but that is not to say we haven't had risk of potentially falling into that hundred times in the last decade we talked about going all in on crypto we talked about going all in on AI we talked about going
in on all sorts of things at different moments we talked about pivoting the whole fun to a program we talked about all this and as I said like this applies to not just Venture funds but any business it's as much as what you say no to doing and the decisions you decide not to do is what you do and so we have thankfully I think navigated it to we don't try to aine too heavily on
the thing we are still led by people so like at the end of the day what I love about seed and what I was alluding to on my realization is partnering with people which is seed seed there's nothing there there's nothing built there's nothing to underrate is what I love and I have found that other people are smarter than me and other people see the future better than I do when I met vladen baju
I hadn't thought about that opportunity but when they told me their vision and showed me a demo of the product in 2013 it was the most beautiful mobile app I'd ever seen in my freaking life and right when they said The Narrative of changing the way our generation I was 25 at the time experience the stock market it was like yeah like 100% like that's going to happen Y and so it
wasn't my brilliant idea right it was just you know I've done a good job attaching myself to brilliant people so that that's how we still operate as a firm and it'd be very easy right now to be go on on AI but you know we're still I think honest with ourselves that we're still people first so how do you think about pra and kind of maintaining a position riding your winners any of that
is that kind of off the table or do you have a specific strategy for that now so this goes to a broader thing that I've been thinking a lot about which I think that um Venture is a pretty inefficient market and if you let me just take a step back and I'll answer the question which is like public equities are pretty pretty efficient right like a bid ass spread of a single stock is like really
tight and you end up having a clearing price it's weird that in my opinion the most important industry in the world which is the Innovation industry of the world which is technology has a market which is called Venture Capital that is really efficient if you're a founder and you're raising a bee you pitch like 20 firms and get a price yep like kind of crazy right and so what we're trying to
do at Susa is not force upon Founders certain round constructions like why is the a 20% dilutive no matter how much you raise yeah it's a construct of the Venture business model but what if a startup wants to raise four at 100 Y what if they only need three like we should develop more products in venture to allow every type of founder to finance their business in that way and
so the way we think about it is like we start the seed but then we'll be creative we'll partner with you however you want as you build your company MH uh do you think that the fundraising needs are changing over time you're seeing more companies ramp to 100 million ARR faster than ever uh they're more profitable there's just more smaller teams doing stuff is there are capital constraints
changing 100% like that is for sure the efficiency of companies is real how much of this early hpe Revenue Vibe Revenue I think a terms are so good they're just like they're they're golden um you know how much is this durable I don't know some of these Be Blood B but like what is empirically true is companies will be more efficient in the future than the past yep so what I love about where we
are position in the market is in a world where companies are more efficient early stage is really like the place to do this business it'll be the last entrenched Alamo of venture yeah talk about uh fomo right now you're you're based in the bay I'm sure you experience it all the time everybody you know every time I see you know one of these sort of Revenue s uh where where it's just like
parabolic to 100 million AR uh I I get you know I'm happy because you know uh it's good for the ecosystem but if I'm not in it I'm angry a little bit angry uh but but but on your side what's the general sense like do you feel like a lot of investing right now it it's so unclear because it feels like we're we're early in AI adoption and understanding the potential of AI but
the market is so certain right now uh what what do you do you think fomo is still uh sort of like is a is a dominant force in investment sort of venture investment decision- making right now or is it you know still dominated by the the sort of beautiful potential of the technology across all these different Industries I mean fomo is real like I have fomo every day like to your
point I see these graphs I'm like I text my team why AR the why are we in that deal like what the you know it's like it's it's so real and at the same time like I don't know I'm not 50 but I you know like if you were a venture in 21 you remember 21 and you remember 22 and 23 and suck time like that vintage is g to be historically shitty yeah so it doesn't take you don't have to be around that
