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4:46
Today is Monday, June 23rd, 2025.
4:48
We are live from the TBPN Ultradome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital, capital, the capital.
4:57
Massive news today over the weekend.
4:59
Elon Musk announced the Tesla AI robo taxi launch in Austin, Texas.
5:07
This afternoon, it was the big technology news of the weekend. Technology news.
5:10
Of course, we will be covering what's going on in Iran.
5:11
We have an exclusive interview with Shervin Pishavar, the investor and Iranian entrepreneur who came to America decades ago, has been waiting for this moment for uh 46 years, as he put it to us.
5:23
We pre-recorded an interview with him because he is in Paris. It's very late there.
5:30
Um, but it was a very fascinating interview.
5:31
You'll hear that at the end of the stream.
5:33
Uh, we have a great lineup.
5:34
Uh, tons of interviews going on.
5:38
Uh, we're talking to the founder and CEO of CLA.
5:39
We're talking to a partner at Coastal Ventures.
5:41
Uh, Tom Mueller from Impulse Space is coming on.
5:44
Then we have Derek Thompson, uh, the author of Abundance and, uh, owner of a new Substack.
5:49
Um, as well as we're doing a lightning round with a bunch of, uh, founders who have raised money recently.
5:56
And then we're talking to Yakine, the ex software engineer of X software engineer at X.
6:01
He's an exx ex software engineer.
6:03
Um so it'll be fun to talk to him.
6:03
Um anyway, we have someone uh who's written about the Tesla cyber cab uh in the robo taxi in the back of a robo taxi hopefully calling in to the show. Um I sent him the link.
6:18
We'll see if we can bring him in. Hey, how you doing? Perfect timing. How's it going guys? Can you see the here? Let me see. Can you see it? Yeah. Wow. Yeah. There you go.
6:29
Got our safety rider right here as well.
6:33
Got some sick sick glasses on.
6:33
But yeah, we're uh we're in the robo taxi right now. This is my fifth ride.
6:37
I'm also here with Harry from the UK. Oh, hey. What's going on?
6:41
He's a fan of the channel. Uh yeah.
6:42
So, yeah, this is my fifth ride.
6:45
It's been amazing so far.
6:45
It really does feel like um Tesla has hit this one out of the park truly.
6:51
Uh the geoence area is definitely much smaller than Whimo's right now, but I think they did that uh with the thought process of like, hey, we want to make sure we have a really good launch.
7:01
Uh we want to make sure that it's going real nice and smooth and uh but so far the rides I've taken have all been really really good, very smooth.
7:09
It's very hard to communicate just how smooth the the car is unless you're familiar with the with the software, unless you're familiar with FSD and how it operates on on the Teslas.
7:18
It's very very similar to that experience.
7:20
It's just there's just nobody there now.
7:22
And that that's the freaky part is that, you know, for for a lot of people that have been following the company, uh, a lot of us knew this day was going to come where Tesla would pull the trigger and start, you know, getting actual paid driverless cars on the road.
7:36
But nonetheless, now that it's here, it's kind of like this is this is wild. This is wild. So, uh, is that better? The stock is up.
7:43
The stock is up 9% today. 9% today. Wow. Uh, yeah.
7:48
You're welcome, everybody. I'm kidding.
7:51
Yeah, give us your other takeaways.
7:51
Um, I I I saw you posted uh a good breakdown from your experience.
7:57
Um, what else do you have to share about the process?
7:59
Uh, did you need to go through a pre-registration to get onboarded?
8:04
It feels like it's not completely uh open access just yet. Yeah.
8:08
So, yeah, we were invited.
8:11
We were part of like a very limited group of people that were invited.
8:15
I think Tesla was just uh here.
8:17
So, somebody crossed over the road and it just navigated that no problem.
8:18
Um, the um, yeah, it's a very small group of people.
8:23
I think uh, a lot of us that have followed Tesla very closely uh, over the years.
8:27
Uh, Tesla went out of their way to sort of, you know, get us uh, some early access so we can go out there, test the test the system, get it out there for people to see how it performs.
8:37
Uh, so far it's very very limited um, in its use case.
8:39
And I'm showing you guys here just on the road hopefully. Does it come across?
8:43
Can you guys see the the road how it's driving? Yeah, it's very steep.
8:46
Um, yeah, I think I think Tesla very specifically started this very small.
8:53
Uh, but now if you go and their zip code and their phone number and email address um so they can sign up for the service and that's probably a way for Tesla to get some uh some idea of how much interest there is for this thing out there.
9:12
Uh but so far it's very small small geoence area, small group of people.
9:17
Um and uh I think I I don't know how many cars they have on the road, but I doubt is more than 10 right now.
9:24
Uh we're at a four-way stop right now and it's navigating that no problem.
9:27
Um but yeah, I I think I think it's very limited on purpose.
9:30
Uh but I will tell you that for those of us that are so lucky to be able to experience this firsthand, it's just it feels surreal because it works. It works.
9:39
It just it just takes you around and there's no one there and you're like, it's wild that uh it's wild that we got full self-driving cars before reliable cell coverage in major cities.
9:50
You're breaking up a little bit on top of this.
9:54
I I mean I have one more question. We'll let you go.
9:56
Um uh I mean what's remarkable about this is is not just that it's a self-driving car, but particularly that it looks like a stock $38,000 Model Y. Is there anything?
10:05
Are you seeing anything on the car that looks like it might be aftermarket added to it? Extra cameras, anything? Nothing. Nothing.
10:16
Uh I mean that there's different software, but I mean that's just a that's a software update, right?
10:21
It there's nothing that that I can gather that says, "Oh, this is a spec like a very uniquely equipped Tesla that has some additional sensors."
10:30
This looks to me like the point you made is exactly and this is why this is such so mind-blowing.
10:35
Like I just can't believe it's happening.
10:37
The bestselling car in the world where Tesla's making over a million of these per year that costs less than $40,000, potentially less than $30,000 to make is driving itself in Austin, Texas with a paid ride. I paid $4.
10:50
20 and it's driving me around the bestselling car in the world.
10:53
Like that that is that's a weird thing to process because it fundamentally breaks the like what how we think about self-driving transportation because you think about oh self-driving a lot of sensors, etc. , etc.
11:05
etc. know that the cost structure for this thing is the is sca the scale that Tesla has able has been able to achieve that same car is going to drive itself right and and that just breaks everything cost per mile plummets the method they've taken uh as far as training the the software should allow
11:24
them to get this thing to scale much faster than Whimo can and they have the cars right so Tesla makes as many of these cars every 5 hours that Whimo has on their fleet total right and that that's the mind-blowing piece of it and Whimo should be celebrated for the work
11:37
they've done because it's such an incredible such an incredible technology and I'm really happy they exist but the scale piece is the challenge and it seems like now that Tesla has figured out how to get paid rides going as we come to uh to our destination that's my Cybert truck right there hanging out um
11:52
you know it's like it's monumental this is really a monumental thing for them this is like uh Disneyland for tech bros you can just keep taking rides around all day longing this is like Thank you very much yeah thank you brother uh yeah dude it's like, you know, sometimes I'm like afraid. I'm like, does my does my
12:06
I'm like, does my does my wife think I'm too nerdy?
12:08
Like, am I am I getting too nerdy about this? What's going on?
12:11
But it really is like it's it's it's it's just upending, you know, what Tesla has been historically great at is just appending the equation around uh the technologies that they work in with the electric vehicle.
12:21
Now, with self-driving, they're going to get into the the human robot space. This is what they do.
12:26
And so, I think this is just another reminder that they're they're full steam ahead.
12:30
And it's uh it's very exciting and I'm it's just such an honor to be part of this this release. Truly, it's an honor. Historic. Amazing. Yeah.
12:37
Well, thank you so much for calling in. This was great. Of course. Have fun out there. Bye. Talk soon. Thank you guys. All right. Bye bye. Yeah.
12:42
The uh the scale of this thing.
12:45
I mean it like Elon wasn't the first person to put a satellite in space.
12:48
He's just the first person to figure out how to get the rockets go up and back every single six hours or something like that.
12:54
And so scale really matters.
12:57
It's more of like an industrial question than a technology question at this point.
13:00
And uh yeah, they seem really set up for it.
13:02
I love this post by Nick Cruz.
13:04
He says, "Elon Musk is back on his main quest focused on the robo taxi."
13:09
Uh and you'll love to see it.
13:12
Little bit of side quest going on for the last six months.
13:14
Uh you know, sometimes you find a little pot of gold at the end of a side quest, but it's not it's not the main mission. Pot of gold. Pot of gold.
13:23
Uh anyway, um there's some other uh there's some other news.
13:26
Power Bottom Dad says, "Time will tell, but my bet is that this signals the death of the Whimo, leaving Google in a $20 billion hole and likely Uber as well." Um very dramatic.
13:37
Uh I'm not uh I'm not uh I think power power bottom dad is a very strong poster.
13:46
Y um and you know the the competitive dynamic is really heating up.
13:51
I'm I'm interested to see how quickly Tesla can actually scale this in other cities.
13:54
Right now it's sounds like it's 10ish cars in a very very small area.
13:59
But but again they they could potentially scale a thousand times faster than Whimo.
14:04
It's all just going to come down to safety and what's actually going on behind the scenes.
14:10
George Hotz last week was saying that uh you know Whimo has is our tea operated.
14:15
He said uh you know I I haven't fact checked this.
14:18
Thankfully we're not journalists.
14:19
We don't have to fact check.
14:20
Uh but he said something like 1. 7 people per car 1.
14:23
2 or something you know sort of uh you know overseeing more than a taxi cab because tax only has one. Yeah.
14:30
So the the real question will be what you know is Tesla doing tele operation as well do they um you know how how long will these companies need to do that?
14:41
But um once things are really working and they're safe Tesla theoretically could be everywhere all at once.
14:49
I think the real question is what corporate card should you use? That's right. Ramp. com. Time is money. Save both.
14:54
Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place.
14:57
Uh, no, it's a good point.
14:58
And I don't know about Whimo and Google.
15:01
I think I lean with PBD here saying that they have a lot of explaining to do. Whimo, Google, and Uber.
15:09
It's hard to imagine how you can compete if your product's 10 times the price or if you like the Uber Uber has the the bull case for Uber is that they have the customers, right?
15:22
And that everyone has the Uber app installed, but if the only way to hail a cyber cab or a Tesla robo taxi is through the Tesla app, how hard is it going to be to get people to install that app?
15:37
I think it's going to be very easy because the brand the brand awareness is huge.
15:41
The brand awareness is huge.
15:44
It's not like Zuks where it's some you oh you got to be an insider to know that they're doing tests and that yeah they're a major player in the space or whatever.
15:52
And the virality the virality of seeing Teslas driving around with driver in the Tesla army like he's doing the promotion for free and getting a ton of ton of impressions.
16:01
When it when it comes to Uber, you have to remember that DAR CEO was formerly the CEO of Expedia, which was a booking website.
16:09
And so, if Uber can figure it out, it's like, hey, we're just routing demand and we're taking a cut. Yes.
16:15
But we're integrating with multiple different, you know, autonomous vehicle providers.
16:20
That that actually would be the bull case.
16:22
But the question is, does Tesla just say, can that happen? We got this.
16:28
We're not going to give up.
16:28
this. We're not going to give up. We're gonna let I mean I guess I'll question depends on like the timeline because uh if if the robo taxi so we don't know how much work they did they these might be somewhat teleoperated they might have they have a safety driver literally in the car right although it's interesting because the safety driver did you see the safety driver do they have a pedal because if they don't have a brake what
16:49
is the safety driver doing like is the safety driver going to reach over or push a button on the screen kind of unclear um but the question is if if the robot taxi can't generalize to odd conditions, then you wind up in a
17:05
situation where if you have the Tesla robo taxi app and it doesn't work in the snow or it doesn't work in the rain or it doesn't work if you need to get to the beach or you don't or we won't go into the mountains. Well, then all of a
17:16
Well, then all of a sudden you actually do want something like the beauty of Expedia is that it can book me a Southwest flight to from Burbank to SFO, but then it can also book me a you know Dubai Airlines first first class Emirates Air all the way across the world.
17:33
And so if there is a world where where I want a variety benefiting from variety and and not frequency of booking, if you're booking a Tesla Cyber Cab multiple times a week and you can save by going directly to the app, you're just going to do that. Yeah.
17:50
Overall, I thought that Roboaxi did a incredible job under pressure.
17:54
Probably it's the first sort of live show that it's been a part of. Yep.
17:55
And so the fact that it stayed composed, that it didn't, you know, make any erratic turns or anything like that, uh I'm uh I'm pretty impressed. Yeah. Yeah. It it's very exciting.
18:07
Um but, you know, you don't always want to be in a self-driving car that cost $38,000.
18:15
Sometimes you want to be a Ferrari driving Harvard med graduate AI angel investor.
18:21
We saw this photo on the timeline. Loved this.
18:23
Uh seems like pure bait for VC congratulating themselves for VC Brags AI Harvard Medical School. Is that a Roma? I think so.
18:33
Would would have hit harder if it was an SP3, you know, like Yeah. Okay.
18:39
You're an AI angel investor, but probably seed investor in scale, but clearly has done well and enjoys the Ben is saying it's an SF90.
18:52
That's That's not an SF90. You know what? I think it's Aroma. I think it's Aroma. I think you're right. Debate.
18:57
Let us know in the comments.
18:59
Um and uh you know you know what's missing from this picture? A luxury watch.
19:04
This person's got to get on.
19:06
I'm sure they have a header on.
19:08
They might even have a racing machine on the wrist. They might. They might. Go to getb bezel. com.
19:11
Shop over 25,000 luxury watches fully authenticated inhouse by Bezel's team of experts.
19:17
Um Trump, this is the news of the day with the Iran crisis.
19:20
Uh, Donald Trump says, "Everyone keep oil prices down." I'm watching.
19:25
You're playing right into the hands of the enemy. Don't do it.
19:31
You love to see the president talking to everybody.
19:34
Everybody's saying everybody's, you know, saying this is ridiculous.
19:37
But it's never been tried.
19:39
People always say, "Oh, all that matters in in oil prices, supply and demand." Yeah.
19:43
Well, all you got to do is say, "Hey, supply go down.
19:47
Hey, supply go up and demand go down."
19:51
and then we will have lower prices.
19:54
I mean there is something to that has been tried before.
19:56
It's it's worth it's worth trying something if you do signal.
19:59
I mean there there are there are stories about uh oil prices going down because Americans got the signal that prices were going to be high and they stopped traveling as much during the summer vacation for example.
20:08
Like that does happen every once in a while but uh yeah very very odd to post.
20:11
Anyway, um uh back on watches, the watches of espionage account says, "Men who guide the destinies of the world will wear Rolex watches.
20:21
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, John Dan Razine Kaine in situation room during attacks on Iran wearing a Rolex GMT."
20:29
Well, you need a GMT because you got to know what time it is in doing this.
20:33
This is a good This is a good one. I haven't seen this.
20:35
I've seen the Merkel route.
20:37
I've seen the the the the break cracking your knuckles, but this is this is special.
20:42
It's like four points of attack.
20:44
I mean, I guess they did hit four sites, so you got to point to all of them. Yeah, that's right. Interesting.
20:50
Well, it's been an eventful morning.
20:52
Uh Iran attacked a US base in Qatar. Yes, that's the latest.
20:59
And uh people are basically saying that it's bullish because there were no casualties.
21:03
All of apparently all the missiles were taken out in the air. Yep.
21:08
And this could lead to a deescalation. Yeah.
21:11
And a return to a steady state of tension. Yeah.
21:15
This has been my position for a long time.
21:17
I'm I'm pretty anti-agression, anti-war, but I'm extremely pro domes, iron domes, golden domes.
21:24
I want to be able to shoot down every missile before as soon as it leaves.
21:28
No matter where it's leaving from, let's shoot it down immediately from space, from land. Do whatever you can.
21:35
But missiles, bombs, nuclear bombs, these things should not be relevant in the future.
21:39
Um, but uh, DUVA has a breakdown of this.
21:43
The strike package that destroyed the Iranian nuclear facility at Ford DAO, represents over one year of US production capacity of the GBU57 bunker buster.
21:51
Its primary explosive AFX 757 is difficult to produce and we don't have many factories to do it.
21:58
It's why way more robots are necessary um, to do everything from production to automating research.
22:03
I'll also note that China has been very interested in higher throughput production of this very compound for some time now. Very interesting to see.
22:12
Um Joe Weisenthal had some polyarket news.
22:14
Uh bombing the of the nuclear facility did not push down the market odds of Iran possessing a nuclear weapon in 2025.
22:21
In fact, it's at the highest level of the day.
22:23
I wonder what's driving that.
22:25
Do you think that's more driven by we didn't actually Russian president comes out and said, "Hey, we might just give them a nuke." That would be bad. which would be bad. That would be bad.
22:35
The other thing that's interesting, the uh Foro nuclear facility destroyed by before July poly market is only sitting at a 32% chance still on 4 million in volume.
22:44
So I think people are basically saying calling that it wasn't actually destroyed or at least that's what the market is saying.
22:51
So it was impacted but not uh destroyed even though Trump came out Saturday night and claimed uh total annihilation.
22:59
Well, the uh the crown prince uh of the opposition party uh gave a speech in Paris earlier.
23:04
We talked to Shervin Pishvar about it earlier.
23:06
You'll hear that you'll hear that interview at 2:30 today.
23:09
Um and uh he launched a website to help recruit defectors.
23:12
If you're designing a website, you got to get on Figma. That's right.
23:17
Think bigger, build faster.
23:19
Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. Go to figma. com.
23:22
Um Combat Lejet says, "My buddy was a B2 pilot.
23:25
He flew one of those extremely long missions several years ago.
23:28
The mission was two pilots, 36. 3 hours of flight time.
23:32
Missouri to Iraq and back to a Missouri.
23:34
The mission required five air refuelings taking on over 500,000 or 500k kilograms maybe 500 kilograms of gas total.
23:44
These pilots are legends. Yeah, that's insane. Oh, I guess pounds. 500 500 lb. Um I don't know.
23:49
Anyway, um what a what what a beast. A 36-hour grind.
23:55
Uh, I never want to hear you complain about uh, you know, sitting at your desk for 10 hours or coming in on the weekend PowerPoint or some Excel.
24:05
The investment banker specifically. Yeah. Oh, I work so long. No, 36 hours. Get it done. Yeah. Really? Wild.
24:09
Uh, anyway, um, Jacob Hellberg was was celebrating this, very excited.
24:14
Uh, he has been confirmed, by the way.
24:16
Um, and he says that he's already shifting the conversation, I think, in a good direction.
24:21
He says, "Not a single Chinese humanoid robot should be sold on US soil.
24:24
US government should preemptively ban Chinese humanoids in the US without delay in all caps.
24:28
And Jason Calcana says, "The fact that you need to tweet this is crazy.
24:31
You realize this was posted a year ago." Oh, this is a Whoa.
24:37
And he just reposted it or he edited it or something. Yeah.
24:39
So he was way, but now he's part of the admin.
24:42
Now he can tweak it actually make some of this stuff happen.
24:48
So excited to to see him.
24:50
Um, you know, we talked about this. Why?
24:53
Why are we, you know, let's not allow what happened with DJI to happen again with a new robotic form factor? Yep.
24:59
Uh anyway, uh there was some news that maybe the Johnny IV OpenAI deal might not happen.
25:05
Uh because OpenAI apparently scrubbed everything about Johnny IV and Sam Alman off the website and YouTube.
25:13
It's just completely gone.
25:15
YouTube video private blog post removed. Everything is gone. I confirmed that.
25:18
You get a 404 when you go to the original web page. Mark German.
25:22
So, everyone thought the deal was falling apart.
25:24
Maybe Johnny Iv was getting poached by Zuck over at Meta. That would be dramatic.
25:27
Mark German has the story.
25:29
He says, "The Johnny Ivan Open AAI deal is on track and has not dissolved or anything of the sort, I'm told. Here's what happened.
25:36
They were sued over the name IO and there was a restraining order issued by the judge.
25:40
They had to pull all materials with the name." That's interesting.
25:43
Also interesting that they didn't s What?
25:44
We knew that the name of the company was IO before this acquisition, right?
25:50
No, it was love from and then they had an internal project called IO and that was noted.
25:54
I thought that I thought that was I thought I thought I thought that we knew that the pro the new project was called IO like like 6 months or a year ago. Yeah.
26:03
But uh they're suing now. This happens a lot.
26:08
There's there's kind of multiple sides. We'll hear both of them.
26:10
Nick, who I believe is more in the Elon camp, uh is is saying that, you know, it's the beginning of the end for Sam Alman and Johnny Ives project.
26:19
He says a federal judge has banned Open AI to use the word IO to brand for their upcoming AI hardware advice device.
26:28
Little rough language there.
26:30
The ruling caps a fierce trademark battle sparked by Silicon Valley startup IO similar but slightly different name which spent the past six years developing its voice controlled AI wearable the IO1 uh court filings revealed an eyebrow raising series of events.
26:46
So this is from IO's IO's point of point of view.
26:49
Yes, I'd say from 2018 to 2024 IO publicly showcased its earworn device investing heavily to carve out its niche between 2022 and 2025.
27:00
Yes, Alman's Apollo projects and Ives love from team participated in extensive pitch meetings, factory tours, and hands-on testing of IO's product.
27:07
On March 5th, 2025, Alman declined investment in IO, disclosing he was working on something competitive, which ended up being called IO. IO, not IO. Yeah.
27:21
said, "When OpenAI revealed a $6.
27:23
5 billion venture named IO in May of 2025, IO's fundraising immediately stalled as as Sam Alman influenced investors to stop investing in the small startup."
27:33
Uh, obviously these are all allegations. Yeah.
27:36
What's interesting here is like Sam invested in Humane and that project didn't really get to fruition.
27:43
And so there's this question of like like it's possible that he was like okay idea is good but team maybe can't deliver at scale or can't deliver as an independent venture.
27:53
And so for that reason I'm out and that's kind of clear.
27:58
You also kind of know if you're pitching an investor that's actively running a huge company that you like you can go pitch Mark Zuckerberg to be an angel investor but if you're pitching him like Instagram 2.
28:09
0 Now you kind of know, okay, I'm I'm the thing that's clear the fox in the hen house. Yeah.
28:16
The thing that's clear here is that it's it's very possible that the company IO has great grounds around the trademark if they've been operating for a while.
28:23
And it is confusing, right?
28:25
Even when we're saying it out. Yes.
28:26
Also, IO not it's not such a good name that like they have to stick with it.
28:30
I would just change that name immediately.
28:33
Yeah, I never thought it was thought the name and I would rather just have it called like the chat GPT phone or something, you know, or the or the OpenAI phone or something like that.
28:42
There are other they probably couldn't get away with that because it sounds too much like iPhone.
28:44
But there there are there are other brand names that they could spin off of to create a device that's the the the open AI device and they don't necessarily need to use that IO keyword.
28:54
And so backing off that seems fine.
28:57
There's also this trend of like when big dollars are changing hands, like six billion in this case, oftent times there are folks that come out and file lawsuits just because like there's a whole bunch of money changing hands.
29:08
Everyone wants it to change hands quickly.
29:10
And so if you can show up and say, "Hey, I'm just I I I'm owed $100 million."
29:15
A lot of people will just settle to make it go away.
29:17
This happened to Palmer Lucky during the Meta acquisition or the Facebook acquisition of Oculus.
29:23
There was a guy who came out and said, "I invented VR.
29:24
I have a patent, you have to pay me.
29:27
Palmer went all the way to court, bought it, and won.
29:32
Um, but it was still, it was still framed in the press for a long time as like Palmer Lucky stole the idea for virtual reality, which of course is one of those things where it's like, okay, like the idea of virtual reality has been around for like decades, if not like a hundred years. Yeah.
29:47
Palmer used, he stood on the shoulders of giants, used some patents and some technology and licensed some of that stuff.
29:53
And so you might have a claim.
29:54
There might be some sort of settlement.
29:56
There might be all sorts of different things.
29:57
But at the end of the day, like yeah, like it didn't there was no evidence that Palmer was like literally cheating off his homework like looking over there being like let me just the general idea for virtual reality had been something that had been written about both in venture and in sci-fi for decades.
30:14
And it's the same thing here like like here's what this device looks really cool.
30:19
It's this headphone, but again, it's like what's interesting here is is it's a it's a potentially new type of product that could ultimately be similar to what OpenAI develops with Johnny IV and Love from.
30:35
So, thei IO I YO is a product designed to be an earworn device.
30:39
Uh the the device uses 16 beam forming microphones to create a quote unquote audio display or an immersive audio environment for both speaking and listening.
30:50
The IO1 achieves this through the use of natural language.
30:53
The user does not have to learn, know, or memorize special commands, words, or gestures to cause the device to do what is asked of it.
31:00
Instead, all the user needs to do is speak to the device naturally as though the user were conversing with a person. So, yeah.
31:09
Yeah, I mean like this feels like souped-up AirPods in some ways or completely disruptive and it ultimately depends on the how how great the software is, how great the interaction pattern is, um the branding, the design, the go to market.
31:23
Uh, it's not I I I don't think that they own the idea of like put a thing near your ear and play sounds like that's not like if if Open AI comes out with something that competes with this, I think we would more likely comp it to AirPods and ask what is Apple doing to respond?
31:40
How are the AirPods going to be a competitor in this category?
31:46
I mean, it's the same thing with the with the the Meta the Meta Quest and the Apple Vision Pro.
31:53
These are somewhat similar devices. Screens on your face.
31:55
They have slightly different design choices, but they're both in the same category.
