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[Music] >> You're watching TVN.
4:57
Today is Monday, July 14th, 2025.
5:01
We are live from the TVPN Ultra Dome.
5:03
the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital.
5:08
We have an amazing show for you today, folks. One of the best shows.
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>> I I It's It's the best day to be a journalist.
5:16
It's the best day to be a live streamer.
5:17
It's the best day to be a commentator. >> That's right.
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It's not a slur in the commentary business. >> Commentary. Commentary. That's not a slur.
5:25
>> Um a lot of people asked us to not yell in the microphones. We We cannot help it. >> My bad.
5:30
>> We just get a little too excited sometimes. massive weekend.
5:32
As soon as we got off the stream on Friday, the news broke that Windsurf was being sort of pseudo acquired a trade deal by It was a trade deal.
5:43
>> Really was a trade deal, not a meme.
5:44
>> I believe this broke at 3 p. m.
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Pacific, which is just after market close >> just after we went off air. >> Just after Yeah.
5:50
Which one were they targeting? That's the big question.
5:52
I think they were more worried about the TBPN coverage than whatever the market had to say about the deal.
5:57
Um but the deal was that uh Demis Hibis here has a post.
6:02
He says, "Very excited to welcome Windsurf AI founders Mohan and Douglas Chen and some some of the brilliant Windsurf engineering team to Google DeepMind.
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Excited to be working with them to turbocharge our Gemini effort on coding agents, tool use, and much more.
6:17
Great to have you on board."
6:17
And so this was uh received sort of as like Okay.
6:23
>> So So here's here's kind of the timeline as far as I'm concerned.
6:25
So immediately our initial reaction, we were here at the studio. >> Yeah. >> Uh we were off air.
6:30
Our initial reaction was okay, another one of these quasi acquisitions.
6:36
>> People call them shellers. Yeah.
6:38
Everybody's going to get taken care of. It's fine.
6:39
And immediately a lot of people started uh kind of freaking out on the timeline saying that uh the employees had been screwed. Yep.
6:47
>> Our immediate reaction was this doesn't make sense.
6:51
Why would all the parties from the the founders to the investors to Google tolerate something like this?
6:57
>> And then >> call it 24 hours later, I was still getting messages from employees that thought they were getting total zeros. >> Yeah.
7:05
>> And uh at that point in time, I started kind of re-evaluating >> Yeah.
7:10
>> re-evaluating what may have happened.
7:12
And >> I think I think to be clear, like the the current employees, they they saw the news and they didn't get a check.
7:16
They didn't get a wire transfer and they also didn't even get an email saying, "Hey, we did all the calculation and based on the share price like you'll be expecting this much money.
7:28
It might take a month for it to clear, a couple weeks to clear, but like here's your expected payout."
7:33
There was nothing like that.
7:34
>> People apparently were crying >> crying in reaction to the news. Well, here's the thing.
7:38
This was a unique company, right?
7:39
company, right? So, so Windsurf launched in November of 2014, >> the product >> or sorry 2024 the product, but if you had joined a few months prior to launch, worked on the leadup to the launch, launched it, >> seen this, you know, incredible growth
7:53
>> and then scaled to what you originally thought was a $3 billion exit to OpenAI, >> and then you find out that you're actually >> you're getting to to to you're actually going to continue working at the company while dozens of your best engineers and your founders go and leave. uh
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uh effectively to then go and compete against against you right in codegen. >> Yeah.
8:15
>> And that that that roller coaster is just absolutely insane.
8:17
And so really unique dynamic that was different than a lot of these other um you know the character AIS the scales etc where in those situations many of the employees had been there long enough that they had >> vested a meaningful amount of shares they had certainly reached their cliff.
8:33
In this situation, you could have joined in, you know, in August of last year and not hit your cliff.
8:38
>> Not hit your one-year cliff, but been there for the entire run of Windsurf as a product. Yeah. Like from zero to what?
8:44
40 million ARR was where they were rumored. So, yeah.
8:45
I mean, you watch the launch and you're like, "Cool, I got it right.
8:49
I picked the correct I I picked the correct startup.
8:52
I picked the correct rocket ship. I'm on board." Yeah.
8:55
In Silicon Valley, you know, these options these stock option contracts, they're kind of like lottery tickets, but my number came up.
8:59
and then you go to the gas station or something to cash it in and you're like, "Wait, we don't know how much it's actually worth."
9:05
And it's not just like a tax issue.
9:06
Uh and so yeah, a lot of people very upset.
9:08
Uh and we'll get into kind of some of the uh some of the debate around this.
9:12
So um what's interesting is that I have uh Verun Moan who is the CEO of Windsurf.
9:19
He um has not posted at all still.
9:19
Um the last post he posted was on June 20th.
9:27
So, I think maybe it was a little bit more recently. >> Yeah.
9:31
To be clear, he's been completely muzzled. >> Yes. Yeah.
9:33
I mean, that that's what we believe to be true.
9:35
Um, but but it was weird.
9:38
>> If he's not muzzled and he's just chosen silence. >> Terrible. Yeah. >> Yes.
9:41
Um, the last time he really engaged with anything on on X at least was when >> Wait, John, I have to interrupt because it's now live.
9:48
Uh, Cognition has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Windsurf. Let's go.
9:53
>> The acquisition includes Windsurf's IP, product, trademark, and brand, and strong business.
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And above all, it includes Windsurf's world-class people. No way.
10:02
>> We've privileged to welcome to our team. >> The whole team. That's amazing.
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>> We are also honoring their talent and hard work in in building Windsurf into the great business it is.
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Today, this transaction is structured that 100% of Windsurf employees will participate financially.
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They will also have all their vesting cliffs waved. >> What?
10:19
and will receive fully accelerated vesting for their work to date. Let's go.
10:23
>> At Cognition, we have focused on developing robust and secure autonomous agents.
10:26
While Windsurf has pioneered the Agentic IDE, Devon and Windsurf are a powerful combination for the developers we serve.
10:32
Working side by side will soon enable you to plan tasks in an IDE powered by Devon's codebase understanding, delegate chunks of work to multiple Devons in parallel, complete the highest leverage parts yourself with the help of autocomplete, and stitch it all back together in the same IDE.
10:48
Cognition and Windsurf are united behind a shared vision.
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>> It makes so much sense >> for the future of software engineering and we've never and there's never been a better time to build.
10:54
So, uh there's a video up between uh Scott uh Woo and Steve over at Windsurf and we're hoping to have them on the show later today if we can coordinate together. >> That'd be awesome. Yeah, that'd be great. Cool.
11:05
Um, so anyways, this uh apparently Scott got to work like basically Friday and not only negotiated uh I mean to to do this kind of deal >> during all of the chaos of this other deal that's happening uh and then >> put together a deal that delivers a a win for every member of the team.
11:22
And the other thing that's interesting here is you know uh historically Cognition had um I wouldn't say overinvested in engineering but they were heavily heavily skewed towards technical talent. >> Sure.
11:34
And the people that got left behind at Windsurf were sales enterprise account management GTM, right?
11:40
And and I over the weekend I'd heard other teams that were kind of circling wanting to hoover up their uh their GTM team, but the fact that they were able to get this deal done in uh just just a couple days is fantastic. >> This is incredible.
11:56
>> So, wow, what a what a what a fantastic end to the story. Um >> or beginning. New beginning. >> Yeah, new beginning. New beginning, for sure.
12:02
Um I I don't even know if we should go through the full the full history here.
12:05
Um we can kind of go through whatever.
12:07
Um but I mean you kind of know the end of the story, but I think we should take you through some of the debate that uh that rose up.
12:12
And there's still the question of like even though it feels like everyone got the good ending, there still is this question about like we're in this weird zombie structure era where you can be left in limbo.
12:25
What is the cost of that?
12:27
What is the what is the risk to that?
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Do we need new employee contracts?
12:30
Do we need new uh understanding of how of expectations?
12:38
>> Um because it's one thing for a CEO to say, "Hey, >> I'm I'm building I'm trying to build something really cool in Silicon Valley.
12:47
I'm going to build a tech product and I want you to join me as a salesperson, operations person, an engineer, whatever.
12:52
And we're going to go on this journey.
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We're going to go really hard and we're we want you we all want to be aligned with like thinking long term.
12:58
We're doing a four-year vest with a one-year cleft, pretty standard.
13:00
And the the expectation, at least the history has been like like you will have clarity throughout that process.
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And now that we're in this weird weird regime, like you're getting like, okay, the last the end the end of this the last chapter of the book could be really dramatic, but we got the good ending.
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And the question is like has there ever been if this this deal kind of exposed the risk of like the bad ending and that it is possible that that could happen? It didn't in this case.
13:29
Um but the big question I think people are debating is like how much of this is is due to the chaos.
13:33
How much of the chaos is a function of FTC and and the antitrust regime and Ben Thompson talked about that a lot versus just the differences in communication styles of different MAG7 companies. That's interesting.
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The experience of CEOs like you look at the way scale AI handled it.
13:54
Alex Wang is he's a generational communicator. He's been on the Ovon. >> Yeah.
13:59
>> Uh different suck lead and acquisition.
14:02
Totally >> having having that sort of founder mode confidence right full fully in control of the company >> and you know it it you know everything you know we've heard from various parties says that uh Verun was muzzled but again you like everybody involved should have been saying how do we avoid making it so that hundreds of people don't feel like they've been you know completely screwed even for 24 hours. >> Yeah.
14:29
And the evidence of people feeling overwhelming like like the pe you were at first.
14:35
People were me people were messaging me Friday and Saturday morning saying the wind surf employees got screwed. Yep.
14:41
And I was messaging them back and being like you're misreading this.
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This is the standard deal that they've always done.
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>> And then the overwhelming amount of more information from highquality sources saying no they're screwed. >> Yeah.
14:55
>> It it just flipped and I said okay maybe maybe they are. Right.
14:56
And and the key so so now we don't we had this whole other kind of >> tangent that we were going to go down which is like what happens to the ghost ship, right?
15:04
This could potentially be this like Lord of the Flies dynamic where there's now hundreds of people that >> are still working on Windfur but the competitive pressure is insane.
15:12
You're losing a lot of your top talent and your founders.
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Is are you going to be able to keep momentum or is churn going to be crazy? >> Totally.
15:19
And uh and then do people try to stay a long time so they can get like a distribution or do some people leave because they want to pursue other opportunities >> and now we don't have to debate that because Winurf is home with Cognition and uh and Scott Woo >> and you know the best team about that. >> What's that?
15:38
>> Everyone all those employees who are now onboarding to Cognition >> I know exactly what you're going to say.
15:42
>> They're getting ramp cards baby cuz Scott >> time is money. Save both. >> Save both.
15:46
easy to use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Go to ramp. com to get started.
15:52
Um, uh, and you know, Cognition has a huge lineage with the ramp team.
15:57
And so, uh, we're very we're very excited for Cognition.
15:59
We're very excited for Ramp and we're excited for all of the Windsor employees who landed.
16:04
Um, well, this is funny because there's so much that we should that we could go through.
16:08
I think we should go through a little bit of the timeline of like what actually happened, how people how the debate evolved because it is very interesting.
16:15
So the the the context of like why is windsurf selling at all?
16:18
And I think this big question, the first one is let's just say hypothetically you owned 100% of Windsurf last week and let's say a completely financial investor comes to you.
16:33
Not if there's no even like big tech dynamics.
16:35
It's like Warren Buffett.
16:36
He calls you up and says, "I want to buy 100% of your stake."
16:40
>> Warren needs he's like these Agentic idees. I need it. I need it. I have to have one. >> I have to have one. Yeah.
16:46
Uh >> I I want to buy I want to buy a great business at a fair price. Let's do a deal. >> Yeah. Yeah.
16:53
So that's the question is is like if you were if you owned 100% of Windsurf Jordy, would you sell at $2. 4 billion last week?
17:01
And I think for most people the answer has increasingly become yes.
17:06
And there's a few reasons.
17:08
So the last the last big post that Verun the CEO of uh of Windsurf had interacted with on X was this post by Technium who says Windinsurf wrecked and it's a quote of Nick saying uh breaking anthropic just pulled the rug on Windsurf windsurf will be cut off direct uh will be cut off from direct API access to claude in less than five days 3. 5 sonnet 3. 7 sonnet 3.
17:32
sonnet 3.7 sonnet thinking wi windsurf never even got direct access to claude 4 anyways And so this has been the question of you know how much like if you are in this like rapper business I think it's I think it's a great product I think it's I think it's great I think
17:48
I'm actually very excited about about rappers but there is this there is this anti there is this competitive dynamic with the underlying foundation lab and anthropic does seem to be more aggressive about where the value acrruel will happen. So, you know, if it's if
18:00
So, you know, if it's if it's 50/50 by default, all of a sudden, Cursor and Windsurf start pulling 80% of the gross margin dollars from what they're adding on top.
18:11
Well, then the underlying foundation model is going to say like, hey, like, let's pull this back.
18:16
Let's make sure some of those credit cards live in our stripe account. Yeah.
18:19
>> And you're not just paying us big API fees.
18:21
Uh, and so there was a big debate about this.
18:22
Uh, Curser had to go through it.
18:24
Uh, Windsurf had to go through it.
18:26
and Verun like responded to this and had and had a good analysis and was and was basically making the case that like we can get through this. And I think that's true.
18:33
I I I I think there's totally a world where it gets true.
18:35
But to your you you were saying earlier like it is an extremely competitive market.
18:39
They were not the number one product in the market.
18:44
That's cursor and by most accounts.
18:46
Um and so and so they were in a you know not a super tough spot.
18:49
It's a great growing market.
18:51
It's it's you know it's developer tooling.
18:53
how many how many you know database software enterprise SAS products are on the public market there's like there's like like the seventh one is probably worth 10 billion right so um it's not like they couldn't have gone higher than 2. 4 but 2.
19:08
4 4 billion feels like a great deal for a company for a product that's one years old.
19:11
One year old for a company that's four years old and a hyper competitive space with >> product that launched >> less than a year ago and your direct suppliers are trying to come for you and and getting aggressive and so uh this went out in hacker news.
19:26
>> Not sure how much you should read into it but uh they said web surf is absolutely dead in the water and while cursor hangs on for now all value is going to go back to the models says Jake.
19:34
uh in my opinion other than the Microsoft IP issue.
19:36
I think the biggest thing that has shifted since this acquisition was first in the works is claude code has absolutely exploded.
19:43
Forking an IDE and all the expense that comes with that feels like a waste of effort considering the number of free/opensource CLI agentic tools that are out there.
19:51
Let's review the current state of things.
19:53
Terminal CLI agents are several orders of magnitude less money to develop than forking an entire IDE.
19:59
Uh cloud code is dead simple to onboard.
20:02
Use whatever IDE you're using now with a simple extension for some UX improvements.
20:05
Anthropic is free to aggressively undercut their own API margins and middlemen like cursor in exchange for more predictable subscription revenue and training data access. >> Yeah.
20:14
So, so, so the other context here is this year Anthropic, you know, Windsurf went from zero to somewhere around a $40 million run rate. Yep.
20:21
Anthropic this year has gone from the beginning of the year to 1 to4 billion. So cool.
20:26
>> And so, uh, they, you know, however you you want to say, they've been running running away with the market.
20:32
Um, and and Cursor's, you know, revenue is is equally incredible, although from starting from a smaller base.
20:39
>> And so, this was some of the like, okay, things might be getting tougher from here on out. Yeah.
20:43
Um, I don't know that I fully agree with that, but uh, but people were saying this.
20:47
Um, and then, uh, we covered this last week, but, uh, the meter team did these, uh, evaluations where they ran a randomized control trial to see how much AI coding tools speed up open source developers.
21:01
And what they found was that developers said that they expected co uh, products like cursor and windsurf to improve them by 20%.
21:09
But they were actually 19% slower.
21:12
And so you have this weird dynamic where okay, maybe the future is like so I I don't know how real this is.
21:20
I think that we could totally be in a world where cursor is incredibly valuable for less experienced developers working on more vibe coding projects than like pushing the pushing the frontier of really advanced projects.
21:32
And then also just the next the next version of these tools could be really cool and and solve this problem.
21:36
But there was some worry that maybe uh developers were going to take a hard look at their AI coding IDE stack and say, "Wait a minute, like I'm kind of using this too much.
21:47
I'm leaning on it too much and maybe I should just like go back to the old way."
21:51
So there were some there there were some there were some reasonable uh points around like maybe now's a good time to exit, right?
21:59
Um then so so after so after that the question becomes when you sell you have the board has a fiduciary duty to shareholders. >> Yeah.
22:14
>> And the big question that I think everyone was actually debating was this concept of was the windsurf deal with Google a paro improvement for all stakeholders which means in a paro improvement basically you can think of like the baseline is how everyone's doing.
22:29
in a parade of improvement.
22:29
Some people might go up a lot, other people might go up a little in in value, but no one is going down.
22:36
Not a single person is going down.
22:37
This is the goal of like all political legislation.
22:39
You want to create things that are not just positive sum in the sense that like, you know, I tripled my net worth and you only lost half. Like that sucks, right? You don't want that.
22:48
Perimeter improvement is like, I tripled, you doubled.
22:50
Yeah, I won, but we both won and we're both happy, right?
22:54
And so in in a in a in a good acquisition deal, everyone is par it's a paro improvement.
22:59
Everyone gets more than they than they, you know, had before. Everyone gets paid out.
23:03
Then the flip side is something called Caldor Hicks improvement.
23:08
And a Caldor Hicks improvement is where some people go up, other people go down, but when you sum them, it's still a net improvement.
23:15
So very few people were saying like, you know, the VCs, even when you add up the VCs and the employees and the founders, it's a net loss for everyone.
23:25
Very few people were making that argument. The employees got hosed.
23:30
>> It seems like everybody would have done better on an open everybody would have done better on an OpenAI acquisition. >> And so when the 2.
23:37
4 before a billion number came out >> in uh on the evening of uh of Friday, >> it seemed like okay, not as great, but still everybody's going to do well.
23:46
And then 24 hour 24 hours later, it was oh wow, like this might have been structured in a very >> funky way that um you know, people were >> I won't I won't report the number, but people were um messaging me >> information on how much uh Verun personally made, and that was still in the context.
24:06
I mean, you can just do the rough math.
24:07
Founder stake, couple rounds of dilution.
24:09
How much do you think he made? Right?
24:11
Like, it's not rocket science to figure this or to at least ballpark it to the right order of magnitude, right?
24:15
Um, but you build a great product that gets some traction that solves some problems and you you build a great team and big tech wants you like you, you know, I I I'm I'm not upset about it.
24:27
>> Um, but the question was like what's fair for the employees?
24:30
What's fair for you know, all the different stakeholders?
24:34
And so, uh, a lot of people kept coming out with really interesting stories.
24:38
So, William Allen here has one, uh, about Scott Bellski and Behance going to Adobe. We should read through.
24:44
So, William Allen says, uh, I don't think he's ever told the story, but it's worth telling.
24:49
When we were selling Behance to Adobe many years ago, Scott Bellski made a spreadsheet of every employee, 32 of us at the time, and personally negotiated each person's title, salary, and incentive structure and made that part of the overall deal terms. I'm going to choke up. It's so virtuous.
25:08
Uh I heard the phone calls where he went to bat for each individual.
25:13
individual. uh he he he not only he not only didn't have to do this but it actually complicated some of the other factors in the deal of course uh it changed the trajectory of so many people's lives including my own two years later 100% of that original team was still at Adobe even today a dozen years later many of the core members are
25:31
still there building I was inspired by it then and I'm inspired by it now and so um I think that was a good a good case study in like the founders do have a lot of hard power in the sense of board control and and actual voting shares to almost every founder can veto a deal which gives them leverage to build that spreadsheet and actually decide who gets what. And then on the
25:55
And then on the flip side they have a ton of soft power because you can't really do a hostile takeover of a private VC back company where the founder has board seats and stuff. It just doesn't work.
26:06
And so uh it's incumbent upon the CEO to actually take that step.
26:11
And that was the fear that Verun didn't do that he didn't go far enough. >> Yeah.
26:16
There was another there was another example from Par Ilyasukar company.
26:20
So one of his former employees says we got news our startup was being acquired 5 days before my one-year cliff.
26:26
I thought I'd get nothing.
26:26
Our shares were accelerated to 100%.
26:28
It was a life-changing event.
26:30
And I'll always appreciate that our founders did the right thing for us at Parse.
26:34
And said uh Ilia Ilia quoted it and said 100% acceleration for everyone but the active founders.
26:41
We went backwards and revested our vested. Glad someone remembers.
26:43
So, >> um, very heartwarming. >> Yeah.
26:49
And so, people were people were debating um, you know, did like was the core team taken care of?
26:56
It feel it felt very rough, but then pretty quickly it came out that um, so we were going back and forth on this on Saturday.
27:03
Um, and the and and the core the core debate like your post went pretty viral.
27:09
You got 2 million views, 4,000 likes.
27:11
Um, and it and it definitely struck a chord.
27:17
Um, folks were uh debating this one line.
27:20
Uh, from what I've heard, the employees are getting screwed regardless of their vesting status.
27:24
And it's like >> and that was because people had people were on a four-year vest. Yes.
27:31
>> But they hadn't hit their cliff even if they had joined 11 months ago. >> Yes.
27:35
>> And had again they had >> worked on the product up until launched the product scaled it. Yep.
27:40
>> Thought that they were getting this three you know massive outcome in which again they some people would have not been able I'm I'm sure OpenAI wouldn't have kept everyone right. Totally.
27:48
I'm sure that they would have made a bunch of people effectively.
27:54
>> There's always layoffs post merger acquisitions.
27:56
Like that happens all the time.
27:57
That's not that that's not a crazy thing.
27:59
So, um certainly reasonable.
27:59
I mean, the other question is just like, you know, if you worked at this company and you were like, I like working at this company.
28:06
I I really would love to work at Google.
28:08
And you don't get carried along, like that is getting screwed.
28:11
Like not getting a job at Google in some ways is getting screwed.
28:14
Um even just the ambiguity over the weekend is a little bit of like a screwing.
28:17
And so I still will defend your initial characterization.
