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Today is Thursday, June 3rd, 2025.
5:02
We are live from the TBPN Ultra Dome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital.
5:09
And we have some breaking news.
5:11
So Periq, he's he was fired multiple times yesterday.
5:14
I believe he's been fired many times.
5:17
First person to be fired by five startups, five plus startups in a day. In a day. In a day.
5:22
It was the positive news. Any timeline exploded.
5:24
any companies that he works for that are predominantly on LinkedIn. Yep.
5:27
He's safe for at least a week.
5:29
Another payroll cycle will come through for sure.
5:33
Um and so there's a big debate raging. Um is he a scammer?
5:35
Is he a misunderstood builder?
5:38
How wrong what was what he did?
5:41
Uh the headline here, India based engineer is accused of juggling multiple jobs and misleading YC startups.
5:49
Uh he defends his passion for building and lands a new role in a video AI start after online backlash. Yeah, break it down.
5:57
Atlas says they hated Sohome because he was profitable.
6:00
Probably was extremely profitable.
6:00
It is wild to think you know if if five plus companies came out yesterday and you know realized they were all employing him.
6:09
How many others was he was he is he actively working for that just didn't happen to pop up on X that day? Yeah. Yeah.
6:18
Yeah. the only it seems like the uh what do they call it in manufacturing where there's like the the single rate limiting piece of equipment is the one that you need to like build everything else around it basically like there's some choke point and for him it was
6:31
probably like standups and so could he do 10 standups inough at the same time it's hard to juggle those um but uh I mean it seems like he got the numbers up there we've been hear I bet you his TC was on average significantly higher than the ARR of the companies that he would work with. Wait. Oh, his his personal TC Wait.
6:49
Oh, his his personal TC across all the jobs grouped, which you put as over two million.
6:54
Over two million is my estimate. I was thinking over one. Um, that's five. That's five.
7:02
Let's say like T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T 200K a year.
7:03
We were thinking cash not equity or were we counting the equity as the thing is he he interviewed very well.
7:08
I think pretty universally people were impressed by him.
7:12
He could easily go in and get, you know, 180k. Yep.
7:15
for, you know, cash comp and then you add some equity into that.
7:20
I mean, the big question, Matt from Antal, who had hired him over two years ago, said that he was joking about how much equity he'd actually left on the table over the years because probably unlikely that he was hitting the cliff at these companies.
7:31
That wasn't really the strategy out so quickly.
7:34
Um, the new CS grads, Ben Hilac, uh, they are, uh, poor poor CS grads.
7:42
Uh, so getting all of the jobs.
7:46
Well, the market is ripping. Wow.
7:47
Bitcoin's almost at 110 uh 110 $110,000.
7:51
So, we are in white suits to celebrate uh the jobs news and the market news.
7:53
Uh we'll be doing a deep dive on the news and doing our normal interviews in just a minute, but we believe we have So, Periq joining the show in about four minutes.
8:05
So, we can go through coordinating this, but we will keep you up to date. Hopefully, it happens.
8:09
Um we can go through some other posts.
8:11
We have a post here from Anna Mostar.
8:12
She says, "The tech industry needs a are we dating the same guy group."
8:18
These are groups that pop up on on uh Facebook and things like that where people coordinate and and see if um you know, girls see if they're they're dating the same guy.
8:29
Clearly, we needed something like that or we needed um I think the big question that that we were kind of debating is, you know, was he, you know, a lot of these companies don't typically have something in their in their offer letter that says you legally cannot have other W2 income.
8:46
Yeah, that's a big question.
8:49
And yet, he probably was signing full-time Yep. job offers. Who knows, you know?
8:54
So, we'll have to dig in dig into it with him.
8:56
but we believe he's here in the studio with us here.
8:58
So, welcome to the stream.
9:00
Uh, so uh good to meet you. How are you doing? There he is. Welcome himself.
9:05
Thanks so much for joining.
9:12
Uh, why don't you uh why don't you introduce yourself and uh just take a few minutes to just uh give us what's going on in your world?
9:20
What's the last 24 hours been like?
9:22
Um, how would you describe yourself?
9:25
describe yourself? what what what do you have to say to people and then I'm sure let's go back to the very beginning who are you where do you come from I mean um I am you know I'm originally from Mumbai I kind of grew up you know here all my life obviously drove into computer science like you know coding and
9:41
everything kind of without a choice kind of process of elimination fell in love with it you know as you're aware at this point I'm like everyone's like favorite founding engineer pretty much or worker 17 or whatever you might call it like AI bot or so as a service I don't know Um but yeah um don't have much to my story essentially. Uh you know I've just been
10:00
Uh you know I've just been always passionate about you know building. What was your first job?
10:05
Uh my first job was actually at a company called Allen.
10:07
It was like a voice assisted like conversational startup.
10:10
Uh you know this is back in like 2020 2021 2020.
10:12
And when did you come to the states?
10:15
Because I know uh I was talking to Matt and he said you you would go to the anti-metal off sites and and you're very much a part of the team.
10:24
So to be honest and my my uh you know uh I have family in the east coast.
10:26
The first time I ever visited US was in 2018 and then I was supposed to do grad school there.
10:32
Uh you know different financial circumstances couldn't do that.
10:36
Had to kind of like you know not go with that plan.
10:37
Um but obviously you know uh I have visited uh you know America mostly for like offsites and stuff just to catch up with team members and things like that. Um, okay.
10:47
So, the main claim uh that was levied against you on X yesterday uh kind of started with Su Hail over at Playground.
10:55
He accused you of working at multiple jobs simultaneously. Is that true? It is true.
11:04
Um and yeah u I I would you know love to add color to it but you know that is true. Yeah.
11:10
Um, I guess the question is, do you believe that you were in violation of your own employment contracts or do you believe that there was some sort of legal loophole that allowed you to do this without committing any sort of legal violation?
11:28
I mean, honestly, uh, I think going back to like how it even like started to happen and what the motivations were would probably have, you know, obviously I I would want to like preface with saying like I'm not proud of what I've done.
11:39
um you know that's not something that I endorse either.
11:41
that I endorse either. Um but you know financial circumstances essentially like no one really likes to work 140 hours a week right but I had to do this kind of out of necessity like I was in extremely like dire financial circumstances and somehow like you know I don't I'm not a very people person uh uh I I don't share much in terms of like what's going on with my life and kind of in my internal
12:04
thought process you know was kind of like getting more stressed with like hey you know I want to like come out of the situation what should I do so it's more not it was not more so kind of out greed but essentially like necessity and just like thought that if I work like multiple places, you know, like I can basically like help myself like elevate the situation I was in much faster. No,
12:21
No, it's very economically rational.
12:23
Uh what about the uh conjecture that that you had uh a a team of junior developers underneath you helping you actually accomplish the tasks?
12:34
Is there any truth to that?
12:36
I wish I had the money and I wish that was true, but that is not true.
12:41
um any of the founders that uh you know uh I've worked with can watch with that.
12:46
I have multiple occasions like pair program with people.
12:48
You know I've written every single inch of the code.
12:52
Uh you know antimemetal is one of the companies I worked at.
12:53
You know they have pretty high bar for design as you might know.
12:57
Uh they did a launch recently.
12:59
Um you know there were two occasions where you know just before the launch like you know the the contractor who was going to do the front end for us essentially had bailed out and you know we as a team had to figure out and do everything which was a team of only three engineers right.
13:12
So so how did it originally happen though?
13:14
started with one job in 2020, then you realized, hey, I could add another, and then you realized you could just continuously add them.
13:22
Did you create any type of financial models to kind of model out potential churn as you would get, you know, uh I'm curious if you were operating this looking at as basically a SAS business, the SAS of SOHAM, this was this was not a business to me.
13:38
um every company that I have worked with I have deeply cared about like you know um and again people who spend you know a lot of time with me can like back that um on multiple occasions the uh and again I did not have any financial model the uh like I said the only motivation for me was hey you know I'm in a financial jeopardy uh you know and so I
13:58
didn't do this until 2022 2022 is actually when I was you know running into issues I had deferred my you know grad school uh admit and uh you did like an online degree but basically you know did not have like enough uh uh uh you know like uh essentially like you know just to get out of the situation I was in don't want to talk like too much deeply about it but no no that's fine. So yeah, so that's talk about talk about
14:22
So yeah, so that's talk about talk about your own talk about your own uh abilities.
14:27
Every it seemed universal that the that the teams that you worked on said that you were extremely talented, that you interviewed incredibly well.
14:34
Um it's, you know, easy for, you know, new CS grads to be frustrated because you were probably running laps around them in the interview process.
14:42
But um but yeah, uh it's very impressive if you actually didn't have a junior team and you were just, you know, juggling.
14:48
You know, it seems uh estimates seem to put it at maybe five five companies at once.
14:52
Are you are you just like hyper productive?
14:57
Are you leveraging AI tools and coding assistance?
15:00
Are you just able to move really quickly in a startup environment or are you also like talented at like systems engineering and algorithms and like solving really really hard computational program uh problems.
15:09
So I'll preface with this.
15:12
Um you know some of these companies I worked at was before the co-pilot boom, right?
15:15
There were no AI assisted programming.
15:18
At least three startups have went on the record like saying this.
15:21
People who have pro pair programmed with we can also watch with this.
15:24
But the real truth is you there's this funny line in some of my interviews like TLDDR.
15:27
I don't do anything outside coding. That is very true.
15:31
And if you're like spending hours like you know sitting in front of the computer, you will eventually like at least I hope so like get good at it.
15:37
Um I I would there's obviously a lot for me to learn in general.
15:42
to learn in general. uh you know I wouldn't say like I'm you know like a like a I don't know what they call like uh you know like a platform manage or something like you know top principle or whatever but I I would like to believe that I was a decent enough a good enough
15:57
engineer to essentially be able to work at three places because that's the only thing I did the entire day so an average day for you an average week for you it feels like basically maybe you sleep for six to eight hours and then you're basically programming for 12 to 14 hours every single day for 7 days a week. But
16:14
But as as some of these, you know, new coding uh codegen tools came out, claude code, cursor, Devon, etc.
16:20
Were did you feel like you could add maybe a few more jobs?
16:25
Were you getting, you know, more efficient or did you still handcrafted code, farmtotable, organic, you know, handmade?
16:32
I mean obviously like you know having more like uh you know AI assisted tooling like definitely helped but it did not amount to like me working on more jobs.
16:41
Um because like I would still love to spend you know a justifiable hour like working on something and it doesn't have like a measure.
16:49
It's not like hey you know I'm going to split time like four hours for this company for that company.
16:53
Like I was essentially like working until I got something done for that day.
16:56
And um I think people around me will probably say this that I am notoriously known for not sleeping.
17:03
Um I am uh you know I'm a serial like non-sleeper at this point is what I would say.
17:10
But yeah and as far as the interviews go right like so one there there's also been a lot of things around like hey you know I probably used uh you know some sort of like tool like cluly which you know I would love for the founder to essentially go on record and say if I'm a paying customer I'm not.
17:24
um but uh or or some sort of like you know had to game the system.
17:29
The truth is a lot of these companies did not have lead code style problems and if they did I would have bombed the interviews you know because I don't practice lead code as much.
17:37
I'm I know my data structures well I know what to use when but you know like typically a gun.
17:41
Well you're also great at cold email.
17:42
I saw some of these cold emails. You got a great format. It pulls people in.
17:46
It it shows your personality.
17:48
It shows that you care about you know coding and I think that helped a lot as well. Totally.
17:53
Yeah, I mean I do care about coding a lot, but again like you know most of these companies essentially had a take-home assessment or a work trial, right?
18:01
So it's very difficult to like game a work trial or game a take-home assessment like you have to do it and then deliver it.
18:10
Um and I I did everything you know on my own like I was also doing the work trials on my own and um yeah like I guess I'll I'll leave it at there.
18:17
If if they did have lead code I would have bombed the interviews but luckily they didn't.
18:21
like startups usually just like care more about like working talk about uh talk a little bit about the companies that you chose to work for you applied to.
18:29
Do you think you could have pulled this off with Microsoft, Google, Amazon and split three times?
18:36
Or do they have defenses in place that would make this difficult?
18:41
There's a variety of memes around maybe big tech companies it's easier work, maybe startups are harder.
18:48
I'm just kind of curious about it seems like you went for a lot of startups.
18:52
What was the reasoning behind that? Yeah.
18:55
So, it feels counterintuitive like if I was in dire need of money like why would I work for you know startups as opposed to big tech because they clearly pay well.
19:03
They have a 9 to5 schedule for the most part like I would say you know people don't really care about like what you are essentially like doing.
19:09
Um the thing with me is like if you're spending you know multiple hours a week like working on something you would have to at least decently be passionate about it because otherwise you'll just like burn out.
19:21
Um like I said you know each of these companies that I work for and again uh you know founders some of the founders who spent meaningful time with me can vouch um you know would would say that I actually cared about these companies.
19:33
So it wasn't like cold email without context like I deeply read into what a company was doing, what the business model was, you know, who who their customers were.
19:41
I had great ideas about like you know what to build for them, what not to build for them, you know, what the platform is like.
19:46
um you know I did deliver like beyond engineering for a lot of these companies and um yeah like it was more kind of like hey if I'm spending like 140 hours like I want to do something that I actually care about like I don't want to like you know do 9 to5 and kind of like send out a div in like six hours or something.
20:04
Um you know that's that's just not me because I do like what I do and and and that's kind of cold email hack.
20:10
Send the cold emails from the heart.
20:11
Put some real thought into them.
20:14
Um, talk to me about um other alternatives that you maybe considered or maybe didn't.
20:20
Um, did you ever think about going to a startup and saying like, "Hey, I'm doing a great job.
20:25
I'm working 40 hours a week.
20:27
I need to make more money.
20:28
I'd like to take on a second job.
20:30
Would would would that be amendable to you?
20:33
Do you think that founders might be actually open to that?"
20:35
Or say, "I'm working 18 hours a day.
20:38
Can you pay me three times as much? Can you pay me?
20:40
three times as much? Can you pay me? I'm doing the work of three devs because there is a world where you could have allocated all that time and one startup would have gotten three times as much value but they probably should have paid you three times as much maybe to make
20:53
that balance out and so did you ever have those types of decisions like we're seeing this with the AI talent wars the the 10x you can think of yourself as like a three to fivex engineer I guess no offense but you know the 100x engineers are getting you can maybe be 10x if you just if you really focus Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so and so it's Yeah. Yeah.
21:09
And so and so it's almost a question of like why couldn't you get the money that you wanted from a single job?
21:15
What was what was the what was the stumbling block there?
21:17
Yeah, I think the part where you know I should have basically done is like come clean with my situation.
21:24
Uh you know to be very frank with you like I mentioned like I'm not a good uh you know person with sharing what my internal conflicts are.
21:32
I do like to keep boundaries between my personal and private you know like whatever is like going with me mentally and that's true with any person I'm with as well like you know that's outside of work.
21:39
outside of work. Um so one there was an embarrassment to essentially like admitting that hey you know I have this struggles mentally uh you know like and talk in open about it and then the second thing is you know I uh really did not like think through this because like
21:54
I said it was an action that was done more out of like desperation to get out of the situation I was in rather than like I mean the flip side here is that you you don't necessarily need to have something going on in your family to justify a $10 million salary or a $1 million salary. Like LeBron James
22:06
Like LeBron James doesn't need to say, oh, like, you know, I have a Saab story and that's why I need $50 million.
22:12
He's like, I'm delivering this value to you and you should pay me the value that I'm creating.
22:18
And so I'm wondering if you ever considered just coming to a founder and saying like, I can do the job of three engineers, but you got to pay me three times as much.
22:25
Honestly, I it again feels counterintuitive like I don't really care much about the money.
22:31
I was really into it for building.
22:31
So like greed was not like an incentive for me.
22:36
Um again regardless of my financial circumstances in most of these companies I always took the lower uh you know pay higher equity offer.
22:44
Um again like equity for me was not even like vested until I would make the move to US which like I said you know I was based out of India so I had to go through a whole visa process in order to make that happen.
22:56
So I wouldn't even be getting equity as long as my immigration was uncertain which it was. Yeah.
23:00
So the decisions seem counterintuitive.
23:05
Basically for me it's like hey you know I have to do something to kind of get out of situation I'm in.
23:09
I also want to do spend time like building something meaningful you know as long as I like the startup and as long as it's not like handtomouth. Yeah.
23:16
It did not matter too much like you know.
23:18
So what are you going to do now?
23:20
you have the intention of the entire tech ecosystem the and I appreciate how candid you've been uh with us and and I want to talk about dev shop specifically. Yeah.
23:31
I mean there's a few angles here.
23:33
You could do the the dev shop of Periq.
23:35
I think you would be able to get a handful of clients immediately.
23:39
Uh I think you could sign a max out maxed out contract with Cluey.
23:45
they would probably pay you uh a pretty penny to to join the team over there.
23:51
And I also it sounds like you're interested in joining uh uh as a founding engineer uh of a new AI startup.
23:57
So how are you thinking about your opportunities right now and and um how can you turn this into a win?
24:04
Yeah, look like I've you know regardless of the situation like I've been privileged to like work with some of these companies like you know antimatter you know sh m the founders like sink labs you know pratty uh you know rudaba they're one of the most uh you know crack faces I've been at in general partly because they had me maybe not I don't know uh I guess with that but um I
24:25
think the main thing is like I am really excited about what I'm going to be a part of next so you know working with a company called Darwin they are essentially like building a new like AIdriven like data plat like you know video platform essentially for more kind of like you know uh UGC style media and we're going to release to the market very shortly. Um this is the only thing
24:42
Um this is the only thing I'm going to focus on.
24:45
Um I think you know they've put a bet on me. I have a lot to prove.
24:49
Um and there's there's not a lot for me to say. So yeah.
24:52
H how do you rebuild trust?
24:55
How do you how do you give them the confidence that this isn't just you're focused on it for a couple weeks and then the second job creeps in and then the third job creeps in?
25:04
Um is there something that you see happening down the down the line around um you know worker monitoring or or checking when the GitHub commits are coming in or doing something to understand if someone else is uh is is working multiple places.
25:22
Somebody was saying we like um tech needs a like a some sort of service to see hey are we employing the same company.
25:30
Uh how do you how do you rebuild trust and and guarantee that you won't be working multiple jobs against the will of the current employer?
25:39
So I I think like you know all all of this that has taught me is like you know just coming to Canada like probably makes people understand your situation.
25:46
After all like we all are humans.
25:46
After all like we all are humans. um I don't anticipate like working on multiple gigs again but you know my financial circumstances have not changed so if even if it did came to them which it won't like right now I'm very clear that this is my sole focus um you know I would probably like approach with like being very candid with the founders and
26:04
just letting them know and if that's not a possibility you know that's fine um you know maybe I can uh figure a way out where you know there's like a higher pay or whatever kind of like to your point right um but in in in another spectrum of the Well, I think like what I've really realized is that I just, you know, I just want to be a part of like building something that I can like focus on a longer term. And that's always been
26:25
And that's always been the goal.
26:28
Uh, you know, it is always the goal with any of these companies I worked with.
26:30
So, um, you know, I uh obviously, you know, like I uh I I believe in actions more than words.
26:37
Like I guess what we'll build and launch in a month would probably be a testament to, you know, what we've been able to build.
26:45
Well, you're certainly going to have a lot of attention around that launch.
26:46
I hope you uh now is probably not the right time to renegotiate your your uh offer letter for the new company.
26:54
You should probably uh you know, stick with it.
26:57
But uh I think you're going to bring a lot of marketing uh value to to Darwin, the new company you're joining.
27:03
What's the reaction been like uh at home?
27:05
you're getting a lot of messages from from from has this broken tech x and broken containment into kind of your your the world beyond just people asking you about this.
27:18
Yeah, I mean obviously you know reaction is natural like a ton of people have been asking about this.
27:20
Uh what's also funny is like you know some of the memes like um I I am very new to Twitter.
27:25
I joined Twitter yesterday.
27:27
So this was a lesson for me in social media in general like I am not a social media person.
27:31
So it just like I was like you know very overwhelmed with it in general.
27:34
Um obviously you know feeling shitty about it as well like I like I said you know I'm not very proud of what I did.
27:40
I think there was a way where I could have course corrected in in a much different manner.
27:45
Um so there was a lot of like reflection in general but I think friends and family have been strong.
27:48
Uh you know like I said I was lucky to work at some of these places where I had really close relationships with the founders.
27:54
You know a lot of them reached out you know they to essentially be like helpful or kind of give advice on what I should be doing next.
28:00
Um even like you know sometimes like staying through with with me like you know uh just to make sure that I'm like all right.
28:06
Um you know like uh No, I think it says a lot that that a number of the people that that you work for that fired you because you were working multiple jobs still care about you.
28:16
It shows that when you were working for them at least it you know that it does seem like you really you really did care.
28:21
Are there any uh startups that you've worked for in the past that you were uh working multiple jobs for that you haven't gotten a chance to apologize to yet that you plan to?
28:31
I mean in general like I plan to apologize to everyone.
28:33
Like that's that goes without saying.
28:35
Um any companies that you still need to resign from? None whatsoever.
28:41
Is the only focus I have. That's great. Okay. Okay. He's on the record.
28:46
You're on the right path. On the right path.
28:48
Well, I'm rooting for you.
28:49
I I I hope this is a story of redemption.
28:51
I believe in forgiveness.
28:51
I believe in mistakes and I'm I'm I'm optimistic that this can have a good ending. Me, too.
28:56
So, to be clear, your ex account is at real Periq, right? That's the real one.
29:03
There's a lot of fake ones floating out there trying to take uh trying to ride the hype wave. Mhm. Yeah.
29:10
I mean, 100% that there's been so many fake accounts um and a lot of fake narratives as well.
29:16
Uh but yeah, that is my real account.
29:19
Um there's there's one person who asked me to post a picture of banana on my head with a fork in my hand.
29:25
And I did not have banana at my home at that point in time.
29:29
But uh I was trying to do that just to show a freak. Okay.
29:35
But it's it's been it's been interestingly like uh uh you know while to like notice how people are like taking this in different ways.
29:42
But um yeah, that kind of helps like just feel a little bit less less shitty about it. But yeah. Yeah.
29:48
What what what are the uh the questions here?
29:51
Remote versus in office, US versus international AI.
29:55
Yeah, I mean I think we we had this post from Ahmad at Mercury.
29:56
from Ahmad at Mercury. I think I think the reason this s struck such a chord uh is you know again it's this remote angle the international angle the ideas around a 10x engineer uh the potential of new AI tools but uh this has been really
30:13
helpful get to know you and I think um you were getting uh you provided uh entertainment for a lot of people the last 24 hours so I'm glad to hear that you're going to apologize to everybody that that you misled and uh I I am excited to follow uh what you do next. Yeah. Thanks for stopping by. Thank you Yeah. Thanks for stopping by.
30:30
Thank you so much for having me. Cheers. We'll talk to you soon. We'll talk soon. Bye. Fascinating. Fascinating.
30:38
I think he's handling it quite well. Yeah.
30:41
And I do think this is a situation where the damage is hopefully minimal to the companies.
30:48
It's not It's not like he was working multiple jobs and then there was like a you know the customer database leaked because he wrote bad code because he was working multiple jobs. too stressed out.
30:57
There's no there's no one alleging that yet, at least that we've seen.
31:01
And I think the founders that hired him and then fired him in general, yeah, probably noticed it pretty quickly.
31:08
This is not like somebody joining a big tech company and working there for 5 years, not doing any work and just sort of like being a cog in the machine. Yeah.
31:15
And so, yeah, ultimately it's unfortunate.
31:18
Silicon Valley runs on trust. Yes. He violated that trust.
31:20
trust. Yes. He violated that trust. Uh but uh I was happy to see that he was you know really apologetic and and that's the thing about the startup ecosystem like we like Silicon Valley has really really leaned into the trust thing to the point where a venture capitalist can shake your hand and say
31:36
I'm going to invest a million dollars and the expectation is that they actually do that and they don't back out and if they do back out it's it's a big thing it's a big deal and so um yeah even even though you know I don't know how I don't know how ironclad every work
31:52
contract is e like we were going back and forth on like does is there a specific no moonlighting clause that describes exactly what you can do in your free time and can you go do dash or Uber Eats on the side or can you take a you know you know c can you earn an ex creator pay pay share uh like revshare
32:10
like does that count as moonlighting you're posting you're making 200 bucks or a thousand bucks from X is that moonlighting you know maybe there's not but people know what full-time means and if I send you an offer I'm I'm offering you a full-time job I'm expecting you not to take another full-time job. Like
32:22
Like maybe, yeah, maybe, you know, someone throws you 50 bucks to, you know, uh, walk their dog once, you know, once on the random on the weekend, but the idea is that you're not taking a very similar job at another company.
32:34
So, uh, it seems pretty clear even if there's no major like legal ramifications. So, I don't know.
32:40
He seems he seems like he's he's he's handling it well and and and going on the the correct apology tour.
32:43
And, um, there could be the good ending here. Yeah. Lulu said, "Come clean. Be sorry." He did that.
32:50
Be willing to laugh at yourself. Embrace a good meme. Yep. Worker 17. He did that. Feed the curiosity. What was it like? What did you learn? Don't sugarcoat.
32:58
I thought it was interesting that that he would have been hilarious if he came out and said, "Oh, yeah.
33:04
I'm running, you know, uh, 10 Codeex agents. I'm running Devon. I'm using Cloud Code."
33:09
He was just like, "No, I just worked really hard." Yeah.
33:13
And, uh, I don't do anything other than than Yeah.
33:15
It is always tough with this stuff because, you know, like somebody who would lie about working multiple jobs might just come on here and lie to us.
33:22
But he seemed he seemed he seemed uh sincere.
33:24
And so I I'm I'm I'm inclined to believe that he is an insomniac and just was working three jobs, 40 hours a week each and that's 120 hours and that's, you know, Morgan Stanley investment bank associate. Yeah. You know, work.
33:37
But it it does raise this question of like like there are people out there who are willing to work 100 hours and if they go to Wall Street they get comped on that immediately and startups don't really have a mechanism not necessarily immediately.
33:53
No, but but the the the comp and the expectation is matched and and like I think Wall Street has like absorbed that that latent demand for work and capacity of young people who are down to grind basically and they can choose to opt out of it and getting a different job.
34:10
Uh but they kind of know what they're going into.
34:13
Like no one no one no one shows up at Goldman Sachs and is like oh my god I had no idea I was going to have to like do a slide deck on Saturday, right?
34:18
Um, but in startups like there's kind of this like, hey, we're we have this, you know, good work culture. It's kind of chill.
34:26
Let's, you know, do 40 hours a week, but then, you know, also there's no real way to make three times as much if you're willing to work three times as hard.
