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[Music] You're watching TBPN.
4:35
Today is Thursday, June 12th, 2025.
4:38
We are live from the TBPN Ultra Dome.
4:41
We're back in the Ultra Dome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. And it's great.
4:48
We are both uh deathly ill today. It's been a rough week.
4:54
We're still doing the show. The show must go on. That's part of show biz. It is.
4:59
The show must always go on.
5:01
And there's no greater show in the world of technology and music than the Coachella 2027 lineup featuring Fast Takeoff scenario.
5:10
Neuro Neural, the alignment choir, DJ DJ Token Drift, Autoprompt, Jordy had uh Chad GPT generate a uh a uh hypothetical Coachella uh poster.
5:26
It was no surprise to see Gentle Singularity headlining day two. Yes.
5:32
Vonoman and the Tylings, Loi Oracle, Synth Ethics.
5:36
Which one did I really like?
5:38
The copy bar is very good.
5:41
Uh, Chain of Thought Collective.
5:41
Like some of these just sound I think a lot of people were surprised to see the the Gooners didn't make the list at all, but uh maybe that's a little white pill, right? Yeah.
5:51
Let me try and adjust this microphone.
5:53
Um, anyways, we got a great show today. Hey.
5:55
Yeah, we have a stack lineup.
5:57
Can we pull up the the run of show?
5:59
We're going to have Delian join back to back.
6:01
I think he's the first guest to ever go back to back to back.
6:05
He was on the show yesterday.
6:05
Jordy absolutely blasted him with some confetti and um he's coming back to talk to us about the Shink deal as well as I really didn't hold back.
6:15
I really didn't hold back.
6:17
I I I I tried to not shoot confetti in the face of anybody yesterday.
6:21
Uh but Delian uh really, you know, got got the uh the full effect.
6:27
But yeah, a lot of fun at YC Demo Day yesterday. Tons of great founders.
6:29
Uh major White Pill being there. That's great.
6:34
And uh and we have some posts reacting to YC Demo Day. I like that.
6:39
Jan from RAMP, he's been on the show many many times with Why did he not come on the show?
6:43
I I I know we should have we I saw his post after we left.
6:45
Uh but he had a really funny one.
6:48
Uh he said you're more likely to raise a series A as a YC company than go bankrupt as a gambling addict. Let that sink in.
6:56
Because there's this viral post that says like there's a 20% chance of gambling addicts going broke.
7:00
And everyone was memeing it like a couple days ago being like gambling addicts will take those every day.
7:05
80% chance they don't go bankrupt. It's great.
7:08
Uh but Gary Tan says 45% of YC companies get to series A and median ARR is $1 million. Uh plus trending up.
7:16
Find me another place where that is true.
7:19
In any set of potential investments in the world, YC does have higher valuation caps.
7:26
But to me, this quality justifies it. Invest demo day. I recommend it. I love it. Astonishing. Yeah. And uh yeah, it was fun.
7:35
We handed out a bunch of ramp hats. They're in hot demand. I thought we ran out.
7:38
A little crazy with the color.
7:41
Like when I think of ramp, I think of like a bright yellow, not necessarily a full neon yellow, but these hats were full neon green.
7:46
like safety runner green or yellow actually.
7:52
Uh and they were very intense, but I got a lot of text messages from people that wanted them.
7:55
So, we will probably be printing more of those fun.
7:57
We handed out some of our TBPN hats, which are now uh printed. They're here. They're finally here.
8:02
We got to figure out how to distribute them.
8:04
We don't want to be in the apparel business, but uh we're here reluctantly figure out how to get them out into the world.
8:10
And so, if you're looking for one of those RAM hats, you got to be a RAM customer for sure. You got to go to ramp. com. Time is money. Save both.
8:17
use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place.
8:20
And Eric Ramp, former YC founder. That's true. That's true.
8:25
Um, and Su Hail uh also chimed in.
8:28
He said, "So many insanely great YC companies.