long ago to remember 21 and we're in for sure some type of bubble now how much of that will be in during Valley or not is like I have no clue but like this makes no sense what's going on like it makes no sense there's seed rounds at 70 with nothing and like four 19 year olds like this is insane um and because Ventures power law that individual deal can make sense if it's the right one but as but
as an industry it's G to be a huge waste of capital so the fomo is real and but I I think I'm do like we do a good job to like temper our fomo and remind ourselves like let's just try to stick to our you know our guns here what are you doing for sourcing these days and uh how' you meet Ryan Peterson for flexport how'd that deal come together we met Ryan through Wesley Chan who was at
Google Ventures at the time he's now at fpv his own firm yeah and um Ryan pitched us on a call there's no Zoom back then really and T other YC demo day okay right before it right before it they allowed people to talk to investors before Dad back then Gary really locked that down that or they're just not talking us it's one of the two um we committed to Ryan on the phone is the
only time we've ever done that in Susa history we committed to the deal on the phone call he pitched us for 24 and a half minutes and we were like yeah we're in whatever pisp to wire you know super irresponsible it was our first song like I cannot tell the LPS this this is insane this is like you know a bad idea but um it was the most compelling pitch I'd ever heard he's one of the best
salese of all time um and he's become an incredible friend our families are friends he and I even own like a business together outside of work now yep um you know the the cheesy thing about Ventures like it really is the friends we made along the way true he's the best he's the best yeah he was the best he was our first guest on the show yeah he was um a solid Texas out of your out of your portfolio
re you know maybe some more recent Investments what what do you feel is the the most underhyped uh portco the company that you know should be getting more headlines and attention but isn't for one reason or another I mean one that flies relatively under the radar but I'll tell you why it's not going to be under the radar for very long is a company called chapter which is based in New York City the
founder is Kobe Kobe worked at uh paler back in the day the reason it's not going to be under the radar for very long is um up until two years ago Kobe had a very interesting board and a very interesting co-founder so his co-founder was v um and his board was JD and Peter teal so talk about going from like oh we have this great board Dynamic to all of a sudden being like my board memb is the
vice president of the United States and you know Peter's still very involved and this company's doing really meaningful work and AI is going to accelerate it it is helping this very big problem of senior citizens in the US like navigate the Medicare Medicaid healthare system pick the right plans it is super hard to do um there's all these contingencies and other to understand the flows and
prescriptions and what stuff are you on and what state are you in and so they're making that process easier it should help Healthcare cost and WR it should help patients this is really important work but just talk about upleveling your Connections in the world uh by the facet of who you chose to be investors um we were the lead the seed there and um it'll be a many many billion dollar
company fantastic love it uh question on specifically around reindustrialization uh and dreon had their American dynamism Summit today JD was speaking there there sort of this broad uh emphasis on bringing manufacturing back to the US uh I'm curious to get your take on manufacturing even robotics L manufacturing as a category because from my senses there's going to be a lot of
great businesses that come out of this that just aren't necessarily Venture scale because they get to the point where there maybe you're doing $20 million in iida and you you know maybe you're not you know hyper growth but you're just a good business and then you know people are going to look at that and say okay this we know what the market price is for a manufacturing business for this kind of widget um and
so how have you looked at that as a category and are you making are you making net new Investments there out of the new fund yeah well shout out to my co-founder Leah pit he started a fun called humba Ventures a couple years ago that's only doing like manufacturing American dynamism Hardware stuff so he's primarily of the original OG Susa founder guys his fund is really what's
doing that to primarily focused on software but um I think a couple things you said are interesting Trends in of themselves like one I think this question of like what is Venture bable and what is not is a good question in the next decade which is there's going to be this Cameron explosion of like micr SMB and midsize company creation that AI enables that maybe shouldn't be
ventured back or to my point earlier there should be different products different ways to finance a company maybe different ways to not have it only be Equity but also have R you know profit sharing or other longterm I think that's a reasonable Point whether it's Hardware really anything like as a big question two is like the Strategic value of on Shoring manufacturing is like