34:34
So, yeah, it's an interesting it's an interesting story. Yeah.
34:35
And to be honest, he he posted yesterday, he said, "There's a lot being said about me right now.
34:40
Most of you don't know the full story.
34:41
If there's one thing to know about me, it's that I love to build, which I do believe." He said, "That's it.
34:46
I've been isolated, written off, and shut out by nearly everyone I've known and every company I've worked at.
34:49
That doesn't feel completely true because he's in conversation with the CEOs that had hired him.
34:55
But building is the only thing I've truly known and it's what I'll keep doing.
34:58
Earlier today, the timing of this is amazing.
35:01
Earlier today, I signed an exclusive founding deal to be founding engineer.
35:06
Say exclusive at one company and one company only.
35:09
They were the only ones willing to bet on me at this time.
35:11
I actually think there's a lot of companies that would take a bet on him now.
35:14
And it just has to be you have to promise me that you're going to work for this just for us exclusively.
35:23
And and I think the right thing to do for this next company is try to bring him out to SF or wherever they're based because he will probably spend 18 hours a day in the office. Yeah.
35:32
It's so much easier to deal with a with a known unknown or like a known risk factor.
35:35
It's the devil, you know, like forever this will follow him as like, "Hey, monitor this guy.
35:39
make sure he's not working a second job.
35:40
If you scroll down on this post, he says, "I'm pissed and I've got something to prove."
35:47
It's like he had a very aggressive posting style and he came on very like sweet and nice and just like kind of contrite.
35:52
It seems like he got in a bad spot.
35:54
He made some bad decisions.
35:54
He's sorry about it and he's now got something to prove. Yeah. And he's now infamous. Yeah. Infamous.
36:01
Well, that's a fun story.
36:05
Uh I'm glad we were able to get him on and cover it.
36:07
That's uh that's part of the beauty of this show. live baby. Uh anyway, news maxing. Yeah.
36:13
And I think that provides some good closure to this chapter of the timeline. Yeah.
36:20
Um we have a million messages coming in from various sources.
36:22
Um I can go through a little bit of the stories if you want.
36:26
Um we got to ring the gong though because the US economy added 147,000 new jobs. Let's go.
36:38
uh manufacturers are it's a it's a it's like a a very very slight job speed.
36:44
It's not actually that big of news, but we're very excited.
36:46
Uh Joe Weisenthal has a post in the stack somewhere where he says um breaking it's a beat 147,000 new jobs.
36:54
Unemployment rate falls to 4.
36:57
1% last month revised higher.
37:00
Analysts had expected 106k new jobs and a 4. 3% unemployment rate. So we love to see it.
37:07
Uh stark contrast with the calls uh from our president to reduce rates.
37:15
If if um jobs report is good, it's hard to argue uh to to drop them very so manufacturers are pausing hiring amid tariff uncertainty while unemployment fell partly because fewer people are looking for work.
37:28
So that's never a good sign.
37:30
But it does seem like uh the the American consumer seems resilient and things are uh we're we're staying in the kangaroo market.
37:38
We're neither we're neither, you know, it's not so over, but we're maybe not so back just yet.
37:43
We're kind of uh right back where we started at the beginning of the year in terms of the stock market rates.
37:49
Uh anyway, um the CEO of Ford had a controversial quote in the Wall Street Journal. He's agilled. He's agyp.
37:55
Journal. He's agilled. He's agyp. has been uh talking to Daario over at Anthropic and clearly uh the so the CEO of of Ford said uh AI will replace quote literally half of all white collar workers which is something that was
38:10
definitely said on Dwaresh Patel first I think Shto might have mentioned that and then Adario mentioned it in the post as well and uh Anthropic's been kind of noodling on this and then uh OpenAI and Meta have kind of stayed back from that
38:24
and a lot of the other labs have kind of said I don't know like you know Dar I think the quote from Sam was like Dario is a scientist like you should apply more scientific rigor here to like do this prediction like this is a very jar light
38:36
cap over that's right Bradap at open AI was pushing back a little bit but look uh the when he was making these comments he was also talking about just how advanced Xiaomi and these other Chinese e EV manufacturers are. So this was
38:48
So this was coming from a broader conversation and it's a good, you know, ultimately whether or not he actually believes this is true, he's signaling to the market that he's he's on top of this trend.
39:01
Y and uh if this does turn out to be the case, it's very possible that, you know, Ford will will be a beneficiary in some way. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
39:13
I mean, it's a it's it's tough business.
39:15
And I'm sure he's uh looking to the Chinese manufacturers and looking at their their COG structure and their their SGNA spend relative to revenue and and seeing how they can benchmark.
39:25
Um not that not that the Chinese uh EV manufacturers are necessarily adopting AI any faster than Ford, but uh it's certainly the idea of like how the shape of the business will be a little bit.
39:38
They do like facial recognition tech.
39:40
I think it will like you walk up to your car, it'll unlock Yeah. for you.
39:45
I think there's a story about the Ford CEO dailying a Chinese car just to get a taste of like, okay, we need to step it up a bunch of different ways. Yeah. Yeah. Um, in other news, Yeah.
39:57
There's no reason that that Ford can't catch up on these type of things, right?
40:01
Uh, in other news, we have a massive story out of the United Kingdom, folks.
40:07
Uh, Britain's royals gave up their luxury train, citing fiscal restraint.
40:12
Uh, this was sent to us by a friend.
40:15
Uh, in an era of hard choices for economies around the world, Britain's royal family is also playing up its part, waving farewell to perhaps its most extravagant mode of transport, the royal train.
40:29
The House of Windsor's personalized service that chugs the royals to engagements will be axed in 2027 after a review concluded that it no longer offered value for money and that two new helicopters are reliable.
40:44
I know nothing is sacred.
40:45
They're getting rid of their train.
40:45
The locomotive service, which features bedroom compartments, a dining room, and a study, has has been a lightning rod for anti-monarchy campaigners who pointed to its costs as emblematic of royal excess.
41:01
Shows the power of democracy that that we have anti- monarchy campaign.
41:06
Be a king with a private train anymore.
41:08
What's happening to the world? It's ridiculous.
41:13
uh you know, royal excess.
41:13
What is royalty if not excessive? It it's the brand. It it's it's terrible.
41:20
Um last year, King Charles III undertook a 190 mile rail trip to the capital from England's East Midlands, which was build at nearly $62,000.
41:35
It's like the price of a Model S.
41:38
Wait, the the trip was 62.
41:38
It was 190 mile rail trip on a private train car.
41:43
And so they have to staff it.
41:43
They have to load it up with fuel and food and all this different stuff.
41:47
And the study has strike you as I mean it's it's a it's $62,000 for 190 miles. Yeah.
41:55
But but 190 miles it's across maybe a few days.
41:58
Probably bringing multiple people having meetings on there. Yeah.
42:01
It's cheaper than, you know, taking a a zipping around in a in a PJ for that whole thing.
42:06
Well, they uh well, a review by the government concluded that two buying two new helicopters would be a relative a reliable alternatives or a viable alternative.
42:19
What about safety though?
42:19
I I have to imagine trains have a better safety. I would think so. I would think so.
42:24
Uh James Chalmer's who manages the royal finances as keeper of the privy purse said the decision to halt the personal train would mean the fondest of farewells. Yes.
42:35
Uh this is the Wall Street Journal.
42:38
Uh in moving forwards, we must not be bound by the past, he added. Rough.
42:42
This kind of public fiscal self- flagagillation is nothing new to the British monarchy, which is often at pains to point out its value to UK taxpayers who bankroll the franchise.
42:57
The late Queen Elizabeth II gave up the royal yacht in the 1990s in the name of financial prudence.
43:02
But this latest decision is all the more surprising given that the royal family's finances are arguably stronger than they've ever been in modern times.
43:11
The royal train Let's give it up for the royal family.
43:16
The royal family's finances. Thank you.
43:19
Ramp I I don't think ramps in in in the UK yet, but uh they they'll be able to get to the next level obviously when when that happens.
43:27
The royal train will stop rolling for the first time since Queen Victoria first commissioned coaches to be pulled by a locomotive in the 1860s.
43:34
The train's importance in an age of air travel has repeatedly come into question.
43:39
Once the train is mothballled, Charles, who has long advocated protecting the environment, will instead use two newly leased helicopters that run on sustainable aviation fuel.
43:50
The train will be taken out on one more tour of Britain before it is retired and can be placed on display.
43:58
So, RIP to the Royal Train. The Royal Train.
44:02
Hopefully, it makes a comeback at some point.
44:03
Yeah, I think American train.
44:05
You know, the Royals are backing off.
44:06
Let's get an American train. Yeah.
44:08
This is actually could be bullish for trains because them them shutting it down creates an opportunity for them to start it back up, which would be a positive catalyst for for the train. Yes. Yes. I agree.
44:17
Um well, you mentioned ramp. Time is money. Save both. Easy.
44:21
Use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more. All in one place. in.
44:23
If you're trying to expense train trips, do it on ramp. It's the way to do it. Ramp travel, baby. Ramp travel.
44:29
Um, what else is going on in the news?
44:32
Um, JP Morgan is revamping its bank for the super rich to cater to global clientele.
44:38
David Frame, named global head of private bank, helping deep pocketed clients invest more abroad. Oh.
44:45
Oh, there's also uh big news. Not very American.
44:48
No, not very American, but um uh Ilia Sutzkver has issued a statement on uh Daniel Gross with super safe super intelligence.
44:59
So Ilia writes, of course, the OpenAI co-founder now at SSI, says, "I sent the following message to our team and investors.
45:06
As you know, Daniel Gross's time with us has been winding down and as of June 29th, that's three four days ago, he is officially no longer a part of SSI.
45:16
We are grateful for his early contributions to the company and wish him well in his next endeavor.
45:22
I am now formally reading between the lines.
45:24
Do we think he hit his cliff?
45:26
I don't know when did SSI start?
45:28
Probably one year cliff or your best.
45:31
You think it went default? I don't know. Uh when was SSI founded? 1970.
45:37
Scuba schools international. Wow.
45:40
Uh super intelligence has not arrived in Jord's web browser just yet.
45:45
Oh, he hit he may have hit his cliff.
45:45
It was founded June 19th, 2024. No way. Wow.
45:51
But it's very possible this was resolved prior to that. Absolute dog.
45:54
And um anyway, so Ilia says, "I am now formerly CEO of SSI and Daniel Levy is president.
46:00
The technical team continues to report to me.
46:02
You might have heard rumors of companies looking to acquire us.
46:06
We are flattered by their attention but are focused on seeing our work through. He's a missionary. We have the compute. We have the team. We know what to do.
46:13
Together we will keep building safe super intelligence.
46:15
Ilia, so DG has entered the trade portal and uh trade portal.
46:24
I don't even know what that means.
46:25
I've never heard that term before, but I understand that it's vaguely familiar. It's portal time. It's portal time. It's portal time.
46:30
Um but uh anyways, uh the the rumor is that he's going to Meta, but we will have to see. Yep.
46:38
Uh well, speaking of Meta, uh Nat Freriedman officially posted that he has in fact joined Meta.
46:43
This was rumored and uh and leaked multiple times.
46:44
Uh it seemed pretty uh pretty confident.
46:50
Everyone seemed pretty confident in the reporting.
46:51
Um but he has confirmed it.
46:53
He said, uh I started work at Meta this week.
46:56
This is Nat Friedman tweeting.
46:56
Uh my job is to make amazing AI products that billions of people love to use.
47:04
He's in the application layer, baby. He's product layer. Love it. I'm excited.
47:09
I'm so excited for build.
47:09
Will says, "Taking the balance sheet of the world's largest mega corp and using it to develop the technology to find Noah's Ark, the Ark of the Covenant, and other biblical artifacts is top tier stuff." Congrats, King.
47:21
Ashley Vance says, "If you're not hiring an intern to use ground penetrating radar to find the ancient first copies of Solaris buried under building 12, I'll be disappointed." I love it.
47:31
He says, "It won't happen overnight, but but a few days in, I'm feeling confident that great things are ahead."
47:36
Yeah, I posted something when when the news leaked that uh it's like it's 2026.
47:39
I put on my meta quest for uh llama open Instagram and pull up the latest Vuvius scroll u because I certainly hope this means more Nat Freiedman side projects.
47:51
Obviously, he's going to be incredibly locked in has a huge task in front of him uh catching up to the big labs.
47:58
uh he's, you know, has an incredible team now, a lot of funding, but it is a big challenge and I'd certainly hope that he has time for some side projects.
48:08
I wonder what this means for AI Grant.
48:10
I wonder what this means for the the rest of the Nat Friedman cinematic universe of of uh kind of cracked interns that have gone on to the the Nat Friedman diaspora is really illustrious at this point. Yep.
48:23
Uh sort of sort of a new teal fellowship. Breaking news.
48:26
The big beautiful bill has passed way uh the house.
48:31
Uh I had a poly market just uh about 45 minutes ago.
48:35
It had rocketed up to 99%.
48:38
It's now sitting at 100%.
48:38
So Axios has the reporting.
48:41
The house passed president's big beautiful bill Thursday.
48:45
This article is from 5 minutes ago clearing the way for Trump to sign it by his July 4th deadline.
48:49
It's a massive victory for Speaker Mike Johnson, who was able to flip dozens of members who had initially threatened to vote no, as well as for Trump and Senate Republicans.
49:00
The bill passed uh 218 to 214.
49:06
Representatives Thomas Massie and Brian Fitzpatrick were the only Republicans to join all the Democrats in voting against the measure.
49:12
Moderates and conservatives demanded adjustments after the Senate made significant changes to the House version, but ultimately none were made.
49:21
Several key holdouts flipped following meetings with the president at the White House, but a ground of of a group of hardliners needed more persuading.
49:30
Um, anyways, so we will wait to see the uh the the impacts of all of this.
49:35
I'd be curious to get uh Zack Kukov on maybe at the end of the show to just kind of break it down.
49:41
We will be continuing to track the big beautiful bill.
49:43
But if you're trying to design something big and beautiful, head over to figma. com.
49:48
Think bigger, build faster.
49:48
Figma helps design and development teams build great products together.
49:53
You can get started for free at figma. com.
49:55
Palmer Lucky has loving the S1 loving it. Yes.
50:00
Uh and they're going out.
50:02
We got to get TA on who does the S1 deep dives. For sure. We got to do that.
50:06
Uh and if you're also in the S1 deep dive business and you have an interesting take, hit us up.
50:10
We'd love to have you on and chat about the Figma S1. Very interested in that.
50:13
Uh Anderl Palmer Lucky has an update on the story about uh how many weapons from America are flowing to Ukraine.
50:21
He is kind of uh giving his take and where he stands on this issue.
50:27
So uh Andre Yermach uh says uh today I remembered an early wartime meeting with Palmer Lucky.
50:32
I remember I think I remember this photo or a photo like it going out at the early start of the war.
50:37
uh steady, kind, and clear like Tangiro in the face of darkness.
50:43
Grateful he chose to stand with Ukraine.
50:45
His company's growth is proof good people build strong things.
50:47
And Palmer chimes in and says Anderl had people/hardware in Ukraine two weeks into the invasion.
50:54
Our autonomous weapons have destroyed hundreds of millions of worth hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Russia's war machine.
51:01
The United States should give them the tools they need to win.
51:03
It is the fastest path to peace. one way or another.
51:08
So, I had to look it up, but Tangiro is an anime or a manga manga demon slayer.
51:15
So, uh Andre clearly knows his audience with that post.
51:22
Luke Metro has a post here.
51:22
Uh so, OpenAI came out yesterday and said, "These OpenAI tokens are not OpenAI equity.
51:29
We did not partner with Robin Hood.
51:31
We're not involved with this and do not endorse it.
51:33
Any transfer of OpenAI equity requires our approval.
51:35
We did not approve any transfer. Please be careful.
51:40
And Luke Metro says what every CFO is thinking.
51:43
Yeah, these tokenized shares on Robin Hood are every startup CFO's newest headache.
51:46
Uh they are derivatives from what I know.
51:49
So they're not it's not actual equity.
51:52
It's closer to a, you know, something like prediction market. Yeah.
51:55
No one is more creative financially than secondary salesmen. Yeah.
52:03
Do you remember the whole uh Ford contract situation? This whole thing? Yeah. Yeah.
52:08
You'd write the I mean it's derivative contract, but people were doing that for a while and then that got banned.
52:12
Um and I don't know how they're doing this one, but uh odd to uh never bet against American financial.
52:20
But the interesting what does this say about Robin Hood?
52:22
Says that they're not AGI built because if you're truly believe that OpenAI is building God, you wouldn't want to make God angry. So not AGI built. I guess something. Is that the conclusion?
52:31
That could be one one conclusion.
52:33
I think we need to we need to frame everything in the context of do you believe every decision is how AGI you know you're just reading between the lines. Yeah.
52:42
Uh yeah even even the even you know the UK is clearly not AGI pill because if we're approaching super abundance having a royal train figure out how to operate the royal trainer than you know walking. Yeah.
52:57
This is this is very damaging for their brand. Yeah.
52:59
Ford CEO though, AGI Pel, let's get let's get him on the show.
53:05
Um, anyway, let's tell you about Vant.
53:07
Automate compliance, manage risk, prove trust continuously.
53:09
Vant's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your trust out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program.
53:22
Um, anyway, uh, Zack Pogb has some fantastic photos and Getty Images.
53:26
He went through Getty Images and found some insane photos of Steve Jobs that I hadn't seen.
53:32
I thought I'd seen viral photo watching in in the bottom right corner.
53:37
If we can pull this up, he's watching uh Larry Allison game tape. Game tape. I love it. That's amazing. So good. Yeah. Wow.
53:44
He's really watching Allison just being like, "Okay, what's he saying?
53:48
How am I going to counter this?
53:49
How am I going to do that?" I I assume. Wow.
53:51
Or just learning from from one of the best. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
53:53
Zoom in on the bottom right.
53:54
picture laying on the floor like you know deep in conversation or argument. No, no. Oh, is he on the phone?
54:02
I I I think he's just thinking.
54:04
It just seems like he's on the He's just on He's just like exasperated like taking a second.
54:08
They didn't have I It's funny.
54:10
I just assumed he had an iPhone up, but the phones weren't that small.
54:13
No, he invented the phone. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
54:15
They they didn't have that.
54:17
He had to go through that to make the iPhone in indeed.
54:22
Speaking of hardware and jobs, I have Reggie James new book here.
54:24
It looks absolutely fantastic. I got it last night.
54:29
So, well, thank you for making it.
54:32
I purchased it to support a fellow technology brother.
54:34
Uh, but it is absolutely fantastic portfolio company in there, Daylight. That's very cool. Love to see it.
54:41
And bunch of other features.
54:43
We got I love these books. Nothing.
54:45
Oh, we got nothing in there. No way. That's amazing. Yeah. Very cool. Beautiful. Beautiful stuff. So, go pick it up. Uh, what is it? Hardwarebook.
54:52
com, I think was what he said. Hardwarebook2024. Hardwarebook2024. com. It's sold out.
54:59
So, it's sold out, but I don't know.
55:01
DM Reggie with something.
55:03
He'll figure it out and figure it out.
55:05
But if you're trying to build a product, go to linear. com or linear. app. It's linear. app. Linear. app.
55:12
Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products.
55:16
Meet the system for modern software development.
55:17
streamline issues, projects and product road maps and they got linear.
55:21
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55:22
They got cursor perplexity, retool, ramp, openai, scale, boom, cash app, forcell.
55:28
You should be one of them.
55:31
Kind of LeBron James of uh of product planning.
55:35
Speaking of LeBron James, breaking news from Emily Sunberg.
55:37
LeBron was in the Hamptons last week and needed somewhere to practice.
55:41
Instead of going to some weird rich guy's home gym, who who would have probably asked for photos afterwards, he turned to the most obvious solution, a high school, and Emily interviewed a teenager who played pickup basketball with him. This is amazing. Great story. Good for his brand, too.
55:58
It's just good all around. Great for his brand.
56:01
Yeah, it's like an it's an unexpected gift and unexpected time.
56:04
Like you played, you're a teenager.
56:07
We probably played basketball at this high school gym like, you know, every day for a couple months during basketball season, probably offseason a little bit and then all of a sudden the greatest basketball player of all time potentially.
56:17
I don't know where you stand on the goat debate, Jordy, but um he uh he just shows up, puts on a clank.
56:23
There's only one goat debate I care about.
56:26
Um the best entrepreneur of all time.
56:26
We have another post here from Jira at Jira tickets. Good morning.
56:30
10,000 new AI startups with cute little minimalistic names and logos just launched and they say they're going to change everything.
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Please enjoy your timeline scroll.
56:38
Just call me if you need anything. That's true. Uh we have a post here.
56:43
Is he just saying that there's a ton of AI startups launching every day on the timeline basically and they're all going to change everything, John? Okay.
56:54
They're going to they're going to do their best. Realistic names, logos.
56:54
I feel like I feel like what's clogging up the timeline more is like, you know, people actually taking like the viral videos seriously and like and like breaking through.
57:02
I I I don't see that many like cute little minimalistic names and logos that much. But I don't know. It's interesting.
57:08
Yeah, I guess I guess it is uh it is a paradox that there could be so many things that all uh that all change everything simultaneously.
57:15
My my recommendation for Sohom, we were on the drive-in today.
57:20
We were we were working on this the uh it's hard to see.
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Uh maybe text it to the group or put it in the tab.
57:26
The dev shop of Sohham Periq is the last. Yes.
57:28
And and just flip the browser company logo. Yep.
57:31
You're at 5 million of ARR by the end of next week.
57:37
I I really I really do think that I I I'm you know hopefully excited for him if he's going to this new video AI startup and he's working seriously on that and he's enjoys the founding engineer role there. Uh rooting for him.
57:51
But I do think the dev shop he he's teed up for something amazing.
57:54
Like I think that that would be a fantastic business for him.
57:58
Deeply aligned with the culture. Clearly loves building.
57:59
He got over his skis, made some bad decisions, disappointed some people, maybe broke some rules.
58:06
But if he just if he just, you know, stayed in Mumbai and found 50 other guys like him and and he was the guy that that was onboarding clients, he would absolutely crush it. Totally. Totally. Yeah.
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Onboarding clients would be huge.
58:19
It seems like he likes juggling.
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He likes juggling, bouncing around. Totally.
58:22
And and I think most importantly with this like the crazy viral attention that he got, I think he had a chance to kind of rewire people's brains on what it means to use a dev shop because using a dev shop feels very antithetical to like the way startups are built.
58:42
We talked about this a little bit yesterday.
58:43
bit yesterday. like you're like it's a it's a sign that like you can't hire or you can't actually build like you don't have a team on your like a line to you but he is he has such an interesting story that I think a lot of people would would say yeah let's get So on for you
59:01
know the dev shop on for a quick sprint for three months seems to be good at good at that he has a good team and uh he could grow it from there so I don't know I'm I'm optimistic about that I was surprised that that didn't it didn't seem like when we talked to him that it was even in his mind that he that he could do that. Um it also seemed like he
59:16
Um it also seemed like he hadn't considered just having a bidding war between the three jobs and saying like who can actually pay me more.
59:23
Uh the equity thing was weird.
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Surprisingly there's a bunch there's a bunch of teams right now where if you just said I'm going to work 18 hours a day on your company, they would probably pay you 350k.
59:35
Yeah, there was something weird.
59:39
There was something weird about the fact that he's like like I I don't want to talk about my personal life, but I have financial needs, but also the I did wasn't doing it for the money and actually like I cared about the equity because it's like if you were really in like I have medical bills or something, you'd be like cash now.
59:53
No, the takeaway is that like he's like the mob the the Mumbai mob is like saying like go get equity. No, no, no.
1:00:02
Like go you you you work for us kind of thing. Sure. Sure. Sure.
1:00:07
But but in that case, you would just max out the cash.
1:00:09
You max out the cash, right?
1:00:10
You max out the cash comp and you and you try and go get one one job or multiple jobs that just pay all cash or as much cash as possible.
1:00:16
And I mean, we need to talk to more of the founders on the other side.
1:00:19
It wasn't like he had this master plan of I'm going to like taking the takea away from yesterday is I was coming away and being like, okay, if five people came out on X, are there 20 more on LinkedIn?
1:00:31
And it's like this massive conspiracy that he was like master plan, but it didn't that wasn't my take away.
1:00:39
We'll have to dig into it more and talk to more folks because it's totally possible that more people Dee had a post from yesterday who was on the show yesterday.
1:00:46
He said, "Sohom is just the tip of the iceberg just like this Redditor pulling 800k a year working five jobs." Wow.
1:00:52
There's a Reddit uh uh uh what is it a group called our employed?
1:00:58
There's 500,000 people where people just maniacally discuss this.
1:01:04
There are thousands of Sohant Periqs we don't know about.
1:01:07
Um there's a post here from user big fat phony account.
1:01:14
He says five jobs at 800K TC using an ROI mentality.
1:01:17
I've jumped from three jobs to five jobs two weeks ago.
1:01:22
I'm now making three 3K a day. It's doable for me. Here's why.
1:01:26
I'm an expert in my field which is data.
1:01:28
I know how to solve problems in various forms.
1:01:33
Clients, as I call them, know my value.
1:01:35
If there's a problem or they need my expert help, they like having me on the team.
1:01:39
This expertise has come from 15 years of experience, but also three years of overemployment teaching me the latest methods. I'm all remote.
1:01:45
None of this one day in the office BS. Just say no.
1:01:50
So, he's basically giving the playbook.
1:01:52
The funny thing is you could just have a consulting shop and do this above board and probably be way more successful. Yeah.
1:02:01
You just have to build the muscle to sell your services and and not just get fixated on just applying for jobs.
1:02:10
Like you can still look, okay, this company is hiring for this role. Great.
1:02:14
I should reach out to them.
1:02:15
Hey, I offer um XYZ service. Yep.
1:02:20
I I'll be, you know, fractional. Yep.
1:02:22
Staff engineer, whatever it's called.
1:02:22
I command a premium because I'm super experienced and I have this team. You can call me anytime.
1:02:29
I'll be available, you know, 18 hours of the day and you could just build a legitimate business.
1:02:35
So, I think that that's should be the takeaway from engineers that are um getting uh inspired by Sohom in the wrong way is just build a consulting practice. I agree. I agree.
1:02:43
Well, if he does, he's going to have to reach out to a lot of people.
1:02:46
He needs a CRM that he can trust.
1:02:48
He needs Adio customer relationship magic.
1:02:50
Adio is the AI native CRM that builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level.
1:02:55
Um, let's mix it up with a post from the PE god.
1:02:58
If you're pure, this is important going into the weekend, everyone.
1:03:01
Yes, this is huge for July 4th, which is tomorrow.