28:20
Um, but I thought that there were things that could potentially shift the narrative.
28:27
And so I quote tweeted your yours uh with the Steelman argument, which is one >> and we tried to get a a a night in shining armor suit for we we were getting the steelman suit ready, but then we knew we didn't have to.
28:40
>> We will production team will get the steel knight of suit of armor eventually.
28:44
We we we need to order from a prop shop.
28:46
uh we take >> it's on the way. We're working on it. >> Yeah. Okay.
28:50
We're gonna and and just make sure it's great when it comes.
28:52
Um and so uh I I had three points.
28:54
One was that uh employees who haven't reached a one-year vesting cliff don't have that strong of a claim around I built this with sweat and need a liquidity event and we don't know the 10 years of all the left behind employees.
29:05
the left behind employees. So there is an argument that like if you joined 3 months before it was already like really big like should you really get accelerated four years and like >> oh and I and I never would have made that argument but it was the fact that you could have worked there for 11
29:18
months and gotten zero and it's like no you're getting a ride on the ghost ship now ride the ghost ship into the sunset >> and that was in the context of of the founders and this is why people in in group chats and DMs were getting so angry because it was in the context of you know somebody that worked for you for 11 months was potentially going to get zero. Now, that's not not the case
29:37
Now, that's not not the case now, but um and then and then you're walking away effectively uh defecting >> and and taking a a multi00 million payday.
29:47
It >> it is a weird dynamic with these startups because clearly >> I I don't know exactly what Windinsur's headcount was.
29:53
I think everyone was saying it was around 500 at the time of this deal.
29:57
And a year ago, pre- pivot, what do you think their headcount was?
30:03
Couldn't have been more than 50, right? Definitely not.
30:06
>> So you're looking at a 10x increase in in employees who haven't really been like they've been on this rocket ship.
30:14
So I think I I personally think they totally deserve liquidity and accelerated vesting which it sounds like they're getting and and it sounds like they're going to do great.
30:19
Um but but it but but it is like not the nature of the initial contract which is like one year cliff four-year vest.
30:25
cliff four-year vest. like I if it if it came out that it was like okay they're getting paid out to the tune of you know how long they've been there I don't think anyone would be like that upset but then somebody was making a good argument that basically >> like you when you sign up with like a four-year vest you're saying I'm going to keep working for four years if you sell the company and put me on some
30:47
zombie go ship like I didn't bail you bailed >> so you so you should you should accelerate me and I I I actually think that that argument >> yeah the other the other dynamic here was um so when character AI when uh when the when the character AI founders and and part of the core team went back to Google, >> the character AI became a ghost ship, but it was cool in the fact that they had >> 20 plus million users. They also had 100
31:12
They also had 100 million on the balance sheet. >> Yeah.
31:16
And it wasn't this like insanely gnarly enterprise market where and and I know I know people on the character team and they were like it's pretty cool. We have $100 million.
31:27
We have tens of millions of users and we're just kind of going to experiment to try to find you know figure out how to monetize this.
31:35
And I just don't think that that was I I don't see the the code generation market playing out in the same way where >> I was trying I was trying to think about that like like is there a world where you know I if the ghost ship had pl had had like stayed a ghost ship and they
31:51
had pivoted is there some world where they you know niched down like there was this rumor that they were going to niche down into B2B like could they have niched down wind surf into some like niche category and actually had like a pretty durable business. we were talking
32:03
we were talking about like could Jeremy Kafon make it work if he acquires it and like turns it into some cash flowing business.
32:09
I just wonder like is there is there a niche where like I mean we've heard we the example I would give is like we've heard that like these codegen tools are like particularly bad at like rewriting old programming languages like forran for example.
32:23
Uh and so if you created like cursor just for like rewriting forran it's like that's not sexy at all.
32:29
that's not going to be hot on on Twitter X, but it could be really valuable in like, you know, the bowels of like legacy banking and like you could pay you could charge a bunch and you wouldn't like the TAM wouldn't be very big, but the business could be quite good.
32:44
Um, and and that that that might be a weird outcome, but it it could be a silver lining. I don't know.
32:50
Well, anyway, the second point that I made was that, you know, uh I I said the second the real culprit might be FTC antitrust.
32:57
This is a hyper competitive market and Google still feels like they can't just do a normal acquisition.
33:03
And I thought that was crazy because it's like this is textbook.
33:09
They should be able to acquire this company, right?
33:11
Like like cursors out there.
33:13
They're not acquiring a market leader. >> Yeah.
33:17
>> Open AAI is clearly going after this market and to the tune of what's what what's their valuation like 350 billion or something like that.
33:23
or something like that. like like >> we haven't we we should try to get an update there because I think the MASA I'm not sure the the full >> MASA >> it's not even onetenth of it's it's greater than onetenth of Google's market cap right yeah and so you're looking at
33:37
like and then is Microsoft going to compete in this absolutely they have they already do and so it it's like you're you're basically like I don't know second third fourth in this market there are four very serious players like this should be textbook rubber stamp good to do the deal. No problem. No problem.
33:55
>> There's also a there's also a very long list of founder-ledd companies that were that are may that were maybe less hyped than Windsurf but have incredibly talented teams. There's like poolside. >> Yeah, poolside.
34:05
>> There's there was that one that Nat Freeman and Daniel Gross did that was >> Magic Magic. dev.
34:08
They were found apparently they were training their own foundation model for a while and that was kind of like you know very capex intensive and and and maybe slowed down some things on the product side but still like clearly it's a competitive market.
34:21
Everyone's working on it there.
34:22
Also, we're we're missing out like there's probably a ton of YC teams that are working.
34:25
There was actually one YC team they got in trouble for forking uh like cursor too hard or something. >> A little too hard.
34:31
>> Yeah, they crossed some line there.
34:31
Um I think they did fine and I think that they wound up like cleaning it up.
34:35
But people were upset about like uh when you fork something, you have to abide by the MIT license or whatever the underlying license is.
34:42
And so you can't just like steal open source code and not abide by the by by the open source rules.
34:46
Um and then and then I said three uh new facts might come out, which they did.
34:51
Um and uh and the FTC thing was interesting because there was a little bit of push back on that.
34:56
People were saying like, "Oh, like Lena Khan ate my lunch."
34:58
Like Lena Khan's uh like like like responsible for everything.
35:01
And I wasn't I wasn't necessarily saying like Lena Khan was 100% responsible for how this was was was structured or like how this played out, but she did kind of like warp the road a little bit that made it a little bit wonky to drive. >> Yeah.
35:19
Basically, we made hardcore capitalism illegal.
35:21
So we nerfed capitalism >> and then and then capitalism ended up coming in and saving the day. >> Yes. Yeah. Yes.
35:28
>> With Scott Woo at the helmet. >> Seriously. Seriously.
35:30
So the solution to >> capital anti capitalism is more capitalism.
35:37
This is the Brad Gersonner point. Yeah, totally.
35:38
Um >> and so so I still don't I I still think that there's a that that there is a way that even with the weird new FTC antitrust regime, uh Google and the Windsurfing team could have probably been a little bit more aggressive, taken a little bit more FTC risk and avoided this whole PR dust up.
35:56
Um, but that would have been more risk for Google and I think that the way they did this here where they >> I mean it's a great outcome for Google.
36:05
It's like we didn't buy the company. Look. >> Exactly. They bought the company.
36:07
>> They bought the company. Exactly.
36:07
So it really it really is a great outcome for Google.
36:10
Uh even though I'm sure that they their coms team was up all weekend calling people. >> Yeah.
36:15
>> Like I I have to imagine that this was like >> I mean it it more room for that.
36:19
>> It was like serving uh you know it was it was the best possible story that the New York Times could have ever asked for. >> Oh, totally.
36:27
It was like big tech, >> yes, >> buys hot company that was competing, you know, not not necessarily like the whole point of of Lena Khan's thing was that, you know, big tech is like squashing competition by by, you know, buying these companies early.
36:40
And so you had the story that that was served up to them, which was, you know, >> exciting company in codegen, a lot of traction. Yep.
36:49
>> Open AI almost buys them.
36:49
Google says, "Okay, we're going to buy them." That's Google.
36:52
Google and OpenAI are arguably, you know, the the two competitors that actually like matter in search right now.
37:00
>> And so it was just the perfect story.
37:02
And then and then the, you know, I I think Scott um Scott over at Andre had a good post that I that let me pull up here for a second.
37:11
He was basically saying, "There is an irony that Lena Khan's activism has resulted in deals that are far worse for everyone except the people she was targeting."
37:21
>> Wait, who who's who tweeted that?
37:22
Sorry, Martin Casado from Anderson. Yeah.
37:25
>> And yeah, it's like the the people with the lowest, you know, it seemed at the time that the people with the lowest leverage, the employees that had joined recently >> were getting the worst outcome out of out of a deal that that should have benefited everyone.
37:38
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37:47
Um so my question is uh Google it feels like PR nightmare accidental PR nightmare because uh they had done uh what character just fine.
37:57
It it was not that big of a deal for them.
38:02
Not a big and then scale had >> well and it was very clear that that that situation was interesting too because it it Google has delved into social in the past hasn't had the best >> not beating the chat GPT script.
38:13
>> Uh no that that was intentional of course.
38:15
No, but they they've they've they've messed around in social.
38:16
You could tell that Google doesn't want to own the AI chatbot. Totally.
38:20
They just don't want the association.
38:25
>> I mean, there was a rumor that Gnome didn't want to be in that.
38:26
He kind of like was just like, I want to train a great model.
38:29
I want to train a great model.
38:30
I want to do AI research.
38:30
And then that became the use case.
38:31
they found product and then he was like I don't really like you see what you see what Elon's launching today with the um >> I don't even I won't even say it on on the show but his new launch today basically signals that that that is a very important >> he's interested in that market.
38:47
Yeah, >> he's interested in that market. >> Yes.
38:50
Uh anyway, my my question for you is is so feels like a PR nightmare for Google.
38:56
Feels like a couple stressful days.
38:57
Feel like feels like landed over the weekend >> and that's my question.
39:00
Do you think that they are that they were intentional and happy about releasing the news after market close because the the the all of the facts had come out over the weekend and it was such a hairy deal that more deals needed to be done even after the story came out and it couldn't be super clean.
39:18
So you have to do it on on late on a Friday so then Saturday, Sunday people can talk, deals can get done and then announcements can go out Monday and then it resets the whole news cycle.
39:26
So you kind of skip the the the crazy news cycle.
39:29
I think >> I think the world's too online.
39:31
So I think I think it helped that that that it wasn't a weekday.
39:35
But I mean this to to me this this whole thing, you know, from from >> everything that we've kind of triangulated this this could have been avoided by managers taking it upon themselves to basically call >> each individual person at the company and say >> before before you have a negative reaction I I need you to be patient.
39:56
I know you've been patient through this this uh this deal with OpenAI.
40:01
It's not the deal that we wanted, but we are working to make this a a positive outcome for anyone.
40:11
>> And uh and don't cry yet. >> Yes. >> Don't just don't cry. >> And it's really hard.
40:15
And it's particularly hard because if you if you're in the scale situation, a lot of those people had been there for four years.
40:23
And with Windsurf, most of those people had been there for less than a year, almost certainly.
40:26
And so the the strength of those connections socially outside of work is weaker.
40:32
So there aren't as many, oh yeah, like my boss like we we're already on signal with disappearing messages, so we just talk back channel all the time.
40:41
It's like the crazy thing too is the argument was >> the new company has a strong balance sheet. >> Yeah.
40:48
>> And they're going to be able to just do a distribution or pivot or like that was effectively the the suggestion.
40:53
And it was intentionally ambiguous.
40:57
>> And at the same time, the the employees left behind on the ghost ship were already talking with other companies.
41:04
Other companies were coming to them trying to recruit.
41:06
>> I think you're coining ghost ship because uh like everyone involved with the deal would prefer you to use the term remain co remain co.
41:12
Uh but that's not as sticky as ghost ship.
41:16
So I think go ship >> ship without aip ship without a founder.
41:21
>> I don't think this will be the last go ship we see.
41:22
I think it's I think it's like a new pattern and we're just going to see this more and more.
41:26
>> No, but but so so then you have this dynamic where the the these talented people specifically I talked to a founder who was talking with a lot of people on the go to market team being like these are very talented people, right?
41:37
They took a company from zero to tens of millions of dollars in ARR and a bunch of enterprise contracts in a very short period of time. I want to scoop them up.
41:46
And those people were entertaining conversations because >> it was just totally unclear to them what what was going to happen.
41:53
So >> So yeah, I mean I still I I I think some of our friends hold the FTC like 100% accountable.
41:59
I'm probably under 100, but maybe over 50.
42:02
Um but my key point is that uh never lose faith if the FTC is giving you trouble.
42:08
Dylan Field didn't lose faith when he was dealing with uh a messy situation with the FTC at Figma.
42:17
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42:25
Uh anyway, there there was another side of the stakeholders that was interesting that the this that this guy Publius said in your in your uh in your in response to your post, which I don't think anyone was talking about at all the entire weekend, which is cool.
42:42
Uh and and this is something people don't really think about.
42:45
I think we're in a good spot with these folks now, and I think they'll actually probably be in a better spot now. >> Much better spot.
42:50
>> Um but let's read through it.
42:50
So Publus says, uh there are more stakeholders here that have not been discussed.
42:54
There is a whole network of software resellers that invested millions into building partnerships with Windsurf.
43:00
I was leading the team at one of those partners.
43:03
We have customers that we have been selling to for years who we vouched for Windsor for Windsurf 2.
43:08
I am sending out a note to our 300 customers on Monday that we are stopping all partnership activity with Windsurf effective immediately.
43:16
I hope you didn't send that because it's you got to recall that email. Don't send the email.
43:21
Uh, Curser has no channel partners and this will cost our firms millions. Oh, interesting.
43:27
I didn't realize that that Windinsurf had a channel strategy and Curser does not. Very interesting.
43:31
So, so Windsurf actually has resellers who who go and sell it into their partners because they're doing something on, you know, uh, we do software development consultancy.
43:42
We come in and help your team run more efficiently.
43:44
We help you pick the right tools.
43:45
You could imagine like McKenzie, I don't know where this guy works, but like you could imagine a consulting firm coming in and giving advice on what tools to use.
43:51
Uh they get a kickback from Windsurf.
43:54
They don't get a kickback from Cursor.
43:55
So he's going to lose millions of dollars.
43:58
Hypothetically, hopefully not.
43:58
Uh but my reputation and good name is worth more.
44:02
Uh with Google taking the best engineers from Windsurf, our large enterprise clients are screwed.
44:05
When they purchased Windsurf enterprise licenses, they were also purchasing an ecosystem that they assumed would continue to improve.
44:12
This is disastrous for any startup tech company with goals of building an enterprise channel. It's interesting.
44:17
Uh I don't think people have any idea how much this just killed channel sales for any AI company.
44:23
So the rest of the AI companies out there who are like, "Oh, channel uh channel sales is really interesting."
44:30
>> Basically, if you're if you're if you're a top company in your category growing super quickly, you might turn into a ghost ship. >> Yeah. Yeah.
44:37
And so if if I'm trying to resell that type of stuff, then I I have to go to the CEO and But they're not so good to get these maxed out.
44:44
They're they're not getting a trade deal. >> Yeah. Yeah.
44:48
>> You can count on them to not get traded. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
44:49
You're having you're having dinner with the uh with the CEO of some AI companies talking to you about like, "Yeah, we have the best software."
44:55
And you're like, "But you don't have any like actually great AI researchers, right?"
44:58
Like you mostly just have >> We like to partner with companies with with medium to tier research. >> Yeah. Yeah. Great product.
45:04
It works, but not too well because we don't want to lose you.
45:09
>> We want to keep working with them for a long time.
45:10
>> We want to keep working with you.
45:10
Um, and so, uh, yeah, the there were a bunch of other reactions. Shellqua hires. Let's see.
45:18
I'm not an M I'm not an M&A guy, but something feels really broken in tech.
45:21
M&A confidentiality is out of the window.
45:23
Deals get done and called off on a whim.
45:25
Lack of rigor and discipline on both sides.
45:26
Curious to hear what practitioners think.
45:28
People are going back and forth on this.
45:30
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45:44
Um and so Will Manitis was particularly blackpilled over the week friend of the show >> incredibly blackpilled.
45:50
>> Uh but uh he it's we're so back Will you're good.
45:53
Uh Will Manitus said the reason that tech has been able to grow so quickly and create so much wealth that it is rich that that it is that it ritualized a set of norms around corporate governance that are very distinct from what the law actually requires.
46:05
The second someone defects, the whole ship goes down. He's so upset.
46:10
But basically, he's talking about like hand the handshake deal protocol is not a legally binding contract.
46:13
Even term sheets, you get a term sheet from a VC.
46:18
That's not a legally binding uh that's not a legally binding contract.
46:20
Like a VC can write you a term sheet, everyone can sign it, and then you can just says >> it literally says it says this is not binding and then you can just wake up on the wrong side of the bed and be like actually I don't want to do the deal.
46:34
and or or it could be like you found something in due diligence or you met a different competitor but the like you know the game isn't over until the money's in the bank.
46:41
the experienced entrepreneurs know this, but we run on this like basically, you know, these society the these like social constructs and these like uh social contracts that say, "Hey, if you're the type of VC that constantly rugs on term sheets, on signed term sheets, like you will there will be a bad vibe around."
47:02
>> I can think of two that that are widely known. Yes.
47:05
>> And are still in business. >> Yes.
47:06
But they the the it becomes very hard to be an effective VC if your brand is you just pull term sheets. >> Yes. Yeah.
47:14
And some of some of those folks have been banned from YC demo day.
47:17
Other people have had like viral Twitter posts about them every once in a while.
47:22
Like they they do that to a founder and then the founder becomes very successful in post economic and is like yeah I I still have a grudge so I'm going to tell the truth about X Y or Z.
47:31
Um and and so the the thing is is that now where we are now is I don't think I don't think the whole ship goes down.
47:40
I I I don't think this is a true defection.
47:42
I don't think this reflects poorly and I think that the the question of like the big question here was was will this cause more new startup employees to want to just go straight to Google?
47:55
Let's say let's say that you have the option of working at Google or big tech broadly where you know the paychecks are coming on time.
48:02
You know the RSUs are liquid and you can just cash out as soon as you get them or whenever their lockup is and you know your managers going to be there.
48:10
You know the company's going to be around >> somewhat accurately predict what your comp will be in five years if you really work hard. >> Exactly.
48:16
And then and then on the flip side you have startups which are in some ways lottery tickets but also you get to work on gamechanging technology with really cool people.
48:24
You get to move a lot faster.
48:26
There's a lot less overhead.
48:28
It's a lot more edifying for >> people.
48:30
Potentially the next Sundar instead of Sundar.
48:32
>> And and the economic upside can be a thousandx. It could be huge.
48:36
>> And the question is if that if that deal was broken, if that if that deal was okay, yeah, you can go work on the cool thing, but you might wind up penniless and not cash out like you were promised.
48:48
That changes the equation and that could pull people away from startups.
48:51
Um, but I don't think that's going to happen based on this because I think the lesson from this is that everyone got taken care of and the social contract still still holds.
49:01
Although it was very messy and I think going forward every company that's doing a deal like this needs to think how do I get the scale AI outcome and not the windsurf outcome because just two days of pain is not worth.
49:15
I think I think one potential solution to these deals is exactly what we just saw happen. Yes.
49:25
Which is big tech company does basically an aqua hire of the of the team that they want >> and then you simultaneously sell off the underlying asset immediately and you generate a liquidity event for everybody so everybody's happy.
49:38
It doesn't have to be >> like life-changing, right?
49:40
But it has to be something, right?
49:42
So that it's >> and I mean the very key thing is that they left enough money on the balance sheet because the money on the balance sheet and this was uh this was uh Hari Ragavan's uh analysis.
49:51
He he clearly I mean the guy's he's a good friend.
49:54
He's uh he's obsessed with cap table math.
49:58
>> I know he was >> this was Capital Journalism. >> Yes. Thank you.
50:03
>> This was investigative journalism. >> Yeah.
50:05
Uh and so I mean his post is so long uh that I need to just go to the TLDDR.
50:09
But the TLDDR is that he says, "I spent hours last night breaking down the cap table and deal dynamics from public info.
50:16
I realize that the unvested equity is around $80 to $100 million, awfully close to the $und00 million the founders and board negotiated to leave behind in the bank.
50:26
Why shouldn't management just a key detail unvested?"
50:29
So they basically saying we're we're leaving enough as though you vested your full four years. >> Yes.
50:37
And so and so if you if it like it's a it's it's still a leap of faith because I don't believe that Google and cognition were in communication at all.
50:46
And I think if they were that would be more like antitrust chaos and stuff but just economically you know that if you acqualance sheet and those many and that many like unvested options somebody is just going to be like wait so I can get that for basically free if and I can make all the employees whole and I get all the
51:09
employees and I don't have to pay really like anything to get that thing like it's just going to happen immediately and because it's just like you've create you've left this you've left this like you know $100 on the floor and someone's going to pick it up like the free market will just work. >> I think the I think the question that I
51:23
>> I think the I think the question that I had and that I think a lot of people probably had is what is the governance structure of the ghost ship right so Jeff >> crazy question >> Jeff uh Wang who's coming on the show at 1 p. m.
51:37
>> Uh Jeff and Scott will both be coming on at 1 p. m. for 15 minutes.
51:38
Okay, uh >> can we can we communicate that to the other guests by Yeah. Yeah.
51:42
Um, and so the question is like, okay, Jeff, you now run a company with hundreds of employees that are angry about what just happened that that probably like maybe they want to keep building Windsorf, but maybe they want to go and do something else.
51:59
And what happens like Jeff is basically, >> I would imagine, like has to make a bunch of calls. Yeah.
52:05
It's like, do you just keep running the business? Yeah.
52:08
>> Is there pressure to keep running the business? First question, Jeff.
52:10
Did you ever feel like uh is it Froto Baggins throwing the ring into the fire?
52:14
It's like pay out the $und00 million in bonuses.
52:19
After all, why shouldn't I keep it? Just throw the ring in.
