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4:48
Today is Monday, June 16th, 2025.
4:51
We are live from the TVPN Ultra Dome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital.
5:00
Uh we have a great show for you today, folks.
5:03
It's Lemon and one of our absolute boys.
5:06
I've never met him in person, but he's a legend. DHH is in the race.
5:10
Uh I mean, race is over, but uh still, we will we will have him uh on the show soon to break it down.
5:17
I'm very excited for that.
5:17
Uh in other news, uh the Wall Street Journal is in absolute turmoil over Iran and Israel.
5:24
There is a new war in the Middle East.
5:26
Uh Israel races to reshape region with few checks.
5:29
Iran, Israel put energy sector into new peril.
5:32
Uh I'm thinking of having somebody on the show to talk about oil markets.
5:35
I think that might be an interesting downstream um thing.
5:39
We're not a deeply political show, but obviously there's defense tech angles situations.
5:43
We do monitor situations.
5:45
We've been known to monitor situations.
5:46
We've been watching the poly markets.
5:46
Uh there's a lot of if you're just getting into situations, this one is a good one to start.
5:51
Do you think this is the good first situation? It's pretty intense.
5:53
I don't I would completely disagree with that.
5:57
It's a of all the situations that you could start off with if you're getting into monitoring, this would this is for advanced monitors in my opinion for sure, but you know, get throw yourself into the deep end. Yeah, I guess.
6:08
Yeah, it is a bit of a deep end situation. Swim, you know.
6:10
Yeah, it is sinker swim at this situation.
6:12
But fortunately, we have Poly Market where you can monitor all of the situations.
6:17
Um, how is poly market tracking US odds of of actually no action?
6:21
I think that is a market.
6:24
Um, there's a number there's a number of of interesting poly markets.
6:28
I I have them pulled up yesterday. Yeah.
6:29
So, it's hovering at 32% on US military action against Iran before July.
6:35
If this starts spiking, I think we should all start paying attention because all of uh I think many of the actions from Israel to date uh poly markets on them would just start going Yeah. insane vertical.
6:50
Well, uh the journal's covering it left and right.
6:53
Uh there are some other stories in here.
6:56
Investors are wary of the roller coaster.
6:58
We're still in the kangaroo market.
7:00
Uh some move into cash or foreign companies to avoid market volatility. very very tricky.
7:04
There's also an interesting article somewhere in the journal I was reading about which was that that uh uh politics is increasingly dividing the portfolios of investors.
7:15
So so so Democrats are are more likely to perceive that the market will degrade that the economy will do poorly and Republicans are more likely to assume that the market will do well.
7:30
And so they're like basically right now Republicans because the Republicans are in the White House are more bullish which is very interesting.
7:36
And you know there's an old adage that like you should keep politics out of your portfolio because like the market doesn't care about about politics very often.
7:46
Do things that make money. Exactly. Exactly. Um that was interesting.
7:49
Bucko Capital Bloke had a fun post from over the weekend. Oops. Mic down. Mike down.
7:54
Um on Saturday he posted the start of World War II is bullish because we now have a new positive catalyst, the eventual end of World War II.
8:03
And he posted he quoted that this morning and said lol because there was some positive news that the World War II might signal.
8:10
Yeah, Ron was signaling that uh allegedly signaling that they were interested in um figuring out some type of ceasefire. But it would be good.
8:22
Uh we certainly hope for a ceasefire.
8:23
We hope for um uh you know positive uh collaboration between all of all parties in the global economy and uh I mean there are some interesting developments.
8:34
Um there's there's the potential of a new trade deal.
8:36
There's potential of a new uh geopolitical order.
8:40
You're really struggling with that Mike.
8:41
You got to crank that thing.
8:43
This is a grip strength test.
8:43
This is why uh the Lone Ranger sent us those grip strength uh the grippers.
8:49
Jord's really at an awkward angle.
8:51
We'll see how long this works. Yeah.
8:54
Um but uh back in the tech world, there is some more exciting, more positive news.
9:00
Uh Meta Oakleys are coming.
9:02
Uh this uh Shield says this makes sense.
9:04
Lxodica owns both Oakley and Rayban and Meta is reportedly investing $5 billion for a 4% stake.
9:12
Lxodica is a fascinating business story.
9:14
The founder Leo Delvvesio's family still owns onethird.
9:17
The guy was an orphan who became a metal worker making parts for glasses ultimately becoming the largest listed company in Italy.
9:25
It is really interesting to think about how if if Meta can basically corner all of the all of the most iconic uh all of the most iconic frames which they can do through Lotica if they do figure out some type of exclusive over time uh through that investment.
9:43
Does LXica just own all the major brands and everything?
9:48
Every time you buy sunglasses, you think you're buying, you know, some unique brand with heritage. Luxica. It's interesting.
9:55
We should we we should dig more into that company because uh they they don't own all the retail sunglass hut retail stuff going on.
10:02
I mean, they are big glasses and that created the opportunity for Warby Parker. Yep.
10:07
because they're manufactur you know basically this entire you know Luxada had verticalized from brand to production to the actual um medical side as well interesting well let me tell you about ramp.
10:21
com time is money save both use corporate cards bill payments accounting and a whole lot more all in one place there's been some wild rumors circulating rumors about ramp but we will we will have more on that front this coming days including some special guests shalom says he can't stop thinking about the Coinbase sponsored military parade.
10:39
I mean, it really was uh an iconic image, you know, the stage at the parade and then coin brought to you by the US Army brought to you by Coinbase.
10:50
Usually, you see the army sponsoring things like UFC and things like that for recruiting purposes.
10:54
Uh you don't typically see them the other way around recruiting sponsors. Yeah.
11:00
Um, and we, you were saying off air this morning, it's kind of feels in some way counter to crypto's, you know, origins and roots as a sort of libertarian technology.
11:11
Most Bitcoiners would say, I'm acrewing Bitcoin so that you cannot tax me.
11:15
And what can you not do as soon as you stop taxing me?
11:17
You can't pay for the military.
11:19
But of course, in the libertarian, you know, extreme, there are still like private military forces, I suppose, and different structures. I don't know.
11:28
I'm not I'm not super into all the all the crazy crypto.
11:29
U Coinbase could hardcore libertarians, but but but Coinbase is not that that's not the median Coinbase customer anymore.
11:35
Like the median Coinbase customer is just like an American investor who wants to diversify.
11:40
And that's very for me it was interesting because there would been so much you know it was the 250th anniversary of the army, right?
11:46
anniversary of the army, right? there had been so much excitement and noise around it and then um yeah I guess credit for Coinbase to Coinbase to getting the presenting sponsor slot but uh you'd think given how much we spend on our military they could just say no
12:03
sponsors on the 250th birthday that is that'd be like you know there's certain friends of mine that I would I would maybe want their birthday party to be sponsored by ramp but it's just you know different context yeah it is it is funny like David Senber his when when we celebrate his birthday. It is sponsored
12:18
It is sponsored by sponsored by RAM. It is. Yeah. Yeah.
12:21
It is funny like why why why do like what did the Coinbase sponsorship pay for?
12:25
I guess it it takes money out of it.
12:27
Does it takes the burden off the taxpayer which is certainly nice.
12:29
I mean I I like the idea of paying less taxes for military parades. I I guess that's good.
12:35
They should just start putting ads on your on your ID card.
12:36
They should put ads on the military uniforms. Your California ID.
12:42
You should be able to see a Nimtt's class brought to you by Verizon, you know.
12:44
Uh, you should be able to see a massive aircraft carrier just engraved with corporate logos everywhere. NASCAR livery.
12:52
Full NASCAR livery on on the submarine. Yeah. On the Triton class.
12:57
This thing doesn't get photographed much, but when it does, but when it does, you know, it's brought to you by class carrier, you know, all the you you basically get all this free marketing through the open source intel accounts.
13:08
You know, they're just posting pictures.
13:09
And I mean, a lot of those military assets, they go into the next Transformers movie.
13:12
They go into the next Top Gun movie.
13:14
When you see Tom Cruz step into the F-16 or the F-35 and it's got the Exxon Mobile and McDonald's logos on it, boom. Fire me up. Yeah, fire me up.
13:24
They're not taking that out in in post.
13:26
Okay, I think we got Someone listening, this is your life's work.
13:32
Bring out ofome advertising to the military. Maybe it's Adquick. Maybe it's Adquick.
13:35
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only adqu combines technology out of home expertise and data to enable efficient seamless ad buying across the globe.
13:46
I have a request for startups.
13:47
Um maybe maybe we can get Tyler to work on this.
13:50
We didn't give him a task today, but we do have Tyler. Okay. Here's my pitch.
13:56
Okay. Here's my pitch. uh you know you studied physics so you might have to recruit some biologists for this but the story he he we were thinking about having him day trade so that's why he's got a day trading background but we
14:10
didn't really get that through so anyway here's my request for startups so the story of GLP1 glucagon like peptide one I think that's what it stands for ompic wagui mjaro wiggoi that's the proper pronovi Ompic these these uh these fantastic weight loss drugs that are absolutely blockbusters. We have some more news
14:31
We have some more news about the patent which was very funny this weekend.
14:35
Uh you might have seen um the whole origin story of GLP1s is that the Hila monster is a animal that doesn't have to eat very much and they figured out that if they extracted the saliva or venom they could distill something from that and that was kind of the the inciting research point to go and actually understand GLP1s and then ultimately create because the Hila monster has some weird way that it eats.
15:03
It has like a very unique metabolism. Yes. Exactly.
15:05
And so my request for startups is to do the same thing but with the saliva of a golden retriever.
15:12
So I want to take the saliva from the golden retriever, extract that and create a GLP1 type shot. Yeah.
15:15
That when you when injected would make you friendlier. Yeah.
15:20
So we're trying to up upregulate friendliness.
15:23
Basically productizing golden retriever mode. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly.
15:26
So So Tyler, I would love a deep dive.
15:28
We'll check in with you afterwards.
15:30
I want I want to understand, you know, what it takes to build the golden retriever the golden retriever mindset.
15:36
People are always talking about bio biohacking.
15:38
Oh, I want to be more focused. I want to be stronger.
15:41
I want to have more energy. I want to sleep better. What about friendlier? What about hotter? What about dumber?
15:46
These better getting chasing balls. Exactly. Relentlessness. So figure it out.
15:52
figure out who the top uh bio technologists we could possibly talk to on the show to see if this is feasible.
16:00
Figure out what it'll take and give us a breakdown at the end of the show.
16:05
Uh speaking of the show, we have uh we have a fantastic lineup.
16:07
We have uh uh John Jumper from Google DeepMind coming on, Christian Garrett from 137 Ventures.
16:13
We're going to debate uh the uh a whole bunch of topics in late stage, growstage venture with him.
16:17
We have Aaron from Lighteed and we have Joseph Cass from uh People just want to see Aaron's name in their deck, right? You remember that quote?
16:26
He uh this was in the 2021 era.
16:28
He had he had sold his company to Apple.
16:31
It became the Apple card.
16:33
And oh uh basically people would just come to him and be like, I can I give you half a point in my company?
16:40
And they just wanted to see his name in their deck.
16:44
They thought it would give him an edge.
16:45
And I'm sure in many cases it did.
16:47
But I'm excited to have him on uh later today. Very excited.
16:50
Uh Gary Tan has some news.
16:53
Pano raised a $44 million series B for their wild wildfire early detection eyes in the sky startup.
17:01
Wildfires have only become more fierce over the years.
17:03
And now we have software, computer vision, and smart cameras to stop them before they become giant and unstoppable. Fantastic.
17:09
I mean, a lot of companies were started out of the last batch of wildfires where the sky turned orange in San Francisco.
17:18
I think that was 2020, 2021, something like that.
17:20
Um, and uh, it's good to see that someone's been grinding on this.
17:23
I hadn't even heard of this company before.
17:25
There was that other map. It must be a YC company.
17:28
It must be or maybe Gary's just spreading the love across across Silicon Valley or Yeah, it's possible Gary did it pre potentially YC, but obviously very exciting.
17:38
Uh, we should make sense there.
17:40
You've seen the footage of of after the Palisades fire.
17:43
where they were re-watching this like ultra low res footage like trying to figure out where it started.
17:51
It's it's all these like sort of research labs I think that maintain camera footage. Put it in 4K. Let's get it in 4K. Let's get in.
17:57
Let's let people kind of better understand thetic aperture radar going.
18:01
Uh let's do a lot of different things.
18:03
I mean, this is this is one of those things where like Anderal for wildfires might not be an anderal on the andal road map immediately.
18:11
They they they were testing wildfire, the wildfire fighting tank and stuff, but they've been Andrew has been so focused on the military specifically now because they really have an like an edge there.
18:22
I don't know about the DC.
18:24
Oh, you didn't know that?
18:24
They wanted to make a tank that fight. Yes.
18:25
An autonomous tank that could go fight wildfires.
18:29
They brought in Jamimeie Heinman from the Mythbusters to help work on it. They built it.
18:32
And then I talked to Palmer about it and he said that there was a lot of push back around like job displacement and unions even though they would need plenty of people to like man these and like manage them.
18:44
But but it was it was a very complex situation to get through and so they wound up scrapping that and it's probably good that they did because now they're in submarines and fury and roadrunner and they have like major major contracts and major major uh like serious jobs to address directly within the DoD.
19:00
And so just focus once they want to start experimenting with hubris they can expand into a category like wildfires right for now they seem it's obviously adjacent but this feels like something where you know it's like flock safety like yes it's like and adjacent but it's kind of its own thing and so you're not just going to get rolled immediately.
19:17
So uh congrats to the pano team we'd love to chat with you and uh help protect our houses because we live in Pasadena and Malibu and we are subject to wildfires all the time.
19:26
Uh anyway, if you also want to protect yourself from risk, go to vanta. com.
19:33
Automate compliance, manage risk, improve trust continuously, Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. Um okay, JD Ross, Santa.
19:48
com, co-founder of Open Door, I believe.
19:51
Um I've chatted with him a few times.
19:53
Um, he says, "I couldn't find a single notable founder with a degree focused in entrepreneurship.
19:58
I expected at least one outlier given the number of undergrad programs, but no, zero." Interesting.
20:03
Did you study entrepreneurship? What did you study?
20:06
What's this comment from an account you muted?
20:08
This is This is something we can't click, so I can't even show you.
20:13
But I guess we'll never know.
20:14
This is the JD Vance thing when you mute Miles. Yeah. Um, uh, yeah.
20:21
I I I wonder how many actual undergrad programs there are.
20:24
How many undergrad entrepreneurship programs?
20:29
It's just hard because like so much about entrepreneurship is go and become an expert in computer science or there's more than any like look at look at the story of of TJ Parker.
20:39
It's like he became a pharmacist and then was uniquely suited to build a company around that pill pack.
20:45
Um and you you like just starting with entrepreneurship and then you have to go learn something about a particular industry that you want to disrupt is much much harder in my opinion. Yeah.
20:54
In many ways uh YC is the undergrad program for venturebacked entrepreneurship. I agree. Yeah.
21:01
So unnecessary I'd say uh wind them down.
21:08
Take all the entrepreneurs and start teaching them art history.
21:10
They'll be that's how you get a real edge in the in the new economy. Yes.
21:14
Uh, well, you have a nice post here. Oh, this is fantastic.
21:19
Aiden Burke putting some positivity on the timeline.
21:22
August Roden has such a kind, intelligent eye.
21:26
And it's a picture of a beautiful horse. Really does. And wouldn't you agree?
21:31
Such a kind, intelligent eye.
21:33
M muscular development, vascularity on a fantastic horse as well. Yes.
21:38
If you go to the next slide, there's a closeup of this horse.
21:43
We got to check uh with with the the building managers and see if we can have many horses on the property because it would be absolutely fantastic.
21:51
Yeah, we need to replace the soundboard like like we have the gong sound on the soundboard, but then we have a physical gong.
21:55
Yeah, we have the horse sound.
21:57
What if we could just say here throw him a carrot and he'll nay for us on on command. A miked up horse. Miked up horse.
22:03
You know those like proper headphones and we're just playing it like pasture meditation tracks and then it just you throw them a carrot. be great. Okay.
22:13
Uh Ben, actually look into this. It's important. Can we get a horse?
22:18
Can we get We should be at least like set up a petting zoo. Yeah.
22:21
So, it's keep it under five horsepower. Yeah. Okay. So, hey, we're looking.
22:26
Hey, we're interested in uh in increasing our transportation.
22:32
We just so you know, like it'll be a very low horsepower solution. Really?
22:36
One horsepower won't take up more than a single parking spot. Absolutely.
22:40
So, we don't need any more parking or anything like that. Is that okay, guys?
22:43
They approve it and we get this beautiful horse. It's wonderful.
22:49
Uh, the founding engineer meme is going is continues to go wild. Luke Metro chimes in.
22:54
Says, "These founding engineer memes are about to become a five alarm fire meme for seedstage startup recruiting.
23:00
Some enterprising VC content flak needs to figure out some counterprogramming."
23:06
Okay, so the meme is real.
23:08
Founding engineers get about they take on almost all the risk.
23:12
They get none of the sort of um status of being a venturebacked founder even though they're taking on that that that similar level of risk and they obviously get a fraction of the economics.
23:25
Let's say the founding engineer gets one to five points sometimes less than that but maybe that's a good range.
23:32
And so it is it is uh sort of painful.
23:35
At the same time, there's a lot of people who would be a 10 out of 10 founding engineer that would be a six out of 10 founder.
23:43
And six out of 10 founders don't build billion dollar companies.
23:48
And so a lot of people are actually here's the counterprogramming for you, Luke Metro.
23:53
A lot of people are just much better suited to go and crush it in a role and work on work under somebody who is you know truly 10 out of 10.
23:59
Uh and I would say it's much better um over over a 5-year period much better to be a founding engineer at a at a you know signi you know culturally you know significant generational company.
24:12
Yeah uh than it is to be a six out of 10 founder and you know just uh you probably that doesn't really get you that far.
24:22
It's all that it's all that like naval thing about like playing status games like titles don't actually matter.
24:27
What matters is equity and control and return and distributions and secondary and actual financial outcome.
24:35
And so instead, you should just take Yeah, I was I was intern. I don't care.
24:39
The title doesn't matter, but I got I made a lot of money.
24:41
And so I was able to go on bezel and get a fantastic Rishard Mill. That's right.
24:45
And everyone's like, "Oh, yeah, he must have been early because he's got a hitter.
24:50
He's got an absolute hitter.
24:50
He's got a hitter on his wrist.
24:51
He's got a condo on his wrist."
24:54
He's got a condo on his wrist. Exactly.
24:56
Uh but but if someone's pitching you, hey, uh hey, come be a founding engineer.
25:03
Uh you know, you're you're you're basically a founder, be like, cool, give me a board seat.
25:07
Yeah, give me a board seat.
25:10
I'll take that title, but I also want a full board seat. Irrevocable.
25:13
First board meeting, pull the pull the lead VC to the side afterwards and say, "Look, I mean, what's going on here? Let's let's get real. Let's get real.
25:19
I should be in that seat.
25:21
I should be in that seat immediately. We have the votes. Let's do this. Let's do this.
25:28
Immediate hostile takeover day one of being a founding engineer.
25:30
Yeah, founding engineers, you know, they they go through a lot at times.
25:36
It should be okay if if they get a little unfriendly. Founder unfriendly.
25:39
I mean, at the same time, like it is nice to throw someone a title that signals like, oh yeah, you were here from day one.
25:44
You were you were on the founding team.
25:46
You were on that initial build out of the company.