32:00
I wouldn't I wouldn't say, oh, like me Zuck should 100% sue Apple for launching the Apple Vision Pro, right?
32:08
Like that is not spec like they don't own the idea of screen on your face.
32:16
And I would say that Apple doesn't necessarily own the idea of audio in your ears and and Johnny IV doesn't necessarily own that idea either.
32:26
So it's going to be much more nitty-gritty.
32:28
You might be more quick to come to the defense of IYO if you knew they were funded by both big tech and big defense tech.
32:35
Loheed Martin and Alphabet are both are both in the company.
32:40
Uh they've raised over $20 million in venture funding to date.
32:43
So I'm Yeah, I mean it could definitely Yeah, it could definitely be a valuable product, but I think the game will be won in the execution totally of the of the software and the hardware, not strictly the idea of like of like voice first computing in your ear.
33:01
That's not enough to win.
33:04
Just like in many ways the AirPods have already done some re-event and it'll talk to you a little bit.
33:11
It's like they're not actually or you can call your executive assistant and say, "Hey, can you book this up for me?
33:16
Hey, can you call this person?
33:18
Hey, can you schedule this?
33:20
Hey, can you book me a flight?" Yes.
33:21
In many ways, they're just trying to recreate a great EA. Yes.
33:26
Well, um, whatever IO is building, they got to get on Vant.
33:30
They got to automate compliance. They got to manage risk.
33:31
And they got to prove trust continuously.
33:35
Vanta's trust management platform takes the work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation.
33:40
whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program.
33:43
Um, but yeah, I mean, these lawsuits are always uh are always interesting.
33:47
Could wind up being a big settlement.
33:49
I mean, if they can even get $40 million from the $6.
33:50
5 billion in a settlement, that's a series B for them.
33:55
They get to keep going, keep building.
33:57
That's a that's probably a good outcome for them.
33:58
Um, maybe they can change the name because I the name is crazy.
34:03
the most attention, you know, if they spin this and say, "Hey, the OpenAI team spent years ordering our products, meeting meeting with the fitting specialist, doing all this stuff because it's so great.
34:14
Maybe they'll get some out."
34:16
You know, the best thing for everyone in this scenario, what's that, John?
34:20
We're going to get some emails in discovery that are going to go on big tech history emails the the the X account and you know we're going to find some funny back and forths between Johnny IV and speaking of speaking of uh of of lawsuits and and emails um and Discovery uh Elon's lawyers are apparently claiming that he doesn't have a computer as part of the lawsuit between OpenAI who doesn't have a computer Elon does doesn't use a computer.
34:47
It doesn't even have a work computer. You posted this earlier.
34:49
I found this out because I I posted Yes.
34:50
I posted earlier, if your CEO has a quote unquote work computer and a personal computer, it's time to start polishing your resume.
34:59
And so, somebody responded to that with uh notes to uh basically claims that uh how does Elon play Diablo?
35:09
Well, he probably has a gaming rig. A g Oh, it's a rig.
35:12
It's not It's not a computer.
35:14
No, but the the Verge posted this.
35:16
Your honor, my client doesn't have a computer. He has a rig. He has a gaming rig.
35:21
Oh, you want access to his rig where he plays games on. Yeah.
35:25
You want You want to see if he's really that would actually definitely want that for sure. The setup. Yeah. Uh I I don't know.
35:32
May maybe the second greatest Diablo player of all time will will subpoena that information.
35:36
Be like, I want actual data.
35:38
How many hours did he log?
35:40
I need to know the real account information.
35:42
So WY is reporting this morning that the claim appeared in a court filing related to Elon Musk ongoing lawsuit against Sam Alman and OpenAI.
35:53
Uh he uh said uh that the lawsuit also flags that he has posted about his laptop numerous times in the last year.
36:01
So people are trying to put him in the truth zone. That is crazy.
36:06
So he doesn't have a computer.
36:08
He doesn't he doesn't have any apps installed on the computer.
36:11
He doesn't have linear installed on his computer. I'm sure his team does.
36:14
His team must because how do how would they get anything done without a purpose-built tool for planning and building products?
36:20
Like they need a modern software development.
36:23
How how else would they streamline issues, projects, and product road maps?
36:26
How else would would they would they run such a big service with so few people on their team?
36:32
It it make no sense unless everyone is just okay.
36:34
I I think we're going to find the computer and when we find Elon Musk's computer, we're going to find There's going to be one app on there and it's linear for sure. That's right. Linear. app.
36:44
Uh, an anonymous little birdie told me that uh he does have a massive a gaming PC with an ultra massive screen and indeed does not have a work computer. Lol. Pretty based. Okay.
36:58
Anyway, uh Wealthfront is filing to go public. Very exciting.
37:02
We've heard about this fintech platform before.
37:04
Um, they seems like the window's open, John. The window is wide open.
37:10
If you're a series D company, series C company, series B company, maybe Cle gets out. Who knows?
37:16
I can see clearly getting out with Chamoth. It's possible.
37:21
Anything's possible when the windows open. So, go for it.
37:22
If you're a founder, uh, our advice to you, just go public.
37:27
Just take your company public and then go on a generational run compounding it 40% a year stock price for decades. Yeah. Couple decades. That's all it takes.
37:36
And then you'll be in the in the mag seven. Yeah.
37:38
In many ways if you go public earlier those initial Yeah.
37:43
years can be easier because it's such a small base. Yeah.
37:47
Everyone says the SEC requirements are so difficult. You could be short.
37:50
You should be you could be short sellers could attack you.
37:53
It's like that's just inspiration.
37:56
harder with, you know, putting up incredible quarter over a quarter results. Blow them out. Blow out the short.
38:00
Speaking of, uh, the public markets.
38:03
Anthony Pompiano posted this morning.
38:06
Today, I'm announcing a $1 billion merger to create Pro Cap Financial, a Bitcoin native financial services firm.
38:11
The company will be a publicly traded entity on NASDAQ at the conclusion of the proposed business combination between my private company, ProCap BTC LLC, and Columbus Circle Capital Corp.
38:23
one, a publicly traded spa.
38:26
The ticker for the publicly traded entity right now is CCCM, and he has raised over $750 million.
38:36
They will focus on acquiring Bitcoin for their balance sheet while also developing products and services to produce revenue and profit from the Bitcoin on our balance sheet. Let's give it up.
38:48
Some people would say that should be the first goal, but it's the third.
38:51
Let's give it up for revenue and profit. Everybody, we love it.
38:55
Love to see try to be the Warren Buffett of Bitcoin.
38:57
Buy companies, invest in Bitcoin, file, funnel the Bitcoin back into buying more companies, produce more Bitcoin. The flywheel continues. That's the goal.
39:07
Uh, well, whatever company he buys, got to put them on numeral numeralhq.
39:11
com, sales tax on autopilot.
39:13
Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance.
39:16
Um, should we do some of the some of the downstream fallout from Cluey?
39:20
I didn't even know if it's fallout.
39:22
I just wanted to cover this post from Will Brown first.
39:23
Zuck hired uh Alex Wang for a half to 1% equity.
39:29
He's basically a founding engineer. Thought that was good.
39:32
When when the when the 15 billion number was being thrown around just just a week ago, everybody was freaking out. But it's basic. It's barely a point.
39:39
Yeah, we I mean we identified that.
39:41
It's like threw him a point.
39:43
It's like, what would uh what would it take for Alex Wong to move market cap 1%.
39:49
Well, like I don't know, a great Llama 5 release, that would probably do it, right?
39:53
Like there's there's a ton of things.
39:55
There's a lot of opportunity.
39:56
If you're just talking about that's being the stakes, it's not that he has to overnight double the company in size.
40:01
He just has to he just has to, you know, implement a rational and effective AI strategy.
40:06
Ben Thompson was talking about this earlier today for a multi- trillion dollar opportunity. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
40:12
And there's so many places where AI products can have an impact.
40:16
Ben Ben Thompson was talking about this, this idea that the researchers are really important, but what Zuck has been on a terror about is hiring actually great managers.
40:23
When you look at uh Daniel Gross, Nat Friedman, Alexander Wong, like these guys are everyone the criticism like they're not researchers, but that's actually probably the benefit to the strategy because we are in the application war right now.
40:37
We are in the implementation of these AI tools and the the capabilities of the models are clearly way way ahead of the uh of the actual foundation models like the like the actual science that's happened.
40:52
Uh I was thinking about this just like for for Instagram during the Dolly moment.
40:56
I was like, I w like I wonder what would happen if you just took every single person's on Instagram their most recent photo and Gibli it studio Gibli it and just sent them to it.
41:09
Send it to them proactively.
41:11
It would cost a ton of money to do this in the inference.
41:13
But you do that, you send it to everyone and you just say like would you like to post this?
41:19
I bet you have like the biggest day on Instagram like ever, right? Yeah.
41:22
Because you're just creating all this like viral fuel for the day.
41:24
um or what does it take to distill that model down, bake it into just a filter.
41:28
So when you upload a photo, you can just select the Studio Giblly thing and it runs efficiently.
41:32
And that's almost that's not really a research task.
41:34
It's more of like product management.
41:36
And I'm not even like a product manager at Instagram, right?
41:38
Instagram, right? for product managers, but like those types of like the valition that it'll take and the will and the incentive alignment that it'll take to actually roll out a product like that and really push the team to be like, "No, we want to spend all this
41:51
money rendering these Giblies because we think this is a calculated risk that will put us back in the AI image conversation or we want to, you know, spend all this money to distill down images, uh, image generation, diffusion to a point where it can just be a filter button on the on the Instagram app." Like those are product management, those
42:06
Like those are product management, those are cost.
42:08
Like it's almost like more of a CFO question than a research question at this point.
42:11
Like we know that the Giblly filter is doable and it's great.
42:16
And so how do you actually get it out into the world effectively?
42:17
And that's more of a manager uh manager discussion.
42:22
So he's basically a founding engineer, but I think he's going into more of like a seuite role.
42:26
So we'll we'll we'll we'll we'll keep tracking it.
42:28
Anyway, um should we keep uh should we keep going into the AI application layer with the rapper of all rappers?
42:34
Cluey, final rapper, the final boss of rappers.
42:37
Yeah, we should uh we should get Tyler's take on this.
42:41
Um because the the question that I think people are digging into is that clearly like the easy the easy take was like, oh, it's this is like Theronos.
42:53
And it's like I don't think it's like Theronos at all.
42:55
like the product works like you you tried it and you would agree that it is a real product. Yes. Yeah, for sure. 100%.
43:02
It's it does what it advertises.
43:06
It does what it advertises.
43:07
Now, there are some questions about like the actual long-term value there or I I think the risk the the the bare case for clue.
43:17
real the risk is that the risk is that the opportunity does not align with the the the marketing strategy.
43:24
So like the the opportunity for helping students with their homework and the sort sort of like traditional nature of cheating aligns with the marketing strategy.
43:33
I think they can dominate there. Yep.
43:35
The enterprise opportunity of let me intake all the information from every call that you have internally every sales call that you have every you know that's a very competitive space.
43:45
That's a very competitive space that the labs will probably want to own because it's very valuable data, right?
43:51
You can imagine OpenAI having a desktop application that's permanently running in they already do.
43:57
They already have a Yeah, but they haven't they haven't adopted that pattern.
44:00
And so yeah, the that the risk is like is like if if if the pattern really works and people are like this is what we want.
44:07
We always want the screen capture and and constant uh uh constant responses from LLMs.
44:13
Like if it's a really big opportunity, you're going to face competition from the really big labs.
44:18
Um if it's a smaller opportunity, it's hard to kind of scale up.
44:22
So there so so so there there is a lot of more the more the other push back was high level you know why are we funding these types of businesses that are loud and and not you know truly sort of bending the world in any type of positive direction and it has the the cheating angle which some people I think that was very intentional.
44:42
Um the push back I would have there is like it seems like it seems like there is enough venture capital right now like if you have a great idea in hard tech defense tech manufacturing etc you will be funded. Yep.
44:55
And it's you know it's it's not like some great you know manufacturing American dynamism business is not getting $15 million this week because clearly got 15 last week and so it's not zero sum. Yeah.
45:08
Um we had some good reactions.
45:12
Uh Kevin uh aka Plant Daddy uh was quoting uh a segment from our interview and said Roy was basically saying like there's not enough viral content which is actually an interesting take his his take at a high level is like if you make something like great novel engaging it just will naturally go viral because there's actually a a um scarcity of of like viral content.
45:37
I think it's an interesting I think it's an interesting point and I think that um he's probably right to some degree.
45:47
Kevin fired back uh at a high level and said this is not correct.
45:49
While it is true that when Oh and and sorry the last thing Roy was basically saying that uh consumption has just so shifted so dramatically to Tik Tok which is a new form factor and so that's changed the dynamics.
46:02
Uh Kevin is an active creator I believe on YouTube and I'm sure he's everywhere.
46:06
So he was just firing back.
46:08
He says, "This is not correct.
46:08
While it is true that when Tik Tok blew up in 2020, there was a brief moment where there wasn't enough short form content to satisfy consumption.
46:14
That lasted 12 to 18 months.
46:16
I remember it well because I was one of the first gardening accounts on Tik Tok in 2019. It was free back then.
46:22
Literally any video popped off.
46:24
Then millions of new creators came onto the scene.
46:26
Coupled with 10x reduced friction in creating content due to Tik Tok's native editor, filter and cap cut.
46:32
You saw an explosion of short form videos.
46:34
So both the number of creators and number of videos dramatically increased.
46:37
Consumption just increased even more because the videos were all 5 to 15 seconds long.
46:41
So one scrolling session equals 100 videos instead of 50 to 70% of one YouTube video.
46:46
It's not true that for the next 6 to 12 months, anything that you post has a potential to go viral will go viral.
46:52
That's only true when there's a paradigm shift and all platforms have to catch up.
46:56
The phase where IG Meta released reels and YouTube released shorts to catch up to Tik Tok was truly a free attention grabbed era and thousands of creators made a fat bag during that era.
47:05
From 2020 to 2022, I grew epic gardening from 300,000 to something like 8 million across all platforms be it was that free.
47:15
That time isn't today though.
47:15
He says, I think what you're seeing right now with Cluey is someone applying a Mr.
47:22
B style hypers scale influencer content model into something that VCs will salivate over B TOC AI.
47:26
Whether anything comes of it is another story, but it is somewhat comical to see the tech VC space go crazy for the viral attention grabbing when the type of attention they're grabbing as well as the scale of it is dwarfed by almost any top 1% creator of which there are thousands of.
47:44
Yeah, Christian Kyle was pointing out that clearly is getting millions of views on X but only a few thousand views on YouTube.
47:50
And so it's very very platform specific and um and yeah, but it's it he Roy is really fantastic at applying that the the viral playbook that works for X on X and it's been it's been very successful.
48:04
I think they're successful on other platforms too.
48:05
Um but it is interesting. Yeah. And it's interesting. Slow Ventures Yeah. created a fund.
48:11
Megan Lightcap over there runs it.
48:13
We've had her on the show. Uh I believe, right?
48:15
Uh we don't have Megan on, but we should.
48:19
um basically saying, "Hey, there's all these creators that are getting a massive amount of attention.
48:24
They if they have capital, they can monetize it."
48:25
So, some people are paying attention to this.
48:28
Um it's still like I've been surprised by how much the cheating buzzword has been uh really controversial.
48:37
It seemed very clear to me that that was uh deliberately edgy and just kind of an edgeord statement and that it was pretty clear that the tool was was very much just like embracing the new norm of co-pilots happening everywhere and that cheating was deliberately um used as a as a word to kind of spark controversy.
49:03
Um but it but it it really is it really is acting as baggage on Roy.
49:06
And so Sarah Guo over conviction said uh we should celebrate hacking, not cheating.
49:14
Cheating quietly pockets extra monopoly money, insider trading, plagiarism, inflated metrics.
49:18
Hacking hacking openly flips the game board, exposing rigged rules and inventing a better game for everyone.
49:24
Wikipedia replaced Britannica.
49:27
Airbnb monetized spare rooms.
49:27
Linux openly challenged Windows.
49:29
Both break the rules, but hacking doesn't compromise integrity.
49:33
It reveals the old game wasn't worth playing.
49:36
Yeah, it's interesting because like he could have totally reframed the Cluey launch as hack everything, hack dating, hack your your you know your online interviews or whatever.
49:49
And it probably would or the other position is like much less viral but much less controversial. Yeah.
49:54
But it's the other thing is like give yourself superpowers in any of these domains. Totally. Right.
49:59
Yeah, I mean the co-pilot thing is like the friendliest framing of all of this, right?
50:04
It's like, yeah, it's just like something to help you out.
50:05
Autocomplete saying autocomplete for everything is not nearly as viral.
50:10
And many people have said that over the last years.
50:12
I think this is what Roy is already is already battling with is he I think generally has good intentions, right?
50:19
He has his own intentions around he clearly is excited about being famous.
50:24
many ways he already is a niche tech celebrity over 100k followers.
50:29
Um, but at the same time he does want the respect of insiders and you can tell that from from some of his comments over the weekend and replies. So anyways, he's young.
50:42
He's going to figure it out.
50:42
Well, if he's going to try and sell this into enterprise at some point, he's got to get on Adio customer relationship magic.
50:48
Adio is the AI native CRM that builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level.
50:52
Um, Lulu continued the conversation saying, "One thing clearly got really right is hiring only marketing people who have already built large followings on their own.
50:59
Any marketing person that isn't bringing you an audience is just being subsidized by yours."
51:04
I thought this was a good take.
51:06
I I don't know how it it's tricky because um many people who have built large followings have their own businesses, but uh Royy's clearly created some sort of like great relationship with them such that they can come in and earn a paycheck and at some point get paid very highly.
51:23
uh kind of unclear how much is cash and stock, but it's enough to get people to step back from uh a Tik Tok account that's 100,000 followers or something like that, but that type of person understands the algorithm and actually can do marketing more effectively.
51:36
Um and so I I I I think there is an interesting lesson there in that um the new marketing like we transitioned from from resumes to GitHub profiles for hiring programmers.
51:49
We've seen this with folks that the interns that we've focused that we've hired where someone will come in and say, "I built this this weekend.
51:56
Here's an example of what I can build or here's an example of something I built in the past, an open source project."
52:01
And the equivalent in the marketing world now is building some sort of following and actually understanding content creation at some level.
52:09
And so, uh, it's yeah, it's very bullish.
52:11
Maybe maybe marketing departments should be doing more proactive outreach to folks that are building uh large followings but not quite monetizing them just yet and saying hey you clearly understand Instagram, Tik Tok, whatever you're doing you should come inside the organization and work here in our marketing team.
52:26
Uh which I think can make sense.
52:28
Um Dylan Field had some alternative framing of the Cluey story.
52:33
He said isn't just good marketing.
52:33
Roy hacked the algo feed with an antifragile mimetic virus.
52:38
And the more energy you throw at it, the stronger it gets.
52:41
Well, here we are throwing more energy at the mimedic virus, baby.
52:47
That's what it's all about.
52:50
Uh, we can move on from clearly in a little bit.
52:51
Uh, Teddy Blank says, "Roy disturbs people because by any measure he should be a successful cryptoforex influencer, course hustler, but instead he chose B2B SAS and it feels unnatural."
53:03
Funny that he's saying B2B SAS because the previous uh the previous post by Plant Daddy he said BTOC SAS and so no one even knows they're doing they're doing both I guess yeah they'll sell to willing buyers at market prices.
53:16
Um also interesting in the open source world uh Ian has the story while clearly spent that $15 million on marketing videos this random guy on Reddit built and open source the exact same project.
53:29
Always interesting to see when these open source projects break through because I remember there was a competitor to Devon, open Devon that was open sourced and everyone was like Devon's cooked but we saw the the data and it seems like Devon's producing tons
53:44
and tons of GitHub pull requests and has a very different go to market motion and that for a lot of enterprises that are doing replatforming of their net application to Python, they might not want to use an open source product. they
53:54
they might want to have a team there that's actively improving the project on a daily basis.
53:58
And so the open open source did not kill Devon in that case.
54:01
In fact, their their more significant competition comes from OpenAI um and another and another large enterprisecaled you know hundred billion dollar company not just some random developer.
54:13
Uh on the flip side we saw DeepSeek and Manis come out with open source projects.
54:17
Um but uh but not quite these like you know I just open sourced it and made it free like deepse commanders nobody would call those like true side projects.
54:26
Um so it's unclear um how much this will affect.
54:31
At the same time uh if you are hesitant about sending screen recordings to clearly uh maybe open source is the one that you actually want to run.
54:41
You want to run this locally because of a privacy issue.
54:44
But it will be interesting to see whether or not this is a uh uh a factor in Cul's roll out.
54:47
I would be surprised if this is if this is something that makes uh a difference uh to them.
54:58
I would imagine it's much more about Yeah, they're clearly marketing to people that don't know how to run open source software.
55:08
The thing that was interesting, Gary Tan shared, "Are people building brands ahead of the tech just to try to hold space right at the moment that the just right models hit?"
55:15
Uh, somebody named Ethan Ding was highlighting that, uh, he was comparing Cluey and Icon.
55:20
Uh, both of which have been very controversial.
55:26
Uh, Ethan said, "I'm surprised no one's connected Roy Lee's playbook to the Icon Admaker playbook a couple months back.
55:33
Have an unusable product.
55:33
dominate mind share for potential buyers.
55:35
Buy time for the AI to catch up to bail you out.
55:37
Uh I don't I don't you know Royy's product is not unusable.
55:42
We used it on the show Friday.
55:44
Y uh it worked for the use case that that they advertise the most. Yep.
55:49
Um they clearly are dominating mind share.
55:50
The the question is uh will AI catching up actually um actually enable them to win in the enterprise or these categories?
56:01
The issue is that the two categories that Cle is going after being effectively like BTOC, so like students and B2B enterprise are two categories that chatbt is already dominant in.
56:15
And so the the the question again is is uh are they going to be able to win head-to-head uh with OpenAI even if OpenAI doesn't have as many viral uh Tik Toks being produced inhouse.
56:26
So yeah, he calls out the risk of churn here.
56:29
I think that's very real.
56:29
I think the bigger question is um clearly in very much it is rapper but at the same time it's not trying to compete on the foundation model level and so if the models get better clearly should get better.
56:45
Um and so you are you are very much riding the rocket or riding the the wave uh of technological improvement which seems like a good strategy.
56:52
I I guess it just keeps coming down to the question of if this is if this is truly the UI paradigm that people want to interact with chat GPT through uh you would expect the chat GPT app to to launch this.
57:05
Um but you know who knows maybe it gets popular and maybe there's other pockets of of opportunity that come through.
57:13
Um and uh and there's a bunch of uh uh uh and in other news, Mark German was reporting over the weekend.
57:24
He said Apple will need to leave its M&A comfort zone to succeed in AI.
57:28
Basically calling out that uh Apple has held various early conversations with different companies like Perplexity and Thinking Machines uh around potential acquisition.
57:39
People were pressing him saying why perplexity.
57:44
Mark responded um which looks like it's an output from chat GPT. I don't know. It's not.
57:50
It's not actually wrote this. It's got so many M dash.
57:53
Look how many M dashes it has though, John. Wait, no. No.
57:57
I actually maybe this is from I don't know. I'm confused. I can't tell anymore.
58:00
Yeah, this might be from Chad.
58:03
I thought this So he says, "A proven consumerready product.
58:04
It fills a clear need, a decently sized team, and a reasonable valuation at around 14 billion.
58:12
Perplexity wouldn't break the bank. Yeah.
58:14
And uh the timing, too, is interesting.
58:17
Apple's long-running search deal with Google is under threat from a US antitrust suit.
58:20
This iPhone maker has to prepare for a post Google search world, and acquiring Perplexity would allow it to finally launch its own Apple branded search engine.
58:28
My question about perplexity going to Apple is what is perplexity building on top of that wouldn't be an issue in an Apple acquisition because I don't think that they trained a foundation model themselves and I don't think they necessarily wrote a massive web scraper.
58:50
So I feel like they might be sitting on top of a few APIs that might be renegotiated if all of a sudden Apple's the buyer on the other side.
58:58
So Google search or Bing, I think Bing also had for a long time an API where you could search the web using Bing and resell that as a product.
59:09
But if Apple's the buyer, it's going to be a different conversation with Microsoft, right?
59:17
So they use a number of different they have their sonar family of models.
59:18
Those are perplexities inhouse models.
59:21
Then they have R1776 which was a Deep Seek.
59:26
Then they have a bunch of different third party models that they use OpenAI anthropic XAI.
59:30
So they're they're they're routing to a bunch of different um but they say the default model is optimized for speed and web browsing delivering fast relevant answers.
59:40
So yeah, complexity has been solid.
59:42
I I I I use it once a day.
59:42
I don't know if I at least once a day.
59:48
I don't think I don't know if I'd use it if I wasn't um running uh the show, but uh I get value from it dayto-day. Yep.
59:56
Um I I'm not sure if it'll happen.
1:00:00
I mean, it certainly makes sense.
1:00:01
I posted over the uh um over the weekend that uh Siri was an acquisition.
1:00:09
And so even though Apple has this culture of let's never um let's never acquire anything or let's never um uh let's build everything in house.
1:00:23
Everything needs the Apple polish.
1:00:25
They do have a lineage of acquisition although Siri was a much smaller acquisition much earlier 200 million and and I think Siri had been around for like a couple years kind of similar and if you think about what a I mean it's with 100 times 200 million in 2010 it's a hundred times as expensive uh it is it is a big big deal but uh still um it's uh you know it could it could happen.
1:00:50
Um well in more important news the allin All-In podcast released their new tequila brand over this weekend in LA.