1:03:03
If you're pure of heart, drinking 17 ice cold beers isn't bad for you.
1:03:09
We got to have Andrew Huberman back on to debate debate this and uh and Brian Johnson, too. We'll get both of them. They'll they'll love it.
1:03:17
They'll be they'll be like, "Yeah, hard agree."
1:03:18
I think we feel this way about splitting a bottle of champagne.
1:03:20
Yeah, it certainly doesn't feel bad.
1:03:24
Everything in moderation, including moderation.
1:03:26
That's what I like to say. That's right.
1:03:29
Um anyway, what what else should we go?
1:03:32
Leaf uh over at Public, our friend said, uh this is some interesting context on the on the tokenization of private companies.
1:03:38
So, he says tokenization of private companies is tricky and risky.
1:03:42
Yeah, public used to offer alternative assets like music royalties and we look deeply into offering tokenized private company shares.
1:03:50
Here's why we haven't done it.
1:03:51
The risks come down to four aspects.
1:03:53
Liquidity, supply, information rights, and investor protections. First, some background.
1:03:58
Public offered private assets via regulatory framework called rag.
1:04:02
A think of it like a wrapper that turned a private asset like IP, art, real estate, or private company into a security i. e.
1:04:08
securization enabling it to be traded.
1:04:11
It's very similar to what a crypto token represents in the Robin Hood tokenization scenario.
1:04:15
Same thing, different database.
1:04:17
And he goes on to give uh a lot more context.
1:04:23
Uh he says, let's say Robin Hood now owns $10 million worth of stock at a $300 million valuation.
1:04:28
They could spin up 10 million tokens priced at $1 each and offer them on their platform.
1:04:33
Customers then own the token, not the actual shares in OpenAI.
1:04:35
Think of it like a ticket representing a sliver of ownership in the SPV, but not OpenAI directly.
1:04:43
And he says the issue one, a $10 million float on a $300 billion company with major hype is unlikely to meet demand.
1:04:49
That limited float can quickly lead to a price spike, aka the shares will trade at a premium.
1:04:53
The $1 token might jump to 10, implying a $3 trillion valuation for OpenAI.
1:04:59
What started as a fundamentals-based investment quickly turns into pure speculation.
1:05:03
people buying tokens in the hope someone else will pay more.
1:05:07
I mean, the float on some of these things is crazy.
1:05:09
I I mean, the the numbers that I was saying with with Republic 5 million, $5,000 investments, $5 million total.
1:05:16
So, there's 1,000 people that are putting 5K down to set the price of SpaceX.
1:05:22
It's like, does that make any sense?
1:05:24
Not setting the price, the initial Well, they're setting off. No, no, no.
1:05:28
But but like there are essentially 1,000 slugs of 5k value to kind of set the price.
1:05:35
It's like the mo the smallest possible market.
1:05:37
So yeah, I mean uh I I I think that there's there's a lot of uh risk to that.
1:05:41
They they could just trade like the other thing because you know these types of offerings will typically uh to be tied to SPVS not the underlying shares.
1:05:54
There's usually no information rights.
1:05:56
there can be dilution other changes and so you actually don't know uh the the value of the underlying assets.
1:06:04
Well um really quickly let's tell you about numeralhq.
1:06:07
com sales tax and autopilot spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance.
1:06:12
Um we have Chris Miller joining the author of chip war.
1:06:14
Uh in just a few minutes I wanted to run through this post in the it's not a post it's an article in the Wall Street Journal from yesterday.
1:06:22
Uh China is quickly gaining in the AI race.
1:06:23
I think this is something we'll be talking about with Chris.
1:06:26
Um, Chinese artificial intelligence companies are loosening the US global strangle hold on AI, challenging US superiority, and setting the stage for a global arms race in the technology.
1:06:37
In Europe, Middle East, Africa, and Asia, users ranging from multinational banks to public universities are turning to large language models from Chinese companies such as startup Deepseek and e-commerce giant Alibaba. That's Quen, of course.
1:06:55
Um, as alternatives to US offerings such as CHACBT, HSBC and Standard Chartered have begun testing DeepSeek's models internally according to people familiar with the matter.
1:07:05
Saudi Ramco, the world's largest oil company, recently installed DeepSeek in its main data center, which is interesting because Saudi Ramco, I believe they have their own model as well.
1:07:12
Um, and so they're they're testing Deep Seek, very AGI pled.
1:07:16
And I mean you could you could rewrite this to say like hey like you know perplexity has a deepseek fork.
1:07:23
Microsoft serves deepseek so maybe it's okay but obviously the larger geopolitical narratives here is like we don't want to have the rest of the world standardize on nonwestern models that could be very harmful uh to global competitiveness and so that's something that we'll be digging into.
1:07:39
uh even us major cloud service providers such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Google offer DeepSeek to customers despite the White House banning use of the company's app on some government devices over data security concerns.
1:07:50
Of course, there's a there's a separation between the layer there.
1:07:54
If you're running the open source model on your own chips, it shouldn't be able to call back to China.
1:08:00
But if you're installing the DeepSseek app on a government phone, well then everything that you send, it has to go to a server to be processed to then be inferenced.
1:08:09
And so like when like I assume that everything I've ever said to chat GPT exists on an OpenAI server somewhere, right?
1:08:16
Because they have to store it because when I open the app, I want to see all my chat required. Yeah.
1:08:19
Yeah, it's Yeah, it's required.
1:08:21
Well, that's a slightly separate thing that's about like actually disclosure, but yes.
1:08:24
He Seth uh h Seth in the deep sea gap just being like thoughts on Iran right now which we do.
1:08:33
Uh OpenAI's chatbt remains the world's predominant AI consumer chatbot with 910 million global downloads.
1:08:40
Let's hit the gonk for OpenAI. There we go.
1:08:47
Uh compared to with Deep Seek's 125 million.
1:08:50
Give me the 125 million for Deepseek.
1:08:54
Not even close to open AI deepseek.
1:08:54
You got to catch up, buddy.
1:08:57
Uh, no, it's very impressive.
1:08:59
121 million serious serious number.
1:09:01
Uh, figures from research sensor tower.
1:09:03
Uh, the US's AI is widely seen as the industry's gold standard because of advantages in computing semiconductors, cutting edge research, and access to financial capital.
1:09:16
Uh but as many other industries uh but as in other as in many other industries, Chinese companies have started to snatch customers by offering performance that is nearly as good at vastly lower prices.
1:09:29
I imagine what they're going to say. Let's see. Prices. Yeah.
1:09:34
Uh a study of global competitiveness in critical technologies released in early June by researchers at Harvard University found China has advantages in two key building blocks uh of AI data and human capital that are keeping it p uh that are helping it keep pace.
1:09:54
The competition some industry insiders said has set the world on the path toward a technological cold war potentially even a chip war.
1:10:01
And we have our guest Chris Miller in the studio, author Chip War. Welcome to the show. How you doing? What's happening? Good, thanks. How are you?
1:10:10
Thank you so much for joining. It's great to have you. Uh, great to have you.
1:10:13
Um, I would love I mean, we were just reading an article from the journal um about the uh the China versus the US AI race.
1:10:21
There's a whole bunch of modern details, but I'd love to kick it off with uh a little bit on your background and how you initially came became interested in the idea of a chip war and kind of how things emerge from there.
1:10:38
Yeah, I I got interested in the idea of a chipboard because I realized we've been living through multiple iterations of one since the first chips were invented in the late 1950s that you couldn't really separate the development of military power or country's strategic position on the world stage without understanding the ability to access and deploy computing power.
1:10:57
And so we're seeing a new version of that right now with AI, but it's it's actually replicating what we saw in the cold war competition between the US and the Soviet Union or the economic competition between the US and Japan in the 1980s.
1:11:11
And so then as now, uh there's this deep link between access to compute and your strategic position. Yeah.
1:11:16
Going back in the history, um we we we were digging into some of the the efforts that the Chinese government had uh Yeah.
1:11:23
How many how many fiveyear plans have they have they done?
1:11:28
They they keep stacking these fiveyear plans and it seems to be working for decades just to stay on the lagging edge.
1:11:33
Um what did you learn about that and what what can you tell us about like that narrative as you know maybe the chip war is heating up right now but China has been aware of this for decades and has been investing against it. Yeah.
1:11:46
No, they they've certainly been investing uh for a a long time.
1:11:48
I think really the last decade or so it's kicked up a a real notch.
1:11:53
um both because China's solved a lot of its other technological problems.
1:11:57
It's become self-sufficient in many other spheres of of manufacturing and making chips is the one of the really few areas and the largest by far where China still has to import manufactured products from abroad such that today China's largest import more even than it spends on oil is importing semiconductors from Taiwan. Wow.
1:12:18
And uh so this is something that they wanted to break free from more on semis than oil. That is wild. That's insane.
1:12:25
Um, when you talk about that, are is is that driven heavily by uh stuff that's not sanctioned on the lagging edge, the you know the 15 16 nanometer like the bigger chips?
1:12:39
Um, or or are we talking about like smuggling numbers of 3nmter chips that have been repurposed through shell companies or something like that?
1:12:48
It's it's a mix, but it's it's mostly things that are are legal to sell to China.
1:12:52
And you can sell both the the lagging edge like things in your dishwasher, but also a a smartphone chip at 3 nmters that you can still sell to China.
1:13:00
And there's a large volume of those for PCs and smartphones and autos that are still being sold. Yeah. Yeah.
1:13:07
So, every every Huawei phone has a chip and those are not not sanctioned.
1:13:09
We're just talking about the large accelerators, the G the big GPUs that are really under Exactly.
1:13:14
under under lock and key. Um That's right. Interesting.
1:13:17
Um, then take me through kind of how you processed the initial roll out of the chip ban during the Biden era.
1:13:26
What uh how did that play out for you?
1:13:29
Were I assume people were calling you? I don't know.
1:13:32
I I want to know your side of that of that era of history here. Yeah.
1:13:35
Well, I would actually rewind the clock back to 2018 and 19.
1:13:40
That's that's when um ASML, the Dutch company that produces the lithography tools you need to produce cutting edge ships, was first thinking about selling a cutting edge tool to a Chinese customer.
1:13:51
And then the the Trump administration, then the first administration leaned very heavily on the Dutch and said, "Don't let this go through uh because if you do, China will have everything it needs to catch up in in shipmaking."
1:14:03
And so I think that was actually the the key turning point.
1:14:05
And then the 2022 restrictions that not only tightened up the rules around chipmaking equipment but also banned the GPUs that you can make with these uh tools uh in some ways naturally followed from that first 2019 move.
1:14:21
What was different in 2022 was that there was a real I think understanding and it came before Cat GPT that AI was going to be a big deal and that access to GPUs was going to be a critical input into building bigger and better AI systems. Yeah.
1:14:37
Uh how how did the chip shortage uh fit into all of that during COVID?
1:14:39
I mean, everyone experienced uh you know, the the chip shortages from like auto prices going up, used cars, there were so many market distortions.
1:14:47
Um h how did you process that point in time?
1:14:50
And then I want to step forward even further. Yeah.
1:14:55
So I think the chip shortage didn't really impact tech companies.
1:14:59
impacted as you say autos and dishwashers and microwaves.
1:15:01
But it brought together a political coalition across the west that uh included the auto companies and the tech companies and and medical device companies all of whom realized chips were very very important.
1:15:14
We needed reliable supply chains and we needed to stay ahead technologically in uh in this and that's why whether in the US or in Japan or in Europe you had chips acts being passed to reinvigorate domestic manufacturing to try to provide some more resilience for these supply chains.
1:15:30
It would have been unthinkable 5 years earlier but because of this coalition it was possible. Yeah.
1:15:34
Is it is it a misnomer to call China's strategy around semiconductor and domestic production of semiconductors and all of their semiconductor strategies communist.
1:15:46
It feels like they in some ways have an extremely capitalist system with not picking winners and putting out, you know, huge government incentives.
1:15:57
is they're they're shifting the market, but from what we've heard a lot of times there's just a huge pool of money and there's vicious competition to go after it.
1:16:08
So, how how would you actually characterize or like what words are we using?
1:16:13
How are we describing the Chinese political system now with specifically with regard to not just how they elect people, but specifically their chip policies? Yeah.
1:16:24
You know, I think you got a a strange uh mix of of policies being deployed by the Chinese and and in some ways that's why it's worked relatively well by a lot of metrics.
1:16:33
You you have the benefit of the market weeding out uh firms that can't compete, but you've also got the benefit of the government devoting long-term patient capital into its priority areas, which pulls in resources, pulls in entrepreneurs uh to these segments.
1:16:47
entrepreneurs uh to these segments. I think the risk for China is that unlike other sectors that they've done well like solar or EVs where they've had a thousand flowers bloom and you figure out which ones are capable which ones are not in the chip industry you don't
1:17:03
have nearly as much of that and in fact the key players today like the most uh significant most advanced maker of processor chips today was also the most significant advanced in China 10 years ago so there's much more that would be SMIC which produces chips for Huawei Yeah. Got it. Yeah. And so Got it. Yeah.
1:17:19
And so you don't have this thousand flowers bloom dynamic in the chip industry just because it's so capital intensive uh and the number of people with the knowhow is fairly limited uh that you got a small number of flowers blooming and all these flowers now have state ownership. Yeah.
1:17:35
Can you So it's a different dynamic.
1:17:35
Uh it feels like they're building like a like a mirror stack.
1:17:38
Uh can you walk us through uh the equivalent to Nvidia TSMC ASML over in China and then maybe give me a little color. Yeah.
1:17:49
And on on the SKH side as well, are they doing stuff there?
1:17:51
And then I'd love to know um kind of uh if you can give me like a qualitative grade of like how serious these these competitors are.
1:18:00
Huawei seems super advanced.
1:18:02
It seems like Smick and SME maybe not, but I'll let you explain it. Yeah. Yes. I think you're right.
1:18:06
They are trying to build out the entire supply chain on on the memory side.
1:18:09
You have YMTC, which is their leading producer of NAND memory.
1:18:14
CXMT, leading producer of the DRAM memory, including uh eventually the DRM memory that will go into uh be paired with GPUs, the high bandwidth uh memory.
1:18:24
I think on the memory side, China's done really well.
1:18:28
Um you probably wouldn't say it's at the cutting edge in terms of its ability to produce that volume, but in terms of the kind of pure technological capability, they've if they haven't cut up, they've gotten very close.
1:18:38
Um, yeah, I think for the the the processor chip uh side, it's been more complicated.
1:18:44
Huawei is very capable at chip design.
1:18:47
It's done it for smartphones at the cutting edge.
1:18:49
Now it's, you know, catching up very rapidly in terms of GPU design.
1:18:52
Hard to exactly uh benchmark visav the Nvidia, but Huawi is very capable in chip design.
1:18:58
The the challenge I've had is that SMIC um is right now about five years behind TSMC, five or six years in terms of its ability to produce processor chips at quality and at scale.
1:19:10
Uh and so that has been a a real limiting factor and the reasons behind is because there are no real Chinese equivalents today of companies like ASML or Applied Materials or Tokyo Electron that make the tools that make chips.
1:19:26
There are companies that would like to compete with them that can compete with some of the really simpler lower-end tools, but when it comes to the advanced tools, the Chinese firms just aren't there yet.
1:19:35
And so, Smick needs to buy how far behind hard to say.
1:19:43
Um, I mean, I think certainly uh certainly 10 years behind today.
1:19:48
They're now investing a ton.
1:19:50
They're reverse engineering the usual playbook.
1:19:52
Um but if you look at the the leading edge fabs that Smick operates, it's still mostly western tools inside.
1:20:02
And every single year uh for the past, uh decade or so, China's been one of the largest, if not the largest importers of chipmaking equipment in the world.
1:20:10
Last year, China accounted for ballpark half the revenue of all of the world's key chipm equipment vendors, which is a pretty good data point for uh where those firms are relative to their Chinese competitors.
1:20:26
What about on the what about the what about the scale of the shell company activity buying from from TSMC and and other players?
1:20:35
Did have you tracked that closely? Yeah.
1:20:38
Well, certainly a big shell company was discovered and then uh we hope shut down uh last year.
1:20:43
Uh but the scale was vast uh uh truly enormous.
1:20:49
Millions several million chips uh procured from TSMC and then it appears diverted to Huawei.
1:20:54
Um which is you know at a scale that I am frankly surprised by.
1:21:01
Everyone knew there would be smuggling in the scale of dozens or hundreds or even thousands.
1:21:04
Uh but smuggling at the scale of millions uh really calls into the question the ability of the US government to properly enforce these rules.
1:21:12
And you the only thing worse than a rule um that is is overly broad is a rule that's overly broad, not not seriously enforced.
1:21:18
You get the worst of of of both worlds.
1:21:20
And so I I I think the US government has a lot of thinking of its own to do.
1:21:24
And how do you actually make these rules uh stick in the real world?
1:21:28
And thus far there's it's been a real struggle.
1:21:30
Are there any underexplored uh areas in data center buildout that where people aren't really tracking the competitive dynamic between China and America?
1:21:42
I was listening to Dylan Patel talk about how with Huawei's cloud matrix 384.
1:21:47
They were able to do I think fiber optic connections between the chips and basically do NVL link at a much larger scale and Nvidia had tried to do that and maybe not been able not been as successful and it felt like you know Huawei is slightly behind or seriously behind in a number of categories but that might be one place that they're actually ahead.
1:22:06
Have you tracked that at all?
1:22:08
Is there is there anything that uh people should be digging into there?
1:22:12
I feel like the the narrative was like everyone was getting up to speed on Nvidia and then people learned about TSMC and then they learned about ASML and then they learned about SKH Highex and I feel like we're all about to learn about a networking provider soon, but what what what's been your uh what's been your take on that industry? Yeah. Yeah.
1:22:27
No, I think you're you're right to focus on networking as a as a key area of rapid technological advance.
1:22:34
You know, it's hard to benchmark who's how far ahead.
1:22:36
um unlike in Foundry where you've got like a really clear way to measure TSMC versus SMIC um there's not such an obvious kind of benchmark.
1:22:49
I I think the the underexplored area in in the Chinese ecosystem is actually not at the chip level but the cloud level which is we know that China's smuggled in a large number of chips.
1:22:59
We know that there are uh a meaningful volume of chips that Smick has produced domestically for Huawei.
1:23:06
Uh but it appears that a lot of these chips are in data centers that have low utilization and anecdotally all the anecdotes we hear about um utilization of AI data centers in China suggests a lot of real challenges in terms of getting utilization partly because there's some stateowned telecoms that are just mismanaging their cloud businesses.
1:23:26
Um but it's I think surprising that Chinese firms like DeepSeek talk about compute limitations given the number of chips we know that are actually in China.
1:23:36
And so if you're, you know, if you're starting with a thesis that China is good at centralization, that doesn't appear to be what we're seeing here.
1:23:42
We appear to be seeing an inefficient um decentralization perhaps driven by some of the pathologies of having stateowned firms run data centers.
1:23:50
Do you have any uh insight into what's happening uh that benefits China but happens outside of China?
1:23:57
I've heard reports that uh folks are taking uh training data on hard drives and flying it to another country, doing a training run, saving the weights to hard drives and then flying back.
1:24:08
Uh you know, you could imagine, you know, Deep Seek V4 or something being trained by, you know, a series of shell companies and it's just an American guy with a big AWS account, right?
1:24:20
Um, but at a certain point I would hope that Amazon says, "Wait, who are you and why do you want to spend $100 million this month on on cloud?"
1:24:30
Like we we like billing everyone a few thousand dollars, but this is going to set off some alarm bells.
1:24:37
Um, what are the risks there?
1:24:37
Uh, are is the government doing anything about that?
1:24:41
What what is your take on this idea of of just, you know, hopping on to other clouds and then routing the data backwards?
1:24:48
Yeah, I think this is an emerging area of focus for uh the government.
1:24:53
I think you're right that it's an area where the US government doesn't have a whole lot of visibility and I think cloud computing companies haven't they've got know your customer requirements etc but not nearly as as much investment as say a financial institution spends on making sure they're not transferring money to a sanctioned Iranian entity for example.
1:25:10
I wouldn't be surprised if over the next couple years we have a lot more buildout of this type of regulation precisely to deal with uh what you're talking about and I think you know a large training run is large uh and so I think we shouldn't be surprised to see uh heightened know your customer requirements as you get larger and larger in terms of the scale of compute uh that you're you're using.
1:25:33
The other nuance is that certainly US cloud providers are are are key here, but there are also cloud providers from other countries in other countries that are playing a role.
1:25:44
We read a lot about Malaysia the last couple of months as one of the key buyers of GPUs and uh a variety of Malaysian companies that are maybe working with Chinese companies um operating there.
1:25:56
I think that's also an area where we might see uh more regulation.
1:26:01
There's been proposals in uh out of the House of Representatives for example to say we want more GPUs going to US cloud providers and fewer going to non- US cloud providers precisely for that type of of region.
1:26:12
America first for AI is sort of the um the way to think about that and and you know there are different parts of the government that would find that pretty appealing.
1:26:21
Can you uh I mean you mentioned Malaysia.
1:26:22
Can you take me on a little bit of a tour geopolitically of of what's going on in some of the other countries that might might be on the horizon for uh AI relevance?
1:26:31
Uh I'm thinking about, you know, we've obviously everyone knows the US and China and then Taiwan's role and then Malaysia pops up and then France has has Mistral now and there's deals being done in the Middle East.
1:26:45
Um, I was always surprised that Russia was not on the conversation at all because they have a very fa like long lineage of incredible math prodigies and it feels like you you would I mean uh there are a number of AI scientists in America who come from Russia and so I was I'm surprised that we're not seeing oh Russia's getting in the supercomputer game or trying to build out some massive data center. They have been busy.
1:27:09
Uh and so what are some of the other countries?
1:27:11
Can you take me on a tour of maybe maybe let's just start with like what's going on in the Middle East?
1:27:16
How are you thinking about that?
1:27:17
Is is it just like a jump ball bidding war between are they going with the west or the east?
1:27:21
Uh and then we can move on to some of the other regions in the world that might be relevant or not. Yeah.
1:27:27
No, I think the Middle East uh has a real advantage in terms of the amount of capital they can deploy, which matters if you're trying to build big compute clusters.
1:27:34
And I think both for Saudi and especially for the UAE, there's a desire to build their next generation of industries if and when oil becomes less less uh less reliable for them. Mhm.
1:27:45
And and that that's driven this investment in terms of building infrastructure.
1:27:49
And we saw after Trump visited uh a couple weeks ago now big deals announced especially in the UAE, you know, 500,000 GPUs a year uh to the UAE is a large uh number.
1:27:59
Um, I think the question for the UAE is there's no doubt they can build data centers, no doubt they can afford the GPUs.
1:28:05
Can they build businesses on top of that?
1:28:07
Um, and I think all these countries want to do more than just host Azure AWS data centers.
1:28:16
They want to own their own businesses and and build on top of that.
1:28:19
And that's a harder thing to do than than simply building data centers.
1:28:21
I think the UAE has big ambitions in particular.
1:28:25
Um, but it's it's easier to have ambitions than it is to realize them.
1:28:28
And it'll be a challenge.
1:28:28
What's uh what's your take on TSMC's traction in Arizona?
1:28:34
Nvidia's had some announcements as well.
1:28:37
How how bullish are you on on the progress they're making?
1:28:44
So, I think the good news is that TSMC's publicly said uh their manufacturing yields for the share chips they produce that actually work are just as good in Arizona as they are in Taiwan.
1:28:52
That's a a really powerful data point.
1:28:54
I think the bad news is that on a unit cost, they're still a lot more expensive. than in Taiwan.
1:29:00
And that cost differential will decline over time, but it's it's a real differential and it's not going to go to zero.
1:29:06
And so the key question, I think, is to what extent TSMC's customers are going to keep pushing TSMC to build more in the US versus be comfortable with um production in Taiwan.
1:29:19
I think the trend has been that they're pushing TSMC to do more in the US.
1:29:22
Uh and certainly TSMC looking at the tariff dynamics has has registered that.
1:29:28
They've announced plans to build six fabs beyond the the one operational one under construction right now.
1:29:34
Unclear exactly over what time horizon that happens.
1:29:38
Um but so long as you've got these kind of tariff and geopolitical issues front and center, I think TSMC customers will be encouraging them to to pursue this diversification. Yeah.
1:29:46
Who who would eat that cost?
1:29:48
Because Nvidia has famously very high margins.
1:29:50
All the hyperscalers are thinking about doing in-house chip design now.
1:29:55
Uh, I'd love to know your take on on Microsoft strategy, the TPU at Google, uh, anything else that's going on, uh, Tranium at Amazon for example.
1:30:04
Um, because you could see those you could see, yes, TMC TSMC in Arizona is more expensive, but that cost is kind of mitigated by being able to route around Nvidia's margin.
1:30:16
But I don't know if that's a reasonable thesis. Yeah.
1:30:20
And I I think my assumption would be that the the cost is shared by across the supply chain and actually if you look at the supply chain you've got a a number of high margin companies involved.
1:30:30
TSMC uh has a pretty healthy margin.
1:30:32
Its key customers do as well.
1:30:35
And if you you know take an iPhone as an example, you know, ballpark the the share of TSM the TSMC content in an iPhone $50, let's say.
1:30:43
if if that goes up by 30% in the context of a $1,000 iPhone, it's not dramatically going to change the economics.
1:30:52
Uh same for um same for an Nvidia server.
1:30:56
Uh so I think you're right to say there's there's plenty of places where you could you could absorb uh some of that cost.
1:31:02
What share of it goes to TSMC versus customers, I'm sure, is a a constant source of negotiation. Yeah. Yeah.
1:31:08
So, there's there's kind of like an interesting supply chain here in the actual delivery of AI applications.
1:31:14
And I can't help but wonder if some of the uh some of the international players outside of America and China are maybe targeting the wrong thing.
1:31:26
It seems extremely valuable to be able to uh fab chips in your country and own your supply chain and be able to produce a consistent flow.
1:31:35
And then it also seems incredibly valuable to have the front end to AI essentially like a chat GPT national champion that users go to.
1:31:41
But the model itself and the data center seems maybe less important there.
1:31:47
But it feels like all of the different countries that we're talking about whether it's France or Saudi Arabia, they seem obsessed with owning a data center.
1:31:58
But then if the local population is going to chat.
1:32:02
com uh instead of lech for mistral like has France really won if they just have a model and maybe may maybe they're thinking about in terms of like deploying within the government in the same sense that like the DoD is deploying llama right now but how do you think they're how do you think these international uh countries are thinking about the different places that they can try and plug into the overall delivery of artificial intelligence.
1:32:31
Yeah, I think that's the right question to to ask and I think you're right to suggest that just having a data center is not a guarantee of making money off of AI. Yeah.