8:31
This batch is easily has many 10 billion companies.
8:35
What a many That is so aggressive. I love it.
8:38
I love the optimization." People were upset.
8:43
They said mostly cursor for X.
8:43
He said, "Nah, there was a lot of agent infrastructure stuff.
8:47
There was agent for agent products." Yes. Yes. A lot of AI on AI stuff.
8:51
Uh, but that's where the money you're going to need agents to work on to help other agents, right?
8:57
Because that's Yeah, for sure. Uh, yeah.
8:59
No, I I I think there was like a very very clear I mean, Gary Gary said 90% AI.
9:04
Uh, but it was even more narrow for that than that.
9:07
It was a lot of a lot of B2B AI, a lot of narrow AI infrastructure, a lot of uh h how do you run an agent on the cloud?
9:15
How what what kind of databases are you building to enable agents?
9:20
All sorts of stuff like that.
9:22
Uh some really exciting companies though and and some really great stuff.
9:25
It was very fascinating comparing YC Demo Day where I came away like you mentioned like incredibly optimistic about these entrepreneurs who are going and building companies and they're clearly going to like like maybe they're maybe some of them are directly competitive with each other.
9:42
Some of them are directly competitive with pre previous YC companies.
9:44
I'm sure some will morph and pivot and change.
9:46
But you just have the entrepreneurial motion which is very exciting compared to so many other paths that people could take in the past.
9:54
It's like the best time to start a company. Yeah.
9:55
And ultimately it felt pretty even.
9:57
There was a lot of companies that clearly founders we and teams we talked to that came in with an idea and just executed against it.
10:03
But it felt like half of them too were just iterating through the batch which is what they should be doing. Yeah.
10:09
I mean that's where a lot of those infrastructure plays come from is like I wanted to build an app.
10:12
I needed infrastructure so I built the infrastructure.
10:16
Kind of the story of Slack.
10:17
You know they were building a a video game and they needed to communicate with each other.
10:21
So they built an internal chat tool and they were like let's just sell this uh and and that stuff can happen all the time.
10:26
Uh it it is like less visual, less exciting sometimes, but uh it can still create a ton of shareholder value and hopefully a$10 billion plus outcome.
10:32
Uh my interesting takeaway was that we did YC demo day and then we also did the teal fellowship day a few a week ago or maybe two weeks ago. Time flies.
10:42
Um, and the difference between YC Demo Day's vibe of the companies and Teal Fellowship companies were wildly different. Like wildly different.
10:52
The the Teal Fellowship companies, obviously, there's a lot less, but I don't know if we talked to a single AI agent company during Teal Fellowship Day.
11:00
It was almost all like bio regenerate organs, brain computer interfaces.
11:04
Like much more of like things that you could science projects, but that's kind of the point. Exactly. Like super super high. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
11:12
and and and the and the tenor of the conversation during the Teal Fellowship during YC demo day.
11:16
We were like, "Give us the number. What's the ARR? What are the customers?
11:20
How many GitHub stars you got?"
11:22
And we were spraying confetti everywhere.
11:23
Like if we had done that during Teal Fellowship Day, I think a lot of them would have been like, "Yeah, like we're five years out from commercialization." Yeah. Which is cool.
11:31
Like 2035 and then our revenue in year one will be a billion. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.
11:37
Uh and so still like very very exciting stuff on either side but uh more differentiation where I think in the past like like a decade ago it was like YC and YC clones all had kind of the same shape of companies.
11:51
Now we're seeing a real bifurcation between what Teal Fellowship means versus what YC means.
11:59
And obviously there's some companies that will do both, but um and ultimately I mean for a lot of the the founders and the teams yesterday YC was effectively like do college in three months focus majoring in startups venture right and and that's a good thing that's a good product that enables a lot more companies to be created. Yeah.
12:17
And the other high school drop that was a very interesting trend who was then selling soft drops out of high school and then is selling software back to his teachers. Yeah.
12:27
So yeah, it's always just it's always just cool seeing um the uh like like just how how young you can be and start a company.