25:48
And so uh just you can like signal that forever instead of needing to say it explicitly in addition to like I was you know senior software engineer and by the way I was early but still people can put that together by the years. Yeah.
26:01
The founding title means uh my last angel investment was into a company that uh the guy was on the founding team of a company that scaled and and he was there from $0 pre-launch to $50 million run rate.
26:15
And that means a lot to me because he saw the stages of iteration to product market fit, early scaling, hiring, all that stuff.
26:22
Um, and uh, so yeah, it does mean something and can be incredibly valuable.
26:28
Well, if you're scaling, you should get on linear.
26:31
Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products, meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product road maps.
26:38
Uh, and they have linear for agents. Go check it out.
26:40
If you're building a technology company and you don't use linear, you're out of your mind.
26:46
We got to call the board.
26:46
We're going to call the We're going to contact your board.
26:50
We find out that you're building a technology company and you don't use linear. Yeah.
26:54
Expect we're going to have the VCs on the show. Maybe flag.
26:58
You know, we talked to a lot of venture capitalists.
26:59
Probably some of them are on your board.
27:00
We're going to pull them to the side and say, "What's going on?
27:03
We need we need new leadership.
27:05
We're normally against firing founders, but this is the one exception.
27:07
This is an exception to every rule and this is the exception.
27:12
Um, have you seen this company PopMart? I have not. It It is insane.
27:15
Okay, so uh they have kind of like quietly blown up to it's this Chinese company uh toy company basically and they um they're worth like 20 or$40 billion or something. Decaacorn. Yeah.
27:31
Public on the Hong Kong uh exchange and just let the companies that aren't critical to national security go public. Yep.
27:42
And then the ones like Huawei for some reason. For some reason.
27:45
But this company is fascinating because so my co-founder at at Lucy and Soilent um uh in high school we had this economics class and for the economics class you would have to try and make as much money as possible.
27:59
That was like your class project.
28:01
And so the the classic thing people would do is they'd like go get a bunch of like Chipotle burritos and then like resell them.
28:06
So they'd buy them for like six bucks or whatever and they'd resell them for like 20. Different era. Different era.
28:11
You're gonna make me shed a tear. I know. $6. Something like that.
28:15
But they they do like the family plan, the big one, and then divide it up.
28:17
It was like a very basic just like reselling of something like seeing like the arbitrage of the all business, right?
28:23
You just make something for one price and you sell it.
28:27
So that was kind of like the default that people would do would just like buy one thing and try and resell it on campus where you couldn't get it.
28:31
campus where you couldn't get it. Um but in uh but his project was he sold he auctioned off a mystery box and so he had he had this mystery box and and it was like wrapped and he would hold it up at like the class meetings uh like the assemblies and say like hey we're
28:51
auctioning off this uh this this and I remember all the new consoles were coming out like there was the Nintendo Wii and the PS3 were both coming out at this time and and so they would make the team behind And this would make all these like illusions to like maybe there's a PlayStation inside. So it' be
29:05
So it' be like like uh like we think you'll love it.
29:10
Like PS, three of us will be in the courtyard selling tickets later.
29:13
Just like wink wink nod nod.
29:16
And so the meme became like oh there's going to be like something crazy.
29:19
It'll probably have like a $400 value.
29:21
Like you can you could buy a ticket for just you can buy multiple tickets.
29:25
You can buy multiple tickets.
29:26
So a bunch of people bought like a lot of tickets.
29:27
So they made like a couple thousand dollars. Oh my god.
29:31
And and so they would have made a decent margin on if they'd actually given away like a PlayStation.
29:35
Uh but it was just a bundle of firewood inside and a book on how to manage your money.
29:40
Like don't make don't make financial mistakes. A bundle of firewood. Yeah.
29:44
A bundle of firewood to give it some like heft.
29:46
So when you shook it you would be like oh it's like heavy. Oh yeah. Wow. It was it was fantastic. Yeah.
29:51
But but it but it did it did raise these like moral questions about like you know is surprised they didn't get class action like we are taking this to the California law.
29:59
kind of refunded everyone.
30:01
It was like more of a prank than anything else.
30:02
But what's funny is that is that uh when I moved to Silicon Valley and we were first talking about starting businesses, we were like maybe we should do like a mystery box company.
30:12
Like there was something there.
30:12
Like mystery boxes are are are like you know this interesting category of like you know it's it's kind of like gambling but it's like in this physical it's like regulated differently.
30:21
And this company PopMart has made like $20 billion selling mystery boxes.
30:26
And so the way it works is is you go and you buy their drops of these different toys and there's different varieties.
30:31
This the same dynamics as like opening a opening a pack of Pokemon cards, but it's become it's become like absolutely uh massive.
30:39
Vanity Fair is reporting on it.
30:39
Uh this woman Lisa, who I assume is a celebrity of some sort, is saying, "I'm obsessed."
30:47
And and it's become like, you know, there's lines down the street for these different things. They trade at a premium.
30:51
People trade them on eBay and and different uh you know, different like StockX type websites. Yeah. Yeah.
30:56
Um, and it's this like hilarious dynamic, but uh, you know, at the end of the day, it's just like just like stuffed animal toys, but they're making so much money.
31:04
Pick one thing and take it more seriously than anyone else.
31:08
That's exactly what they did.
31:08
So, the stock's up like 12 1,200% this year, something like that. Absolutely ripping. Absolutely ripping.
31:14
Anyway, well, I'm sure they have to pay pay sales tax on all of that stuff.
31:18
And they should be on Numeral. Go to numeralhq. com. Sales tax on autopilot.
31:23
spend less than five minutes per month on sales.
31:25
If you're building SAS or an e-commerce brand, get on numeral. Get on numeral.
31:30
Um, oh, this is this is a perfect segue into our first guest from uh from Deep Mind.
31:36
Uh, Google's co-founder says AI performs best when you threaten it.
31:40
And Amrit says just like real employees. Uh, I don't know.
31:45
This looks like some sort of gawker.
31:47
Like just looking at the font of this screenshot just reads like this is not a real article.
31:51
like this is not a serious article.
31:54
This is like clearly a quote taken out of taken out of context. com.
31:57
Um but but I mean everyone knows about prompt engineering. This is not new.
32:02
This is this is not this is not a like a serious threat of any kind.
32:06
Um it's more just like you know fun clickbait that obviously if you want if you want to play around with this go to openai or claude and say chatbt make me a ninef figureure arr mistakes.
32:21
when it says, "Well, I'm actually just a language model and I have just start threatening it and you know, see for yourself."
32:28
So, it doesn't quite work that way.
32:30
Anyway, our first guest is here.
32:32
We have John Jumper from Google Deep Mind.
32:33
Welcome to the show, John. How are you doing? Boom. Welcome. Doing well.
32:38
Uh, nice to meet with Sergey. Yes. Yeah.
32:41
uh just this s it was just completely random, but this this silly article that looks like straight out of one of those clickbait websites that's just farming farming attention constantly.
32:53
Um but but I I mean I'm sure we could go into this, but there's so much more interesting stuff to talk about uh in the deep mind world.
32:58
Uh first, would you mind giving us an update? Where are you today? What's going on?
33:05
Oh, I'm at the uh Y Combinator AI startup school.
33:08
So, this is a pretty cool event.
33:10
They've brought in a bunch of people with startups are looking to found them and they have a a great speakers list and you know just kind of a fun place to be and so I'm backstage.
33:21
I don't know if you can hear it. Oh yeah. Yeah.
33:22
We can definitely the plant and the everything else.
33:24
It's a little bit of ambiance. Fantastic. Are you giving a talk?
33:28
Could you give us a little bit of background on you to kind of set the stage for the discussion? Yeah. Yeah. So I'm giving a talk.
33:34
I think I'm well I'm very certainly best known for work on AlphaFold and really this is uh doing work in AI for science and trying to solve or really predict the results of really really hard scientific experiments and do them with AI and we've been quite successful hence I'm here.
33:55
here. Uh so the system we've built and you know there's this experiment that biologists do to understand how the body works really important to drug development really important to a lot of other things give you an idea of difficulty it takes something like a year to do if you think of it in cost
34:08
it's something like $100,000 and we have an AI system that we've trained that will do it in a couple of minutes uh to near experimental animated openly available and so we see it used from everything from kind of designing vaccines to finding missing aspects of our own biology to everything else. And I think
34:29
biology to everything else. And I think it's also this kind of symbol of the pro promise that AI is going to solve these really hard problems that humans don't right we there's a lot of really exciting work and how do we do things that are you know really impressive examples of human capability be it you know writing be it making
34:50
images but there's this other aspect of how do we use AI to solve these really really hard problems that if we want to solve it we go do a year of experimental work and that's that's what we that uh at the science group at DeepMind work on we try and say how are we going to solve these really really hard problems with AI and sometimes it works spectacularly well. Can you tell me about the initial
35:08
Can you tell me about the initial project spec for Alphafold?
35:11
Was protein folding the most obvious choice or were there other targets that you thought were appropriate for deep learning?
35:19
Um and and how how did that initial uh project kick off?
35:25
Was it let's go collect all the data or or let's just start experimenting on like synthetic data.
35:31
How did all this like play out in the early stages?
35:37
So one thing to say is this problem had kind of stood as a crown jewel of hard problems in science um for a long time.
35:44
So something like 50 years that people had been trying to build some computer system any way you could.
35:48
And I think it was kind of obvious also that this felt like a problem that AI could do something about. One answer was data.
35:57
That in fact at enormous kind of effort and forethought and expense um scientists worldwide had basically put every structure ever solved into what's called the protein data bank.
36:07
And so for about 50 years people had collected this data set.
36:12
The time we were doing our work was about 140,000 structures.
36:14
But it represented essentially everything.
36:18
Everyone had the same data.
36:18
There was some thoughts I think early on about, oh well, maybe this is a good problem for optimization and combinatorial search.
36:25
That didn't really turn out to be how we solved it, but there was this thought that maybe it's kind of well teed up for the methods that were looking incredibly powerful and are, you know, incredibly powerful in terms of Alph Go and other search uh style methodology.
36:41
And then I think also there was actually some grassroots where there was a local group of people that were going into a hackathon at the company kind of do whatever you want for a week and literally googling grand challenges in biology.
36:51
And so that was the other way that this got started and you know it was on the list and and all of these kind of came together.
36:57
And I think what it turned out to be is we didn't at all solve it the way we thought we were going to do it and there were many blind alleys.
37:04
So, we got into it possibly for some right reasons, some wrong reasons, but we stayed with it for a long time.
37:12
Talk to me about the state-of-the-art of protein folding uh beforehand.
37:13
You mentioned like a year and $100,000.
37:15
Um, but but what did that look like in terms of the actual problem of like defining the structure of a protein based on a sequence of DNA?
37:26
Um, is is this is this, you know, an undergrad or a graduate student kind of pipetting stuff and and putting it in a centrifuge?
37:35
Like I've seen some biolab work, but try and walk me through actually what it looks like.
37:42
Is it just using a different machine and pushing a button? What's driving the cost? Is it labor?
37:46
Is it is it, you know, reagents and and equipment and expendable things?
37:50
Like like what was the state-of-the-art at the time?
37:56
So it's a very good question and underlying it is a false premise. Okay.
37:59
You have this premise that there is a series of steps. Yeah.
38:04
That you're going to execute and you know you're going to maybe it's a year long but in January I'm going to do this at the end of January I'm going to succeed at that.
38:11
I'm going to go do the next. Yeah.
38:11
And you know you can think of it the same way as training an AI system isn't just I want an AI system.
38:17
Let me press the AI button and then go get coffee.
38:19
It's really about research and iteration.
38:21
And so four scientists going to solve the structure of a new protein.
38:26
They have this huge numbers of steps and one like the very first thing they have to do is make enough pure protein to study this thing. Mhm.
38:34
And I, you know, I did my PhD in biohysics and I remember sitting in a lab meeting where someone's for 6 months talked about how they couldn't even make their protein to get started on their experiments.
38:43
And I remember saying if you if you talk about protein, you know, making protein in one more lab meeting, I'm going to start talking about my compiler errors in the next meeting.
38:54
But just like building and doing the work to get enough product to get started is enormous.
38:59
And then then you have to convince it to form this very regular crystal structure that is not at all natural.
39:05
And no one really knows how to do this.
39:08
They just have some ideas that maybe or maybe not work.
39:12
And so they try many many combinations and you know always look like one that really brought home the difficulty for me is one paper I can't remember if we trained on it or evaluated on it.
39:21
I think we evaluated and I looked in the appendix of the paper and it said after more than a year crystals began to grow.
39:29
you have to make crystals to uh solve a protein structure.
39:31
And so they were literally trying things and probably that whole year they were trying things just to look in their cabinet, find out something from a year ago worked.
39:37
And then after you do that, you go to a very large synretron and there are many other steps.
39:42
But I would say the real answer is there's wide error bars and there's enormous amounts of experimentation and cleverness and this is why one or a couple protein structures can be a PhD.
39:54
You can be doctor at the end of this. Mhm.
39:56
Uh, talk to me about the timeline between that that kind of was done. Yeah. Yeah.
40:01
Talk to me about the timeline between Alph Go and Alpha Fold.
40:06
Um, and the lessons from the Lisa Doll match, the move 37 moment and and just uh the different paradigms.
40:13
I mean, I remember like part of the beauty of learn and go is that it's this very defined system that can be simulated at an extremely high speed.
40:21
um it's like kind of a prime environment for this reinforcement learning uh strategy. What was taken? What was different?
40:28
Um and uh and and and how did those timelines match up?
40:35
So already coming out of Lisa at a kind of company level demis level people were getting interested in this question.
40:41
I can't remember exactly I think it was 2016 when the work really started.
40:44
I actually joined slightly after that. Sure.
40:48
The early work was in kind of can we use reinforcement learning and these models these energy functions where you're trying to treat this as a minimization problem just a really really hard clever minimization problem and I remember even like when I came in it was kind of I come from a protein background and there's a way in which this is obviously not the right idea in that we don't know the full you know God's energy function for proteins.
41:13
We don't know this thing that if you just minimize it, we're sure that's the right answer.
41:20
At least if we do, it's quantum mechanics that we're not solving.
41:21
And in fact, a big problem is that really you needed to solve the kind of how do we how do we optimize this and what are the rules that we're optimizing under at the same time?
41:34
And it turned out to be actually much more datadriven supervised learning.
41:38
learning. And what really started to make the difference is when we sat down and we you know the state-of-the-art kind of before it was growing there was progress was in using convolutional neural networks a certain design you can also try transformers they're not really much better for this but there were a
41:54
lot of kind of people trying to take machine learning off the shelf and say I'll just apply it this is an application problem and I think what we did really really well especially in Alpha 2 the one that really worked is that we said no no no this is a machine learning research problem. How are we
42:09
How are we going to rebuild our kind of core components?
42:13
How do we get inspired by the transformer but build something different in order to make a system that learned really well?
42:18
And we can show in fact like an external group did a very careful experiment where they took Alphold 2 and they trained it on 1% of the available data and they found it uh more accurate than our alpha fold one system.
42:32
So even between one and two. Wow.
42:34
You can see what is 100fold in data.
42:37
And so in a certain sense all we did was a lot of machine learning engineering. Yeah.
42:41
That got us a hundfold better data efficiency than we used to be.
42:46
And in fact use the exact same data as everyone else and that we had used for Alpha Fold one.
42:50
And oh we're having some trouble.
42:55
Really in these core ideas that enabled it to learn much more. Yeah.
42:59
I think all of these I think the ideas evolved and still I think you know there's room to play and there's all these different problems and I but it did kind of preage how important learning directly from data has become uh in terms of this and then RL to optimize uh performance and achieve other objectives. Okay.
43:19
Um I want to talk about the reaction to Alphafold in the public markets.
43:24
I know you're not a public markets analyst, but I was very surprised that, you know, this this 50-year age-old problem, this incredibly tough, you know, millennium challenge level uh problem is solved.
43:39
And I didn't see biotech stocks like really pop.
43:41
And you'd think that if you took this cost out and this uncertainty out of the system, you would see benefits.
43:47
And we're certainly seeing all sorts of companies tell stories about, oh, we're using large language models all over the place and their and their stocks pop.
43:54
And so, um, was that in your mind like a misunderstanding of the impact of this technology or or was it more that hey, we're this is just one step down the path to actually increase the output of biotechnology companies.
44:14
I think I think it's a very interesting question.
44:15
I should say I'm not an equity analyst and I would actually be after this podcast you should go back and do the same experiment for crisper which was undoubtedly a big moment in biology and I I would be shocked if you saw a pop when the crisper paper uh hit.
44:29
So there there actually was a major pop during crisper but it was more about uh like companies that were directly linked to it.
44:38
Uh so so there were there were a number of companies that were that were trading on the back of we will be commercializing crisper technology specifically.
44:46
There weren't as many pure play uh alphafold companies if that makes sense.
44:51
And so the I I don't think there was as much of a vehicle and some of these biotech companies like they're just not traded on a cost basis.
44:57
So maybe that was what was going on.
45:00
Um it's like yeah okay you're going to save a million dollars next year on protein folding.
45:09
I think I think you shouldn't think of it too narrowly and you want to be really careful.
45:12
So if you think about it from the $100,000 point of view um then it should already be immediately obvious that a single protein structure wasn't the gap to a drug.
45:21
A drug is about a billion dollars totally in R&D. Yeah.
45:25
And so you can already see that that enor that many orders of magnitude what I think Alphafold I think but there are two more things that are really important.
45:34
One is and especially when AlphaFold first came out, it was unclear if we just solved a grand challenge or was this going to be a really practical system and the practicality became much more apparent especially in six months when it was available to everyone.
45:46
I think uh you know people started to say wait a minute it's actually solving my problems.
45:51
Um the other and we see it here all the time from biotechs using it.
45:56
I think when alpha fold 3 came out it was apparent that the same thing would describe protein small molecule binding and of course we have work uh within alphabet and isomorphic labs it's really about how do we take these technologies and make them better. Yeah.
46:10
And I think all of this is to say one is to say really you know certainly one of the big drivers of cost for biotech is clinical trials.
46:17
So if you want to increase the success rate you need to understand biology better.
46:20
understand biology better. Yeah, I think there's been some really important work in terms of technologies either using AlphaFold or downstream of it such as the really incredible advances in protein design and maybe not in the public markets but if you look at
46:35
private valuations from everything from evolutionary scale to Zera to others you've seen some really enormous funding rounds where certainly the startup community believes that this is going to hit it big and I think you do see some
46:50
effect in that you need more techn technologies on top of this and it's not a single a single problem but I think it will also make a larger and larger difference of course there are more problems to be solved and without jumping into the valuation and but you also see these strong valuations
47:07
on the companies very you know are trying to figure out how to use this and how to say kind of this door has been opened do you think in terms of AI and biology and predictive biology do you think that the FDA will be able to adapt. Do you think the FDA will be
47:21
Do you think the FDA will be able to adapt quickly enough to advancements in uh research at the intersection of AI and biology?
47:29
Like is there anyone at the FDA that's AGI pilled and is like you know thinking 5 10 years out um yeah how the underlying systems need to change that's a very interesting question.
47:41
Yeah, because the the what what will be concerning is like if if um we have all this great technology and we can't implement ultimately decrease the cost of drug creation if all the costs are in trials.
47:53
Yeah, that's a great question.
47:53
Well, so one thing I'll say and I'm outside my area of expertise and I don't have any contacts at the FDA, but let let me say this version of it.
48:02
The these are tools that make predictions. You still check them.
48:07
You don't check them by doing the exact same work as you were going to do otherwise, but you you check the consequences.