1:00:59
Uh there was quite a lot of push back, but I thought the bottle was uh quite unique and uh I would be down stack of poker chips.
1:01:09
I would want to sample it as well.
1:01:11
Also, people were saying, "Oh, this is so out of character."
1:01:14
Uh but Elon Musk has Tesla tequila and Donald Trump has Trump tequila apparently.
1:01:19
And so um or liquor brands.
1:01:22
I guess Trump has a liquor brand.
1:01:23
And so this is this is a proven proven strategy.
1:01:26
Um anyway, we have our first guest of the show, our second guest technically since we already had that call-in. Uh the CEO of Clara. Welcome to the stream. How are you? What's going on? Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me.
1:01:37
I just realized the light in here is very very odd, but I hope this is fine. I think you look great. You're good. You're good. Great. Uh thank you so much.
1:01:44
I imagine you had to stay up late for this, so we always appreciate it when someone can do that.
1:01:49
Um uh would you mind getting last man in the office?
1:01:51
It looks like leading by example. Exactly.
1:01:55
This is what your team said.
1:01:57
There's some more people here than me. Yeah.
1:01:59
You No, no, your team said this about you.
1:02:00
They said that you're you're you're obsessed with artificial intelligence right now.
1:02:03
Obsessed with digging in the weeds, tinkering with stuff.
1:02:06
Uh probably goes back to the the early history of the company.
1:02:08
Maybe that'd be a good place to start.
1:02:10
Uh h how did you actually like what was the inciting element or the inciting incident that led you to start the company? Wow.
1:02:18
Well, so as you may know, I've been at this for uh longer than many others.
1:02:25
So I'm at the 20th year of this venture. An overnight success. Overnight success.
1:02:30
We love an overnight success. It's been easy. Exactly.
1:02:32
U But I was 23 back then, so I'm not that old yet. Um 23.
1:02:39
But did you ever have a real job? What?
1:02:41
Did you ever have a real job or did you go straight into entrepreneurship? I had many jobs. I had many jobs.
1:02:44
I uh you know I started working when I was a 15year-old at Burger King. Nice. Flipping burgers. That's great.
1:02:50
Uh were you any but were you were you any good? Uh flipping burgers. Yeah.
1:02:56
I think it was like we actually had a competition for like making war who warpers really fast with quality with quality.
1:03:01
I think I I think I scored pretty well. Good.
1:03:04
So yeah, walk me through history of greatness.
1:03:09
Uh so 15 you're flipping burgers.
1:03:11
23, you're starting a a massive tech company that would go on a 20-y year run.
1:03:17
Uh what happened in between? Uh very shortly.
1:03:20
Well, first look, you know, for whatever reason, I always dreamt to be an entrepreneur.
1:03:24
Kind of odd thing to do as a kid.
1:03:25
My my father really wanted me to be a doctor, but I was inspired by Richard Branson and Ingva Campra, the founder of IKEA and stuff. Yeah.
1:03:32
And I went to business school. Bad idea.
1:03:34
I should have learned to code the first thing I did, but that was a bad idea.
1:03:37
But anyways, um and then you know after a few years of just like testing a lot of different jobs, I ended up by very odd story going around the world without flying coming back too late to continue my university studies and as a consequence ending up as a sales guy at a factoring firm that was doing like account receivables.
1:03:59
Last thing in the world I ever thought I would work with. Yeah.
1:04:03
And at that point of time realized there was a lot of these very small newcomer e-commerce companies that were selling stuff online and they needed a better payment solution because their customers didn't trust them.
1:04:13
Didn't trust that they would ship.
1:04:15
So they preferred the idea of buy now pay later where you would first receive the product and then kind of pay for it once you had it.
1:04:21
And that was pretty much the beginning of Clona. That makes sense. Yeah, it's awesome.
1:04:28
Um uh yeah, walk me through, uh the the more recent developments.
1:04:31
How big is the company today?
1:04:36
Um so we're about 100 million users worldwide. Mhm.
1:04:39
Uh we do about a hundred billion dollars worth of payments volume annually.
1:04:44
Uh there's about half a million merchants, but a lot of them are really large.
1:04:48
So there's like Nike, Macy's, Sephora, uh Walmart nowadays.
1:04:52
And um and yeah, what else on on number of employees about 3,000 people? Yeah. Wow. Yeah.
1:05:00
What was the uh what was the initial go to market?
1:05:02
I seem to remember um there were specific dynamics in Europe around uh cash on delivery being a unique kind of vector into growth.
1:05:11
Can you walk me through kind of like um what the early go to market was and how um and and it like it seems like you almost like leapfrogged the technology curve a little bit.
1:05:26
little bit. Well, the truth is funny enough even in the US if you look at the beginning of credit bureaus they actually a lot of them started as mail order companies where the first credit was provided actually by you shipping a product and asking for cash on delivery
1:05:43
and then the third time you shipped to that same address you would say well this customer seems to have money every time I ship to them so I'm going to provide them a small credit credit line that was actually the beginning of a lot of credit bureaus even in the US back in the early 20th century. So, and kind of
1:05:56
So, and kind of same thing happened across Europe, across the US.
1:06:00
So, the idea of doing like cash on delivery and then turning that into credit line based on the performance of that customer always having cash at hand when they were buying those product or paying for those products that they ordered at that point of time mail order catalog orders, right?
1:06:13
Um that that actually worked.
1:06:13
So, in the end to us when online came along, most people were offering debit card payments.
1:06:21
And the problem with debit card payments is the customer ships money and then maybe receives what was on that picture that they ordered.
1:06:25
And so basically offering credit uh not necessarily for the lend for purpose of lending but more for that kind of security of getting and touching the product before you paid for it made a lot of sense especially in markets where credit cards were not as prevalent as they were in the US. Right. Yeah.
1:06:41
What was the uh like as you were looking at the global map of expansion?
1:06:46
Uh what what what informed like where you go next?
1:06:53
Like like walk me through the different markets that you that you had at the top of the list and how you chose to kind of rank those as you expanded the How soon did you know the American consumer was undefeated and you had to be you had to had you had to be here.
1:07:08
That took a long like stuff. Yeah. We like to buy stuff. Exactly.
1:07:12
funny enough took a lot of years before we realized you mark.
1:07:13
I mean first and foremost like when we started you have to remember at that point of time there was one one globally successful European tech startup and that was Skype. That was it.
1:07:24
Like Skype was the thing.
1:07:27
Everything else had been launched out of Silicon Valley.
1:07:29
There was no real European tech success of that size that had like global consumer you know recognition right and hence to us it was like okay where are we going to go from Sweden?
1:07:40
Let's go to the massive market called Finland that is half the size of Sweden because it's very close and we kind of know what it means, right?
1:07:48
So, we kind of started with expansion in the Nordics, then went to like Germany which was a huge thing for us.
1:07:54
Figure that out and then went to UK and we ever we always thought that we never like figured out how are we going to come into the US market because credit cards are so prevalent.
1:08:02
But the funny thing that we hadn't realized was due to the financial crisis in '07, uh there was a lot of regulation introduced that made it much harder to get a credit card.
1:08:12
One thing that kind of sounds sane is that credit card companies couldn't advertise in campuses anymore, which is one of their like most common places to sign up credit card holders really.
1:08:20
And so there was a lot of that regulation.
1:08:24
So it meant that between 2010 and 20, debit cards in the US grew like a credit cards volume grew about 2x, debit card volume grew 10x, right?
1:08:32
And so actually rather than us figuring out how to be successful in the US, it was the other way around.
1:08:41
way around. the US market became more like the European markets with much higher debit card penetration where buy now pay later and the kind of products that we offered became much more relevant suddenly for this new uh consumers that didn't have credit cards to the same extent or didn't have as
1:08:55
much credit limit as they used to have historically right yeah what was the the roll out like in Finland Germany the UK the US um from a regulatory perspective do you have to get like banking licenses there approval is it mostly like regulatory or are you more focused on engineering challenges, setting up servers, localization, all of them. All All of the above. All of the above.
1:09:16
But I think from a regulatory perspective, um, we quickly identified that it would be a benefit to be fully licensed over time.
1:09:25
So about 10 years ago, we did get our bank license and we were fortunate that EU had implemented legislation that meant that you could take your eur uh Swedish bank license and passport it across all the European countries. Right?
1:09:37
So we run on the on the Swedish bank license, but it's applicable for all and it included UK up until Brexit, right? So yeah.
1:09:42
Um so that worked um for a long period of time, but obviously technology was an important challenge for us. Yeah. As well.
1:09:48
What are the knock-on effects of having a bank license?
1:09:52
Uh I I I talk to fintech founders all the time where they it feels like they're in the money moving business, but then they you find out they have all this float and they're making a ton of money on on treasury bills or something like that.
1:10:03
Is there an aspect of your business where uh you can actually drive more profit and bottom line on the basis of having that bank license or is that less relevant and then I want to go from there into stable coins and what's going on uh and how that might be changing the market.
1:10:22
So I think that the in our case what you're referencing is kind of funny enough something we have underutilized the clona which is the ability to generate the deposits and kind of earn interest of those deposits. Right. Yeah, funny enough.
1:10:34
And that's something we're addressing right now where we're introducing more products and services in that area.
1:10:40
Um, but where the big advantage for us was, if you look at like the history over those 20 years of a lot of fintexs who were credit providers, a lot of them offloaded their balance sheet and did so effectively up until at some point of time something went wrong in the underwriting model and it turned out that the losses were higher than they expected.
1:11:02
At which point of time the people that had taken on their balance sheets realized that they wanted to shift the liability back to the fintech but the fintech was not capital-wise equipped to take that on meaning that like their valuations either collapsed or the whole thing went bankrupt. Mhm.
1:11:19
So, and it's happened over and over again if you look at a lot of the like fintex over the last 20 years.
1:11:23
In our case, the benefit of having deposits is we are a bank.
1:11:28
We're fairly capitalized as a bank.
1:11:29
We need to hold the same capital that, you know, any large bank needs to do in in comparison to our balance sheet.
1:11:35
And it means that we're much better equipped.
1:11:37
Like even if our losses go up and down or whatever, it doesn't change the sentiment of our balance sheet.
1:11:43
Doesn't mean that we can dry up funding.
1:11:45
We're not dependent on the funding in the market.
1:11:47
the whole the whole thing that went down in 07, right, which was the problem.
1:11:50
We're basically we only have deposits and that are insured by the government and and so forth, right?
1:11:55
So, it gives us a much more stable way of funding funding the bank basically.
1:11:59
Then on stable coins, is there any benefit to you there?
1:12:01
We've heard stories about lower fees and faster payments and obviously there's a massive, you know, the frequency of payments across the Clarin network is massive.
1:12:12
Uh are you looking at it?
1:12:12
Have you already looked at it?
1:12:14
What's your takeaway on on stable coins or uh the uh the genius act that is seems on the customer?
1:12:22
We've had fintech CEOs on the show that have said actually traditional banking rails can be pretty awesome if you utilize them properly.
1:12:28
you utilize them properly. So curious how what your I think that the I have been one of the crypto skeptics for a long period of time and um and the reason for that is when like I started playing around with this stuff in 10 years ago I felt that you know I always ask myself like how's this technology
1:12:43
going to make my mom's life better like how is it going to make our products and our customers experience better and I didn't really see any any benefits of the technology apart from the fact like people have been speculating that it's an interesting asset an alternative asset to hold right like Bitcoin or whatever. Um but then I gave it a second chance, a
1:12:59
Um but then I gave it a second chance, a second look now one about a year ago started looking at the next generation of stable coin implications and implementations and I very much agree with the fact that like now the technology is showing strong promise both in its speed in its cost uh etc etc versus the traditional bank rates
1:13:18
especially especially obviously in international transfers h in corridors that are more like you know you're moving mainly from like UK to US you're probably not going to make that big of a But if you're moving money from, you know, Brazil to, let's say, Greece, uh, oh, sorry, that was a Euro country. Stupid idea, a stupid suggestion, but
1:13:35
Stupid idea, a stupid suggestion, but another one which, uh, with a smaller currency, you're going to have a a very real benefit of it, right?
1:13:41
So, I think that stable coins definitely are going to be a major thing.
1:13:44
I think also like crypto is here to stay and the bitcoins of the world are here to stay as assets, right, that people find are interesting assets in their portfolio.
1:13:52
So, I don't think that's going to change either anytime soon.
1:13:54
Yeah, I'm always interested in in where the value will acrue with these technological shifts.
1:14:01
Specifically, like with stable coins, you can imagine if you're going from two-day settlement to instant settlement.
1:14:07
Well, if the customer would accept one day settlement, all of a sudden you have one day of float that's going to sit there that you could kind of keep as your own margin and maybe put in T bills and maybe it gets to be a big number.
1:14:20
And so I've been I' I've been kind of trying to understand their like when there time is money and when you know when time decreases and and systems get faster you can pass all of that along.
1:14:32
You can pass half of it along um and and and there's different things that different companies can do um based on the consumer practice.
1:14:39
I I think you're totally right.
1:14:41
That also means that in in in some degree which is something I tell my investors right it's a race to the bottom like this payments industry has had a you know combined revenue globally addressable market of like $2 trillion or whatever it's not going to stay that way.
1:14:57
There's no there's no real good reason why it's more costly to send money than send an email, right?
1:15:02
There's a little bit more risk involved.
1:15:04
risk involved. there's a little bit more like you know security involved but in essence you're just like shifting data between two accounts and so like in in some to some degree that like that those kind of solutions will drive and that also means that the revenue generated
1:15:18
from these services will be significantly lower than it is today right what's your broad uh not not to go too broad but what's I'm curious to get your broad market outlook right now you have this interesting view into consumers companies all over the world it's It's a very interesting time right now. We have geopolitical instability.
1:15:35
We have geopolitical instability.
1:15:38
We have, you know, and and effectively war.
1:15:40
We have uh tariffs, trade wars, all happening at once.
1:15:43
Um yet at the same time, you know, we've seen Circle Public and is now trading higher, I guess, higher than than Coinbase, you know.
1:15:52
So, it seems like the the general excitement around um capital marches on.
1:15:57
Yeah, capital is marching on.
1:16:00
But but yeah, how are how are you thinking about uh markets broadly from your view?
1:16:08
To me, um from my perspective because of kind of the deep um interest that I've taken into AI and tried to understand the implications on how to apply the technology.
1:16:18
I am very much convinced that it will have implications on white collar jobs.
1:16:22
on white collar jobs. Effectively you can have like economical swings that you know recession non-recession it may you know higher inflation higher cost pressure and so forth may have some implications for consumers sentiment of spending you know I like I'm going to spend a bit more I'm going to spend a little bit less and so forth but the but the true life-changing moment that affects people's true ability to pay
1:16:45
back right is to a large degree uh loss of jobs right if you if you lose your job then it severely impacts your ability to do So I think that the key question now is to what degree we're going to see an acceleration of loss of
1:16:59
jobs among white collar uh people which in itself then potentially leads to a recession and less spending in that group of people which is obviously a group of people that have had a lot of money. Yeah. Um, so I think that's the Yeah.
1:17:09
Um, so I think that's the area that I'm like mostly because the tariffs so far obviously have been announced and kind of changed and then announced again and changed and so forth.
1:17:19
And now it almost feels like if I look at our merchants when the first tariffs were announced on Labor Day, they really did adjust their marketing spending.
1:17:26
We saw changes in the transaction volumes.
1:17:28
We saw for example some of the larger Chinese companies that we work with would shift their marketing spend from US to Europe and would try to offset more of their inventory in the European market as opposed to the US market etc.
1:17:39
But as now also like there's been more and more like turbulence around these things people start also discounting it saying like yeah it was announced this week but who knows what's going to happen next week and so we're not going to draw too early conclusions from this.
1:17:52
we're not going to change, you know, the business of what we're doing until we know it's for real, right?
1:17:57
And until it's actually going to happen.
1:17:59
So, I don't actually see currently in the trends the direct implications of the tariffs themselves in our business.
1:18:05
But, and I'm more just like trying to second guess if I'm going to see a major change in the uh in job.
1:18:14
and what are you trying the other thing is you're kind of hedged in some way and that that I think people would be more likely to use CLA if they have if if they you know uh in in some ways have reduced spending capacity or or you know you know more more likely to leverage a product.
1:18:31
I'm curious just getting getting you know more specific around this what is your up updated hiring strategy throughout the the rest of this year and next year?
1:18:40
what what are you um you know hiring what areas have you are you hiring in or or kind of shifting away from?
1:18:46
away from? So we um about almost now two years ago um after experimenting with Chachet and so forth for a few months, our conclusion was that this will lead um this will change our ability to get more done with less people and that we
1:19:04
believed that in an AI world, revenue per employee will be a very key metric because the higher revenue you have per employee, uh the more profit you make per employee means that you can spend more on marketing, means you can acquire more customers, which you can scale more. So if you have a low revenue per
1:19:18
So if you have a low revenue per customer, you'll be less competitive basically.
1:19:21
And so uh for us the question then was how do we catch those efficiency gains?
1:19:26
And so we decided to stop hiring about 2 years ago.
1:19:29
At that point of time we were about 5,500 people.
1:19:33
And since then we shrank to about 3,000 employees that we are currently which is basically through natural attrition.
1:19:38
Uh because you know in a tech company about 20% will leave on an annual basis voluntarily because they're going for other jobs, other opportunities.
1:19:46
And so by just being very strict in not rehiring, uh we have been able to shrink down the company and and and continue to do so.
1:19:54
Now, we've hired a little bit.
1:19:54
Doesn't mean that we haven't hired at all.
1:19:55
We've hired in some areas and so forth, but if you look at the net, um you can see that we've shrank from about 5,500 to 3,000.
1:20:04
And we uh and then what we also done is internally we've been very honest and open about this and we've communicated to our employees that um what's going to happen is the gains because obviously this means our labor cost is shrinking uh while our revenue actually has been
1:20:18
growing right so revenue as a consequence of that our revenue currently went from about 400k up uh to about over a million now and which is kind of equivalent to where Goldman Sachs is now next yeah thanks next step is um is kind of you know Apple Netflix being $2 million. I sometimes joke
1:20:33
I sometimes joke because like Only Fans is at like $30 million for Yeah. Don't go there.
1:20:37
That's Don't look at Tether.
1:20:41
Don't look at Te te Tether will have you looking at uh net income per employee. Yeah, exactly.
1:20:47
So, I'm not sure that's a great the comparison you want to have.
1:20:49
The the thing is that like um the anyway so we are continuing down that path and and the point is that um uh what we've communicated internally however is that as the total labor cost shrinks um we are reinvesting that in an acceleration of compensation for our existing employees.
1:21:07
So as they participate in the efficiency gains we have been able to accelerate both equity and cash compensation at CLA to our existing employees more than we had in previous years.
1:21:17
And that's kind of a way for them to share the benefits with the shareholders of the efficiency gains that this creates. Right.
1:21:23
So if you're a new if you're if you're a new grad and you want to get a job at CLA and make a career out of it, maybe be there for 20 years and earn a lot of stock and cash over come for your job. Come for your job.
1:21:37
Uh what should a new grad do?
1:21:40
Should they learn prompt engineering?
1:21:42
Should they learn to vibe code or program?
1:21:44
or should they be focused all on networking and management skills and people skills and the things that the robots seem to be mediocre at?
1:21:51
I think very clearly is there's one area where we have not reduced um number of people at all and that's sales.
1:21:59
In our case, I mean like B2B enterprise sales.
1:22:02
Um so we have people locally on the ground across the world in over 50 offices.
1:22:07
you know, whether they sit in in China next to to to Shien and Tik Tok and so forth or whether they sit in Portland next to Nike or whether they are in, you know, uh somewhere on the east coast or in parts of Europe.
1:22:19
Um and those obviously there's no like immediate expectations that this those are affected by this, right?
1:22:27
Rather the opposite like that human connection in in customer relationship is super important.
1:22:30
I've never I've never seen a a Chad GPT have a power lunch and a steak dinner.
1:22:38
Yeah, it's impossible till we get better humanoids.
1:22:43
Um, but on the rest of jobs actually it's been quite interesting because for a period of time now we said okay let's stop hiring all other competences than engineering.
1:22:50
So if you look at that 5,500 of them 1,500 were engineers.
1:22:56
Today of the 3,000 1,500 are engineers.
1:22:59
So actually the number of engineers have stepped kept the same while it's all the other like marketing you know analytics um whatever it might be that shrank.
1:23:06
um whatever it might be that shrank. Um now with that said however in the last like months because of the acceleration of uh claude code and and you know and cursor and all these tools what you're seeing is now is a group internally at Lana who are like a few hundred business people that in the last two years have you know learned how to code not necessarily like the most complex things but inspect code understand code
1:23:30
interact with code uh but doing so with having all the business knowledge understanding what the customer wants understanding a lot of things that engineers sometimes have struggled with like they can't articulate uh why we're building the product for what purpose for how it's going to solve customer needs and so forth and they've been maybe sometimes more focused on just like latency or technical implications or you know etc. So I kind of see a
1:23:50
So I kind of see a convergence now of the truly kind of renaissance people that are kind of you know both on both sides that can understand the code but can also understand the business those are the ones that are now truly becoming the most productive in my opinion.
1:24:03
what is your framework for buying AI tools versus building AI tools internally? Right.
1:24:12
So we we have been fairly vocal about the fact that you know as part of acceleration of AI clana one of the first thing that we remember chat GPT came along there was this like hey I can now connect all my PDFs to chatd you know and like and people were like oh that's awesome.
1:24:29
Uh the only problem with that is that like the truth in data modeling and data science has always been like [ __ ] in [ __ ] out, right?
1:24:34
So if you feed it tons of like internal stuff that is contradicting, inconsequential, not truthful, whatever, it's just going to get lost, right?
1:24:44
Just like some of our MPs get lost when they start navigating the internal workings of CLA, right?
1:24:50
So so the first thing that we realized we can't silo the data anymore.
1:24:55
We have to have a a common data model.
1:24:58
And that meant that we started removing software as a service uh providers, you know.
1:25:03
So we um we closed down Salesforce, Workday.
1:25:05
Uh I think the next big one that would go is Atlash and Gyra and and and so forth.
1:25:11
Uh but then there's also like a long amount of smaller software as a service vendors that we have utilized.
1:25:17
So actually if you kind of count it in total, there's over 1,500 that we have uh closed down in the last two years.
1:25:23
in the last two years. Now obviously some of them are like super small like some plugin to gyro or whatever like it's not like every one of them is like a tremendously big software as a service application and then we've kind of harmonized and standardized our data
1:25:36
layers so that we have one data that we can then let the LLM interpret and run on top of uh allowing us to uh to do more with less right um so currently there are a few things like we will use 11 labs for voice uh we will use like specific people that are really really proficient. We use a company called Full
1:25:58
We use a company called Full Story that's fantastic to kind of catch user interactions.
1:26:02
So there's some some places where we just found like this software is so strong that there's really no, you know, meaning in like trying to replace it.
1:26:10
But a lot of traditional SAS may have just been a database with, you know, some nice UI and some data and some process logic on top of and that is easier to replicate today.
1:26:22
and and it's not easy, but it's easier.
1:26:25
And the problem is if it's spread out, it's inconsistent.
1:26:27
And we need it to be consistent for both humans and LM to make sense out of it. Well, this is fantastic.
1:26:33
This is super interesting.
1:26:35
I feel like uh we should talk regularly about the the situation with white collar workers and just the advance of AI tooling.
1:26:42
There's so many interesting things where you have uh a unique insight because of your position in the industry.
1:26:48
Last question from from me before we jump.
1:26:50
Do you think uh cookies hurt conversion rates across Europe policies? Yeah.
1:26:58
Just the fact just generally on this topic well well generally half an hour. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
1:27:04
We could spend half an hour but no but generally like the more clicks you need on a website to get to the eventual purchase you know the worse the conversion rate and uh maybe that's why the American consumer is outperforming just purely technicality.
1:27:16
just purely technicality. I think the the challenge of GDPR which is the legislation that led to those that cookie uh sorry [ __ ] show is that um the problem was it it came from a very good principle and idea and that is that we as users should own and control our data
1:27:37
not the companies right and if you think about it when when a few years ago WhatsApp there was some rumors that they have updated the terms of use and now there was so much more privacy infringing and everyone should shift Right now, how many people really shifted to Telegram or whatever? Not Not enough. Right? Why?
1:27:54
Because at the at the center, the way it should have worked is you should have been able to go to WhatsApp with a click of a button, extract all the data, all your contacts, all your messages, and be able to then feed them into Telegram or, you know, Signal or whatever your choice of preference would have been.
1:28:12
preference would have been. that would have been true customer mobility and that was the purpose of GDPR is to allow that customer mobility but because there wasn't the legislation wasn't implemented thoughtfully enough it it that hasn't materialized because in that
1:28:27
world where you had 100% customer mobility the point is if you lost trust in WhatsApp as a provider of your primary chat messages you would have instantly been able to move to something else and the fear of losing all your users in such such a very mobile world where everyone could move would have
1:28:46
forced WhatsApp to be concerned about privacy and not just speak that they are concerned about privacy right so like I think that and that was the original intent but then it was implemented with these cookies which actually creates the opposite which is that like we're just
1:29:03
tired of accepting cookies I don't want to go to new website because then I have to click again on 55 like the people that the people that wanted these kind of laws had the right intentions but the implementations are horrendous and actually cause the opposite which is less customer mobility. People less
1:29:18
People less willing to shift services and try different things and funny enough are hence playing into the hands of the same companies that they were annoyed with for infringing on our privacy because as that creates just like the bigger success of these big tech companies.