12:36
Uh it was funny when you asked him like, "Okay, you asked a couple people like uh how'd you make money in high school?"
12:43
And that's a hard question because like some entrepreneurs, they were just like, "No, I was actually just heads down.
12:46
I wanted to get schooling drugs." Yeah. Or something like that.
12:50
They're just doing like random stuff, mowing lawns.
12:51
But they all had really good re really good stories about like building websites and scaling things and doing all sorts of stuff.
12:58
That one the one the one founder was like I sold a very basically was like I I I I made a website for a pastor for three grand and I was reading into that being like you made a Squarespace site and like you marked it up 100%. Yeah. Thousand% or something.
13:13
But still still it's all about the ultimate value and a good website can easily be worth a few grand. Yep.
13:21
Uh anyway, there was one interesting article that uh came up or interesting statistic that came up a couple times.
13:28
Uh Gary Tan mentioned this uh and we didn't have a time to fact check it on on air, but I wanted to get fact check it today.
13:34
So, uh this idea was uh surfaced that the that the uh uh so the Federal Reserve Bank of New York had a report called the labor market report for recent college graduates.
13:45
And in it they have 2025 annual outcomes by major.
13:51
They have a spreadsheet there.
13:52
And so the headline is that US computer engineering grads face double the unemployment rate of art history majors. Very aggressive.
14:01
And so like like the the narrative is obvious there.
14:03
It's like AI is disrupting everything.
14:05
You don't need computer science majors anymore.
14:09
You just need, you know, cursor or some AI agent product that will just go and build things for you.
14:15
So, we're we no longer are going to be employing computer scientists or computer science majors.
14:21
Um, and I wanted to know more about this.
14:24
So, I dug into it and and and it and there is some interesting stuff going on, but it's not exactly the narrative that I think people think it's telling.
14:31
It's more of a lagging indicator.
14:33
And so, uh, so the claim like the facts are literally true.
14:36
So, uh, in 2023, because this is lagging data because you can't just like graduate and be within like one week like do you have a job or not?
14:45
like that's not relevant.
14:46
Like you might go and and and hang out in in the summer and tour around a little bit like like when does unemployment really set in?
14:52
It's kind of it it it takes a minute.
14:54
And so uh so the so this data does lag.
14:57
And so we're talking about 2023.
14:59
Um but the unemployment rate for computer science majors was 6.
15:03
1% and the unemployment rate for art history, criticism and conservation was 3%.
15:08
And so yes, it is about twice our history in the data set.
15:13
Um and so the same file indicates uh computer science ranks seventh amongst 73 majors.
15:18
Art history sits in the middle of the pack.
15:20
But the New York Fed cautions that these are survey estimates drawn from one year of this survey micro data with only a few hundred art history majors graduates in the sample.
15:28
So because art history is small and they're only sampling a small section of that um the numbers are pretty are pretty small.
15:38
Like I'm pretty sure that for art history so two years earlier CS actually had a lower rate. Yes.
15:44
And so uh w with with art history uh the 3% rate they're only surveying 2,000 graduates with art history degrees.
15:56
And so you're talking about 60 job seekers like 60 people that are still saying I'm looking for a job and I don't have one yet.
16:03
And so that number if it can swing so much.
16:05
My my immediate question was could there be a lot of those art history degrees majors that just that are unemployed but aren't counting themselves as unemployed because they're not looking for a job at all? Yeah. Right.
16:18
Like don't you have to can't you can't you just So so yes. So that's a big thing.
16:23
So, um, uh, wi in in art history, a lot of art history graduates go and get other jobs or they or they don't they don't necessarily get the job of art historian out of college.
16:36
And so that takes them out of the unemployment pool because they're they're they might be, you know, be in the marketing organization or communications or they might join and and and do, you know, anything in a business.
16:50
They might become a corporate athlete, maybe they become a sales guy. Who knows?
16:53
um they're doing something.