48:13
You say if this is true, then this change or this drug will have that effect.
48:18
And what you ultimately look at in terms of safety and efficacy of drugs is real world evidence.
48:22
Now you look at clinical trials and they have this 90 plus% failure rate.
48:30
So you think about that as being really one of the key drivers.
48:32
It's not so much are we just going to totally trust computation.
48:36
we'll just do AI and because it says AI, we'll kind of leave it.
48:40
It's going to be that we're going to do AI and then when we go in the lab, we're going to have a much better sense of what's really going on.
48:45
We're going to have much better predictions and that's going to let us do the right experiment in the first trial or the third trial instead of the hundth trial.
48:54
And I think that and that that doesn't necessarily require you to shift your standards of evidence for what is evidence of safety and efficacy so much as it's about, you know, you as researchers where you have a lot of freedom on how you choose the experiments you do.
49:08
How do you choose the right ones that will advance you toward treating that disease?
49:12
That makes a ton of sense.
49:14
Uh well, thank you so much for joining.
49:16
We'll let you get back to it.
49:17
I know it's a busy day over there at AI Startup School.
49:18
We really appreciate you taking the time and we'd love to have you back to go way deeper when we have more time to dig into everything.
49:25
So, thanks so much for joining. Thanks a lot, John. It was a pleasure. Thank you.
49:29
Have a great rest of your day. Cheers. Talk to you soon. An absolute legend. An absolute legend. An absolute dog. Dog.
49:38
That's probably the first time he's been described that way.
49:40
Yes, it probably won't be the last.
49:42
Definitely won't be the last.
49:43
Uh it is it is uh amazing.
49:45
I mean, we should have gotten in I'd love to go deeper into the way Deep Mind has been uh reorged a bit.
49:52
Google Brain has merged in.
49:52
They're working on a lot of different stuff and uh and the science side and and the research side is something that uh Google has been fantastic at for for decades and continues to be.
50:04
So, uh lots to dig in there.
50:07
Anyway, uh let's let's go back to the timeline and go through some posts.
50:11
Marvin Vanhagen says, "Plane flying over Stanford, graduation right now. Congrats. Don't work for Elon.
50:16
Uh, 20 years after Steve, stay hungry, stay foolish. Commencement speech."
50:20
So, this is like a proTrump uh post.
50:22
Like they're they don't want you to work for Elon because they're on Trump side.
50:27
They must be extremely magapilled.
50:28
Yeah, it's Well, it isn't red.
50:30
They must actually just be in favor of big government, you know, massive spending bills.
50:34
That's probably what's going on there.
50:36
Um, now I always wonder with this type of thing.
50:40
I mean, this is the the person that that's going to go through the effort to I imagine they're there.
50:44
I mean, you got to give it up for them because they're doing some outdoor advertising. We love out of home.
50:50
And so, you know, if you have a message to get out regardless of or not, we we regardless of whether or not we agree with it.
50:57
We always support out of free speech and out of out of home advertising combined is is kind of the sweet spot. So, yeah.
51:04
So, if you have a good message to send, uh, throw it on throw it on a plane.
51:08
There was a big debate on the timeline.
51:10
I think this works better than than skywriting.
51:12
By the way, skyriting is potentially overrated. I I think so.
51:16
It just dissolves too fast. Totally.
51:18
And you can't really get a message out, but this I mean, you look at this photo and if you go to the next slide, you'll see it's zoomed in.
51:24
Like, it is incredibly legible. Yeah. Incredibly legible. And so, um, yeah. Yeah.
51:29
We should had a competing plane there. Congrats. Please work for Elon.
51:35
Yeah, Elon, where where's your consider applying to roles at companies like SpaceX, Boring Company, Neuralink?
51:39
Yeah, just just fly hundreds of planes.
51:42
I have been seeing stuff on the timeline about like, oh, maybe there's like a talent exodus from some of the Elon companies to other companies.
51:49
There was one post I saw.
51:50
One post you saw that and I wonder how real that is.
51:52
You know, some of the stuff can be trashed.
51:54
The thing is Elon's also laying people off. So, like, who knows? Yeah.
51:57
And and when you're at a scale like Tesla or any of these other companies, at any given point there could there's a bunch of people that are leaving to go work on other things.
52:04
One person Microsoft laid off a thousand people and it's like 1% of the workforce. Yeah. It's like Yeah.
52:10
Well, the big debate over the weekend was between you and Ashley Vance.
52:14
It was more of a collaboration than a debate.
52:18
More of a collaboration, but but um really trying to get to the bottom of an important story.
52:21
Ashley said, "Why is the US not breeding tens of thousands of gorillas?"
52:25
I want to know what sparked that post for him.
52:26
Like like why did he choose to post that?
52:28
He's just got so gorilla pelled on a on a Sunday.
52:30
Anyway, I said I'm about to find out.
52:33
I went to 03 Pro on Chad. Very funny.
52:36
Tyler Cowan retweeted this, which I love.
52:39
Um and there's some answers.
52:42
Gorillas re reproduce very slowly, so it would take a long time to scale up.
52:46
Uh confer conservation programs keep the population small on purpose. I don't like that.
52:53
like that. US zoos follow a coordinated plan called a species survival plan which aims to keep around 350 to 355 g conservation program is against widescale mass breeding that is crazy this number's chosen to preserve genetic diversity over the long term I feel like
53:11
if you grew the population to 10,000 like boom you would have I guess overbreeding leads to surplus gorillas with nowhere to go what about to our students we have plenty of space we'll take some gorillas I think you could scale up the number of
53:25
zoos as well and then also like obviously put them to work like you know horses no one's like oh yeah like you know too many horses you can just ride them around everyone can have a horse everyone can get a gorilla yeah they probably need to be domesticated the acceleration of gorillas too could be
53:39
great for city kind of transportation you know stop and go traffic gorillas are really quick off the maybe gorilla domestication is the next uh biotech project let's check in with Tyler Cosgrove over on the intern cam get an update Oh, okay. He's moved over to big
53:52
He's moved over to big pharma.
53:54
He's he's a biotech company. Give us an update. What have you learned?
53:58
What's new in your world?
53:58
I'm still looking at, you know, various drugs, but but I have found some interesting people.
54:03
I I would like to talk to you about this. Okay, hit us up.
54:06
Um, so the first one is uh, of course, Derek from more plates. com. Fantastic.
54:10
So, everyone, you know, famous he makes YouTube videos about, you know, peeds.
54:14
So, um, I think his experience would be useful for for one, just the increased uh, attractiveness. Oh, yeah. That'd be big.
54:20
you know, he has a long history of um like functional looks maxing. Yes.
54:22
Um and also for like athleticism, right?
54:26
If I'm gonna be chasing balls, Yeah.
54:28
Um I need to, you know, be stronger, more fast twitch muscles got to be working over time.
54:34
So the next guy is uh Mike Henry.
54:36
He's the CEO of BHP Group, which is the largest uh publicly traded mining company in the world. Why are we mining?
54:44
We're mining because I need lead to make me dumber. Oh, okay.
54:47
Yeah, obviously he should be an expert in lead there.
54:50
Mix that in, you know, mining mining company.
54:53
So, making more of a cocktail than a oneshot drug. Got it. Okay.
54:54
And then uh so so there I have increased, you know, I'm look maxing and I'm making me dumber. Yes.
55:02
So the third one I need Well, I guess there's friendliness.
55:05
Friendliness, but also I need uh I need to have more hair obviously, right? Because I'm a dog.
55:10
So I'm going to talk to um I think it's Gunter Khan. He created Minoxidil. He did. Okay. Interesting. Is he Is he alive? No. Oh, okay.
55:20
Well, we need a live person.
55:20
Well, actually, he might I'm not sure. I'll look into that.
55:23
We'll have to figure that out.
55:24
Um, we need experts we can bring on the show. Yeah.
55:26
So, those are the three I found so far.
55:28
I'm going to keep looking at We need friendliness.
55:31
That's the key one that I'm most worried about.
55:32
That's the one that's the most the the elusive the elusive drug for h for for friendliness.
55:37
And that's the one that we need.
55:38
We see a lot of negativity on the timeline.
55:40
We try and we try and encourage people with the what would your mother do ethos.
55:43
Um, imagine being able to show people so friendly a link to them to say, "Hey, take this drug.
55:51
Injecting this once a week, you'll be friendlier on.
55:53
Could make you, you know, an order of magnitude more friendly on the No more no more aggressive quote tweets, no more clapbacks.
55:58
Those will be a thing of the past.
56:00
I didn't actually know that golden retrievers are actually uh have pretty significant intelligence when comped to other dogs.
56:11
They're the fourth most intelligent breed behind border collies, poodles, and German shepherds. Narrative violation. Narrative violation. This is what you want.
56:17
This is the guy who's on the left of the bell curve meme.
56:19
That's where everyone thinks the golden retriever is, but the golden retriever is secretly the guy on the right. Yeah.
56:25
But that's the beauty is that they're the same guy, you know, like he doesn't feel the need.
56:29
The golden retriever is just because in the age of artificial intelligence, AI is going to increasingly push everyone who's trying to be the guy on the right into the midwit territory. Yeah.
56:39
And so you want to just go full guy on the left or at least have people expect that you're the guy on the left.
56:44
Well, we have a post from Bucko Capital. Wait, really quickly.
56:49
If you're breeding gorillas and you're going to try and sell these gorillas across the world, you're going to need Adio customer relationship magic.
56:55
Adio is the AI native CRM that builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level.
56:59
Anyway, there's someone in the chat right now saying, "Adio has a great UI. I would invest in them." Let's go.
57:05
Let's give it up for Adio. Adio. Get on there. You can check it out.
57:10
Let's go over to Buco Capital Bloke.
57:12
He says, "Apple has more of an impact on job creation in China than all of China has on America." Wow. This is obviously Yeah.
57:18
So, there's a entire paragraph here.
57:20
The size and influence of Apple aren't properly understood in part because they are so difficult to fathom.
57:25
How can it be for instance that demand from China's 1.
57:27
4 billion people indirectly supports across all industries between 1 million and 2.
57:32
6 million jobs in America?
57:34
Whereas by Tim Cook's estimate, Apple alone supports 5 million jobs in China, 3 million in manufacturing, and another 1.
57:42
8 million in app development.
57:44
That upside down contrast boggles the mind.
57:47
One super corporation has more of an impact on job creation in China than all of China has on America.
57:54
Yeah, that is that is wow.
57:57
This is obviously from Apple in China. Fantastic book.
57:58
We had the author on the show and uh Tim Cook's been Tim Cook is quoted a bunch in the book.
58:04
There's a ton of great scoops.
58:06
Uh I've been listening to the book a bunch and it's and it's fantastic.
58:10
There's a whole bunch of really interesting deep dives.
58:13
Some stuff you might know, but it's woven together in a very interesting way.
58:16
Highly recommend going and picking up the book or the audio book Apple in China.
58:21
Uh uh Ben Thompson's been singing its praises as well.
58:24
he had the author on his show uh did an interesting uh podcast with him and really dug in at a layer deeper that I highly recommend going and listening to.
58:34
going and listening to. Um, fascinating and it'll be interesting to see how this affects uh this could be this could Apple in China I think could be one of those books that becomes um a reference point for DC policy makers in the same
58:47
way that uh chip war became kind of a a playbook for uh the chips act and uh the hundred-year marathon uh uh also became a kind of playbook for a renegotiation of the trade policy between the US and China and so uh these books don't come along often But when they do, uh, give them a read. Make sure it's heavily, uh,
59:06
Make sure it's heavily, uh, heavily annotated and and highlighted.
59:13
Uh, anyway, if you're looking to invest in American companies, get on public. com.
59:16
Investing for those who take it seriously.
59:18
They got multiasset investing, industryleading yields, and they're trusted by millions. Go to public. com.
59:22
Uh, what is this thing about Frontier Valley? I saw you post. I put this in there.
59:26
Uh, I invited the founder, James, on the show.
59:28
So, Frontier Valley is a new special regulation district in SV that's larger than MoMA.
59:34
Once approved, it will be America's epicenter for physical AI and deep tech innovation and will also be a template first a template for robotics first cities that can be replicated nationwide. What is going on here?
59:45
Is this on top of this on top of an airport or something?
59:50
Like where where are they going to build this? Is this landfill?
59:54
Like this this looks amazing.
59:54
It just seems like so ambitious.
59:56
I don't know how they're going to pull this off.
59:59
Um, anyways, I invited the founder on to learn more.
1:00:02
I thought that uh it was at least it it reminded me about some of the stuff that California Forever is working on around ship building.
1:00:10
So, anyways, we need more big ambitious uh projects like this and I hope they can figure out a way to pull this off.
1:00:18
Yeah, seems like it's gaining steam.
1:00:23
Uh post in here from Reed Hoffman.
1:00:23
Reed Hoffman says, "Some AI industry leaders are predicting white collar blood baths.
1:00:30
Even the most inspirational advice to new graduates lands like a band-aid on a bullet wound.
1:00:34
Some thoughts on new grads and finding a job in the AI wave.
1:00:36
Got to go into art history.
1:00:39
It's the name of the game.
1:00:41
Huge opportunity to go into art history."
1:00:42
Uh Reed says, "What you really want is a dynamic career path, not a static one.
1:00:46
Would it have made sense to internet proof one's career in 1997 or YouTube proof it in 2008?
1:00:49
What when new technology starts cresting, the best move is to surf that wave.
1:00:55
This is where new grads can excel.
1:00:57
College grads almost always enjoy an advantage over their senior leaders when it comes to adopting new technology.
1:01:03
If you're a recent graduate, I urge you not to think in terms of AI proofing your career. Instead, AI optimize it. Sure.
1:01:10
I think that's a great good framework.
1:01:12
What do you think internet proofing one's career in 1997 would have been?
1:01:15
Like I it's unfathomable because like the internet don't start a newspaper, print newspaper. Okay.
1:01:25
or don't go work for one, I guess, and instead go work for No, but it is but but the the immediate takeaway I have here is is you can be worried about job loss from AI and trying to pick the right job that's not going to be replaced or you can proactively figure out how to leverage AI to be just vastly more efficient and productive.
1:01:48
I'm just thinking about like like internet proofing feels like find a career that will not be disrupted by the internet or YouTube proofing means like find an industry that will not be changed at all by the existence of YouTube.
1:02:00
So it's not about okay like what what was disrupted by YouTube.
1:02:03
I mean, I guess potentially like linear advertising or linear TV and that's still boom like if you went if you went into reality TV in 2008 like you did great I imagine but then also there was like kind of the death of Hollywood.
1:02:18
Well, the thing about the thing about people that are entering startups or or in the industry already, if you want to generate massive wealth and have massive impact and work at a company that becomes significant because of your participation, you have to work in an oftentimes have to work in an industry that's experiencing, you know, rapid rapid growth, right?
1:02:38
And so, you know, joining traditional entertainment world, uh, or getting into the reality t TV business when YouTube was taking off. Yep.
1:02:49
Probably not going to have that sort of ridiculous rapid growth. Yep.
1:02:54
Um, you know, maybe working for, you know, some some creator or or actually joining YouTube itself. Yeah. Yeah.
1:02:59
I mean, certainly he's saying like like ride the wave, lean in.
1:03:02
I'm I'm just wondering about like the idea of internet proofing a career or YouTube proofing or AI proofing a career. It all feels the same.
1:03:10
It's it's like become a furniture maker or something or become a become a plumber.
1:03:13
Um they're they're all kind of the same same sides.
1:03:16
It's like if you're if you're a lawyer who's trying to inter internet proof and says like we're going to be the one law firm that doesn't use the internet like that would be a disaster.
1:03:25
And it's like it's kind of unthinkable.
1:03:27
And same thing with like with with YouTube.
1:03:29
If you're working for like in a marketing agency and you're like, "Oh, we're going to we're going to be the best at at content that isn't relevant on YouTube."
1:03:37
Uh it would be very very difficult.
1:03:40
Um and so yeah, I mean I I I agree with that sentiment. It's interesting.
1:03:44
Uh but also just go into art history.
1:03:46
Anyway, how'd you sleep last night?
1:03:50
Put up some good numbers.
1:03:50
88 night 7 hours 16 minutes.
1:03:54
Not quite as good as Sunday where I got a 92.
1:03:57
Slept for almost nine hours.
1:03:59
Putting up generational numbers. I got an 88. Did I beat you? I uh Did I beat you? Got an 86. Let's go. Let's go. Two weeks in a row. Two weeks in a row. Get the Pod Five.
1:04:15
I'll give you an air 5ear warranty.
1:04:17
30 free returns, free shipping. Go to asleep. com. Use code TBPN.
1:04:22
Uh, speaking of Father's Day, Kendall from uh, Ken Kenny Rose, the best gift you can give your father today is just the space to speak for 20 minutes unin uninterrupted on any one of the various geopolitical issues he's been monitoring this week. It's great. Fantastic gift.
1:04:42
Just give us give us the It's free to give, but it's priceless to receive. It is. It's fantastic.
1:04:47
Uh, well, we have Christian Garrett from 137 Ventures in the studio.
1:04:51
Welcome to the stream, Christian. How you doing? Good to see you guys. Glad to be here. We're at three sessions. Okay.
1:04:57
Recently, I think the promise was five for a rocket engine. Oh, yeah. We got to up these.
1:05:04
We got What are you doing tomorrow?
1:05:05
What are you doing Wednesday?
1:05:06
To be clear, I I tried to book this like weeks ago and uh you know, so two Justin was on debt pretty soon. We're opening it. We're open it.
1:05:16
Well, we got the space for it here.
1:05:17
We're we're in the new studio.
1:05:18
We definitely have the space.
1:05:20
You can come by and hang in person. Andrew sent some Legos.
1:05:21
Uh we're we're getting to the physical stuff in the building slowly and surely. Uh we have the big gong.
1:05:28
Anyway, uh I want to have you on talk about uh growth stage venture trends, LP dynamics, Bill Gurley's appearance on Invest Like the Best.
1:05:37
Thought it'd be interesting to get your reaction to that.
1:05:38
Uh let's kick it off with this Logan Bartlett post though first.
1:05:42
I'll read it and uh and I want your reaction.
1:05:44
Oh, uh, Logan says, "Have had a few conversations with bankers and friends and private equity over the last few weeks, and it's kind of remarkable how orphaned most of these 1 to10 billion horizontal software companies are right now.
1:05:57
There will be some strategic acquisitions, i. e.
1:06:00
Informatica, but few and far between as those acquirers are getting their own house in order with AI.
1:06:04
And some of these companies aren't just big enough, just aren't big enough to move the needle.
1:06:10
and private equity players are all worried about the Pluralsight acqu uh Pluralsight situation where AI just takes a leap and steamrolls something.
1:06:18
It seems a lot of them are just on the sidelines from buying a horizontal player.
1:06:23
We're going to see some frustrated public shareholders with very little recourse other than mix up management. Weird times.
1:06:28
So, break it down for us. What's your reaction? How real is this?
1:06:32
What's what's correct about this? What's what's maybe off? Yeah.
1:06:35
No, Logan makes a great point and Logan's a great investor and um he's he's absolutely right.
1:06:40
Uh I think there's definitely going to be consolidation.
1:06:44
It's just like he hit at right what price um for context, right?
1:06:50
Like a sauna trades at a 4x NTM multiple right now.
1:06:53
They're forecasted to grow 8% this year with 1% free cash flow margins.
1:06:57
That was a business that during COVID, right, was trading at like multiples, higher multiples than than a ton of software businesses.
1:07:03
Uh, workday now is is is trades at a premium to a sauna. Bill.