1:29:36
full customer mobility, the being able to take your data with you and go wherever you want is the key to creating a better competitive internet where uh companies that actually have to compete on creating more value for you as a customer rather than locking you up and locking your data up and then you know creating models that just uh forces you to use the same thing. Makes a ton of sense. Makes sense. Thank you for joining. It's fantastic. Talk more.
1:30:01
Thank you for an amazing podcast.
1:30:03
Yeah, we'll talk to you soon. We'll talk soon. Bye, Sebastian.
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1:30:17
We have our next guest in the studio already.
1:30:21
We have John Coastal Ventures. What's going on? Welcome to the show. Good to be here. It's great to have you.
1:30:28
I uh we didn't we didn't prepare at all, which is which is the part of the beauty of our show.
1:30:33
But we just we you just come in, you're live, we we'll do it live.
1:30:36
The show is um it's great to have you.
1:30:39
Uh I've got a bunch of questions.
1:30:41
You're always getting spicy on the timeline.
1:30:43
Uh we'll talk through a bunch, but um why don't you introduce yourself, quick background, what you're doing at KOSA, all that good stuff. Yeah. Uh so I'm John.
1:30:52
I'm one of the partners here at KV.
1:30:54
Um I do a lot of technical things.
1:30:57
So um basically anything I've really written code on in the past.
1:30:59
So like data infrastructure, dev tools, a lot of AI stuff from foundation models and the app layer if I really understand what it does, right? Um yeah. Awesome.
1:31:11
Uh let's get right into it.
1:31:11
Uh what did you read what are you reading into the uh news around uh DG potentially going to meta and all that?
1:31:23
Was that a surprise to you?
1:31:23
Uh what what can you talk about there?
1:31:26
Yeah, so it was a big surprise.
1:31:28
actually say like the funny thought that came to mind when I first heard the rumor was like should I be buying meta options because does that mean like Zuck got Ilia, right?
1:31:35
And then that gets announced and Meta just jumps.
1:31:38
Um but like look, it's it's pretty obvious what's going on here is that there's a giant market in AI, right?
1:31:46
OpenAI kind of proves that.
1:31:46
Um the pie is huge and Zuck has a shot on goal and Zuck is not someone that likes to lose shots on goals.
1:31:54
So if he has to pay up to get the best talent that he thinks that can actually compete, he doesn't even have to win.
1:32:00
You don't have to beat OpenAI.
1:32:01
He just has to be number two.
1:32:02
If he can get there, billions of dollars is worth it, right?
1:32:05
So like all of this makes sense when you think of it through the lens of like Facebook is a giant company.
1:32:11
A billion dollars, $5 billion, that's a drop in the bucket if you take on this new market that ends up dominating.
1:32:17
Um and yeah, the last thing he wants to be is like Microsoft and miss phones. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
1:32:24
What do you think about the phone story?
1:32:26
Uh, at one point Facebook was working on a phone and maybe the lesson that Zuck learned is that he should have put more resources into that instead of not try to do it at all.
1:32:36
Um, I'm wondering because there's all these different stories.
1:32:41
VR, he's investing way ahead of adoption.
1:32:44
Uh, Reals, he was a little bit behind, but wound up rolling out a product that I believe produces tons of profit.
1:32:52
And so it was totally worth investing in and taking the shot at uh building out all those data centers to do the recommendation algorithms.
1:32:57
So yeah, I mean what what what other examples do you think we should be pulling from from the from the meta history or do you think that might be relevant here?
1:33:07
Well, I mean there's there's basically two things to know about Meta, right?
1:33:09
Uh one is that they are fantastic fast followers.
1:33:14
They either buy or they copy.
1:33:17
I think like Snapchat is a fantastic example of that where like the stories literally like that was a team that just copied stories and just executed better.
1:33:26
So like if anything Facebook is an execution machine and they are able to pull that off.
1:33:30
And then the second takeaway is Zuck is willing to take bets.
1:33:35
So like I think Oculus uh the acquisition and the whole metaverse is a great example of that. Yeah.
1:33:40
And you don't win all of them, right?
1:33:42
But like I think on the upside he's won more of them in terms of like call it shareholder value than he's lost.
1:33:51
So this is just another one of those. Yeah.
1:33:55
And this one I think he has extremely strong conviction behind more so than you like the fact that AI is already doing real things in the real world that actually are impacting enterprises and impacting real people gives you a significantly higher confidence bar than like the metaverse bet.
1:34:12
totally has to have significantly more confidence here.
1:34:16
I I was talking to like a guy at Windsurf um who like runs their field engineering team and he was like, "Oh, you know, I I talked to this Enterprise and they're like, "We're going to buy like 2500 Windsurf licenses cuz this was fantastic."
1:34:27
And those guy he's like, "Why?
1:34:29
Why don't you buy 5,000 cuz like you have 5,000 engineers."
1:34:31
And he's like, "Yeah, we're not going to have 5,000 engineers because of Windsurf.
1:34:35
We're going to have 2,500 engineers."
1:34:36
Like it's actually doing real things. Yeah. Yeah.
1:34:38
how how can Meta benefit broadly from AI, not in the just found in the foundation model game or image generation or things like that.
1:34:47
You know, we we've talked about um just just getting slightly better at AI across the entire organization can have tremendous benefits on just improving delivery of ads and these sort of like basic things.
1:35:02
You were working on ML at Facebook back in the day, so I'm sure you have some some strong insights.
1:35:06
Well, so I I think like there's a few layers here.
1:35:09
Um, if you start from the product level, the obvious is that there's new products that are going to be built, right?
1:35:16
Um, there's the whole like Joan IVive and um, OpenAI thing, right?
1:35:22
And that's some kind of hardware thing we're all guessing.
1:35:27
Uh, that's probably a new product.
1:35:29
And if you just take the lens of like if this technology in five years gets significantly better, I have a bunch of hardware products inside of Meta, I can add more.
1:35:38
I have a great research team that knows how to build great hardware.
1:35:41
I know how to handle the supply chain. What can I build?
1:35:43
There's like random upside there in products, right?
1:35:47
If you go back to the current Facebook suite, um there's uh Meta AI is like already doing a lot of this, but you have chat apps, you have Messenger, you have WhatsApp, right?
1:35:57
like you can already do chatting in there.
1:35:59
You have a great llama model.
1:36:01
If you have chat GPT in there, you can just pull them into conversations and already add value.
1:36:04
That increases engagement.
1:36:05
That increases uh ads views, right?
1:36:08
That's that's automatic money there.
1:36:10
Um, and then if you go back to the where I worked like in ads models, there's a you're seeing less of it with generative today mainly because everything is doing attention on sequences and ads like ranking models are a little bit different but people are already applying research to different layers of the ads models and like if you have a 1% uptick in ad score that's like a billion dollar actually it's like a percentage increase in revenue.
1:36:37
So like a billion dollars today in the future 1% is going to be like $10 billion right if Facebook goes tax.
1:36:41
Um, and there's some really interesting research there.
1:36:45
Like I I have an a port code that I invested in actually was a distinguished an at Facebook or at at Meta and like he's kind of got some technology that's a foundation model for ranking where you really just don't need any feature engineering.
1:36:57
And I saw another company this morning which is the same that's like that rips out giant pieces of infrastructure has like automatic increase in adore ranking and you can like fire all your ML engineer.
1:37:08
You probably don't want to do that but like it can fire most of the ML engineers at Facebook. That's gigantic, right?
1:37:12
That kind of stuff is going to happen.
1:37:14
I mean, the time scale is a question, but it's going to happen over time.
1:37:17
Do you think that the UI paradigm around AI's interface with social networking is defined enough?
1:37:23
I I'm thinking of the example of Snapchat and face and Instagram stories.
1:37:29
It was very clear that Evan Spiegel at Snapchat did enough of the experimentation to define how vertical disappearing video and images would be distributed on social networks and then Facebook was able to adapt that and adopt that and bake it into Instagram.
1:37:48
Um, when I think of who what big tech companies, which of the Mag 7 is most closely cheating off of Chat GPT's homework, it feels like it's Gemini and the Gemini app feels much more directly competitive to the Chat GPT app.
1:38:02
Uh, I would be surprised if if Facebook or Meta or or Instagram tries to stuff an entire chat GPT experience into the fifth panel on the hamburger menu.
1:38:17
Um, so I'm wondering like is is there is the story of Meta's AI roll out really just about ad optimization or are we actually going to see it instantiated in different UI and like interaction paradigms?
1:38:28
You're you're going to see it everywhere.
1:38:30
Um, ads is just an obvious place. You got to win, right? Yeah.
1:38:32
Um, but like you're you're going to see it actually someone might stick it in a tab somewhere.
1:38:40
If if I know anything about Facebook, having been there, like if the number goes up and to the right, they'll do it.
1:38:44
So, like, yes, like that that might happen.
1:38:46
Um, but like in like I said, inside of Messenger and WhatsApp, I think there's going to be lots and lots of usage there.
1:38:52
And if you think about it, like people ask this question.
1:38:56
I was actually a little confused at first.
1:38:57
They're like, why did you pay 15 billion for what it sounds like just Alex Wong, right? Like that's one guy.
1:39:03
And then you think about it for a bit and you're like, okay, well, what makes OpenAI open AI?
1:39:06
Like, yes, there's great tech, but Sam, like Sam actually runs that thing and Sam makes it successful.
1:39:13
And then like if you ask anyone in Y even Paul Graham is like okay if you had to pick someone again that's like a top founder inside the YC network that's not Sam who would you pick?
1:39:22
Even Paul Graham says Alex.
1:39:24
So like if you're looking at products inside of Facebook or even outside of Facebook like pick the guy, right? Yep. Yeah.
1:39:30
I mean it it feels like a really really strong like total reset of Meta's AI strategy.
1:39:35
bring in three absolute hitters and turn them loose on whatever the next phase is.
1:39:40
Yan Lun was there for kind of the research like journey and the research part of the AI story.
1:39:49
Now we're in the application story and so go get the managers, right?
1:39:55
How much how much should people read into uh again this is all alleged.
1:39:57
I don't think it's been confirmed that DG is joining Meta yet, but rumored.
1:40:02
How much should people be uh reading into uh you know the CEO of SSI leaving to work at Meta uh and using that to inform their general timelines, right?
1:40:15
you know, if we were on the cusp of developing super intelligence in two years, maybe you wouldn't leave billions of dollars of uh on the table at at a company that had the potential of of of cracking that uh even, you know, getting a billion dollarsish liquid at Meta, it's great.
1:40:35
Uh but still, I I think it's hard not to read into into the move if it happens.
1:40:40
I I I have no no knowledge here.
1:40:44
Like I I don't know Dan well enough to know like what his uh what his kind of thoughts behind this are and what drove the decision, right?
1:40:51
But like I I can say honestly for myself working with Ilia would be like an amazing dream and it's kind of amazing uh to do.
1:40:59
At the same time like SSI is a pure research lab.
1:41:05
So it's not like OpenAI where Sam is over here trying to build products.
1:41:08
It's a pure research lab.
1:41:08
And I don't know if that's what Dan actually finds fun.
1:41:12
and also like what he actually excels at versus like Meta also has a giant research lab, tons of opportunity and like unlimited GPUs and money, right?
1:41:23
So like and distribution to to scale products extremely rapidly and get data to feed them back into the models.
1:41:30
Yeah, it's huge Facebook like distribution.
1:41:32
Everyone underweights that all these gems that come out of Facebook and pitch me the thing they always miss is like no distribution is not trivial.
1:41:39
was trivial for you at Facebook, but it's like not real world. Yeah. Yeah.
1:41:43
Oh, you got a billion people to, you know, click on your new button.
1:41:46
It's like that'll be a lot harder when you're starting from zero.
1:41:49
Um, I want to talk about Apple. Yeah.
1:41:51
I was going to say, do you think Apple will make a big bet here?
1:41:52
There were conversations reporting over.
1:41:55
You're talking about Tim Cook going to Meta to get a pay bump. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
1:41:58
Barely scraping at Apple. He's making 75 under 75. Under 75 a year.
1:42:01
He could probably double that if he went over to Meta. Yeah. Something there.
1:42:05
No, but do you do you do you expect Apple to make a big bet?
1:42:09
uh here there was you know rumors over the weekend of reporting that they had spoken to perplexity and thinking machines.
1:42:14
Do you think they do you think that um they're willing to make a big investment?
1:42:19
You know Siri uh over 10 years ago was 200 million.
1:42:24
That's like a seed an AI seed round for ants these days.
1:42:26
So um I'm curious about it.
1:42:30
Man seed rounds are so expensive.
1:42:35
You're like don't remind me, dude.
1:42:35
I've been priced out of almost every round in AI research I've tried to do this year.
1:42:42
There have been a few exceptions, but like it's not like I'm priced out by a small amount.
1:42:45
It's like 2x my price or whatnot.
1:42:47
How are you even underwriting a AI research bet these days?
1:42:51
Are you pulling out a spreadsheet and building a market size or is it just like based on the vibe of this founder, I'd pay 50, but the price came back at 100.
1:43:01
Like I get to go to the future and then I figure out if they're actually going to work. Yeah.
1:43:06
Um, it's basically you got to underwrite the team and then the opportunity size, right?
1:43:12
That's really all you can do.
1:43:13
I mean, that's basically what we did when we did Sakana.
1:43:15
Um, yeah, I was going to ask about Sakana, the the Japanese language model. They're a cool company.
1:43:21
But that like today it's even worse is like that's really all you can do. Yeah.
1:43:24
And then part of it's like if the price is just not there given the confidence interval, then like got to step back, right? Yeah.
1:43:31
At the same time, I mean, the the the SSI deal, the scale AI deal, like it feels like it's potentially easier than ever to get taken care of as an investor if even if you overpaid and did a seed to 300.
1:43:43
Like the Mag 7 has money to spend on multi-billion dollar acquisitions.
1:43:49
Like a lot of these crazy looking deals might get rolled up, but I don't know how many of these there will be.
1:43:55
Like you have to be you have to be backing a founder like an Alex Wong or like a you know Nat and Dan to to to even have that on the table. Yeah.
1:44:04
If you back a generational entrepreneur, you have a little bit of a safety net, but they have to be um Yeah, it's it's funny.
1:44:12
We we don't typically underwrite to acquisitions, right?
1:44:16
We only under can this company IPO.
1:44:18
And I think most investors do that.
1:44:20
Um if you think about it too, there's like seven of the n seven.
1:44:21
So, like yeah, if not on goal is like not really an investment you're going to put like 200 mil post on, right? Yeah.
1:44:27
Um that that being said, like I made this, it was a half joke uh when we were looking at one of these hot rounds in the seed rounds.
1:44:36
I was like, you know what we should do?
1:44:38
Like we should just invest now and then sell it the next round.
1:44:40
It'd be like the best IR on the planet.
1:44:42
And Venode like looks at me dead and he's it's part of me.
1:44:45
He looks at me dead and he's just like, you'd be a great hedge fund manager. We don't do that here. Yeah, that's great.
1:44:49
I think it's a good strategy for angels to be honest.
1:44:53
Angels are the only the check sizes are lower.
1:44:55
You can get a you can get a quick 10x and sell in three months.
1:44:59
Um would you rather billion spack or a$ 14 billion aqua hire on your on your ROI? Yeah again too.
1:45:04
I got pitched a spack recently.
1:45:10
Wait, why are they pitching you a spa?
1:45:12
They're like, "Hey, got any codes?"
1:45:12
And then he wanted us in the pipe and I was like, "Wow, Spacks now. They're coming back." Wow.
1:45:19
uh h how what's your updated thinking on memory as a lock in and a moat for uh different model providers and app app layer companies you had been um it sounds like you've been pitched by a bunch of like plaid for memory type companies you've been posting about this
1:45:38
what's your kind of framework there I I still don't have a clear view to be honest I I think it is a mode so um you look at all of the the model providers they need different ways to keep their customers coming back to them versus going to other model providers and memory is one way to do it. Um, if you
1:45:56
Um, if you have enough history on the person, you can tailor recommendations, tailor responses, etc. , etc. , right?
1:46:02
You've seen this play isn't like the first time someone's done this like I think the best example of a data mode is effectively Google and search.
1:46:11
It's literally like, oh, I get so much search data that I can do better ads and make a better product and then like no one on the planet can get more search data than me because I am the best.
1:46:21
You all come to me and you give me more data, right?
1:46:24
So, it's kind of the same play.
1:46:24
Um, at the same time, like I see why users want this memory thing of like, oh, I can like shift memory from OpenAI over to like anthropic.
1:46:34
But then like I have the same question of like, well, why would OpenAI let you do that?
1:46:39
Like why is Google gonna let you take their data and give it to like Bing, right?
1:46:42
It's just like not going to happen.
1:46:44
So yeah, I I still don't see what the outside function is where like an anthropic or an open AI would be game for that. Yeah, that makes sense. Yes.
1:46:54
I mean, that seems like the entire dynamic is that it's a good idea, but customers won't demand it.
1:46:59
It's the same it's the same dynamic as uh you know should I be able to we were having this discussion back in like 2010 about like Google's walled garden like can I export all my Google data or all my Facebook data and just give it to Google to get better ads like that potentially but no one's demanding that from the customer side and so it'll never happen from the from the B2B side. Yeah.
1:47:20
Are you worried in general about, you know, there's been a bunch of different app layer companies that are kind of B2B players that are building products that ultimately will just potentially be built into things like the Google suite, right?
1:47:30
And and happen where you can get sort of these sort of fast revenue ramp, something like a calendarly, but then then ultimately just get added as a functionality to core Google Workspace or or Teams functionality. Yeah.
1:47:43
So, this is kind of funny.
1:47:45
funny. This is like um one of those questions that keep come keeps coming up is like started with like GPT rappers where it's like oh my startup is going to die and now it's like all right what's inside the space of these model companies and the answer is like you need some story for defensibility and I
1:48:01
I actually don't understand why this is so hard for people to gro because like this has been the history of technology forever is like yes there's tech tech eventually gets eroded like what stays along that gives you defensibility is it like community is it some kind of open source thing is like workflow lock in. There's like these moes that have
1:48:16
There's like these moes that have existed forever that everyone knows about and for some reason because the word AI is here like entrepreneurs and VCs just like forget about the existing modes.
1:48:26
They're like yeah this is like something different and new and it's like no it's not.
1:48:28
It's just like technology like before, right?
1:48:29
Um, so that that's really the story is like yes, things will get eaten and like yes, you're already I've seen plenty of companies get killed that are shallow GPT rappers and I'm seeing some actually deep like technical notes getting overrun by open eye anthropic and you just need the story on like okay how do I get to something defensible and can I get there in time? Mhm.
1:48:54
What do you think about these new generation of uh startups?
1:49:00
Some of them are in AI where it seems like the efforts of the team are like 90% marketing um and they're really really good at getting a ton of attention and they're being very noisy and Gary Tan was kind of framing it as like maybe they're trying to win in distribution and then kind of hold on to the attention until the AI models pick up.
1:49:28
It feels like it's almost like a necessary evil of the current market and and how fast things move that uh if you want to accelerate revenue and kind of live up to this to the standards of the day, you have to be very very noisy online.
1:49:43
But do you see it as like a counter signal or do you think that there's something that where maybe this is around to stay?
1:49:48
It's not necessarily a counter signal.
1:49:50
like um it it's the same as like when when we pick companies, if you're too early, you're wrong, right?
1:49:57
Same thing for founders here is like some of these founders are fantastic, especially like these like younger founders are fantastic at getting attention. Yeah.
1:50:06
Um and I think historically with any company, any movie, any like pop star, any type of hit, eventually the attention wains, right? Yeah.
1:50:19
So, really, it's a timing thing of like I need the attention to translate into customers.
1:50:26
And if my product's not there, I'm going to see churn. Yeah.
1:50:28
So, how long can I capture attention?
1:50:30
Does that overlap with where my product actually doesn't have churn?
1:50:34
And if I have enough timeline in the middle and I timed it right, then I win. Yep.
1:50:37
And if I don't, then I lose, right? Yep.
1:50:39
It's like pretty much that simple.
1:50:41
It's like it's simple to say.
1:50:42
It's not an easy game to play, but if you play it correctly, you have a giant company. Yeah. Yeah.
1:50:46
the the organic attention getting it seems like a a really great go-to market or like early beach head, but it doesn't feel like a sustainable flywheel versus some of the other permanent gotom market motions or like viral loops that drive, you know, meta to beat earnings every year for decades or something like that.
1:51:06
It can get you into one, right? Exactly. Yeah. It's an opportunity. Yeah.
1:51:10
It gets you the shot on goal where as a lot of entrep a lot of entrepreneurs that are maybe those PMs that say I'm going to get distribution and they just put out a you know press release and they're like where did all the customers go?
1:51:19
I don't have any clicks on my on my button.
1:51:21
So yeah it it is kind of a a necessary thing.
1:51:25
There was a there was a market map a while back showing all the different venture funds investing in all the different labs.
1:51:32
the different labs. you you guys at Kla are open AI purists so passed on I'm sure had the opportunity to invest in all the different you know anthropic xai coher all these different players um talk about kind of that was that always an intentional decision is it let's
1:51:50
stick to ventures roots and have our bet or was it sort of um sort of a a lucky ability to just be in you know the breakout you know winner that's the lab and the consumer app And so, uh, you know, talk through that decision- making process, um, and maybe kind of insights from from different partner meetings. I
1:52:07
I I don't know if we've ever like discussed this intentionally until we kind of came to the like OpenAI is it thing. Mhm.
1:52:16
Um but I I think it happens kind of organically where uh you you work with a founder, you work with a team, you have giant breakthroughs and giant wins, you own enough of a company where like their success is basically your success.
1:52:31
And uh it kind of looks like they're going to win it anyways.
1:52:37
they're going to win it anyways. Like I mean I I we had this back and forth on Twitter I know but like Keith was kind of like yeah I don't think another Transformers based or another like foundation model company's going to be a great VC return outside of acquisitions and it's kind of like yeah how how are
1:52:52
you going to beat OpenAI like it's quite hard they have distribution they have marketing brand they could have a shittier product and they probably still win this right um so like and they have money is actually very important in this game because of GPUs so it's it's both the like we bet on this horse. We love We love this team.
1:53:10
We work very great with them, very closely with them.
1:53:11
There's like symbiotic value here and also like they're probably going to win this. Yeah. Yeah.
1:53:17
Um we'd love to have you.
1:53:19
What are you uh last last question, what are you expecting out of uh are you expecting to see ads in various LLMs, consumer apps this year?
1:53:28
I'm sure you've been pitched people saying, "I'm going to build an ad network for LLMs."
1:53:31
I'm sure you have opinions on that as well.
1:53:36
But what are what are you expecting to see out of the next year?
1:53:37
big question I have is will the average American pay for their favorite LLM 3 years from now?
1:53:45
Uh, and I've been trying to figure that out or will it just sort of um, you know, go closer and closer to free over time? I I don't actually know.
1:53:51
Um, like I I think What do you mean you're you're a VC?
1:53:56
You should know everything.
1:53:56
You should have a crystal ball on your desk.
1:53:59
You know, I I like technology and I think there's many ways to monetize this and people will try all of them.
1:54:04
So, like are there going to be like ads? Yes, people will try it.
1:54:08
I mean, like Arvin over at Perplexity already said he was going to try it, right?
1:54:12
So, we're going to see that at some point. Yeah.
1:54:15
Is it going to be the model that works? Who knows?
1:54:17
Um, but it is like a nice triedand-rue model, right?
1:54:20
So, there's a good probability that it does work for some set of products.
1:54:24
I saw somebody somebody had a pretty viral post last week saying, "I'm so sick of being asked to sign up for different services across the whole internet."
1:54:34
And and then um what's his name at uh Antonio at at Coinbase was like, "I I'll tell you a model uh for this, but you're not going to like it. It's ads."
1:54:43
Um anyways, thank thank you for joining.
1:54:47
Um appreciate all the all the insights and uh welcome back anytime. Yeah, this was fun. We'll talk to you soon. Thanks guys. This was fun. Have a good one. Cheers, John. Bye.
1:54:56
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1:55:15
Uh, we have our next guest in the studio, Tom Mueller from Impulse Space. I'll be right back.
1:55:22
I will uh to handle the intro. Cool. Tom, how are you doing?
1:55:28
Uh we are bringing him in in just a second uh to give you more background on Impulse.
1:55:34
Uh I met Tom Oh, it must have been two and a half years ago.
1:55:37
Uh legend in the uh space community, worked at SpaceX.
1:55:42
uh also a car afficionado who uh engaged with my post about the Kugan test, which of course is the challenge to have a uh humanoid robot step in step into a Dodge Viper ACR and lap the Nurburg Ring in under seven minutes.
1:56:01
It's been done by a human in seven minutes in one second and a few milliseconds.
1:56:05
milliseconds. uh it's an extremely difficult challenge requiring uh physical endurance of the G-forces but also a bunch of dexterity and obviously image processing and I was talking to a bunch of AI folks about how long it will be until humanoids are actually at that
1:56:20
level where they could do something like that and it took I think the consensus was around 45 20 45 something like that anyway Tom great to meet you I don't think it'll take that long will it how long do you think it'll take this is a great question I I don't when you take fear know. Yeah. Yeah. May maybe that's Yeah. Yeah.
1:56:34
May maybe that's a big one. I don't know.
1:56:36
You you've done a lot more laps than I have.
1:56:38
So, please uh don't they haven't had they already shown that fighter aircraft can beat a human in, you know, in dog fights. So, yes.
1:56:47
So, the difference there is that I I'm adding the challenge of the the Dodge Viper ACR must be stock.
1:56:53
And so, the humanoid must operate three pedals and the stick shift and the steering wheel.