52:21
Throw the ring into the Mount Doom. >> Yeah.
52:26
And the question was like, could >> Were you ever tempted?
52:28
>> Could could the the new leaders the leadership >> Yeah. Like was it ever?
52:32
>> Well, could could the leadership have decided, you know what, we can run this business super late.
52:35
We could actually run this business with like 10 people and and you know we're going to run it for a few years and we're going to we're going to use the advantages that we get from our own product to run a super lean team >> and then and then you would have it employees like effectively uh burned again potentially. But that didn't happen.
52:55
>> I'm very happy about it. >> Yeah.
52:58
>> And the question uh another question >> thing is like if you're if you're big tech and you're going to do one of these like zombie acquisitions, you got to leave enough for the unvested shares.
53:05
And if you're a founder and you're going to do one of these zombie acquisitions, the ghost ships got to be full of plunder, >> full of be stacked with treasure because then then the rescue divers will go and lift the ghost ship off the seafloor.
53:19
>> If big tech comms are telling you, you can't tell anybody that they're getting taken care of.
53:24
>> You have to risk it conversations.
53:27
>> Tell little birdie to go fly around and let people know.
53:29
You you you got to be you got to be having like quick calls.
53:33
Not not saying anything too specific, but saying what you said.
53:35
I think you worded it perfectly where it's like and don't cry. >> Poor Veroon. Poor Veroon, right?
53:39
Because because he was getting dragged because >> because he apparently he he apparently he apparently people were messaging me like >> he joined like the the all hands for like a minute, you know.
53:52
Um, and it just seemed like he was being like ultra like kind of like a psychopath being like, "See you guys.
54:01
>> Yeah, >> it was a good run."
54:02
>> And it's like, >> "Go have fun building, you know, continuing the mission."
54:06
>> This would not have happened if he had said, "No, I need an hour.
54:07
I need to explain everything."
54:10
Would that have killed the deal? Almost certainly.
54:11
If that killed the deal, what's the outcome for the employees?
54:17
>> Probably worse than what they got.
54:18
>> You think it would 100% have killed the deal? >> Almost certainly.
54:21
If >> I think one of the key deal points in the negotiation with Google was we do it via Google's comms and legal strategy >> because Google does not want to get hit with some crazy FTC lawsuit that's going to not just be some multi-billion dollar settlement, but also a huge headache for years and bad press and stuff like that.
54:42
So Google says, "Hey, we we want to do this our way.
54:45
It's going to be awkward, but we're going to take care of everyone. And and yes, we will.
54:48
Yes, we will leave enough money on the balance sheet to pay out all the unvested options and but in exchange, you got to do the comms our way, which was rough.
54:58
>> You have to create a terrible >> you have to be scapegoed by the entire >> you get hazed.
55:03
>> Yeah, you're going to be hazed for 48 hours.
55:05
>> You're going to get hazed.
55:05
But then >> and it's going to blow back on us.
55:10
>> Google didn't look good either that weekend. It was rough. It was rough.
55:13
>> Uh anyway, let me tell you about linear.
55:15
Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products.
55:16
Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps.
55:21
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55:24
>> And if you are launching a TBPN derivative product, derivative work, get on linear, >> the tool we use.
55:32
>> So what you would do is you'd put all the glasses of tap water that you need to drink and then you would just check those off at a time.
55:39
>> Like we only have one rule about copying us.
55:41
It's the derivative works clause in our terms and conditions and uh in there if you create a derivative work of TVPN you are legally required to drink a glass of tap water on >> every time you go live. >> Yes. Yeah. Every time you go live.
55:52
Um >> and so yeah again we don't have to pay for being we did invent TV. We invented news.
56:00
Um but we we will open source it.
56:03
It's an MIT license type of situ modified MIT license. Yep.
56:06
>> Uh the only modification is that you have to drink tap water.
56:08
Y uh >> it is a small price to pay.
56:12
Anyway, um, in other news, >> uh, question, what do you think, >> why do you think Google did this? >> Why?
56:18
>> Yeah, I mean, >> oh yes, yes, yes, that is the that is the real question is is we've talked about the role of the VCs.
56:24
I think based on what happened, never talk down on first ballot hall of famer Neil Meta.
56:31
Never talk down on the future for first ballot hall of famer.
56:33
Everyone was saying, "Oh, Neil Meta, Green Oaks, they they did this sloppy deal.
56:37
They screwing over the employees." Employees are great.
56:40
Neil meta potentially goed. I don't know. >> I agree. I agree. No, it was well played.
56:46
I think but the question is Google.
56:49
Why did Google feel like they needed to do a meta >> style trade deal in >> Yes, it's a good question.
56:59
So, so >> Windsurf in my I I don't know everything about all the employees they brought over.
57:07
They brought over 50 engineers.
57:07
I don't know if any of those are like insane AI researchers with like crazy citations on like foundational papers.
57:12
I don't know that it's the same.
57:14
I don't know that they're trying to build a super intelligence team to really bring their models to the frontier because they already have that like Gemini is is at the same like level of like AI research quality as OpenAI Anthropic by most benchmarks by most people that use them.
57:34
Like it doesn't feel like they're way behind there.
57:36
way behind there. Llama 4 on the other hand was a little bit behind and so and it felt like Llama 4 was specifically behind not on the product side but on the research side like they just weren't figuring out what works in RL and so they had to bring over a ton of people to just be like how do we actually train this next model like behemoth couldn't they couldn't tame the behemoth like they got to get some behemoth tamers in
57:59
the building and it seems like that's why they acquired all the different researchers who know okay like training on a 100k Hey, GP H100 GPUs gives you this and then you need to use this data and you need to hold back this data and
58:12
you have this this reward function and this reinforcement learning technique and you need to do all these different things and so you need AI researchers for that but Meta has great product people. So like they're going to be able
58:21
So like they're going to be able to take what they build and then vend it into Instagram and vend it into all sorts of different places and use it to optimize the ads 1% and make a trillion dollars.
58:32
Like they're going to be fine on that side.
58:33
Google is great at AI research. DeepMind is amazing.
58:36
They have so many reason.
58:38
They invented the transformer.
58:39
They're not behind on the quality of the foundation model.
58:41
They are they are behind on product >> and they are they are behind on like user experience and everyone complains, oh, they have this amazing V3 model, but like I had to log in seven times to get access to it and then go through an upgrade thing and it was on the wrong Google account and then I have to trigger it and then I get >> here's the here's the the uh >> the steel man for the short sellers. No, no, no.
59:04
Here's what's what's kind of interesting about the way this is developed.
59:07
So, at at Google's last uh developer event, they launched Jules, which is an async development agent. Okay.
59:14
>> For for for code codegen, >> it's a cloud code competitor, an open >> more so like a dev. Yeah. Devon AI competitor. >> Devon competitor.
59:22
>> And so now you have uh you imagine Google has more ambitions around codegen, right? They've seen anthropics.
59:29
very few businesses actually like will work at Google, right?
59:32
You need a billion dollars of revenue or you're going to get shut down most likely.
59:35
And so codegen is an area that I'm I'm sure they're taking very seriously.
59:40
I haven't heard a lot about jewels since the event.
59:44
I haven't heard about people that are that are using it.
59:45
I'm sure it's I'm sure it's powerful.
59:47
Y >> but you now have a dynamic where some you have cognition and Devon who got not I can't say cloned by Google but again like they were the first like serious like enterprise coding agent >> and so uh and and the the Windsurf GTM you know sales marketing team versus the former Windsurf founders and top researchers uh who are now at Google and so I'm just incredibly excited to watch this play out.
1:00:17
Pavle was uh posting earlier.
1:00:20
He said, "I hope these guys smoke Google at AI coding.
1:00:22
Imagine the chip on your shoulder after this if you're a Windsurf employee."
1:00:26
So, yeah, everybody's got to be very fired up.
1:00:31
>> Okay, really quickly, we got to uh I want to I want to track some poly markets around Google.
1:00:35
Uh Google forced to sell Chrome.
1:00:38
Remember, we were uh tracking that a while back.
1:00:40
There was a question of whether they need to split it up because the FTC, we've been talking about the FTC a lot.
1:00:44
I will pull up this uh this Google forced to sell Chrome. It is down at 1% now.
1:00:49
No one thinks that they're going to have to sell Chrome.
1:00:55
And of course the the browser war is heating up completely.
1:00:57
Um and I was checking the uh the the not tracking the Sundar Pachai um thing, but >> Sundar Pitch AI >> Pitch AI he has been pitching AI very successfully.
1:01:13
Um but uh the uh the uh the the the the question of like competition is like it's heating up a ton in browsers and then now it's heating up in this and like the FTC should totally be sitting back and just watching the gladatorial games play out and yet like even though there look at look at the vibe look at the vibe coding market right now.
1:01:36
Is competition not thriving? >> It's insane. It's insane. Yeah. No, I completely agree.
1:01:41
Uh, and so like I think I think there's a lot of people that are making the argument that like, oh, you can't keep blaming Lena Khan.
1:01:47
She's not even there anymore.
1:01:47
And it's like she was there for long enough to really like lay out a new pattern and just instill a bunch of behavior in the big tech companies that results in these in these crazy deals.
1:01:58
Um, anyway, let me tell you about numeral numeralhq. com. Sales tax on autopilot.
1:02:03
Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance.
1:02:06
Um, it's a it's like an AGI for sales tax. That's right.
1:02:10
Should we talk about uh Zuck's new supercluster? >> Oh, yeah. Let's go through it. Okay.
1:02:15
So, >> and there's some new reporting from the Times as well around their strategy, which we'll cover next, but why don't we start with uh Zuck hit threads this morning.
1:02:24
>> He hit threads hard >> with a thread >> with a thread. It was very cool.
1:02:27
He had a great visualization.
1:02:28
I hope we can pull this up.
1:02:30
I'll put it in the tab, but um basically uh bangers. There we go.
1:02:37
um this uh >> Jarvis send link to Bang >> send link to Ben.
1:02:44
>> So basically he has this cool visualization of how big the Hyperion data center is and it's just the full size of Manhattan and somebody was replying to this being like he's building the cube.
1:02:54
Oh Sam De Mo from uh he's been on the show a bunch from Impulse.
1:02:57
Uh he's building the cube because there's this old visualization of like if you put a billion people in one building in Manhattan it would just be this cube.
1:03:05
And so everyone who's like extremely pro- building housing is like, "Let's build a cube. Let's build a cube."
1:03:10
Anyway, the news is that Mark Zuckerberg is is uh giving more details.
1:03:15
Not he he's announcing that like the super intelligence team is real.
1:03:17
It's been only rumored reported.
1:03:18
He hadn't he hasn't actually said, "Hey, we're doing all this."
1:03:22
That was all like leaked reporting.
1:03:24
He came out and posted on threads and he posted on Facebook, too, saying like, "This is real and here are the details."
1:03:30
He says he's going to invest bill hundreds of billions of dollars in in capex.
1:03:33
Uh which is which is what they're doing like 60 to 80 a year now.
1:03:39
And so I guess like it's more just like he's going to continue that for the couple years.
1:03:44
He's not giving specific guidance on where the >> 2024 was 84 basically 85 billion. >> Oh capex or ibida. >> That was IVIDA. >> Okay. Yeah. Look up the capex.
1:03:55
>> Cap capex was between 38 and 37 billion. >> Okay.
1:03:59
Um, and then some of that goes towards like reels and then some of that's used for AI and then the AI stuff kind of slips over into reals and and just other uh other other data center uses.
1:04:08
But in general, you know, he's going all in.
1:04:10
He's continuing to invest billions.
1:04:12
Uh, what's interesting is that he claims that Meta will be the first lab to finish a 1 gawatt supercluster.
1:04:19
So he's basically racing against Stargate and thinks that he can bring Meta's next data center online before Stargate and he's calling his 1 gigawatt supercluster Prometheus, which is a hilarious name.
1:04:33
The guy loves the Roman Empire, apparently loves Greek mythology, too.
1:04:37
But Prometheus is a very, very edgy name to pick in my opinion because Prometheus is the guy is the Titan who stole the fire from the gods.
1:04:47
And it's like I I get that it's like the seed of of like the new it's like the seed of humanity.
1:04:53
It's the seed of this new thing.
1:04:54
It's a great name in many ways, but also it's like >> if God's real like he might not like that and that could be a problem. >> That could be bad.
1:05:05
>> But uh you know Zuck seems to like like uh uh Icarissian names. Yeah.
1:05:11
>> Because um Orion >> he likes flying I mean he objectively likes flying close to the sun. >> He does.
1:05:17
That's kind of where he feels at home. The warmth of the sun.
1:05:20
>> The warmth of the sun.
1:05:20
And you know the the the hot take on Icarus is that you know everyone talks about oh like you know don't fly too close to the sun.
1:05:26
You don't want to be Icarus.
1:05:28
But you know who you know the person who was like telling Icarus to do that. >> No. >> Surprise surprise.
1:05:35
No one remembers his name. His name was Datalus.
1:05:37
And Datalus was like, "Oh, don't fly close to the sun." Who do we remember? We remember Icarus. That's right.
1:05:42
And so maybe >> hot take.
1:05:44
It's better to be Icarus than Datalus.
1:05:46
If you want history to remember your name, even if you fly too close to the sun, even if you have a great fall, you will be remembered. >> That's right.
1:05:53
>> So maybe it's a, you know, uh, Icarus gets rich.
1:05:57
Datalus sounds smart situation.
1:06:01
Datalus sounds smart, Icorus gets rich. >> That's right.
1:06:04
>> I think that might be the what's going on. >> New mental model.
1:06:05
>> New mental model. Anyway, I mean, we I was also on one of the first shows we ever did, I was talking about how how how the the the name of the new VR headset Orion is kind of odd because Orion is like this hunter um but was notoriously like over his skis with the
1:06:19
hunting and was killing all the animals and like was smited by the gods and you know and and basically like it was it was like a textbook case of like hubris and aggre and overaggression like like the moral of the story of of Orion who is the hunter in the stars. the reason
1:06:32
the reason he's in the stars is because of hubris.
1:06:36
And so it's very funny to name your product like a like a tale of hubris. Maybe it's a reminder.
1:06:41
I I I seriously want to talk to Zuck about this because like I'm very interested like how many layers deep does he go?
1:06:47
Cuz I mean the guy's like clearly like studies this stuff.
1:06:51
Like he he's like a student of the Roman Empire more than me.
1:06:53
I just I just Google it when a new name comes out and like look at the summary.
1:06:57
I imagine that he reads it much deeper and I imagine that he gets the joke and and is doing this almost ironically which I think is cool.
1:07:05
Um anyway, uh the other news is that uh they're aiming to to scale up Hyperion.
1:07:10
Uh so Prome Prometheus will come online in 2026.
1:07:13
So that's probably one year away, maybe a little bit more than one year if it it's toward the end of 2026.
1:07:20
Uh, and then they're building Hyperion, which will be able to scale up to 5 gigawatts over several years.
1:07:27
And that feels like simultaneously like crazy, insane, ambitious, amazing. I love it.
1:07:32
I'm super excited for the capability coming out of that.
1:07:36
And also like the biggest glass of cold water poured on the AI 2027 folks like of all time because like I feel like everyone in the AI like is going to be self-reinforcing and just ripping is like well yeah like the data center capacity will 10x every year for the next 20 years.
1:07:53
And it's like and and Zuck's like we're going to 5x over the next three years.
1:07:57
I don't know how many several years is.
1:07:58
I imagine like three or four something.
1:08:00
But it's just funny to be like like it's it's incredibly ambitious.
1:08:05
It's the biggest data center ever.
1:08:07
I I believe it's like this massive project. It's so cool.
1:08:09
It's amazing and it still doesn't match the rhetoric of like the really crazy AI people at all. >> Totally.
1:08:15
>> Um but you know, it's fun.
1:08:15
Anyway, that's the story of uh Zucks.
1:08:17
Any any other takeaways from the Zuck supercluster? >> Congrats.
1:08:21
We should We should ring the gong.
1:08:23
We should ring the gong for Zuck. >> Let's hit the gong. >> Hundreds of billions.
1:08:29
Uh so there was some new reporting from Eli Tan over at the New York Times around uh Meta's new super intelligence lab is discussing major AI strategy changes >> and so there is a picture >> what does that mean like like going close source or >> Yeah. So I'll read through it.
1:08:46
So Meta's newly formed super intelligence lab has discussed making a series of changes to the company's artificial intelligence strategy and what would amount to a major shakeup.
1:08:54
Last week, a small group of top members of the lab, including Alexander Wang, meta's new chief AI officer, discussed abandoning the company's most powerful open source AI model called Behemoth in favor of developing a closed model to people with knowledge of the matter.
1:09:07
Said for years, Meta has chosen to open source its AI models, which means it makes the I'm going to not I'm not going to read this.
1:09:16
Any move towards a closed AI model would be >> what is uh what is software?
1:09:19
Can you >> They were about to say they they the New York Times wrote uh they're about to make the computer code public.
1:09:26
>> What what what is a computer? Oh, what what is code?
1:09:29
Can we can we can we explain this for our audience?
1:09:32
>> Yeah, we should we should really break it down.
1:09:33
We're about to do a whole deep dive.
1:09:34
Um anyway, so Eli writes, "Any move towards a closed AI model would be a philosophical change at Meta as much as a technical one."
1:09:41
Uh Meta has won over developers for open sourcing its AI models and one of its top AI executives Yan Lun has said that the platform that will win will be the open one.
1:09:53
>> So um so yeah I think this is obviously still uh still very much in flux but >> build Mecca Churchill >> Mecca Churchill >> if he builds me Mecca Churchill instant win instantic win over Elon.
1:10:05
They're clearly battling it out.
1:10:08
They're trying to fight in MMA wars and and and they never they never got that fight down.
1:10:14
Now they're fighting it out in AI. Build Mecca Churchill.
1:10:16
It'll be such a good meme. Be great.
1:10:21
>> Whatever you build, Zuck, you got to sell it to people. You got to use Adio.
1:10:24
Customer relationship magic.
1:10:24
Adio is the AI native CRM that builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level.
1:10:30
You can get started for free.
1:10:30
Um, tailwinds of the last decade are the are now headwinds, says Buco Capital Bloke.
1:10:37
Uh he says higher rates, AI labor compression and available roles salaries, business model maturity, managing margins versus growth, crowded knife fights versus green field, less liquid, less liquidity because companies stay private longer slot forever.
1:10:48
Uh worse M&A environment due to regulation PBD uh technology enabled outsourcing.
1:10:56
So little bit bearish from the buco capital bloke.
1:10:59
Uh Sheil says, "Feels like a good time for everyone to learn about single trigger versus double trigger acceleration of shares."
1:11:05
So single trigger is if there is an acquisition all of your shares vest.
1:11:10
I don't know if this would the the question is like how do you define trigger because these zombie acquisitions you're on the go ship.
1:11:17
Who knows if you trigger the trigger?
1:11:19
But double trigger means you have to be acquired change of control and then fired.
1:11:27
>> And so double trigger is hard.
1:11:27
Hard to negotiate that if you're just the 300th or the 100. >> Almost never happens.
1:11:34
>> Uh the people who negotiate are the CFOs who come in. >> Yeah. >> CFO comes in.
1:11:37
Doesn't matter if CFO is employee number 700 or number three.
1:11:42
Like CFO is going to get single trigger always. >> Always. I don't know.
1:11:45
Maybe not always, but like like the people who know know, but you should know about it.
1:11:49
You should know about single trigger and double trigger.
1:11:52
The other interesting thing that I was digging into that we didn't really ever get to the point of like understanding was for a long time people were saying like hey you can debate all of the stuff about Windsurf but the the employees on the go ship the ones who are in the remain co the ones who were left behind they would have vetoed this deal if they could have.
1:12:09
I think if you go to them today and say, "Hey, you're working at Cognition. You're using RAMP now."
1:12:15
>> They're gonna be like, "Yeah, I'm happy."
1:12:17
And it's not like, it's not even like they landed at a boring company.
1:12:19
I was saying like they could land at like, you know, some old line company that just picks them up like what was that company that that uh like uh Humane landed at like HP or like they're like doing like smart printers now.
1:12:30
Like that's not exactly like a like a like a upgrade in terms of status in Silicon Valley.
1:12:36
>> It's not exactly a >> airhorn moment.
1:12:38
You got to put your you got to put these on so you can uh experience the audio >> audio.
1:12:43
Um but but but going to cognition seems like a great upgrade in terms of just like like you know being at another cool company.
1:12:50
You're still on the startup roller coaster. You're on the ride.
1:12:53
You're you have a lot of unbounded upside.
1:12:55
U >> I mean I I I don't want to um I don't want to be uh take too strong of a position here but but Scott and the team at Cognition are some of the best.
1:13:04
And you know, if you just lost all your engineering talent and you're confident in your own abilities and you want to work with worldclass engineering talent, >> y >> really great really great uh place to end up. >> Yep.
1:13:18
>> Um really quickly, let me tell you about Finn. ai.
1:13:20
The number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake offs, number one ranking on A2 on on G2. Go to Finn. ai.
1:13:30
um customer but the but the question that I was uh running through and I was getting to was um >> single trigger double trigger like that that does matter that is important in acquisitions but another thing that potentially could be relevant in a future acquisition if we get sort of
1:13:50
like you know the wind surf situation one of these zombie aqua hires with the bad ending where even years later you're like I would have loved to have vetoed that uh like I really didn't I never I wasn't happy with the ending at all and I haven't changed my position for years. Not just it wasn't just a few days of
1:14:03
Not just it wasn't just a few days of chaos.
1:14:04
It was like forever I was like ah I wish that hadn't happened.
1:14:07
I picked the wrong company.
1:14:08
Um the question is if you exercise your stock options would you have a different outcome?
1:14:13
And so uh essentially when you get when when you get a job offer from a startup they give you a stock option contract that allows you to exercise and pay to buy stock actual stock in the company for a lower price.
1:14:27
And the question is your legal rights as an option holder are different than as a stockholder.
1:14:33
So an unexced stock option makes you technically a contract creditor, not a stockholder.
1:14:41
And so um you do not have the bundle of statu statutory and fiduciary law rights that attach to stockholders.