1:32:38
Um I mean it it seems highly likely to be the case that the the application layer and the the the operating system uh for AI, however that develops, will be places where a lot of money is made.
1:32:50
uh and again not clear that that if you build a data center in in your country you're going to guarantee that you have that at all.
1:32:56
I think when governments think about this there's probably a degree to which they're not asking the question you're asking and they ought to.
1:33:03
U there's also I think a degree to which they're thinking about um uh sovereignty and control over their their tech infrastructure.
1:33:11
uh and they're worried uh that if they become wholly down wholly reliant either on US or Chinese AI providers, they're going to be in a a weakened position politically.
1:33:21
Um now is is the best use of their resources solving that problem building data centers?
1:33:27
I think that's an open question.
1:33:29
Uh but we've certainly seen a lot of countries uh turn in that direction as their first response uh for trying to build a bit more uh room for maneuver in the AI space.
1:33:37
It's interesting in the as the UAE was was opening up to western businesses back in the day, there was a structure that was popular where if you were CocaCola or Michelin and you wanted to sell into the UAE, from my understanding, you needed to set up basically a J like a 50/50 JV with somebody locally.
1:33:58
So, it was like basically owned and operated to some degree, but almost like more of a franchise model.
1:34:05
And I wonder if we're we'll end up effectively seeing something like that on the data center side.
1:34:10
I just wonder I just wonder how much that particular layer matters.
1:34:13
Like if you look at what China's done in just the delivery of conventional web services, it's like obviously knockout dragout fight to try and build data center capacity and import chips, but also develop the traditional semiconductor, the CPU supply chain and then ban Facebook and Google and develop homegrown alternatives for the application layer.
1:34:37
But they haven't tried to rebuild Linux from scratch.
1:34:41
like uh North Korea does have a fork of Linux called Redstar Linux apparently but um in general you know Chinese phone companies have been fine forking Android uh that hasn't been a place where they've said oh we got to rebuild we got to own that from start to finish it's
1:34:58
like we want to be able to make the phones and we got want to be able to deliver the services so that you know Google can't like bring their own censorship rules and we can't and you know Samsung can't cut us off of actually delivering the phones but in terms of the actual operating system layer. Everyone's been kind of fine with
1:35:12
Everyone's been kind of fine with standardizing around Linux and Android. I don't know. It's interesting.
1:35:15
Um I I wanted to talk about uh the AI trade AI trade deals. Yeah. Yeah.
1:35:20
So, this this is what I want to get into.
1:35:22
I I would love to to understand the talent market to the in China to the extent that you can. Yes.
1:35:28
It's been what what we've been covering for the last couple weeks, these sort of massive changes between uh in talent moving around between the different labs.
1:35:37
I'm curious if there's that level of competition for talent or it's like deep because in some ways, you know, these American, you know, uh uh researchers constantly, you know, shifting around to the highest bidder.
1:35:53
Uh it's not necessarily the best for winning the AI race or winning the AI war.
1:35:58
It's the right strategic moves for the different labs and different hyperscalers to compete for this talent to to build the best businesses and products that they can.
1:36:06
But it's not necessarily Yeah.
1:36:08
An authoritarian might say, "Hey, let's just consolidate all of the AI talent at one lab in America."
1:36:15
That's not the way America works.
1:36:15
But how does it work in China? Yeah.
1:36:16
I you still do have a pretty flexible labor market.
1:36:22
I I think there's an interesting question.
1:36:23
Would you be right to consolidate all AI talent?
1:36:25
I think if you're if you're a believer that we're going to kind of reach a single threshold called AGI and if you reach it two months earlier, you've got this kind of enduring strategic prize, then maybe concentration is the right strategy.
1:36:37
Um, but if you're a believer instead that there's going to be a bunch of different products which will themselves be pretty transformative, but there's not one threshold you want to pass, then actually you probably want a more flexible uh system that's going to allocate uh between different firms.
1:36:53
Then, you know, maybe it is macroefficient to have people jumping between firms uh once every year or two if they're bringing the cutting edge, spreading it to different firms.
1:37:01
That could actually be a good thing on uh on the macro level as well as for the the individual level.
1:37:07
I I I would be more pessimistic about China's chances if I found them centralizing more aggressively.
1:37:13
I thought one of the most pessimistic data points this year about uh the Chinese a ecosystem was the news that deepseek researchers were having their passports um confiscated.
1:37:20
is there to report international travel.
1:37:23
Um, which to me is a strong disincentive to do it doing research.
1:37:28
They China seems to love doing that.
1:37:30
They were doing that to rare earth element experts as well. Rare earth minerals.
1:37:34
Uh, it seems like it's just in the playbook when when a when an industry becomes important, the passports start disappearing. Um, yeah.
1:37:42
I mean the the other the other uh elephant in the room is you can imagine the amount of pressure that the CCP is putting on Chinese AI researchers that are here in the US.
1:37:52
Maybe they want to they're they're citizens already or they have a path to citizenship but if they have any family or any exposure at home there's still that's still a lever that they can pull.
1:38:04
I want to talk about talent uh in the context not just of AI model development but actual chip fabrication.
1:38:10
Uh it feels like right now what we're seeing in the foundation model labs is an extreme power law in the value of AI researchers.
1:38:17
Hence hund00 million offers for top talent and starting salaries in the 300k range.
1:38:25
Like that is a widewide power law, right?
1:38:27
Uh there's always been this narrative around TSMC that you can't chat GPT how to make a semiconductor.
1:38:35
There's a couple books out there, but it's it's a lot of lore.
1:38:37
It's a lot of toutelage and mentorship.
1:38:39
How power law distributed is talent in semiconductors?
1:38:46
And is there a world where chips act 2.
1:38:46
0 gives Intel a bunch of money or something and then they start offering TSMC experts $100 million offers and that really pulls forward American uh chip production.
1:39:03
So I don't think the mental model is is that expertise is power law distributed.
1:39:08
I I think that there's lots of very unique capabilities you need to make a chip and the level of expertise you need in each of the verticals is very deep and you need all of them and if you only got 90% of them your chip doesn't work
1:39:21
and so you need to build this expertise over a long period of time and so if you were to say who are the three people you need to uh hire from TSMC to replicate TSMC I would say that's not the way to think about it you need to hire half the half the staff or more. Um when TSMC was
1:39:34
Um when TSMC was bringing the facility in Arizona online, uh they had hundreds of people from uh Taiwan working in Arizona and this was not even their most leading edge ship production there.
1:39:47
This was two generations behind uh the cutting edge with all of the explicit help coming from headquarters as well.
1:39:53
And so I I think that helps illustrate how much of the the transfer needs to happen at different levels.
1:40:02
But, you know, if you look at who's Mick hired over the last decade, it's been a ton of engineers from Western Taiwanese Singaporean semicunter firms.
1:40:09
And I think a lot of the advances that they made can be ascribed to the fact they were able to import all of that human capital uh from uh workers who had previously spent a lot of time at other companies. What are you tracking?
1:40:20
We're halfway through the year.
1:40:23
what what kind of events are on the horizon or or various uh potential new legislation are you kind of following?
1:40:35
I think from the the policy side there's going to be some action on tariffs and semiconductors.
1:40:38
It seems president's repeatedly said that unclear exactly what direction that's going to take but it could have pretty big implications for the cost of building AI data centers.
1:40:48
Uh that's that's certainly one and I think on the kind of tech controls front uh we haven't seen the last of the moves from this administration either and I wouldn't be surprised to see more there too.
1:41:02
Can uh have you been tracking uh the leadership change at Intel Lip Bhutan is coming in.
1:41:08
It seems like they're going to be doing doing a lot of layoffs.
1:41:09
I was trying to go back through Ben Thompson's analysis of Intel through the years and try and understand how the narrative I haven't been tracking Intel that long to follow whether there should be a split.
1:41:21
Uh what has been your take on Intel and has it changed and how do you think what what should we expect from Intel over the next few years?
1:41:30
It seems like they're going to be tightening things down, but do you expect any significant changes?
1:41:35
Would you recommend any specific changes?
1:41:36
I'm interested to hear your take on Intel.
1:41:42
There's a lot of people who think that a split between the manufacturing design businesses is the right way forward.
1:41:45
I think that the question if you think about a split is what does that mean concretely?
1:41:50
Um because the reality is you'd still need to have a fair amount of integration between the design side and the manufacturing side because the manufacturing side is making chips for the design side that will be in progress for a number of years and the manufacturing side needs business from the design side.
1:42:05
So, you know, split or no split is probably too simplistic a way of thinking through the option set.
1:42:11
There's a bunch of different variables uh around that.
1:42:13
And I think that's probably exactly what Liipu is wrestling with uh right now.
1:42:18
Um I think that the second challenge that Intel has is in its products business, the CPUs for PCs and data centers.
1:42:26
I think there's a a a wide uh agreement that they've got work to do on both those fronts in terms of uh um remaining competitive with AMD and they've lost market share uh over the past couple of years.
1:42:38
They need to win that that back.
1:42:39
And so I think those are the the two key issues he's got to deal with and they're of course interlin and it's hard to um hard to say you're only going to focus on one of them. Totally. This is great. Any other questions? Fascinating.
1:42:51
No, would love to have you back on. This is fantastic.
1:42:54
Thank you so much for taking the time next quarter. really appreciate this. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Bye. And I'll be right back.
1:43:00
Up next, we have Aaron Gin, the GPU whisperer, as uh his moniker in the information proclaims.
1:43:09
He has a new piece out in the wild.
1:43:12
I believe it's in the Wall Street Journal.
1:43:14
Will we will get the latest from him. Aaron, how you doing? Hey, man. How's it going?
1:43:18
Wait, did I get that right?
1:43:20
New piece in the journal or somewhere else? Uh the one of Robots?
1:43:25
Uh, well, I mean, Arena Mag. Is that where? Yeah. Yeah, that one.
1:43:27
That was Yeah, Arena Mag.
1:43:28
And then I did You're prolific. Yeah, it's fun.
1:43:33
I'm I'm a kind of a not only a Christian, but academic at heart.
1:43:38
So, I like I like writing.
1:43:38
I like all sorts of things in in that zone.
1:43:41
So, uh, but yeah, I have a new one on on robots.
1:43:45
Okay, take me through it.
1:43:45
What was the inspiration? What's the thesis? Give me the details.
1:43:50
Um I guess you know I kind of known for hot spicy hot spicy takes done in a kind manner in a gentlemanly manner.
1:43:57
Uh but I think I think most of the analysis done with people in our space is devoid of any kind of reference framing.
1:44:04
They uh kind of live people in Silicon Valley particularly people in AI live in they they think they live in this kind of arrogant microcosm as CS Lewis would say like chronological snobbery. Mhm.
1:44:15
So they don't appreciate how other things that look very similar are just patterns of repeating uh as the uh you know one of the most famous Solomon phrasing because the theorize in the Bible that Solomon said that uh you know that there's nothing new under the sun.
1:44:31
sun. uh we don't fully know what it's driven to but generally it's driven to Solomon and and in that sense like innovation kind of goes the same pattern that you have something that innovation is always intentively oriented to capex both in the sense of knowledge workers and also capital expenditure and and it always starts with a as a rich luxury
1:44:49
but then it gets proliferated out and robots as people have been kind of pitching both in the sense of the doomsday sense and the utopian sense uh I think are wrong because they if you if you look at past patterns terms of innovation and how it's been adopted in society, it generally doesn't get oriented towards the rich. Like the rich
1:45:05
Like the rich continue to do what they do.
1:45:07
Like like there's a reason why rich people have their own planes, have their own drivers, have a yacht, have multiple houses, have chefs and caterers, things like that.
1:45:16
Like that's basically the same trajectory of lifestyle that they've had for a while.
1:45:19
And in terms of like things that you own, things that you do, things you buy, like there's the the names that are associated with the Yale club and the Harvard club continue to be the same names. Yeah.
1:45:27
uh people who go to Davos to the same but the real arc of capitalism uh which is why the existentialist the German the Frankfurt school was completely wrong is that what it does is that it takes those luxuries and gives it to everybody else.
1:45:40
Um I think that there's a there's um I've heard the name of the venture capitalist but he said that uh his his kind of moniker of looking at innovation and adoption is oriented towards taking something that is available for the rich and giving it to somebody else.
1:45:53
So Uber is the example of that, right?
1:45:54
Private driver to everybody else. Yep. Yep.
1:45:56
Um and and so robots will be the same thing.
1:45:59
Like certainly like robots will there'll be a certainly, you know, a luxury version of a robot that will be deployed for people in the rich and famous, but the rich and famous can afford people. Yeah.
1:46:09
And rich and famous like character.
1:46:12
They like things that are like go listen to like I know people love comparing you and Jordi to Allin, right?
1:46:19
And just go look at what Shamoth talks about.
1:46:22
It's like it's things that are take a long time and are delicate. Cashmere. I love it.
1:46:27
That's one of my favorite. Yeah.
1:46:29
Oh, this is made of endangered panda fur, right?
1:46:30
That I looked it myself, right? I am.
1:46:33
And so, no, no all-in host has ever wore panda fur.
1:46:38
That's the king's cashmere is real. Yes. Yeah. Yeah.
1:46:42
So, so like so for the rest of us, right?
1:46:44
Uh upper middle class down, robots will be for us.
1:46:47
Robots will give us the ability to do things that we didn't have before that makes us more like rich people. Yes. And aka time.
1:46:52
And and so that's what it's arguing is that that robots will not be dystopian. It will not be utopian.
1:46:59
It'll be every other pattern of wave innovation and helping the average American live a better life. Yeah. Yeah.
1:47:04
I I noticed this when I started interacting with um like the the multi multi-billionaires that uh every app on my phone they had a person for.
1:47:15
So, if you do incorporation of your company through Legal Zoom or Stripe Atlas, they have a lawyer full-time on staff.
1:47:21
Uh, you have Uber, they have a driver.
1:47:24
You have Door Dash, they have a chef.
1:47:25
And and it's like guys, the new technology. Yeah. The guys. Yeah.
1:47:29
How many problems can you solve by just calling a guy? Uh, very interesting.
1:47:33
What do you think about it? Was Chris Pike, right?
1:47:34
Who had this going to create guys. app.
1:47:36
They're going to be democratizing access to guys to just a guy.
1:47:40
It's just a database of like good lawyers and drivers. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
1:47:44
I mean, even even like, you know, you don't call 911 and that that's for everyone.
1:47:48
Private security is the opposite side of that.
1:47:50
Um, but what do you think about Chris Pike's take that um when I I mean, I guess this relates, but I think his take was that if there is a human that is acting as like a a a roadblock to something that you want, that will be a that will be replaced by uh artificial intelligence or robotics.
1:48:12
But if it's but if the human is is part of the delightfulness of that experience and his example was like an omac chef that will never be replaced because you want what do you think about that?
1:48:21
Give your reaction please.
1:48:23
So, so like I I'll I'll like um I'll I'll be a chim for right because like there was a question once he said like you know he was talking to Jal right he's the ultimate like the thing guy whatever the thing is that's that's Jal right and he goes you know talking about watches and Shimato was like oh get a handmade mechanical watch right so I'm wearing one right now actually so like and and so you look at this right so it's a go to getbazzle.
1:48:46
com your bezel is available now to source you any watch on the planet literally any So, so it so it uh you know hand and hand gil hand and carv software engineer then he'd be watches and and so the reason why this is worth it is because of that human interaction. Yep. Right.
1:49:07
It's that his his ability to do everything by hand.
1:49:09
He has like the machine built in like late 1900s. He does everything. He can show it.
1:49:13
It's like that's the point, right?
1:49:14
And so another example of this would be like being a waiter.
1:49:17
Like you could I use this an example like there is automated checkout in Applebees.
1:49:21
I don't know if you've been there recently, but there's automated take on Applebee's like Chick-fil-A, right?
1:49:26
One of the most highest grossing per store sale fast food joint in in the world.
1:49:30
One of the best delicious has tons of people, right?
1:49:34
So, it could if it wanted to, but it's not the point of what you go and and fundamentally there there's this disconnect.
1:49:40
I think it's spiritually connected.
1:49:41
I think you could watch some of Peter Chill's recent uh interview with through that and you can kind of hear some of these trends is like if you remove the ability of the anthropomorphic orientation of what innovation is and why you do it, you come up with these inconclusions that are basically absurd.
1:49:55
Like there's people in the Silicon Valley who argue absurd things about the nature of what the arc of innovation is going to because the presupposition and priors and the metaphysics built into it are basically that humans are worthless and existential and they kind of a have a start daycart view.
1:50:09
start daycart view. the world that's very dark and and the same thing exists with social media the same thing exists for search the same thing exists for mobile phones now it exists in AI all of these are continuations of the same thing and just like the AI doomers if you go look at the names of the people
1:50:24
it's like the same people who are like that title to social media is going to end the universe sort of people because it's the same line of thinking so humans just like what you're doing now people watch this show because of you too sure like like it does even if there was a mimetic machine It's not the most efficient way to get the news, but it's fun. But it's fun, right? Like like like But it's fun, right?
1:50:43
Like like like because it's it's part of what the nature of this uh it's hard for me to imagine the idea that that uh let's say a humanoid robot, you know, gets real traction in restaurants will natur you know and you can go and sit down at a restaurant, a humanoid can serve you and whatever and and it's efficient, it's fast, it's smooth.
1:51:05
that will naturally create even more opportunity for human waiters, waitresses that love the craft of service.
1:51:15
And I think it is a real craft.
1:51:17
And I think that anybody that's had a truly fantastic dinner and uh can can uh can attest. Yeah. Yeah.
1:51:23
So so it's a uh this is one reason why I think the adoption curve of AI is going to be kind of like two different bucks of buckets of things.
1:51:35
There's going to be the infrastructure side which we're going to excel at.
1:51:38
And then there's going to be the adoption side which we're not going to excel at and some of it is political which is everything from we lost the AI mortorium in the bill but thankfully the bill got passed so we're not paying higher taxes so thank you Daddy Trump. Uh Daddy T wins again.
1:51:50
So yeah you know so yeah exactly make what noise right?
1:51:56
So, but but the but but on the other side is like if we're going to do let's say uh one of the best things AI does is that it allows this the ability of computers to look like humans behave like humans.
1:52:08
It's fantastic at that is the ability to to to model us right to to make a mimemetic version of us.
1:52:14
And from a education perspective that could be incredibly powerful because my upbringing even though I went to public school before it was insane.
1:52:21
So like I was safe from that, but my dad who's Chinese raided me much more of a tutu traditional tiger dad sort of fashion.
1:52:28
So I still remember this one conversation I had with my dad.
1:52:30
I think it was in like fourth grade and I got like a hundred in a class uh and he said, "Why did I why did I do extra credit?" Right?
1:52:37
That was like his immediate response and and you know and the you know the the more Caucasian people in the audience will clutch the pearls, oh my god, that's so traumatic. Right?
1:52:46
But but the point of it, right, is like you always can do more, right?
1:52:50
He's teaching me resiliency, teaching me how to challenge myself, teaching me how to uh push beyond what I think I could do and to like open my experience because his goal was to not have the upbringing he did, which was super poor.
1:53:01
And and so imagine the AI that could do that, right?
1:53:03
That could be your your own Yeah. Yeah.
1:53:06
It did like it your own ability like challenge your thoughts like people are thinking it like the cluey thing, which I think is a very surface level understanding what AI can do.
1:53:15
But imagine if AI was actually like a challenge agent that let's say you got the right answer and AI was like you're wrong so prove it to me like you're right. Right?
1:53:22
right. Right? there's a whole other layer of of this and this is this is what like in terms of the El Salvador project that we're working on is like that that's kind of like the orientation of why other countries don't have that like they don't have the teacher the the library units let alone they don't have
1:53:39
the internal capability of delivering these types of things today but a computer can come in now because what they have now they have nothing right and they're willing to take a swing being like well you know if it works 50% of the time that's a huge win for our country but America the lawsuits and this and this and this, right? But, you
1:53:52
But, you know, Belli is just like, "Oh, this sounds a great idea. We should just try this.
1:53:57
If it doesn't work, well, I'll do something else." Right?
1:53:58
And and so that's why I think we will excel at infrastructure, which is why it's so important.
1:54:02
We push in video products everywhere, but the adoption is going to be in Africa, second world, third world countries.
1:54:07
It's not going to be in America because we already have people doing it today and people will still be the preferred like rich people still have tutors, right?
1:54:15
And they're still going to have tutors even if AI can actually good at tutoring. Interesting.
1:54:20
uh give me the update on sovereign AI generally.
1:54:24
Uh there's an article in the Wall Street Journal I think yesterday about more and more Western companies adopting Deepseek and Quen's like I read that yeah I need to check now it's Josh Chim Lyn.
1:54:40
Uh but uh but yeah I mean any major updates there?
1:54:44
Did anything get stuffed in the bill related to chips or semiconductors or anything like that that's relevant?
1:54:50
Uh not that I not that I know of.
1:54:53
I mean I mean people all have to to take a step back and realize this is a tax bill. Yeah. Not a spending bill.
1:54:58
I'm I'm an Austrian economics guy as yall know. So I don't like that.
1:55:01
I'm I don't believe that you can keep spending forever. This is a tax bill.
1:55:06
It's literally why he's going through reconciliation to be willing to like lower your threshold. Like I agree with Elon. It's one of my heroes.
1:55:11
He's very wrong on the purpose of this bill.
1:55:14
But he's he's but he's right.
1:55:16
We're spending too much money.
1:55:17
But it's also we have to get away from omnibuses.
1:55:20
So the the AI mortoriian stuff got removed.
1:55:22
I'm pro that Sax is pro that uh the OSTP office is pro that I I this is not something should the states it it's something that we have to win and we can't have these like varying laws everywhere on the chip side essentially you know there are uh like I have a hat that the the president seller gave me.
1:55:41
seller gave me. So like the so like for countries like you know Belli who's trying to uh basically provide this sort of infrastructure and capital to the world the market is there for us and we have these um basically voices that I think are living in an era of where the
1:56:00
mo resided in areas that they previously defined sort of infrastructure waves and we're at this moment now where we could accelerate victory to where hey how about you know China we outsource all you know manufacturing the last 30 years
1:56:13
to them that make all the stuff in t-u all the stuff in sheen and all this crap like why can't we do that to them for semiconductors now like why can't we take their money right and you see all these people like oh but wait a minute like what if AI destroys the world right
1:56:26
and it's like it's all this kind of like sooths saying again title two people go back to the to that debate remember free speech debate online and like telco versus where does the right to speak reside and the right to serve content those people are the same people in the AI mortorium. It's literally the same
1:56:42
It's literally the same line about thinking and and so the the the AI mortorium was supposedly specifically on like training and application but in El Salvador like they pass an AI law like basically a free training law where which is how the law should be structured.
1:56:58
When you train something it's up to the user to apply it.
1:57:02
If the user applies that to make a robot to kill somebody just like you get a hammer and kill somebody, right?
1:57:06
or get a robot to scratch, you know, Jord's Mercedes, right?
1:57:10
It's that person's fault, right?
1:57:12
It's not gonna be like if John trained that, you know, open source model and they use it against, you know, Jordy.
1:57:18
It's like it's not John's fault.
1:57:20
So, like in South, they pass that law, but in America, they want to co-mingle these responsibilities. Yeah.
1:57:23
Uh most out of baseless baseless fear, but but but still the policy of the administration is still towards we need to export.
1:57:31
to export. we need to become the AI exporter of the world because we have this ability to be the definite infrastructure of the next era and not reside in this kind of loose or not loose it's definitely it's actually really hard to understand I mean even what the critics are saying even with
1:57:48
something less dramatic than like you know using an open source LLM model to commit a crime or something just just the intellectual property thing like it's very easy that we've had the ability to go and uh you know pirate a movie and upload it to YouTube for a very long time. That's like not a crazy
1:58:03
That's like not a crazy new technology, but it is in the sense of like copying data is new and distributing it all over the world.
1:58:09
And yet you don't you don't even YouTube doesn't even need to stop it ever from happening.
1:58:16
They just need to stop there to from being an economic model.
1:58:18
Like you can't build a business on top of YouTube just uploading Star Wars.
1:58:22
Like that's not going to work for you.
1:58:26
And as long as you kill that economic model with enough pressure and and say, "Hey, we're not going to serve ads against this.
1:58:33
We're not going to pay you out.
1:58:34
We're going to ban your account eventually."
1:58:35
Uh, there's a bunch of ways to prevent this stuff at at at the level of like, yeah, like someone might some kid might upload Star Wars and five people see it and before it gets taken down, not the end of the world. Who cares? Exactly. And so, yeah. Yeah.
1:58:50
Going after the uh like the individual actors.
1:58:52
That That's a very very good point. I like that.
1:58:53
point. I like that. the the the most the most freeing phrase you could ever and maybe you could raise your kids this way too because it was the most freeing phrase I ever received from a from a guy who's famous but I won't say his name because uh uh but he's huge radio star
1:59:07
and he he taught me this he goes whenever you feel stuck just say the phrase so what so what right and and like why should I buy into your presuppositions why should I believe in these things like prove it to me like so what and and and it's so freeing to reside in that zone of like Like you just said, so what? Like
1:59:24
Like somebody does that, like why is that a big deal?
1:59:27
Like and and it kind of puts people on their heels like like I I said this once in a debate about like since we're talking about chips like well whoa like you know by dance could get access to this like first of all Oracle's number like top five customers are like Chinese so like you know they're already doing it right then I said like so what? Mhm. Oh my god.
1:59:46
Like it's like, "Oh my god, videos will be more musical."
1:59:48
Like I was like, it's a and and they're like, "Well, we could do this. Could you do this? Could do this."
1:59:54
I'm like I'm like, "Yeah, I could say the same thing about anything.
1:59:56
I could say the same thing about like, well, you know, you if you if you buy this watch, you could use this to put on a bomb, right?"
2:00:01
And like it's like it's like that's like their level of thinking. There's so many steps. Yeah.
2:00:06
I was going to I was going to ask Chris earlier, you know, how if how he thinks about AI war versus AI race.
2:00:14
And then you would have to ask him the question, well then should you have named your book the chip race and then that would have sold like 1% of the copies.
2:00:22
Um, is it a war or is it a race? Interesting. Yeah, it's so tough.
2:00:29
I mean, so many of the loudest voices in our industry are beautifully conflicted because they run multi-billion dollar businesses that are dependent, you know, the future fundraising, current fundraising is dependent on certain narratives and so it's hard to figure out what's what's real. Yeah.
2:00:49
uh me as it relates to like the like the the China stuff.
2:00:55
Uh not just that even even just like the progress of models how much we should be spending when AGI will arrive when super intelligence will arrive AI war versus AI race because if if you brand it as a war then all of a sudden it's it it it brings in a new level of funding like you know there's all sorts of uh downstream implications of well you know um uh it's it's it's it's really important that uh we get the AI doom question Right?