1:57:02
And that's a lot more challenging than just plugging into the steering column and, you know, controlling it like you do in a Tesla or Whimo.
1:57:10
Um, and so I think that adds a wrinkle, but I don't know, 2045, 2035, it's clearly going to happen.
1:57:17
But, uh, well, that that's that that that's a good way to say that you're bullish about uh, humanoid robotics. Yeah.
1:57:24
Do you anticipate that humanoid robotics will have an impact on your business in the next decade in terms of maybe manufacturing or something even more narrow scope?
1:57:33
Uh certainly manufacturing.
1:57:36
Um I think I think for manufacturing robotics are developing fast.
1:57:41
But I think you know I I think humans should explore space but but it's really expensive and dangerous to put humans in space.
1:57:46
So if you really want to like you know use the economies of of space I think it's going to take a lot of robotics.
1:57:52
So I'm I'm bullish about robotics.
1:57:54
We got to put put a Nurburg ring on Mars and then ship on the moon, which I'm all about.
1:58:01
Yeah, I would love a track.
1:58:01
Use taxpayer dollars to put a racetrack on Mars. I would love that.
1:58:05
Anyway, sorry, we jump straight into it.
1:58:08
Would you mind kicking us off with an introduction for both of you and a little bit about the company? Yeah, sure. Yeah, I'm Tom Mueller.
1:58:15
I'm the CEO and founder of Impulse Space.
1:58:18
I was one of the founding members of SpaceX uh where I led the development of the propulsion systems for Falcon 9 and and Dragon and a little bit into Starship and left there in 2020 and started Impulse in 2021 and uh we have our four-year anniversary here coming up next month. Congratulations. That's great to hear. It's amazing.
1:58:42
And it's been uh been doing great.
1:58:44
And Eric, would you mind introducing yourself? Yeah, sure. I am Eric Romo.
1:58:48
I'm the president of the company.
1:58:49
I've been with the company for the last two years.
1:58:50
I've known Tom for better part of god Tom 22 years I want to say now 23.
1:58:55
I so I was an early propulsion engineer at SpaceX uh in the very early days and then went did a bunch of uh nonspace non propulsion stuff for a long time and found my way back to Tom a couple years ago. Amazing. Yeah.
1:59:07
Uh I mean as I describe it in kind of uh layman's terms or in terms even a venture capitalist could understand you can get to LEO pretty easily but you need impulse to get to higher orbits.
1:59:17
Is that still kind of the bread and butter of the business?
1:59:21
Am I describing it even remotely accurately? Yeah.
1:59:22
At you know at SpaceX we I think we really um made LEO very accessible lowered the cost made it you know you get you know flights going there you know every other day. Mhm.
1:59:35
So I want to do the same for for everything beyond LEO.
1:59:38
So get make it much easier to get to high energy orbits, to get to the moon, to get to Mars, to get to outer planets, anywhere in space.
1:59:45
Like let's make it much easier, much more affordable, and you know, really start the true space age. Yeah.
1:59:52
When you were at SpaceX, did you have an idea of how valuable LEO would be?
1:59:56
Uh, I think a lot of folks Starlink took them by surprise basically in terms of not just how awesome that service is if you've been on a plane and used it.
2:00:07
Uh, but also the business that was to be built there.
2:00:09
Uh, did that take you by surprise?
2:00:12
And then, uh, is there something that you can use as a concrete example of what is exciting about the higher orbits? Well, yeah.
2:00:21
I I'm old enough to remember the first time we tried to do Leo constellations, you know, back in the late '9s and and actually worked with some companies uh that that tried to do it and you know, it wasn't the right time.
2:00:34
Uh technologies improved a lot, especially lowcost launch, you know, better bandwidth, uh easier to manufacture spacecraft, all the things.
2:00:42
So, I kind of realized it was the right time and when it was, you know, when when SpaceX first started talking about it, it really clicked.
2:00:48
I'm like, "Yeah, we need to do this." Yeah.
2:00:50
Uh and so in terms of the higher orbits um what are I mean obviously going to the moon is very concrete.
2:00:58
Are there specific um obvious business cases or or anything that would be you know inspiring or or immediately relevant that geostationary orbit is still probably the most important orbit because it's it's the 24-hour orbit over the equator.
2:01:16
So you you just point your dish at that and and it's always there in the sky or your antenna.
2:01:22
Um or you can cover the whole you can cover the whole earth with with three satellites. Wow.
2:01:28
So making access much more affordable to that I think is a huge help.
2:01:34
But then I'm I'm you know I've always said I'm I'm really all about a lunar economy starting and and even mining asteroids and things like that.
2:01:42
So those are the those are the things I'm most excited about. Question.
2:01:43
Uh, I'm sure you guys have gotten asked in every single pitch meeting, so I'll ask it.
2:01:50
Uh, why uh do you think this is on SpaceX's roadmap?
2:01:54
Do are you guys partnered with them already?
2:01:57
Do you expect uh do you expect them to want to prioritize this in the future or, you know, what does that kind of uh partnership or competitive dynamic look like?
2:02:07
Lonnie, you cover that one, Eric.
2:02:09
Yeah, I mean they're pretty busy, right?
2:02:11
And so this is the equivalent of the Silicon Valley startup question of like why doesn't Google just do that or Facebook just do that or right they could they could do anything right they're technically amazing company that's shown they can execute on pretty much anything they sink their teeth into.
2:02:22
I think the question is will they um and why where would this be on the priority stack so you know one of our products Helios is really good at getting large payloads to high energy orbits like medium earth orbit and and geostationary orbit.
2:02:34
Um SpaceX can certainly do that with a Falcon Heavy but they've been super vocal about the fact that they would prefer not to.
2:02:39
Um, and there's operational reasons for that and cost reasons for that.
2:02:42
But, um, so this is a space where we think that we can actually help them and other launch providers get to a thing that they're to some degree ignoring right now.
2:02:50
And then on the the small spacecraft, uh, side of things, we we make a small, highly maneuverable vehicle called Mera, which is largely usable for Space Force.
2:02:57
So, we announced some contracts with them late last year and a partnership with Andrew to go to market with with Mera.
2:03:04
Uh, and that's a thing that's pretty far a field from anything that SpaceX is working on today.
2:03:07
um you know that Starlink is awesome but it you know kind of just sits there right as a constellation whereas mirror is designed to move very quickly as its core compensate.
2:03:16
Can you talk about the lunar economy and how you imagine that developing?
2:03:21
Does it start with tourism or scientific exploration?
2:03:24
Do we need an ISS like base that's kind of taxpayer funded on the moon first or do we go straight to mining or helium 3? I remember the movie.
2:03:36
remember the movie. Um, but what what are what like what are the rest uh what is the tech tree look like as we build out the moon as a as a capability possibly all of the above like mining helium 3 certainly could be um a good starting point because it's uh even
2:03:52
right now on earth if you don't flood the market it's on the order of $20 million a kilogram so you can certainly if you can get it on the I don't know how the part of getting it like you got to mine apparently millions of tons of regalith to get it but if you have it there transporting it back is like500 of that cost. So, it's definitely it's it's
2:04:07
So, it's definitely it's it's economically doable assuming that you have you have a you know a can of it.
2:04:10
Um but I think if if if you're doing mega structures or or or massive manufacturing in LEO pretty fast, you'll figure out that it's 23 times roughly uh more efficient to bring mass from the surface of the moon than from the surface of the earth just because the gravity well is so much lower.
2:04:29
Y and I think that's that's when the real use of the resources of the moon will happen just to get to get material to low Earth orbit. Um yeah. Yeah.
2:04:40
I've always thought that the moon was also just a great staging ground for Mars.
2:04:44
You imagine if you're up there, the moon's always facing Earth.
2:04:49
So something goes wrong, you know, the sci-fi version.
2:04:51
Oh, there's a crack in your in your suit.
2:04:55
You can just dive in an escape pod and you're aiming in the right direction.
2:04:58
Whereas Mars, you have to deal with the transfer window.
2:04:59
uh it's a whole different problem and if we can get really good at living on the moon, we're probably going to be able to get good at living on on Mars.
2:05:04
Um I I am interested in kind of these questions about when the one one of the great stories about SpaceX is that it feels like it's a relatively smooth handoff of capability in terms of uh launch capacity from NASA to SpaceX, from the taxpayer to the private sector.
2:05:24
Um, at the same time, I love that NASA put a helicopter on Mars because I can't imagine that would ever happen no matter how crazy the VCs are.
2:05:36
Uh, I don't see that happening and being underwritten against any sort of 10year, 20-year uh, you know, life cycle of return on investment.
2:05:44
And so my question for you is like what type of space projects should we be pushing into the you know the the NASA world, the government funded world, the even the nonprofit world versus what is commercializable today?
2:05:58
Um and do you see both as important going forward that we that we kind of have this, you know, taxpayer funded R&D, the really fringe scientific experiments and then we commercialize thing when they're ready?
2:06:12
Well, I I think two things really that I'd like to see from from NASA mainly um is is answering the big science questions like is there other life out there?
2:06:21
Um and and also let's explore what's out there.
2:06:24
Like I just posted a picture this morning from the the new Vera Rubin uh observatory.
2:06:27
Amazing, you know, just amazing stuff.
2:06:30
They could should continue to do things like that.
2:06:34
And but I think as far as develop, they should develop technology that's that that takes a lot of money to develop that maybe commercial companies aren't going to invest in now.
2:06:42
Like I think the next thing, you know, Jared Isaacman was talking about is is NEP.
2:06:46
And I'm I'm always touting that too is the next step in propulsion.
2:06:50
So rather than than build a giant rocket that competes against people that already build giant rockets, why don't they go develop the next thing, you know, the next the next technology?
2:06:59
I think that's probably the best use of taxpayer money through NASA is to advance science.
2:07:03
How do you think about Oh, sorry.
2:07:05
I was just going to say fundamentally I think NASA needs to figure out if it's a jobs program or if it has goals, right?
2:07:11
I mean, I think that's the that's the thing like SLS made no sense in in the commercial rocket economy.
2:07:16
Maybe it did when it started planning 20 years ago or whatever, but in for the last decade or more, it's made zero sense.
2:07:21
But yet, it's still kind of hanging on because Congress wants to fund jobs in Alabama, which is, you know, maybe a noble purpose, but, you know, is that the purpose of NASA?
2:07:28
I think is the thing that they need to figure out. Yeah.
2:07:30
How do you think about extraterrestrial life?
2:07:34
Uh do you ascribe to the dark forest theory or uh like do you think it's promising?
2:07:41
Do you think, you know, we will have an answer to this in a few years?
2:07:44
Do you think we're getting closer?
2:07:46
What What is your take overall?
2:07:48
I Yeah, we need we need to get we need more information. Definitely.
2:07:53
I I hope it's just life is extremely rare and it's not, you know, some some great filter that's that's still ahead of us. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
2:08:01
That would be a good What are the What are the the kind of upcoming events in the next one to two years in commercial space that you think can be major catalysts for the industry overall that maybe you guys are working on or or that that you want to see from the industry broadly?
2:08:17
Well, something that we're not working on, but something that that SpaceX is developing is Starship.
2:08:21
I I I really started this company realizing that Starship and other, you know, reusable rockets are going to be be bringing massive amounts of cargo to to LEO and it needs to go other places.
2:08:31
So that's was the premise of this company.
2:08:35
So I'm excited about Starship finishing development and becoming a commercial, you know, commercially viable uh spacecraft.
2:08:42
And then well we have really uh you know we have the the mirror that that uh Eric talked about um earlier and NH is really for for government and defense and then we have Helios coming on online here next year.
2:08:54
We're developing it right now which is basically adding a third stage to Falcon 9 and other midsized rockets and that's what it can allow us to get, you know, more easily to to high energy orbits.
2:09:04
So those are the two big things uh for us right now.
2:09:09
super excited about lunar landers, Mars landers, all kinds of cool stuff.
2:09:14
It's going to be awesome.
2:09:14
I was just going to tack on I think you're seeing one big trend is that um Space Force the the rhetoric of uh counterpace or space defense activities has really ramped up in the last 6 months um in the public sphere.
2:09:26
There's not been a lot of investment in in you know sort of space on space defense.
2:09:29
Um but in privately Space Force has been talking about that a lot more.
2:09:33
Um and then they started about six months ago really publicly not coincidentally with the change in administration.
2:09:38
And so the the question I think for companies like ours is you know do dollars follow that rhetoric you know is there increased investment in that sort of thing.
2:09:45
Um and then on the commercial side I think you have an awful lot of operators who are trying to figure out how do they carve out a niche and survive in a post Starlink world.
2:09:51
Um how do they figure out you know what their space is as a commercial compat operator that you know once you have the dominant Starlink player in the market.
2:10:00
Uh I'm interested to hear about the challenges of developing rocketry or or engines at different scales.
2:10:08
Um I've heard this story that one of the reasons the Raptor engine was so successful was that it wasn't a mega project in the sense that you didn't need to bring in a crane necessarily to work on it.
2:10:21
There were more smaller modular pieces. Is that true?
2:10:25
And then I'd love to know um about the challenges of of scaling up and making bigger rockets.
2:10:31
It I was tracking obviously I want Starship to work as soon as possible.
2:10:36
It feels like it's a really really tough challenge and it feels like it's a harder challenge than the Falcon 1 or the Falcon 9 which you know went it did it did crash several times exploded several times.
2:10:48
uh but you know SpaceX is a much more mature uh company and so you would expect that it's not just you know the first time that they're doing it.
2:10:57
It's actually something fundamental about the larger scale engineering that's going on there.
2:11:02
So can you share anything about that?
2:11:05
Well, we've become a lot better at developing rocket engines, you know, over the last, you know, 20 years.
2:11:10
Certainly, um, when when we started SpaceX, there wasn't really, it it wasn't like startups would do rocket.
2:11:17
That's why I had such a hard time hiring people in the early days because nobody believed in it.
2:11:20
And that now there's many teams all over the world that are developing liquid rocket engines.
2:11:24
And it's it's never easy. It's not. it.
2:11:25
Um, but it's it's doable and modern, you know, modern tools are affordable and and available and certainly modern manufacturing techniques like 3D printing is is almost a cheat code for for rocket engines.
2:11:37
Um, but when you're doing something like Raptor, which is extremely high pressure, full flow stage combustion, very advanced engine, the most advanced engine ever, it's just it takes the difficulty to 11.
2:11:49
So, not surprising that there's been setbacks.
2:11:54
Um, also one of the hardest things to do uh in in in launch vehicle recovery is getting back in upper stage.
2:11:59
You know, um, you saw we had pretty good success with Falcon 9 getting back to first stage and certainly the flying the boosters back and land that awesome landing, but second upper stages are coming in with a lot of energy. So, really hard.
2:12:13
Um, they're going to solve it.
2:12:15
Um, it's it's just a matter of time. Yep. Just time.
2:12:18
Well, it is rocket science after all.
2:12:21
You know, I was saying people don't people don't use that phrase.
2:12:24
It's not rocket, you know, this isn't rocket science anymore because we've gotten really good at there's a lot of stuff that is rocket science.
2:12:31
How many times have you heard that? Come on, Tom. It's not rocket science. It is rocket science.
2:12:34
Well, I'm sure you have a lot of rocket science to do.
2:12:38
We'll let you get back to it.
2:12:38
We really appreciate you taking the time to chat with us. This is a lot of fun. Yeah.
2:12:42
Thanks for have a great rest of your day.
2:12:44
Uh next up, we have some breaking news from Truth Social where news breaks. use breaks apparently.
2:12:50
Uh Trump says, "Iran has officially responded to our obliteration of their nuclear facilities with a very weak response which we expected and have very effectively countered.
2:13:01
There have been 14 missiles fired, 13 were knocked down, and one was set free because it was headed in a non-threatening direction.
2:13:07
I am pleased to report that no Americans were harmed and hardly any damage was done.
2:13:13
Most importantly, if they've gotten it all out of their system, gotten it out and there will hopefully be no further hate."
2:13:18
Okay, I want to thank Iran for giving us early notice, which made it possible for no lives to be lost and nobody to be injured.
2:13:27
Perhaps Iran can now proceed to peace and harmony in the region, and I will enthusiastically encourage Israel to do the same.
2:13:33
Thank you for your attention to this matter. That'd be good.
2:13:34
It's a good way to It's a strong way to end your post.
2:13:39
Now, if you want to come across presidential, yes, just bolt on.
2:13:44
Thank you for your attention to this matter. That's great.
2:13:45
Uh well, we have our next guest, Derek Thompson.
2:13:48
the uh the uh author of Abundance in the studio. Welcome to the stream. Great to be here. Thanks, guys.
2:13:55
Congratulations on the being a a businessman now.
2:13:57
You're a businessman now. I'm a businessman. I'm an entrepreneur. I'm the C I'm a CEO. CEO.
2:14:02
I mean, I'm the everything.
2:14:04
You you name whatever piece corporate suite that you want to name. I guess I am that. I'm CTO. I'm COO. There we go. Feels great.
2:14:12
He's about to become a hyper capitalist. Vibe shift. Yeah. Uh yeah.
2:14:17
Talk to us about the move.
2:14:17
Uh what uh I I mean we we're going to go into a bunch of stuff, but give maybe just start with a little bit of background and then the decision to move. Yeah, sure.
2:14:26
So I I I've been running for the Atlantic for 17 years, which is like honestly like freaking disgusting to even contemplate.
2:14:31
I don't Wait, how how old were you when you joined? Uh I want to say four.
2:14:36
I mean much better about myself. Uh the answer is 22.
2:14:39
So I joined in September of 2008. Wow.
2:14:41
After graduating from college, I was like a comm's intern for a while.
2:14:45
Um, I'm currently the comm's intern for my Substack.
2:14:49
So, right back to that old position.
2:14:51
Um, and I wrote for 16 16.
2:14:51
75 years at the Atlantic and it was great.
2:14:58
And the truth is like I've always had like a little bit of wander lust.
2:15:00
I've always felt like I had a bit of an entrepreneurial bone on my body.
2:15:03
There was never a great time to leave because the Atlantic is really a wonderful place to work.
2:15:08
to work. they let you write about in my position in my case about whatever I wanted tech science economics social mysteries and conundrums and finally I just thought you know abundance the book has become a lot of things um it's certainly become something almost
2:15:26
like something that could be a full-time job like if I just wanted to reply to and engage with like the political feedback that would be its own job and part of this was like this is an opportunity to do something on my own to
2:15:39
do something that's really independent, not put the Atlantic in a position where they're like a non-political organization with a writer who's doing some things that are explicitly political, but also like I just kind of wanted to know, and this is what I said
2:15:50
I think in my original essay, um maybe you guys felt like this when you started this um this show, like what does my mind feel like when I wake up in the morning with a new job, a new task for it, right? Like you work at like a maybe
2:16:01
Like you work at like a maybe like a VC, right?
2:16:03
you know, you work at um maybe a private equity firm and like you wake up and like how do you process the world?
2:16:09
You process the world the way it's most remunerative to you at that private equity firm or at that VC.
2:16:13
And when you change your job, you change your mind, right?
2:16:17
New tasks, new questions, new mysteries are unlocked.
2:16:22
And I wanted to do that for myself.
2:16:22
I wanted to like wake up with a new set of questions.
2:16:25
And so that's what I'm doing right now.
2:16:26
Was there a price that could have kept you at the Atlantic?
2:16:28
Many people say everyone has a price, but it feels like legacy media is not set up to retain superstars.
2:16:34
And I imagine, no, look, the Atlantic paid me well and um and the book paid me well.
2:16:41
Um I I'm I'm really lucky uh from that standpoint.
2:16:45
There's not really a number, right?
2:16:47
Like you know, $1 billion.
2:16:47
Okay, now suddenly you're talking about something completely silly.
2:16:51
Like I wanted the the freedom, the freedom to say, "All right, like I'm 39 years old, right?
2:17:00
If I stay for another 11 years, I'm 50 years old."
2:17:02
Like now I'm basically on the other side of the hill.
2:17:06
At some point, you want to like be in your sort of in your your electric prime.
2:17:10
Be like, what what is my mind like?
2:17:12
like? what is my life like when I give myself an entirely new task of starting my own company of thinking about the world from the perspective of I'm writing for myself not writing for this august institution so no I I don't think there was a number um and I also think it's important to say like the Atlantic
2:17:27
is one of these places that as much as independent media is growing and obviously I think that's great there are a couple empires that are growing too the times is growing like crazy the Atlantic is hiring like crazy they pay their writers over overall I think quite well so this was not really about about money at all. This was about um being in
2:17:43
This was about um being in a fortunate position to take uh to take a risk that had nothing to do with money. Yeah.
2:17:47
If you just cared about money, you'd become an AI researcher and you join Meta, get 100 million.
2:17:50
Well, we got to pitch him on private equity because he sounds like he doesn't want to be private equity guy, but I think the scale the Substack, start acquiring, rolling up other other independent journalism. Could happen.
2:18:01
Uh I I I do want to talk about uh advice from Ezra about this.
2:18:06
Obviously, you wrote a book with him.
2:18:07
He's been at the New York Times.
2:18:09
He's been started his own thing.
2:18:11
What was his advice to you as you kind of stepped out in this next uh next?
2:18:15
Yeah, that's interesting question.
2:18:15
No, no one's asked me that that question before.
2:18:17
So, I told Ezra three days before the book came out.
2:18:21
Uh we had just done here I'll set the scene for you.
2:18:24
We had just done um Freedakaria show and it was one of the first interviews that we did together and we were in the Hut.
2:18:30
You guys are based in San Francisco. We're in LA calling. You're in LA. Okay, cool.
2:18:33
So, so in New York, Hudson Yards is that like enormous like skyscraper mall, right?
2:18:37
and we go like get some food and we get some lunch and um we sit down and I say, "Hey, by the way, just so you know, I'm starting to think a little bit about doing something independent."
2:18:45
Um this was before Abundance became what it was.
2:18:49
This was before a single book had been officially sold.
2:18:51
I said, "I I kind of think I want to do something on my own."
2:18:55
And he said, "You know why?
2:18:55
Like The Atlantic's a wonderful perch."
2:18:56
And I honestly told him I told him what I told you.
2:19:00
I was like like the job of like being a content creator, right?
2:19:04
It's a it's a weird and wonderful job.
2:19:06
Your job is to wake up in the morning and think, what do other people want from me that lives in here that I can put out here and give to them?
2:19:14
It's a really weird and wonderful job.
2:19:16
And I feel like that work requires a certain amount of churn and experimentation.
2:19:23
If you're stuck somewhere, and I didn't feel stuck at the Atlantic, but I was there for 17 years.
2:19:29
If you're in one place for 17 years, there's a certain amount of experimentation that you're essentially choosing to block yourself out of. Yeah. Right.
2:19:36
And so I I told Tim like I really wanted to to experience like you know what what different kinds of questions what different kinds of writing styles and podcasting styles maybe eventually like you know um video podcasting styles would would eventually be unlocked by going independent.
2:19:48
I think that's a lot of the the appeal of Substack for people for people in a certain place or or Beehive or some of these other places.
2:19:55
Patreon is really getting into the game here as well.
2:19:57
Um it's this opportunity to be like all right what is it what does it feel like to be a content creator for myself?
2:20:03
I'm not answering to anybody else and I'm taking on all of the responsibility and the stress that comes with, you know, being my own boss.
2:20:11
Um, I feel like that's an experiment that more people should run on themselves.
2:20:14
What about the timing of the launch?
2:20:17
Um, you always hear about the big bump that comes from like a big podcast appearance or something like that.
2:20:23
Is there a world where you think you should have been doing email capture in the leadup to the book so when the you did the interviews for the book, people could just go subscribe immediately? Is this the ideal time?
2:20:32
It seems like it's it's really well timed because the like the book has really really done extremely well and so you're you're in this like capturing moment.
2:20:41
It would have been probably much riskier to launch this a year from now, but uh did that factor into it?
2:20:48
Did you did you think about doing it before or later?
2:20:51
How'd you land on this time?
2:20:51
Look, here's here's here's a framework that I that I thought about.
2:20:54
It's not like the only framework that in my head except for one.
2:20:59
Obviously, having a number one New York Times bestselling book is a good opportunity to do something new because a certain number of people are already paying attention to like there's a certain amount of obviousness there that I don't want to be like um cynical or or conceited or vain, but I think it's just flatly true.
2:21:16
And there was a certain calculation that was like if I do want to do this in the next 10 years, does it really make sense to think am I going to have another another number one bestselling book in 5 years?
2:21:25
Like almost certainly not.
2:21:27
Yeah, in 10 years not like it is an incredibly fortunate and frankly just strange thing.
2:21:32
I mean I don't know there's no reason for you to know this.
2:21:37
Our book did not hit number one on week one.
2:21:38
It didn't hit number one on week two or three or four.
2:21:41
It hit number one on week five.
2:21:43
Like a a discourse built around the book. Yeah.
2:21:48
Allowed it to sort of like hover in the two to three range and then spike to number one in a way that my book agent said she's never seen this before. Like no book.
2:21:55
She said, she said, "I've had a lot of books hit number one, none for the first time in week five."
2:21:59
So, it was a really original, not original, really maybe unique experience in terms of the way that it hit the discourse, popularity of the demograph. Yeah.
2:22:08
Was that a product of like the the the podcast appearance strategy?
2:22:11
I saw Ezra going and you both of you guys going on like a really wide swath of podcasts and and bringing the message to places.
2:22:19
And I think a lot of authors when they launch, they think like, I'm going to do like five big things on week one and then like uh you know, I'm done.
2:22:27
But it it felt like you were kind of taking the message to all these different pockets of the internet and really capitalizing over a long time.