1:14:47
So if there was going to be like a class action for the ghost ship employees and and they really did want to block it or they wanted to sue Google or they wanted to sue the founders or something like that, they would say this is a breach of fiduciary duty and I'm a shareholder. You had a duty to me. Yeah.
1:15:02
>> But they didn't in this case because I if they hadn't if they hadn't exercised.
1:15:06
I'm sure some of those employees had early exercised. It's a thing.
1:15:08
But it's just an interesting piece of the of the of the puzzle that we fortunately didn't even have to go down this road.
1:15:15
But I do think that people might want to re have this conversation because I mean the chatbt summary says uh to preserve more robust remedies that stock law makes available.
1:15:26
Inspection rights, fiduciary duty claims, derivative suits, appraisal, exercise first, complain later.
1:15:32
Exercise first, complain later.
1:15:35
And so you can do a partial exercise, but if you don't own a single share of the company, then you don't have the right to actually sue via or you you might have less of a claim to sue in in a scenario like this.
1:15:46
So it's a uh it's a potentially rough scenario.
1:15:49
Should we go through Elon? Let's switch gears.
1:15:54
Elon is leading a massive $2 billion investment from SpaceX >> into his other company XAI.
1:16:05
>> Yes, we've talked about this.
1:16:05
Nothing better than one hand washing the other. >> That's right.
1:16:09
>> This is what we like to see. >> Yep. >> It's so efficient. >> It really is.
1:16:13
>> How else do you wash your hands if not with one and the other? >> Yeah. Try washing. >> It's impossible. >> Don't Yeah.
1:16:17
Don't try to wash your hand.
1:16:19
is taking 2 billion from the SpaceX balance sheet which is what at 400 billion now and they're raising billions pretty regularly and doing tenders and stuff.
1:16:28
So SpaceX is uh I think the the largest they're kind of neck and neck with open AI in terms of private market uh companies.
1:16:35
Uh it's a 20-year-old company, very stable business.
1:16:39
Starlink's print throwing off cash.
1:16:40
There's like so much that's that is mature about that business.
1:16:43
Obviously still got to get Starship to work.
1:16:45
Still got to get to Mars.
1:16:47
still got to go to the moon regularly, but uh you know, exciting road ahead, but still very solid business.
1:16:53
>> Uh and he's taking two billion off the balance sheet of SpaceX and putting it into XAI.
1:16:56
And so the the the map of of Elon is getting crazy. Yeah, it's a Katzu. >> It's a It's a Katzu.
1:17:04
Everything Everything owns everything else.
1:17:06
So >> the question the question that when when I saw this news come out >> Yeah. What' you say?
1:17:11
>> My uh my first reaction was that Mecca is going to love Mars.
1:17:16
He's going to love it up there.
1:17:16
It's going to be the first potentially the first AI to get to Mars.
1:17:20
My second reaction was I actually think that if you add up the valuations of every Elon company, Tesla taking at number seven on the Mag 7, $900ish billion dollar company.
1:17:33
>> SpaceX 400ish billion dollar company.
1:17:36
XAI which is maybe getting valued at 200. >> It's at 200, right?
1:17:38
Yeah, >> something around 200 now. >> Um, great.
1:17:42
And then Neuralink which is what at like 12 somewhere somewhere between like seven I don't know somewhere around roughly around like double >> almost a almost a $10 billion company might as well leave.
1:17:52
>> So somewhere in that range. >> Yes.
1:17:54
>> It's actually interesting to think of of if if you rolled all these assets up together. >> Yeah.
1:18:00
>> What do you think it would trade at a premium to all of their standalone valuations?
1:18:04
>> I don't know enough about wait in the public markets or private markets.
1:18:07
>> Yeah, in the public markets. >> I don't know.
1:18:09
I don't know enough about like because I've I've heard a lot of a lot of public markets investors say stuff like the market just really wants a pure play in this.
1:18:17
They >> what's more pure play than Elon Inc. >> just Elon Inc.
1:18:22
>> because a lot of these companies still even at various points end up being founder bets totally >> like Tesla is still a founder bet.
1:18:29
Will Elon figure out autonomous vehicles?
1:18:33
>> And I I do think that there's this underrated narrative of like >> and XAI too at $200 billion.
1:18:36
It's like I don't think investors are underwriting the the the the new AI companion today like the profit stream or even revenue stream from the API business. Yeah. No way. >> Yeah.
1:18:50
They're, you know, they announced a $200 million government contract today.
1:18:54
They were underwriting Elon being able to get deals like that done, right?
1:18:59
>> So, >> and even even remember Ben Thompson, we we asked him about this and he he basically said, "I can't do analysis on Elon companies because they are detached from traditional business reality.
1:19:11
Y and so my question is like if you roll all these things up, is this a $3 trillion company? >> Yeah. >> I don't know.
1:19:23
>> I mean the the interesting thing is like like it does give you as a retail investor like you can pull so many different narratives. Yeah.
1:19:30
So, like right now, just within just just within Tesla stock, if you're a if you're a Tesla investor, you can look at what's happening with Tesla deliveries because of the political backlash or what's happening with the with the tariff war, the EV tax credit, and you can be like, that's bearish.
1:19:48
But then you can simultaneously tell yourself a story about, well, robo taxi is going to be be so big that it'll make up for everything.
1:19:56
And then if that doesn't sit with you, you can be like Optimus is going to be so big that it that it justifies a multi- trillion dollar valuation.
1:20:02
So I'm still a buyer, right?
1:20:04
Because you have like these these call options.
1:20:06
>> Really, it's all about the rare earths on Mars. >> Yeah. So imagine imagine that.
1:20:08
So right now with Tesla, I see like four stories and they're kind of like too bearish, too bullish potentially.
1:20:15
Like the bearish ones are are EV tax credit and, you know, not being able to sell as many vehicles.
1:20:23
The bullish ones are like maybe he figures out robo taxi, maybe he figures out Optimus, right?
1:20:27
And that's why you might choose to buy or sell Tesla >> or Neuralink chip in your brain with >> all of them together.
1:20:34
When you put all of them together, it's like on any given day, you could it's so much easier not to be a panicking, right?
1:20:40
You don't need to be panicking because you're like, "Well, yeah, like Neurolink got pushed back by the FDA today, but SpaceX landed Starship, so like I'm buying."
1:20:49
or like, oh, the starship blew up, but you know, Neuralink, you know, made a monkey play Counter-Strike, so like I'm I'm going long, right?
1:20:58
There's like always some good news to latch on to when you see the the Elon portfolio as a whole.
1:21:01
Um, but there's this fascinating chart here.
1:21:05
I don't know if we can pull this up, but uh it's the links between all the different uh Elon companies.
1:21:09
So, so SpaceX buys it SpaceX buys 5 million annually in in vehicle parts, energy systems, and and the Model X astro van.
1:21:20
So that's money flowing from SpaceX to Tesla.
1:21:22
Um stainless steel alloy technology Starship materials for Cybertruck uh go from SpaceX to Tesla.
1:21:30
And then the Boring Company purchased $300,000 annually in energy systems and uses the Model 3 for the Las Vegas uh loop.
1:21:37
And so they're buying from Tesla.
1:21:40
Starlink has a T-Mobile partnership connectivity for vehicle internet and superchargers in Teslas.
1:21:45
And then you have all these other things where like Neuralink might link into XAI.
1:21:49
XAI did the all stock acquisition of XCORP and then uh there's a study to uh for robotic arm control and future mind controlled limbs that links Neuralink to Optimus.
1:22:01
Uh Solar City was acquired by Tesla.
1:22:04
FSD is a separate product.
1:22:04
So like all these companies are are overlapping.
1:22:08
And the interesting question is like is like should should they just be that correct?
1:22:12
Like and what is stopping that?
1:22:14
Should they all just be under one Musk Holdings, Musk Inc.?
1:22:19
And if it was, I think it's that that would actually be extremely uncomfortable in the public markets because there would be all these crazy shareholder lawsuits where so like, you know, if you were if you were an if you were a shareholder in in Nur in like Musk Inc. and Musk Inc.
1:22:38
is public and owns Neuralink.
1:22:41
You can >> there's also there's also this beautiful there's also this beautiful cottage industry of people that are effectively resellers of Elon shares that own a lot of these companies and wouldn't necessarily want this to happen because it that that kind of stops the gravy train uh gravy train.
1:22:57
I had somebody message me yesterday and said, "It's funny how investing in Elon Co.
1:23:01
is not too dissimilar for from buying watches from ads, you know, because like if you have a great relationship with your ad in this case, which is Elon, >> you can get direct access to the companies, but if you don't, you're on the secondary market just buying up SPVS."
1:23:18
>> You're going to get bezel. com.
1:23:18
But don't worry because your bezel concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. Greatition.
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1:23:26
Uh anyway, uh if you're looking to buy Tesla shares, the one Elon Musk company in the public markets, head over to public. com.
1:23:34
Investing for those who take it seriously.
1:23:36
They got multiasset investing, industryleading yields, they're trusted by millions.
1:23:38
Um anyway, uh in other news, uh is there anything else we should talk about with Elon ripping two billion into XAI?
1:23:44
I think we're good there.
1:23:46
Uh let's move on to Casey Neistat.
1:23:48
Some personnel news, baby.
1:23:51
He's joining Mod Retro as chief storyteller.
1:23:54
That's not a real title and it's not a real job, but I'm excited to be a part of the team. I love the cander. I don't know. I've mispronounced that.
1:24:03
But he put out an 11minute video talking all breaking down the mod retro thesis all about how planned obsolescence is destroying great consumer electronics devices.
1:24:13
You buy something and it's in the trash in a couple years. It's collecting dust.
1:24:17
And he goes through some of the products that he's had when he was young that still work as intended.
1:24:22
They didn't need some crazy software update. was an IoT toaster.
1:24:23
It was, you know, the things that he loves, the Walkman, the original Game Boy.
1:24:28
And he breaks down how Palmer's thinking about building and the Mod Retro team is thinking about building a quote unquote like Game Boy that's different from the other companies that are also creating similar like emulator products.
1:24:42
He's like, I got this $50 one and it works.
1:24:46
Like you can actually play it.
1:24:46
Now, you can't play it at a high level.
1:24:48
like the frame rate is not like the the quality of the product is not at a level where it's like truly competitive, but also it's it's kind of designed just like as like you know teu level junk basically and it's just like how can we just like slop it up for a little bit whereas uh publish the just getting to the quality level of the original like Game Boy Color.
1:25:10
I have a Game Boy Color from my childhood. Oh yeah.
1:25:12
And a while back I just put in it had been a two decades I just put in new batteries and just turned it on.
1:25:20
It just immediately booted up and worked.
1:25:22
>> And that just doesn't happen anymore with with modern electronics because >> after Tyler updated to glass >> we made we made we made >> How is it? Give us a thumbs up.
1:25:32
We're we're missing a microphone for Tyler today.
1:25:35
So just give us the thumbs up. It's still good. >> We got a thumbs up. >> We got a thumbs up. Okay.
1:25:38
Well, he will be back on the stream uh shortly.
1:25:39
We will we will buy another camera.
1:25:41
We will buy another camera.
1:25:44
Um and uh and we will also buy another mattress from EightLe mattress cover. Go to eight. com. Uh get a pod 5 ultra.
1:25:53
They have a 5-year warranty, 30 night risk-f free trial, free returns, free shipping.
1:25:56
Um Shane Copelan over at Poly Market says, "One day there may be more AIs than humans, creating, pricing, trading millions of Poly Markets on everything.
1:26:04
A unique benefit of onchain prediction markets is the ability for AI agents to plug in multiple groups quietly print on poly market with agentic workflows as AI ushers in super intelligence.
1:26:14
Poly market ushers in collective intelligence. It's happening.
1:26:17
Um I'm using the best AI models. Oh, interesting.
1:26:20
DED is doing something over there.
1:26:22
Uh I asked it to use modern portfolio theory bet sizing and make calculated bet.
1:26:26
Yeah, very interesting to see the the interaction of AI and and and like web 3 or like you know just crypto generally cryptoowered protocols because it's like >> this is one that actually makes sense because there was there was a there was an era of >> of basically meme coins that were just like I'm not a normal memecoin.
1:26:42
I'm an AI meme coin >> but this is actually bringing together and them uh bringing them together in an interesting way.
1:26:50
Uh Josh Kushner, friend of the show had an absolute banger.
1:26:52
He said, "The goal of life is to be excited to go to work and excited to go home." >> I love it.
1:26:58
>> And I couldn't agree more. >> That's fantastic.
1:26:59
Put that on a billboard, Josh. Go to adquick. com.
1:27:00
Out of home advertising made easier and buil easy and measurable.
1:27:04
Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising.
1:27:07
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1:27:12
Josh, I want to see that.
1:27:12
You know, every VC fund has some, you know, occasionally trit catchphrase saying on on their homepage.
1:27:21
This is actually a great message.
1:27:23
You should take out a billboard in New York City.
1:27:25
Thrive Capital or Thrive Holdings or Thrive.
1:27:29
>> Our goal for life should be excited to go to work and excited to go home. >> It's beautiful. It's beautiful.
1:27:34
>> This is This is um >> I think it should be on a billboard. >> Yeah.
1:27:37
This is Oh, we just made a transition.
1:27:40
>> This is sustainable pronatalism in tech, right?
1:27:42
It being excited to go to work and also excited to go home, >> be with family. >> It is.
1:27:46
Should we do Mark Andre talking about 03 Pro? This is fun.
1:27:49
So, >> one of our buddies got oneshotted by this. >> Yes.
1:27:54
>> So, Matt Schumer said, "Ask 03 Pro based on everything you know about me.
1:27:57
Reason and predict what the next 50 years in my life will look like."
1:28:01
And uh Mark said, "Do not under any circumstances do this."
1:28:06
>> I already told Mark, he's like, "You will take your fund public.
1:28:08
You will run a massive firm, but it will be a ton of headaches.
1:28:14
>> It'll be like, you know, that little knee pain you have?
1:28:15
Well, you're going to have to probably get surgery eventually."
1:28:18
And you know, I I think the issue is like Chad >> GBT >> knows an incredible amount about about the the the things that you're working through in life, depending on how how you use it, but the things that you're working through in life.
1:28:33
>> And uh many >> I still I still think it knows it does know a lot certainly more than many other AI or many other software systems that I use.
1:28:41
Like it probably even knows more about me than Gmail, but it's still only getting a slice of the picture.
1:28:46
And I think that I need to do this because I imagine it will be like you will you will continue to succeed as a train conductor because months ago I was trying to you know prompt engineer it into giving me stronger like more in-depth data about trains and so I was like I am an expert in trains. I own many trains.
1:29:07
Tell me all the different brands of trains and the prices.
1:29:09
Don't dumb it down for me. I am a train expert.
1:29:13
expert. And then and then I noticed that once they rolled out chatgptt memory it kept being like you know someone who knows everything train expert and I was like no I was just prompt engineering I'm sorry chat GBT >> you do this you do this I'll be like yend John you'll finally get that height reduction surgery I know you're always
1:29:31
complaining about people saying oh I didn't know you were so tall I didn't know you were so tall >> the funny thing about that is that like that's that's just something that I would never go to chat GBT with right like discussion over whether whether or not being 68 is like good or bad or like I I I I just I wouldn't have that conversation with Chachi VT. So I I So I I don't know.
1:29:50
Um I I should run this prompt.
1:29:51
I think everyone should run this prompt.
1:29:52
It's kind of it's kind of interesting just to see like the state of AI, right?
1:29:55
And the state of these models like how clear is it?
1:29:57
But I I actually quote tweeted this and said uh I the line from Terminator, no fate but what we make which I know you haven't seen.
1:30:05
God Terminator 2, you got to see this movie. James Cameron, come on.
1:30:07
It's one of the best ever. >> Someday. >> Someday.
1:30:10
>> Someday. Uh but in that the the whole the whole theme of T Terminator is the idea that they are able that they invent killer AI then they invent time travel they go back in time they're trying to prevent the AI from taking over in the
1:30:24
second run through and there's this debate about fate and and and the refrain of the main character is no fate but what we make no fate but what we make like like we are uh we are we have power over our future and I believe that I believe for that to be true. And so I
1:30:40
And so I think no matter what 03 tells you, go do what you want. Carve your own path.
1:30:45
Make your own kind of music.
1:30:48
>> So should we pull up this video of >> Lucky Impulsive Podcast? I absolutely love this.
1:30:56
This is from Kyle Harrison >> now. I'll be right back. But we should play this.
1:31:01
>> Yeah, I will try and pull it up.
1:31:01
Um, so Kyle Harrison is I'm putting this in the tab. Let's see. Um, let's see.
1:31:10
So, uh, Kyle Harrison is clipping the impulsive podcast with Palmer Lucky.
1:31:15
Uh, talking about Kyle says, "A strong afficionado of conspiracy theories myself.
1:31:20
Palmer Lucky has given a perfect direct answer to anyone who believes the moon landings were faked."
1:31:27
And I thought this is very very fun because uh as as it's become more uh more open to just talk about conspiracy theories generally uh there's been a uh a weird meme where people have gone from like I believe in one conspiracy theory to I believe in all the conspiracy theories.
1:31:43
And if you believe in all of them you're not really thinking critically.
1:31:46
You're not actually thinking independently.
1:31:48
Uh and independent thinking is what's the most important.
1:31:51
So how are we doing on the video?
1:31:53
Can we pull that video up?
1:31:53
I would love to watch this and react to uh Palmer Lucky on the Impulsive podcast.
1:32:01
Full screen if we can be great. >> Let's see. It is loading.
1:32:03
Um but he gives a direct answer to uh it's a very funny reaction. >> We're working on it.
1:32:10
It's not >> There's a quote tweet of Mike saying topic at lunch today.
1:32:14
What is one what is the one conspiracy theory that you have the most conviction in being true?
1:32:20
Moonlanding being fake was the consensus of the group.
1:32:23
Mike, who you hanging out with? canvas outdoors.
1:32:24
You got some wild men in there. It's crazy.
1:32:30
I like the conspiracy theory that uh that John Wils Booth was a British agent and killed Lincoln.
1:32:35
This is a very interesting one.
1:32:37
Have you guys heard this? No.
1:32:38
You've never heard this conspiracy theory? Yeah.
1:32:39
There's a conspiracy theory like everyone knows about the JFK conspiracy.
1:32:42
You got to go deep to get into Lincoln assassination conspiracy theories, but there's all there's very little information about this and I don't know if we'll ever get to the bottom of the >> There was no Reddit. >> There was no Yeah.
1:32:53
No, no Fortchan at the time.
1:32:55
Um, but uh, but if you look at like some of the incentives at play at the time, like it's it's completely possible that like someone was pushing John Wilks Booth to do this and potentially it wasn't this reaction to the war or something. I don't know.
1:33:09
It's just an interesting theory that like I don't think many people have gone down.
1:33:13
Uh, anyway, uh, do we have a chance to pull this up? Yes. No. >> It's not working. >> Okay, we'll skip it. We'll skip it. Uh, let's move over.
1:33:19
Anyways, just just to give people kind of the takeaway, the uh Pal Palmer was basically uh Logan said, "I don't believe the moon landing was real."
1:33:27
Palmer says, "The reason that I think it's real is the astronauts >> left these effectively reflectors on the surface of the moon, and you can build your own laser system to beam them up, wait for the light to travel, and then come back to you."
1:33:43
>> And it will not bounce like the laser won't bounce back if you just shoot it at the any part of the random moon.
1:33:47
You have to hit the mirror and they put a mirror up there so that you could do this.
1:33:52
The real question, the real conspiracy theories, the real real conspiracy theorists ask how deep does this go?
1:33:57
Who put the mirror there? Maybe it was aliens.
1:34:01
>> Yeah, >> because it could have been aliens and >> or it could have been a a rover, you know, or or a >> rover >> like like a nonhum like a non-human landing. >> Oh, rover.
1:34:10
I've never heard this term. Like an alien rover.
1:34:13
>> No, like the Mars rover. >> Oh. Oh. Oh, okay.
1:34:15
So humans never went, but NASA still put the mirror there. Oh, that's funny.
1:34:20
That's a but we can't get humans there.
1:34:23
But we can get a mirror there. So let's do that.
1:34:25
And let's So it's like the moon landing was like 90% >> or let's just land a mirror on the moon. Smash it. No. No.
1:34:33
But the um but the but the real the real theory that Palmer very clearly did not deny is that the moon he didn't say the moon wasn't made of cheese. >> Cheese.
1:34:43
I knew you were going to go to cheese. Yeah.
1:34:44
Well, hopefully we'll have Palmer on the show soon, be able to press him on on the moon landing further, get to the bottom of it, see how deep the rabbit hole really goes.
1:34:54
Um, but we have our first guest coming in the stream. Welcome to the stream. Jeff, how you doing?
1:35:00
>> Hey guys, great to be back. Thanks for having me.
1:35:02
>> It's great to have you.
1:35:03
>> For some reason, I'm missing it. Let me see.
1:35:05
I think I lost >> John's not getting audio. >> Oh, are we good? Are we good?
1:35:10
>> I'm not getting anything right now. No.
1:35:13
Can you can you uh you got me?
1:35:13
Uh I got you loud and clear. Uh how are you doing?
1:35:18
You had a busy busy uh we haven't put up a traded graphic for you and the team yet.
1:35:24
But uh and I'm almost surprised, but >> I I really should publish an address.
1:35:29
You know, I think they keep uh sending to the wrong spot, so that's okay. >> Yeah. Um yeah. What's going on? What's going on?
1:35:34
Give give us the update since the last time you've been on the show.
1:35:38
I was checking the checking it and three months ago uh we chatted and actually the question of the day was like what's going on with Zuck, what's going on with Llama for you know where is this going and uh you know I don't know not sure if
1:35:49
Zuck is a follower of the show but like you know I did go back and I said I wouldn't bet against Zuck at hundred billion dollars of free cash flow per year and uh you know I think that's panning out to be pretty true. Uh so
1:35:59
Uh so >> yeah that was a great prediction. Uh how did you react?
1:36:04
Did you catch the news this morning uh that first hit threads and then it was being shared over on X as well around the new data centers?