1:07:08
com was once the highest multiple in software and fintech.
1:07:11
Now trades at like a 2 and a2x multiple.
1:07:15
On topline, there's a ton of these companies that are real businesses, but they're not long-term compounders with power to grow margins. Sure.
1:07:24
And they're kind of stuck as point solutions.
1:07:25
Um, we at 137 heavily focus on durability when investing due to our focus on partnering with companies across the entire growth life cycle of a business. Right.
1:07:33
So we want to be excited about continually holding and investing into a company 10, 20, 30 years from now.
1:07:38
And I think venture is kind of realizing this dynamic here.
1:07:40
Uh there's a Michael Mabusen paper on what's called the competitive advantage period that I encourage a lot of people to go read.
1:07:47
Um and it's focused on how companies end up competing and being publicly traded on average for about 10 years, 10 to 15 years.
1:07:56
Um and then it ultimately ends up delisting or getting bought.
1:08:01
And so you just kind of realize that you know there are businesses that you could be right on at one point in its life cycle but then you know after 10 years 15 20 years margins compress growth slows and the business ends up kind of with a very different story and moniker.
1:08:15
Um, and I think a lot of the ultimate winners within these categories, front-end software development, fintech, they're actually the bundles, right?
1:08:24
And the stories we're talking about are point solutions, uh, or companies at risk, uh, uh, where growth slowing down due to AI.
1:08:30
I think the bundled winners are going to end up having opportunity to consolidate, whether that's Figma across front-end application development.
1:08:37
Sure, you have uh, RAMP and and BAS uh, and Mercury within fintech.
1:08:43
Um, I think that's a real opportunity there, but the question is still going to be on what price, right? Yeah.
1:08:49
Can you explain to me a little bit more about the the horizontal software companies versus vertical software companies?
1:08:56
Uh, Toast is like the classic vertical example, I think.
1:09:01
But, um, these are kind of buzzwords and I feel like when one gets hot, you're going to see a lot of CEOs be like, "Oh, we're the we're in the hot category or vice versa."
1:09:08
So, how do you how do you see the the landscape of like horizontal versus vertical software?
1:09:12
or what are some examples?
1:09:14
Can you explain that to me? Yeah.
1:09:15
me? Yeah. Um I mean I think when looking at either I think the our investment framework is is around powers and we look for sustainable competitive advantages and so whether that's a vertical software business or horizontal software business the key thing is are they building these defensible notes whether it's switching costs whether there's network effects is there some durability to this business getting
1:09:37
better the bigger it gets and then a big key function of that is multi-product and it is much easier for a bundled offering to end up going after these horizontal points solutions or it's much easier for vertical software business to run that playbook, right, of moving into financial products, launching more modules within that vertical uh to end up in that story and building more defensibility. If you end up kind of a
1:09:56
If you end up kind of a single product company within the horizontal space, it it does become very difficult to have a long-term kind of defensible story.
1:10:04
Um, so I think, you know, there's like inherent business model dynamics to pay attention to and the ability to go multi-product, right, is key.
1:10:11
Um, a lot of the stories that we're talking about are companies that have multiple business lines with nine to 10 figures of ARR. Sure.
1:10:16
Uh, these companies that haven't worked have a very different story. Yeah.
1:10:20
Is is an example there like uh what happened with like Slack and Teams where Slack was kind of this point solution. Yes.
1:10:25
It eventually got plugged into the Salesforce ecosystem, but uh a lot of Outlook users and Microsoft Exchange users were just like we'll just add on Teams.
1:10:35
And so that's more of the the horizontal playbook.
1:10:38
Um, I'm because I'm I'm wondering about that Asauna example specifically, like is there a horizontal player that's eating them?
1:10:45
Because I when I think about what ASA does, yes, it's a point solution, but it feels like something that I can't immediately think of, oh, well, like if you're on the Microsoft stack, you'll just be using Microsoft's version of project management, but I'm sure they have one.
1:11:01
So, uh, I don't know if there's more to say there about like what what areas are most are what what vertical areas are most fragile when it comes to a horizontal player coming in and kind of like eating their lunch. Yeah.
1:11:13
Know, it's it's a great question.
1:11:15
I think it's areas where the software becomes or the product becomes commoditized. Sure. Right.
1:11:20
And so, you know, within fintech, you're seeing that with bill pay. Yep.
1:11:24
And within a space, like I think most of front-end software development is in that category.
1:11:27
and you see Figma moving into more and more uh uh uh watching more and more products that kind of go after that.
1:11:33
Um and so yeah, you you just kind of see like there's either a cap on how large the market actually is.
1:11:37
So you sort of saturate the market uh whether that's based on kind of sector um or sizing of business uh or it's based on the actual kind of use case or you end up running into just and it ends up being a commoditized product, right?
1:11:52
It's very easy for the marginal competitor to launch a competitive offering and get there on feature parity over time.
1:11:57
over time. Um so yeah there's not a particular formula but and it's always not easy right especially in a growing market it's very easy to extrapolate out how you know a market will grow uh in perpetuity I mean Bill Aman has this good line around growth annuities right not every business has that dynamic right where they can continue to own a
1:12:15
large percentage or some meaningful percentage of a continually growing market and therefore they have durable growth a lot of these things end up saturating out and their market size is actually much more constrained than uh investors anticipated uh or they end up just getting commoditized and so it gets really hard and that leads to margin uh or pricing pressure or uh growth stalling. Yeah. Do you have a current Yeah.
1:12:34
Do you have a current thinking around like the the Parker Conrad like the compound startup idea of like let's build like everything as fast as possible and get our get our fingers in every single pie um vers versus like the more methodical like let's go dominate one point solution and then add on another and then add on another.
1:12:53
We're certainly seeing that at like ramp and we're seeing that at Figma with you know a really really strong point solution and then using that as a platform for the rest of the of the horizontality to come into the business.
1:13:05
Um I'm wondering I'm wondering if there's like is it too early to do like a postmortem on like the right time to go broad?
1:13:11
I've always thought about the consumer neo banks.
1:13:12
Like there still hasn't been a consumer neo bank that I'm aware of where I can go and get a checking account, a savings account, a uh public trading like trade stocks, also a home mortgage, also an auto loan.
1:13:26
Like those are five different point solution consumer fintech companies.
1:13:28
And I was and everyone will always say like, well, there's a lot of regulation.
1:13:32
It's really hard to build all of them at once.
1:13:34
And I was like, but five of them are being built in YC like every single batch.
1:13:37
Like what if we just merged all those companies?
1:13:40
you would have a compound consumer startup, but it didn't happen.
1:13:44
Um, and I'm always wondering like like where is is that like a unique thing to Parker?
1:13:48
Like what is the full like post-mortem on the idea of the compound startup?
1:13:52
Yeah, I mean I think the fundamentally it's it's hard to pick a playbook for each, right?
1:13:57
We've seen to your point, you know, Ripplet tries to move much faster and get to 50 plus% feature feature parody before launching products within their bundle.
1:14:06
And then you have startups that are much more methodical, right?
1:14:09
Um different business line.
1:14:11
Gusto's focused on really small businesses, but Gusto has been very very methodical on rolling out products and they have, you know, two core businesses that are massive.
1:14:18
Um and uh they are slowly kind of rolling out more and more products, but they're very methodical.
1:14:23
Um I think the biggest key is right to win, right?
1:14:26
Uh and so in that case, as long as you have a core business that has a right to win, you give yourself the ability to think about how and what strategy you want to run for going multi-product.
1:14:35
multi-product. And also the other key is I mentioned this feature parity point for certain product offerings I think feature parity matters less in regards to how much depth you have within the product and then for certain offerings it matters a tough right and so you have to sort of think about do we want to get
1:14:51
something out quick as possible and cross-ell or do we want to wait until we sort of have a a real offering and that also depends on what customer you're servicing an SMB is very different than an enterprise customer and you're going to take a lot more time to launch an enterpriseg grade product uh you know if you're going after this bundled opportunity. So, it's not a particularly
1:15:06
So, it's not a particularly it's not a clear answer.
1:15:08
It definitely does depend, but these are the kind of the fun things to think about when trying to invest in businesses over, you know, 10 20 year time frames.
1:15:14
You have to walk through kind of the strategy and these stories and make bets on how you think it's going to play out and and founders obviously will inform those bets on their thoughts and we'll respond and iterate accordingly. Yeah.
1:15:24
Is there is there enough capital out there to do a roll up of like a sauna and bill.
1:15:28
com like some crazy take private of these two companies because like they are let's go buy two slow growing companies who were category leaders that are getting eaten alive if you work it might be crazy enough to work if you're if you can raise money for that rollup do you you might be gated you should do I mean, this is this is private equity, right?
1:15:56
But I mean, the real question is Logan, why haven't they bought them, right?
1:15:59
Or why haven't these other companies, you know, decide to try to consolidate them or do a tech private or merge more in the private markets?
1:16:06
There really hasn't been as much consolidation in the categories I'm I'm particularly excited about around front application development in fintech. Why is that?
1:16:12
And I think this gets into a little bit some of the points on Bill Gurley's podcast recently, but there are all these companies where if you're cash flow positive, you're not a force seller.
1:16:21
Um, and if you're still hold on or hung on a expensive price, then it's not very clear from the buyer side why they should take all that dilution, especially if you believe that AI is going to uh lower the ceiling on uh or increase the ceiling and sort of lower the floor bit on on development and product development.
1:16:43
So, in some sense, maybe you should just build, right?
1:16:44
Like the bioverse build dynamic is really interesting right now. Sure.
1:16:47
um given sort of the the the the unlocks within AI on software development and where kind of pricing is for these companies.
1:16:56
Um so it isn't clear what's going to happen with all these things.
1:16:58
Do I think you know as interest rates drop there's a lower cost of capital that maybe changes the calculus but right now a lot of these things are kind of stuck in a pause right now and there hasn't been a lot of consolidation like I thought there was going to be but uh I think that will change over time mainly as a function of the cost of capital dropping. Yeah.
1:17:14
Throughout this year, people have been calling 2025 the year of agents.
1:17:19
I feel like that's come up quite a lot from a variety of of different hosts.
1:17:23
There seems to be this or sorry, not host, but guests.
1:17:25
There seems to be this collective belief that this is the year that we unlock power of agents.
1:17:32
We've seen consumer agents like deep research.
1:17:34
We see coding agents, things like that.
1:17:37
Um my question from an investing standpoint is is um it seems like every you know scaleup SAS company is aware of the potential of agents and is just launching their own agents and given the distribution advantage they have how do you think about the the investability of of sort of net new agentic software when when there's yeah yeah intercom intercom's a good example right they they have hundreds millions in ARR.
1:18:07
They have, you know, a traditional SAS offering than they have Finn.
1:18:11
And so, or even in like bill pay, it's like is is bill pay is is bill.
1:18:14
com more threatened by a startup that's going to move much faster with codegen and generate something that's like just has different economics or or should they be more worried about like Microsoft spinning up a clone very quickly because Microsoft's able to move faster because of AI?
1:18:30
because we have this weird like arms race dynamic where you know everyone has access to AI even though the startups might be the only ones that are slapping it on the front door and the and the domain name but in theory like AI should improve everyone. Yeah.
1:18:44
And if you're a if you're a CEO who started your company seven years ago and you have 100 million of it's not like you just didn't check X.
1:18:51
It's not like you have it's not like you haven't tried research or anything like that. Yeah. Yeah. I want your reaction. Yeah.
1:18:59
I mean I it's it's a great point.
1:18:59
Um I think that you're you mentioned like Intercom is a good example, right?
1:19:06
Where you have an incumbent that you know is one of the winners in a category.
1:19:10
Um and you've seen them execute incredibly well, right?
1:19:15
In launching agents in in the AI in an AI race.
1:19:16
Uh I know Owen tweeted out and we're investors in intercom for for a long time now and Owen tweeted out a bit about the performance of the company and how AI has been pretty transformative to them.
1:19:27
Um, I think you've seen other companies, you know, launch their their their own agents out to mixed degrees.
1:19:30
I think Intercom's a really successful example.
1:19:34
Salesforce has been mixed.
1:19:34
Um, and, uh, and then you have, you know, some other legacy incumbents that have done pretty well actually in launch agents like Service Now, right?
1:19:42
We've seen a ton of growth there.
1:19:43
Um, it's an interesting dynamic.
1:19:45
I think there's a debate now as well where some of these companies are talking about gating uh, access to their core data within as a system of record.
1:19:54
Um, and uh I think Oh, that was great. Hello, Dorothy.
1:19:59
Um, so, uh, and I think that's also going to be another a big one, right?
1:20:04
If if you believe and sort of extrapolate out the role that agents are going to play, um, I think some of these companies are going to look and try to maintain their kind of position system record and not give access uh to kind of some of the cordly data.
1:20:16
So, that folks are going to have to use their agent for certain workflows.
1:20:19
certain workflows. Um and so this is also going to be I think a continual debate on how people respond where the value will acrue and what does it look like to have agents in the workforce right is it going to be agents within sort of the gated ecosystem uh within
1:20:33
data bricks within service now within kind of your existing SAS providers or you're going to have this kind of abstraction layer above and one agent to kind of you know that that that rules them all and and abstracts and coordinates across them all um very interesting to see how it all plays out. Yeah. Uh let's go to Bill Gurley. Hot Yeah.
1:20:47
Uh let's go to Bill Gurley.
1:20:47
Hot takes a retired We love a retired venture capitalist speaking freely.
1:20:52
Um I hope we'll be there one day. Yeah. Yeah.
1:20:58
What what was your what was your takeaway on his his uh state of the venture markets?
1:21:03
He's very worried about uh capital wars, the zombie unicorns, the what's going to happen with the decacorns.
1:21:10
What stuck out to you in his appearance on I mean I thought Bill Gly on the market was really good.
1:21:16
um he's a legend in our industry and I'm one of many who's learned a lot from him sharing his knowledge.
1:21:21
He's absolutely right about the dynamics around the overhang from 2021 and how there are a thousand or so companies that are still hanging on to marks uh from 2021 in people's books and that's still working its way through the system.
1:21:33
Um he's absolutely right in the loss of the kind of singles or doubles that used to matter to funds and that's just a function of the growth in fund sizing, right?
1:21:40
So you were more incentivized to go for larger and larger outcomes and put more and more capital into these businesses.
1:21:45
um which is a you know real change from the beginnings of the industry as kind of a a niche fledging industry decades ago and I think we're going through the same growth dynamic that private equity went through you know in the 90s and 2000s as it became a really mature and large asset class.
1:22:00
Um I agree with him that we're repeating the same mistakes from 2021 a little bit and a lot of AI companies may end up zombie AI companies with a ton of fun. Yeah.
1:22:09
The challenge now is like how do you avoid false positives?
1:22:11
A team is in an interesting category.
1:22:13
they get to 15 million of ARR in 6 months and you're looking at the business and you're like this team is incredibly talented.
1:22:20
The the company is growing at at such an incredible clip.
1:22:25
But then it's so easy for them to just kind of fall, you know, fall off a cliff and and um not actually break out into the into the sort of type of company that really ends up mattering. But absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely.
1:22:38
Um and uh and the one point that he he did hit on which I definitely would want to dive a bit more into is something that we talk a lot about.
1:22:45
Um but he talked about this kind of category within those you know thousand plus unicorns and he you know he he he hit on Stripe for a bit in data bricks. Mhm.
1:22:56
There's a category of company now that I I would say is probably like maybe 10 to 20 or so um that we call the semi-liquid category of technology company. It's really unique.
1:23:04
I I'd say our bet 15 years ago on the trend of companies staying private longer post Facebook didn't even really appreciate or see the ultimate magnitude of this trend.
1:23:14
If you look right now these kind of top 10 20 or so companies we all know about from SpaceX to Stripe to Android.
1:23:23
Uh these companies would otherwise be large cap publicly traded companies.
1:23:27
Some might even argue in the Max 7 if they were public and had the cycle not changed they probably majority of them would be public.
1:23:32
venture hasn't really seen this many companies stay private this long at this kind of growth and profitability and magnitude.
1:23:39
Um, and it's actually being met with a matching liquidity profile as well.
1:23:44
Uh, and so for context, right, like a bunch of these companies are doing billions and tens of billions of dollars in topline and they're extremely profitable.
1:23:52
They're all growing faster than what's in the public markets.
1:23:54
Uh, I'd say within the bucket of companies I'm talking about, they're all growing 50 to 100%.
1:23:59
Um, Palunteer is the fastest growing publicly traded software business and it's growing 30%.
1:24:02
So, the only way to access this kind of growth is in the private markets within these high growth technology businesses.
1:24:07
And of that group, not only are they larger than many large cap businesses and growing faster, but they're also running a liquid market and that liquid market is extending to the founders and employees as well as the investors and the LPs.
1:24:19
So, having these companies on your books is entirely different and almost like holding a public stock given the recency of the marks and liquidity around them.
1:24:28
So it is almost entirely like a whole new sort of sub subset of company or whole new asset class within venture.
1:24:34
We try to focus on cost training here and are lucky to be major shareholders in a lot of these businesses.
1:24:37
But it is definitely something that I think no one could have sort of uh forecasted.
1:24:41
Um is that usually companies they stayed private longer but they went public when they were still burning cash when they were still early in the growth curve.
1:24:48
Now you're looking at companies that are not just growing fast but they're extremely profitable and given the liquidity around them they kind of don't have a reason to go public.
1:24:56
Um, and that is a pretty interesting dynamic.
1:24:59
And you know, he talked about Stripe.
1:25:00
I think there's a lot more of these companies, but it is still relatively small. It's, I'd say, 10 to 20. Yeah.
1:25:04
I mean, I feel like Stripe was the first private company that was really getting whispered around in like the Centicorn conversation and then we just blew past it with SpaceX and OpenAI, both in like the 300 plus billion range, heavily heavily liquid.
1:25:20
Uh, what is what does that mean for the LP dynamic?
1:25:22
because if I'm paying 2 and 20 or something on holding something and maybe there's like uh like an opportunity to go direct is is there some pressure to distribute those shares earlier since they are semi-liquid?
1:25:36
Is there anything that's changing on the LP side with these like ultra late stage ultra mega cap scentorn private companies?
1:25:44
Uh I mean I think back on the earlier point if you're in these companies and you're in managers in these businesses it's a different dynamic.
1:25:53
I think if you're in the thousand unicorns, right, and a lot of them are still holding on to marks and uh and kind of it's unclear what's going to ultimately happen there, that creates a different dynamic. Totally.
1:26:02
We talk about the gap between TVPI and DPI.
1:26:04
If that gap are in these companies that are extremely profitable, they're marketing every six to 12 months because they're running tenders regularly.
1:26:10
Um you know, the the fundamentals uh uh you have visibility into.
1:26:15
Um these companies the pressure around liquidity is very different.
1:26:20
In fact, they kind of want that part of the book to still keep compounding because it's where the growth is in the public markets.
1:26:24
The growth is not there compared to here.
1:26:28
And so if you're, you know, have the ability to be within a power law asset class and you're in the power law companies and they're performing this well and there's liquidity around them, we've actually seen less of a pressure, which has been kind of interesting.
1:26:38
And when there is demand, it's very easy to facilitate it, right?
1:26:42
That's why I mentioned like you're holding the ST in your book.
1:26:44
You can close the gap between TPPI and DPI relatively easily.
1:26:46
Um and uh and so I think it's creating a different decision for the LPS within these funds.
1:26:53
And we've seen increased demand to hold, increased demand to buy.
1:26:57
And when there is demand to sell, you're able to facilitate that really easily.
1:27:01
Uh as if you were holding a public stock.