2:22:37
And it didn't feel like it was necessarily like, okay, you got 50% of the audience in week one and then 10% and then 10% and then 10%.
2:22:42
It felt more like you're having different frames on the same conversation again and again and actually building that momentum. Yes.
2:22:51
So if we were doing like book publishing economics 101, right? Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
2:22:56
Um the book publisher controls very little distribution themselves, right?
2:23:02
There's very few channels of exposure the book publisher controls themselves, right?
2:23:05
Even if you love reading non-fiction, my guess is that you aren't going to randomhouse.
2:23:09
com to check out their non-fiction titles every Tuesday when the new non-fiction titles come out, right? What do you check?
2:23:16
The New York Times book review, um, podcasts that you listen to, other sites that review books, right?
2:23:21
Um, TV interviews, those are the channels of exposure.
2:23:25
When you're a book author, you're basically in a position of begging.
2:23:28
You're in a you you go to Fred Zakar and you say, "Please, please, can you talk to me about this book?"
2:23:33
And you go to Barry Weiss and you say, "Please, can you talk to me?"
2:23:36
And you go to the far-left podcast, you say, "Please."
2:23:37
And you go to the right-wing podcast and you say, "Um, you know, Ben Shapiro, please."
2:23:42
You're asking, "Please, please, please," of everybody and their assistants and the assistants producers and the producers assistants, you're begging the entire world. Yeah.
2:23:49
Made this and almost every author is doing that.
2:23:53
Every author is in this position of begging because often other people control channels of distribution that they don't.
2:23:58
Now, in Ezra's case, he he arguably has with the Ezra Klein show like the the medium of exposure that is most successful for launching books.
2:24:07
So, that's unique experience for me and my co-author. That said, two things. one.
2:24:13
Um, I would guess that if you really looked into the numbers, what sold this book early on, despite the impression that you gave that this book was on a lot of different podcasts, what sells books is still television.
2:24:27
And the reason why is not because television is bigger than podcasts.
2:24:32
In a weird way, it's because television is shorter and it's a worse product.
2:24:36
But a worse product gives you a better amuse for the book.
2:24:39
If I talk to Lex Freedman for 4 hours about abundance, exactly how many more hours do you want to spend inside of abundance?
2:24:50
Like that's a great point.
2:24:53
Talk to Fred Zakaria for 10 minutes about the book.
2:24:56
It's this little amuse bouch that makes enough people think oo that sounds exactly what I want.
2:25:00
The future Democratic Party, the future of liberalism.
2:25:03
So my feeling is that while podcasts are important because in a weird way the product of a book is even more the conversation about the book than the product than the book itself, the best way to sell a book, weirdly even in this like podcast heavy moment is still television.
2:25:19
That's my that's my unempirical Yeah. vibey bet right now. That's fascinating. Yeah, I love that. Um, yeah.
2:25:27
I mean, I noticed that with uh I mean Ezra on his I believe it's his own branded podcast channel put out a 20 minute video essay outlining the thesis for the book.
2:25:38
It also that video did very well.
2:25:40
I believe it went viral and got maybe millions of views.
2:25:42
That that feels like number one bestseller on on that week, but I think that happened on week one, not on week five, which is interesting, which is weird. Yeah.
2:25:51
interesting, which is weird. Yeah. I mean so what happened was um uh John Green the author of the fault in our stars uh who's become a non-fiction writer wrote a book called everything is tuberculosis and that book I I I don't think I can share the inside numbers
2:26:05
that I have told we did great week one we did that book kicked our ass like we weren't even we weren't even close like I don't know if you guys are what kind of sports fans you guys are like that book was like the Miami Heat sorry that book was the Cleveland Cavaliers compares me with the Miami Heat. Like every single a blowout.
2:26:23
Like every single a blowout. It destroyed it.
2:26:24
So like we we weren't even close to number one number one big one.
2:26:29
Um and that does go to show that that with book selling, it's all about channels of exposure and is already a celebrity owns their channel of exposure and so the book publisher by giving them a lot of money is essentially buying their channel of exposure and that's partly what they're paying for.
2:26:42
Um but yeah, the strategy, you know, beyond strategy, there's this question of like how do you sell how do you sell a book?
2:26:51
Then there's also this question of like I don't mean to get like weird existential, but like what what's the job of a book?
2:26:56
Like what what's its job?
2:26:59
And I think the job of a non-fiction book is to get people talking about it.
2:27:03
Of course, you want people to buy it, but like or start your presidential run or start your presidential one, honestly.
2:27:09
You do it the other way around because the best way to get attention for yourself like if you dudes if you guys run for president is a ticket. Yeah.
2:27:15
You'll get a ton of media exposure. A ticket.
2:27:17
We haven't even thought about that. That's hilarious.
2:27:20
Then you'll build then you'll build your book totally free.
2:27:22
It's totally free media because all these people the New York Times is like they have to talk to you guys doing in the Washington Post like what are these guys doing right?
2:27:29
You get all this media exposure then everyone knows your name then you go to a book publisher then they give you a lot of money and then you have this this um platform that's been co-constructed by media organizations that were to build it even though they didn't even mean to.
2:27:46
So you should not write the book then go for president.
2:27:48
You should you should do it the other way around. Exactly.
2:27:50
Um but the but the the product is the conversation.
2:27:52
Um and so the reason to go on podcast, the reason to go, you know, on on shows like this Yeah.
2:27:59
is because like you want these ideas to get out in the ether.
2:28:01
Like no one should write a book if they don't want to talk about it for 50,000 hours because that is the experience of writing a book.
2:28:08
You finish it and then if you're lucky you talk about it for the rest of your life. Okay.
2:28:11
Well, talking about things actually in the book, this has been fascinating so far. I really enjoyed this.
2:28:17
um that one of the narratives that I keep coming back to is the the story of California highspeed rail. I grew up in California.
2:28:23
I have friends and family members who have worked on that project actually.
2:28:27
Uh, and I think for a lot of technologists and Californians, the the comparison between SpaceX and the California highspeed rail uh, story really draw a very clear conclusion in people's mind, which is that the private sector is more efficient than the public sector.
2:28:45
And I'm wondering how you uh, do you think that that narrative of, you know, one was literally rocket science, but at the same time, we had put things up into space.
2:28:56
it wasn't entirely a new capability.
2:28:58
Um the other was a train which you know we've had trains for generations and we tried to build a train and we tried to build capa capability to get to low earth orbit.
2:29:08
One feels very successful and the other feels like we didn't get anything out of it and I think for a lot of people the takeaway is let's not have the government even try and do things.
2:29:16
Let's let the private sector do as much as possible and that tradeoff between if there is an economic feedback or there is a profit motive or a payback that will act as a better incentive to actually get the result that people want which is transportation or the ability to get to space.
2:29:33
Um how h how how have you grappled with that anecdote specifically?
2:29:41
I'm a liberal who believes in a large role for private sector innovation.
2:29:47
There's no question that SpaceX is an extraordinary company that has done things for rocket technology and especially for rocket efficiency. Yeah.
2:29:57
That no other company in the world has done.
2:29:58
No other individual in the world has done. Yeah.
2:29:59
How many people has it moved to space? A lot. How how many? Like dozens? A thousand? Hundreds? I don't know.
2:30:09
It's just the people are in California.
2:30:11
This is our this is our Iran population question. Yeah.
2:30:14
Is there 50 million, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
2:30:17
In California to build infrastructure. Yeah.
2:30:21
That is a public good for 50 million people is a different challenge than building technology whose proof point requires several dozen.
2:30:28
These are entirely different challenges and that's why we need I would just I would say like SpaceX has provided internet infrastructure for billions kind of count as the people in this case like because that's the that that's the benefit that people really want.
2:30:43
The public benefit is that people in Iran right now canat you know and and and I and I think the the value of Starlink is is sensational. Yeah.
2:30:54
But like when you're talking about right I mean when you think about like broadband technology Yeah.
2:30:58
Yeah, like broadband technology is already being built by a lot of private companies, right?
2:31:03
So like it's not as if the creation of Starlink is taking away what has historically been a public service and is creating a private company out of it.
2:31:15
Like broadband companies exist like Charter exists, Comcast exists.
2:31:17
So I think it's great that there are private companies that are working on that.
2:31:22
When we're talking about questions like public goods, when we're talking about roads and bridges, things that are frankly quite difficult to monetize, and it's not entirely clear that we want to like directly monetize them, like do we want to charge poor people a certain fee every time they use a road or a bridge?
2:31:42
Or does it make sense to live in a rich society with a progressive tax structure such that we can tax the rich a little bit more than the low income and use that money to create a set of public goods that makes life better for everybody that allows frankly low-income people to use those roads to drive into areas where they can provide services for high-income people such that everyone turns out better off.
2:32:04
I I I see a large large role for the federal government and for state and local governments to look out for public goods.
2:32:13
And to me, when I say public goods and you look at the actual budgets of the federal, local, state governments, overwhelmingly what we're talking about is healthare, subsidized healthcare.
2:32:22
We're talking about education and we're talking about infrastructure and transportation, things like roads, things like bridges.
2:32:28
Um I think there's a huge role for government to play. I I I like having both.
2:32:33
like having a mixed economy, right?
2:32:35
A muscular government and also um even more I would like to see and the book is partly about this even more purposeful pro tech pro-science strategy because the truth is if you look at what SpaceX did for rocketry, why haven't we done that for Alzheimer's?
2:32:50
Why isn't there like a SpaceX for like chronic inflammation or SpaceX for carbon capture technology?
2:32:55
Um so I I see a huge role for both of these things.
2:33:00
I don't think that the success of government in some places proves that the private sector can't do certain things very well or that the success of SpaceX means that the government should get out of the business of building bridges. Yeah. Yeah.
2:33:10
I I I agree with you on the roads and bridges thing.
2:33:11
I guess my my my worry is like the free market solution to how do I the real problem that you're solving is like how do you get people from LA to San Francisco?
2:33:20
Uh how do you move people around California?
2:33:22
And the free market solution is a 1-hour southwest flight that costs a hundred bucks or a Camry that drives you there and maybe costs $20 in gas or something like that.
2:33:33
And so the free market's kind of solved like if you have six hours, you can do it in 20 bucks or if you have one hour, you can do it for 100 bucks and you kind of choose those.
2:33:42
And we kind of came in with like we want something that's cheaper for two hours, but it there wasn't this like massive market pull.
2:33:50
And so that it was more like the decision to to uh to create that interim solution uh just just never really happened.
2:33:59
But I mean we just just stop there. I love Southwest.
2:34:01
I love flying on airlines.
2:34:03
I at no point in my life am I like what we need to do is like nationalize United do. But like who built LAX? Totally right.
2:34:11
Like you need public infrastructure or infrastructure that is partly publicly financed. Yeah.
2:34:20
In order to create a kind of platform technology a platform for the private sector to succeed.
2:34:24
In the same way if you look at the history of Elon Musk's companies like what is the total number of government contracts and loan guarantees that SpaceX and and Tesla have benefited from in order to become the companies that they are?
2:34:37
I'm pretty sure it numbers in the billions especially when you count all the NASA contracts. Yeah.
2:34:42
So I guess the question is like a huge a huge opportunity for a public private partnership to give us the outcomes that we're most proud of. Yeah.
2:34:50
With the California highspeed rail example, the question I I I guess is is it a mistake for the government to pick highspeed rail as an important project?
2:34:59
Like was it a misranking?
2:34:59
Should have spent more money on roads and or was it just the execution?
2:35:04
I mean yeah billions of dollars were spent on a on a rail system.
2:35:08
I mean $33 billion um were essentially um tacitly approved by a bond that was voted on by the public.
2:35:15
I think several billion dollars were actually spent constructing rail that isn't connecting anything to anything right now.
2:35:20
So clearly if you were looking back like the total of the total number of manh hours spent and dollars allocated on highspeed rail has not been worth it for people who live in California.
2:35:28
I don't want that failure Yeah.
2:35:31
Yeah. to indict the good that the public sector can do any more than I think you would say that the failure of one SpaceX launch proves that SpaceX is in fact totally overrated like right how much um switching gears a little bit how much
2:35:47
are you digging into general research funding we had Andrew Huberman on the show last week talking about his concerns around NIH tell me tell me his concerns can you actually I didn't see that can you so he had a he had a long interview with uh Jay Badacharia. Uh and
2:36:00
Uh and uh and essentially the proposal is to cut uh government funding to uh uh university labs and research and scientific research uh labs by something like 40%.
2:36:14
And that's a pretty significant chunk.
2:36:16
Uh he was very worried about this.
2:36:19
worried about this. there are some unnecessary costs potentially that he highlighted but in general this is the uh this is the research that cannot be underwritten by the private sector because it does not if you're just doing research on how do how do we fall asleep or like how do we how does the brain
2:36:36
work uh at a very abstract or or what is the what is DNA you can't patent DNA as soon as you discover it and yet as soon as you've discovered it boom there's a huge huge you know massive boom in in bio in biotechnology, but it won't be captured by a single patent holder on the underlying. Yeah. So, that just feels like an area Yeah.
2:36:55
So, that just feels like an area that you could really dig and dive into in an area where it's okay to be kind of skeptical of this hyper capitalist viewpoint and you know, venture-backed companies can solve everything when when the smartest people in the world. It's it's it's broad.
2:37:09
It it's it's a it's a ton of funding of a whole bunch of different research areas.
2:37:13
They're all they all can't be underwritten by the private sector in any way versus being very prescriptive.
2:37:18
We need a train from here to here and we are gonna hire the people to build it.
2:37:21
That feels like much much harder for the government to get right.
2:37:24
I I I agree with the way you guys are thinking about this and maybe it means I agree with the way that Andrew's thinking about it as well.
2:37:29
I think what's happening at the NIH right now under HHS is horrendous.
2:37:31
I think if what you wanted to do was to reduce America's annual deficit by $18 billion, which is what we're cutting from NIH. Yeah.
2:37:42
You could either cut NIH, like the the the the fountain of scientific discovery for not just the US, but the entire world. You cut NIH by 40%.
2:37:52
Or you could cut the corporate income tax cut by 0. 4%.
2:37:55
Like why why not why not just like kind of reduce the size of the corporate income tax cut by a microscopic percent and still fund scientists to discover the basis of Alzheimer's and chronic inflammation and multiple sclerosis and pancreatic cancer. You said it really well. Yeah.
2:38:14
Knowledge can't be patented. Period.
2:38:18
Like when the first scientists who looked inside the Hila monster's mouth discovered that there was a little hormone there that seemed to suppress its appetite and regulate its insulin.
2:38:28
You can't patent a lizard's tongue.
2:38:28
But our knowledge, our subsidized knowledge of the liquid on top of the lizard's tongue gave us GLP-1 drugs, which now appear to be something like a miracle drug for everything.
2:38:41
I mean, they don't just help people lose weight.
2:38:42
They don't just help people reduce inflammation.
2:38:45
They literally seem to, there's a study going on right now that they might reduce rates of Alzheimer's because Alzheimer's might be caused in part by inflammation in the brain.
2:38:53
And if GLP-1 drugs work by not only reducing obesity but also reducing chronic inflammation, they might ironically or um incidentally be a neurogenerative drug that works through the gut brain um interface. That's [ __ ] crazy.
2:39:08
And we see this by looking in a lizard. And no smart VC.
2:39:13
Like Mark Andre's brilliant, but he would be an idiot if he told scientists if he gave scientists tens of millions of dollars to just look in the mouths of a bunch of reptiles. That's dumb. That sounds really dumb.
2:39:23
But it's really wonderful to have a publicly funded um organization that asks re scientists who simply discover the truths of the universe with the hope that if it's true, someone along the line can find a way to make a product with it.
2:39:38
that makes money and saves people's lives.
2:39:41
So, I think we need a really aggressively funded NIH and NSF.
2:39:43
I think what's happening right now in the Trump administration is really, really sad.
2:39:48
Um, and Jay Badachara, if you're out there, um, I would love to talk to you about what's happening at NIH because I know you a little bit.
2:39:55
We've talked a little bit.
2:39:57
I know you don't want this deep down.
2:39:58
Um, and I would love to talk about how we could amend NIH policy to truly make Americans healthy again and make America great again because cutting NIH by 40% ain't it?
2:40:08
Yeah, I think the frustration from Andrew was seeing, you know, the increased spending and and trying to reckon with the the two uh decisions there.
2:40:19
Uh, let's switch to something less politically charged.
2:40:21
Can you give us the highlights of your conversation with Mom Donnie?
2:40:24
You released that this morning. Oh, yeah. Uh, right.
2:40:28
right before we got on the air, so we haven't had a chance to listen, but I'm sure it was uh I'm sure it'll be entertaining.
2:40:33
Look, um let me uh give you my reaction as a like a person and then as like a political thinker.
2:40:41
Um he's unbelievably charming and engaging and um and thoughtful.
2:40:48
Like you know when you know when you're talking to someone who's listening or who at least is very good at performing the act of making you think you're listening to them like I only know this guy for 37 minutes but um I loved our conversation.
2:41:02
I really really loved it.
2:41:03
I think he's wrong about a lot.
2:41:05
I think rent freezes are a terrible idea to increase housing supply.
2:41:09
I think fundamentally you c you cannot try to cap the price of something whose supply you're trying to increase.
2:41:17
The way I put it in the podcast is I was like, you want grocery stores in New York to be better.
2:41:21
If you passed a law that capped receipts at grocery stores at $50, what do you think grocery stores would start doing?
2:41:28
They would stop they would stop stocking the shelves because you can't make money selling nice stuff to people if it's illegal to make $51 on the receipt.
2:41:39
So, in the same way, if you cap the price of a good and you're trying to increase its supply, you're you're you're you're tying the hand behind your back that you're trying to use.
2:41:48
He was respectful, but we disagreed about that point.
2:41:50
We disagreed about the fact that I think I'm persuaded that while I'm not against public sector unions in the big picture.
2:41:56
If you look at why New York City subways have among the highest um uh transit construction costs in the world in the per mile basis, one part of it is that their union staffing levels are four times higher than the international average.
2:42:10
You you cannot build you cannot build anything efficiently.
2:42:14
If the first rule of your company is your staffing levels have to be four times higher than all your competitors, like just doesn't work.
2:42:22
So I asked him whether he was interested in talking to public sector unions, which are a democratic ally, of course, if he was interested in in in building public transit efficiently and increasing public excellence. Um, again, he disagreed.
2:42:34
That said, I was really impressed by his insistence that he wanted to be a politician who was outcomes first and process second.
2:42:44
And there was a certain amount of ambivalence that he seemed to communicate to me. Again, maybe he's lying.
2:42:51
I don't know him that well.
2:42:51
He's a nice guy on the phone.
2:42:53
Um, but there's a certain amount of of sort of procedural ambivalence that I really like in a politician.
2:42:58
Like if uh if Jay Badachara came on your show, right, or or if RFK Jr.
2:43:02
came on your show or whoever else in in tech policy, someone in on who's doing AI policy and they told you that the outcomes that they wanted were the outcomes that you wanted.
2:43:12
They were ambivalent about what process it took to get those outcomes, but they were going to try their damnest to make sure that when they left office, those were the outcomes that everybody could agree about. Right.
2:43:21
There's something that's like very refreshing and like non ideological about that perspective.
2:43:26
And I heard a little bit of it.
2:43:28
That said, you know, I'm Is that Is that tying into changing his mind around how police should be funded where he We talked about him changing his mind on two things.
2:43:37
One, he told the New York Times he's changed his mind on the role of private developers in housing.
2:43:40
I think he used to be more on the side of like the government should build up the houses.
2:43:44
I'm more on the side of the government should fund some of the housing construction, but like we've got private companies that are really good at building housing.
2:43:50
Let's let's not do what the private sector is already doing um too much.
2:43:54
But the other thing he changed his mind about, as you said, is defund the police.
2:43:58
He talked four years ago, 5 years ago about defund the police being um a slogan that he believed in.
2:44:04
And now he really his policy is fund the police.
2:44:06
Um he thinks that police don't solve crimes fast enough and that in many cases they're forced, this is clearly true, to act as social workers rather than police officers.
2:44:14
And so if you got a police officer or say 100 police officers who have to basically be, you know, street therapists and social workers all day long, how are they going to solve crimes?
2:44:23
how are they going to stop crime?
2:44:24
And so he said he's changed his mind there a little bit as he talked to more police officers.
2:44:28
And the end of our conversation was, I thought, a really refreshing um point that he made that he thinks that his job, he sees his job as surrounding himself with people who aren't too fast to say yes to all of his ideas.
2:44:41
He likes being around people who challenge his ideas.
2:44:45
And I think that's I think that's a useful thing for really I mean anybody, any politician or executive.
2:44:51
And so there were many things in the conversation that I was impressed by.
2:44:52
Um but you know also fundamentally I think it's just important to say there's there are very big differences between socialism and liberalism and he's a socialist and I'm a liberal.
2:45:01
So we're not going to agree about everything but you have to be able to talk to people you don't agree with.
2:45:05
What are you hoping to see out of tech uh the intersection of tech and Washington in a post uh Elon White House world?
2:45:17
You know, um, we got to get beyond this this insanity where the administration attacks on progressive thought become attacks on the kind of talent America needs to train and attract and retain to keep our dominance and to keep the really valuable information clusters that we have here.
2:45:46
If we attack Harvard because we're pissed off at them and force all of the international students to leave or if we encourage some of the smartest people around the world who deep down want to be at Caltech, want to be at Harvard, want to be at Duke and we push them to be in London and Beijing and Shanghai, we are losing so many great ideas, so much elomeration.
2:46:08
the interaction effects that happen when you put a lot of smart people together in America.
2:46:13
Like it's important that Silicon Valley is in California and not in Brazil or France or Poland.
2:46:17
Like there is a special sauce to America.
2:46:20
I think you want to you want to attract retain these people.
2:46:24
I I want to I want us to rationalize our talent and immigration policy and not have it be a kind of unfortunately like assassinated bystander in this war between the Trump administration and a progressive movement that they think has gone too far.
2:46:41
Um I think we really need to to get back down to um a reasonable basis on on immigration policy in particular.
2:46:46
Um and then I would like to I would like us to add back the funding to NIH and NSF.
2:46:50
add back the funding to NIH and NSF. um you know are I'm sure Andrew talked about this a little bit like is it possible that there are so-called indirect costs right money that I work at Harvard let's say uh you're NIH you give me some money for my Alzheimer's um study you also give me money for Harvard
2:47:07
is it possible that that Harvard money that those indirect costs are too high yeah sure let's have a public debate about that let's have public testimony let's not cut NIH by $18 billion and say well hopefully we're only cutting the the fat and none of the muscle um so better immigration policy Um, and uh, and better science policy. Number one, I wish I had a good answer
2:47:26
Number one, I wish I had a good answer on AI.
2:47:28
Um, I don't know what the hell the next 5 years look like.
2:47:30
Um, I feel like the smart people that I follow change their mind every six months.
2:47:36
Sometimes they accelerate, sometimes they decelerate.
2:47:37
Um, I wish I had like this sort of crystal ball that could tell me what like optimal AI policy coming out of Washington looked like.
2:47:45
Right now I don't, but hopefully in the substack I'll be able to get some answers there.
2:47:47
Well, we're excited to follow along. That was great. Thank you for joining. This was great. Thank you so much.
2:47:52
Yeah, we'd love to have you back. We could talk all day. All right. Great. I'll do it. Have a good one. Talk to you soon. Later. Bye.
2:47:56
Um, sorry I went way over.
2:47:59
I thought we I thought we were 5 minutes over. We are 11 minutes.
2:48:03
We have a We have a light system in the studio, but uh the golden retriever does not concern himself with the lion does not concern himself with who's in the waiting room.
2:48:14
Uh we have our next guest from Juniper Square. Thank you for waiting. Great to talk to you. And we got some news. We got some news. We got some news.
2:48:26
What do we got to be here, guys? What do we got? Uh, we got two things.
2:48:30
We got a $130 million series D. Congratulations.
2:48:36
I've been waiting to do that all day. Glad we got it out. Yeah.
2:48:40
And then we launched our AI product that we call Juny AI. Congratulations.
2:48:43
That's our second uh bit of news.
2:48:45
Now that we got the important stuff out of the way, who are you? What do you do? Yeah. Yeah.
2:48:52
Well, I'm I've become a fan of what you guys are doing.
2:48:55
Uh, so I'm glad to be on the show.
2:48:57
It's really interesting and unique. So, keep it up. Um, but yeah. Yeah. So, my name's Alex.
2:49:02
I'm the co-founder CEO of Juniper Square. Nice.
2:49:06
And, uh, Juniper Square is an 11-year-old technology and services company.
2:49:10
All of our customers are uh private markets GPS. Sure.
2:49:16
Uh so venture capital firms, private equity firms, real estate investors, crypto, private credit, you name it.
2:49:23
If they raise an outside fund, Yep.
2:49:26
Then we help them with fund administration, we help them with technology to manage that fund, reporting, basically everything is not the investing.
2:49:33
And we've got close to 200 customers now, trillion dollars that we're responsible for stewarding and about 750 employees. 2500 customers.
2:49:40
Is that is that not all of them?
2:49:46
How many investors are there?
2:49:46
I feel like I saw that number on your website.
2:49:50
You need to update it, by the way.
2:49:50
It says 2,000 on your website here. 2500.
2:49:53
Yeah, we got to get that get those numbers out.
2:49:54
But I mean I I feel like there's I mean we try and talk to I thought we talked to all the VCs.
2:49:58
We've had we've done hundreds of interviews.
2:50:00
I thought we talked to them all.
2:50:02
Apparently there are more. There's some left. How big is this market?