1:36:14
>> Listen, I mean, you know, it's hard to ignore a giant blue box on top of Manhattan.
1:36:17
You know, it's like uh pretty freaking epic.
1:36:19
You know, the technology bros love to see it.
1:36:20
So, >> it's a good graphic, right? >> It is. Yeah. Very. >> Great.
1:36:25
I Yeah, I thought it was a great visualization.
1:36:26
Um I guess the uh the other question is yeah, just like what was your reaction to the wind surf news?
1:36:33
We we we we were chopping up on it.
1:36:33
Did you go through the emotional roller coaster?
1:36:36
Did you never lose faith?
1:36:40
>> Super excited to see what's Yeah, I'm super excited to see what Scott has to share here in a few minutes.
1:36:43
Um >> uh yeah, I mean, you know, obviously all kinds of weird distortions in the market from, you know, kind of former FTC policy.
1:36:52
Obviously, hope that gets like cleared up quickly.
1:36:54
Um I think it's a big gift for cognition.
1:36:56
I think it makes a ton of sense they kind of needed like a horse in that race.
1:37:00
And uh you know while yes agentic coding is part of the long-term play here like you know you want to you can't go straight to streaming you kind of want to start with the DVDs you know and so with cognition picking up um wind surf I think they're kind of buying that DVD business and uh going to allow them really leaprog to the agent stuff in the future.
1:37:18
Um so makes a ton of sense excited to see uh what they build. Okay.
1:37:22
The like where we left it as like the potential risk of these like sort of zombie go ship aqua hire situations is that if a deal happens and we get kind of the bad ending where there's 80% of the workforce, 90% of the workforce, couple hundred startup employees who've been working hard for maybe a year um and they don't get a good outcome and they're not happy about it.
1:37:48
the it could have a chilling effect on startup hiring and those folks could wind up just saying, "Hey, I'd rather just a stable bet in big tech as opposed to a lottery ticket that even if the numbers hit, I might not be able to cash it in."
1:38:04
And so my question for you, you have to you compete with hiring people from meta.
1:38:11
The question I have is do do some of these later stage or even you know you know big tech companies themselves start using that as a recruiting tactic to be like look like you know it's very possible that this company gets acquired in the next year and it's unclear you
1:38:27
know >> I mean they already do like these RSUs are liquid like they'll just show up in your account you can just cash them in but uh but what is your take do you think it makes it harder for you to pull people over from big tech into the startup world. I think you know the true believers in
1:38:41
I think you know the true believers in startups you know are oftentimes you know yes they're buying a lottery ticket they sort of understand that but ultimately you know the analogy I think of is uh yeah ships in harbor are safe but that's not what ships are made for and I think like you know the best early stage founders and hires just like can't
1:39:00
uh they have to live a certain way you know they kind of have to hit the high seas and uh see what they're made of um you know that being said like I think obviously as startups start to scale and they're hiring the 20th person, the 50th person, the 100th person, the 400th person, like that math really starts to make a lot of make a lot of of a difference. And yeah, absolutely. I And yeah, absolutely.
1:39:17
I totally believe that the recruiters, you know, at the big tech companies are already weaponizing this um to to bring people in the door. So >> yeah.
1:39:27
>> yeah. Um, what about uh the uh I want to know more about how you're seeing the hyperscalers pick different parts of the stack to plug in as like as they build out like the AWS dashboard because it feels like with >> like I wouldn't have necessarily expected like >> IDE to be one of the places where potentially like AWS needs play they have uh Microsoft Azure has co-pilot now Google
1:40:02
what what was the one that they launched that was like jewels but now they also have the wind surf team or some of them and like they might launch something that's that looks like you know uh like a piece of software that's not at the
1:40:14
API level above the API level um >> what what other categories of like AI tooling rappers that type of stuff do you think big tech is looking at or what do you think they will like build internally? Like I feel like you have
1:40:29
Like I feel like you have some experience here. >> Exactly.
1:40:32
Where the value capture ends up landing is a big open question.
1:40:34
I think everybody's nervous.
1:40:36
Um you know the SAS companies in the middle are nervous.
1:40:38
I think also the model labs are also pretty nervous about this.
1:40:41
You know nobody at this point wants to like have any too principled of a stance.
1:40:44
You know they'd rather have uh sort of an egg in every basket and however it hatches they'll come out on top.
1:40:51
Um, you know, I think that like obviously yes, like coding has emerged.
1:40:56
It's for one of the main one of the largest use cases of AI today and it makes a lot of sense.
1:41:00
It's a highly deterministic, highly controlled environment.
1:41:04
Um, it sort of makes sense that people who are using these tools sort of at the edge also are the ones applying them to more software.
1:41:12
And so it's a great use case for AI.
1:41:12
Um, in retrospect, it was sort of obvious I think that like it was going to be a really big deal.
1:41:17
really big deal. um you know where the value capture really shakes out over the long term is anyone's to say but I think like you know you can in some sense you'll never regret owning the top of the funnel and having a direct relationship with an end user and being in the default um in a given category
1:41:32
like that's Lindy that goes back you know a millennia right you want to be the default you want to control the direct relationship with the end buyer and you want to own the top of the funnel and so in that way like you know you may be pretty bullish about your models um but does that mean you shouldn't have an IDE play probably not. You probably still want an IDE play
1:41:48
You probably still want an IDE play because you know you're not going to you're not going to bet the bet the farm on uh the models winning the value capture at the end of the day.
1:41:55
So >> yeah, how how bright is the line between engineer AI engineer and AI researcher right now?
1:42:06
because it feels like we've se the original narrative around a lot of the trade deals was like AI researchers can get a $500 million training run unstuck and that can immediately unlock billions of dollars of value, save you tons of money on inference.
1:42:27
Like the math just works out so so clearly.
1:42:29
out so so clearly. I feel like we've always had this divide between I mean to some to some degree we've had a divide between like DevOps and and product engineering but the bigger brighter lines have always been between like engineering and sales or engineering and
1:42:43
operations but is there a new but like dividing line between like who's an AI researcher versus who's an AI engineer and are are companies like gaming that yet with like I I always see like the member of technical staff and I don't really know what that means. I' I assume
1:42:57
I' I assume if you work at OpenAI you're smart and can do a lot of stuff but like how how niche is the skill set and how much of a dividing line is that?
1:43:08
>> I think the skill set is still quite different.
1:43:10
Um you know if you're working at a large lab on a research team you know you really are concerned about primarily training whether premid or post training um you know you're primarily looking at loss curves you're primarily thinking about you know what benchmarks you're going to be exceeding at.
1:43:25
You're thinking about what data sources you can capture to continue to train and fine-tune on.
1:43:28
You're experimenting with new approaches to reinforcement learning or other to like try to, you know, sort of seek out incremental gains and be out your competitors.
1:43:36
If you're an AI engineer, you're really thinking about like how do I apply GPD4 to legal?
1:43:40
And it's really kind of a different shape of both like skills and also folky and obsession.
1:43:46
Um so you know that's not to say that like in the limit like those these things won't sort of converge or won't merge to some degree but like I think today there's still a pretty bright line between the two. >> Yeah.
1:43:58
>> Yeah. What about um the uh >> I guess the question is like deep mind seems very different from the llama organization in the sense that like the Gemini models are truly frontier and but the but the problem with uh Google's AI strategy feels like
1:44:20
it's on the product side where not that many people are downloading the Gemini app or a lot of people are it's like millions and billions of hundreds of millions of people but like but like you know market share on on chat apps and like who has it in their home row like
1:44:33
chat GPT is so successful kids just call it chat and Gemini is not really at that level yet and so yeah the the the question is like is like the problem that Google's trying to solve feels like a different problem from the problem that Facebook is trying
1:44:48
to solve and the question is is can you acquaire and and and acquire talent that actually solves that problem or is there some sort of like underlying structural problem of like how big Google is that is actually slowing down product development. My my fear is that
1:45:02
My my fear is that like you get some you get some great product engineers in but then you're still hamstrung by Google's scale, Google's HR department, their legal department, how they think about, oh well like we can't launch this unless it's internationalized on day one because we're Google.
1:45:19
And so all of a sudden you have these great people who have been able to like go zero to one on a product, get it really viral and like create a product that like people love, >> but they can't do that in within the confines of Google.
1:45:31
So um yeah, what do you think about >> that?
1:45:34
I mean and the the potentially more specific question is are you betting on Google plus windf or or cognition plus windsf if they're going after the same, you know, developer sort of engagement, right?
1:45:46
If if these if these you know if if the products effectively converge. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> Yeah.
1:45:54
I mean like Conway's law the idea that you ship your org chart remains quite stable and true and you can kind of take that even one step back which is like you ship your culture as an organization.
1:46:05
Obviously the org chart is one manifestation of your culture.
1:46:07
Um, you know, I think that if if Google leadership does not give these this new windsurf or half windsurf team like a really long leash and a ton of autonomy, like you know, there's going to be some level of like a, you know, imuno response and they're going to throw them back up again.
1:46:25
Um, I think you really have to give those folks a long leash and that has to come through the top.
1:46:28
It has to come from the top, right?
1:46:30
has to come from the top, right? has to be um you know either founder or seauite level where they're getting the green flag to like really run hard and ignore stuff like internationalization um and you know maybe you still have to get the legal sign off but like you get a dedicated team of legal people you know at your beck and call to unblock you whenever you need to um yeah I won't I won't too early to you know bet on the
1:46:50
horses here so I'm not sure I can bet on the horses yet but >> even even like the uh like the ADA rules like accessibility rules like when you're a startup you move pretty quickly and There's still you still have to do a lot of the accessibility work, but if you're like 90% there, it's like if you mess up and the screen reader breaks on one page, you're like looking at like a $5,000 settlement to just say, "Hey, sorry, like we messed up. Like one
1:47:13
Like one person couldn't use this and like we feel bad and we paid you and we're good."
1:47:18
But if you're Google, it's like there's going to be an army of lawyers who are like, "How can we how can we squeeze them on this? Get them to settle.
1:47:25
Get a there's just more economic power gets and that and that just naturally slows things down."
1:47:28
Um >> yeah, it's very interesting.
1:47:31
Um >> how are you uh what are you expecting out of open source uh broadly uh open source models broadly in the next couple months?
1:47:40
Uh we saw OpenAI delayed uh their launch uh just basically saying like the the the takeaway was effectively not quite ready, need a bit more time, want to ship something that we're super proud of.
1:47:52
At the same time today, there was some reporting that that uh and and unclear if it's true yet, but reporting that says maybe uh maybe Llama will uh shift away from from open source in general.
1:48:05
So, I'm curious um >> uh generally uh excited for OpenAI's open source model, but uh what what are you thinking?
1:48:16
>> Yeah, it's a great question.
1:48:16
I mean, China obviously continues to bring the heat on open source.
1:48:20
heat on open source. um you know regardless what we think of uh the CCCP and their motivations like just yesterday over the weekend the KI model came out already doing incredibly well on benchmarks a bunch of developers and founders that I know are pretty excited about that model and so um I think that
1:48:37
like at the end of the day like you know if there is some belief that like if you have a very good model that it could sort of run away and eat an entire market um you know if so facto you're fighting against everybody else who doesn't want you to be able to do that and so I do think that like to some
1:48:53
degree the margins will be competed way I think that more things will be open source in the future and I think that also you know if you think about like the workloads we don't use supercomputers to write our email um we just need basic at home stuff it works just fine and I think the same model you
1:49:08
know same idea can be extended here you know while the frontier models are going to be develop you know kind of developing and and figuring out new science and uh hopefully uh letting us don't die right we'll see um I think that you know for a lot of like business use cases and consumer applications. Honestly, the intelligence bar is just
1:49:23
Honestly, the intelligence bar is just like not that high.
1:49:24
And the capability overhang that's already in the models today continues to be quite large as well.
1:49:30
I think there's a lot of, you know, people joke there's hund00 million inside your laptop.
1:49:33
You just figured out how to unlock it.
1:49:35
Well, there's a couple billion dollars inside of these model weights at least.
1:49:38
And you know, we got to go unlock it. So, >> yeah.
1:49:41
What's your like temperature check on just like overall progress stagnation?
1:49:45
Like are we are you feeling the acceleration?
1:49:48
Are you feeling a deceleration?
1:49:50
Dwarkesh last week updated his timelines, kind of pushed them out.
1:49:54
Still very aggressive timelines.
1:49:54
Um, but what what was your reaction to that?
1:49:57
It feels like I'm seeing a few memes about like no one knows how to scale RL or like, you know, yes, we're seeing impressive stuff on ArcGI from Gro 4, but keep in mind we went from like 7% to 14% and this is a test that kids can do.
1:50:13
And so it feels like everyone's saying like we need new research, we need new breakthroughs, we need new paradigms.
1:50:18
what's your overall temp check on timelines and just like >> yeah I mean listen I think that like AI continues to be really spiky and it's really hard to in it where it's strong and where it's weak and it's you know we want it to be strong in all the ways that human intelligence is strong we also want it to be strong in all the ways that human intelligence is weak you
1:50:34
know sort of project all of our hopes and fears and dreams like onto these things um and you know I think in many cases they're still not there um just today uh Chroma released a technical report on the topic of context rot And so the question is basically like okay this model's got a million tokens but does it like what can you actually do with those million tokens? Needle in a
1:50:54
Needle in a hay stack is certainly one benchmark but we demonstrate across a sweep of other approaches that actually these models like they can start to fall apart really early like way earlier than you might think.
1:51:06
You might see reasoning performance drop off even around like 10,000 tokens or earlier and 10,000 tokens is like not that much.
1:51:11
And so, you know, like I don't, you know, at least what I want as a builder is I don't want a model that has the 10 million token context window, but kind of maybe sort of work sometimes like I want a model that has 60,000 tokens, but is a is per perfect at paying attention to that model to that context and perfect at reasoning over that context.
1:51:31
And so, you know, we hope this report will both help developers understand what's possible to build today, but we'll also create like a new set of benchmarks to the model labs who care about um because this is ultimately what people who are building care about. >> Okay.
1:51:44
So, I mean that seems like victory lab for you.
1:51:45
Give me the update on Chroma Rag and uh you know because it's like ju just to kind of set the the base case like there was a lot of like oh like oh rag's going to get one-shotted by just huge context windows.
1:51:56
I saw the million tokens and it was like that's a lot of stuff.
1:52:00
I feel like I could just stuff everything in there.
1:52:01
And then I was talking talking to Doresh about can we go even larger?
1:52:05
Can we get to a billion token context window and and he was making some of those points, but he was also just saying like the like yeah the inefficiency like it scales quadratically and so just getting to a billion tokens is not a thousandx harder, it's like billionx harder or something like that.
1:52:22
Um but but but give me the update on like um on like rag as a as a research effort what Chrome is doing in terms of a product and then some of the actual like use cases when this works where this breaks down like how it fits into the overall puzzle.
1:52:37
>> Yeah, the big question has been is long context all you need or not?
1:52:40
And um you know maybe it will be someday.
1:52:44
Um so I've not I don't have a time machine.
1:52:47
I've not been in the future but I don't care about someday.
1:52:49
I care about now and I care about the community developers that we serve and giving them good information so they can really reason about what is this stuff, what is it useful for, how can I mix it together to create value.
1:52:59
That's what we really care about.
1:53:00
And so I mean the research was not really commercially motivated, right?
1:53:03
I think like no good research is commercially motivated.
1:53:05
You have to go in with just like >> a question and you know a thesis and you'll just see what happens.
1:53:10
Like you can't go into it with a bias. Yeah.
1:53:13
>> Um and I think really you know the bias from us came from intuition from us building stuff.
1:53:18
We noticed that actually once models start crossing these certain like thresholds, stuff really starts falling apart.
1:53:23
And this is what you talk to anybody building in the space, they'll tell you this firsthand.
1:53:26
This is their intuition as well.
1:53:27
Yeah, like million tokens maybe, but like it really starts to fall apart after a certain number of tokens.
1:53:32
And so we wanted to like really just try to quantify that and reason about that and put numbers around that.
1:53:37
And so we start to think about like what are the solutions there?
1:53:40
Well, one sol solution certainly is to use retrieval.
1:53:43
Obviously, you know, we are biased in that way.
1:53:45
We think Chrome is a great tool for that.
1:53:46
Um, we're also seeing increasingly people use reranking in the loop.
1:53:50
We're also increasingly seeing people take like a large context window, say like 10,000 or 100,000 tokens and breaking it into many small LLM calls because the the fewer the context, the better the model can reason.
1:54:02
And so that sort of process of doing sort of a map produce of like splitting it into many pieces and then having these like huge army of parallel small fast cheap LLMs like process that context is also I think emergingly a best pattern a best practice.
1:54:14
Um, but you know it's still early.
1:54:16
I think that like we didn't really want to go into the technical report either with like here are all the answers and we don't know all the answers.
1:54:21
We want to motivate like here's the problem as we see it. >> Yeah.
1:54:25
Well, speaking of other like research and technical reports, uh what was your interpretation of the meter report that suggested that uh code tools were like cursor and windsurf were actually potentially slowing down a set of in of developers.
1:54:41
It wasn't a huge study, but it seemed like a shocking result in the sense that it was people were expecting a 20% increase and they got a 20% decrease roughly.
1:54:50
Um, and and and one of the developers who was actually in the study chimed in as well and was like, I I think I know what's going on.
1:54:57
I'm like leaning on this tool too much.
1:54:59
I'm doing a lot of waiting for stuff and so maybe some of this just naturally cure cure uh is cured by speed.
1:55:06
But uh would love your take on on that report if you read it.
1:55:09
>> I mean, we as society are going to figure this out the hard way, right?
1:55:11
we're going to figure out like how much of our uh sort of reasoning should we externalize to AI and how much of that reasoning that we then have to integrate to process what it thinks right um and uh probably also there's also news over the weekend about you know open AI making you dumber or chat making you
1:55:27
dumber and kind of headlines like this and of course the exact claims you always want to dig under the hood and look at the actual study design and their actual claims versus the salacious headline but >> um I think it just speaks to how early all this stuff is obviously there's like a ton of excitement people wanted to change the world. Um, and you know, I
1:55:42
Um, and you know, I think exactly how it gets integrated into our workflows over the medium and long term.
1:55:48
Like, you know, it's the classic thing where like over the next year it probably won't look like that that much, but over the next 10 years it's going to look totally different.
1:55:57
Um, and so yeah, we'll just wait 10 years and see. But yeah. >> Yeah.
1:56:02
talk about uh just just condensing down information in the context of uh of rags specifically, but also just the other the other techniques for this.
1:56:10
other the other techniques for this. Um what what I'm interested in is like Andre Karpathy recently was kind of thinking through what the future of reinforcement learning could look like and he draws on this very interesting uh story that I think most people will be
1:56:23
familiar with which was that for a long time if you went to any LLM and said how many how many uh instances of the letter R are in the word strawberry it would get confused and it would give you the wrong number and this was because of tokenization each piece of the word is broken down so we can't really see the letters. And so the solution was that
1:56:41
And so the solution was that they they kind of baked in some sort of like system prompt apparently that said if a user asks you to count letters, split it into individual letters and iterate through it one at a time.
1:56:54
And they just kind of like figured out the cheat code for that particular type of problem.
1:56:59
The problem of course then is that like humanity's job is unbounded and there's a billion different versions of that that come up all the time in the context of work and like that's where you have all these little edge case failure modes and that's probably why uh you know I still have to book my own flights or something or you need a human to book your flights because using all that stuff there's just too many edge cases.
1:57:21
So his his solution was like we need to develop a reinforcement learning paradigm that goes and finds those hard one lessons and bakes them down and saves them and that feels like something like compressing of information because you're not just going to want to stuff all that into the context window again.
1:57:37
You're going to run into that problem.
1:57:37
So so just talk to me about your reaction to Carpathy's post and then just kind of how how how rag might interface with the next models whether on the training side or on the inference side. >> Yeah, for sure. Sure.
1:57:47
I mean I think learnings from the system running can be integrated both into the data systems that underwrite that system can also be integrated into the weights.
1:57:55
Now whether that's through RL or different you know means yeah is sort of going to be dependent on the use case.
1:58:00
Um one way that we've been thinking about it is we're calling this the the inner loop and the outer loop of context engineering.
1:58:06
So if your context needs to be tuned to do a good job, context fraud is real.
1:58:12
It motivates the need for context engineering.
1:58:13
Um and this is the job that many application developers are doing have been doing now for years is like solving that problem of what should be in the context window right now. >> Mhm.
1:58:24
>> That's the inner loop.
1:58:24
The outer loop is how do you design a system that will get better at the job of the inner loop over time.
1:58:32
So how do you capture signal from your users?
1:58:34
How do you capture feedback from agents?
1:58:36
How do you capture all that data?
1:58:38
How do you analyze all that data?
1:58:40
And then how do you bring that data back into that inner loop problem?
1:58:42
That could be obviously number one massaging and changing the knowledge and data your model has access to as known as retrieve augmented generation.
1:58:51
Um or it could also be you know applying it to weights in different stages of the pipeline including the LM itself, the embedding model, re-rankers, all the above.
1:58:59
Um and so I mean this concept we just sort of put out like a week ago.
1:59:04
put out like a week ago. um we gave a little short a short um kind of conference at RAMP's office in New York on context engineering NYC >> listen you got to do it you got to do it >> and uh and uh and this is the first time I've really seen this posited in such a
1:59:20
clear way and so you know okay we don't have all the answers but I think this is the question people will come to ask in the future is like not only how do we build a system which works today but how do we build a system that gets better over time automatically and that is like the outer loop of context engineering makes sense. >> Uh I I want to get your how you're
1:59:36
>> Uh I I want to get your how you're thinking about Grock.
1:59:39
Last week was an intense week from everything from uh the fiasco.
1:59:45
I think it was on Tuesday uh with with the Grock bot just going wild.
1:59:51
Maybe it brought more attention to launch Wednesday which was extremely impressive.