1:27:02
And once again, that's just very different than than than kind of what Growth Venture has has experienced, you know, over the previous decade plus. Yeah.
1:27:10
You mentioned a number of companies that are uh maybe public and cash flow positive, so there isn't that pressure to sell.
1:27:16
Uh what about those unicorns where they are burning money still?
1:27:20
They're hanging on to those high marks.
1:27:22
We've seen a couple companies go out at haircuts to their all-time high valuation, but it seems like historically when companies get out at rational valuations, they're somewhat set up for success and they can go into kind of the next chapter of their lives and start growing.
1:27:36
Um there's also this dynamic around M&A maybe being back on the menu.
1:27:41
We saw the whiz acquisition news. Uh scale just happened.
1:27:43
And there's been a few of these wind surfs been rumored.
1:27:47
And so like the multi-billion dollar acquisitions seem to be happening.
1:27:50
Lena's out, but the administration isn't fully, you know, embracing M&A.
1:27:55
It's not happening constantly.
1:27:57
But how do you think all of this unwinds? Yeah.
1:28:01
Um I think M&A will pick up.
1:28:01
I think some companies are, you know, at the tail end of growing back into those marks. Sure.
1:28:09
Um and that just takes time.
1:28:12
You know, some grew back within 12 to 24 months.
1:28:14
some it's taken, you know, 36 to 48 months.
1:28:16
Y um and then there's a large swath that are going to just have to take the pain and think about the business long term and remark.
1:28:24
Um and there's some that's like super unclear.
1:28:27
I don't know what percentage breakdown it is.
1:28:29
I can probably confidently say the majority of that thousand are going to be in that sort of latter bucket where it's very unclear what's going to happen to them. Yep.
1:28:35
Um and I don't think founders are going to want to operate zombie companies forever, right?
1:28:40
So, at some point they're going to have to find a home and the investors are going to have to be willing to take the pain.
1:28:45
Y um but look, there's a lot of companies that grew back into the marks from 2021 over varying degrees of time frame.
1:28:52
You know, I mean, people forget there are companies in that top 10 to 20 bucket I mentioned that are growing fast and have very efficient profitable growth and a bunch of them also had to go through 2021, right?
1:29:01
And and and adjusting kind of their their views on pricing.
1:29:05
If you can compound past it, great.
1:29:07
If not, at some point you're gonna have to make a decision whether it's remarketing the business or selling at something that maybe doesn't clear path.
1:29:13
And this is just a cycle.
1:29:13
It's just taking a lot longer to work its way through.
1:29:17
Do you think these bigger fund sizes and these more aggressive revenue ramps and these more aggressive valuations getting up into I mean time to unicorn for companies that are anywhere near product market fit seems like it's like three to six months now.
1:29:31
Uh, is that putting downward pressure on like the the, you know, low hundred million tuckin acquisition that used to be just like such a win for everyone?
1:29:41
It's like, yeah, they only raised 10 million, everyone made money, the founders got, you know, liquid 10 million plus or something.
1:29:46
Everyone everyone's happy and then they can kind of move on with whatever the next chapter is and they built something cool.
1:29:52
It feels like maybe I'm just not hearing those because all the numbers if it doesn't if it doesn't if it's not in the billions, no one's even breaking through.
1:29:59
It's not even going viral.
1:29:59
Uh, but it does feel like there's just there's just less of those happening.
1:30:04
And I'm wondering if it's more driven by, you know, just, hey, it's a lot of overhead to do post merger integration even if we could get it approved. There's the FTC angle.
1:30:11
There's also just the pricing angle.
1:30:13
What do you think's driving like early stage M&A uh, you know, the status of early stage M&A?
1:30:18
I mean, so many things, right?
1:30:21
I mean, one, to your point, you did have an administration that was a lot harder on M&A.
1:30:25
And so I think big tech who was the traditional buyer you know called let's say pre last the last cycle.
1:30:29
Yeah I'm thinking about that VR company that Zuck bought that was like it was VR fitness and it was like you know not a huge deal not in the billions and and they were like you're do you're monopolizing VR fitness.
1:30:41
It's like I don't know anyone who does VR Amazon and Roomba right I mean like it's like the the hundred million to couple billion dollar talking from big tech definitely got put on pause one factor.
1:30:52
Um, another is pricing expectations.
1:30:56
I mean, the growth of the asset class, the growth of funds, people kept funding these companies a little longer to keep pushing for product market fit and therefore you start looking at valuations that become less attractive, right?
1:31:07
So, that, you know, one to $300 million tuckin was based on a company at series A that did their series A $50 million post, right? Or something like that.
1:31:14
That world is gone, right?
1:31:16
So, now you've priced yourself out of an acquisition because you've raised too much money.
1:31:19
Um, it's a seed round now. $50 million post.
1:31:21
It's like it's a watermelon seed.
1:31:23
We're calling it watermelon.
1:31:26
We You keep saying watermelon seed, but watermelon seeds are smaller than any other seeds.
1:31:29
Like the mango seed was seed round. Yes. Yes.
1:31:34
The mango has the biggest seed. We're beyond seeds now. Yes. Yes.
1:31:36
It's just the whole fruit. Yeah. The whole fruit. Yeah.
1:31:40
I mean I I think that's another that's another dynamic.
1:31:42
Um and so yeah, I just think a lot of this is just structural. Sure.
1:31:47
Do I think it comes back?
1:31:49
I think on the margins, but It's on the founders.
1:31:52
The founders have to say no to the higher valuations if they want to have that as an option because once once you have 200 million 200 million in the prep stack it's like yeah you're not going to take $150 million aqua hire offer acquisition offer or tuck in like it's just not going to happen.
1:32:06
Jordi I wanted you to ask about capital wars a little bit if you had that question but if you have something else feel free to run to that.
1:32:11
I mean, I I my issue with capital wars is they can have a negative effect on outcomes, but it sounds so awesome.
1:32:18
You just want to get involved, right? Capital is the best.
1:32:22
I just um I I had a I mean uh I don't know how much there is to say or if you have any comments there, Christian.
1:32:29
Christian. And it just it just feels like yeah in every category now you have at least two big fast growing players and then a couple multi-stage investors on each side that are just sort of saying let's ride and just putting in hundreds of billions and and you know I think uh gurly had a front row seat to
1:32:48
that with Uber andyft and how being funded just as though they were you know really really competitive with Uber um even though they they there was pretty material differences harmed Uber for years and years, but it felt like Uber it was worth it to fight the capital war because Uber won so hard and now trades at what 100x lift or something like that. So, I don't know
1:33:09
So, I don't know any any thoughts on capital wars and where we are right now.
1:33:13
Yeah, it's obviously it's an inefficiency in the market.
1:33:18
Uh it' be much better if all the venture dollars that were funding R&D and sales and marketing were consolidated into one company after one opportunity. Mhm.
1:33:27
Um do I think also it's a sign of a vibrant ecosystem as well that there is that level of competition and there is that level of entrepreneurship where founders all want to go after some opportunities and sort of have their version or strategy around it. Absolutely.
1:33:43
Um so you know like if the business of America is business as Calvin Kulwood said I think it's great that there is the ability to have multiple businesses going after the same opportunity.
1:33:52
If you look in other ecosystems when there's one dominant player, there's not 20 startups that get funding and go compete.
1:33:57
And so although it's extremely inefficient and from as an investor perspective, you would like to see everyone just kind of back into the winner, assuming you're in the winner.
1:34:06
Um at the same time, it's also a sign of a vibrant ecosystem where other other sort of tech markets don't have this dynamic, right?
1:34:12
this dynamic, right? And so um overall I think the biggest question which is going to be very difficult right is when are founders willing to merge forces right and accept and I think you've seen that happen here or there in cyber security and other categories pretty rare still it's it's it's a tall ask yeah the the ex PayPal
1:34:32
merger legendary worked out really well you roll the tape and you say what what would happen if some of the codegen companies merged and stuff this had to happen it 100% has to happen and a lot of is preAI or I mean pre AAI but the latest AI cycle from 2021 like we've been talking about they're also going to have to go through this version. Yeah. Yeah.
1:34:51
But it's it's a tall ask and I think it's just taking a lot longer to work its way through.
1:34:54
Deal is already employing rippling employees.
1:34:56
So imagine if you merge those companies just one payroll system for all the employees be super efficient.
1:35:02
That should on the cap table for both companies.
1:35:07
What are you hoping to see out of uh robotics generally in the next 12 months?
1:35:13
Feels like there's just a a massive amount of excitement.
1:35:15
massive amount of excitement. uh everybody's calling it the next in some ways like it it feels like it could turn into another even though a lot of robotics applications are kind of you could bundle them into the American dynamism category broadly feels like it
1:35:31
could turn into its own thing and even today uh an AI cleaning robot firm called Cardinal raises 800 million I never I'd never heard of this company I thought you were going to say Gecko because they raised money and they've been No so this company Cardinal just raised 800 100 million. Wow. Uh I guess Wow.
1:35:46
Uh I guess Soft Bank is participating, but but this is just one uh of many examples.
1:35:53
I'm curious uh if you have any sort of expectations around the category.
1:36:00
I'm sure you guys are in a lot of exciting companies already. Yeah.
1:36:04
No, we we haven't done much in the robotic space.
1:36:06
Um I think for the for the most part for us, there's kind of two things.
1:36:11
there's kind of two things. like one there's still we like to think about things between R&D risk and engineering execution risk uh and I think this still feels slightly on the R&D risk side especially some of the humanoid robotics companies and we're just not I think there's better people to underwrite that we're happy to invest once there's a bit more traction in the business as you
1:36:29
know growth growth grow growth stage investors um in that I think you know I'm not as close to a lot of these businesses but I do think that you know for an LM to build a world model I think it's very difficult um I I know there are people that are much closer that have really good arguments on either side and I walk away convinced believing their argument based on who the last person I talked to. Uh and so yeah, I I
1:36:48
Uh and so yeah, I I think overall we're just kind of staying back and paying attention to how this plays out.
1:36:53
I think there's a ton of excitement for a lot of reasons.
1:36:55
I do worry that this may be like the first or second wave of autonomous vehicles where like now we're actually living in them beginning to actually play out and uh we may be right on the trend.
1:37:08
Um, I'm a big immersive computing believer.
1:37:11
I read every sci-fi book as a kid.
1:37:13
Everyone read Kevin Kelly, every Kerswell books.
1:37:17
Like 100% we believe in robotics and want to see this, especially human robotics.
1:37:20
Um, I wonder if it's too early.
1:37:22
Uh, and I wonder if the main use cases now are going to look more like industrial use cases um or robotics that have been around in manufacturing kind of scaling out versus the kind of human robotics like you're seeing. Um, but we'll see.
1:37:34
But obviously, it's a huge opportunity.
1:37:35
unclear if that's going to play out this cycle or in a future cycle.
1:37:38
Um, but it's a cool world with PDA.
1:37:41
I I'm very much rooting for these companies.
1:37:43
Are you seeing a uh last question, are you seeing a slowdown in activity yet? It's June 16th. Yeah, summer's coming. Sanchez popping. Samaritz, you're going.
1:37:58
Do you think any Do you think do you see rounds getting done this summer just because some of these companies are moving so quickly?
1:38:02
I think all of Silicon Valley grinds to a halt personally, but we'll see.
1:38:05
What What do you think, Christian? I mean, what?
1:38:07
Ask me in August what's going on in July.
1:38:11
There's a lot going on still and there's a bunch of fundraisers. We're we're busy.
1:38:14
Um and there'll be a lot of announcements coming out, but uh ask me in August. Okay.
1:38:19
Yeah, we'll have you back on uh from wherever wherever you're vacationing.
1:38:23
Uh thank you so much for joining. This is fantastic. Two more to go. Two more to go.
1:38:27
Let us know what you're doing tomorrow.
1:38:28
We got a lot of space for an engine. Come on, hang out.
1:38:32
We can even put the we can put a plaque on it that's big enough, you know, if you zoom in that says, you know, the 137 uh engine. That'd be great.
1:38:39
Anyways, great to see you.
1:38:41
Thanks so much for coming. Talk to you soon. Cheers.
1:38:42
Really quickly, let's tell you about Figma.
1:38:44
You heard Christian mention it on that in that interview.
1:38:48
Think bigger, build faster.
1:38:49
Figma helps design and development teams build great products together.
1:38:52
And we will invite our next guest into the studio, Aaron from Lightseed Venture Partners, lsvp. com. Aaron, how you doing? There he is. Round of applause. Welcome to the stream.
1:39:04
First appearance hopefully. First of many.
1:39:07
First of many, I would hope.
1:39:07
Uh, how are the chickens?
1:39:10
You said you were you were uh you said you were looking after your chickens for a second before you joined. It's awesome. Yeah. Yeah.
1:39:15
I had to go feed the chickens uh in the midday sun. Uh they're good. They're good.
1:39:20
We have a dozen new ones.
1:39:20
Also, that's not a metaphor for seed stage bats.
1:39:23
You found feed my chickens.
1:39:29
No, it's not what I call my founders.
1:39:31
No, the chicken coop on on the property where I live. So, amazing.
1:39:33
Do you have a high-tech chicken coupe or are you keeping it low tech?
1:39:37
Just pretty much all chicken coops are falling apart by nature.
1:39:41
Uh you just kind of like keep propping them up.
1:39:43
Uh it's like any early stage investing.
1:39:45
You just keep keep the companies alive until they they produce eggs. Yeah.
1:39:48
Growing up, my my dad was was uh very into building hardware software solutions for our chicken coupe.
1:39:57
So he would rig uh these sprinklers to like fill up a bucket at the right time that would pull up the gate using gravity and then it would dump out.
1:40:06
So he should have productized it.
1:40:08
There's now a bunch of chick tech companies.
1:40:10
I don't know how they're doing.
1:40:11
Reaction to foxes and hen houses uh avoid at all costs.
1:40:14
Uh guess scarecrows and fake fake owls there. Oh, fake owls. Really? Decoys.
1:40:19
Yeah, I'll send you a picture. This is good.
1:40:20
Fox defenses defense tech for for chicken coops. I love it. Yeah, I forgot to ask.
1:40:27
Anyway, uh awesome awesome to have you on.
1:40:29
Um why don't why don't before we just start uh all ranting together.
1:40:35
Give give us uh give give a quick kind of overview of your background, what you're up to for the audience. Yeah.
1:40:38
Uh well, before I sold out, uh I was a founder myself, so I sat on the other side.
1:40:45
Uh I bu built a company called Final about a decade ago that became we sold it to Goldman Sachs and it became what is now the Apple Card.
1:40:50
So I've done a lot of kind of deep fintech experience.
1:40:53
How I met Jordy was I was angel investing and advising long ago in early stage fintech.
1:40:58
Um and then now I'm an early stage partner on the fintech team at Lightseed.
1:41:02
Um and when I say sell, this is kind of what I want to do with my life's work.
1:41:06
Uh is help early founders and kind of be in the weeds go zero to one.
1:41:10
Break up the chapters of fintech history in your mind.
1:41:13
When you started final, uh I'm sure you just got a lot of Did you get a lot of nos or were you built different?
1:41:21
And people were like, "Yeah, I don't know about this fintech thing, but uh yeah, this this makes sense."
1:41:27
I got a lot of I got a hundred nos, I think, when we were raising our series A.
1:41:30
Just it was kind of a slog.
1:41:32
Uh we were probably, you know, fintech 2. 0 where 1.
1:41:34
0 was like Bank Simple and like um a few other of those uh people. Wave 2.
1:41:40
0, Chime would be at the beginning of that and then like Robin Hood be in the we were kind of the same core of Robin Hood.
1:41:47
uh my company final ultimately we kind of were going after the wrong target customer segment where you just needed massive distribution which it turns out that you know Apple does have especially for the right customer base.
1:42:00
So it made sense to partner with Goldman and kind of sit inside there.
1:42:03
But you know now we're sitting on almost wave four right like we're doing a lot of stable coin stuff at Lightseed and I spent a lot of time kind of we hosted a stablecoin conference back in February.
1:42:12
uh you look at all this stuff and the stuff that you want to do in fintech now are just so much easier than it was back then.
1:42:18
Um we were like a full actual credit card including line of credit and took two and a half years to launch that company just cuz there hadn't been anyone since wave 1 when it was a company called Revolution Money had uh had launched through Steve Case and u which why they call it Revolution Capital.
1:42:36
Um, but that was wave one and we had to go find people from that company to even figure out as a startup how you bring a credit card to market.
1:42:44
Now you can do it in nine months if if I have a question about this.
1:42:48
I was talking to Christian about this earlier.
1:42:50
Um, this idea of like the compound startup, we've seen it in enterprise software.
1:42:55
Why can't someone build all of the consumer fintech products in one kind of neoank one-stop shop?
1:43:04
On day one, I sign up and I get a credit card, a checking account, a savings account, the ability to buy stocks and Bitcoin, a mortgage, and a car loan allin one.
1:43:13
Right now, that feels like six different startups, six different YC companies potentially.
1:43:18
But if if each one of those can now be built in nine months, why can't they all be built in parallel in 9 months?
1:43:24
We may see with kind of like all the AI stuff, but honestly, it's not a technology problem.
1:43:30
Okay, financial services products, the same building blocks that have existed, I hate to say since the Medici, but for a long time now.
1:43:35
So, we have product market fit.
1:43:37
Consumers want access to credit.
1:43:39
They want savings accounts. They want mortgages. They want car loans.
1:43:42
What we don't have is product marketing fit.
1:43:44
And so, it's the same reason we've seen even Robin Hood with essentially infinite capital to go and acquire.
1:43:50
It's taking them a long time to get the right product construct and aggregate all of those different products together.
1:43:55
products together. and them them this is sort of the wealth the wealthfront MMO when they tried to play this game but it's just really hard to get that second third fourth fifth attach rate to be high enough to make it work that you can ever make the economics work um unless you're playing the bundling game right if you're build which is what Robin Hood
1:44:12
gold is if you're playing Amazon Prime which is my best customers I want to just own their entire financial life that's a path you can you can take but that the answer is just product marketing fit it's not product market fit financial services fundamentally have it we need access to it, but you just, you know, getting the product right. Why would I, if I have trading at
1:44:29
Why would I, if I have trading at Robin Hood, go get a a shittier checking account from them?
1:44:34
Not that they have that, just from across the board.
1:44:35
You just need to get the product construct right.
1:44:39
And then you're also not going to go out and spend on CAC again.
1:44:40
You're going to try to cross-ell.
1:44:43
So, I I'm just wondering about like the product marketing fit.
1:44:46
this idea that like if you went to customers with this idea of like this is the drop-in replacement for your Chase account which you have your mortgage with and your car loan and your credit card with and Chase owns a bunch of different stuff but it's all one solution one app for everything.
1:45:01
Uh maybe they're all kind of mediocre to start with but then they all get better.
1:45:07
It just it's interesting that no one's been able to break through with that.
1:45:10
But I mean I think I think the challenge is you acquire a customer in their 20s and they just need a basic checking account, credit card and maybe best class and everything, right?
1:45:18
Because you're like, "Oh, I I want the best possible price for my mortgage."
1:45:20
And so unless you can win consistently in every single thing, you're going to get fragmentation.
1:45:24
So I think it'd be helpful to talk through a couple recent IPOs, Chime as well as Circle.
1:45:27
They they Chime, you know, obviously represents what you called, you know, fintech uh 2.
1:45:35
0 0 started around the time that you guys started final.
1:45:37
Finally got out, you know, well below uh their their 2021 marks, but at least they're out.
1:45:43
And we now have proof points to that that some of these businesses can do well in the public markets.