2:50:03
It it feels like like you know you talk about uh uh private markets investing that feels like a small market yet series D is at a billion.
2:50:14
1 like you're building a big business how big is this market right so the you have to kind of take it by asset class right because VC is relatively small sure as an asset class both in terms of the capital that it manages and the number of uh GPS or or investment firms that are out there private equity and real estate are respectively probably five times as big as venture.
2:50:41
So there's thousands and thousands of, you know, just think of all the middle market private equity kind of LBO growth focused uh firms out there or think of all the different real estate investors focused on, you know, apartment buildings or retail or whatever.
2:50:54
U there's probably about 20,000 GPS globally. Mhm. Uh that matter.
2:50:59
Was Zer crash hard for you?
2:51:03
Was that a slower growth period for your business?
2:51:05
Because it seemed like it was really rough for all the VCs and a lot of investors pulled back, but it's not as like they really shut down their funds.
2:51:13
Yeah, it's it's more like net new fund creation. So, yeah.
2:51:18
Was that a real driver or are you just going after the existing players and so the new ones don't necessarily matter as much?
2:51:23
No, we definitely felt it and you're right that we're what we're sensitized to is in a given quarter, a given year, how many new funds were created. Mhm.
2:51:32
Our market share is so low that we still can sell to existing funds and people switch their providers all the time, but it's always easiest to get the new fund that's raised.
2:51:41
So, we had the double whammy of uh you know, big focus for us is commercial real estate.
2:51:46
So, when COVID hit in spring of 2020, you know, it just took out retail, it took out hospitality and hotel and commercial real estate was it was really tough sledding from like 2020, you know, really until 2022.
2:52:01
And then the rate hike started and commercial real estate's, you know, heavily capex intensive.
2:52:06
It's super rate sensitive.
2:52:10
Um, and then we had the big bust in, you know, public markets correction.
2:52:13
We had the the big overhang of everyone investing at, you know, 100x revenue multiples in 2021, 2022.
2:52:19
We're going to bring those back.
2:52:21
Yeah, we're working we're working on it here.
2:52:23
The sober the sober days of uh 100x revenue multiple, which we're kind of back to now areas.
2:52:30
Uh how did you get through all those times? It's recovering. It's coming back.
2:52:33
Uh h how did you get through the tough times?
2:52:35
Did you have to do layoffs or change the direction of the business?
2:52:39
Were there any pivots in the story?
2:52:39
Kind of specific meditation tracking meditation actually. Okay, cool. Yeah, bring it down.
2:52:48
Yeah, all of the above you guys.
2:52:50
We we had to do some layoffs for sure like everybody.
2:52:52
I mean, we were going into, you know, the Fed started hiking rates in like late 21.
2:52:56
But by spring of 22 is when we had that huge correction. Yeah.
2:53:00
In the public markets, and by that summer, it was clear that companies like us and pretty much every high growth late stage tech company was spending too much, right?
2:53:09
We were uh all investing for revenue growth and we all had to pivot to invest for growth efficiency.
2:53:16
Um, so we did a round of layoffs then like a lot of people did.
2:53:22
It was the first time I ever to do that as an entrepreneur.
2:53:23
It's not fun by any means, but it was necessary.
2:53:25
Uh, but then the big thing for us is, you know, we started out as a technology company, but then we added uh in 2019, we moved into the world of fund administration and we became a full-ervice fund administrator.
2:53:39
And fund administration is like a really critical market for private capital.
2:53:45
There's probably 3040 trillion dollars of private capital out there in the world.
2:53:48
and all almost all of it needs a third party administer administrator.
2:53:52
So we we kind of moved into this market that was like 50 times the TAM of our previous market concurrent with this big correction happening and so those forces ended up working out that like the company did really well and we continued you know we grow grown really quickly uh through a really challenging market period. Yeah.
2:54:12
Um so it wasn't without its bumps and bruises but it's overall it's been really well. Yeah. What?
2:54:15
Talk about uh the new AI product.
2:54:18
Uh I imagine it's a difficult one to build.
2:54:21
You can't really like LPs and investors can't really tolerate hallucinations, you know, and uh I can imagine it it you know, a product that works well.
2:54:31
I I don't mind if you leak my fund returns to my direct competitor. No problem.
2:54:34
Well, well, no less less of that.
2:54:37
But if you're trying to understand fund performance and things like that or reporting, you can't like, oh, I'm sorry. I misreported TVPI. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
2:54:48
So that is the crux of the challenge is um I mean as you guys know you talk about it a lot on the show you know generative AI is probabilistic right so next token prediction is is probabilistic in its nature and the kind of work that we do of reporting on financial assets is deterministic right like 1 plus one always has to equal two.
2:55:11
It can never equal you know one or three or anything like that.
2:55:13
Um, and so the real trick is, uh, and as if you guys ever know, if you've ever like taken a pile of invoices or something and uploaded them to chat GPT or any LLM and been like, "Hey, tell me the, you know, invoice amount for invoice number eight."
2:55:27
It's it's terrible at financial data extraction.
2:55:30
data extraction. Um, and so the big hole that we have in the market that we're filling for our customers is if you're an asset manager, if you're a financial services firm like a venture capitalist or real estate investor or whatever, one
2:55:42
of the key things you have to do is you have to report to your regulators, you have to report to your LPs, that reporting is like, you know, you're putting your brand and reputation and your ability to raise more money in the future and everything behind it being accurate and correct. Um, and so the
2:55:54
Um, and so the trick is how do you leverage all of the power of generative AI?
2:55:59
This like all these summation use cases, document extraction, the chat interface that we've all become so accustomed to.
2:56:06
How do you fuse that with a set of deterministic tools that do all the precision stuff, the precision math, so that like you're calling functions in Python to run some code to, you know, answer a question.
2:56:19
You're not trying to have a next token prediction be the answer of that.
2:56:23
And that's basically what this platform is is um it's multimodel.
2:56:27
We have a bunch of different models running inside of it.
2:56:29
Uh uh and the idea is think of it as like a model orchestration layer where if you're a private markets GP, there's a lot of work you got to get done.
2:56:40
You want agents for different things.
2:56:42
Different models fit different use cases.
2:56:44
Um and you need a way of orchestrating all of that work, ensuring it's compliant, ensuring it's accurate.
2:56:51
Uh and that's what this layer does. Mhm. Anything else? This was great.
2:56:53
Yeah, we Yeah, we got to have you back on.
2:56:56
We're running behind today as you saw, but we really appreciate you stopping by.
2:56:59
We're congratulations on on making it through the fire and uh come back on when you have more news. Yeah, we'll talk soon. Happy to be here, guys. You and the team. Cheers, Alex. Bye.
2:57:08
Um, really quickly, how'd you sleep last night? I'm hopeful. I'm on a run. 94.
2:57:19
Let's hear if you beat me last night.
2:57:20
I'm going to be streaming 86. Oh, let's go for John. It's crazy.
2:57:24
Ever ever ever ever since I got ever since I got sick, I've been I've been trailing you by by like 10 points off your game.
2:57:31
Well, Jesse from Decagon in the studio.
2:57:33
He's certainly been on his game. How you doing, Jesse? What's going on? Welcome to the stream. Good to see you. Thanks for having me.
2:57:41
Yeah, thanks for hopping on. Uh, give us the news.
2:57:42
Uh, what does the company do and what's the breaking news with you? Yeah. Hey everyone watching. I'm Jesse.
2:57:49
I'm one of the co-founders of Decagon.
2:57:50
If you don't know about us, we're essentially an AI customer service agent.
2:57:54
And so what this means is, you know, imagine next time you're, you know, booking a hotel room or something, right?
2:57:59
There's an AI agent that's there that you can call or or chat with live and it knows everything about you.
2:58:04
It can book rooms for you. It can upgrade.
2:58:06
It can answer questions about your loy loyalty points and and so on.
2:58:10
And so uh essentially what we do is we work with these large you know usually consumer businesses that have a lot of customers and a lot of you know contact center volume and we're there to both you know drive a ton of efficiency for them because now they're human agents don't have to deal with these more mundane issues uh but also we are able to give a better customer experience for the uh the actual customers. So, that's what we do.
2:58:32
And then today, we're very excited to announce our series C-led by A16Z and Excel at a 1. 5. Let's go.
2:58:43
Give it a bigger hit, John. Oh, there we go.
2:58:47
Um, talk to me about the early the early uh beach head for the company.
2:58:54
I feel like uh LLMs are so generalizable and yet uh go to market is so specific.
2:59:00
Every vertical industry has slightly different customer service needs, whether it's a Shopify store that needs access to an inventory management system or refunds or Stripe versus a SAS product.
2:59:12
What has been most interesting to you?
2:59:14
What's been uh where where has adoption been the strongest early on?
2:59:19
Yeah, it's a good question.
2:59:19
So I would say that with most of the use cases out there, the the ones that have, you know, had the had the most impact from AI has been ones where there is a little bit of complexity, right?
2:59:30
Where where you need the AI to go and take actions for you or look up data for you.
2:59:34
And it's kind of adding this extra layer uh beyond what you know traditional chat bots have been able to do because I'm sure both of you have used chatbots in the past and usually it's a pretty frustrating experience because it's it's horrible.
2:59:46
Yesterday I was trying to cancel uh I was trying to cancel Spectrum Internet at my at our old office and good luck and couldn't do it on the website.
2:59:54
This is 100% deliberate by them by the way.
2:59:58
Couldn't do it on the website.
2:59:58
Of course, like you know this is a CRUD app.
3:00:01
I should be able to click a button and update the You have to wonder if it's intentional. It's 100% intentional.
3:00:07
They broke one password so I couldn't log in.
3:00:08
Finally, they say, "Hey, text us."
3:00:10
And I'm texting with their chatbot.
3:00:12
It texts me natural language, but then asks me to click a drop down for two different options every single time.
3:00:19
Finally get through all that flow and they're like, "You need to call us.
3:00:20
And by the way, we're closed today." It was awful. It was the worst. Yeah.
3:00:23
Is is that is that is that some maybe friction in the sales process where people are like, "I get it that you want to make this more frictionless for our customers, but you're going to increase our churn, you know, 10%.
3:00:34
I don't know if we should sign up."
3:00:37
Are there actually trade-offs there? I'm super interested. Yeah.
3:00:39
No, that that is that is one use case, right?
3:00:40
So to to your question, what use cases are good?
3:00:43
It is where you need a little bit of complexity because in the old days, the reason why you can't do that today is because it's really easy to game that system.
3:00:51
Like sure, they made a decision tree, then people, someone would make a Reddit post about, hey, here's how you actually cancel easily and everyone will just do it immediately and it impacts your revenue, right?
3:01:01
So the nice thing about LM now and the thing that it really unlocks is this level of nuance.
3:01:06
you're able to create much more complex flows and sort of situations that are tailored to specific users.
3:01:11
And because of that, you're you're able to cover way more ground, right?
3:01:16
So, we have customers, for example, that use us to process refunds.
3:01:20
We have customers that use us to, you know, uh either book flights or reorder a credit card or or things like that.
3:01:28
And that's really powerful because it just wasn't possible before, right?
3:01:32
before you're kind of in this more, you know, dumb decision tree that you have to get forced down a certain path and maybe that path is kind of what you want, but you want like something slightly different and you're just forced to go down the path.
3:01:43
You get stuck and you get escalated, right?
3:01:45
So, that that's one of the main benefits of of these LLMs.
3:01:48
Last question from my side.
3:01:50
side. I know we're we're going crazy on the timing, but um the in my previous jobs when I've hired a really allstar customer service agent, the thing that's always impressed me is when they're able to expand out of their role as just customer service, just doing specific flows and actually turn into sort of a
3:02:10
salesperson and actually uh turn an interaction into customer education or upselling or cross-selling or uh you know, hey, yes, you said you wanted to cancel, but I think you want to cancel for a reason that we can actually alleviate by switching you around or giving you a discount or doing something like that. Some of that can be
3:02:27
Some of that can be deterministic.
3:02:28
We've seen this with like uh are you sure you want to cancel? We'll give you 20% off.
3:02:31
But the real best customer service agents tend to do it with more touch.
3:02:35
Is that something that you're seeing already being able to be handled by LLMs?
3:02:40
Do you think that's coming with more agent workflows?
3:02:42
Um how do you see the role of the customer service agent or human evolving over the next couple years?
3:02:50
We work one with our customers a lot on that exact concept which is what is the definition of customer experience over time because when you start you you're generally working on the lowhanging fruit like you know processing transactions or looking up information and FAQ right right exactly but if you end up having a really really good AI
3:03:08
experience and if you if you just think about it with the products in your life right you're just going to interact with it more like it's not that you're going to it's like oh I'm done with this if it's a good experience you're going to interact with it a lot more and that opens up a much broader surface area for what customer experience means. You can
3:03:21
You can start being proactive instead of just reactive.
3:03:24
Uh you can start looking at revenue generating use cases like you just mentioned, right?
3:03:27
And it doesn't just have to be a cost center, which is what a lot of enterprises look at customer service, right?
3:03:31
It's like, oh, it's this thing that it's not really strategic to us.
3:03:34
We're just going to put it off to the side and try to save as much money as possible. Yeah.
3:03:37
AI is changing a lot of that.
3:03:39
changing a lot of that. And you know a lot of the the customers that use Deagon are super excited by this concept that hey if you have a good system there it almost becomes essentially a concierge for your product right it becomes like a
3:03:50
a new UI that customers can use to interact with you because if it's really good and it can do everything like yeah maybe people are just chatting with it instead of using an app or kind of going through a bunch of you know drop downs and stuff like that. So yeah, what's
3:04:02
So yeah, what's happening in the call? Sorry to interrupt.
3:04:06
What's happening in the call center BO market right now?
3:04:08
Is there already pretty massive impact from companies like DecaGon, Intercom, Sierra, etc.?
3:04:18
The Yeah, the call call center market is definitely thinking about this space a lot as you can see, right?
3:04:23
When u when AI first came out, a lot of their stocks went down by quite a bit because it's it's one of the most obvious use cases for for AI.
3:04:30
I would say the the best BPOS out there are are really figuring out how to become AI native and either partnering with solutions like us or spending a lot of effort in in building their own.
3:04:41
I think partnership would probably be the realistic path because when customers when end customers buy these services they they usually kind of see BPOS as a service provider.
3:04:50
So there is room for partnership but that's typically the way way it'll happen. Yeah.
3:04:57
I mean, just the advent of software as a service or just websites in some ways reduced the amount of humans in a sales interaction because you could go through the Shopify checkout by yourself and yet there was still a role for the humans.
3:05:11
So, I'm sure that will be evolving.
3:05:12
Um, but it's exciting stuff.
3:05:15
Thank you so much for stopping by.
3:05:17
Congrats on the round and congrats on uh picking up uh Max Scaria a couple months ago, star sales leader.
3:05:24
I went to uh I went to college with Max. He's an absolute Chad. That's awesome.
3:05:28
And he was telling me about you earlier. Yeah. So, shout out to Max.
3:05:32
Anyways, thanks for coming on. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers.
3:05:35
Have a good rest of your day.
3:05:37
Uh, next up we have welcome. Chat has been waiting.
3:05:44
Yakine, how are you doing? What's going on?
3:05:49
Uh, you are on mute, brother. No audio yet. We got the video.
3:05:51
We got the weight rack set up in Is that a weight rack or Looks like it. Hello. Test. Yeah, we can. How you doing? Testing. Good.
3:05:59
I haven't set up my DACK yet. So, no, you're good. You're good. What's happening?
3:06:05
Let me just uh uh ask uh uh let me just check like let me just look at something on Sure.
3:06:10
Uh yeah, we'll we'll we'll give the basic background on you for the audience while you figure that out.
3:06:17
A poster who needs no introduction.
3:06:20
He needs no introduction.
3:06:22
um uh founder of Ding Board, a what are the names based of the hosts of John and Jordy. John and Jordy. Hey, how's it going? Nice to meet you guys. My name is Yen. Uh apologies. Uh good to meet you. Hello.
3:06:40
Thanks for thanks for the introduction.
3:06:41
I appreciate the time as well.
3:06:43
And I'm like actually like a huge fan of you guys.
3:06:44
Like uh someone someone I someone I used to work with uh introduced me to you guys.
3:06:48
So, I like found a lot of enjoyment. That's great.
3:06:52
It's great to have you on.
3:06:52
How have the last few days been?
3:06:53
Um, a little bit stressful to be honest.
3:06:56
Uh, I've slept three hours every single night because uh posting on Twitter has been so fun and uh unfortunately for fun or stressful. Yeah.
3:07:04
Uh, so both fun and stressful because I can't stop posting and uh that's uh not good for me, but I I will basically just not stop posting. Yeah.
3:07:12
But if you keep posting the way you have been, could you potentially replace your salary?
3:07:16
you were making in the seven figure mark.
3:07:18
You got to really ramp it up a little bit.
3:07:20
You know, I used I used to go on 4chan and these like people would be like, "Yeah, I'm like making like a million like a mill two million at these AI companies." I'd be like, "No way.
3:07:26
There's no way you guys are making 2 million at these AI companies."
3:07:28
And I started making like seven digits this at an AI company.
3:07:30
I was like, "Wait, like these guys weren't actually lying.
3:07:33
Like you actually make that much money at these AI companies."
3:07:36
Um, and it's like pretty fun work too as well.
3:07:38
So yeah, for like I didn't work on AI.
3:07:40
I worked on like bugs that really annoyed me on the app.
3:07:42
And that's why I joined actually.
3:07:44
So I joined X because uh there were a lot of bugs that really annoyed me and I fixed quite a lot of them.
3:07:48
So I'm pretty happy like with the work I've done.
3:07:50
work I've done. X X X is the product I use that I find the most bugs yet am not just I don't abandon the product like that's how super interesting that's a super interesting thing and it's because there's like when it's a very large app right so the scale is huge and you guys are like right tail users right like you guys are famous like the you know the
3:08:07
podcast of the tech bro podcast sorry the the host of the techro podcast you guys are famous so the amount of notifications you guys get the amount of replies you guys get the amount of DMs that you guys get is an insane amount you guys are so far into the right tail but like how many people are there like That's why it feels buggy for you. But
3:08:20
But for most people, like an engineer who's like creating a test account and like clicking around, it's not it's not going to be buggy for them.
3:08:27
And for what it's worth, this is true across all the apps.
3:08:30
Power users will always experience a lot of bugs unless they have someone to like uh really like, you know, um talk to them and like understand what their pain points are.
3:08:38
And and for what it's worth, X does a really great job.
3:08:39
Like I mean, it's actually remarkable how well X was as run as a company.
3:08:43
And like just working there, I got to learn a lot about like how to get engineers motivated and like really like get [ __ ] done.
3:08:49
like uh it was it was awesome work there.
3:08:51
It was like super super how how uh do you wish you had the opportunity?
3:08:54
You you were working remotely the entire time and and that was maybe counter to the broader ex culture.
3:08:57
Do you think it's the type of organization where if you're going to work there you should just 100% be in the office or do you think Yeah.
3:09:05
So the person who hired me like was like dude like let me tell you you you're going to have to get to the office.
3:09:10
My wife uh so at the time I got the offer in between I was interviewing I found out that my my wife was pregnant.
3:09:15
So I let them know and congratulations because uh yeah so so kid is born now he's 7 months old.
3:09:19
Um so that's by the time I joined I was like okay well we're going to I'm going to work remotely for a bit and then see if I can move but as the kid got older my priorities started changing a bit and I I was kind of like considering and talking to my wife about like different ways I could come to politics.
3:09:31
I I could totally work remotely like and be productive.
3:09:35
I think after the X and XAI merger, the information attractor got so strong and the talent at XAI, they were like ship, they're shipped so much.
3:09:41
Like I used to be able to read every commit.
3:09:44
Like I used to actually just like sit there on my email and like click archive over and over again and read every single commit that went to the codebase.
3:09:50
But after the Xi AI people joined, it was there's like literally no way.
3:09:52
So they're like you're and I mean I told one of the XAI guys this.
3:09:56
It was like uh you know when when you have like um dinosaur [ __ ] and you know which was the Twitter codebase and you get extreme pressure which is XAI talent. Get diamonds. You get diamonds.
3:10:08
That's how I was so bullish after that.
3:10:11
Like it's like they're really like they're really pushing on it.
3:10:14
It's like uh really awesome.
3:10:15
I want and honestly I really wanted to be there.
3:10:17
Like I wanted to go and I think it was like probably I was talking to my manager at the time.
3:10:20
I was like, "Um, can I like maybe come like twice every quarter or something?"
3:10:24
Was and he was like super I Forsworth, by the way, like my manager was reading between the lines. Totally surprised. Totally surprised.
3:10:31
He looked super depressed in the meeting. I felt so bad for him.
3:10:34
But it's if you're watching this, it's okay, dude. Don't worry about it.
3:10:36
You're uh seriously like some people like the probably the best thing I think like working at X is like I got to work with these engineers who've worked at Twitter for so long and when I joined I was like, "Oh, these guys like are onboarded onto everything."
3:10:48
But that wasn't the case.
3:10:50
Like my manager literally could just figure anything out.
3:10:53
It felt like he was already onboarded onto everything, but he could actually just like read the code, look at the logs, and figure out what the problem was within 30 minutes, and it didn't matter what it was.
3:11:01
I I was like, "This guy must have been here for years."
3:11:04
No, he's like actually just that good.
3:11:05
Um, so I mean, I really loved working with him.
3:11:07
He's like a really awesome guy.
3:11:08
Um, I think it was surprised.
3:11:10
Um, I I I guess like I guess I kind of kind of guessed what happened to be honest, but it doesn't really matter.
3:11:16
But anyways, like it's been really great working there.
3:11:17
So, I was I was going to go to visit actually we were planning to visit Palto.
3:11:21
My wife is going going on a trip with her mom and the baby and I was like, "Okay, like that's one week.
3:11:25
I know I'm not I didn't want to go on the trip because I had work to do. Not anymore.
3:11:28
So, I'm probably going to go and it's going to be pretty fun."
3:11:31
Um, but like uh I was going to I was planning for that week to go to Palp Palto, but uh but also my manager was like, "Can you come like next week?"
3:11:38
And I told my wife and she's like literally like, you know, baby in her arm like you know trying to like scarf food in her mouth for like the few seconds that she had just like clearly dying.
3:11:47
So, first- time parents, right?
3:11:49
So, we're kind of getting used to it, but yeah.
3:11:50
No, it's a crazy it's a crazy change.
3:11:52
What um why don't you give some background on what you were doing prior to X Dingboard and then I want to talk about the future. Is that the Okay, sure.
3:12:00
So, uh you guys can I'm probably going to like work a bit more on Dingboard.
3:12:03
Um there's a bunch of bugs that I want to fix.
3:12:05
I just didn't have the time with my full-time job. Uh so, dingboard.
3:12:09
com is the best app ever. Dingboard. com.
3:12:11
If you want to make a meme in seconds, 15 seconds meme. I was a paid user. I was a paid user. I loved it.
3:12:17
Thank you very much for paying very very good.
3:12:19
You know, like your money actually helped pay for this.
3:12:21
Like this is this is John Kugan.
3:12:23
2% of this is John Kugan, right?
3:12:26
No, it was and you should give him naming rights.
3:12:30
It's actually crazy that that mobile meme making is so in the dark ages and I feel like you just pulled it forward.
3:12:36
feel like you just pulled it forward. I used to have an app called like Photoshop Mix or something and it was pretty good and then they just completely deprecated it and then they put ads in it which was I would I was dealing with and then they just shut it down and it was pretty good at dropping out the backgrounds and doing it wasn't great but it was okay and then they
3:12:53
forced you to go over to Photoshop Express and Lightroom and it and so I'm using two different apps and neither of them are good anywhere near what you need and so I was always I was always a fan of of Dingboard but I was actually like in the process when I joined them I was in process of rewriting it so that it could deploy on web like applications and sorry on iOS and Android. And it's
3:13:08
And it's actually like if you guys if you guys are a nerd there's there's something called soal. Okay.
3:13:13
So is made by this Swedish guy.
3:13:15
I think he's retired kind of.
3:13:17
He works three days a week and on the four days that he has he's working on this crossplatform GL um graphics library like uh I guess like transpiler.
3:13:26
So you write in one GL language.
3:13:26
It'll it will produce the the metal version for iOS.
3:13:30
It'll produce the version for Android and it'll produce the version for web.
3:13:33
So I can use the same code and the code can be basically like it can basically be the same code base deployed to all apps.
3:13:39
And then John Kugan and Jordy can make memes in seconds and get more followers on X.
3:13:42
This is the future I was promised.
3:13:45
Yeah, it feels like incredible founder market fit for you to make a tool that helps posters make memes.
3:13:50
I mean like the reason was because I was like making memes on my software engineering diagramming tool and then they like started adding a watermark and I was like [ __ ] this.
3:13:57
You [ __ ] ruined my meme making tool. I am going to war.
3:14:01
It's been two weeks and then I remember you had you had sponsors. This is I love this.
3:14:05
the sponsors when you would open a new dingboard file, it would just have a semi analysis ad from Dylan. It's still there. It's still there. Oh, it's still there. It's still there.
3:14:14
So, I mean, semi analysis, Dylan Patel, you should guys should go check out his Substack.
3:14:18
Uh, he sponsored me for three months and he stopped sponsoring me and I was too lazy to remove it.
3:14:24
He's not, but uh he's actually he's on passport with Ben Thompson.
3:14:27
But anyway, he's the man and we love him.
3:14:28
And uh but the but the big question is like Dingboard, you're super popular online.
3:14:35
Um, why didn't you go and raise like $15 million from a grocery? Oh, dude.