1:59:54
impressive. Um but then later in the week, you know, people were realizing that like the reasoning model was uh or or like part of the kind of reasoning loop was like kind of making sure that uh it understood the boss man's views uh by by you know what is what is Elon
2:00:11
finding the coverage and then reinforcing that wrongly and not >> so as I went into the weekend I was thinking this will be interesting to see how Grock can do in the enterprise and then this morning they announced like a $200 million deal with the government. So, I think that's a a good stamp of
2:00:27
So, I think that's a a good stamp of approval.
2:00:29
But I'm curious like kind of what insights you have around, you know, some of the basically like >> larger potential customers and how they're even thinking about model selection for for you know, different products and applications.
2:00:46
>> Yeah, you know, I think you could probably wait.
2:00:47
I think actually again ramp plug has like the graph of like you know anthropic and chat GBT or anthropic and open AAI revenue growth.
2:00:54
Um you know let's wait to see when GROC makes a dent in that.
2:00:58
Um that's not to say they will or they won't. I don't know.
2:01:00
Um you know there are these headwinds that you're talking about which is uh you know you could either see as a a feature or a a bug depending on which way you look at it.
2:01:10
Um I mean you know there's things to like there's things to not like.
2:01:14
I is kind of hard to predict the future here.
2:01:16
I guess I guess what I want to know is like what is the what is the flip side?
2:01:19
Maybe we should just talk to Ara at RAMP about this, but what's the flip side of that chart?
2:01:23
Uh we know who the sellers are, OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, and then Grock.
2:01:29
And there's like kind of a long tale.
2:01:30
Um but who are the buyers?
2:01:30
Because I see uh >> individual like proumer knowledge retriever I would pay $200 for a better Google types. I'm one of them.
2:01:42
>> Uh then there are the developers who are paying for developer tools.
2:01:44
But then what is like the third bucket of like buyers for >> tokens right now?
2:01:50
It seems like it's a lot of companies with like kind of point solutions little I'm stuffing an LLM in my SA enterprise SAS speeding something up cleaning up some data but do you have any insight into like kind of >> what's the third wave that's coming that everyone listening to this should start investing in now? No, I'm just kidding.
2:02:11
I think you're right that a lot of the spend while a lot of the spend is consumers um you know a lot of the spend is also businesses enterprises are using it for really boring stuff process automation broadly um you know those buyers you should expect to be like way
2:02:26
more conservative about like the tool they pick um you know the adage of uh you never got fired for hiring IBM definitely also applies here and so sort of reasoning about like who is the IBM of this space and why I think will like help you determine uh where that spend is going to go. >> Yeah, that's a great question because
2:02:43
>> Yeah, that's a great question because from a from like a bra from like a being on the frontier as a brand I would say OpenAI but then from like a you know scalable infrastructure I would say GCP and Gemini but then from like a model agnosticism view I would say Microsoft.
2:03:04
It's a tough question there.
2:03:04
I I don't know if that IBM has emerged.
2:03:06
Maybe you maybe you have a strong opinion.
2:03:08
Maybe Jordy does, but uh overall I mean great great great catching up with you as always. >> Yeah. >> Anything else, Jordy?
2:03:14
>> No, congratulations on the on the launch of the paper.
2:03:17
>> Yeah, I mean yeah, very exciting results.
2:03:18
So, thanks for thanks thanks for funding it. >> Good to see you guys. >> Have a great rest. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. >> Take care.
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>> She wasn't driving the car to be honest, >> but she's into the car.
2:03:54
>> She's not just hanging out >> and the livery was absolutely fantastic.
2:03:59
Uh just to give everyone some context.
2:04:01
So we have Scott Woo from Cognition and Jeff Wang from Windsurf joining any minute now.
2:04:06
where the studio >> crew is getting ready for everybody. We are ready whenever. >> Bring them in. How you guys doing? Congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Round of applause.
2:04:20
>> Did you guys have a relaxing weekend? >> Yeah. Really chill weekend. >> Yeah. Yeah. Easy, easy, easy. Nothing too much. Nothing too much. >> Lot of sleep.
2:04:28
>> Honestly, we we both haven't really slept. >> Okay. >> So, >> go easy on us. Okay.
2:04:33
Well, you had a lot of you had a lot of people to take care of and and honestly when you know we uh we heard the news, you know, a few minutes before we went live and we were >> fist pumping here in the studio because it's such a such a fantastic outcome and uh I I'm I'm sure everybody involved is grateful for the work you guys put in to get this done. >> But give us Yeah.
2:04:54
kick us off with the the high level.
2:04:56
What's actually um the partnership look like?
2:04:59
What do you like how would you describe it in your own words of like what's actually happening?
2:05:06
>> Yeah, I mean this is a this is a real acquisition. >> Okay.
2:05:09
>> We are being acquired by Cognition. >> Okay.
2:05:12
>> And um you know >> must feel great to say that too.
2:05:16
>> You don't hear that much.
2:05:17
>> It was a tough It was a tough uh Friday I would say.
2:05:21
>> Um I don't think anybody would want to be in my shoes on Friday.
2:05:23
Um but we talked to a lot of uh teams out there.
2:05:27
There's a lot of AI companies, uh, foundational companies, and, uh, after talking to Scott and the Cognition team, uh, there it was done in my mind. It was a done deal.
2:05:37
>> Um, I don't know if you guys know this, but, uh, Cognition was, uh, probably the only other team that we thought was smarter than our our team, actually. >> Yeah.
2:05:46
>> No, and that's what that's what we put we put that together just on the show, seeing the announcement.
2:05:49
It's like you take this incredible, you know, go to market sales machine that that you guys had built and you combine that with one of the best, you know, research and just hardcore engineering culture. >> Perfect.
2:06:00
>> And it's a and it's a perfect, you know, match. >> Perfect overlap. >> Yeah, absolutely.
2:06:04
And on the Windsor side, I'll just, you know, obviously there were all these stories breaking out on Twitter and everything going on and people were saying, well, you know, the the thing that's left is just the shell.
2:06:13
And we looked at it and we said, well, actually, I don't know if that's right.
2:06:17
you know, it's the there's there's the code, there's the product, there's the customers, most importantly, there's the whole team, obviously.
2:06:22
Um, and and it's an amazing product and there's a lot to do and a lot to build together.
2:06:27
And and so I think as we started talking about it, we found that there were just so many natural ways to partner, you know, both in terms of obviously the customers and and customers would love, you know, are super excited to have a solution that that basically combines both the IDE and the agent.
2:06:42
the agent. Um and and and then the technology itself which is you know I think we dev at Devon you know building Devon have always focused on this kind of remote background agent as the thing that we've kind of done um whereas you
2:06:56
know windsurf is is really focused on the agentic IDE and and I think there's a lot of kind of things that play in there um all the way down again to to the kind of the fit of the the the relative teams and the team strength and so on. So,
2:07:06
So, >> it's almost like you predicted this because like the like like these types of mergers are really hard because you have two brands that are popular, but Scott, you've been managing cognition and Devon, like you've had the the the corporate structure and the product structure for a while and so like it doesn't seem nearly as complicated as like where does this go?
2:07:23
Do you have to rebrand one or another?
2:07:25
I I don't know if you have thoughts on it yet.
2:07:26
I'm sure you this is down the road.
2:07:27
Uh but it seems like you're actually fairly set up to to integrate these two companies in a in a way that's like not so super chaotic to you either, which is great. >> Yeah. Yeah.
2:07:38
You know, I I I wouldn't say it was intentional.
2:07:41
it was intentional. I think on our end for example it's probably more that just we we we we tend to overfocus on on software engineers because it's just a lot of who we are and how we think about it and in particular kind of just like the these like product and capabilities things whereas I think on the windsurf
2:07:55
side I think um Jeff and the team you know the whole team have built out a really great kind of suite of of all the different kind of functions right you know sales deployed engineering um enterprise work infrastructure um marketing operations and so on you know finance etc and and and yeah, just turned out to be a really really great fit. >> Yeah. >> Yeah.
2:08:14
>> Jeff, uh Friday, end of day, did you think you would be running a process so quickly?
2:08:18
I I know, you know, part the the obvious move would just be, you know, continue to to run uh and scale the business.
2:08:24
You guys had a lot of momentum, but uh what was going through your head Friday night?
2:08:27
because I I imagine at the time you were also balancing uh you you were all of a sudden managing a team of hundreds of people that uh I probably all uh you know wanted wanted uh your time and attention as well.
2:08:41
>> My my immediate priority was just to get a lot of options on the table and to have a lot of paths forward.
2:08:46
Uh I had to tell the team like this is the path forward immediately because this is this is happening now.
2:08:52
Uh, and then outside of the meeting, you know, I I I was thinking like, okay, who do I need to talk to?
2:08:58
What what is the best use of my time?
2:09:01
I can tell you I was on the phone for pretty much 24 hours non-stop on my phone uh after after the all hands.
2:09:05
And uh me and Scott, we we worked really fast.
2:09:09
Uh we met at our office the next day.
2:09:11
Um he even brought in everything on a piece of paper to sign.
2:09:14
Uh he even brought he had to talk through a lot.
2:09:19
Uh but that was uh it was really it was pretty dramatic. Scott. But it was cool. It was cool. >> Yeah, it was fun.
2:09:24
And naturally, you know, because it has to be this way, we got things signed like one or two hours before we were able to put out the announcement.
2:09:30
But like look, as soon as we started talking about it together, I think it was kind of clear for both of us like the the the way that we really make this a success is, you know, obviously customers kind of want to understand what's next.
2:09:40
The team wants to understand what's next.
2:09:41
You know, the whole world is talking about it.
2:09:43
We want to be able to come out together as soon as possible and say, "We're going to do this.
2:09:49
We're going to make this really amazing.
2:09:50
um we're going to make sure we take care of all the users and all the customers.
2:09:53
We're gonna make sure we take care of the team and there's just a really great product here at its core and and that's what we want to focus on and that's what we want to build out together.
2:10:01
>> And you know what's crazy?
2:10:01
Um what is crazy like we talked pretty late on a Friday night as well.
2:10:06
Um we were comparing notes and there was like almost no overlap.
2:10:08
I mean we talked about the team already um but even the product the product is like missing exactly what the other product is offering and the ability to combine the products together is going to be so amazing for our users.
2:10:18
It's gonna be really cool.
2:10:21
>> Yeah, I think there's g be a lot of fun stuff around, you know, um you can have have an agent work and then review the code, you know, locally in your IDE.
2:10:27
You can be planning tasks out and then kind of sending them off for work.
2:10:31
You can be um you know, you can do a first pass with an agent and then come and look at the work and then kind of finish that up and do the finishing touches with uh you know, with tab and all these other features and so on, right?
2:10:41
Um and we're really excited to to to to build that out together.
2:10:46
>> How is how is the team feeling right now?
2:10:47
I imagine this is the craziest 48 hours of of their career as well.
2:10:51
>> Give us a preview of the Slack emojis that are ripping right now.
2:10:54
>> Actually, we uh we announced it uh at another all hands.
2:10:56
Uh we probably all hands and we put another Monday all hands and uh very very different.
2:11:02
>> They're like it couldn't possibly get worse. So, >> so it's only up.
2:11:08
>> We made it dramatic, too.
2:11:08
Uh and we So, me and Scott uh and the team uh we we really went out of our way uh to to make this a very generous acquisition. I'll just say that.
2:11:16
And um I think uh I you know the team probably felt like uh you know their you know their career was over or something you know like it was very sad on Friday but I think today I don't know how long did they clap Scott uh they they kind of cheer for like uh finance or something.
2:11:32
Um so I think the sentiment has shifted the team is even more fired up to go.
2:11:36
Uh they the whole product is still there.
2:11:38
All the all the things we had in the GTM team is still there and now they also have Devon uh to to sell as well.
2:11:45
So everybody's fired up now. >> That's amazing. Yeah.
2:11:47
Every time I talk to Scott, it's always because like he's done something really incredible and aggressive like like and it's like okay like let's do let's talk about this right now.
2:11:58
And before it I was making like documentaries.
2:12:00
It took me a month to put out a single video.
2:12:01
Now fortunately I have a daily TV show so I can just have you on. We can chat about it.
2:12:05
Um I do have some some random questions.
2:12:07
I don't know if it's worth um I'm interested to know about about that go to market team and and channel sales specifically.
2:12:13
Um there was somebody in the comments of one of Jord's posts talking about um how Windsurf was growing revenue and and and working with channel partners.
2:12:22
Can you walk me through how like h uh what would you give advice to somebody who's structuring a like a successful uh channel partnership strategy for a product like this?
2:12:33
Um what what incentives do you have to align?
2:12:35
How big of a of a piece of business was that?
2:12:38
Do you expect it to be a continual source of growth?
2:12:42
I'd love to know about just that as a particular strategy as opposed to say, you know, Google ads or going viral. >> Yeah.
2:12:49
Um, we we made the decision to go 100% partners uh back in February.
2:12:51
Um, the thing about a partner uh channel kind of like segment is like you have to like you have to like kind of feed them like you kind of kind of build belief with them in the product but also show that there's an economic incentive too.
2:13:05
And it did take some time actually from Q1 to to Q2 uh to like get the top priority partners, make sure those partners can easily sell uh on your behalf as well.
2:13:14
And it really took like about four to five months to really see this like kind of take off.
2:13:19
Uh so some of our partner partners have already started bringing in seven figure deals uh even without even trying the product.
2:13:26
They just go to their customers, they ask them you know what what they want and they just say it's windsurf and uh and now they they can say windsurf and devon. That's amazing. >> Yeah.
2:13:35
I uh I was getting multiple messages from people Friday and Saturday being like I want this team. I want this team.
2:13:42
team. And that was what and and and I think that uh it is it is just uh it's such a this whole deal and everything is is really a a testament to the caliber of the team which was the which was one of the major disappointments Friday is if you were on the team that that was
2:13:57
staying behind at Windsurf there's this sort of almost like signaling right of like I took this company let's say you joined last August and you brought the the product to market you launched it you grew it to tens of millions of dollars in revenue and then uh don't get to kind of continue the mission. It's uh
2:14:11
It's uh I'm I'm just really happy for everyone involved. >> Yeah. I think Oh, sorry. Yeah.
2:14:18
>> I was just say now, you know, now we're all one big team and it's I mean, we're we're kicking it into another gear.
2:14:22
I I think we're all so amped up to to take this and just go, you know, we're going to go full speed basically for for the next while.
2:14:30
Um and we get to play on offense now and go for real brittle.
2:14:32
So, >> are you guys already making plans to get under one roof?
2:14:37
What's what's the uh what's we have a lot to figure out.
2:14:39
Um but but but yeah, working getting to the point there there's there's kind of the product collaboration, there's the go to market collaboration, and then there's the literal kind of like team situation.
2:14:51
A lot a lot of work to do over the next couple months.
2:14:53
>> Well, we tell our customers like we got their back now and the product is going to get so much more cool. >> That's amazing.
2:15:00
>> Well, you guys turned something which was um in in many ways, you know, a disaster.
2:15:05
I was just waiting for I was waiting for the New York Times piece on Monday and getting to see the New York Times push out this news uh and turning this whole thing into a win is is incredible and you guys have done a service to uh the team and the industry. So, thank you.
2:15:22
>> Yeah, honestly honored to get to be a part of it to to work with such a great group of people and I just want to see you guys you guys have no idea h how things went with all the legal and everything last night in terms of figuring these things out.
2:15:33
Are we going to make it there in time?
2:15:34
were we not going to be make it was we we we've been through a lot and I think it's uh it's it's it's just the start of things.
2:15:40
So, >> ju just so you know uh uh Scott was like we are announcing Monday uh hell or high water and uh we we just did not sleep uh for the last like 72 hours.
2:15:49
Yeah, it's been a crazy it's been crazy.
2:15:53
>> I mean we Yeah, we we we appreciate you coughing on the stream.
2:15:55
Do you have anything else Jordy should you guys probably too early to sleep but you both deserve a power nap at the very least.
2:16:03
So, >> thank you for coming on.
2:16:04
Anything else that that makes sense to share now or should we let you go?
2:16:09
I >> think we're all good. >> Awesome. Yeah, stay tuned.
2:16:11
We're gonna have a lot more announcements soon. Thanks for having us. >> Amazing, guys. >> Great work. Cheers. >> Talk to you soon. >> Congrats. >> Bye.
2:16:20
>> And next up, we have Carl Pay. No, not yet. One second. Um, >> that is amazing.
2:16:27
>> That Yeah, what what a great story. >> Absolute dogs. >> Absolute dogs.
2:16:32
>> That is >> the perfect match. cemented in SV lore. >> Tech lore. For sure. For sure. >> Didn't know.
2:16:39
I mean, I knew Scott could fundra. Yeah.
2:16:41
I didn't know he was this kind of this caliber of deals guy. >> Absolute dog. Absolute dog.
2:16:45
Uh well, we read through some timeline. What else we got?
2:16:52
>> Uh Bigma has such a homey feeling. I spend all day in it. I really enjoy it.
2:16:55
Feels cozy, safe, good to come back to. Uh shout out Zack.
2:16:58
Giving Figma a little shout out.
2:17:01
Uh, let's bring in our first >> There he is. First studio walk-in. >> First studio walkin. >> Let's go.
2:17:08
>> Welcome to the stream, Carl. >> How you doing? >> Welcome. >> This is fun. >> Welcome. >> Thank you. >> How you doing?
2:17:20
>> Great to have you here.
2:17:20
We haven't done this much before.
2:17:22
>> No, we've had a few people in in studio, done a few.
2:17:24
Usually when we're in person, we're on the road, but good to have you come here.
2:17:27
Uh uh would you mind kicking us off with an introduction on yourself, the company?
2:17:33
>> Uh yeah, my name is Carl.
2:17:33
Um I have a company called Nothing.
2:17:35
We're the only new smartphone company to have emerged in the last 10 years. >> Yeah.
2:17:40
>> Um I felt like tech got really boring. >> Yeah.
2:17:43
>> Like I was a big big tech fan.
2:17:43
I got the latest iPhones um >> all the time.
2:17:47
I sat up to watch the keynotes. >> Yeah.
2:17:50
>> I was based in Europe, so the time zone wasn't always the best.
2:17:53
>> Um but in the recent like five years, I haven't done that anymore.
2:17:55
like every iteration is pretty much >> the same as a previous one >> and I wanted to do something about it.
2:18:03
>> So what did you do to spice it up?
2:18:03
What was the first the first feature and then walk me through all the other features?
2:18:08
Please follow I want >> we um >> show us.
2:18:10
>> So we're we're in a very big industry, right? Like 1.
2:18:12
2 billion smartphones are sold every year. >> Yeah.
2:18:16
>> So we're not trying to reimagine the category.
2:18:17
We're trying to find our niche.
2:18:20
So we started with industrial design.
2:18:21
So if you look at our products >> Yeah.
2:18:23
>> they look pretty different. >> Totally.
2:18:24
Before actually starting to um make products, we made a design book.
2:18:28
We took inspiration from movies, from uh architecture, from furniture design and we created this little uh mood board and then we based all our designs uh on that.
2:18:40
So if you look at our different products, these are our headphones. >> This is a smartphone. >> Yeah.
2:18:45
>> You can immediately tell even if you don't see the logo that it's from the same company. >> Totally. >> Yeah.
2:18:49
>> So design is how we started.
2:18:49
Um, if you ask our users why they buy our products, design is number one reason.
2:18:54
And then lately, we've been working more on the software side. So, >> it is funny.
2:18:59
A cell phone should be the ultimate personal accessory.
2:19:02
Yet the that but yet they've all converged onto the same exact form factor.
2:19:07
It's so funny because John and I have the same exact exact same phone and we get we get mixed up all the time.
2:19:13
I grab it, he grabs mine. >> Yeah.
2:19:16
>> Yeah. I mean h how much do you think we are at like the end of history for uh differentiating on like quantitative specs because for a long time it was like okay I need to go with this one because it has just a faster processor but that kind of disappeared and then there was software lock in you want the
2:19:34
blue bubbles or whatever but if we truly get to the end then we're going to get like every watch tells the time the same people spend a lot of money on certain watches that say something about them right same thing with cars um but what's your view on like just staying on the frontier? How how stagnant is the
2:19:48
How how stagnant is the frontier?
2:19:50
>> We're pretty much at the end in terms of hardware innovation.
2:19:52
Like we all have the same suppliers.
2:19:53
We buy the same screen screen, same processor, same battery.
2:19:58
battery. Um and and you don't think that there's going to be any sort of like crazy breakthrough where like this happened with the with the Apple Vision Pro where you know uh Mark Zuckerberg was was certainly like doing everything
2:20:10
to stay on the frontier of VR headsets and then Apple allegedly does this crazy thing with their supplier where they're like you know that thing that you're making in the benchtop that costs like thousands of dollars for this screen with this pixel density. Let's just pull
2:20:22
Let's just pull this forward and just like eat that cost to just leapfrog everyone and have the best screen.
2:20:28
Now they now they made a bunch of other mistakes so the product didn't take off but they at least nailed it on the screen front and everyone agrees that the Apple Vision Pro has like the best like resolution at least in the of the modern VR headsets.
2:20:37
Uh so you don't think that there'll be like a oh wow the next iPhone has twice the battery life.
2:20:44
They figured out something crazy.
2:20:46
>> Uh not any anytime soon.
2:20:46
And I would probably say that the first phase of the smartphone wars are over. >> Yeah.
2:20:51
>> And Apple and Google won have the biggest platforms.
2:20:53
iOS has like a billion users.
2:20:55
Android has three billion.
2:20:56
But I believe that the next war is start is just beginning to uh to happen. >> Yeah.
2:21:02
>> And that's going to be all about reimagining the operating system.
2:21:04
The previous generation operating systems, they're very mature already.
2:21:08
>> Y >> but now with AI technology, I think we can build something really different.
2:21:12
>> So >> yeah, how are you how are you thinking about partnerships?
2:21:13
I mean, John John's probably said this 200 times on the show, but all he wants is better transcription.
2:21:18
Siri, it's >> You know what we did?
2:21:21
Um I don't know if the people there can see it, but >> you can hold it up. >> Hold it up. If you hold this. >> Oh, wow.
2:21:28
>> Now we're actually recording this meeting. >> Okay. >> Okay.
2:21:31
>> Oh, and you see the waveform there. >> You see the waveform?