2:01:24
And so we need to overinvest or it's really good that we win.
2:01:27
It's really important that we win the geopolitical battle and so we it's okay to overinvest in this case.
2:01:31
You know, it's it's all about just like justifying different levels of underwriting.
2:01:35
And when you add one of these infinite numbers, you can say 1% chance of infinity is still, you know, I'll pay any price. Yeah. Yeah.
2:01:42
I I guess I guess my my firm is just way more optimistic.
2:01:46
Like I understand like why can't we just invest because it's cool? Yeah.
2:01:49
It it like like I like I like we we like stuff that Elon does.
2:01:52
I don't own a Tesla because I like my my cars to go boom, right? So, but it's still cool.
2:01:59
Like why can't it just be cool?
2:02:01
Why can't it just be, hey, this is awesome.
2:02:03
This is like moving the trajectory of the human race to something even more amazing.
2:02:06
It seems like there Yeah, but it seems like we're getting there.
2:02:12
I mean, I don't know if you saw Nat Friedman's post, but you know, he was saying he started at Meta and he's gonna just build some cool stuff. And I'm like, yes.
2:02:18
Like that sounds awesome because I mean there are a lot of AI products but a lot of them are to discover the great lost wonders of history. I hope so. I hope so. Better.
2:02:29
Anyway, thank you so much for stopping by, Aaron.
2:02:30
This is always a pleasure.
2:02:32
What are you What are you doing for the fourth? Yeah.
2:02:33
What are you doing for the fourth? Uh no, I don't work.
2:02:34
Uh I'm doing something with like my church and uh I usually my my house is a third space.
2:02:42
Uh so for like the community so it's very on the other side of this is I built it.
2:02:48
I built it at custom house and so like it's a big basically like I don't drink but it's like a big beer hall essentially from front to back. Wow.
2:02:55
So so we usually host something.
2:02:57
It's like uh I don't know maybe 3 or 4,000 ft. Yeah.
2:03:00
And it's just a big open room with like a kitchen, dining room, living room, outdoor space. Very cool.
2:03:05
So we usually like host stuff and people like use use my house uh to do that.
2:03:07
Um, so I I think this goes back to the the you know the human element.
2:03:14
It's like fundamentally innovation is supposed to be anthropomorphic is supposed to be make humans better.
2:03:18
That's why people pay for it. Yep.
2:03:19
And there's certainly negative downsides of this.
2:03:22
Uh and we have to mitigate those downsides.
2:03:25
But you always should start from the the phrase so what or go read Thomas Soul about can you even regulate downsides without creating a secondary effect of mitigating upsides.
2:03:35
And and I mean I think that from many people are projecting lots of things in AI that they could just get from just like being in community and just like having friends and uh and like y'all have your sauna workout. Yeah. Yeah. Like Yeah. Exactly.
2:03:52
Yeah. Exactly. like you you you like so much of the projecting of internal problems people have into technology when if they had a friend uh they resolved their loneliness academic they had a good family they surrounded by a religious community uh you know particularly Christianity uh that a lot
2:04:13
of these things kind of go away where you can just look at a technology you can look at innovation from where it is which is like this can just be awesome it doesn't need to kill us it doesn't need to start a war it doesn't need to AJI all those are certainly things we
2:04:26
can talk about but to overextend you dig into that person that's arguing that there's typically like a a pathology built into them that is projecting externally when it's just like hey dude like you just like want to hug like you just like you just want like you want to hang out like a pool or like go to
2:04:43
CrossFit or something like and then and then it kind of like you know fades away because there there there are many things in the world you should not care about and and I don't like I get asked tweet about things and I'm like I don't really care about that. Like it's not
2:04:52
Like it's not something I want to talk about.
2:04:54
And and because you care about less things is the key to joy because less things means you're actually more responsible for more things which means you can be happy because you can see your work go into something that has output.
2:05:05
But there's when you become unhappy is when you see all this crap happening around you and you get worried about it and do something about it and you really can't.
2:05:14
And in reality it's like there's there's just things you just shouldn't care about and then you're like I'm sensing uh I hate to cut you off but I'm sensing a TED talk. too.
2:05:21
We'll do we'll do a TBPN talk very soon, but have a fantastic weekend.
2:05:26
Great seeing you as always. See you soon. See you guys.
2:05:30
Well, speaking of fantastic AI products, go to Finn.
2:05:32
ai, the number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake offs, number one ranking on if you if you like winning, don't get in a bake off with Finn.
2:05:42
Don't get in a bake off TVPN.
2:05:44
Well, our next guest is Bridget from Founders Spun.
2:05:48
Welcome to the stream, Bridget. How are you doing? Busy time in Oh, wait. Okay.
2:05:52
So, can you say where you are?
2:05:56
Last time I was on it was a different format.
2:05:58
You guys were in the old format. We were. Yeah. New studio.
2:06:02
We are now in Hollywood Future Capital Media. Media. Yeah. And entertainment. Future home of media.
2:06:06
But speaking of future homes, where are where are you right now? So, I'm at ETHC. Where's that?
2:06:11
You're So, you're you're literally doing the meme.
2:06:14
You're a venture capitalist and you're you're in France. At a conference. At a conference. Oh, yeah.
2:06:18
at a conference conference.
2:06:21
One one hour conference, seven days on the beach. Is that what's going on? Oh my gosh. It's productive. It's productive. It's productive. Okay. Okay. She's working here.
2:06:29
Um yeah, I don't know why they have it in France, but last year was in I know why. It looks beautiful. It was beautiful.
2:06:35
And all the venture capitalists will be there anyway.
2:06:38
All the events with the ocean background. Yeah, it's fantastic.
2:06:41
Uh yeah, give us the what actually happens at an event like that.
2:06:43
Is it people kind of voting on direction of the technology or is it just like pitch meeting founders building on top of stuff?
2:06:51
What what's Yeah, I would say it's like it's sort of a mixture of everything.
2:06:54
I would say like these conferences probably originally started because the crypto industry is like just so decentralized like for lack of a better word um and everyone lives in different places.
2:07:05
different places. So I think originally it was like for kind of like like-minded individuals to meet up and Peter actually used to go to some of the really early ones called like FC financial cryptography and then they slowly evolved into like ETC there's like token 2049 and it's just a good way
2:07:20
to like see everyone in person like obviously in person is so much better than Zoom but people in crypto are just so distributed like they're not really concentrated in one city maybe New York now but it's still kind of like you know since the US isn't like insanely regulatory friendly yet like people are everywhere. So, no, I feel like there's
2:07:36
So, no, I feel like there's very serious projects in San Francisco, New York, Puerto Rico, uh Singapore, and Dubai, which is like all over the world. Yeah, totally. Totally. Yeah.
2:07:47
But Joey and I try to do like one-on-one meetings most of the day and like because if you just get caught up in events, it's easy to just do a bunch of events and like not actually get anything done. So, yeah. Yeah.
2:07:57
We we we've gotten steamrolled a few times.
2:07:59
we're not crypto native enough to know the full calendar and we'll try and book some crypto people and they'll be like are you crazy?
2:08:05
We accidentally held our crypto days and we just didn't know and we were like well Brian Armstrong's coming on so you know if he's not going to this thing like we actually had some folks from the conference hop on which is cool and it wound up working up well like 2 a. m. our time or something. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
2:08:22
Uh and and getting Mert on the stream.
2:08:24
We had Mert yesterday and he's always great but he's you know always traveling across the world.
2:08:28
Um, I wanted to get the update on the the stable coin world. What's interesting? Is the game over? Circle's out.
2:08:36
It feels like the legislation's passing, but what are you seeing?
2:08:40
Is there are there still investment opportunities?
2:08:41
Are there still opportunities to build or is it the time of the enterprise SAS integrator in web 2? Yeah.
2:08:46
Yeah, it's a good question.
2:08:49
Yeah, I think stable coins are definitely the main character right now.
2:08:53
Like we there's a new announcement every single day with something stable coin related. like it's very hypy.
2:08:58
Um it's very in the meta, but I think like for good reason.
2:09:01
Um I was joking with Joey the other day.
2:09:03
It's like stable coins are basically the the part of crypto that has found the most product market fit and it's just like a tokenized US dollar, which is like kind of ironic because the original crypto was like we're going to rebuild the financial system, everything's going to be Bitcoin denominated, like we're going to do, you know, basically recreate and now we just have like the tokenized US dollar moving around.
2:09:25
Well, everyone was complaining about volatility of the meme coins and the crypto community said, "Fine, we'll give you something with zero volatility. Are you happy now?" And of course, Exactly. Exactly.
2:09:34
Well, it feels like some of that hype uh be I want to get into the the tokenized private assets and tokenized stocks as well.
2:09:40
But before that, uh Sachs came out and posted that there was a certain concession in the stable coin uh bill around stable coin issuers not being able to pass yield back to holders.
2:09:55
Could you could you dive into that a little bit because that was felt monumental, but yeah, I think that was something that the banking lobbyists probably snuck into the bill and the bill was like a herculean effort even to just like pass the Senate.
2:10:12
Like it got blocked once um just to like get it like to the Senate was like basically like an insane task.
2:10:18
And I think basically the gist of that is like if too much money flows out of banks and into like stable coin issuers like Circle or you know there's going to be like a million in the US probably um that's money flowing out of like the traditional financial system and then basically like net new money cannot be created via loans because stable coins have to be onetoone backed with like T bills or cash and cash equivalent.
2:10:41
So, so stable coins would kill the entire western financial system.
2:10:45
Like I mean basically and they make I mean it makes so much sense because it's like I like I would rather hold my money in stable coins.
2:10:51
It's like one to one backed. It's very safe.
2:10:53
And when you put your money in a bank it's like people think it's safe and whatever but it's actually like not that safe.
2:11:00
Like they're like lending it out and that's how new money gets created and that's how the economy functions. Yeah.
2:11:05
We all experience with the monitor. Yeah. Sorry. Yeah.
2:11:08
And it's it's yeah, we we we all experience this firsthand.
2:11:12
I mean, most people in tech with the SVB crisis and First Republic and the idea of FDIC insurance and everyone kind of learns about fractional reserve banking at the worst possible time when there's a crisis.
2:11:21
Um, but you actually wrote an article all about how a stable coin bank might be different.
2:11:25
Can you take us through some of what you might expect and and why do we I I feel like there's this whole crypto podcast called like bank list and they're all like don't have a bank at all and that was a meme in crypto for a while. Why?
2:11:36
banks are going to issue stable coins. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
2:11:40
So, what is the role of the bank going forward?
2:11:42
What even what even is a bank like like what why do we need that at all?
2:11:46
And then walk me through the stable coin bank idea. Definitely definitely. Yeah. Um okay, let's see. Yeah.
2:11:52
I think me and my friend Obby wrote the piece originally like early this year.
2:11:56
We basically were looking into this act that didn't end up passing.
2:12:00
It was called the credit card competition act.
2:12:01
it had like a 3% chance of passing the Senate or something, but we were reading it and basically what it did in practice if it were to be like passed into law would be to like allow um or force banks to accept a network other than like Visa or Mastercard.
2:12:15
So, it' basically create this like golden opening for a stable coin network to come in and people to be able to uh pay with stable coins and like all of these things because right now like banks are pretty locked into Visa and Mastercard.
2:12:30
Like they have a trillion dollars in market cap like they're the deacto and they've also been doing like fairly well on the stable coin side.
2:12:35
Like they're kind of like innovating actually like pretty well.
2:12:39
Um, so it's kind of like a regulatory thing where you would have to have like the CCCA, the the act I was talking about pass um, in practice for like a a stable coin network to come through.
2:12:50
And so that was like the first angle we looked at it.
2:12:52
And then basically we were thinking about, okay, what about like from a consumer banking perspective?
2:12:57
And it basically would function the exact same way as a narrow bank would just it's just a stable coin bank.
2:13:04
Like your deposits are held onetoone backed.
2:13:05
um they're like backed by Ta bills and it's super safe.
2:13:08
by Ta bills and it's super safe. But again, it's like if all of that money were to flow out of the traditional financial system and banks and into this, you know, this is why the narrow bank could never get a master account, they could never get a charter and they
2:13:21
never actually got a meaningful amount of deposits because it's like a threat to the Fed and like to the the US economy essentially if if it got you know in aggregate like a ton of deposits and that was kind of like the way it would trend I think if it got um a master account. So yeah, but a stable
2:13:37
So yeah, but a stable coin bank, I mean, I think it's something that like needs to exist.
2:13:41
Like it it just makes so much sense and the banking system is incredibly antiquated.
2:13:49
Like it's actually not safe as we've seen.
2:13:51
Y um and so but yeah, I don't know.
2:13:55
A lot of the banks are trying to explore stuff around stable coins now.
2:13:58
JP Morgan is trying to pilot like a tokenized deposit program.
2:14:00
Viceerve is trying to launch a stable coin.
2:14:03
Um, and yeah, and like honestly the incumbents are doing incredibly well.
2:14:08
Like Stripe acquired Bridge, Stripe acquired Privy, Stripe via Bridge launched their own stable coin, USDB.
2:14:14
So, it's kind of one of those things where like you want to see all these like net new winners be created, but also like Stripe and a lot of the traditional players are are kind of crushing it.
2:14:24
So, it's interesting to see.
2:14:27
What about stocks on chain, private company shares on chain?
2:14:30
What are you What are you tracking there?
2:14:31
Uh there was a bunch of memes this week.
2:14:34
We talked about it with with MERT a little bit, but I'm curious what you're expecting.
2:14:39
Uh it it just seems like there's funny enough a massive amount of demand for US regular publicly listed US stocks just tokenized on chain. Yep. Yep. Yep. Totally. Yeah.
2:14:51
So I I actually went to the the Robin Hood event where they announced like the private company shares and and then tokenizing equities.
2:15:01
Um, and yeah, I think basically like if you're tokenizing equities, it makes a ton of sense as a regulatory arbitrage like to to deliver these equities to people outside the US that have historically had a hard time getting them.
2:15:13
But like for people in the US, it actually just makes sense just to like use the traditional, you know, equities market and just buy them from your bank account.
2:15:20
Um, and then I think on the private side, yeah, uh, Robin Hood talked about, what do they do like SpaceX and Open AI, I think.
2:15:27
But again, it's really it's it's difficult to issue private company shares.
2:15:33
Like we you saw like the OpenAI response, I'm sure.
2:15:35
Um it's just one of those things where yeah, it's hard to custody them. Where are they living?
2:15:42
What happens like when you redeem them?
2:15:44
Um and it it kind of it kind of becomes foggy.
2:15:48
So that's why I think like unless it's like a regulatory arbitrage, at least for tokenized equities, it it makes more sense for outside the US than inside the US.
2:15:55
But everyone's doing it now like Kraken issued X stocks. Let's see.
2:15:59
Obviously Robin Hood, Coinbase is trying to get into it.
2:16:03
So I mean I think it makes sense but within the US it's probably like a a less interesting market because our system works pretty well as is I would say.
2:16:13
would say. And then I also think like the most interesting thing about like issuing these things on chain is is native issuance such that basically like instead of like wrapping you know Apple stock and then issuing it on say arbitrum like you just like natively like like let's say just like a like I don't know like Mertz's company just
2:16:34
like goes public and you natively issue those shares um and such that you don't have to like wrap and unwrap add an extra step where you're taking like counterparty risk you're taking custody risk, there's more fees involved and you don't actually own the underlying like you're trusting someone else to own the underlying. So
2:16:50
So the point of crypto was trustless systems.
2:16:54
So exactly like if you want to like natively like Tether is doing like tokenized gold, right?
2:17:00
Where it's like that's the only asset that represents their gold is that tokenized gold.
2:17:04
It's not like they issued it, you know, on like the CME and then they wrapped it and like tokenized it.
2:17:10
So, I think like if you have that extra step of tokenizing, it only makes sense as like a regulatory arbitrage.
2:17:16
Otherwise, you should natively issue it.
2:17:18
And I think native issuance is going to become more and more of a thing.
2:17:22
And that's going to like drag the rest of the financial system kind of on chain.
2:17:25
That's Vlad's vision too with Robin Hood.
2:17:27
It's like if a lot of these companies if you can find a structure that works for like OpenAI, SpaceX, you know, all these like private companies and you just like have them like natively issuing shares of their own that represent, you know, some kind of stake in the company and like a cleancut way, then you don't even really like need to go public, right?
2:17:44
Cuz like that's kind of like your trajectory of like letting outside Yeah, it is interesting the strategy of trying to force the conversation and then potentially force the partnership by just creating these things, right?
2:17:57
Republic was coming out, we had Ken on and he was basically saying, "Yeah, some people plenty of people aren't going to like this, but we think it's sort of the natural evolution and then and then, you know, we'll we'll see what uh what actually pans out."
2:18:09
Well, I'm sure you have a big day of yaching and wine tasting tomorrow, right?
2:18:14
I mean I mean meetings meetings uh business meetings.
2:18:18
So, we appreciate you staying up late to hop on the stream.
2:18:20
Thanks so much for stopping by.
2:18:21
Always great to catch up.
2:18:23
Uh we'll talk to you soon, Bridget. Have a good one.
2:18:24
Enjoy the fourth in France. Yes.
2:18:27
Uh, if you're looking to get a good night's sleep, head over to eightsleep.
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com/tbpn and get a new Pod 5.
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2:18:36
And we are ready for our next with an 89. Congratulations, Jordy.
2:18:41
He hit a soundboard for you.
2:18:43
And let's bring in our next guest, Price from Open Ledger, embedding accounting in your platform fast. Price, how you doing? Good to meet you. Did you hire Sohome? No. Did you interview him? Uh, no not ne neither. Well, check spam.
2:18:57
It tends to be a bull signal if you reached out.
2:19:00
Um, but yeah, please kick us off with an introduction on yourself and the company. Nice.
2:19:06
Hi, I'm Price, co-founder and CEO of Open Ledger.
2:19:10
We're building embedded accounting, an embedded accounting API that help helps uh vertical SAS platforms embed full accounting suites into their products instead of having to build a general ledger from scratch.
2:19:21
ledger from scratch. uh 70 million people are running businesses of all types and no matter what type of business they're running they all have to do their accounting and so uh they're turning to a lot of modern platforms like Shopify MindBody and Surf Service Titan to run these their platforms but
2:19:35
most of them still don't have accounting features and the ones they do are usually duct taped together and so uh what we've built is a set of APIs and components that makes it much easier for these platforms to embed a full accounting suite inside their product for their end users to use. Interesting. Interesting.
2:19:49
So is this is this B2B TOB software? Yeah, I love it.
2:19:52
We're adding an extra layer of Why did you pick an an easy problem like accounting infrastructure?
2:20:00
Well, I I I don't see it as an easy problem. I'm totally kidding.
2:20:05
I'm I'm I'm I I get it though. I get it.
2:20:09
I think um at first glance it seems like a very simple company in a lot of ways, but I think I don't think it's I don't to be clear, I don't I don't think so. No, he was joking.
2:20:18
It's a simple complicated it's simple idea extremely compliment to actually create totally because you have to create so much flexibility for each different client.
2:20:27
Um but yeah uh and we had we had a a a CEO on from from Ambrook that does accounting and financial just for farms and she said it took them like I think two and a half years to like build the core accounting sort of engine. So yeah. Yeah.
2:20:41
So so what have the trade-offs been as you've as you've built the product? Yeah.
2:20:44
So we went all all the way down to the ledger level and built our own ledger database that that's what we build all the functionality on top of for reconciliation and then the actual embedded accounting API itself is all built on top of that general ledger level.
2:20:59
And so that took a bunch of time, but we really wanted to save folks who, you know, that exact situation you mentioned, folks who are building these custom accounting products that provide so much value to any users, finding a way to really take that those core things that don't change between accounting systems and turn them into uh infrastructure that anyone can use to build their own products.
2:21:18
What's the go to market like?
2:21:20
How do you actually bring on these businesses?
2:21:22
Is it power law distributed?
2:21:24
Do you need to just get a few really huge companies on the platform or are you trying to go super broad like Stripe where kind of everyone's using the product? Yeah.
2:21:32
Uh so I think that's how we we really got our start and that's how our first clients are larger power law as customers.
2:21:41
But uh what we're looking forward to is this uh this deeper thesis that we've been building around is this idea that accounting data is basically the best substrate you can get to put at the base of a vertical vertical agent for business, right?
2:21:53
And so as folks are building more types of vertical agents that are uh working with financial uh APIs or payments and things of that nature, having accounting data reconciled into a book or a chart of accounts and building on top of that is one of the best places to sit because that information is essentially like memory for a company. Yeah.
2:22:14
I mean, it's the reason that every board meeting starts with like, let's look at the let's look at the finances of the business because that that, you know, that is the map of the territory and then then you can dig into specific things.
2:22:27
So, that makes a ton of sense.
2:22:28
Um, in terms of agents, it seems like you don't actually need to uh do all the work of maybe discovering the correct patterns because your clients are working on top of you in that regard.
2:22:40
Are you using artificial intelligence at your company?
2:22:42
Is there been uh different trends that you're tracking that are improving the product on your end yet?
2:22:50
Yeah, so uh what we're really excited about right now is really weaving it inside and through the the way we're building our general general ledger architecture so that it can automate a lot of those um those those bookkeeping tasks that that really are a big part of accounting and turn that into infrastructure that can quietly sit inside of a product rather than having so much human in the loop input.
2:23:10
And I think that's really what makes this part of what makes this a really exciting opportunity and different from a lot of other embedded payment or fintech features is that we're essentially helping to automate more of a service as well alongside a suite.
2:23:24
That's something that uh a lot of platforms previously were helping their end users and customers like hire bookkeepers or accountants to sit alongside them.
2:23:33
We help um kind of add that almost as an extra feature that they can sell alongside their suite.
2:23:39
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Jordy, anything else? Oh, very cool.
2:23:42
I'm excited about uh you know, I'm excited about all the different features and functionality that you can build on on top of Open Ledger.
2:23:50
Yeah, I mean, we've seen such a big trend in vertical SAS and all the different uh different B2B players.
2:23:53
It makes sense that there would be uh you know, an enabling technology here.
2:23:57
So, thank you so much for stopping by. This is great.
2:24:00
Great to hear from you, Price. We'll talk to you.
2:24:02
I'm excited for you guys. This rocks. Thank you. Have a great day. Cheers.
2:24:04
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2:24:24
Um, well, we have uh our next guest coming into the studio.
2:24:27
They need a little bit to build the four up.
2:24:30
So, we can do a little bit of timeline.
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You saw us deploy uh ads uh in the real world.
2:24:51
We did an out of home campaign in New York and the response to that has been remarkable.
2:24:54
It's been really fun running by it taking pictures. Yeah.
2:24:58
And it's been a way to to reconnect.
2:25:00
We've gotten so many text messages from people who are less online.
2:25:03
online. uh family members all sort it it really cut the out of home is just built different friends college friends it's just built different I mean you you got to do a lot of different marketing strategies there's a lot of different things out of home should be a piece of that it is incredibly underrated I
2:25:19
expect a a uh people to just start doing the oneup no launch video just big 101 billboard that's the way to do it very efficient that's the way to do it it's very efficient uh well do we have time to dive into the business of Formula 1 or Uh Jordan, you want to check out our next guest because uh I saw F1 last night. Yeah. Tell give us give us your Yeah.
2:25:38
Tell give us give us your review. It was incredible.
2:25:39
It was one of the best movies ever seen.
2:25:43
I'm really sorry because I we wanted the whole crew to come and but I I you know was catching up with friend, you know, college buddy uh and former guest on the show as well.
2:25:52
Um and uh it just kind of came together. But saw it in IMAX. Highly recommend it.
2:25:56
The entire film seemed to be shot in IMAX, which I have no idea how they did because half the shots are from the perspective of a Formula 1 car and so they must have mounted some massive camera rig on that thing.
2:26:08
Um, but it was beautiful.
2:26:08
Han Zimmer delivered an absolutely incredible score.
2:26:11
I've been listening to the the theme to F1 religiously as I drive uh at just, you know, five over the speed limit, right?
2:26:20
Um, you sure, you sure you want to put that on the record?
2:26:24
I I heard that you drive always perfectly at the speed limit. One under. You've cap your car.
2:26:28
You You actually hacked it to Yeah. Yeah.
2:26:31
I I kind of take the Nvidia approach to driving. Yeah. You know. Yeah.
2:26:35
Um and uh yeah, fantastic movie. Highly recommend it.
2:26:38
Uh lots of great sponsorships, lots of great ads within the movie. Shark Ninja in there.
2:26:45
We got a bunch of We got a bunch of great stuff.
2:26:47
Highly recommend seeing in theaters. Anyway, go check it out.
2:26:50
F1 with Brad Pit will be on Apple TV soon. We have our next guest. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing?
2:26:54
Uh could you guys introduce yourselves?
2:26:56
I wasn't We weren't fully expecting two.
2:27:00
We're excited to have you all here. Thank you so much. Of course.
2:27:01
So, I mean, maybe just to start out, um my name is Jacob.
2:27:05
Uh I'm very excited to be here at the Temple of Technology, the fortress of finance capital of capital, the ultra.
2:27:13
Very early, very early supporter. We appreciate you. We we we will remember.
2:27:18
Great to finally have you.
2:27:19
So, just quick background.
2:27:19
Um I'm currently a student at Stanford um along with Jack Whitaker, one of your old interns.
2:27:26
And then uh right now I've been working for a lot GIL for the past wow it's like I think four or five months now.
2:27:34
Um and what I'm going to be talking about today with Ofira is wait first fit fit check.
2:27:39
What what is this jacket? Oh yeah.
2:27:42
No, this is um a Sun Micros Systemystems jacket that we got from the old seauite, one of my co-workers.
2:27:46
Uh the Cleveland mafia of Ann, me, Peter Teal, a bunch of other folks.
2:27:51
Uh there's there's a bunch of Sun Micros Systems merch. Uh yeah.
2:27:56
So, every time I wear this, I think that's that's kind of what you need.
2:28:01
If you're going to a pitch meeting, if you're fundraising, this instantly gets you into the Letterman jacket of our industry. Yes.
2:28:05
Know it doesn't have Java on the back, but it does have Java on here. So, oh that's great. Incredible. That's amazing. Um, okay. So, give us the Yeah. Yeah.
2:28:14
Give us the story and then OP quick intro as well would be great. Hi. Yeah.
2:28:19
Um, my name's Oira and uh we're going to be talking about um large language model art.
2:28:27
Uh I actually I I invented um making artwork with language models like Chat GPT and Jacob has a really exciting project around that. Please wait. Break it down.
2:28:40
You you you something on you there.