3:14:37
Man, that sounds so lame, man.
3:14:40
Oh, like raising money with managing people on the road. I'm so not down. I'm so not down.
3:14:47
I mean, I could serve like literally, dude. Like this.
3:14:48
I have two plugged in right now and I don't have enough power going to my house to like like plug this one in, which is why it's unplugged.
3:14:54
Um, but like I could serve literally a [ __ ] million people. A [ __ ] million.
3:14:58
So, we're going to blow your mind.
3:14:59
We're going to blow your mind with this, but sometimes you can raise 15 million and you can do what's called a secondary transaction where some of the money goes directly into your pocket.
3:15:06
You don't have to hire that many people. Yeah.
3:15:08
So, you could raise like 50 on 500 and it's, you know, take take 40 million off the table. Yeah.
3:15:13
Just just to kind of set yourself up a cushion. They call it a cushion.
3:15:16
I feel like I feel like you want the opposite of that.
3:15:20
I would never trust a founder who asked for that. Like example joking. He's joking. Yeah, I'm joking. Roy Lee never happens.
3:15:27
You You don't You don't want a founder with money.
3:15:29
You want a founder with no options.
3:15:30
You want a founder like Roy Lee from Clue. New dad. New dad or or new dad. Got to figure it out. Got to figure it out.
3:15:37
I've got to figure I I need I need a twoacre lawn and a zeroturn tractor. That's what I need. I This is I need this.
3:15:43
I will get it no matter what. Maybe the next 10 years.
3:15:45
But like Roy Lee, for example, uh CEO I think of Cluey who he he got, you know, kicked out of his university. A disgraced tardant fee. He has no choice.
3:15:52
I wish I got an allocation.
3:15:54
I didn't even know he was raising.
3:15:55
I would have written I I I need the money, right? Like I got a kid.
3:15:59
I would have written a check without even thinking.
3:16:00
I don't even care what the Buffy's doing.
3:16:01
Yeah, you're you're a Roy Lee defender. Okay. Okay.
3:16:02
But here's the thing about I want a number for Dingboard.
3:16:07
Like how many users did you get?
3:16:09
How much money were you making?
3:16:10
Give us some sort of number so we can ring the dong.
3:16:11
I think the peak MR was like like I I mean I don't uh I don't remember. I'm not raising. I don't want funding. Probably 10K. 10K 10K. Indie developer.
3:16:22
Let's hit the gong for you. Let's [ __ ] go. Let's go.
3:16:28
Honestly, honestly ringing that for your fans too because you're you you genuinely you're you're a internet celebrity and you have real fans.
3:16:34
I the question the question I have for you is cuz you're a Roy Lee defender.
3:16:38
Uh how what what what's your line between balancing you know engagement sort of like rage baiting versus you know you sound like much more even keeled you know on on the show right now.
3:16:51
All my rage baits here's what makes people so mad. Sure.
3:16:55
that I actually believe what I say.
3:16:57
I'm not saying it to piss people off. I really believe it.
3:16:59
Like I actually really mean it when I say it, which makes them even more angry.
3:17:02
It makes them just like and but like when you're honest, like I mean like you know I'm I'm a big believer in like honesty and stuff like that.
3:17:09
And like um like when you're honest like you kind of like also the same amount of haters that you gain, you kind of gain the twice as much as like people who like are fans of you.
3:17:17
And I think that's what really matters.
3:17:18
And sometimes the haters can kind of drown it out.
3:17:20
Uh, so like I mean the reason I'm I'm a big fan of Roy Lee is because he posted that video right around the time I got fired.
3:17:24
I got like an email which was a bunch of like really scary legal words like non-disparagement.
3:17:29
I had like to like Google what this meant.
3:17:30
Like I didn't even know what disparagement meant.
3:17:31
I was like okay wait I'm not going to sign anything.
3:17:34
I'm going to wait for a lawyer.
3:17:34
And um and then Roy Lee did this thing and I realized like you know what like Roy Lee's a [ __ ] legend.
3:17:38
He's got skin in the game. Like Roy Lee has to win. So you know what?
3:17:42
I'm just going to [ __ ] be [ __ ] I'm going to be a [ __ ] I'm going to be a [ __ ] online and I'm going to have to win.
3:17:46
And then I'm going to I'm obviously capable of winning.
3:17:50
But if I have like, you know, like the one thing I don't understand about people like Elon who like work super hard, like super smart and like, you know, Elon's done. He's got like compounds.
3:17:58
He's got like, you know, tons of children he could spend all day all day with.
3:18:01
Like he's got all the toys he could possibly want to play with.
3:18:03
All the engineers he could talk to.
3:18:04
Like if I was him, I would just like goof around with fun toys.
3:18:07
But like he's actually trying to get to Mars.
3:18:09
Like you know, like he I feel like I feel like sometimes it's like some I think about being Elon.
3:18:15
I could never be him because I would give up at 20 mil.
3:18:16
I'll be like, "All right, I'm done, dude." Like, "This is me. Like, I did my part.
3:18:19
Like, I'm going to chill with my zeroturn tractor and my twoacre lawn."
3:18:22
Um, so got to know what you want. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Right.
3:18:25
So, but like I think that's what happens to a lot of founders. They get enough money. Like Palmer Lucky. Palmer Lucky.
3:18:30
It was like a chip on his shoulder.
3:18:31
He was like, he was like, "Fucking Jason Cal.
3:18:32
I'm going to [ __ ] get that guy. Like, I'm so pissed.
3:18:33
I'm going to do it again." And he did it again. He 100% did it again.
3:18:40
Um, by the way, I love Jason. I love Jason. I love Paul. I love both of them. I'm And you know what?
3:18:43
Jason is like the it's like it's like you can't have Batman without the Joker, right?
3:18:46
You can't have Palmer Lucky without Jason. He's the Joker of tech. Okay. Never joker.
3:18:54
He's the Joker for Palmer Lucky.
3:18:56
For me, the Joker would be the middle manager who I pissed off by complaining about Android bugs. Uh never mind. Okay.
3:19:01
We're getting into the story.
3:19:01
We're learning what actually happened. We're unraveling it.
3:19:07
I never said anything about my Don't worry. Don't worry about it. Yeah. Yeah. What's next? Yeah. I mean, yeah. So, what's what's next? All in on Dingboard. building out the team.
3:19:14
Okay, so Dingboard is doing great.
3:19:15
I'm going to, you know, keep on growing it and like try to get more money because I need some land.
3:19:19
And here's why I need some land.
3:19:20
I've been building things. Mhm. This is the Dingbot. The Dingbot. The Dingbot. See this? What does it do? I I 3D printed this. What does it do?
3:19:27
Um, this this is an ARM ESP32 attached to a a motor driver attached to a stepper driver.
3:19:35
Sorry, sorry, stepper motor.
3:19:35
Some 3D printed things that I made with Dinkcad, by the way, dinkad. com.
3:19:39
It's currently down because I had no time to to work on it, but I have like a local host version.
3:19:44
Dad is coming back breaking news. Popsicle sticks. No offense.
3:19:45
Oh, here's here's the genius of it. Okay. It is. I need cash flow.
3:19:50
You know, hardware is hard cuz you buy an iPhone and like you have an iPhone, it's like good for like 30 years, right? Yep.
3:19:56
But with popsicle stick robots, they'll break in a month.
3:20:00
You have to buy a new one. There we go. There we go.
3:20:03
Get him in the boardroom.
3:20:05
And you know what it's like?
3:20:06
You have a Dobby the elf robot that's like cleaning the house and like you know it cost you 30 bucks and it makes a mistake.
3:20:12
You just go in and just [ __ ] eat it.
3:20:13
You like kick it across the room because it's like 30 bucks.
3:20:15
You can just buy another one.
3:20:16
It's like it's like that's the feature you're not worried about.
3:20:19
You're not you're not worried about you know uh getting paperclipipped by abusing your Dobby robot.
3:20:24
Uh because it'll come back to get you at some point. Oh no.
3:20:29
You just program it to be happy that it gets kicked.
3:20:31
You know it's like Dobby's like you know please you know please sir.
3:20:34
You just program it, right?
3:20:35
Oh, this is like a solved problem, by the way.
3:20:37
Like the No, we're not going to get run away.
3:20:39
I think the real problem with like AI and stuff is like YouTube shorts.
3:20:41
Have you seen these kids all like like I saw a kid like uh so uh he ate dinner so with my family.
3:20:48
This kid was like at the uh trying to get to the bathroom.
3:20:50
He was 12 years old and he was on his YouTube shorts and he was like trying to like find the the doororknob like clicking like like not clicking around but like like reaching around.
3:20:58
uh was actually kind of kind of brutal, but like that I think that's like the real AI risk for what's worth like YouTube shorts specifically. So you're in retirement.
3:21:05
Is there anything that could get you to come out of retirement?
3:21:08
Could you There's nothing about retirement.
3:21:10
I was coding yesterday million dollar offer.
3:21:13
I mean to get you back into a mega corporation is it going to take 80 million 100 million$1 120 million?
3:21:21
What gets you to take the job for?
3:21:23
I think I probably like find it really hard to say no to like 2.
3:21:27
5 probably like but I I don't think like the companies I would work for have that kind of liquidity hanging out. I mean they do.
3:21:31
Well, what are those kind of companies?
3:21:33
What are those kind of companies?
3:21:34
We can run a process big tech.
3:21:37
So I know you don't want to work there, but there has to be a number. What's the number?
3:21:39
All right, I'm going to just start doing an auction here.
3:21:42
I Okay, I got a message for 500. 500. Do I have 600? 600. All right, 700.
3:21:48
our our our internal goal was to get you hired on this stream or at least get you to raise 15 million with 5 million in secondary.
3:21:55
I I could raise really money like super easily and like I could also get a job super easy.
3:21:58
I mean I have friends I the thing is like I'm a very honest hard worker like the places I've worked at I could I could go back like I have like a really strong network so I don't really need a job and I mean I'm not worried about getting a job but if I wanted to join in terms like for me mission alignment is super important like I really need to like use the product to actually enjoy it.
3:22:12
So, I sold some Dingboard t-shirts on Shopify and I'm like aligned with like Toby's awesome.
3:22:18
Um, and then Coher, I think, is like a really interesting place to work for because they're on the comeup, but mostly like I mean, he's in Canada. Hold on. Hold on.
3:22:26
Uh, yeah, break down Coher.
3:22:28
That that is not the common narrative.
3:22:28
I mean, I love Aiden and I I I think it's incredible founder, but but but it does seem like, you know, there's got to be some sort of like geopolitical strategy there for that company to really play out.
3:22:40
I think I just think they're base, dude. Like I just Yeah. Just [ __ ] based. Yeah.
3:22:43
So it's just pure pure culture. They'll figure it out.
3:22:46
I mean like you know like it's it's it's a lot closer than Palo Alto or like California or Canada.
3:22:52
And I think they're [ __ ] cool.
3:22:54
Like they kind of they need a poster in residence.
3:22:56
You could basically you could thousandx their their their impression.
3:23:00
Do you listen to death grips? Uh yeah. Yeah. It goes it goes it goes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
3:23:03
Cuz cuz Aiden's a big death grips guy.
3:23:05
So that just bumps coher on top of Shopify. Yep. Yep. Yep. Wow. Yeah. Yeah.
3:23:10
He did a he did an interview in a Death Grips t-shirt.
3:23:13
I saw it and I was like, "That's amazing. This guy's a killer."
3:23:16
But what what's what's wrong with just becoming a full-time poster, getting a Substack set up, getting a nice uh I think I'm going to try to become like an actual billionaire.
3:23:26
The Dingbot thing is not a joke.
3:23:27
I'm actually going to actually do it.
3:23:29
And um I'm not going to race. I think I can do it.
3:23:31
I probably can find people to to do this for.
3:23:33
There's a lot of things I'm really interested on the way which is like uh doing like reinforcement learning for like uh control of robots, certain types of robots.
3:23:41
Um uh I think I figured something out after listening to a popular lucky podcast about don't solve for things in hardware when you can solve them for them in software and I'm pretty good at software and I'm sure hardware isn't that hard.
3:23:51
Clearly it's not hard enough to start it's easy actually you you proved with that that it's easy. Yeah.
3:23:58
Explain that with the uh reinforcement learning for robotics.
3:24:02
Are you thinking like you're going to do stuff in simulation and then transfer the the knowledge back with reinforcement learning?
3:24:08
Are you doing the thing that uh Dylan Patel was posting about with like the robots on the, you know, on the harnesses trying to walk and then reusing that as reinforcement learning data?
3:24:16
Like what what are you actually thinking in terms of reinforcement?
3:24:19
So, I don't think like humanoid robots is what I would do.
3:24:20
I think I would do robots for things that annoy me.
3:24:24
For example, dandelions on my lawn and I would do whatever is possible.
3:24:27
Like talk I I have a pretty good solid network.
3:24:28
good solid network. like talk to some of the guys from ETH Zurich Zurich I don't know how to pronounce it and just be like hey like just give me feed me the papers and like some shitty Python code I'll clean up and make good um sorry researchers you got this is extremely Matt Freriedman code coded he's out of
3:24:43
the game someone's got to build the robot that picks up the exactly exactly what N cuz it's like I'm [ __ ] sick of like going outside and just you know just like poking out all these dandel I'm I'm absolutely so sick and tired of it and it's so easy to build this it's like literally 3D printer like you You even 3D print the wheels. Like you can
3:24:59
Like you can get like five bucks off of AliExpress and ESP32 costs like three bucks. I just impulse buy them.
3:25:05
I like get my X ad revenue payout and I just like spend the whole thing on AliExpress.
3:25:08
My my my house like constantly has like these random AliExpress packages.
3:25:12
I just like maybe build like a Minecraft sorting system in real life. Like Yeah.
3:25:16
I feel like I feel like if you could build it, you could sell it at Home Depot for like 300 bucks, you know, kind of new.
3:25:20
I could also sell it for 25 bucks on subscription and you get a new one every month. Oh, there you go. Yeah.
3:25:25
people are taking their dobies.
3:25:27
It's like if it breaks, it's like I literally will tell the users, "Hey, I'm just, you know, a dude in and uh there's a CNC shop here uh that does wood."
3:25:36
Uh so like they do wood CNC.
3:25:38
So I'm going to make the robot chassis out of out of maple wood because there's a lot of maple here in Ottawa.
3:25:43
And I'm going to laser, you know, laser on like made in Ottawa on it.
3:25:44
Um except, you know, modulo the the motors inside that will be made in China until I figure out how to make motors, which shouldn't be that hard.
3:25:51
Um, but I guess like the the the core insight I have after doing Dingboard and like honestly working for a lot of these big tech companies is like there's a lot of little businesses on the way to something.
3:26:01
Like I'm going to try to do this.
3:26:02
I'm going to realize like holy [ __ ] like all the CAD software [ __ ] sucks and I'm going to build it because I can and like you know with Gemini 2.
3:26:07
5 Pro just like ripping on my credit card. What about Grock? Uh Gemini 2.
3:26:13
5 Pro is the best model to use for coding if you write your own coding frameworks because it's cheaper.
3:26:20
uh is faster and it's good enough.
3:26:22
Like I'm not like giving all of my work away to I don't need a PhD level intelligence because I'm not a PhD level guy.
3:26:29
I'm trying to write React.
3:26:29
Like it's not that hard to write React.
3:26:31
I need a model that can listen to me and understand what I mean and kind of like doesn't avoid using too many if statements. Stop.
3:26:37
Just stop using if if statements and like Yeah. Yeah. So Okay. Okay.
3:26:41
So, but but here's the thing.
3:26:41
You need you want to build a bunch of stuff. You need some cash flow.
3:26:44
Why not set up why not set up, you know, some type of subscription?
3:26:49
And you have a lot of payouts.
3:26:50
A lot of people want to give you $10 a month so you can have fun.
3:26:53
Honestly, that was the dingboard subscription that I signed up for.
3:26:54
It was like support this guy who's doing something cool. Yeah.
3:26:57
The issue is Dingboard is so hard to sign up for.
3:26:59
How do I even sign up for Dingboard right now? Go to dingboard. com. Okay.
3:27:05
I never Okay, first of all, Jordy, never doubt my conversion levels ever again.
3:27:09
I am a conversion I can convert anything to anything.
3:27:12
I am I am I am a conversion god. Okay, go to dingboard. com.
3:27:16
I'm Wait, you're so good. You're so good.
3:27:18
You don't have a buy button cuz you want to inspire yourself to grind harder. Go to dingboard. com. Okay, I'm here. I'm here. Sign in first. Do I have to sign in?
3:27:25
I don't even have to tell you what to do. Legend. Legend.
3:27:29
All right, I'm signing in. I'm signing in. Okay, I'm here. What do I Dingcribe? There we go.
3:27:35
Once you're want to know what dingscribe even means, you should not dingcribe. $12. 99 per month.
3:27:42
You got to get your numbers up, dude.
3:27:45
Dude, I don't actually don't have the code. It's like on my server.
3:27:46
No, you got to do what Google does.
3:27:48
It's 500 a month, but they give you six months at half price and then it just auto converts up.
3:27:53
Yeah, that's the that's the real ticket.
3:27:55
Or I could double the price. Yeah. Yeah.
3:27:56
But the price should be, you know, cheap on day one and they just get more and more.
3:28:00
It should go up by 10% every month. [ __ ] dude. I'm not doing that, man.
3:28:03
That's some YouTube shorts kid some kids brain [ __ ] like that. All right. I I'm a ding proc. No, dude. You're a ding. You have to get that.
3:28:15
Dude, Jordy, never get that wrong again. You're a Ding Scriber. Ding. Ding. You're part of the crew. You're part of the crew. I'm Dingaxing. Okay.
3:28:21
Talk about the rest of your stack. Gemini 2. 5 Pro. Are you cursor guy? GitHub copilot cursor. What do you never say? I'm okay.
3:28:29
I have a custom framework I've written for Neoim.
3:28:31
So, basically what it is is I have a server that creates a facade for all the LLMs that I have.
3:28:36
So, uh Claude and before Gemini was good, Claude and Open AI's models, um they'd go down all the time.
3:28:43
like the infrastructure is hard to serve at scale like I don't blame them.
3:28:46
It's like that's a hard problem to solve.
3:28:47
Uh so I have like always I always have a model available like even if both of them are down like I can hit deepsek over open router right like it's a facade can you do that in cursor by just switching the model router switching what was there a hotkey so for me it's like I have a weird I mean let me let me let me flex on you guys a bit.
3:29:07
So this is my keyboard flex away there we go nice by the way.
3:29:10
Yeah, I got a I got a homie from from China built to make it for me.
3:29:17
Um, and uh, so basically space space uh, what was it?
3:29:20
Space I don't even remember.
3:29:21
It's all space I is uh, LM provider. So that's a Gemini 2. 5 Pro. Okay. Space K is Gemini Flash.
3:29:27
And it all renders in a single markdown file. Okay.
3:29:32
And I've created commands for these models.
3:29:34
So basically like depending on the fence.
3:29:36
So three uh, three apostrophes and then there's going to be the command name. So like edit file. Yeah.
3:29:41
It can I can give basically give it a syntax to edit a file for me and then I actually manually is this open source like you know people do files up like like can I install your your setup?
3:29:52
Uh so uh no it's not open source mostly because people are going to start posting issues and I'm just not interested in fixing them.
3:29:58
So I'm just going to do it for myself.
3:29:59
I'm like I'm pulling up the ladder behind me.
3:30:00
Like I'm you know I know how much this is open source. You got a raise for it.
3:30:04
It sounds like we got ourselves a real cursor competitor here.
3:30:06
Uh, it is a cursor competitor and it's probably going to kill cursor if I open source it, but I'm not going to sell it for money.
3:30:15
I think what's going to naturally happen is like when people see me do use it, they're going to have ideas of their own and then they're going to build it for themselves. Okay.
3:30:20
Like the the whole point of so it's a neoim plugin kind of it's like also a server and it plugs into a bunch of I'm I'm good at software.
3:30:26
Um, so uh part of the part of the problems with uh uh so Neoim like is great because the software is configurable as a feature. Yeah.
3:30:33
So like the the best software you can get is like software you can read and understand and you can actually change.
3:30:40
The best software for you is software you've written yourself because if something annoys you, you can actually go change it.
3:30:44
And that's why I really like to like write my own frameworks.
3:30:47
Cursor I'm sure is a great product, but I like I'm just so particular about certain things.
3:30:51
Like for example like I want to like implement um uh trees across multiple files and automate adding files to my context.
3:30:57
So I have a I have a file which has a bunch of file paths and those get added to my context based on the workspace that I'm in.
3:31:02
And I manage it manually by like literally going to the file and deleting the lines.
3:31:06
And um what I want is to automatically create an a so an abstract syntax tree um to be able to jump around with an LLM or like train a model to actually go through the a.
3:31:15
And this is all super obvious to me. It's like [ __ ] man.
3:31:19
Like what about uh you're going to make any products in the parenting space? Uh yeah.
3:31:22
So actually I have an idea. I had an idea.
3:31:24
So I I use an e-ink display.
3:31:26
Um, by the way, before you try to hack this, uh, I never update the software and I never write anything private on it.
3:31:30
So, go it's it's I'm I'm just I'm going to put it public.
3:31:33
Um, so I have an e- in reader uh slash like tablet.
3:31:37
And what I wanted to make is to teach my kid to write uh instead of texting him, uh, I want to make like a kind of like a radio e ink display, kind of like an etching sketch, which you can write on, but it's synced to your parents etching sketch.
3:31:49
So, my wife will have one, I will have one, and my kid will have one, and he'll learn how to write because we'll write to each other over over distances, right?
3:31:56
I think that's like a really cool idea.
3:31:58
So, I'm probably going to build that.
3:31:59
Um, if you wanted to make like a gajillion dollars, it's so easy.
3:32:02
Just look around and like come up with good ideas and actually just believe that you can do it.
3:32:06
Like, literally just go do it.
3:32:07
Like, it's not that hard. It's actually not.
3:32:09
Get a 3D printer, watch some YouTube videos.
3:32:12
YouTube is great products.
3:32:12
I would love it if they stopped putting shorts because there's so many great videos where you can learn. Stop with the shorts. Stop. Get ready.
3:32:18
This is going to be a YouTube short.
3:32:20
We're going to edit this. Yeah, exactly.
3:32:21
This will be on TikTok, maybe. Yeah, exactly. Minecraft. Yeah.
3:32:25
Minecraft speedrun and surfers over you. Anything. AI slob.
3:32:28
How many kids do you want to have?
3:32:32
Uh, so as much as God allows us to have.
3:32:34
Uh, so just leaving it up to God.
3:32:36
And uh, yeah, that's how many kids. Good answer. That's great. What else?
3:32:42
What else do you have to say to the people while you're here?
3:32:43
Uh, thanks for doing your this podcast, guys.
3:32:46
I know how hard I know how hard it is to run a podcast and all the tech behind it. Uh let's just say that.
3:32:51
And like uh the doing live and stuff like it's it's a pain in the ass. Uh so keep it up guys. I know like Thank you.
3:32:56
And and and the the the live the live uh the video team at X are like generational talents like super super good people like so like just like find someone to like like find a way to reach out to them so when you have any issues and like actually talk. Yeah.
3:33:09
I didn't fully realize that you were the bug guy until you posted over the last few days.
3:33:14
Otherwise, we would have been hammering you with messages every single day. But this has been great.
3:33:17
Come come back on whenever you want to talk about your project.
3:33:20
I'd love to just hang out and chat. Yeah, thanks.
3:33:21
I really appreciate you guys.
3:33:23
And uh yeah, so keep it up. Thanks.
3:33:24
We're we're excited and and I'm excited to be ding maxing.
3:33:28
Just offer offer a premium tier like I don't know like 10 grand a month or something like that and maybe we become, you know.
3:33:33
Oh, I mean if you guys want an ad space, I'll sell you right now. Like spit handshake.
3:33:37
If you want to put an ad on Dingboard, your podcast, I'll uh let's say 12 grand. 12 grand. Okay.
3:33:45
We'll talk to our We'll talk to our CFO. All right. All right. All right.
3:33:49
Our CFO our CFO will talk to your CFO.
3:33:52
But but but can we get the semi analysis deal where it's perpetual?
3:33:56
It's 12 grand once and we get it forever because what if you is it a one time or it's a great option.
3:34:04
There's a lot of upside here.
3:34:04
It depends on how good your your podcast is. Yeah. Okay. Okay.
3:34:07
Well, we're going to keep working on it.
3:34:09
Hopefully, Dingboard keeps growing for the next decade and we can be massive together. Yeah, absolutely. We're excited to follow. Awesome. We'll talk to you soon. Godspeed. Have a good one. Bye.
3:34:17
Uh, next up, we have to talk to you about Wander. Find your happy place. Find your happy place.
3:34:27
Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel, great amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, and a 24/7 concier. Should get a wander. He should.
3:34:33
He's going to be traveling around interviewing at all the top companies.
3:34:36
Wander would be a great choice for him.
3:34:38
Um, we have had a great show.
3:34:38
We were gonna play you a uh an interview that we did earlier today with Shervin Pishavar, but there are some security issues unfortunately and so we're working to potentially blur the background and we will get you that interview as soon as we possibly can.
3:34:52
But security uh all it it comes first and so um we uh we'll we'll obviously relay some of the key takeaways.
3:35:01
And honestly, it's such a developing story.
3:35:03
I feel like already the story has moved and we should just have him back on uh again soon uh from a more secure location and make sure that everything is above board.
3:35:12
Um but thank you so much for watching.
3:35:14
We had a lot of fun in and we will talk to you tomorrow. Have a great day.