2:21:33
You see the little uh red light blinking? >> That's a nice text.
2:21:36
>> And after the meeting, you can just have AI summarize the >> And and my question is, is that using a transformer-based uh transcription AI or is it using the old thing that gets every other word wrong?
2:21:48
>> Uh we're using a model I think.
2:21:50
>> I think we're using Whisper Plus Gemini. >> Okay.
2:21:52
So, yeah, it's going to be fantastic. Amazing.
2:21:53
And for some reason, no one's thought to implement that in the old stuff.
2:21:57
And it and it's getting to a point where I'm like deeply frustrated with it because my my standard workflow for I need to send someone a text message this long is I open up the chat GPT app, I click the whisper button, I talk to it, then I copy it, then I then I paste it into my into my text message box because I don't trust the standard transcription in iOS by default.
2:22:18
It's very very frustrating.
2:22:20
Um anyway, uh I want to talk about the second the second smartphone war that's coming.
2:22:26
>> Who are going to who's going to be in that war?
2:22:28
It feels like Apple and Google are going to continue to compete.
2:22:30
You're going to be there.
2:22:32
>> It feels like Johnny IV and and Sam Alman and and the OpenAI team want to play in there.
2:22:38
There's probably going to be other folks.
2:22:40
>> I feel like they in in a lot of the kind of teaser content, it's really around uh saying like this is an additional device in your stack.
2:22:48
They're not going as far as to say we're going to fully replace the phone.
2:22:54
>> Um why not just do try and do like an add-on or like a fourth device, third device.
2:23:00
I mean most Apple people have like Apple watches, phones, the iPad, the computer, you know.
2:23:05
>> Uh for me like the smartphone is one of the best devices especially for applied AI because >> it's got all the distribution. 1.
2:23:09
2 billion are sold every year.
2:23:12
We have it in our pockets every day. We charge it every day.
2:23:15
We use it for 4 to 6 hours every day.
2:23:17
Yeah, >> it's got the distribution, but it also has has the data, right?
2:23:19
We do so much on our phones.
2:23:22
>> So that if we're going to build a really intelligent operating system, we need the distribution scale, but also the depth of data to create a really personalized experience for for each consumer.
2:23:31
>> Yeah, >> I do believe that in the next 10 years, we will all be carrying another sensor as well because sometimes the phone is in our pockets >> and we need another sensor to capture data for us.
2:23:42
>> Uh I don't believe it's going to happen that quickly though. other sensors.
2:23:43
Uh glasses, something we've been debating on the show.
2:23:47
One, one of the one of the challenges though is like you're walking around uh a lot of these, you know, the meta ray bands are like actual glasses, sunglasses.
2:23:57
Are people going to be carrying multiple glasses that they're using differently throughout the day?
2:24:02
There's >> I don't know what the form factor is going to be.
2:24:03
It might be glasses, it might be a pin, it might be a necklace.
2:24:07
Um >> but I'm not super bullish that it's going to come in the next two, three years.
2:24:11
What do you think of the idea of uh >> which is a which is a challenge to be clear if you're a seedstage company >> and you need to generate traction sales now.
2:24:20
So to pick a new form factor, you guys can almost from your position be like, well, we have the supply chain.
2:24:24
We know we can build hardware.
2:24:26
We can in some ways kind of see what how this this next device. >> Exactly.
2:24:32
We built this machine, right?
2:24:33
Because making hardware is very tough, especially smartphones like from having an idea to actually shipping the product across like 40 countries, servicing the consumer. >> It's a machine.
2:24:42
We're building the brand, building the fan base. >> Yep.
2:24:45
So, I think whenever a new form factor comes out, it's quite easy for us to quickly follow and uh have distribution worldwide.
2:24:53
>> Well, what do you think about putting a camera on headphones?
2:24:57
>> Um, we've seen like patents of other companies doing it.
2:24:59
I'm just not sure what we would use it for.
2:25:01
It seems like the it seems like metaray bands are like we want a camera on your face and we will give you headphones for free via uh speakers that you can kind of listen on someone's uh call, but for the most part it's so it's so close and so localized that if someone's taking a call and the meta ray band's back there, we won't really hear what the other person's saying.
2:25:26
And then Apple, I think is the company you're referring you're like alluding to, uh, potentially has a patent and people have been kind of rumoring that uh, that the next version of AirPods Pro might have a camera on there and so then you could ask Siri, take a picture of that, tell me what it is.
2:25:42
Are you bullish on like the idea of visual intelligence?
2:25:44
Because when I've walked around with the meta ray bands, I like in I like having an LLM at my fingertips, >> but I'm very rarely actually saying uh what is this can because I can look at it and it says yerba mate. It says mateina. It says mango.
2:26:00
I don't need an AI to do that.
2:26:02
What I do need an AI to do on my glasses is tell me uh what's the history of yerba mate?
2:26:08
>> And I can just ask that without taking a picture.
2:26:10
I can give it the I like I'll be walking around and some some idea will pop into my head and I'll be like I need to know the history of the state of California.
2:26:18
Tell me when it was founded. Just give me the data.
2:26:19
And it's nice to have an LLM at my fingertips, but I don't actually need the visual intelligence. I I see it on my phone.
2:26:23
I have the new I have the new button where I can pull out visual intelligence.
2:26:27
I'm not a daily active user of any v visual intelligence project, but what are you are you bullish on it generally?
2:26:33
>> Long-term I'm bullish.
2:26:33
I don't know exactly how it's going to play out, but for your use case today, we already have a chatbt voice integration in our earbuds.
2:26:41
>> So, if you connect your uh this these headphones to our phone, you can just click a button to ask >> make a phone call with the chat voice.
2:26:49
>> Yeah, that's good enough.
2:26:50
>> Yeah, good enough for now. >> Yeah.
2:26:51
And >> is it is it is it do do you think that the technology industry broadly just so badly wants there to be a major platform shift that they just talk that that in some ways and and it makes sense in the context of like Zach, right?
2:27:02
context of like Zach, right? Zuck has spent the last decades like basically being like uh you know very you know the platform layer just kind of messing with him right it's been a hassle so like it makes sense to to invest tens of billions of dollars to try to make sure that you have a a real >> you know horse in the next platform race
2:27:22
but at the same time it's it's I think if if you love technology and you grew up the way that I think the three of us did >> you have this desire for there to be like because it would just be fun and exciting even even if you look at the phone, you're like, "Okay, this this might be this might be the dominant platform for the next 30 years still." >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> Yeah.
2:27:41
I'm I'm super excited to see what the industry builds.
2:27:43
Like, we need people to try new things.
2:27:46
>> Uh for us, we're still going to be focused on the phone because I believe there's so much cool software we can just build on on the phone. >> Yeah.
2:27:52
>> Of course, we're thinking about what comes next and we're prototyping, but it's not where our main focus is. >> Sure.
2:27:57
Was was the changes to iMessage a uh a a catalyst for you guys?
2:28:01
They they they allowed like red receipts and and deliver RCS.
2:28:08
>> I I see it as a positive for us.
2:28:10
>> Well, yeah, it has to be a positive.
2:28:10
I'm curious if it was Did it Did it make a material difference or >> No, because I think it's not just about the color of the text message or it's not just about the read receipts.
2:28:18
It's actually about the color. >> It's about the color.
2:28:21
The color is more important than the text. >> Way more important.
2:28:23
Really >> and that hasn't been solved.
2:28:24
So >> yeah, they need to add that to the protocol.
2:28:27
What what what color message do you want this to show up?
2:28:29
And then all the Android users can >> there's so much social pressure of having the blue bubble.
2:28:33
Like my friend told me that at school his daughter's teacher is like handing out homework through AirDrop. >> Yeah.
2:28:40
>> And his daughter was the only one who had to raise their hand and say, "I don't have an iPhone. Sorry." >> Yeah. That's rough. Yeah.
2:28:45
The social pressure is big.
2:28:47
uh on on the on the the the blue bubbles and the idea of like tech is almost a status symbol and a personal expression.
2:28:55
Uh I I was joking earlier that, you know, if uh if OpenAI wants to build a phone, they're going to have to contend with the blue bubble issue.
2:29:04
They should do like gold bubbles or like you know the the Trump phone.
2:29:06
I think Trump was launching a phone.
2:29:08
Love your take on that at some point.
2:29:09
But uh you know is there is there a hierarchy of colors that you should be thinking of?
2:29:15
Is is blue intrinsically more welcoming than green?
2:29:20
>> I think because of how the ecosystem has played out, you just have to go blue if you want a chance. >> Sure. >> Yeah.
2:29:26
So, we're on our phone business, we're not targeting the US >> very strongly just because of this reason.
2:29:31
>> Like we can't see a way past the the blue bubble situation. >> Okay.
2:29:34
So, yeah, walk me through the landscape of your non US competitors then.
2:29:39
Who who who's actually in in the market?
2:29:42
What are the different markets that are interesting?
2:29:44
Like where's the biggest opportunity?
2:29:48
>> If we're talking about building the next generation operating system, I think we got to put China aside because China will have its own ecosystem with its own players and the rest of the world will have its >> ecosystem.
2:29:59
>> I believe you need you need data and distribution to be able to build the next OS.
2:30:03
>> So of course the smartphone companies will be contenders like Apple, Google, Samsung, and us.
2:30:08
There's only four smartphone players outside of China today. >> Yeah.
2:30:12
Um, but then there's other companies with a lot of data as well, like Meta for instance, or OpenAI.
2:30:17
>> So, it could be any one of them.
2:30:19
>> Have you ever done like a postmortem deep dive on the on the Facebook phone? >> I had it.
2:30:25
>> You had it back in the day. What?
2:30:25
I I didn't even know it existed. Yeah.
2:30:28
>> Wait, it was actually a real thing. >> It was real.
2:30:29
It was built by HTC, I think. >> Oh, interesting. Okay. Yeah.
2:30:31
I I I think Chimath worked on that project.
2:30:34
An interesting like bit of Silicon Valley lore.
2:30:38
Um but uh I wonder I wonder what the like is the lesson there um differentiate more on design is that what you learned from that or is it more like uh price for performance?
2:30:48
How like what are the different levers that you think you need to pull to pull something?
2:30:54
>> It's probably like PMF like people have certain expectations from a smartphone like great cameras, great battery like you can't >> underperform on any of those things.
2:31:02
You got to be competitive with the latest iPhone, the latest Samsung, >> and then you can add your flare on top of it. >> Yeah.
2:31:09
>> But your flare cannot be significantly different from what people are used to. >> Yeah.
2:31:13
>> Like I believe that in the future, for instance, that apps are going to go away.
2:31:16
There's only one app on the phone.
2:31:18
It's the operating system. >> Interesting.
2:31:19
>> But we can't ship a phone without any apps.
2:31:21
Like people love their apps.
2:31:23
>> So you can't have a future vision, but it's going to be like a step-by-step process to to getting there.
2:31:26
And you got to bring the consumers along the way. >> Yeah.
2:31:30
Talk to me about uh >> how do you think uh I I can imagine where a world in which more and more of the app apps on that you use day-to-day are just eaten by the operating system.
2:31:41
Something like weather for example.
2:31:41
I don't love my weather app but I will open it up from time to time.
2:31:45
And there's a different scenario where I just you know transcribe what what's you know how's the weather going to be this afternoon and it just knows where I am and it just pops it up and says you know it's going to be 72 and sunny.
2:31:54
Um but then for other things like don't you think there'll be some networks that endure like for example like something like a Strava somebody's really into running >> um it's hard to imagine that that just merging with the operating system.
2:32:08
So >> I see it slightly differently.
2:32:12
I think broadly there's two categories of apps like waste time apps and save time apps.
2:32:17
Yeah, >> waste time apps are more like entertainment apps >> and the the save time apps are just utilities.
2:32:23
I think the utilities are going to be really easy to replace in the beginning.
2:32:27
>> But when it comes to Netflix and Spotify and those like entertainment apps, it's going to take some more time, but >> eventually the OS will partner with apps and apps can still exist in a in a container, just not as a separate uh thing you launch. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
2:32:42
>> What have you learned from the the history of like uh bloatware on smartphones?
2:32:47
I worked at a startup years ago, maybe 15 years ago or something that was uh it was running a Siri competitor.
2:32:54
Uh and part of their business model was uh getting like BlackBerry to pay them to pre-install their app and it was like a pretty good deal for Blackberry and this in this case it was a pretty good piece of software and so it just it just obiated the need for the customer to go and click pay for $20 for this app.
2:33:11
At the same time, customers have notoriously been like, "Why do I have 75 Verizon apps on my phone?"
2:33:18
And they get kind of uh they get kind of frustrated with that.
2:33:21
Uh what's the good condition for that? What's the bad case?
2:33:24
And then where does it go?
2:33:29
>> Um the smartphone market is very big.
2:33:29
So on the lower end, everybody has a ton of bloatware.
2:33:33
And >> I think that's okayish for the consumer because they get a better priced product that they couldn't afford otherwise.
2:33:38
But if you're operating on the high end and you have a ton of bloatware, then it's kind of weird because people are already paying a lot of money for your product to then have ads inside of the product. >> Yeah.
2:33:50
>> So, that's kind of how I think about it. >> Yeah.
2:33:52
What what is the uh what are like the key break points for uh for phone pricing?
2:33:56
Uh like internationally even >> internationally um probably around $300.
2:34:01
Like that's the main >> main category. Yeah.
2:34:06
>> Uh here in the US it's very different.
2:34:07
And it's like a barbell shaped market where the ultra premium takes a lot of share and the low low end like burner phones take a lot of share. >> Oh interesting.
2:34:14
How much are burner phones in the US?
2:34:17
>> Uh I don't have the numbers but probably like 20% of the market. >> Okay. Wow. Yeah.
2:34:20
I I I meant in terms of price like are we talking like $100? Yeah.
2:34:24
>> Oh so really really cheap. Interesting. I big thing.
2:34:28
>> How much capital would you need to deploy to be able to make a cheap phone high quality phone in the United States?
2:34:35
Are we talking like >> you know manufacture locally? >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
2:34:37
Like would you need like $50 billion to set up all >> capex or opex problem?
2:34:43
>> Well yeah the question is like if you have to basically like re not just do the assembly but like recreate all the sub suppliers.
2:34:48
It it's you start adding that up and and it gets >> I don't really know because we partner with a bunch of factories all over the world.
2:34:57
>> So if we wanted to manufacture in the US we wouldn't know who to go to to partner with.
2:35:02
>> Uh we do a lot of our manufacturing in India. >> Yeah.
2:35:04
And there we've seen that the government has been pretty successful.
2:35:05
I think you know India is now the second site in terms of volume after China. >> Yeah.
2:35:11
>> And they have incentives to uh like if you manufacture locally and export locally you get some cash back >> and I think that model really works.
2:35:17
So if the US is serious about this uh it's more of like the structural incentives that need to be set up for this to run. >> Yeah. >> Interesting.
2:35:27
Um, what would it take to to Is there anyone trying to build like a Tata Nano of phones?
2:35:32
Like something that's like smartphone level, not burner phone, but at like 75 bucks a pop.
2:35:39
>> They're they already exist. They do. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like for Africa. >> Okay.
2:35:43
Are they are they delivering on the promise at all?
2:35:47
>> Yeah, they're doing a great job in Africa and other markets where people need cheap phones.
2:35:50
You can get a smartphone for like 50 bucks now. >> Yeah. >> Interesting.
2:35:54
What about uh how do you guys think about have you integrated wallets for stable coins?
2:35:59
Is that something that should happen at the operating system layer for a phone?
2:36:03
I'm sure you've been >> I haven't thought too much about it for me.
2:36:07
Like there's no real use case for crypto yet.
2:36:11
>> No real use case for crypto.
2:36:11
What about store of value?
2:36:13
Bro, >> we just haven't seen anything with real PMF yet. >> What about Bitcoin? That's PMF.
2:36:19
>> Yeah, that's like one of the only things. >> I I get you.
2:36:22
Yeah, you're you're probably not trying to sell that many phones into sanctioned countries where the citizens really want to get dollars on chain. >> Yeah.
2:36:31
Uh can you walk me through the relationship between manufacturers and telecommunications companies?
2:36:35
I remember like years ago, >> this is the absolute last question because I know you got a heart out.
2:36:39
You just got to hit the we got to make time for hit the >> gong. Yeah.
2:36:42
Um, every market is different, but in the US there's basically very little relationship between brands and the carriers because there's only three carriers >> and they're playing a user acquisition game against each other.
2:36:56
>> So, their main way of acquiring users is not through selling unique hardware.
2:37:01
>> It's mainly the bundle, right?
2:37:01
How much data do you get? Do you get free Spotify? Do you get Netflix?
2:37:03
So for a small brand like us, there's basically no play with the carrier unless we build a ground swell of support with our community or have like really really innovative products.
2:37:15
>> I think our products are becoming more and more innovative and and fresh.
2:37:19
>> But we probably need a couple more years before we have a product that's really different for the US. >> Very cool.
2:37:23
Uh very cool and then we'll let you go.
2:37:26
>> Well, do do we need a number?
2:37:26
Can you give us anything?
2:37:28
How how big is the company?
2:37:29
How many employees you got?
2:37:29
How many phones have you sold?
2:37:30
We're about uh 750 employees. >> Wow. >> We're 0.
2:37:35
2% market share globally. >> That's actually huge.
2:37:38
Market is Congratulations. >> Thanks.
2:37:41
We've done more than a billion in revenue and we're doing a billion this year. >> What? Okay. Okay. Okay.
2:37:45
Please hit the smack right behind you.
2:37:48
That is >> very welld deserved.
2:37:50
Give it a give it a congratulations and thank you so much for coming by.
2:37:56
Really appreciate having you in person. This is fantast. >> Thanks so much. >> Um, >> great stuff.
2:38:04
>> Really buried the lead there for sure.
2:38:07
>> Um, are we hopping straight on with uh with Garrett or we got 15 minutes?
2:38:09
I guess we got 10 minutes. Yeah. Till the next one.
2:38:12
Uh, I want to go through >> uh is there anything else you want to go through? I I like this.
2:38:16
Uh, in the uh in the how to spend it section of the Financial Times, we have a review of something we've been hunting for, which is the best hotel gyms in the world. There we go. There we go.
2:38:28
So, uh, if you've been to a hotel gym on chest day, you've probably been disappointed because many, it's hard to find a hotel with what is it bigger than 50 pound dumbbells 50 pound dumbbells.
2:38:40
And we believe, we haven't fully verified this, but we believe this is due to a uh a market failure in the hotel gym insurance market.
2:38:49
And so, I think that uh there are two tiers of insurance.
2:38:52
one for like a CrossFit gym or powerlifting gym that has free weights and also barbells and you can do hang hang clean and clean and jerk and all that stuff.
2:39:03
Uh and then there's a different level of uh of insurance underwriting for things like treadmills and bicycles and free weights that go up to 50 pounds.
2:39:11
And so that's why when you're traveling you see a lot of gyms that don't have they won't you can't do squats.
2:39:18
there's a leg press machine and so they le they lean on the machines because they're the risk of injury is lower but the risk of gains is also lower.
2:39:25
So we are going to understand where you should travel um because to to to get access to the world's best gyms.
2:39:32
Uh hotel gyms are a mixed bag.
2:39:35
Even in top flight spots working out can be jar can be a jarringly subpar experience. That's right. Could not agree more.
2:39:41
Machinery might be decades old.
2:39:43
The water cooler might might be might date to the 80s office era. Should get Rora.
2:39:48
Uh for years, hospitality didn't invest in gyms as unlike with restaurants and spas the gym usually doesn't bring in ex any extra revenue.
2:39:57
That's an interesting dynamic I hadn't thought of.
2:40:00
So yeah, I mean if you put in like a Nou in your hotel, that's going to drive a ton of extra revenue whereas your gym will not.
2:40:07
Um so uh increasing >> just charge me per set with the 75 >> per pound.
2:40:12
Yeah, charge me >> per pound.
2:40:13
And then you got to put the bigger weights in cuz like I'm going to want to lift heavy.
2:40:18
>> Profit maximizing strategy.
2:40:20
>> Uh so but increasingly top hotels are pivoting.
2:40:22
It's important I keep the same fitness routines as when I'm at home, says Emily Oberg, founder of clothing label Sporty and Rich, who works out six times a week.
2:40:30
Her favorite hotel gyms include the Ritz Club in Paris for the pool and the Ilsan Pietro in Pazitano.
2:40:37
It has it has alfresco cardio equipment uh outside cardio equipment uh tennis courts and views.
2:40:42
It's motivating if the space is also beautiful.
2:40:44
Gym lighting needs to make you look and feel good while working out, says interior designer Kelly Worler.
2:40:50
Acoustics should amplify without distracting.
2:40:53
Materials should perform functionally while still feeling refined. I couldn't agree more.
2:41:01
>> Have you been to any of the proper hotels? Santa Monica proper gym. I haven't.
2:41:06
>> She She designed the Santa Monica proper. Oh, really? Kelly Worler. >> Yeah, there you go. Um, okay.
2:41:08
So, the best concept, these are awards from HTSI and uh the Financial Times. How to spend it.
2:41:16
Uh, the best concept goes to Power in Ireland, a great gym chain in the lobby of the hotel.
2:41:20
Power, Ireland's leading boutique workout provider, has partnerships with the Dean Hotels in Cork, Dublin and Galloway, and the Mason also in Dublin.
2:41:29
In the gyms, there's a functional fitness area with a custom athletic rig and astroturf track, a lifting area, free weights and a cardio equipment, cardio area equipped with technology, techno gym, skill run treadmills, rowers, ski urgs, watt bike pros, and more.
2:41:45
There are several 45minute classes, including run and metcon.
2:41:49
Guests can recover afterwards in the hyper ice suite, which is stocked with massage guns and foam rollers. Rooms from €200 euros. Not bad.
2:41:55
The most scenic is at the Aman Zo at in Greece.
2:42:01
It's an Aman property, of course. >> There we go.
2:42:03
>> Summer escapes are all about picturesque locations, seafront settings, a quaint and quiet local, and often ancient European history.
2:42:10
Uh, this Aman property gym offers all of the above and then some.