obviously a very good idea uh incredibly important we're doing less there what we're doing more on is um stuff back in our realm of you know we l the seed have stored now over a billion Flex part other like we're doing a lot in supply chain resilience and other so obviously when stuff is manufactured whether it's abroad or here there's like a whole supply chain resilience of a company
that has to happen especially with ter stuff going on of like where do we move stuff once it's already manufactured around the world like that's probably what we spend a lot more time thinking about but like you guys have had Chris on I think power from from ha and others like these companies are insanely important and awesome um we don't spend a ton of time in around it yeah that makes sense
um have you made any Investments out of the new fund you're you're already doing deals or yeah yeah we we soft secretly started writing checks out of it in December so we're we're actually Four in which is a little a little hot for us we're we're different than a lot of investors we we do relatively low volume each partner will only do two to three Deals a year it's kind of like 90s
venture capital and uh but to your point on fomo we're running a little hot right now so we we we've done a couple I think we're just excited to get going I have um I guess none of publicly announced but they're all over the place to give you you know what you asked earlier like we're still founder Le so one is a stealth consumer gaming thing with I'm partnering with this us chess grandmas
to build um one is a AI personal kind of co-pilot that uses a bunch of uh cameras to collect first-party context about you yourself and then has like a has an app on the phone for a personal AI where we think that apples and others are going to have a little bit of innovators to Lim on this stuff um we've done one that's an AI co-pilot in um Hardware manufacturing so like you know we're all
over the place like we're we're just curious are you seeing more solo Founders these days we we were at YC demo day and we saw a couple teams come through where it was just a guy with no team because he's building it all himself because of AI stuff uh and that kind of flies in the face of YC's like early advice of like you need a co-founder it's going to be hard you
need someone early uh but what are you seeing out there yeah I mean literally the pitch right I had right before you guys I was literally singing our comments from here this guy walks in he's thinking about starting company he's like I really want a co-founder we talked about it for 30 minutes I was pushing him to just start himself um and his actually entire product thesis which
is the irony of how he was thinking about his own co-founder thing was he wants you know his belief um without giving too much of the idea around is like we are starting to extract away parts of building software right if you think about we had like cursor is literally like you know code itself then you have like the bolts of the world and you have um you know lovable lovable in Europe right where like they're
abstracting way not just the code but kind of like like bu like prompting entire parts of the system you know where we're obviously going in through years is like prompt to like company or like prompt to entire thing and that's the company he's thinking about building and his entire argument is like could a software company to the Future not have and he's a world class CTO sold a
company to Apple has built big companies could we not have a company where instead of the engineering looking like 10 20 30 people it's like three really good people and they control front and back end everything through like a series of agents that are responding to prompts and understanding computer science understanding technology is still useful so I think that is a counter to like the Jensen and all the
things like you don't learn computer science anymore but like that I think that's where it's heading I kind of buy that Vision yeah have you heard any AI tools that have particularly helped your job in Venture even just like scheduling or note taking like or put the deck in chat gbt say what do you think what you think chat GPT rip it should I do it I feel deeply insecure about this
question me too because LP's asked me this and I'm like like not really like I should probably doing more somebody asked me like oh how many chat gbt queries are you making per day I'm doing 20 and I was like I think I'm doing like five I don't know if that's good or bad like I should be using it rookie numbers John you got get you got get those numbers up I guess I I find it
not that useful for what we do I mean what like to be honest like we don't do a ton of diligence like what are we supposed to diligent yeah it's like people and themes yeah so maybe like yeah if you're searching like how big is this Market where who are the major players I want to get to know the industry I don't ever search how big a market is that's where you're already
wrong I've never that work I actually think it's bad work to do it seed yeah no that makes sense it's seed yeah that's very funny there's nothing better I mean this is this is I just it's so important to be authentic and I believe that that is actually the dominant approach of of most good early stage investors yet still half of people want to be able to sort of claim Credit in