2:28:42
You're you're the creator of AI art. Break that down. Yeah. One of them. Yeah.
2:28:47
No, she's ridiculously I I'm going to gasop her up for a moment.
2:28:51
Um she invented a large portion of modern AI asy art.
2:28:55
Um and is probably the world's best jailbreaker.
2:29:03
OpenAI holds these competitions pretty regularly, like every couple months or so.
2:29:07
Um they invite people from all around the world to jailbreak their models.
2:29:10
Usually people can't get past like one or two of the tests out of like a 20 test thing.
2:29:14
Um just regularly wins them breaks everything.
2:29:18
Like it's something where I was talking with Ben man who's one of the anthropic co-founders.
2:29:23
And even when we were discussing this, he's like, "Yeah, no."
2:29:26
Like there's still a lot of red teaming and CBRN, which is chemical, biological, uh, radiological, nuclear threats that like these artists in their communities, they just break through everything.
2:29:38
Like, and all the like I don't care what kind of MIT, PhD, like hire everybody like doesn't work.
2:29:43
Like they're just they're killers. You know what?
2:29:48
I was using the same techniques to make artwork.
2:29:49
So, back when Microsoft Bing came out in like summer of 2023, I got like, you know how you guys read poetry books sometimes and the poems are like arranged in these beautiful shapes?
2:30:00
The words have like like this gorgeous shapetry.
2:30:02
That's what I do with language models.
2:30:04
So, I actually first discovered that they could do that in the first place and I've made a whole beautiful art form out of that.
2:30:12
So, this is not diffusionbased image generation.
2:30:14
No, this is this is a language model doing it. Yes.
2:30:17
And so, just And so it's showing that's actually very interesting capability because it's showing spatial intelligence despite all it's doing is predicting the next token just like like you would normally get a chat reply, but it's doing it in these gorgeous shapes that very often actually reflect the content of the words.
2:30:34
Yeah, I've seen someone put out a benchmark for uh having LLMs uh basically interpret secret messages in Are you familiar with this?
2:30:45
you draw uh you basically write out a sentence in a square box and the LLM gets really confused even though the human can oneshot it.
2:30:53
It's kind of like an arc AGI for this type of thing.
2:30:54
But it's very fascinating that you're able to get good results because I thought that that's a place where LLMs were particularly weak, but it seems like you've been be able to break through.
2:31:05
I think they also like one thing to note is that they don't naturally they're naturally not very good at this.
2:31:10
Like I think if either of you like both of you I feel like are fairly AI fluent but if you tried to go out and do this I don't think that you would get terribly interesting results at first.
2:31:20
There's a lot like to get some of the artworks that are featured on beautiful art.
2:31:24
com going right now showing showing my stuff our stuff.
2:31:29
But um yes uh to go to go buy this um I usually like I mean Opera can speak on this like you want like sometimes it's like 30 40 even like hundreds of prompts that warm it up and go into these very weird places of distribution since if you think of modern language models they're pre-trained on the entire internet.
2:31:50
So the odds of like if it is on the internet you can probably make it.
2:31:55
So for people saying like, "How do you make this art? How does this happen?"
2:32:00
Like, if you just have creative enough prompts that go on for pages at a time, like you can just find anything on the internet, you can make all sorts of ridiculous stuff.
2:32:10
And that's how honestly I think you can get around these uh these jail kind of like these safety measures and so on is that if your if your training distribution is the internet, like anything on the internet, you can just you can go and find.
2:32:24
So, give me the give me the announcement.
2:32:26
Uh, it sounds like you mentioned selling art on the internet.
2:32:31
Have you processed your first sale? How much things cost?
2:32:33
Uh, how many sales have you done?
2:32:36
Can you give us a number?
2:32:37
I I'm I'm I'm itching to ring the gong for you.
2:32:40
I'm actually going to check right now.
2:32:42
Pull up the Stripe dashboard. Let's see it. Stripe dashboard.
2:32:45
Um, it looks like we already have six orders. Um, congratulations. There we go. That's great news.
2:32:55
Um, well, we'd love to have you back on when you hit a thousand sales or take it to the moon or put it in the What's What's the vision for beautiful art. com?
2:33:04
Are you going to add a bunch more artists over time? What does it look like?
2:33:08
I think that my original thought was that first um all of these great artists, we just have to put something out there.
2:33:16
We just have to ship, keep shipping.
2:33:17
So goal of today was launch, have all the payments set up, have all of the drop shippers, so that way we don't have to worry about inventory about uh shipping costs, etc.
2:33:29
And yeah, no, a bunch of people from the NFT community have reached out.
2:33:31
The crypto community has been pretty good to us.
2:33:34
Um I think that adding more artists is definitely on the list. And can talk about this.
2:33:40
Yeah, I wish like I I just came on the show like I I found out about an hour ago maybe.
2:33:44
So I you guys are going to admire my telephone today.
2:33:48
So, this is actually a poem by um a historical artist named Aldis Huxley called The Crystal Cabinet. Okay, cool.
2:33:55
And um it's it's you can see like it's in the shape of a wing. Very cool.
2:33:58
And it's very beautiful and it was interesting.
2:34:01
I I actually prompted a clawed opus 3 by anthropic to do that and it's very interesting.
2:34:06
So, it's a whole conversation as Jacob describes and you actually say like, can you make this more like the shape of a wing for example?
2:34:14
And again, even though this is like like I can picture that in my head cuz I'm a human, but somehow the model is able to gradually refine the shape more and more like that. That's very very cool. Yeah. Very cool.
2:34:24
Well, look forward to following along.
2:34:26
Thank you so much for stopping by.
2:34:28
Uh wait, do you have a closing uh uh anything you want to say?
2:34:32
A closing remark, I think, is something for people to keep an eye out for.
2:34:36
Of can speak on this as well.
2:34:36
Um but Grimes is making a movie about the AI artists.
2:34:41
Um and that's how part of like the impetus for launching this is that um there's uh filmmakers from cans uh that are right now filming Oira Janice some of the other artists um I'm going to feature. Yeah.
2:34:55
going to feature. Yeah. our our friend um our film our friend filmmaker Matt Zien um who we actually met through Grimes who was a huge fan of this artwork and a big supporter of it um is is hoping to film an independent documentary about kind of first contact
2:35:09
with the AI models because so many of us have had like weird exper weird experiences right like you chat with it and it's not like talking to a computer it's like there there's a little something going on there so this is going to be kind of a I I would call myself like kind of further They're on the the edge of that. It'll be about how
2:35:25
It'll be about how we interact with models. So stay tuned for that.
2:35:30
We'll wear TVPN merch in it.
2:35:33
We'll be first TBPN at Cans. Fantastic. Fantastic. We'd love to see that.
2:35:36
Uh thank you so much for stopping by.
2:35:37
We'd love to have you on the so much to chat about, but have a great day. Great to see you guys. We'll talk to you soon.
2:35:45
Uh really quickly, let me tell you about Wander. Find your happy place. Find your happy place.
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2:35:57
We dropped that video into into a timeline and turmoil.
2:35:59
It was a timeline in turmoil and it stood out.
2:36:01
It was a bit of a timeline cleanse. We did well. We did well. It was a lot of fun.
2:36:06
Uh it's having a long life on Instagram right now.
2:36:08
It uh it it did well on X and uh and I've been enjoying getting it into the hands of the Instagram audience.
2:36:14
Before our next guest, I just want to say happy birthday to John Xley.
2:36:20
He is happy birthday, John.
2:36:20
The most positive person, very helpful in the chat.
2:36:25
Met and unofficial moderator.
2:36:28
There's 77,000 people on the stream.
2:36:28
And so, uh, I think we'd be melting down without him.
2:36:34
So, he's been a huge ass. Thank you.
2:36:36
And happy birthday to John. Cheers.
2:36:38
Uh, anyway, we have our next guest, Orin Hoffman, in the studio. Welcome to the stream.
2:36:41
Welcome back to the Welcome back.
2:36:43
Great to talk to you again. Excited to be here. Second time guest. Yes. How you doing?
2:36:46
Uh, I had a question for you.
2:36:49
Uh, do venture capitalists take their own advice? Apparently not. Yeah. Break it down. Myself oral hypocrites. Yeah. Why?
2:36:57
I I I want to hear your your the examples that you have for situations where VCs uh give advice but then don't take it themselves.
2:37:06
And then I want to go into kind of the meta level of like why is this happening?
2:37:10
What is driving that dynamic?
2:37:12
But first, kick us off with some concrete examples of VCs giving advice but then not taking it themselves.
2:37:17
Yeah, I I think first of all just high levels, venture capitalists are just really not that ambitious.
2:37:21
Like they're not imunely as ambitious as like a someone who runs a private equity firm.
2:37:27
Like the level of ambition is probably like 10x higher on private equity than it is in venture capital.
2:37:34
And so in private equity, you might be like really building like an amazing company that you're trying to take public that you're really trying to take over the world.
2:37:40
venture capital is like you're just kind of like you're you're just okay with this um you know essentially just a business. Yeah.
2:37:47
Is that because of duration? Yeah.
2:37:50
And on the company side you're you're kind of you know there's certain investors that take a more hands-on approach or maybe they're on the board but it's somewhat you it's it's sort of culturally you're sort of leaving it up to the founder and and fate to some degree after you write the show.
2:38:06
It's essentially it's a lifestyle business.
2:38:07
Um and so the venture capitalists always deride lifestyle businesses, but they run them one themselves.
2:38:12
Um you know, they they often say to founders, hey, you know, you should have one CEO, but most venture capital firms have like four CEOs.
2:38:22
Um and it's like hard to make decisions.
2:38:25
They'll say take delution, but they don't take delution.
2:38:27
They'll say things like um you know, uh merge with other companies. They never do merge.
2:38:33
They almost always say, "Hey, it's a good thing to go public."
2:38:34
it's a good thing to go public." But you never see them trying to take their own company public like Bill Gurley or you know Brad Gersonner are not taking their companies public but they always give advice to take you know and they have big companies they run big you know fairly large companies they could have
2:38:48
taken them public um but they don't you know they'll say board governance but they don't have their own board governance so you just there's whole host of things where the venture capital will say one thing and then of course they sell like well you should have a differentiated product um but most venture capital firms you know they're just selling money. Um, it's a Um, it's a commodity.
2:39:06
Uh, and so it's very hard to differentiate.
2:39:09
You just have all this competition.
2:39:11
You know, if competition is for losers, well, like venture capital firm is like the most competitive place where you have some of the most smartest people competing against you.
2:39:19
Yeah, in some way the the partners are the product and there's only one Orin Hoffman and there's only so so you're differentiated by by the the product that you're providing is in some way yourself plus the money. Yep.
2:39:34
And so that's but what about um what about some of the rumors that uh firms like General Catalyst or Andre Horowitz might actually go public?
2:39:44
And if you look at the way Mark Andre's been building his business, it does feel like he if someone's going to turn a venture capital firm into a Blackstone like, you know, financial institution, it certainly seems like he's trying to do that. I I would agree. I would agree.
2:40:01
And so I would say first of all, if you think of Anderson Hornets, they have they have at least they have two CEOs and not six, right?
2:40:06
And they clearly only have two.
2:40:08
And they're clearly the CEO and they're clearly running a firm.
2:40:11
So I say they are way more ambitious than almost every other venture capital firm.
2:40:16
General Catalyst like they own like a hospital now.
2:40:18
So right so I mean they're they're definitely leveling up the level of ambition.
2:40:23
But still just if you just look at venture capital versus private equity just if you just think of like the top venture capital firms versus the top you know private equity firms and just do a comparison for each oneonone like it's it's just it's just a 10x different scale in private equity.
2:40:39
Maybe venture capital will eventually get there and and Horitz could definitely be one of those firms that they get there, but today it's like we're the also ran of the uh and the ambition level is just so much lower. Okay. Ambition level.
2:40:52
Do you think it's because it's kind of a prerequisite if you're going to be a VC that you're already rich?
2:41:01
Um, well, the other the other thing is the other thing is I feel like a lot of people go into private equity and they like they're grinders and they grind their way up and so they build that muscle.
2:41:09
Whereas a lot of VCs, they don't kick it off with grinding in VC.
2:41:12
They're like grinding as a founder, which is arguably the hardest thing you can do.
2:41:20
Eating glass, staring into the abyss.
2:41:22
They get some liquidity event.
2:41:22
They do a rest and vest for two years.
2:41:24
Then they go into VC and by then they've kind of come down off of the mountain of like grinding misery and then they're like, "Okay, I'm like somewhat retired now."
2:41:35
Well, there's also the different types of ambition.
2:41:37
There's I want to I want to have a 10x fund. Yep.
2:41:39
But you could be off of a small base.
2:41:41
It could be 2020$ 20 million fund.
2:41:43
And then there's I want to have a trillion of AUM, which no VC has done.
2:41:48
Black Rockck has 10 trillion of AUM, right? Um so there's levels.
2:41:51
And I do think you there's a bifurcation of certain VCs just want to put up good numbers and have a little lifestyle business and deliver great returns for LPS.
2:42:01
Others that have wildly different and bigger in some ways ambitions and that they want to have hundreds of billions of AUM and I think that they will get there.
2:42:12
But I think what you're saying is there's maybe not enough investors that or or too many too many people are just not actually wildly ambitious at all.
2:42:20
you know, they're like, I just want to they're running a lifestyle business, which is totally fine. Yeah.
2:42:25
Um, and obviously they're building they're they're they're hopefully doing the these venture companies are doing good in the world.
2:42:31
It's not like they're not doing good.
2:42:31
Uh they're they're out there doing a good thing and uh but we just we just tend to not follow our own advice. Okay.
2:42:38
Now, let me let if I come to you and I go to the the the the Silicon Valley market and I say I'm I'm going to do it differently.
2:42:47
I'm taking high dilution.
2:42:50
I'm going to take this company public.
2:42:51
I'm starting the a venture capital firm that will scale.
2:42:54
Is that even a viable strategy or is there some sort of like market dynamic that prevents that from even being possible?
2:43:02
It it it might be very hard given the constraints that other people want to put on the market and stuff like that and different people have tried.
2:43:08
So obvious obviously we we saw Soft Bank try and maybe kind of pull back.
2:43:11
We saw some other folks who did have a different level of ambition.
2:43:15
the crossover investors and and some of the powers that be internally have kind of fought against it.
2:43:22
It's it's it's tough and the venture capital market itself is very small.
2:43:26
So it's you know the private equity market is just a much much bigger market especially when you talk about things like private lending you know Apollo just has a much bigger sandbox that they can play in than at least Andre Horitz today.
2:43:38
doesn't mean that will change cuz the the venture capital market is getting bigger and of course Andre Hors is going to move into other things.
2:43:46
They'll move into wealth management.
2:43:47
They're going to move into a lot of other adjacent things over time.
2:43:50
Uh so that's the really the way it's like you you you get this niche in in venture capital that niche really can't be that big and then you'll have to layer on other things to to grow just like any other company.
2:44:01
If you're if you're Facebook just for Harvard University, there's only there's only how big you can grow. Yeah.
2:44:06
Um even for all the universities, there's only you you've got to move into other markets if you really want to become a great company.
2:44:13
So many VCs or big poker players, one of the major tier one firms should open a casino and just start running cash games and have rules. No crying. Yeah. No crying in the casino. Open a literal casino. That's the way to do it.
2:44:27
Say if you start crying, booted. You're booted. Yes. Uh, this is great.
2:44:31
Uh, well, but please we'll we'll have you back on the next time to noodle on this.
2:44:37
What are you What are you doing for the fourth? Yeah. What are you doing for?
2:44:39
Uh, I'm in I'm in Wisconsin for the fourth. Oh, there we go. Stay in America. Let's hear it.
2:44:46
Let's hear it from Capital Alligator. Yeah, for the fourth.
2:44:48
That is That's American dynamism in practice. Yes.
2:44:53
Staying in America for the fourth. We salute you. Absolutely. Great to see you, Orin. Yeah. Thanks, guys. Enjoy the holiday. Cheers.
2:44:59
Up next, we have uh Meron Jalali.
2:45:02
I hope I'm pronouncing that right.
2:45:05
Um I think we got through all of our ads, which is rough.
2:45:07
I like doing ads and now we're now we're out of them. Well, we have one more. Graphite.
2:45:14
I I don't have an but graphite.
2:45:14
dev code review in the age of AI.
2:45:17
Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster cursor ramp get started for free at graphite.
2:45:26
com and we got our next guest in the building. Welcome to the stream.
2:45:32
Mean, am I pronouncing that correctly? Yeah, meron or meron. Yeah, meron. Fantastic. Uh, give us the update. What are you up to?
2:45:40
Where are you in the world right now?
2:45:41
Yeah, I'm in San Francisco.
2:45:41
I'm back in San Francisco.
2:45:43
I was in Bise for the past two weeks doing the scan there. That is complete.
2:45:48
The preliminary results were super super cool.
2:45:50
What were you scanning for? Yeah. Yeah.
2:45:51
Give us the whole back story because I I remember like the initial post.
2:45:55
It was maybe 6 months ago. Sure. That we saw.
2:45:59
So, this has been in the works for a while. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
2:46:00
Um I mean, basically the Mayans, they cleared out forests to build some of their cities and settlements.
2:46:06
And so, when they moved or they died or in any way they vacated their cities, trees ended up growing back over them.
2:46:12
So, if you look at it from the satellite, the it's just completely green.
2:46:16
It's just completely trees.
2:46:17
Um, but beneath the trees are these like magnificent pyramids and roads and buildings and whatnot.
2:46:22
And so, and they're invisible from space and they're invisible on the ground because it's just so hard to traverse these rainforest.
2:46:27
And so, what I'm doing is we're flying planes with very big, very strong light LAR scanners under them.
2:46:34
And we're scanning these trees.
2:46:36
And while most of the canopy is just completely full of trees because, you know, it's a rainforest, some of the lasers make their way through.
2:46:42
And then you classify the points, you remove the trees, you look at the ground, and then you know if we discover something like a pyramid or roads or structures and stuff, we know that we found something that no one's seen for the past, you know, thousand 2,000 years or whatever.
2:46:54
So yeah, lighter scanning for us to find civilizations. Did you find anything? Yeah. What'd you find? Yeah.
2:47:00
So um doing two scans this year, 400 square kilometers in Bise, 600 square kilometers in Mexico.
2:47:05
The Biz one's done, but only like a third of it has been processed so far. Super cool.
2:47:10
There are some there pyramids.
2:47:10
are like hundreds maybe even thousands of buildings um hundreds of kilometers of roads you know things that no one has ever seen you know since a thousand 2,000 years ago. Yeah.
2:47:20
Tell me about the uh tell me about the the the economic model of your entire operation. You're flying planes.
2:47:28
You've got LAR scanners or Yeah, it's a nonprofit.
2:47:31
So I mean so what got me interested in this was I saw this but there'll be a for-profit spin out at some point and I could I could get units.
2:47:41
We're going to tokenize the Mayan ruins.
2:47:44
Yeah, the capped lidar unit. No, 100x.
2:47:48
What got me interested in this was I saw this cool paper over Thanksgiving or so, funnily enough, um that was about how some conservation efforts scanned some trees in some forest in Mexico and then these archaeologists removed the trees and they found stuff underneath.
2:48:03
And so I decided to see like, oh, like if if you can spot, you know, random archaeological sites without even explicitly looking for them, I wonder, you know, have they been doing more of it?
2:48:12
And the answer is like, you know, archists have archaeologists have done some of this stuff in the past, but ultimately there's just not a whole lot of money in archaeology.
2:48:18
I mean, you know, it's not it's not a very like wellunded thing.
2:48:21
Like it's like maybe all the money going into archaeology on an annual basis is the same as like, you know, a series A or series B or something.
2:48:28
Um, and so, and it's like massive economies of scale because you're flying planes, you know, the more you can fly them, the more you can, you know, divide your total costs by.
2:48:35
There are these like extremely expensive like million-dollar LAR scanners.
2:48:38
And yeah, I mean, you know, the the main costs are basically the plane and the LAR scanner and the crew to go and actually do the scanning. Um, yeah.
2:48:45
So, where where do you go from here? What's the next step? Yeah.
2:48:51
So, still the data has yet to be processed.
2:48:53
processed. Um the processing is basically figuring out what points belong to the ground, which which ones belong to the trees, removing the tree ones, taking the ground ones, and then while like you know the the naive visualizations are like striking like
2:49:06
you know you're seeing like this huge pyramid or whatever ultimately the archaeologists draw the most interesting inferences like you know is this actually super novel to us like sure like this is no one seen this before but like did anyone expect this to be there or not? So give the data to so process
2:49:17
So give the data to so process to point cloud, give the data to the archaeologists.
2:49:21
Um they make their inferences, but my goal ultimately is to scan all of this area.
2:49:25
I mean ultimately I think you know we need to put more money into archaeology.
2:49:29
I think there's really cool stuff to do with tech and archaeology.
2:49:33
We need more tech talent in archaeology.
2:49:34
And my goal is essentially to use these results, you know, get like publish them, all that stuff.
2:49:40
Raise a lot more money and do like a significant larger scan next year, like 10,000 square kilometers at the very least next year.
2:49:47
and within a couple years, you know, finish all of Central America, then move to the Amazon, then other interesting archaeological projects like, you know, scanning coastlines, stuff like that.
2:49:55
Um, so I just Anything to anything to scan in in America considering it's it's uh the fourth tomorrow in the US.
2:50:04
I you know, the the thing is the thing that's interesting to me about Central America is that they they actually had like massive pyramids and stuff.
2:50:12
stuff. uh the US and the Amazon like there is stuff there but like ultimately the and the Amazon at the very least they didn't have stone so everything that you find are like dirt mounds which are cool like the fact that they're there like in places that seem so hostile to life kind of in general you know like raining nine months a year or
2:50:30
whatever is cool but yeah there are like dirt mounds and stuff in the US and the Amazon as well but at the moment my interest is mostly in Central America I think there's like you know 50,000 square kilmters or so there to scan and I plan on scanning all of them first and then and then others How are how are the local governments in in these areas? Are
2:50:43
Are they excited about what you're doing?
2:50:47
Are they are they are they emailing you for updates? Hey, what did you find?
2:50:53
Well, well, when I was in Bise and I was talking to the, you know, the people in the city, they were super excited.
2:50:56
You know, they they're proud of their history.
2:50:59
They find their sites cool.
2:51:01
They find that like other people are interested in them. They're very cool.
2:51:03
And I think that people are super excited.
2:51:05
The governments are also very excited because, you know, this boosts their tourism.
2:51:08
This boosts their national heritage.
2:51:10
It shows that, you know, there were once great civilizations here and like, you know, that's something to be proud of.
2:51:13
Um, and they're also wary because the problem is that there's a big looting problem in these countries, especially countries that like don't have, you know, so much money dedicated to archaeology to protect all of the sites.
2:51:24
protect all of the sites. Um, and so they're a little worried worried about uh the data privacy and stuff related to this stuff because yeah, like you know when you're earning like I don't know like $10,000 a year when that's your GDP per capita and you like find like a jade
2:51:39
mask worth like you know 200k in in on in the black market like there's a strong incentive and so they're trying to prevent that and so yeah I mean we've been working with the governments to assure them about the data privacy but generally like they're super excited about this. Yeah I I can imagine. Can you talk about Yeah I I can imagine.
2:51:52
Can you talk about El Dorado?
2:51:57
Um, you know, huge if true. Huge if true. Big if true. Yeah.
2:52:00
Uh, I mean, what is the lore?
2:52:03
What is Are there any are there any folks out there that still believe it's out there?
2:52:08
Is there any like like what what is the uh what is the historical narrative and then what is the modern narrative?
2:52:16
Um, well, I I think the meta point is kind of that uh things like El Dorado, things like Atlantis, like Noah's Arc and stuff are like kind of how a lot of people get interested in archaeology initially.
2:52:31
They're like, "We're going to find Noah's arc in Turkey."
2:52:32
And then you look and you're like, "Oh, well, you know, huge if true, but I don't know how much these these hold up to some scrutiny."
2:52:39
And you're like, "Okay, like what are other like more practical things that we can be doing?" Yeah.
2:52:41
So, um, yeah, I mean, huge if true, but like, you know, most likely not true.
2:52:46
But it's it's good that these persist because it gets some people interested in archaeology. Yeah.
2:52:52
What about other things that we should be scanning for?
2:52:53
I mean, if not gold, rare earth elements are top of mind.
2:52:58
Maybe there's a secret chip fab somewhere we could grab. Yeah. Data centers. Um, data centers. Yeah, exactly.
2:53:05
Just I'm expecting you to find Mayan data centers. Yes.
2:53:08
I mean, what do you think? the Jensen back.
2:53:12
There was a Jensen of that era.
2:53:12
That would be truly huge if true.
2:53:14
Um, well, I I think we should scan the Amazon.
2:53:17
I mean, there's like been really interesting stuff there.
2:53:20
Like the early people that like, you know, the early Europeans that went there, they reported, you know, like 10-ft tall naked women that are like shooting arrows, which is how it got the name Amazon.
2:53:29
Um, you know, it would be cool to maybe fact check this, but like even if this is not a real like there's probably some stuff that this was based on.
2:53:37
Um, it would be cool to look for Atlantis, you know, huge of true.
2:53:38
Um, I think we should scan all the coastlines of the Mediterranean, the Persian Gulf, the Caspian, you know, because there are probably so many cities that that are now underwater. I'm Iranian.
2:53:48
I would love to do archaeology in Iran as well.
2:53:53
Um, you know, there there's so many civilizations that uh that like, you know, are mentioned in Sumerian history, but like we have no traces of except for like, you know, that we know there was a powerful king there.
2:54:03
powerful king there. So there's there's a ton of archaeological uh mysteries, but like kind of the bits versus atoms thing is also true in archaeology where like the atoms part of archaeology doing field work, doing digging and stuff that
2:54:16
hasn't really changed in hundreds of years, but they're like interesting opportunities in bits now of like you know Nat Freiedman's Vuvius scrolls uh or you know doing LAR scanning using satellite imagery stuff like that and like those are kind of the lowerhanging fruits. the more we can do remote
2:54:29
the more we can do remote sensing, the more we can do scalable things because that's the lower hanging fruit and then yes, like making really educated guesses about like where some like Atlantis might be and like doing work there.
2:54:38
But I'll do you find it do you find it funny or fascinating that that being an explorer is like super contrarian like we have this idea that that the world is fully discovered and you know we we've we've mapped every coastline so there's nothing else to do.
2:54:55
like high school career fairs like no one's saying, "Oh, you can still discover things."
2:54:58
Which is like what gets me interested.
2:54:59
Like I didn't know this was an option.
2:55:00
Um I don't know if it's contrarian, but like yeah, I mean not many people are doing it.