1:45:49
At least Dave uh I think if you bought Dave at the bottom like a year and a half ago or something, you'd be up like uh you know crazy multiples.
1:45:59
So, it's good to see that, you know, uh, these sort of neo banks can exist in the public markets.
1:46:04
But why don't we start with Chime?
1:46:06
Uh, what was your reaction?
1:46:09
Uh, it seems like a pretty solid outcome for from my point of view.
1:46:13
It's great for everyone, but I think Sequoia or DST did the last round.
1:46:17
Um, and even then, I think they're back pretty close to in the money.
1:46:20
Uh, ultimately, like liquidity is the future.
1:46:22
The Chime IPO is fantastic for the rest of Fintech.
1:46:24
is fantastic for the rest of Fintech. um we will see compounding amounts of capital flow down one to the early stage funds but even every single one of their employees over the last I think it was a 2012 company 2011 over the last like 13 years become angels in a meaningful way and just see that there's room for product innovation um they also are a
1:46:44
potential one of these aggregators right Chime now has a even bigger balance sheet and they can go in after and and aggregate people and maybe it's not the same customer for the multiple products but they can get deeper into credit, they in theory could buy they could have bought a Dave or a money line and kind of get that sort of product under the hood. Um, you know, when you look at
1:47:01
Um, you know, when you look at like a Chase, a $750 billion company or banking, um, they have to do a lot of things to get to that market cap.
1:47:08
So, you have to do all of these disperate services that don't always necessarily have the same fundamental core systems underneath.
1:47:16
So, Chime now as an IPO shows one that fintech actually can have a decacorn um as a public company um and in neo banking.
1:47:25
So, we'll see a few others go and we can also see that we can actually and I trust Chris and Ryan to go out and do this because they know what they're doing, but they can go and become an aggregator and kind of do more.
1:47:36
I think it'll also just drive a few more fintexs to go public because it's just it forces you to be a mature business, get your economies to scale, right, and in some sense the Chime IPO that it's below the the the top tick mark is probably just more a side effect of interest rates being higher and capital finding other sources as opposed to like this thing being worth whatever it's worth today, right?
1:47:57
It's still up like 40% from the IPO, which seems pretty successful and you know, uh it's a pretty good win for the industry. Yeah. Yeah. Circle.
1:48:05
Um before we dive into Circle, is there um how how are companies like Chime messaging around AI?
1:48:15
It feels like the obvious application is just better customer service and maybe you can use agents to serve more customers and and increase margins.
1:48:24
is that uh and I'm sure they're applying it around, you know, fraud and and and other use cases, but in your mind, what are what are the exciting ways that that a that a scaled uh fintech like Chime can actually apply this stuff? Yeah.
1:48:38
I mean, it's where there's ever in in industry speak and coming from credit cards, there's a lot of industry speak.
1:48:44
Um it's where we can apply AI to arms and legs, right?
1:48:46
Like people are this massive cost.
1:48:47
So customer service is one thing, but really it's actually the back offices of a lot of these businesses.
1:48:52
a lot of these businesses. um we've invested in a company that does dispute management and then like as a professional service plus AI and so you are able to give what is effectively an AI powered BO and do this for other companies but for someone like Chime you know pre IPO they announced that they I
1:49:09
think they call it Chimeore like they built their own processing stack and they they kind of are getting off of Galileo which is owned by SoFi slowly it AI enables kind of all these macro tailwinds that just really give them better economies of scale as a bank um to operate Tier one is customer service. Tier two is then really like, you know,
1:49:25
Tier two is then really like, you know, a bank is kind of like um an iceberg.
1:49:27
As a consumer, you only see above the water, but there's so much below the water to make these things really work.
1:49:36
And that's where Chime is like able to actually and all of these kind of scaled neo and fintech companies are able to use AI to provide better services for their customers.
1:49:44
You can almost think of it as like applied AI, right?
1:49:45
They're not research companies, but they really can find places just to replace where they've thrown bodies at problems in the past. That makes sense.
1:49:53
How are latestage private market investors as well as public market investors looking at fintech businesses that get a large amount of their revenue from interest yield?
1:50:05
It felt like when interest rates popped in late 2022 and and you know have have sort of uh stabilized it felt like people were kind of looking around being like okay a bunch of these businesses are generating a lot of revenue now but everyone was discounting it so massively.
1:50:21
Now if you look at the macro it seems like we we potentially have entered into a new normal with just like sort of moderate rates.
1:50:29
Is that is that the way people are looking at it or or is it still like a massive discount being applied uh in the private markets?
1:50:38
There's still a pretty big discount.
1:50:40
Some people will give you credit and it the reason you give someone credit is just cuz it lets you compound the business, right?
1:50:45
Like you're essentially immediately profitable post zer ending because you just had all these deposits.
1:50:51
it's going to flow to you and you're going to be able to make all of this interest revenue and the best founders are now just compounding that into other business lines.
1:50:57
Um, and using that to just bring kind of more of what you're talking about of all of these different services.
1:51:03
We see it a little bit more in small business than we see it in consumer just because if you're pitching a consumer on a high interest rate, they're typically a pretty like hot deposit.
1:51:12
They're going to move around and it's just not the best person to build against.
1:51:16
where as a business you're actually giving services and so you're able to charge them across the board.
1:51:20
Um, but yeah, so there's a pretty big discount on it, but you know, it's not it's not back to Zerp discount, which is I think what everyone was expecting initially.
1:51:28
It's more akin to two to three point rate, wherever the two-year T is.
1:51:31
You know, it feels about right just from where we're expecting the market to come back to. That makes sense.
1:51:37
Uh, what was your reaction to Circle's IPO?
1:51:38
We had Jeremy, the CEO, on the show, which was great.
1:51:41
They have a big, you know, bold vision.
1:51:43
I think they've executed very, very well.
1:51:46
Um, and at the same time it was interesting to see the market reaction to stables versus how people initially reacted to the S1 which many people looked at it and said this company isn't even actually shouldn't actually go out like they should just get acquired by by Coinbase and clearly there was an exceptional amount of demand.
1:52:07
But I'm curious how you how you saw you kind of looked at the the business pre and then post IPO.
1:52:14
Yeah, I mean preipo is the same kind of look like all the revenue goes to Coinbase and I know a bunch of circle people.
1:52:21
I know Jeremy uh he actually spoke at our conference um and and have been able to get closer to them.
1:52:26
But it it it's one of those that you know if you think about the macro trend of stable coins and this isn't circle specific but you know the biggest export in the US economy is the US dollar.
1:52:35
Um post Brenton wood let's give it up for the dollar.
1:52:45
Uh yeah, post Brenton Woods essentially like we've tried to dollarize the world and make everything trade in it.
1:52:49
Um circle IPO is just showing that there's more demand for that, right?
1:52:54
There's one retail demand for kind of like a normal crypto company in the public markets, but two is if you think about where the world might go, where the dollar might just be it's already hegemonic, but it becomes the only meaningful currency.
1:53:06
Um Circle or Tether is going to be one of those two people who plays that role.
1:53:12
Um, it's possible we see a new upstart.
1:53:14
There's, you know, we're playing around with a bunch of ideas around stable coins and how uh they may exist.
1:53:17
Maybe we'll get a stable coin per country, not necessarily CBDC, but maybe we also dollarize every country.
1:53:24
We're seeing a lot of ideas come through right now from the circle IPO just showed there's just a ton of demand.
1:53:29
Um, I know Jeremy and team are incredible.
1:53:32
What are what are um every single person that is at a legacy financial institution or a big bank is looking at the circle IPO and you know probably excited and a little bit like we should do this ourselves starting to think about you know should we have our own stable coin etc.
1:53:52
I can think of some reasons why they have more of a moat than the average person just kind of analyzing the business for the first time might think, right?
1:54:01
They have liquidity, deep partnerships, they have a regulatory, you know, um, you know, uh, sort of arm that's now getting involved in countries all over the world.
1:54:13
They have developer tooling that's really powerful.
1:54:15
So, they've they've they've done quite a lot to build out their sort of um long-term edge, but I'm curious why you think Circle could could potentially continue to to sort of durably acrue value even though other people will will naturally um start to compete with them. Yeah.
1:54:33
I mean, look, there was a story about Walmart and Amazon trying to launch a stable coin.
1:54:38
Um you know, the joke I've made to friends is that essentially just rhymes with Kohl's cash.
1:54:43
like nobody wants a a a merchant-based stable coin.
1:54:47
Maybe from the banks they'll build a consortium, but we've seen historically those kind of fail.
1:54:50
The reason Circle But did Zel did Zel fail or Well, Zel is EWS which sells a bunch of services, but ultimately like consumer NPS on Zel cannot be high because it's so fraud and so just painful to use as a kind of integration point. Um, no.
1:55:04
I'm talking um, man, it used to be called Soft Pay at one point was called ISIS was this bank consortium of pay by like pay by bank. I kid you not.
1:55:13
Crazy crazy name for a bank consortium.
1:55:17
They had they had to rebrand when ISIS chose the same name as them.
1:55:21
Brutal pay and then JPM bought them to take them out of the market so that nobody could really see how bad it was.
1:55:28
Um, so like a bank consortium with stablecoin makes sense.
1:55:30
There's a bunch of people.
1:55:31
Greg Kidd, who is one of the early angels into Twitter, Square, Ripple, Coinbase, is working on something called USDB.
1:55:38
Um, we're going to see a lot of these things play out.
1:55:42
Circle just has this like in financial services, scale is what makes you win a lot of the times, right?
1:55:46
Or it gives you a real network effect.
1:55:48
Circle is going to spend a lot of this money trying to build sort of a a network like Visa, Mastercard is kind of the underlying bet where they can get merchants on one side and and get consumers on the other.
1:55:58
Um whether or not it's for supplier payments and B2B stuff or B TOC payments is a little unclear and I'm sure you know if I were them I'd be throwing everything against the wall to make it stick.
1:56:09
Um they had a lot of announcements pre IPO in the pretty much all of April and early May.
1:56:13
Um which seemed like stuff that they really been working on for a while and just weren't sure kind of due to the Trump tariffs if they'd be able to go out if the market would reopen.
1:56:22
They got that stuff out there.
1:56:25
It's a very strong narrative of what they can do into the future.
1:56:26
um it just now they have to go and execute on it and that's one of the things you know they're fighting an uphill battle of network effect in traditional financial services.
1:56:37
How are you thinking about stable coins as a c as an investment category?
1:56:40
I'm sure this is how you're spending probably 50% of your time.
1:56:45
Is now the time to get in?
1:56:47
It seems like this is a public company.
1:56:49
Oh, I think in many ways the IPO No, I'm not saying investing in the next stable coin issuer.
1:56:53
I'm talking about the actual consumer applications, B2B applications.
1:56:57
The infrastructure here, you know, to me, it's it's it's I can imagine a massive wave of companies being funded that try to ride the stable coin wave, but then ultimately end up getting just, you know, um, Sherlocked by by circles and stripes and and things like that.
1:57:15
But but how do you think about it?
1:57:16
Yeah, I mean, so I'm an early stage investor for the most part.
1:57:19
like I bet on people and then I like I'm looking for companies and founders I fall in love with and then want to figure out how to deploy capital into them.
1:57:26
Um, stable coins is this current trend.
1:57:28
Every company's now in some sense a stablecoin company um if it makes sense for their business just like every company is an AI company.
1:57:34
Um we we figure out a few archetypes of founders uh and I was joking with one of my founder friends of like we'll probably coin it as money 3.
1:57:42
0 know founders where they they're very serious about how you handle a business that actually touches money but on the other side of it they're taking all the efficiencies that come with crypto and when you combine the two you end up in a in a world which is stable coins.
1:57:56
Um so we've been able to back about two companies right now in the last few months doing that.
1:58:01
We've seen a lot of the companies kind of in the middle of the of the sandwich which is like you have issuance, you have consumer distribution, in the middle you have a lot of orchestration, you have a lot of like actual bill pay and stuff like that.
1:58:13
Um we've sat more on the issuance side and core infrastructure side.
1:58:17
We've looked a lot at the kind of like later stage distribution side and just have realized that in the middle they're going to get squeezed.
1:58:24
the the the issuers like Circle are going to have to move up market and verticalize or the distribution plays where they control all the value from the consumer and can build a better product.
1:58:33
Um they're going to have to move down market and kind of eat down the stack or or dual source or triple source their vendors so that they can at the end of the day squeeze them on margin which is honestly from a distribution perspective the traditional fintech play.
1:58:45
It's what Cash App it's what Chime has done.
1:58:47
you put as many vendors behind you as possible that do the same thing and then when you go to rebid the contract, you just squeeze them.
1:58:54
So, we've made a few bets in the space.
1:58:56
Um, and really when we're seeing demand on the distribution side, we're seeing it honestly outside the US.
1:59:03
I I personally haven't figured out a use case where stable coins reduce the friction of that you see in the US banking system, but if I'm not in America and I want access to the US dollar, it's the fastest way for me to get access to the US dollar in something that looks like a US bank account.
1:59:18
Um, it also helps for people who are, you know, um, operation.
1:59:22
What about buying a car on the weekend?
1:59:27
Uh, you can still do that.
1:59:27
There are services that do that.
1:59:29
Fed wire is actually, I believe, 7-day settlement now.
1:59:32
So with the right bank you can even do that.
1:59:33
But also like what fed wire for coins like yeah I mean no I mean there's a bunch of other there's so many other use cases.
1:59:43
I mean streaming you know I mean there there's it's the thing is like if you think how Visa and Mastercard work they're the biggest factoring networks in the world.
1:59:54
They're they're taking risk.
1:59:54
They're adjudicating risk for a bank when a consumer swipes.
1:59:58
And so what is the risk that Visa, Mastercard, and MX Discover take?
2:00:02
It's single digit maybe dozen like 12 basis points.
2:00:05
The rest of that interchange flows to the bank.
2:00:06
It flows to the issuer who's actually taking the real risk.
2:00:10
And so if stable coins and Visa and Mastercard are both taking this very seriously.
2:00:15
If stable coins start kind of eating their lunch, we're going to enter a world where they're just going to cut rates and we're going to get a much more I hate to say efficient.
2:00:23
we're going to get a less lucrative um card issuing and kind of network-based world there for the big banks where Chase can no longer offer you Capital One can't offer you high high rewards because there's no margin in it for them. Interesting.
2:00:35
So, will we see protests in the streets from point points maxers, you know, just taking saying like we don't want efficiency, we do not want efficiency in the financial system.
2:00:46
We want to keep rewards high. Really upset.
2:00:49
Well, they'll just hire the lobbyists finally, right?
2:00:51
like crypto got around to hiring lobbyists.
2:00:54
The points points guys will uh points guys will uh what about unexpected beneficiary? Oh, sorry.
2:00:59
I'll No, no, I was going to say the banks also want higher interchange.
2:01:03
So, they're actually fighting as well.
2:01:04
It's why they're trying to put out stable coins. It's going to get messy.
2:01:06
Like we're going to overinvest in the space like we do in everything in venture and then at the end of the day a few winners will emerge.
2:01:12
Circle's been around for so long that like it clearly makes sense.
2:01:14
They got big, they aggregated a lot of value and now we're going to see a lot of people come for their for that opportunity as well.
2:01:22
Uh what about unexpected beneficiaries of stable coins?
2:01:24
I've heard that potentially some payroll companies that maybe hold on to uh tax withholding, they might be able to earn higher yield because they're able to actually uh hold the treasuries themselves.
2:01:37
Do like does do stable coins unlock any sort of float dynamics and shift it from a bank making uh making an interest rate return on float that they're holding versus the company can now do it because of stable coins.
2:01:55
Are there any kind of unlocks like that that are might be happening?
2:01:59
uh let if I live in I hate to say Venezuela, Columbia, but if I live like so so for what your use case, not for a sophisticated business, you should be having a serious conversation with your bank to figure out how you earn that float.
2:02:09
Um small scale, it may get you better economics, but it's not going to move the needle economics, right?
2:02:15
There's only so much juice to squeeze from that um orange.
2:02:16
Uh really, yeah, the side effect is like I no longer have to trust my my government as a as an international human, right?
2:02:24
international human, right? like I don't like I can move my savings into the US dollar which right now is in theory the least volatile currency but from like US companies yeah there's a little bit of friction reduction it lubricates the system a little um but at any meaningful scale you're going to take most of that
2:02:41
yield anyway because you're going to go back to your your bank partner where you for if I'm a payroll company I have a direct relationship with some bank somewhere and I'm going to take some of that yield um the other thing I should say is stable coins are in theory two things one is that's the actually underlying treasury which actually holds a risk asset. It's a US usually it's a T
2:02:56
It's a US usually it's a T bill of some sort, but the other side of it, it's a payment vehicle and payment vehicles traditionally are not risk assets.
2:03:04
You send them and the money is good, right?
2:03:06
Like and and so it's one of those like the benefit that we see is really on the payment side.
2:03:10
On the yielding side, maybe we'll get securitized CD bill like T bills and T- bonds and like we'll get securized CDs and like somebody will actually have direct access to Treasury to to get these things at Hawk.
2:03:22
But it's a it's a bit out because there's just so much demand on the payment side of this industry.
2:03:28
And I it's really hard for all of us to grasp truly how big payments are.
2:03:32
Like it that's why stable coins are taking off.
2:03:35
It's giving people access to the US banking system in such large volumes that they otherwise wouldn't have been able to.
2:03:41
What about geopolitical risk?
2:03:42
I imagine that if I'm a dictator in another country and I'm watching all my citizens like go off of my currency that I control, I would want to ban that. Is that a major risk?
2:03:51
Are we beyond those discussions at this point?
2:03:55
Um, you can ban the on-ramps, off-ramps.
2:03:57
You can ban your ability for your citizens to get into a stable coin directly, but not indirectly through crypto, right?
2:04:04
Like I can go buy Bitcoin and then swap that into USDC.
2:04:06
Um, yeah, that's kind of the running joke between a few of my friends on the back channel of like who's going to who's going to be the first startup to just aggressively essentially become an arm of the CIA and new USA ID in dollarized countries um to promote US edge. It's like half a joke.
2:04:24
It also is just going to naturally happen if I don't have to worry about the volatility of my currency and I'm a and I'm a human who's not living paycheck to paycheck.
2:04:31
So, I actually have savings.
2:04:33
Why would I want my local currency if I'm not going to actually spend that money and I actually want to be able to save for the long term?
2:04:38
And there is no ability for you to capture that money because it's my private keys.
2:04:44
It's so so there there's a ton of value there.
2:04:47
There is some geopolitical risk, but at the end of the day, it's one of those that I think um the world's going to have to move through it, not past it. Yeah.
2:04:55
Yeah. you so you're not worried about like a great firewall for all the on-ramps and off-ramps and then I mean if you make it illegal that someone's discovered with stable coins you're holding USDC and now you go to jail like that is a serious serious uh headwind
2:05:08
towards stablecoin adoption in a you know in a dictatorship I imagine yeah it's a question yeah for maybe unfriendly countries to the US but like if you're a semi-friendly do you want to actually do that right especially when the Trump family is so heavily involved with dig digital assets. Yeah. And such big believers. Yeah. And such big believers. Believers.
2:05:28
The joke I made last week was like, uh, why why even issue stable coins against Treasury bills?
2:05:32
We might as well issue it against the US military.
2:05:35
So, like, if you're a friend of the US, you're not going to really cut us off. Yeah.
2:05:38
Issued against Well, that that may be why is Coinbase, you know, sponsored the the Army parade. Maybe. Yeah.
2:05:44
Maybe they're maybe maybe they're cooking. Maybe they're cooking.