2:42:15
The resort has its own UNESCO protected ruins, but it's but it's the outdoor shaded weights area overlook.
2:42:22
Give it up for hotels that have ruins.
2:42:25
>> That is the real cell.
2:42:25
According to Tim Blakey, a personal trainer and founder of the workout at Prime Body, "We go on holiday to be outside."
2:42:31
He observes, "There's a slight breeze.
2:42:33
The sun is usually out and you can get your nature fix while you lift weights. Rooms from 1,500. Also not bad."
2:42:42
Oh, hey, here they have a proper hotel.
2:42:44
Did you know that this was going to be in here?
2:42:46
The proper hotel in Santa Monica. Best for recovery.
2:42:47
Uh, it has an amortal chamber where tech infused lounge chairs pulse with electromagnetic fields to deliver red light therapy to reduce inflammation and combat jet lag. Funny wax testing. Let's go. >> Okay, that's cool. Yeah, it's funny though.
2:43:04
When you walk into a I mean, you're going into a hotel gym, what do you really care about at the end of the day, John?
2:43:11
>> How much weight you throw around?
2:43:12
>> How much weight you can throw around.
2:43:13
Um, so, uh, and and they say at the at the proper hotel in Santa Monica, don't be surprised if you see Brian Johnson on your way out.
2:43:21
Um, >> my, uh, personal favorite hotel, gym, Sensei, Sensei Porcupine Creek.
2:43:26
This is Larry Ellison's uh, basically four seasons competitor and, uh, they've done a a really nice job with it.
2:43:35
>> Okay, we got to go through there.
2:43:35
There there's a few others.
2:43:37
The most exotic uh, the best for classes, but the the most exclusive.
2:43:42
This is this is what I want to know about.
2:43:45
>> Most exclusive hotel gym in the world according to the Financial Times.
2:43:49
>> Suren at the Emory in Nightsbridge.
2:43:52
>> Guests of the All Suite Emory have full access to Sur Saren, a comprehensive wellness club with only 140 vetted members.
2:44:01
It costs 15,000 pounds per year to join.
2:44:05
>> I thought you were going to say per month.
2:44:09
>> The gym is small, but it has 360 degree mirrors. So it feels bigger.
2:44:12
LA celebrity trainer Tracy Anderson has licensed her name to Saron.
2:44:16
Uh it's the only place where you can book her dance cardio workouts in the UK.
2:44:22
Alternatively, guests can request >> Isn't that kind of disappointing though that the >> the nicest that like the most exclusive gym in the world is is 15,000 a year.
2:44:34
Like shouldn't somebody make shouldn't somebody make like a like a >> the $100,000 a month gym?
2:44:39
I think you just designed home gyms in mega mansions.
2:44:45
>> I maybe I did, >> but but >> with with a with an entire team of specialists, >> but so so so you can pay the £15,000 a year for a membership or you can book a suite for 1,600 pounds per night.
2:44:58
>> Um, so maybe I don't know what is that.
2:45:00
Uh, it's it's in pounds, so that's like 15 bucks US or something.
2:45:03
>> It is pretty funny that the the dynamic of this is the most exclusive club in the world, but if you just book a hotel room, you can go to it.
2:45:08
Yeah, >> that's a bit silly.
2:45:11
>> But this is where it gets good.
2:45:11
So, if you book the hotel room, it's suites only.
2:45:14
You book the hotel room, it's going to cost you 1,600 pounds a night.
2:45:19
They have a weights trolley that you can request, and it brings the weights to your suite.
2:45:24
It includes dumbbells, kettle bells, skipping ropes, yoga balls, resistance bands, and a leather gym ball.
2:45:30
A Pelaton bike can also be installed at a whim.
2:45:32
So, you can be in your room and be like, "I don't want to go to the gym.
2:45:35
Bring the weights to me."
2:45:37
and they will bring them to you on a trolley. That is luxury. I love it.
2:45:42
Anyway, lots of fun in the how to spend it section of the uh of the Financial Times.
2:45:49
Uh any other uh any other news?
2:45:51
>> Let's do some timeline.
2:45:53
>> Um the other uh yeah, some time >> I like this post from Dylan Patel.
2:45:55
He said, "AI bros when I tell them Boeing outperformed Nvidia, Meta, Google, Broadcom, AMD, and Microsoft this year."
2:46:03
Yeah, >> I gotta pull up the Boeing uh chart. on public. com. >> I certainly do. So year to date up 34%. >> Wow.
2:46:14
>> Let's give it up for Great America. >> Only 34%.
2:46:18
How does that outperform Google, Nvidia, Meta?
2:46:21
I guess they all round trip because of the tariff.
2:46:23
>> Nvidia is only up 18% year to date because a lot of the election stuff started getting priced in. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Totally.
2:46:28
No, that makes a ton of sense.
2:46:30
>> Um well, well, we have our we have our last guest of the show joining now.
2:46:32
I'm gonna let you take the intro. I will be right back. >> Let's do it.
2:46:37
>> Can we bring in Garrett?
2:46:37
I will say how I will say what up. How you doing?
2:46:42
>> What's going on, boys? How's it going?
2:46:44
>> It's great to have you here.
2:46:44
This is the first time, correct? >> Do I have an amnesia? First time.
2:46:46
Uh I'm surprised it took this long. It's great to see you.
2:46:51
You've got some exciting news today.
2:46:52
Uh hit us with a quick intro on yourself and the company and then we'll get into the news. >> Sweet.
2:46:59
Yeah, my name is Garrett, uh CEO of Pipe Labs.
2:47:01
Uh at Pipe Dream Labs, we build the infrastructure to make autonomous logistics uh scale. >> Amazing.
2:47:08
Uh give us the quick catch us up to speed on the history of the company.
2:47:13
I know we first met back I think it was in 2021 and you've been very busy since then and then I want to get into what you're uh announcing today. >> Yeah. Well, likewise, man. Congrats on the show. >> Uh studio look sick.
2:47:27
>> Y have to come have to come in person next time you're uh next time you're around. Yeah, I got you guys.
2:47:31
Um, so yeah, the the announcement is um something we've been working on for a long time.
2:47:36
Um, you know, the kind of first product we were working on uh at Pipeream is, you know, what we see as like the fiber optic cable for autonomous logistics.
2:47:44
Um, how do you move a lot of things really quickly and really cheaply?
2:47:48
So, we put underground pipes uh in cities and then we have these robots that go through the underground pipes and uh deploy orders to what we call portals.
2:47:58
but they're like ATPM size kiosks.
2:48:00
Um it's a modular system made to be able to be retrofit, you know, whether that's into a building, an apartment building, um underneath a road, uh and uses just standard construction methods that cities are used to using um for non-invasive construction going into um buildings and through public rideway.
2:48:16
Uh so we got, you know, that's something we were working on.
2:48:21
We we got that to a really good place.
2:48:22
And something um that we kind of uh thought about a lot when we were starting was you know if we're working on the fiber optic cable um we wonder if there's also going to need to be kind of like the cloud architecture for autonomous logistics.
2:48:37
for autonomous logistics. Um because as you start to move things really quickly uh and you we've seen this with drones already like drones are like this magical they're magic it's incredible and they're so quick and yet it's still
2:48:53
taking like 15 30 minutes sometimes like I had one that took 40 minutes um because it's so uh it's so hard to pick out of those stores that they're picking from um and they're picking out the stores because those are the you know the closest uh storage areas. is um to
2:49:06
is um to where uh the customers are.
2:49:10
So, it's kind of like a um an inefficient system.
2:49:15
Uh you have this really fast delivery method and a really slow processor um to get that thing out of storage and and into uh the drone.
2:49:21
So, that's something we thought about a lot.
2:49:23
So, you know, me and my co-founder Canon, we're huge retail nerds.
2:49:27
So, we're always uh diving into Costco and Walmart and Amazon and the history um of just logistics and retail as a whole.
2:49:35
Um and what we realized is like man it is time it is time for autonomous logistics to scale and no one stepping up and building these fulfillment centers um that are made to rapidly dispense.
2:49:45
Um so we had learned a lot um worked with a lot of partners who taught us a lot about how to run those uh facilities and decided you know what it's time to go.
2:49:55
So um we just uh acquired our first rapid fulfillment center here in Austin.
2:50:00
um it's going to be what feeds the network um here in Austin and uh yeah that that was the other announcement is >> so so is this just so I'm getting it correctly so is this set up in order to serve the like you know original pipe dream infrastructure and then also traditional drone delivery as well. >> Yeah.
2:50:23
So, the way that we see it is if you have something at at a rapid fulfillment center, the goal is how do we get it into the customer's hands as quickly and as cheaply as possible.
2:50:31
Um, and a lot of the times that's, you know, u you may want to move it through the pipe dream network to a closer location.
2:50:39
Um, you might just want to put it into a drone directly.
2:50:41
Um, it may be a heavier item.
2:50:43
Um, it may be a bundle of items.
2:50:46
You want to put it into a self-driving car.
2:50:47
I think for the foreseeable future, I think it's going to be even like really um load dependent as well.
2:50:52
Um I think autonomous vehicles and uh drones are going to be kind of like the GPUs of the autonomous logistics uh scale up.
2:51:02
Um we're going to be constantly constrained by their availability.
2:51:07
Um so uh our goal is to be really good one at dispensing really quickly and dispensing into the right uh modality and you know constantly figuring out what is that right modality for that address, what is the right modality um for that time um and making sure that um that order is getting into that right modality and getting to the person as cheaply as quickly as possible.
2:51:28
So >> So what is the over the next year specifically what what uh delivery form factor are you most excited about?
2:51:35
Yeah, I think the two that we're most excited about is autonomous delivery right now is still pretty cost constrained.
2:51:42
The cost per delivery is still really high.
2:51:47
Um, so you're either passing that along to the customer or you see a lot of the times it's heavily subsidized.
2:51:50
Um, I think especially on the drone side that's going to come down a lot over the next year.
2:51:56
Um, and so that's the one um that we really want to be the best at doing.
2:52:00
We have an internal goal here at the team that we want to uh by the end of next year we want to have done the most drone deliveries of any company. Um which is crazy.
2:52:09
It's not like a super high bar right now.
2:52:11
Um but I think that is a resource that's really underutilized.
2:52:16
>> Um and then pick up >> what is the regulatory framework that uh drone deliveries are are needing to happen within right now specifically in Austin?
2:52:26
Like I imagine peer-to-peer I could just put something, you know, attach something to a drone, take it up, fly it over to a buddy's house and drop it.
2:52:35
But then if you're trying to do this at scale, I imagine like you you have to uh keep uh keep a lot of other things in mind.
2:52:43
>> Yeah, it's right now um it's not such a straight pathway to being able to do it city by city.
2:52:49
Um so each company who is doing the drone deliveries has to get their own um regulatory clearance.
2:52:54
Uh and so it is like pretty uh pretty big hassle that that's changing pretty rapidly.
2:53:01
We just had the executive order um to make that pathway uh clear up.
2:53:03
I I really think um especially as we start to get more consumer demand uh for it.
2:53:09
I mean it's just if you go and look at the reviews from people who have experienced a a drone delivery uh it is it's it's borderline a religious experience.
2:53:17
it really changes like how you think about commerce as a whole.
2:53:21
So, um I think that's going to change over the next couple years.
2:53:25
Um you know, I think there's a lot of companies that have died uh saying drone delivery is going to, you know, scale the next two years.
2:53:33
They've been saying that for the last like 15 years.
2:53:34
Um so, it's a tough thing to time.
2:53:36
Um that's why, you know, we want to get really good at drone deliveries and be really careful.
2:53:40
Um and just kind of learn right now.
2:53:42
Um be ready for that scale and really focus on pickup as well.
2:53:46
Pickups is a huge um uh industry.
2:53:50
Um it's one that doesn't have a lot of infrastructure to it.
2:53:53
So, it's still such a bad experience, but it's still one of the fastest growing um ways that people experience retail is ordering ahead and picking up, especially in grocery.
2:54:03
So, that's one where we saw the ability for us to go into um grocery uh make it a really really great pickup experience.
2:54:11
That's something that you can do um right now make really good margins on um learn and then as uh those autonomous methods um decreasing costs uh specifically due to um uh better regulation um then we'll start to add that on uh as we go along. >> Amazing. >> Anything else? >> I think that's it.
2:54:35
>> Good to see you again.
2:54:35
The last time we talked or I mean we've talked a few times but uh uh I interviewed Garrett like two was two three years ago or something all about how Amazon had been talking a big game about drone delivery and I was like let me talk to everyone else who's been uh uh been been working in this space and uh it's it's a fantastically massive market that is incredibly difficult to actually get things to work and once they start working it's great.
2:55:04
Um, so >> yeah, I think the key thing is staying in the game, finding finding a sustainable business model that's not dependent on, you know, dependent on adoption over a 15-year period versus a 15-month period.
2:55:17
I remember when we were when we were talking, we were we were n like it's just such a it's it's one of those businesses that you just like naturally noodle on like, okay, should you go to like people that are building new prefab home communities and install a bunch of pipes in the ground when they build the buildings?
2:55:31
Or should you do some sort of Boring Company thing where you get really good at drilling into old old, you know, uh neighborhoods?
2:55:37
Or should you do flying or driving?
2:55:39
Like there's so many different modalities.
2:55:41
So, uh very exciting that you're that you're kind of exploring all of them now.
2:55:44
So, congrats and good luck. >> Yeah, appreciate it. Thanks for having me on. Great stuff.
2:55:49
>> Yeah, we'll talk to you soon. >> Talk soon. Bye.
2:55:50
>> All right, see you guys.
2:55:51
>> Uh, in other AI acquisition news, we almost missed it because it, you know, Sundar did everything he could to drown this out, but we surfaced the post and it's about Mark Zuckerberg acquiring Play AI, poaching the entire team, and they are joining the Meta Super Intelligence Lab next week. Zuck cannot be stopped.
2:56:12
He has the Thanos gauntlet there.
2:56:15
Um, they completed his >> Who's on the Who's on the the who's on >> the cap table or Oh, it's the researchers.
2:56:22
I guess it's it's the it's the team.
2:56:23
I I feel like I feel like we were played a very big role in this meme becoming bigger, but a lot of people have run with it in different directions and it's been amazing watching it watching it grow like this.
2:56:32
Um, the Play AI group will report to Johan Schulquick. Cool name.
2:56:37
Not sure how to pronounce that.
2:56:39
Who recently joined Meta from a separate voice AI startup called a Sesame AI that I remember this that was a controversial one because Sesame is a new new company and you know shouldn't be losing people to Zuck already.
2:56:49
Um, but uh the entire Play AI team is coming over and I believe uh it's a YC company because I saw one of the YC partners posting about, hey, this is uh this is the >> another 100 million for Gareth.
2:57:02
>> The Dark Knight, the Dork Knight rides again. Never go up against him.
2:57:06
>> Well, in other news, over the weekend, Janick Center made history as the first Italian man to win a singles title at Wimbledon.
2:57:12
Naturally, this is uh according to Bezel, he celebrated with a rose gold uh Rolex Daytona Oyster Flex on the wrist.
2:57:19
So, thank you for doing the most important work.
2:57:22
Uh it looks absolutely fantastic.
2:57:27
>> Yes, cover of the Wall Street Journal for this by the way.
2:57:28
Um in Bloom, Italy's Yanuk Center celebrates Sunday in London after his men's singles championship win over Spain's Carlos Alcarz.
2:57:38
I don't know follow tennis enough to know how to pronounce that.
2:57:40
Uh Poland's Ego Suat defeated blah blah blah and uh yeah more coverage but he's looking happy with the trophy.
2:57:49
>> I love how how >> I know sports >> little attention you play to tennis.
2:57:54
>> You you know what I do follow though? >> I follow hitters.
2:57:57
I follow watches and Jensen absolutely mogged the rest of the tech world with one of the most insane Mills.
2:58:08
>> You don't see him in a short sleeve t-shirt much.
2:58:10
No, >> he took off the leather jacket for this.
2:58:14
And this is such a come from behind moment because we've been talking about his the lack of wrist game and we've been doing wrist checks on Jensen for for months now.
2:58:24
>> Karp was was early and right. >> Karp's Yeah. Oh, for sure.
2:58:26
He the orange with the orange strap.
2:58:29
Uh Zuck's been ramping up putting up insane. >> Really?
2:58:35
Anytime he steps out of the house, >> he has a cubitus.
2:58:37
He's got he's got a stack collection.
2:58:39
And everyone was saying even even uh Jensen's uh uh family relative Lisa Sue over at AM AMD was mogging him with a with a Rolex.
2:58:49
We saw uh but now >> doubts never loves this up 3% over the last five days.
2:59:01
So obviously obviously because of this >> obviously because of this but this watch is is really really special.
2:59:05
I mean, what I what I love about it is that it's just so thin.
2:59:10
Like, when I think Rishard Mill, I think of the the silhouette, the outline, this kind of like oh, it's almost like a bowed rectangle, which I think is a very cool unique design.
2:59:18
I think of the skeletons.
2:59:19
It's checking those boxes, but then it's just so thin.
2:59:23
Uh, and it looks fantastic.
2:59:23
And Jensen is wearing it very well.
2:59:25
So, >> we need to do we need to do a deep dive on RM because the story is crazy.
2:59:28
was basically this longtime executive who decided he was going to make a luxury watch brand. Yes.
2:59:39
>> And to actually just decide, >> it's easy to say, "I'm going to start a watch company." Yeah.
2:59:43
>> Very very much harder to like actually crack the code and be able to sell watches in the >> I'm surprised some of our friends haven't started watch companies given how many companies they're spinning up every two seconds. >> Yeah.
2:59:52
Certain one in particular.
2:59:55
>> It'll happen eventually.
2:59:56
>> It'll happen eventually.
2:59:56
Um, the last another post somebody posted, "RIP McKenzie, you don't need a 300K consultant anymore.
3:00:04
You can run now run full competitive market analysis using Gro 4."
3:00:08
And uh, our friend Buco Capital Bloke says, "I'd like to see an LLM provide regular consulting to turbocharge opioid sales, be a trusted partner for autocratic regimes, and help young people get hooked on ecigarettes."
3:00:22
>> Very negative on the consulting firms.
3:00:25
uh who speaks for them but we got a we got a we got a one let's give them they do a lot of good work >> for Mckenzie Bane BCG the white shoe firms they do great work yes some mistakes were made >> but overall >> good farm team for future PMs in big tech yeah >> so uh in other news uh Monumental Labs the has raised some money over $8 million most recently in a $7 million seed round led by Alexis O'Haneian 776 this is the Stone carving alert.
3:00:56
>> Yeah, they're carving stones.
3:00:58
>> They're carving stones.
3:00:59
>> You heard Monumental Labs.
3:00:59
You thought new new >> foundation model.
3:01:02
No, AI robots can already carve stone statues.
3:01:05
Entire buildings are next.
3:01:07
Uh the stone carving startup Monumental Labs has raised money.
3:01:11
They have a new HQ almost 40,000 square feet in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. >> Wait.
3:01:16
So, so the the cool thing here, so so they they are opening this new facility in Greenpoint, which is makes total sense to be the home of >> what will become the largest fine art stone fabricator in North America and possibly in the world when it opens in the fall. >> Makes so much sense.
3:01:32
And this, you know, a lot of people would, you know, this company >> uh was nonobvious. Yep.
3:01:38
>> uh was nonobvious. Yep. But then if you think about what we would pay for stone statues here in the studio and I think what a lot of people will pay >> of all the mag seven CEOs potentially just hypothetically I don't have like a mood board for that or anything you know
3:01:53
it's not like saved on my phone as an idea >> we want to make the the mount rush rush more of the manosphere you know >> yeah yeah it's mag seven watching over the manosphere >> it' be great >> no but I I think I think you know if they can really crack uh >> congratulations to the Monumental Labs team. That's a very exciting company
3:02:13
That's a very exciting company >> and led by Alexis O'hanian, friend of the show.
3:02:18
And also he says, "Looks like the secret is out.
3:02:21
Can't wait for y'all to watch because he is going to be a guest shark.
3:02:26
>> He's going to Shark Tank uh the upcoming season of Shark Tank, which will be uh Wednesdays this fall on ABC and stream on Hulu.
3:02:33
Uh he's gonna really have to really go shark mode because Alexis is uh known to just be a really nice guy.
3:02:41
Really really >> found sharky. That's very funny.
3:02:43
>> Not not I mean uh sharp elbows I'm sure getting into deals, you know, but um but yeah, he's going to uh I mean but there's always room for for >> just offering an entrepreneur on Shark Tank a nice fair deal.
3:02:54
You wouldn't, you know, he's not going to be offering, >> you know, like just give me 20% of topline forever. >> Yeah.
3:03:02
Yeah, I mean as a personality I think he'll fit in great.
3:03:03
I think he will really add something to the show. So very excited for him. Go check it out.
3:03:08
>> And final post from Adam Singer.
3:03:08
I was going to end on this.
3:03:11
The uh CMO of AdQ out of home made easy and measurable.
3:03:16
Says, "Love seeing out of home from the new gen of tech media brands.
3:03:18
Great brands do things online and in the real world.
3:03:22
Uh our software makes this really easy for all."
3:03:24
And I just want to give a quick shout out to Adam uh for betting on us early.
3:03:30
bet on us when we just were two guys, two suits, and a stack of posts.
3:03:34
So, >> we will never forget that.
3:03:35
And uh go do yourself a favor and sign up for adqu >> after you're done with that.
3:03:42
>> Make advertising easy and measurable. Come on, people.
3:03:44
I don't even need a >> It's really not complicated.
3:03:46
After that, leave us a fivestar review on >> Spotify, Apple Podcast, wherever you listen.
3:03:52
And I can't wait for tomorrow.
3:03:55
>> There there was >> a couple weeks of news since last Friday. Yeah.
3:03:59
And I'm sure there will be quite a bit more tomorrow.
3:04:02
>> Uh the other piece of news, uh the information launched a competitor to us and they had some technical issues.
3:04:05
So if you know things about computers, please contact them. >> Yeah.
3:04:10
Tell them tell them the technology brother sent you. >> And that's our show. See you tomorrow. >> Cheers. Goodbye. Have a great Monday.