2:55:05
I would love if there were more people doing it. There was more interest.
2:55:08
There was more money in this.
2:55:09
Um but yeah, I mean, well, you're starting the exploration industrial complex.
2:55:13
You're the first of the of the modern era. It'd be great.
2:55:15
I I I think when the results come out and like they're going to be super cool and yeah, it's going to get a lot lot of people a lot more interested in this sort of thing. Fantastic. Very cool.
2:55:26
Well, come back on whenever you've have updates.
2:55:27
We we should do the next one from the air ideally uh and Starlink powered. Yeah. Yeah.
2:55:32
The plane's flying like 500 meters taking the sharpest turns of the canist.
2:55:36
It's not going to be a pretty sight. Well, it'll be fun.
2:55:40
Anyways, thank you for coming on. Thank you for talking. Absolutely. Thank you for having me. Have a good one. Bye.
2:55:47
Up next, we have Kushall from Extend App coming into the studio.
2:55:50
We got some gongw worthy news, baby. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. It's gong time. It's gong time. It's gong time. Jordy, I'll let you. What's up, guys? How are you? Good to see you. Take us off.
2:56:03
How much have you raised? Good to see you, too. What's up, guys?
2:56:06
Give us the news on the fundraising front first and then we'll figure out what you do for a living.
2:56:13
I just answer customer support for a living. That's what I do.
2:56:15
Well, you got to get on the founder by intercom. Yeah. Yeah. Finn.
2:56:19
Then you can just go to France, you know. There we go. What's going on? What's the news? What's up, guys? Great to meet you.
2:56:25
Uh, well, we recently announced $17 million in funding across our seed and series A rounds. Congratulations. Thank you. Thank you. With authority. That one felt good.
2:56:39
Okay, now to the less important news.
2:56:41
What does the company do?
2:56:44
Well, we also filmed a pretty kick-ass launch video to go along with it, too. I saw that. It was a ton of fun. Yeah, it was great.
2:56:50
So, is this like some type of new like fax machine company?
2:56:52
You're doing document processing.
2:56:55
What What are you building? Yeah. Yeah. So, my name is Kushaw.
2:57:00
I'm the CEO co-founder of Extend.
2:57:02
And at Extend, we're building a modern document processing cloud.
2:57:04
So, you know, we work with companies that just get a ton of PDFs and unstructured documents, right?
2:57:11
uh and we help them ingest and process that.
2:57:13
So we really work with, you know, cutting edge AI teams, data teams, technical teams, whether they're trying to build AI agents on top of that data, new products with that data, automate, you know, manual back office work with that.
2:57:24
Uh we really give them all of the infrastructure and tooling they need to go after that.
2:57:29
Is the actual physical document in problem solved?
2:57:33
Is is Iron Mountain just dominant there?
2:57:37
Is there no need for actual new scanning?
2:57:39
Have we scanned every document in the world by now? Not even close. It's actually funny.
2:57:45
One of the first customers I talked to back when I was getting the company started off the ground.
2:57:48
It was a uh a large healthcare provider in Milwaukee, believe it or not, in the the middle of the country.
2:57:54
Uh and I talked to them, I'm trying to pitch them, you know, LLM for document processing, and they're like, "This sounds great.
2:57:58
Come back to us in 2 years once we, you know, have digitized this mountain of, you know, lockbox warehouse of PDFs and boxes that are stored in our backyard."
2:58:08
Um, so not quite there yet, but I think we'll get there pretty soon.
2:58:10
Talk to me about the tech stack.
2:58:12
Is OCR, traditional OCR pipelines, are those like dead at this point?
2:58:15
I've heard about some people that will, you know, send a PDF to uh Google for OCR, get a big messy bucket of text, but at least it's in text format, and then run that through an LLM to just kind of clean it up.
2:58:30
What's the state-of-the-art? Yeah.
2:58:33
You know what's really surprising is so much of the world still runs on these PDFs and Excel documents and they just end up being the system of record for such mission critical data.
2:58:41
If you think healthcare, you know, finance, supply chain, it's just all powered by PDFs.
2:58:46
I think people's mind would be blown if they knew how much of the global economy just runs off of PDF files.
2:58:51
Um, and the problem's been around for a long time, right?
2:58:55
I think OCR at this point is uh decades old.
2:58:57
Um, you know, funnily enough, we we have a bunch of hoodies for the team and we have the OCR patent printed on the hoodies just as a little testament to it, but it's like 40 50 years old at this point, right?
2:59:07
Um, but it's really accelerating now.
2:59:10
You know, I think more documents are going to get processed in the next 6 months than all of history combined since the PDF file format was invented.
2:59:19
Um, and I experienced this myself.
2:59:21
You know, I actually built this back at Brex in 2018.
2:59:25
I was an early engineer there.
2:59:25
Uh, and we did exactly what you were saying, OCR a document and then just run it through a ton of painful reax to try to like pull out these targeted data fields and it was so painful.
2:59:35
Um, and fast forward now to today with LLMs and the capabilities are just so much higher and the demand for document processing is through the roof right now. Right. Yeah.
2:59:45
I was going to say what what what talk about kind of the demand.
2:59:47
I I I know you got a bunch of uh pretty incredible customers already.
2:59:53
Yeah, I mean we have the privilege of working with some awesome folks from large enterprises like Square uh you know that are trying to do a ton of use cases around uh financial statement ingestion or Flat Iron Health who have billions of pages of patient medical data um all the way to cutting edge startups like you know Brex and Mercury and Checker and many others that are all using us in production.
3:00:12
Um and we have incredibly high retention ton of folks that kind of refer us to others and come inbound.
3:00:17
um and we're growing the team to to keep up with it, but the demand has been pretty intense.
3:00:21
And I think what we've kind of seen is that um as these models have gotten better, it's sort of increased the possibility of what you can go and do.
3:00:28
But for very missionritical use cases, uh where even you know 99% accuracy for example is not good enough if you're trying to do mortgage processing or patient healthcare intake because the downstream impact of bad data is so catastrophic, right?
3:00:42
right? Um and so we really focus on these you know pipelines and industries where you just cannot get it wrong accuracy reliability you cannot get it wrong and that con that you know constraint puts a ton of complexity on the problem and that's kind of where we
3:00:55
go deep and that's why we have a number of customers that kind of try to do the model approach and then come back to us in 3 months 6 months uh and they sign up for extend and pay for extend uh despite the models having gotten exponentially better over the past couple of months. So yeah, I mean what the models are
3:01:08
So yeah, I mean what the models are getting better, but what models are you actually using and for what use cases?
3:01:14
Because I imagine that the price difference and the time cost of using a heavyduty reasoning model versus a really quick optimized like, you know, 40 level model has got to be pretty different.
3:01:27
And then is tool use at all in the mix with some of these?
3:01:30
in the mix with some of these? because I can imagine as clunky as reax is every once in a while you might want to have a layer of reax validation on top of things right just to make sure I think uh you're getting at a really key point which is there's very few use cases
3:01:45
which is like here's a document extract this data because for any mission critical pipeline you have the entire endto-end system you have to build of classify the document because that changes the schema and then split the document up and then actually parse it to make sure you can handle these tables that span 10 pages Right? And each one
3:02:00
And each one of those kind of adds complexity to the axes of cost and performance and latency.
3:02:07
And you kind of need to have all three of those, right?
3:02:08
Not a single model is going to be great at all of them.
3:02:12
And really why customers end up buying us is because they don't want to be locked in to one model.
3:02:15
And we give them all the tooling to figure out, hey, this initial triage step, we want to use a really cheap, fast, you know, low latency triaging classifier, but then for this really complex table, we do want to use a really powerful reasoning model.
3:02:28
uh and we kind of help them integrate build and build all of that end to end.
3:02:31
Talk about where the data is winding up.
3:02:34
Are you seeing more clients demand that you map the documents that you're ingesting all the way to a relational database like Postgress or something?
3:02:44
Are people just saying hey just give me a blob of JSON I'll stuff it in MongoDB.
3:02:47
Do people want a CSV file that's on AWS or S3 or something like how do people want the data finalized from you?
3:02:57
Yeah, few I mean the flexibility is kind of the name of the game and that's why we provide options for all of that.
3:03:02
Uh some people that are trying to build you know AI agents on top of it.
3:03:06
They'll want the JSON payload but then also put it into a vector DB, right? Okay.
3:03:10
Uh some other folks are going to want to actually index that in like elastic search if you're trying to do text experiences on top of it.
3:03:15
Um other people that are like just automating mortgage processing for example that'll just go like structured data points into a DB that then they can take action on.
3:03:24
Uh, so we kind of give them the data, the raw data, and then get out of their way so they can figure out, you know, where to do and what to do with it downstream. Yeah.
3:03:30
Uh, how how real are I mean, there's there was this narrative for a while like, oh, enjoy the VC subsidized era.
3:03:37
It's like the early Uber days.
3:03:39
Uh, all the LLMs are cheap, but they're going to be really expensive.
3:03:43
Uh, how real is it that LLM inference can be a material cost for a company like you that's kind of reselling inference?
3:03:50
Not to degrade what you're doing, but like that that's a piece of your business.
3:03:53
you have a cost uh that's inference and then you're earning revenue from the value that you add on top of that uh versus a startup that's buying from you.
3:04:02
How how big are these line items?
3:04:04
Are we talking uh you know something that's material to SGNA for a company or or is is intelligence like basically too cheap to meter at this point?
3:04:15
Yeah, it's a great question and it really depends on the use case, right?
3:04:19
And um our contract sizes range from, you know, we work with small startups paying us a few hundred bucks a month all the way up to large enterprises that pay us six plus figures a year, right?
3:04:28
Um and it kind of varies all across the board.
3:04:30
Uh but, you know, we haven't played the unit margin game where we're trying to, you know, give away a dollar for 90 cents or anything like that.
3:04:38
We have positive unit economics on on all across the board.
3:04:40
Um because really what we benchmark ourselves against is what is the cost of bad accuracy in your downstream product or your user experience?
3:04:48
What's the cost of six months of edge time?
3:04:50
And at the end of the day th those end up outweighing a lot more than you know potential percentage differences on like the LLM costs themselves, especially as they've continued to come down.
3:05:00
You know, there were some things we couldn't do from a product perspective 18 months ago that now we really can just because it's so much easier to make multiple LLM calls and do things more agentically.
3:05:09
uh in an endto-end system. Very cool. Jordy, anything else?
3:05:13
No, very excited for you. Clearly ripping.
3:05:16
I can I can I can sense the voice. It's going well.
3:05:22
There's nothing better than than seeing um Yeah, you you know, a lot of people raised a series A very not everybody has this level of of of pull from the market.
3:05:31
So, I'm sure you'll be back on for a B in no time. It's fantastic. Can't wait. We'll talk to you soon. Thanks. Great.
3:05:37
I feel like that could be very valuable for you.
3:05:40
You could maybe use extend to take ingest all the registrations from the G63s from the G Wagons and all the service records and then you could have one database for all of them that you query across.
3:05:51
I was going to say I was going to say I mean we produce a lot of documents and figuring out how to process these bad boys.
3:05:59
It's almost like they come from the computer and the internet and they could just uh remain there and yet we print them out because it's fun.
3:06:06
Um anyway, what else is what else is in the news?
3:06:10
What else is important to cover today?
3:06:12
Uh we have a few few we have one more in your view today.
3:06:16
Yeah, we got a vlog Avlock coming on uh in just a little bit.
3:06:22
Uh Daniel Daniel growing Daniel was any breaking news?
3:06:25
Uh he says watching the Sohham interview and I can already tell people are going to see this interview of a legendary liar talking about his legendary lies and be like wow I kind of believe him.
3:06:35
You can label the tin poison and people will still eat it. Label the tin poison.
3:06:39
Yes, you can label the tin poison.
3:06:43
People will still eat it.
3:06:44
Um he says it's you had said at some point it's tough because someone who would lie about having multiple jobs might come on here and lie to us. He see quoting you. He seemed sincere. He did seem sincere.
3:06:56
It's very possible that he's a a legendary.
3:06:58
He's a 10x engineer and also a 10x liar or 100x liar.
3:07:01
Um well the proof is in the pudding, you know. Yeah.
3:07:06
You know, it's very obvious that I I wouldn't recommend a portfolio company hire this guy.
3:07:11
I think it's possible he goes and works somewhere and just does a great job.
3:07:15
Um I wouldn't necessarily bet on it.
3:07:17
Might hire him in a house in your literally in your house. Yeah.
3:07:21
But but the push back there is you got to have him in the office, but then you got to live with him.
3:07:26
And he but maybe he he just is uh you know, he sets up his desk and he's just still moonlighting.
3:07:33
You know, I think he might be he he might just be built for moonlighting.
3:07:37
He also was devop the dev shop thing he's fine.
3:07:40
He would he would routinely miss um you know miss deadlines and then use various excuses when the India Pakistan um stuff was happening.
3:07:52
He was telling people you know they shot a drone 10 minutes away uh guilt- tripping people.
3:07:58
So it's rough terrible behavior.
3:08:01
Uh it's a buyer beware situation for anyone who's employing him. That's right.
3:08:05
You know what you're getting yourself into.
3:08:06
You got to be careful and make sure that that aligns and ultimately the value of what you're paying.
3:08:13
What's the value he's delivering and you just know, okay, uh could be could be some volatility in that.
3:08:20
But he's more of a known quantity now and we learned a couple things at least got him on the record.
3:08:24
So, you know, if he goes out and moonlights again, everyone will be able to point to that interview.
3:08:29
Be like he said he wasn't going to do it. and he did it.
3:08:33
So, somebody was saying uh a fake SOHOM fake SOHO account was saying Elon can work at nine startups.
3:08:38
Jamie Diamond can be on the board of multiple companies, but when you do it, it's a scam.
3:08:42
And then Austin says, "So tired of this argument.
3:08:46
Working at multiple companies was not the problem.
3:08:48
Many people have side gigs or contract at many places.
3:08:52
They just don't lie about doing so."
3:08:52
So, that's the key thing.
3:08:53
Jaime Diamond is not sneak sneaking on to other boards.
3:08:58
Elon's very public about his different companies.
3:09:01
And uh it's all about just avoid lying. Just don't lie. That's what we said.
3:09:05
Uh Sohan probably could have had a had a cracked dev shop, but he chose to lie.
3:09:13
So hopefully he course corrects. Oh well, we will see.
3:09:16
We will let the timeline decide.
3:09:17
We will let I'm sure the timeline will not let up on the memes and the jokes and anything else that's going on. Um oh well.
3:09:25
Should we uh should we go through some F1 stuff?
3:09:31
So F1 has made an annual sponsorship revenue of more than 636 million which I believe is is a significant multiple to the amount of money that they were asking for um for actual TVs TV rights.
3:09:51
I think they wanted 200 million ESPN million for for the right to to distribute that and show that as content, but the ads inside the well beyond that. Yes.
3:10:01
So between 2019 and 2024, Liberty Media says F1 series annual sponsorship revenue more than doubled to 636 million.
3:10:10
At a team level, total sponsorship revenue increased by 60% to 1.
3:10:16
3 billion over the same period.
3:10:21
So, Liberty Media is selling F1 sponsorships, but then the teams are also selling sponsorships.
3:10:25
Uh, the sport is bigger than it has ever been in its 75 year history, and everyone wants a slice, but how can sponsors stand out and justify the cost when demand is so high?
3:10:36
Yeah, I I they haven't announced their new media rights or TV rights deal, but given how much they're doing on the sponsorship side, I wouldn't be surprised if they just go for max eyeballs and kind of take it um at at somewhat of a not necessarily a loss, but just understand it won't be the profit center that it maybe once was.
3:10:57
Because if you actually look at F1 viewership, that was TV rights in the United States. They wanted 200 million. Uh, no.
3:11:04
ESPN wasn't interested in doing that.
3:11:06
Yeah, I guess this is global.
3:11:08
Previously, previously in in 20 2023 onward, they were paying between 75 and 90 a year.
3:11:15
And um they just don't command the live US viewership uh to to really justify that anymore, I guess, or or even beyond that despite the sports popularity. Yeah, it's interesting.
3:11:27
Um, apparently brands are picking teams based on like the unique personality of those teams now.
3:11:37
So we give this example team the team's distinct personalities can be a big draw for sponsors.
3:11:41
Heineken began sponsoring Red Bull in 2017 just a year after the Dutch Brewer started its long-standing series level partnership with F1.
3:11:51
The deal with the team is effective because both are nonpremium brands in a sport dominated by luxury car manufacturers, says Hessie, who has previously worked for both.
3:12:01
Looking up and down the grid at the time, they wouldn't have sat anywhere else.
3:12:05
And so there's the official like drinks car of F1.
3:12:10
And uh if you're selling alcohol or energy drinks, you head over to F1 Red Bull Plus. Uh what was it? There's the steak. Stake has a Oh, yeah.
3:12:20
You love the collaboration.
3:12:23
Uh, it's like it's like insert.
3:12:26
It's the Saur Stake F1 team.
3:12:29
The Kickber, which is Kick is is their streaming platform for for steak. The kick stake saver.
3:12:33
But without further ado, let's bring in Avlock.
3:12:35
He's got a Q2 update for us. Great to see you. What's going on?
3:12:42
Good to have you on the show. Welcome back. How you doing? Welcome back. Thank you. Been great. Been great. Q2 was awesome. Break it down for us.
3:12:49
What was awesome about it?
3:12:50
Um, I mean, overall there's just a lot of optimism.
3:12:54
Uh, maybe I'll just take from the top and and what we're seeing ecosystemwide and then what we're seeing in our data.
3:13:00
Uh, I mean, look, ecosystemwide, we're just seeing um exits uh across the board.
3:13:04
M&A is up by a huge margin.
3:13:08
Uh, IPOs are up by a huge margin.
3:13:11
And so, what we're actually seeing is a lot of uh exit dollars coming through, making its way back to LPS.
3:13:17
And that ends up flowing its way back into venture.
3:13:21
Uh because all of venture is power law.
3:13:23
As you have some of the best companies go public, get acquired, uh all those dollars flow right back in and they go right back in and get recycled back into venture.
3:13:31
And I think we just sort of hit the perfect storm uh in Q2 where a lot of optimism is there.
3:13:39
Obviously, a lot of exits, you know, uh a lot of it's been reported.
3:13:43
you have Circle, uh you have um Scale AI and a bunch of other companies and these exits are massive, like huge.
3:13:49
And so the LP dollars, uh the returns that LPs are getting are also massive.
3:13:54
And what we're just seeing is those dollars come right back in and they just get reinvested back into emerging managers and some of the scaled up uh scaled up venture firms.
3:14:04
And so the the thing that was actually shocking to me personally um you know, you can kind of feel it.
3:14:08
So I invest of course um and you can kind of feel it in the deal velocity and the and the rate at which uh companies are growing like the revenue growth is real but what we saw in our data was the LP dollars to micro VC emerging VC uh think of these as like managers with hund00 million fund size to million dollar fund sizes was up 50% quarter quarter almost 50%.
3:14:33
So that's in one quarter it was like a giant increase that you know for many quarters it was sort of the the valley of debt there was yeah there was a very dark dark period where you we we track that we track those dark periods actually in our data too.
3:14:49
it was like we have the boom times and the bus times and for a while there were a lot of the bus times and but we're just seeing a lot of optimism uh coming in and it's it's actually really really great to see uh and I think some of the data that was circulating around uh X over the past few weeks was around the emerging the death of the emerging manager class and I just think that data is actually wrong.
3:15:12
Uh it it's coming from PitchBook and Pitchbook's data is very laggy.
3:15:15
They don't actually have information on this uh class of venture. Yeah.
3:15:19
They don't have a real-time view of it. Uh Angelus does.
3:15:24
And so we see we basically see it all and that's great. A lot of optimism. Well, yeah.
3:15:29
And the emerging managers that were steadily deploying over the last couple years during that dark period are the ones that are now I'm sure you know showing uh you know tremendous markups during this time which will hopefully catalyze more investment as well. Yeah.
3:15:45
investment as well. Yeah. The liquidity is psychological for LPS versus actual dollars going back into LP pockets and then they just need to redeploy them because there's something about like if you've been in some fund for years and years and years and the marks and they
3:16:02
don't really feel real and then all of a sudden you actually get a check you're even if that's only 10% of the money that you put in or 10% of what you commit in the next fund it kind of feels like okay this is the this is working at least I'm ready um just deploy new cash because I have cash on my balance sheet. Now it depends on the
3:16:22
Now it depends on the type of LP.
3:16:24
Uh so if you are a uh more of a traditional larger asset allocator, you have strict requirements on amount of money that goes into public versus private.
3:16:36
So that is a little bit stricter but you have a large swath of capital that comes from uh non-institutionals like you've got family offices, individuals, lot of lot of wealthy individuals.
3:16:47
I just saw a report the other day the number of millionaires in the US has gone up considerably.
3:16:52
Uh for them it's all psychological a lot of it psychological.
3:16:57
Even if you get 10% of your capital in 20%, 30%.
3:17:00
It feels real because venture is it's a weird asset class when you think about it.
3:17:05
You basically invest in it and uh you're you don't know if you're going to get liquidity for 101 15 years depending on where you invest.
3:17:12
But when you start seeing that cycle of liquidity coming back, all of a sudden you gain confidence not just in the asset class but also the manager that you're backing.
3:17:23
And so we do see a lot of that.
3:17:26
So that that that's what the reflexivity is that we're seeing on the platform where you know you have NASDAQ that was up 18% uh year-over-year.
3:17:31
Um and even venture dollars deployed as an overall uh ecosystem uh is up like 30% year-over-year.
3:17:41
year-over-year. uh but within the uh micro VC emerging VC uh area it grew 40 50% quarter over quarter right so there's this reflexivity of excitement uh because you're starting to see the dollars come right back and people are looking at going this is real these companies are real uh it wasn't just you know uh in their minds like propped up valuations which was a lot of the
3:18:06
narrative I would say for the past uh two years post ser and the thing also it's it's interesting Think about people that maybe invested in the first six months of Angelist being a platform and then maybe they just made a couple investments at the time and then checked out for a decade and then suddenly they get an email and it's like yeah it's a liquidity event. It's like whoa maybe
3:18:25
It's like whoa maybe maybe pay more attention here.
3:18:27
We we actually have that uh you know there there's this thing that happens with banks sometimes and uh even crypto platforms where people have money and they're like trying to get in touch with them to take their take their money.
3:18:40
It's pretty significant in some cases and so yeah we have cases of that as well which is hey you have a return you probably want this this is actually pretty significant um yeah so we see we see that um what do you think about potential new sources of liquidity coming into the LP pools coming into venture um I saw some news about some crossover funds potentially lowering the requirement uh to invest in the fund maybe down to
3:19:09
from like a million down into like the single digit thousands or maybe 25,000 co had a 50k maybe it's a separate fund and so I don't know if I don't know if that changes the requirements around um around uh in uh what's it called
3:19:26
professional investor rules no accredited investor rules accredited investor rules um but but but we're we're seeing you know private company stocks go on chain and potentially be traded on consumer retail stock apps. We're seeing lower, you know, lower
3:19:40
We're seeing lower, you know, lower hurdles to get into venture funds.
3:19:43
It feels like there could be a wave of sort of like retail liquidity coming into venture.
3:19:51
Uh do you think that narrative is real?
3:19:53
How early are we in that?
3:19:53
Do you think that could be a significant shift in the dynamic of early stage investing?
3:20:00
Yeah, short answer is it's real.
3:20:00
Um and Angelus is also working on something around there and we'll have something more to announce.
3:20:08
The the way to think about it is venture has never actually been connected to the public markets directly, right?
3:20:14
It's always been venture dollars get invested into companies.
3:20:18
Those companies maybe 10 years, 15 years later, maybe never, right?
3:20:22
But uh go public and that's when uh people in the public markets uh end up uh investing in those companies.
3:20:27
But what's never happened is venture or dollars going into venture funds coming from the public markets.
3:20:34
And what you're seeing is you're starting to see a lot of these different experiments uh and people trying this out.
3:20:39
Uh CO2 as an example and there are a couple of other funds as well.
3:20:43
And the accredit investor rule that you're referring to is um you can only take on uh 99 uh non-qualified purchasers in a fund.
3:20:51
Qualified purchaser effectively you have $5 million in assets and above.
3:20:55
So if you have less than that then you can only taking on 99 of them into a fund.
3:20:59
So that's what actually keeps those fund sizes pretty restricted. Got it.
3:21:02
But you can register your fund and you uh are effectively under different regulatory regime and you can take on a lot of investors at once right but that's uh takes time it's expensive and all dep also depends what SEC regime you're under right and what the uh goals are of the administration in power at that moment in time.
3:21:24
And right now the goal of the Trump administration is capital formation, the golden age, right?
3:21:28
The golden age of America.
3:21:30
And so what's happening is everything is optimized towards uh new startup formation, more capital coming in.
3:21:39
And so you're seeing a uh loosening of restrictions or a reinterpretation, if you will, of some of the SEC rules to allow for this to happen. Right?
3:21:49
It's actually not even new laws.
3:21:50
It's just most people don't realize this.
3:21:52
The look at them differently.
3:21:54
they just look at them differently.
3:21:55
It's it's interpretation, right?
3:21:57
It's um they they look at the law and they can interpret it and write their own rules based off of it.
3:22:00
So, a lot of that is changing in real time.
3:22:03
And so that's leading to uh funds like the CO2 fund and a few others. So, it's real. It's happening.
3:22:08
I think venture is undergoing a pretty significant shift.
3:22:12
It is not the same as it was 5 years ago, 10 years ago.
3:22:15
You're you have a very large number of these micro funds, emerging funds, and then you have the mega mega funds, right?
3:22:24
And these mega funds are not the venture funds of yesterday, right?
3:22:28
These are full-blown sophisticated uh financial asset allocators uh that some of them are now getting into rollups, right?
3:22:35
And that's a whole separate strategy uh that that comes from the private equity world.
3:22:40
And so we're in the midst of a massive change within uh within venture.
3:22:46
How do you think about new products and experimentation?
3:22:48
We've seen Angelist doesn't have the same luxury that Robin Hood can do, which is run some crazy experiment and in Europe and make companies.
3:22:58
You know, OpenAI was posting yesterday that they were frustrated with with uh what was going on there and that they didn't endorse it.
3:23:04
Obviously you guys have to maintain and build trust within the venture community and part of that is kind of balancing the desires and and uh of a bunch of different kind of players.
3:23:17
So how how do you think about kind of innovating because at the same time it is core to angelist like the initial platform was an innovation right and then the RUV and the and the and the rolling funds and and things like that.
3:23:33
Yeah, it's it's actually really simple for us.
3:23:35
Um there's a through line that has never changed for Angelist since the very beginning, which is the founder is at the top of the pedestal.