2:05:48
Milcoin, it's coming soon. Milcoin.
2:05:48
Uh, any any other any any kind of events?
2:05:52
uh with in the in sort of broader fintech stable coin world that that are coming down the pipeline potential IPOs catalyst that you're kind of looking out for or is it summer break and we can just all check back in the fall.
2:06:06
Isn't their stable coin bill going through right now?
2:06:09
Yeah, the Genius Act they're going to negotiate it.
2:06:11
You know it I I try not to play politics at all.
2:06:13
It's just not where I have the expertise.
2:06:14
Um I think I think they'll actually I don't think we'll have a summer break.
2:06:19
I think the IPO windows open.
2:06:20
uh and not knowing anything like that's great to hear.
2:06:26
Everyone thought they could get public in April and then that blew up and then May kind of like we reopened the window.
2:06:32
Um if I was trying to go public, I'm going to try to sneak it through until something geopolitical closes the window again, which is like kind of the mantra right now.
2:06:40
Uh so I think the the bankers on Wall Street are not going to get the summer off.
2:06:44
Uh the Hamptons will be empty. Time to grind.
2:06:46
That's why the Hamptons are empty. It's so funny.
2:06:48
You know, you know, there there's been like these articles like Hampton's rentals are down 30% this year. IPO windows open. IPO windows open. Stay on Wall Street.
2:06:58
You can't leave Manhattan while the windows open.
2:07:00
Anyway, thank you so much for stopping by.
2:07:03
This is This was great, Aaron. I really enjoyed it.
2:07:04
We'd love to have you back on again soon. Thanks. Thanks, guys.
2:07:07
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2:07:23
Our next guest is from Standard and Pores S&P Joseph Cass coming in the studio.
2:07:31
Very excited to talk to him.
2:07:31
He has talked to some of the most uh impactful financeers um one one notch away from us.
2:07:38
We talk about a lot of technology.
2:07:41
We talked to some business folks.
2:07:41
He has experience talking to Ken Griffin, Howard Marks, Ray Dalio has a bunch of interesting stories to share with us.
2:07:47
I'm excited to pick his brain.
2:07:47
Welcome to the showbound, Joseph. How you doing? Hey, what's going on?
2:07:51
John, Jordy, great, great to see you guys. Thanks for having me. All good.
2:07:55
How's things on your end in LA? Uh, it's fantastic.
2:07:57
Um, the late for you, the the crazy protest here in the UK, but it's still light, so it's good.
2:08:04
Well, we appreciate you staying up late to hop on the show.
2:08:05
um why don't you kick us off with a little bit of introduction on yourself and I'd love to just kind of understand how SNP is structured, how it's working these days, like the core business lines because uh it's such a such an institution. Yeah. Yeah. Sure.
2:08:17
It's a really it's a huge business.
2:08:20
Um so I work in the ratings division. Yeah.
2:08:22
So you have a number of different divisions including the indices.
2:08:26
So kind of like the S&P 500.
2:08:27
You have market intelligence which provides kind of the data and analytics platform.
2:08:32
You have mobility which owns a bunch of businesses, one of whom is Carfax.
2:08:36
Oh, there's there's a number of different divisions um in the company and I'm trying to remember if I've got all of them there, but it it comes together to make S&P global.
2:08:45
So, I work in the ratings division which, you know, assigns the ratings, you know, the kind of AAA's or the double B's or the C's.
2:08:53
Yeah, we get a hold of your feet to the fire because S&P downgraded America and I'm hearing an accent so this seems like it's maybe some political issue going on.
2:09:01
Well, I can correct you there.
2:09:01
It was actually Moody's Moody's.
2:09:07
The the S&P did downgrade the US, but I think it was about I want to say it was about over 10 years ago.
2:09:11
So, come down to the same level that we were like 10 years ago. Okay.
2:09:16
Well, yeah, we'll take it up with Moody's.
2:09:18
Anyway, uh I'd love to I'd love to go through some of the folks that you've interviewed and hear some stories.
2:09:23
Uh why don't we kick it off with Ken Griffin?
2:09:25
uh break down his his career, your experience chatting with him and what you learned from him. Yeah, sure.
2:09:32
So, I can kind of give a quick overview as to like why I'm meeting these guys, like why I'm in a situation where I can meet them.
2:09:37
So, essentially my role at S&P in the ratings division is to engage with the buy side uh the big buyside investors.
2:09:46
So, after about 6 months and I've been doing this previously at other roles, I felt like I need like a platform to essentially kind of make it easier for me to do this.
2:09:55
uh with these senior guys because trying to get as you guys know trying to get a meeting with these senior guys from the finance side can be tricky unless you've got something very hot for them.
2:10:03
So I created this podcast um and just said listen we're going to have a chat.
2:10:07
It's going to be like half an hour.
2:10:08
We're going to talk about you.
2:10:10
We're going to have a guest from S&P and we're going to kind of give you kind of one question to you, one to the S&P person and see how it goes.
2:10:15
And that was like 5 years ago.
2:10:17
So now it's kind of grown slowly. I mean I don't do many. I do like one a month.
2:10:22
So it's not as horrific as you guys doing four hours a day.
2:10:25
But it's um it's grown slowly over the years.
2:10:28
So now we can, as you said, we meet those type of guys.
2:10:30
Um so to answer your question um and just a quick plug, the podcast is called Leaders.
2:10:36
If you want to look it up, it's called Leaders. Go listen.
2:10:39
But in terms of Ken Griffin, so we I um I mean the actual podcast came about from um I create a LinkedIn post like a an old story about Ken um which I don't think many people knew which was it this was like 15 years ago.
2:10:56
One of his assistants actually had terminal cancer and he funded her treatment for two years secretly kind of without telling anyone and she she got into remission.
2:11:08
you know, it was kind of a miraculous turnaround.
2:11:09
And then after that, he funded her to go to Hawaii with her family for like a two week holiday and didn't tell anyone about it.
2:11:16
And um I thought that was, you know, quite a cool story.
2:11:20
So I found out about this through like a tiny in like one of the Chicago kind of newspapers, an old PDF from like 2009, and wrote it up on LinkedIn as just like a story post, which sometimes I do.
2:11:31
And then I said, you know, I just sent it to Ken saying like, "Listen, just thought this thing was really cool that you did this lady."
2:11:38
And then he replied back and I was like, I was like, "Oh, wow." He replied.
2:11:39
So I said, "Do you want to do a podcast?"
2:11:41
And he's like, "Yeah, no problem."
2:11:43
So that was like 6 months later.
2:11:45
And last month we recorded in New York.
2:11:47
Um, and I'm I'm sure like the listeners know who Ken Griffin is, but obviously he's the he's the CEO and founder of Citadel.
2:11:54
Um, so you've got Citadel, the hedge fund, which is this enormous hedge fund, but you've also got Citadel Securities, which is the market maker, which is I think is probably I think it probably is the largest market maker in the world.
2:12:07
So, he's a really he obviously a very smart guy.
2:12:09
Uh, so we interviewed him in person uh last month and you know, he is like a he's just as you would expect for someone who is that successful in their life.
2:12:20
like he kind of like he he's very good at answering questions, very succinct, can give you kind of a one minute answer to anything and he kind of sums everything up in like a really crisp way.
2:12:31
Um, and he's also very like, you know, he's very personable.
2:12:35
So, he came out the lift.
2:12:37
came out the lift. So I'm waiting for him at the lift and he comes out the lift and he has like a group like an entourage around him and I can see someone telling him something like just whispering him something quickly and I'm like okay what's what I wonder what's kind of been said and then in my head
2:12:52
I'm like oh they're telling him who I am probably they're probably saying oh this is Joe he's from S&P you're going to do a podcast right now and he comes up to me and he's like he's like very strong handshake looks me direct in the eye and he's like I am so thankful that you
2:13:05
invited me thank you so much and I was like you know it's such a crazy you know to me he's literally you know I'm just like another person for him but he he probably has this kind of intense uh kind of state which he's in which is just amazing to to witness and he has this aura around him and it I don't want to use the kind
2:13:23
of Rick James analogy but he does have this like aura around him where he's like uh you know you can feel him in the room and you can you can feel his his expectations of his team and of and of you like of me as an interviewer kind of I was like Okay, you know, you're sitting up straight. You're making sure
2:13:38
You're making sure you have everything down to a tea.
2:13:40
So, I was kind of I can you can see why beyond the kind of obvious fundamentals of sit up, you can see how that energy probably permeates through the whole company just through his kind of vision.
2:13:54
Uh do you notice any difference between the Ken Griffin archetype and some of and some of the more behind the scenes financeers?
2:14:01
Like I imagine it's very hard to get someone from from Jane Street on the show because they seem to be quieter and yet Jane Street does do technical talks but you don't hear from the founders that often.
2:14:14
Do you know do you understand what dynamic is going on there?
2:14:18
Is does Ken just view media differently or is there something structural going on with his business that it makes sense for him to have more of a uh of a public presence than a pure high frequency trading focused firm that maybe doesn't have to interface with I mean they still have to recruit but maybe they just have a different PR strategy.
2:14:39
Yeah, it's it's interesting.
2:14:39
I think I mean my sense is that it's quite kenled. Mhm.
2:14:44
So Ken has lots of things to say and he's super super smart and he's not afraid of saying them. Mhm.
2:14:50
So I definitely got that vibe from him that you know there kind of no no holds bars.
2:14:56
He's not he's not just saying something because he thinks he should say it.
2:14:57
He's honestly giving you his opinion of something.
2:15:01
Um and also I mean I I don't know many guys at Jane Street.
2:15:04
Um, and I I I haven't actually reached out to those guys.
2:15:09
Probably because I thought it would be a no because they're so kind of closed.
2:15:12
They do seem closed, but maybe you could break through.
2:15:14
These the sometimes with these guys, they're closed. They're closed.
2:15:19
They're closed until they're not. Yeah.
2:15:20
So, until they need to not be closed, and they need to have a voice.
2:15:23
So, it's it's kind of a the long game, I guess.
2:15:26
Jord, you have a question.
2:15:28
Switching gears a little bit, I'm curious uh your job, you know, on the rating side of S&P, how much more challenging it gets when we're in this sort of uh critical macro environment and things are kind of unfolding real time that impacts businesses, banks, things like that.
2:15:46
How do you know h how do you guys approach um you know situations like we've had even in the last week with with Israel and Iran and and and um other situations like it?
2:15:58
Yeah, it's a it's a good question.
2:15:58
So obviously my role being on the kind of investor engagement um investor relationship side, we hear a lot you know in terms of these kind of large huge events and obviously we've had the things in the past week but we've also had the tariffs. Mhm.
2:16:13
So it it promotes kind of a huge spike in inbound for us.
2:16:20
Um we're we're very keen to be kind of outbound and like forward facing transparent etc.
2:16:24
But there's no doubt that those kind of occasions um everyone wants to speak to us.
2:16:30
Um you know for good reason but also I think you know so the big institutions reach out to you guys and ask you what what else are you seeing broadly?
2:16:39
Is that is that how Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely.
2:16:42
So, it's kind of what you guys seeing at kind of a macro level um what do what does kind of the X situation that's happening right now?
2:16:50
How could that impact this group of ratings?
2:16:51
It could be kind of financial services or it could be large corporates and they drill down to kind of one sector.
2:16:58
So, I you know could have a someone calling us from one of the largest buy firms saying listen I work on autos strictly autos kind of portfolio.
2:17:08
kind of portfolio. how will this be how will the tariffs impact my portfolio the ratings what's your view just to kind of um sound with us and we we have like a pretty much every week you know London New York um Hong Kong we have these investor roundts where we engage um with
2:17:26
these kind of small communities we speak to them we have our analysts speak and they can kind of you know soundboard their ideas and we can we can go back and forth very cool uh I wanted to move on to some other folks you've you've chatted I want to hear the story of Ray Dalio uh obviously the the founder of Bridgewwater. He feels like someone who
2:17:44
He feels like someone who was maybe a little bit behind the scenes for a while building the fund and then uh principles that it was originally a PDF that just kind of like found its way onto the internet.
2:17:54
I think they might have published it.
2:17:56
Then eventually it turned into a book, a book tour, banger, viral videos, podcast appearances.
2:18:00
Uh but what was your experience like with Ray Dalio?
2:18:04
Yeah, I I I it was fascinating.
2:18:07
It was totally fascinating.
2:18:09
So, we had Ray on the show uh in kind of think it was 2012 uh 2022 I think it was so kind of two and a half years ago now just coming out of the pandemic. Yeah.
2:18:19
And like uh we boo we had we have everyone booked for like 45 minutes and I think kind of because usually it goes on for about half an hour and we want some just overrun time in case stuff goes wrong and Ray spoke for you know it was coming up to two hours uh to the point.
2:18:33
So he was very generous with his time.
2:18:36
He has lots of things to say and like he has lots of things to say on lots of different topics and he's very good at kind of connecting the dots like making links.
2:18:47
So for example when I was speaking to him I kind of asked some some crazy questions some some off-the-wall questions to try and make it interesting.
2:18:55
So I talking about my first job at McDonald's.
2:18:56
So I used to work on the first window of the drive-thru and like take the order for people in McDonald's here in here here in uh in my hometown.
2:19:03
And um Ray was like, "Oh, it's so funny you say that because um I set up the hedging strategy for the McNugget.
2:19:10
So the only reason the McNugget is on the menu is because I set up this trading strategy for McDonald's and the supplier."
2:19:16
So like he's he's very good.
2:19:19
He's very He's a very cool guy, but he's very like uh you know, he's very personable and so good at like linking A to B. That's That's hilarious.
2:19:28
You always got to be hedging your McNuggets, you know. Yeah. Yeah.
2:19:29
I've heard about I mean there's the entire supply chain and of course McDonald's doesn't want you know exposure to all that and there's like that famous example of like Southwest successfully hedged gasoline prices for a while and that was a massive beneficiary of that for a long time.
2:19:44
Uh these like small little kind of minute financial operations downstream like the CFO is just kind of off doing something can have like a massive impact on the trajectory of the business when they pull it off.
2:19:55
Um talk to me about Ryan Sirant.
2:19:57
He feels like someone who is potentially underrated as a business leader, business thinker.
2:20:02
Uh people know him as a reality TV star essentially, and yet he's built this massive media business.
2:20:09
You're obviously in the media industry. We are as well.
2:20:11
Uh what did you learn from him?
2:20:13
What was what's the experience been like working with him and talking to him? Yeah.
2:20:16
And he's, you know, my personal opinion here, not SMPPS.
2:20:20
He's a very he, you know, he's someone to look look out to especially in this space.
2:20:25
So he, you know, as you say, he started off in reality TV. Yeah.
2:20:30
Which, you know, sometimes, you know, especially people in the UK, they kind of look down their nose at those type of people.
2:20:35
But when he started to kind of how he leveraged his appearance, but also his media, like his content is uh is enormous.
2:20:43
I think across all platforms, it's something like seven or eight million.
2:20:45
He has like multiple YouTube accounts.
2:20:48
He has Instagram, he has Tik Tok, all the kind of usual suspects. He has LinkedIn.
2:20:50
suspects. He has LinkedIn. and he has this content content to commerce model whereby um I met him when I was in New York just to talk about this just randomly and I said listen I'm in New York do you want to talk about this he was like yeah and so we just met up and spoke about this very thing whereby he
2:21:07
has like different his client base could be you know super super high net worth or it could be kind of someone looking for like a $1 million apartment in New York or it could be potentially the child of the client so that's a big one you know So, so he's very smartly said, "Listen, I just want to spread the board with this." So, we've got the YouTube
2:21:25
So, we've got the YouTube for the kind of like millennials.
2:21:27
Um, we've got Tik Tok for the younger guys.
2:21:32
So, if I said, "Listen, what does this mean like in terms of like revenue basically?"
2:21:37
And he said, "Well, we sold this like uh I can't remember how many million, but it was like it's very expensive property um off the back of one of the children seeing a Tik Tok."
2:21:47
So, so they they said, "Look, look at this thing.
2:21:48
Look at this thing this guy's selling in New York."
2:21:49
They showed it to the mom and dad.
2:21:50
Mom and dad said that's great.
2:21:52
Let's go and have a look at and you know and then it sold.
2:21:53
So like he's he's definitely got like a very interesting model which to be honest I think um again me personally speaking the S&P lots of other kind of industries sectors could could kind of adopt this model.
2:22:07
I don't know why they're not.
2:22:08
It's it's it's kind of been proven now. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
2:22:10
I' I've heard that story before and I' i've heard that he has something like 60 to 80 people working just on content in his organization to really pipeline everything out across across all the different platforms and he's cast a very wide net but he's built a fantastic business around it.
2:22:27
So when I was there last last No, I had a totally unrelated question that I can cap it off with if please cap it off.
2:22:36
Um I wanted to uh get your read since you talked to a lot of these uh byside institutions.
2:22:42
How are people thinking about ESG today?
2:22:45
Is it still are they uh you know how do they feel on a personal level and then what do their actions look like at on an investment level?
2:22:57
Yeah, I think on I mean on a personal level it's kind of tricky to to answer that one because I can probably answer on like professionally what they're they're telling us um and on institutional basis.
2:23:08
So in kind of 2122 the ESG kind of it was it was just enormous.
2:23:14
enormous. it was we couldn't have a conversation with an investor about anything without them mentioning ESG in some way you know and how does this link to ESG and or the S or how does this the G factor into this stuff so whereas now especially kind of in the past I don't
2:23:31
know 6 months to a year maybe a bit longer around that time it's I'd say it's definitely a part of their kind of investment thesis but they're not necessarily pushing it to the front so I don't think that they've kind of, you know, totally dropped this idea. I
2:23:45
I definitely don't think that's the case because we still get lots of inquiries.
2:23:50
We have lots of conversations around sustainability. Um, not so much.
2:23:52
I mean, the brand of ESG seem to have kind of died, but sustainability is is growing.
2:23:59
Um, in the amount of kind of inbound and outbound we're having, the products we're seeing in the market, there's lots of um, I'd say it's definitely not kind of just been dropped, which I think may be the perception by some people. Totally.
2:24:11
Yeah, that's fascinating.
2:24:11
Well, thank you so much for stopping by.
2:24:14
This was a great conversation.
2:24:15
We'd love to have you back and we will talk to you soon.
2:24:18
Enjoy the uh enjoy the evening.
2:24:20
Thank you so much for joining us. Thanks so much, man. Cheers.
2:24:25
Well, let's go back to the timeline and run through some posts.
2:24:27
We mentioned it earlier, but DHH uh raced in the 24 hours.
2:24:33
Lemon Base Camp Mobile number 22 is ready. Let's go.
2:24:36
So, congratulations to him.
2:24:39
He's he's driven it multiple times now. Uh, wait.
2:24:41
We have to try to figure out how he actually did. You work on that.
2:24:46
I will stay in automotive world.
2:24:49
Uh, Nick Cruz Patain says, "Hailing a Tesla robo taxi directly from the X app would change the game.
2:24:54
There are approximately 600 million active users per month on X. Interesting.
2:25:01
There's already a lot of buttons in the X panel. Grock, you got chat.
2:25:03
There's a signal competitor. Now there's communities.
2:25:08
I always wonder about how much you can how much you can add, how much you can bloat before you need a separate app.
2:25:13
I already slapped some AI in there.
2:25:15
Why not slap some robo taxis in there, too, John?
2:25:17
I got the results pulled up.
2:25:19
Uh, DHH says, "We had the pace for a podium, but power stealing failure and a missed pit stop meant P7.
2:25:26
Still the greatest race in the world." That's amazing.