reverse and dress it up and say well look you know I had this memo and I knew exactly how the market was going to unold a lot of that's just window dressing for someone else their boss window dring for it's not like we we just had that we tried this early on I was like I need to do the work so I used to write memos and then we looked back we're like everything we did a lot of
work on that we overthought and passed on we were idiots about and all the things we aped into like like flexport worked and we're like he's he's got to ape in his in his in his logo what's the origin of the ape I'm curious yeah so the we we registered the the firm in October 2013 and going into that we had 10 names picked out that were all similar to like we weren't very creative we were like oh Venture names
are like trees and mountains and so we had all these trees and mountains and names picked out they were all taken in Delaware and we had to register the firm because the next day we were doing our first clo so we like 11:30 p.m. we're on the phone we're scrambling we're trying to think of names Serge like I don't know we're like trying to get creative we like just why don't we
talk about trips we've all enjoyed so someone's like I went to Rwanda and did the trekking with the gorillas and then the other person was like I also did that and other person was like I also did that all before we knew each other independently that's awesome we're like that was the best trip of all our lives like it is truly a mind-blowing experience go see the gorillas it's
insane they're so humanlike so we looked up one of the the family names of the gorillas and it's the Susa family and we were like this is this is so dumb that we're about to name our financial firm after like a a family and B with this little thought the irony is like the only thing people remember about us is our logo so like it's worked yeah fine well venture capital is just a game of
trekking with gorillas that's really what it's about you know it's about appreciating the entrepreneur you know presence but you're really just sort of the the gorilla is the founder the the the founder is the gorilla the founder is the gorilla I think the founder is the gorilla the founder of the company become the 800 pound gorilla if they're big enough that makes sense yeah uh last question uh what What's
your I break down the workout routine I think you've been going pretty hard lately uh you guys have to like people need to roast me way harder when I post this Twitter um no we don't we work out as a team together every morning3 um currently uh I had a crazy list did the half marathon doing the Trion doing the H Roos in in April and then starting mid year I had this crazy
goal that people have now told me who actually lift real heavy weights that the goal makes literally no sense we trying to do the Thousand club which is like the bench Squad but I wrote five reps which everyone's like you're an idiot one in five is like night and day yeah my plan in July is to go like full meat all protein no cardio bulk phase and try to get as far as I can by end of year Mead
mode we need I'm I'm going lean to Meathead and we're just G see what happens good yeah and then and then maybe John's been really wanting Aventure capitalist to go for their ifbb Pro card so maybe you really fall in love with the the sort of just the weights maybe you go the bodybuilding route and you really be I'd love to see you become the souu gorilla you like next time yeah next time we want to see your
traps just in your in your neck right here just full Chad uh Chad uh it's been fantastic having fantastic congrats on the can I can I do one other quick shout out oh yeah yeah of course um one other quick shout out so every great product eventually becomes a dating site sure and um I have a friend in SF who is definitely the most eligible bachelor out of ever met she's beautiful G like
smart ripping surver great skier super hard worker passionate about the environment amazing human Okay so there's a guy out there that sounds like that would be of interest DM me I will set you up fantastic it's funny you bring that up because I I've had that thought recently I want to I want to run sort of anonymous basically Anon you know semi Anonymous ads because it's
kind it's kind of cringe to post on X and be like yeah like I'm looking for the love of my life but we can do it might first setup you guys might get credit for the first setup on this so here we go fantastic we we'll we'll test it a little bit we'll do this one for free and then maybe we'll get like some marriage contracts yeah and if you get married uh tell them the technology
brother sent you use code TBN at the chapel and uh good luck to you it thanks for having me guys thanks so much for coming on congrats again it's awesome I I hope someone uh I hope the matchmaking works we might have a lucrative business maybe this is our cars and bids it's a matchmaking service that's what this I mean uh if you're an SF right now if you're single D DM Chad
don't show up if if you're not a ripping Surfer great skier you got your life together yeah your your traps are eating your head you're jacked already you know it seems like seems like he's looking for someone who's got their stuff together definitely but good luck out there folks and we will see you tomorrow uh great episode thanks for tuning in appreciate you all and have a great rest of your Tuesday go crush it