3:23:42
So everything we do, we always ask is this what the founder would want, right?
3:23:48
And if it's not good for the founder, it's not good for the startup, we just don't do it.
3:23:54
And so this even applies to uh innovations like the rolling fund.
3:23:57
We ultimately asked, hey, is this going to drive more capital into early stage founders?
3:24:02
And if the answer is yes, great. We're going to do it.
3:24:04
We're going to pursue it.
3:24:06
Uh if the answer is ever no or we're not quite sure, um we just won't do it.
3:24:11
Uh because founder trust is everything.
3:24:14
And ultimately, we're here to uh make sure that we increase the amount of innovation in society and that always comes from ambitious founders.
3:24:23
And so that's actually been a very easy thing for us to do.
3:24:25
It's also why we never really went into um secondary markets.
3:24:30
Uh I mean, you think Angelist with our entire portfolio and everything would be the first to get in there, but we never did because there's always this question of well uh are they like are we adding more work on their plate, right?
3:24:45
And having been a founder myself multiple times and uh also having been in that seat, the answer is it's just a distraction, right?
3:24:51
like you're busy running a company, building a company, recruiting, dealing with a thousand fires at any moment in time.
3:24:57
And so, uh, it's been it was easy for us to not fully pursue that path.
3:25:01
But any new innovation we have, we always ask that question.
3:25:05
Is it is it good for the founder or not? If not, we won't do it.
3:25:09
And that's just a through line all the way up to the uh as a board, we we view it that way as well. That's super key.
3:25:16
And when you look at uh many of the new experiments that are happening, they don't they don't pass they don't pass that test.
3:25:21
Still, it'll be interesting to see to to to to watch and and witness.
3:25:27
um it I I've been interested to see if if some of these experiments can can end up um kind of forcing innovation or change, but again that's still not that's still not the role of of someone um you know angelist shouldn't piss off every Fortune 500 CFO or every latestage company, right?
3:25:48
Like it's not just not a good not a good business practice.
3:25:50
um given given your basis, I think there's some cases where you actually want to push the Overton window, right?
3:25:56
I think that's where you're referring.
3:25:58
It's just like can you push the Overton window and make something normal.
3:26:01
Um and so with that in mind, I'm actually very I love all these experiments are actually happening.
3:26:07
In fact, right now is such an amazing time in venture and startups and starting a company having you know even Robin Hood Robin Hood experiment is amazing because we have a chance to push the overton window but where it is today um uh that that particular one is very fixed.
3:26:23
Uh I don't see a way around that. Yeah. Yeah.
3:26:26
It's uh h how are you thinking about uh the angelist kind of core business and scaling the team?
3:26:31
We were talking yesterday.
3:26:34
There's a lot of signs of wild top signals right now between these AI hiring packages and and different valuations and and the list goes, you know, uh Sohom working six jobs, right?
3:26:48
They're they're all across the board.
3:26:49
Meanwhile, Satia is scaling back on some new uh data centers.
3:26:52
He's, you know, doing uh kind of routine layoffs.
3:26:58
It feels like he's not letting at least Microsoft get too exuberant in this moment even though there's a lot of I'm curious uh what your approach has been and and will be for the next half of the year. Yeah.
3:27:12
So Angelus has been profitable for for a little while now and so a lot of the way we've all Yeah. Yeah.
3:27:23
So, we hate to cut you off.
3:27:26
Hate to cut you off, but we love profitability. Yeah, I love it. I love it.
3:27:29
We need a gong like that in the office. Definitely.
3:27:33
Um and so, you know, we've actually always approached it um approached headcount and and people in the in the in the company as do we really need this next person and how is it how are they actually going to move the company forward?
3:27:43
Um so, none of that's actually changed in how we're approaching any of the new bets that we have.
3:27:49
have. uh uh the uh the the bars actually increased now which is hey for this next new person we're bringing in are they truly uh curious to work with AI tools and the models do they really understand how their job is completely changed and
3:28:07
if not we probably shouldn't bring them in because as as you both knowledge work is completely changed forever right whether you're in sales marketing definitely coding right um and so you want people uh who are naturally curious and are naturally leaning into these new tools. And the reality is uh the uh
3:28:23
And the reality is uh the uh amount of headcount needed to continue to scale will go down over time.
3:28:29
Um uh and so that's how we've thought about it is you just bring in people are naturally tuned to this uh way of working because we're in the early innings right now.
3:28:40
It's like so early in terms of how companies are going to be formed, how teams are going to be formed.
3:28:46
Do you even have your traditional functions anymore?
3:28:47
sales, marketing, yeah, engineering, product design.
3:28:51
I don't know because yeah, people are starting to blend skills very, very fast.
3:28:55
And so we're in such early stages that you almost want to rewire your culture right now.
3:29:00
I think every company should rethink whatever culture they had and rethink however they formed their teams.
3:29:05
You may need to blow it up because what's going to happen is I'm telling you that uh I've been watching some of the newer founders are just graduating from school.
3:29:13
They operate differently.
3:29:15
They're like, you know, I recently for the first time I came to attack in 2009.
3:29:20
Uh for years I didn't feel like oh I'm kind of part of an older guard if you will.
3:29:26
In the last 12 months there was a distinct change in San Francisco.
3:29:31
I'm like these new founders just offering I'm a I'm a veteran now. Yeah veteran. I never felt that.
3:29:38
I never felt that before except for the last 12 months where they are very capable, very creative.
3:29:43
They were just born in a different era.
3:29:45
they don't have any of the hang-ups of how things used to be done about a decade ago.
3:29:49
And I I think the um I think it's very important for any company that's been around for even 5 years or seven years or 10 years to just rethink the entire company from the ground up at this point.
3:30:04
Uh otherwise they're going to get completely demolished. Totally.
3:30:05
Well, always great talking. Always fantastic.
3:30:11
We should make this uh let's schedule it quarterly.
3:30:13
Yeah, let's get the next one on the calendar ASAP.
3:30:14
Have a great rest of your day and enjoy July 4th. Yeah. Thank you. You too. Thanks. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Bye.
3:30:21
Up next, we have we have two more guests.
3:30:23
We're going long before the 4th of July.
3:30:25
We got to get an extra couple minutes in. Who we got? Jordy.
3:30:30
Uh we have added a new guest.
3:30:34
This was very last second, but hey, great. We're here. Welcome to the stream. You're live. This is Nico. Nico. Hey, what's up, guys? How are you? Break it down. Introduce shortcut.
3:30:42
Nico managed to go viral yesterday on a timeline that was in turmoil. That's insane.
3:30:50
You You did You were up against some serious.
3:30:52
I haven't I haven't uh I haven't been been able to watch the video yet.
3:30:56
So, you're going to have to bring uh break down the whole thing for us.
3:30:59
But you introduced shortcut, the first superhuman Excel agent.
3:31:01
And when I read this line, I was like, "Shots fired at co-pilot. Let's go."
3:31:06
Well, the the the when I read this line, I was like, "Oh, yeah.
3:31:10
You should just build agents on top of Excel where people already are.
3:31:13
You don't need to reinvent Excel and build agents. You can.
3:31:15
But so anyways, but in your words, what do you do? Yeah. What's up guys?
3:31:19
I'm Nico from Fundamental.
3:31:21
I'm one of the co-founders here and we just released Shortcut yesterday and and Shortcut is a bench is essentially the first superhuman Excel agent.
3:31:29
We actually benchmarked it against Gemini Copilot uh GenSpark.
3:31:30
It's really not even close.
3:31:34
What we have to do now is scale capacity.
3:31:35
It's about four times better than Gemini even in the limited stuff that we were like allowed to use for Gemini because we just know it couldn't do it.
3:31:42
Um, and yeah, we're scaling up capacity now.
3:31:44
I'm actually about to drop a million dollar check on scaling up the Infra just just to Okay, there we go. Physical check.
3:31:49
Do you Did you write it out? You can handle it. How much are you?
3:31:53
I might do that just for posterity. Yeah. Yeah. Smack the thing. Yeah.
3:31:56
You need a You need a million bucks.
3:31:57
You need a comically large check like one of those one of the hyperscalers. Yeah.
3:32:02
Go give it to AWS Andy Jasse. Here we go. But uh awesome.
3:32:10
So, so uh is this the the second, you know, talk about maybe step back fundamental is this? Yeah, sure.
3:32:15
Uh so, Fundamentals research lab, we're in Menlo Park now, but we actually shut down our lab at MIT where my co-founder was a professor about 18 months ago.
3:32:22
And the mission of the company is to build digital humans back when that was like a crazy derange thing to say.
3:32:28
But from a computational neuroscience perspective, it basically means giving AI more than just intelligence, but like fundamental understanding of life, a an ability to perceive and experience emotion.
3:32:37
um grounded interactions in the world, long-term autonomy and natural start with Excel, the the foundation of modern life.
3:32:45
Well, you know, it's it's a perfect storm that we're doing Excel. Yeah.
3:32:48
Um I cut my teeth like on Excel.
3:32:48
I get my knuckles bruised for using the mouse.
3:32:52
Um and then I found my way into a research lab.
3:32:54
And the reason it hasn't been done yet is because the people who are capable of doing it are just so out of distribution for like regular people that Excel hasn't been touched um until now. Right. Okay.
3:33:03
Uh talk to me about actually building this thing.
3:33:05
I remember like Cap IQ and Bloomberg had like VBA plugins for Excel.
3:33:10
There's some pretty crazy stuff you can do under the hood of Excel. It is very modular.
3:33:15
I don't know if that's changed with Excel going more cloudnative, but uh you know, Microsoft talks a big game about C-pilot.
3:33:21
Are you worried about getting steamrolled?
3:33:23
Is there a way that you guys work together?
3:33:26
How does that dynamic play out?
3:33:26
And how are you actually building this thing?
3:33:29
Because we've seen like Cle just does screen recordings, right?
3:33:31
And that's a different vector.
3:33:33
There's other LLMs that are just like using the uh like they'll integrate with any IDE by just using the uh the the ADA features like the accessibility features to just scrape the text out.
3:33:43
Of course, but how are you working through that?
3:33:45
So for context, the reason we're doing what we're doing now is because we actually set the state-of-the-art in OS world which is the computer use benchmark um computer use like sweet benches to software engineering.
3:33:54
Um but we wanted to go tackle it in a much deeper way as if we had full access to the machine interface. Mhm.
3:34:00
So what that means is like can you write your own code essentially to do what you want to do and to do that you actually have to own the machine interface.
3:34:08
So we couldn't build exactly on top of Excel.
3:34:09
What we actually wanted to do is recreate it entirely with feature parody.
3:34:12
And then from there the big question is how we're doing this.
3:34:17
I don't care to give away a little bit of a secret.
3:34:18
This is being done through codegen at runtime which is a totally new paradigm for codegen.
3:34:23
It does codegen is not about writing your own tools to store in your codebase right.
3:34:28
It's about like giving the AI the ability to do what it needs to do as it has to. Interesting.
3:34:32
So, it's writing all of it.
3:34:33
It's essentially writing its VBA as it needs.
3:34:35
I haven't used uh Microsoft Copilot that much, but uh I've noticed that the way Gemini is inter is uh is like surfaced in Gmail.
3:34:43
It's very clear that it's not doing codegen.
3:34:45
It's actually just taking text dropping in LLM.
3:34:49
It's a chat interface and that's it.
3:34:51
And so I can imagine that we're in we're entering the the v2 of of like sidebar companions and this feels very logical.
3:34:59
Yeah, even Gemini if you actually look into the sheets integration they have now they are starting to do a little bit of Python integration.
3:35:05
So they are doing some nump some some data frame manipulation.
3:35:07
Okay, but they're much more hesitant to get there and we were very hesitant to even call this cursor for whatever. Sure. Sure.
3:35:14
cuz like it's such a caricature, but there's a truth that's much deeper about how you do that and it's actually about owning the interface the same way cursor had to fork VS Code to own it. Yeah.
3:35:24
Um, talk about the demand.
3:35:24
I replied to a comment of yours 15 minutes ago and then a bunch of people are now replying to me saying, "Can I get an invite code?"
3:35:33
So, it seems seems like All right. All right. Um, announcement.
3:35:36
Well, we got First of all, I went viral on LinkedIn.
3:35:39
I didn't even know that was possible. Wow.
3:35:40
Um, let's give it up for LinkedIn.
3:35:42
They're always always We got about 7,000 comments now and I've only given out about 50 codes.
3:35:48
This thing is extremely token hungry.
3:35:50
Um, but I did just make code TBPN.
3:35:53
No, there'll be 10 10 uses.
3:35:56
It's probably eaten up by now. Go hunt it down.
3:35:58
But yeah, we are we are trying to get this out as fast as we can.
3:36:02
That's why I'm writing these big checks for infra so that we can scale up capacity to serve.
3:36:04
Um, the only bottleneck is GPUs. That's amazing. Incredible.
3:36:09
Well, thank you for pinging us. This is super exciting.
3:36:11
Come come back on planning to so what's the the next few months looks like is scaling shortcut or are you going to Can I refine this a little bit?
3:36:21
I want to ask uh uh cursor very ground up adoption from what I can tell it's a developer who's at a big company and they just buy it or install it, expense it, that type of thing versus going top down to, you know, I I imagine Goldman Sachs has a lot of people working in Excel.
3:36:38
You could go to Mackenzie, you could go to Goldman and say, "Hey, CTO, install this and let's do an enterprise contract."
3:36:45
How are you thinking about go to market? Yeah.
3:36:47
Um, I mean, the stupid answer is I'm doing a little bit of both and seeing what's working.
3:36:50
Um, but it's pretty obvious that the same people who adopt AI in enterprise for Excel don't have the same risk tolerance or like the appetite to try stuff at the frontier that does software engineers like for cursor. Yeah.
3:37:01
Um so and also my intention is that this bubbles up organically and that people bring it in as opposed to me go tell me telling some VP adopt this you can produce headcom at 20%.
3:37:11
Because that reality also can exist if I wanted to right like makes sense. Very awesome.
3:37:17
All right we'll come back on soon. Thank you for the code.
3:37:19
Hopefully hopefully we get a shot at it before the audience says I'll make you a special one. Yeah we appreciate it. Congrats on the launch. Crushed it. Thank you so much. We'll talk to you soon.
3:37:28
Uh, and up next we have Flo Crellllo coming back on the stream. So Han's former boss. Former boss. Former boss.
3:37:35
So we open the show with Saomself and now we're going to a former employer to get his side of the story.
3:37:44
And the question that I want to answer is that that point that growing Daniel pointed out, which is the question is can he a pathological liar that's just going to continue to lie and scam? Yes.
3:37:56
And is redemption possible? Yes.
3:37:59
Uh, is redemption possible?
3:38:02
So, let's go to Flo and get his take. How you doing?
3:38:04
Good to have you back on the show.
3:38:06
Yeah, thanks for having me.
3:38:08
No, redemption isn't possible.
3:38:10
When people show you who they are, believe them.
3:38:11
Uh, no, there's plenty of very honest people like what are the odds that someone who's been lying compulsively and being been confronted about it for three years, like two or three years.
3:38:23
And like look, it's it's a special kind of person too who can do this thing to people who trust them, right?
3:38:28
That you have a relationship with an employer, you know, and and I my understanding is that he basically has been averaging like getting fired once a month for the last three years.
3:38:38
Like it's a kind of person who can do that.
3:38:40
So he could have learned his lesson like two years, three years ago. Yes.
3:38:43
Like the first time he was called out and and and totally sure, totally.
3:38:48
I I wasn't I wasn't tuning in.
3:38:49
I did I didn't hear what he said. Yeah.
3:38:52
to to me the to me the argument of of sounds sounds like he has some situation that's bad but it's not a justification to go steal money from a bunch of Silicon Valley startups for years and years and years and years and use them as a piggy bank to solve his own problem.
3:39:07
So really quickly uh how long did he work with you? Two weeks. Two weeks.
3:39:13
And what was the result of that?
3:39:15
I mean I imagine you paid him for those two weeks of work.
3:39:16
Did you get any good results?
3:39:18
Uh I am literally out of a meeting like an hour ago.
3:39:21
Well, the engineer described his impact as negative. Negative. Okay.
3:39:25
Well, because we we had to we had to on board him. Yeah. You had to onboard him. Yeah. Yeah.
3:39:31
It's wasted our time and money.
3:39:34
Has he apologized to you? Not yet. Okay.
3:39:37
He said he would apologize to everyone else.
3:39:39
He would go on an apology tour.
3:39:41
We'll see if that actually pans out. Yeah.
3:39:42
My my big my big question is is somebody like this, you could have them working in your office as a full-time employee and they would probably still there's a good chance they would still keep doing this thing with people on LinkedIn that didn't see the whole Soha uh Soh Gate.
3:39:58
We never we never compromise on ethics.
3:40:00
Like that's just a thing I don't with. Uh he's gonna apologize.
3:40:04
Is he gonna give the money back?
3:40:06
Yeah, it's a good question.
3:40:06
I don't know because because stock is cheap.
3:40:10
Yeah, that's a higher bar.
3:40:13
If he wants to make a statement, that's what he would do 100%. Yeah, makes sense.
3:40:16
How do you prevent this in the future?
3:40:19
How does Silicon Valley prevent this in the future?
3:40:22
Obviously, the valley is built on trust.
3:40:24
This is a violation of trust.
3:40:27
There's been discussions about like maybe we need a Reddit for are we dating the same man?
3:40:31
Are we employing the same software engineer?
3:40:32
software engineer? Uh maybe we need an AI tool to you know check the GitHub commits and see that oh they're coming in at the same time every I was wondering if this could be done at the H level this employee has accepted why are they in two instances of of rippling
3:40:50
that doesn't make any sense uh yeah how how are we solving this I I don't want to over rotate on it I think a large part of what makes Silicon Valley tick is its culture of of trust uh you know there's this whole game theory around like hawks and moves, you know, and it's it it turns out there is no stable equilibrium. You're like in a constant
3:41:07
You're like in a constant state of of of shifting because if if everyone's a dove, then the the returns of being a hawk are very high.
3:41:12
And vice versa, if everyone's a hawk, then you can have this like clicks of doves that that start emerging.
3:41:18
So I I'm really careful not to tip Silicon Valley towards this attractor state of like the hawk and like a lot of industries end up in this state of like low trust and I really don't want to do that.
3:41:28
Like look, you're going to get screwed over ever so often. We had a good laugh.
3:41:31
You know, the memes were amazing.
3:41:32
Like I Yeah, I hope I hope your your viral posts at least drove a bunch of new signups and maybe maybe he paid back a little bit by some customer I mean I I I completely agree like yes the handshake deal protocol is built on trust. Do some VCs violate it?
3:41:50
Yes, every once in a while a team a term sheet falls through.
3:41:52
uh it's not the best thing that ever happens, but the alternative is so much overhead on everyone that it's probably worth taking the risk of, yeah, occasionally the handshake deal is going to fall through.
3:42:06
You're going to get screwed over every so often and it's not worth over privating on it and like looking over your shoulder your entire life.
3:42:12
So, it sounds like he is he he's announced that he's taken a new role as a founding engineer at a single startup.
3:42:18
He says he's not going to work at multiple companies.
3:42:21
It seems like the jig, even if he even if he is a pathological liar and continues to lie, like people like his his SEO is terrible now.
3:42:28
Like it will forever like be like very easy when you go to Google search for the person that you're hiring.
3:42:34
He's like, "Oh, that's a different Sohan Periq.
3:42:35
There's a lot of there's a lot of people change his name and it's going to be really complicated for him to get away with this longer."
3:42:41
My question is like if uh we were we were kind of saying like the Sohare dev shop makes much more sense here.
3:42:51
Um does that make sense to you?
3:42:54
Like if he was saying, "Hey, I've been working at all these different startups.
3:42:57
Um I'm starting a developer shop and yes, you can hire me, but I'm a contractor."
3:43:02
Uh why why are dev shops bad for startups?
3:43:06
Why would this not work for him?
3:43:10
Um, I actually think for him the real move is to start a course on how to crack coding interviews because he's really good and he's incredible.
3:43:16
He's he's actually incredible, right?
3:43:19
So, he can actually make lemonade here like he should do that and he can make a lot of money.
3:43:24
It's very highly was that in the cold email strategy was like he had a very dialed in cold email approach where he would be, you know, he'd be like say something nice and really clearly he researched the company, the product I love building.
3:43:38
love building. The funny thing is in his message he said he said I'm pissed and I it's like about what what you are you pissed you're pissed you got busted and he kind of gave himself he was saying like oh yeah like I I'm going to put you know there there's going to be a great
3:43:54
reversal here and he came on and was likeough the mainstream narrative is basically correct about me but maybe I'm sorry the the redemption of being like I'm going to prove everyone wrong by working at one company it's like you don't get you don't get you don't you don't get Yeah. Yeah. We don't give a Yeah.
3:44:08
We don't give a that's like a second the fourth place trophy.
3:44:12
You worked at one company. That's funny. Um Yeah.
3:44:14
I mean look, he's he's not sorry. He just got cut. Like is that's it. It's really simple.
3:44:19
Um and and why do dev shops not work for startups?
3:44:25
I mean there's like I'm a nerd when it comes to like the the theory of the film because of my experience at Uber and so forth.
3:44:31
There's a book that's called Managerial Dilemas that explains why dev shops don't work. Okay. It's it's fascinating. Yeah.
3:44:37
But can you unpack it a little bit more?
3:44:40
Because Uber is interesting because didn't wasn't the very first version of Uber done by a dev shop and wasn't that part of the early early Uber lore that like the codebase was written in Spanish and so everyone at Uber had like the Spanish to English dictionary there which is hilarious because I'm pretty sure Google Translate existed at the time but they still had the dictionary for some reason.
3:44:58
It's like it's like amazing lore regardless of how real it is.
3:45:00
Yeah, I think people add a little bit to it.
3:45:03
This is the first time I hear about it.
3:45:05
Uh but you know, like next time I hear about it, there's going to be a guy with like a sombrero in the office. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
3:45:10
Travis was was in Tijana pulling random devs off the street. Yeah.
3:45:16
They really really amp it up.
3:45:16
The apocryphalenness of the story just needs to grow and grow and grow.
3:45:20
It's a tall tale at this point.
3:45:21
The the reason why dev shops don't work is because there's like a complicated there's a complicated game theoretic argument which goes basically the reason why you employ people is because they know things you don't know.
3:45:31
don't know. And so there is a an information asymmetry which always makes it possible for someone to cheat because they can basically their like and and you see it with engineering all the time like ah this is so complicated
3:45:42
you thought it'd be a day but actually it's going to be a month and you have no clue you have no way to verify and this is ineffable like the reason you hire them is because there is this information symmetry gap because otherwise might as well just do it yourself. Um and so um basically it is
3:45:52
Um and so um basically it is in a way it is always possible to cheat which is why we are not around and hiring people who do cheat because there is no way you can always prevent them from cheating.
3:46:04
If he doesn't cheat by doing this he'll cheat by doing something else.
3:46:07
So there is always a way to cheat.
3:46:08
So you could say that to some extent not cheating is irrational. You can't cheat.
3:46:14
You can get away with it. He's made millions.
3:46:15
He's made so much money, right? Like you can cheat.
3:46:17
You can get away with it.
3:46:19
And so in a way you've got to solve for the equation where it's like I can't cheat.
3:46:23
I can make a lot of money. I can get away with it.
3:46:26
Nothing is ever going to happen to me, but I'm not going to do it because of X.
3:46:29
And you have to solve for X.
3:46:31
That's your job as a founder.
3:46:31
Like why would you act irrationally?
3:46:33
And the way you do that thankfully um is you we have that that that bit that you can flip in our brains as a humans.
3:46:41
who have these uh tribal pro-social tendencies uh that are like I don't want to cheat because I like these people or because I'm I'm b into the mission which is why they always say every startup is like a religion like the mission culture really matter and the camaraderie really matter as a startup and that's what you lose when you have dev shops.
3:46:56
Well, yeah, that the to to be even more specific, the dev shop gives you a scope.
3:46:59
They say, "It's gonna take me xyz time to do roughly this."
3:47:04
Or maybe they're on a retainer.
3:47:06
And then if they come back to you the next day and they say, "Well, actually, it's going to take more time and it's going to be more money."
3:47:11
Well, an employee is going to say, "Well, it's going to take more time maybe, but I'm not going to necessarily charge you astronomically more, right?
3:47:19
I'm just a salaried team member."
3:47:20
And because they have that equity compensation as well, they're bought and and and hopefully bought into the mission. It ends up working out.
3:47:27
Um, thank you for jumping on.
3:47:30
Give us the update on Lindy.
3:47:30
Uh, I know you guys move quickly.
3:47:32
It's been a couple months maybe. Uh, what's the latest? Uh, it's going well.
3:47:36
We are currently grinding.
3:47:38
Uh, to my point about dev shops, like we were at the office last night until like 10 p. m.
3:47:43
Like you don't get that from a dev shop.
3:47:44
So, we're currently grinding. Uh, we're growing fast.
3:47:46
We are making a big launch uh on August 4th.
3:47:48
You got to come back on the show then.
3:47:52
We've got some really really exciting stuff coming around.
3:47:54
I'm I I couldn't be more excited. Amazing. Incredible.
3:47:58
Uh last last question on So, uh what should he do?
3:48:01
What what should he do next?
3:48:04
He should totally start a course and he should raise around Z. Start a course. Okay. We'll see.
3:48:15
Maybe maybe he'll Yeah, that's a laugh track.
3:48:20
Yeah, we've got we've got laugh tracks around here.
3:48:23
Um but yeah, it is it is the part of why the whole thing was so controversial is you like the average new CS grad, even from elite universities, is not having the easiest time in the job market.
3:48:34
So, it's such it's such a you know, it's got to be disappointing for them.
3:48:39
But but clearly So has cracked the the entire flow, the interview code. Yeah. So does it really well. He's figured it out.
3:48:45
So, he should he should monetize that.
3:48:47
It is it is a monetizable skill. Interesting.
3:48:52
Well, thanks for hopping on. This is fantastic.
3:48:53
Good to get the other side. Thanks everyone. Enjoy the talk. Cheers. Bye. Uh very interesting.
3:48:59
Very interesting takeaway. Yeah, I love it.
3:49:01
Uh anyone anything else we need to talk to you uh before the 4th of July?
3:49:05
I hope you have a great Fourth of July everyone.
3:49:07
Uh leave us five stars on Apple Podcast and Spotify and we will see you on Monday. Wild show. Wild all over the place. It had range. A lot of fun though. Uh lot of fun.
3:49:19
Nailed the current thing.
3:49:19
Uh we will talk to you soon.
3:49:21
Have a good an amazing Independence Day. We'll see you Monday. Bye.