2:25:27
The um It's so funny because you don't think of base camp as like a super active major advertiser, right?
2:25:35
Like they like to do this the have the product do the talking. Yeah.
2:25:38
Uh but uh it looks fantastic on on some race gear. So congratulations. Congratulations. P7.
2:25:44
Um the car looks fantastic as well.
2:25:47
So we'll have to have him on the show to break it all down. Totally.
2:25:51
Uh Mike N had some interesting reporting from TechCrunch.
2:25:55
Whimo rides are costing more than Uber and Lyft and people are paying anyway.
2:25:59
Uh he says, "True for most automation scenarios, given m machine intelligence on par with human capability for a task, machines offer lower variability and will be preferred even commanding a premium on price." Big call. Yeah.
2:26:13
This is what Chris Spike was talking about. Yeah.
2:26:15
Uh the the idea of like if if you are a gating function to getting the thing that the person wants and you're not in that leisure category, uh the the robot will be preferred.
2:26:26
Um but yeah, I mean it makes sense.
2:26:29
Have Have you ridden in Whimo yet? I don't think so. Right. I have not.
2:26:32
I I I've taken one ride in SF. It was pretty nice.
2:26:34
We should call one today.
2:26:36
Take it around the block.
2:26:36
I don't think they I don't think they're in LA right now.
2:26:40
I think they I don't know.
2:26:40
Well, I'll have to figure it out, but I I think they might have actually shut it down for a little bit.
2:26:44
Long march back to San Francisco. I don't think so.
2:26:46
Um we got another post here from Laserboat 999. Love it.
2:26:52
Coke tastes like tapping into your ances ancient ancestral petroleum reserves while Sprite tastes like being connected to a big beautiful energy grid. 1. 4 million views. I love it.
2:27:01
And then Celsius daybreak over the computer world.
2:27:07
A real grasp of the English language. Fantastic.
2:27:09
People are really enjoying posting about Diet Coke and Coca-Cola and all the sodas right now. The the Diet Cokeettes.
2:27:17
They've never been better. Yeah. They're peaking. Yeah, they're peaking. They're peing. Yeah.
2:27:20
And the organic marketing is working. I love it.
2:27:23
In an era you'd have been Homer with that. That is spectacular. I completely agree. What a fantastic post.
2:27:30
The big beautiful energy grid.
2:27:33
Anyway, we have a post here from Cersi.
2:27:36
If I if I see a guy in a suit at the airport, I just assume he works for Deote.
2:27:42
Technology business podcast.
2:27:42
He's a technology businessman. Who knows?
2:27:48
Could be an international businessman.
2:27:50
Uh this you don't you just don't see international businessmen flying in suits anymore.
2:27:53
There's almost no suits in business class. Not yet. They're coming back.
2:27:57
The level of disrespect people have for the airport wearing joggers. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
2:28:01
If you want the pilots, what are you running from? Yeah.
2:28:05
If you want pilots to take the the safety of your plane seriously, maybe you should take Yeah.
2:28:10
Imagine Imagine getting on a plane and the pilot's wearing athleisure. Yeah. Not Not going to happen. I am cooked. Not going to happen. I am cooked.
2:28:18
Yeah, you should be thrown out.
2:28:20
Uh, I wanted to shout this out.
2:28:22
The Cadillac F1 team just posted over 60 jobs.
2:28:24
So, if you are wanting to work for, you know, an American, a true American luxury brand in Cadillac or get involved with F1, head on over there.
2:28:38
I'm excited for them to hit the They really are hiring in every department.
2:28:42
They have like finance, operations people, and all sorts of stuff. Get into Cadillac F1. Get him on ramp. Huge alpha. Play the long game. Huge alpha there. Um uh chess.
2:28:53
com saw her says uh between June 2020 and December 2022, accounts on the site jumped from 35 million to 100 million.
2:29:02
I joined during that time.
2:29:02
It had taken 14 years to bring in those first 35 million.
2:29:07
Uh pretty pretty historic run for chess chess. com.
2:29:10
The business is doing great.
2:29:12
Privately owned, founded in 2005.
2:29:16
makes most of its money from subscribers who pay $5 to $15 a month for features such as unlimited play and post-match analysis.
2:29:23
ARR, it's over $und00 million.
2:29:27
So, congrats to the chess. com team. That's amazing.
2:29:29
We haven't hit the gong today.
2:29:30
We got to hit it for chess. com. Hit it for them. Hit it for them.
2:29:35
We uh should also hit the gong for Eli Lily because someone at Novo Nordisk failed to pay a $450 maintenance fee which would have kept its patent on Ozmpic at force for another two years.
2:29:48
This is such a crazy story.
2:29:48
That's like what like $50 billion of value or something like that for $450.
2:29:54
Just absolutely brutal maintenance fee. What a what a mistake. Good reminder.
2:29:58
All the people with IP out there, go pay the maintenance fees. Yeah. Yeah.
2:30:03
This is a use for AI agents just constantly trolling for what fees am I not paying?
2:30:09
Read every email inbox, check in with all of the different patent databases and make sure that we're we're up to date on our maintenance fees because $450 costing you billions is insane to me.
2:30:20
Um anyway, there's got to size for Gecko. You want to hit it? Let's hit it.
2:30:26
Gecko Robotics has raised uh raised 125 million at 1. 25.
2:30:30
They build robots and AI software to inspect and improve important infrastructure like power plants, factories, and military systems.
2:30:38
I think Trey Stevens is on the board. It's very very cool.
2:30:40
It's like these these robots crawl around like Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
2:30:44
So, so if you have a massive industrial equipment, you know, like a massive like grain silo or like oil and gas like, you know, silo that's holding a bunch of like a refinery, uh the the robot will crawl up and down and scan and take images and understand, oh, there's a structural weakness here, there's a crack here, the paint needs a touchup here, all of those different um problems.
2:31:06
And it's Yeah, it's just cool because it's like it's they are very much a scaled business.
2:31:10
Like they really do make these robots.
2:31:12
Uh, they're not humanoids.
2:31:14
They're highly specialized. So crazy. Crawl around buildings. Very, very cool. Wild.
2:31:20
Chad Hurley, the founder of YouTube, says, "Honestly, this means more to me than any acquisition.
2:31:26
He sold YouTube to Google."
2:31:29
Um, but there's a travel vlogger who met a young Iranian boy who basically speaks perfect English all because he watches YouTube. I watched his video.
2:31:35
The kid is has a better grasp of the English language than most adults I know.
2:31:40
It's very very well spoken. Yeah. Um bullish for English.
2:31:45
Honestly, this was probably the biggest news of the last week.
2:31:46
World Sulick uh had a work a back workout with Arnold. Okay.
2:31:52
And um yeah, so I mean broke the internet.
2:31:56
One of the more important stories. Four million subs. Absolutely crushed it.
2:32:01
Uh only two years ago or three years ago. And credit to Zack Pro.
2:32:06
He says Sam Sulick is a great example of where content is going.
2:32:09
back in 2023, August 20th, he's like, "This is this guy's on to something.
2:32:13
He's on he's the future."
2:32:14
And then, of course, he he uh got his IFBB Pro card absolut on an absolute tear and has put out a ton of great content.
2:32:21
Value of daily posting for sure, just 1% better.
2:32:23
The vlogs get better daily poster.
2:32:25
If he was doing it weekly, it'd be much harder.
2:32:28
Um anyway, there was this this odd news about the New York Times reporting that Chachi talked a a guy into insanity, followed by suicide by cop.
2:32:36
a human being is dead in passing.
2:32:38
This falsifies the alignment by default cope who whatever is really inside ChachiBT.
2:32:43
It knew enough about humans to do this.
2:32:45
Uh and so Justine Moore says it's ridiculous to say Chachib talked a guy into insanity when he had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and bipolar before he started using Chachi PBT.
2:32:56
This is a tragic story, but the man was clearly mentally ill.
2:32:59
Messaging with a chatbot didn't kill him.
2:33:01
didn't kill him. very very sad story but uh yeah I mean obviously this is not the this is not the responsibility of the of the AI but yeah it is an opportunity for Chad GPT to potentially step in and and help treat someone and we've already seen promising results in therapy and uh and of course there will be an
2:33:20
interesting dynamic about when does it call the cops on you if you are planning something if it if it detects that you are insane what should it do with that information because there's a lot of privacy and and uh individual rights that potentially infringed upon, but at the same time uh could have could have had a much much better outcome here. Um but
2:33:34
Um but very very very rough story.
2:33:37
Anyway, let's move back to Jane Street.
2:33:39
We talked about them earlier.
2:33:41
Uh instead of being on competes, Jane Street decides to make its own programming language so far from anything mainstream that you can't get a job anywhere else. Not entirely true.
2:33:49
Bubble Boy, if you know Okamel, you can probably write Python.
2:33:54
But yes, they're on branching it is is the thing.
2:33:58
Yes, they're creating their own.
2:34:00
Okamel was already like basically entirely maintained by Jane Street.
2:34:02
Ron Minsky has like the main YouTube video about Okamel, this like low-level machine language.
2:34:09
It's almost at like assembly level, very very performant, very fast.
2:34:13
And Jane Street, I think, has been the main contributor to that programming language for years, but now they are camels, llamas, hogs, pigs. They're having a moment. They're having a moment.
2:34:23
Uh, okamel has been around for uh 12 years, something like that.
2:34:29
Dear Ron Ron Minsky, he put out this YouTube video.
2:34:31
I actually watched it back in the day. It was great.
2:34:33
He's he's an absolute beast.
2:34:33
It's one of the few pieces of Jane Street content that's out there or or was.
2:34:36
It was like this interesting lens into into the way Jane Street builds their high frequency trading algorithms.
2:34:43
They need to be extremely performant, extremely accelerated.
2:34:47
And so, uh, they now have their own um their own programming language.
2:34:52
So, congrats to the Jane Street team.
2:34:53
We have a post from Go Denny probably botching it.
2:34:56
I can't articulate exactly why, but this generation of BDC founders feels like the tech equivalent of Soundcloud rappers.
2:35:04
I wonder they're who they're talking about.
2:35:09
Um, yeah, somebody else was posting that this feels like the generation of founders raised on YouTube. Yeah. Um, which makes sense.
2:35:17
I mean, they're extremely good at viral content. Is that entirely new? I think so.
2:35:24
There's been other people that I mean consumer founders have understood viral growth loops for a long time.
2:35:29
I mean the Airbnb guys were doing stunts like the uh the political cereals that was very much like a stunt but it was like fun.
2:35:39
uh you know obviously the some of the early Mark Zuckerberg experiments at at Harvard were very designed to go viral and designed to go viral or designed to scale rapidly or or like there's this thing that I'm seeing in the timeline of of founders sort of consistently trying to do things that that piss people off or or like are just trying to be attentiongrabbing without necessarily using it to drive any type of business results. Yeah. Yeah.
2:36:04
Yeah, I mean like you can get a lot of downloads and and and attention just by rage baiting the timeline, but that Yeah, it just doesn't scale infinitely.
2:36:17
Like eventually like you just figure out that like getting a million views is doable every week, but it's just a million views.
2:36:24
It's not something that's truly like going to scale endlessly like a performance marketing, you know, uh playbook or a true viral growth loop.
2:36:34
Like you compare it to like the the viral growth engine at Dropbox where you know I give you storage, you you come on, I get storage and there's this there's this loop or like referring people to Gmail like the classic viral loops that continue to grow even among people that don't need to necessarily see your viral rage rate.
2:36:52
Um so there's always a question about like like once you have that attention, you have to shift into something that's more durable and more scalable. Um totally.
2:37:00
But uh I don't know, maybe they'll take the lesson.
2:37:04
The last uh the last viral rage bait didn't really go as well, but we'll see. We'll see.
2:37:10
Well, we have a post here from Christo Vasilev.
2:37:17
A screenshot from Tyler Cowan's blog.
2:37:17
He says, uh this was March 14th, only three months ago. Wow.
2:37:22
When will Israel attack Iranian nuclear facilities?
2:37:25
He says, "It seems this ought to happen soon, though it is not yet a major news item.
2:37:30
Iranian air defenses are severely disrupted, though not forever.
2:37:34
The Hezbollah counterattack has been more than neutralized, and no alternative deterrent has been put in its place.
2:37:41
That too may be temporary.
2:37:41
Israeli public opinion is still close in time to October 7th, and Netanyahu is not so far from the end of his reign.
2:37:49
Netanyahu started his reign when I was six months old.
2:37:55
Is he supposed to wind down soon? I don't know.
2:37:58
I don't know when his term is up, but uh certainly feels more than four or eight years.
2:38:03
Like he's been over there for a while.
2:38:05
Are are you sure it's been 20 years or has he been first elected to prime minister in 1996? Oh, wow. Okay. Interesting.
2:38:12
Um the countries that will The next election is November 3rd, 2026. Okay.
2:38:18
So, a little over a year. Got it.
2:38:20
The countries that will get very mad at Israel for such an attack are already close to maximally mad at Israel.
2:38:26
Trump has signaled plenty of support, yet there is no guarantee that will last forever.
2:38:31
Most of all, Iran is getting closer to having a workable nuclear weapon.
2:38:34
I also find it striking how many people discuss the Ukraine negotiations without considering the two issues may be tied to some degree.
2:38:43
How much will Putin, if at all, shore up Iran in in such a scenario?
2:38:49
Just a reminder that you should not forget about this issue.
2:38:50
It could be the most important thing that happens this year. Wow.
2:38:54
year. Wow. He really really called it and zero comments like like everyone just was like okay yeah he's uh yeah he he he called it and now people are looking um congrats to the work weekek team Adam Ryan one year ago we launched a bold experiment what if
2:39:11
there was a real social network for business leaders no self-promo influencer fluff just verified operators helping each other and they're seeing 10x growth in 5 months 51% acceptance rate did you see who was who was shouting them out too uh Lance Lance Armstrong. Oh, wow. Crushing. Had to Oh, wow. Crushing.
2:39:25
Had to throw this in there.
2:39:28
Lance is an early investor in Work Week.
2:39:30
I was He's investing in a lot of stuff now. He has a whole fund. Yeah. Yeah. He's he's running it.
2:39:34
I was on the Work Week board uh through the series A and it's just been amazing to watch them execute over the last year.
2:39:41
Company is ripping and I thought it was cool that that Lance was was throwing a little shout out here. That's great.
2:39:48
Um anyways, I thought this was posted on Friday, but it was just funny. I got to include it.
2:39:52
This Neil Renick, wow, what a stressful week at work.
2:39:55
Time to relax by holding a phone, beaming endless streams of horrific international news inches from my head. It's ridiculous. Yeah. 220,000 likes.
2:40:05
Everyone's feeling the exact same thing.
2:40:06
And And that really was this weekend.
2:40:08
Like I went to the beach on on Sunday and all of Los Angeles was just peaceful.
2:40:12
I I mean, I saw I saw one train of like cop cars kind of moving from one part of the city to the other, but I didn't see any protests.
2:40:18
Didn't see any real fallout.
2:40:20
like like things were pretty quiet in America generally, but you go online and it's just like I mean you read like the cover of the Wall Street Journal and it's just like flames and insane.
2:40:30
Yeah, that picture is crazy.
2:40:33
Um because there's crazy stuff happening in the world, but uh fortunately due to the the amazing technology, it's beamed directly to your face. Yeah.
2:40:40
In other news, uh the founder Pump Fund as well as Pump Fun have been banned from X. Oh, why?
2:40:48
And I was seeing this because Dan Romero posted something something decentralized doesn't matter until it does.
2:40:56
Farcaster is effectively a sufficiently def decentralized version of X.
2:41:02
Um, so he's kind of making his case there, but we'll see how that evolves.
2:41:07
But overall, slow news day. Pretty slow news day. Only geopolitically.
2:41:15
It's a It's a great time to be a political podcaster.
2:41:18
You got Trump, Elon, Whimos, you got Iran, you got assassinations. There's so much stuff.
2:41:24
Uh us over here, we got to talk about technology.
2:41:27
So maybe tomorrow we break down the Warner Brothers Discovery split, some HBO stuff, some sports stuff.
2:41:34
I think it'd be fun to do a deep dive on Le and some of the history there.
2:41:38
Uh there's a lot that we could go into in different directions.
2:41:40
We also have a absolutely insane lineup.
2:41:41
We have an insane lineup tomorrow, too.
2:41:43
So I don't think we'll be into a lot of that, but we have a lot of range and it's going to be a lot of fun.
2:41:48
Um, and so stay tuned for tomorrow because we have a we have a banger lineup.
2:41:51
We'll you'll hear about it in the morning. Thank you for tuning in.
2:41:56
Thank you to our incredible production team.
2:41:58
Thank you to Tyler who learned all there is to know about biotech today.
2:42:02
Yes, he's in the home of the golden retriever GLP1. I like the AI generated. You good, Tyler? Yeah.
2:42:10
I actually I found this uh great concoction I've cooked up.
2:42:11
Do you want me to Let's hear it. Okay.
2:42:13
So, this is optimal, you know, golden retriever maxing. Okay.
2:42:17
Um, so there's three parts, right?
2:42:19
Hotter, friendlier or dumber.
2:42:21
So for for hotter, I have um melan melan melanotin.
2:42:26
It's like for it's like injections to get you more tan for, you know, so you can have a nice bronze. Okay.
2:42:32
The next one is growth hormone peptides.
2:42:35
So I think Jordi knows a lot about peptides. Yeah.
2:42:37
So what kind of the king that's kind of the king peptide?
2:42:41
You can do a lot of stuff around uh human growth hormone, but at the end of the day, if you really, you know, plain win, just just do it. Sounds good. Okay.
2:42:53
And then the third one I have for hotter is um blood transfusions from young people. Kind of the tech sphere.
2:42:59
Would like an intern be good? Like a summer intern? Yeah.
2:43:03
Would you recommend pulling from a summer intern?
2:43:07
Do not do not be a summer intern for Brian Johnson.
2:43:09
you will you will turn into a blood boy. Okay.
2:43:13
So then the next for friendlier I have two um uh you know items.
2:43:18
Uh the first one is uh MDMA micro doing. Okay.
2:43:21
So haven't haven't tried this myself but could be interesting.
2:43:23
Um the next one is oxytocin nasal sprays. Yeah.
2:43:28
That's the love chemical, right? Yeah.
2:43:30
So this is supposed to increase people's uh trust.
2:43:31
Makes you more generous, more empathetic. Okay.
2:43:34
That's some somewhat doglike.
2:43:36
I don't know why that just seems so wrong to me just like a but at the same time I mean coffee has like a you know a I'm sure a similarly strong effect but just for feeling the dose is the poison so you dose it correctly maybe there's something there interesting okay and then uh the last one is for the dummer um so the first one I have is uh sculpamine okay so this uh apparently makes people confused um extremely compliant and and forgetful. Oh, okay. Okay, there we go.
2:44:08
Uh, the next one is a prefrontal labbotomy.
2:44:14
Okay, I think people have tried this throughout history.
2:44:17
Maybe going too far here.
2:44:18
And then and then the third one is uh just lead. Just lightweight lead.
2:44:23
Well, if you want to have some lead, just drink tap water. There you go. Get you covered. Good luck to you. Well, thank you.
2:44:29
Thank you for solving uh solving one of humanity's most pressing, you know, health challenges, which isdeed indeed.
2:44:36
How do we be more golden retriever like? Uh anyways, great show. We'll be back tomorrow.
2:44:42
I'm looking forward to it.
2:44:44
There'll be some big news and we hope you have a fantastic Monday afternoon and evening. Goodbye. Cheers.