16:53
I mean, you you meet these people all the time where it's like, "Oh, yeah, I actually studied art history."
16:57
And it gives me like this really interesting background and I have a lot to talk about.
17:00
Um but I didn't study the thing that I'm like actively doing because yeah, maybe there isn't like a track for sales or Yeah.
17:05
And ultimately, I I do think uh early stage engineering roles are being impacted.
17:11
Yeah, there's still an incredible amount of opportunity if you're if you're savvy and high agency, but um you had this big tech hiring freeze in 2022 rounds of layoffs and then yeah, I think a lot of companies just need fewer uh junior engineers.
17:30
But at the same time, we look at this, we have two CS major types that work for us and we probably wouldn't have had them a few years ago if we were doing a show like this because we were like, we're not going to build software.
17:43
Now it's a lot easier to build software. So we are. Yeah.
17:46
But I mean, at the same time, if this is real, we need to we need to look out for Tyler. So Tyler's here.
17:50
He's obviously a great software engineer, but if the future is art history, maybe he needs to get up to speed in the world of art history.
18:00
Let's put a background behind him, like a library behind him and the Museum of Modern Art.
18:04
I think today the beauty of the beauty of Tyler skill set is that he's he's incredible at at artificial intelligence and vibe coding.
18:13
I think I think with enough work today, he could become an expert in art history and potentially land an art historian job, maybe even by the time the uh they're keying him live on this.
18:26
Uh yeah, maybe even land a job.
18:26
So uh Tyler, what do you know about Tyler?
18:28
So, Tyler, uh, learn the history of art and then try to get a job in the next three hours. Yes.
18:35
Um, see see what you can put together. Okay.
18:38
Um, I I you're incredibly talented.
18:41
Um, and just sort of see see what's possible. Okay.
18:43
So, we'll check in with Tyler throughout the show.
18:46
What do you know about art history so far? What have you learned? Uh, so far not much.
18:50
I found I found a couple good facts, though.
18:52
So, so, okay, here's one. Hit me.
18:54
Um, the oldest cave paintings, you know, like in Europe, actually were not done by human beings.
19:00
They were done by Neanderthalss. Oh, okay. That's a good fact. Art predates humanity. Okay. Um, I'll keep looking. Not much else, but Okay.
19:09
I mean, it's I feel like I understand art history now. Thank you. Great stuff, Tyler. Great stuff. Great. Uh, but yeah.
19:16
So, so back to the stats here.
19:18
uh 108,000 CS bachelor degrees in 2021 to 2022 versus just 2,000 art history degrees.
19:25
And so it's this like this 50 to1 ratio.
19:26
Would you have guessed there's only 2,000 art history graduates a year in the United States?
19:32
Is that is that I don't I don't know that many people. Yeah. No. No.
19:34
You would think there are more, but realistically it's like there's only a few colleges.
19:38
People know that it's hard to get an art history job and and so I mean I remember when I got to college and I looked at like what are the highest paying majors?
19:45
Like I should major in that.
19:47
I should study the one that's valuable. I should study finance.
19:50
In 2023, it's saying only 1,700 degrees were completed in the sector. Yeah.
19:58
They get art history majors get so much attention for being a thousand people a year getting the, you know, 2,000 people a year getting the degree in a country of hundreds of millions. It is. It is.
20:08
They get so much heat, so much shade thrown at them constantly and they're just like, "We're just a few thousand people that like studying the history of art. Give us a break. Just give us a break."
20:19
I mean, of course, there's other kind of subdes. Yeah.
20:20
Anyway, um, yeah, I I mean, it it is it is odd.
20:24
I I don't think I don't think the the the AI wave is really a major factor in this data.
20:32
I think it's much more about interest rates and uh big tech companies pulling back after the uh after the the the minor recession correction that we had because that correction like some of the if you think about there's a 100,000 new CS grads.
20:49
Where are those folks going to go?
20:51
They're going to go to big tech companies.
20:52
If they all did hiring freezes, you're going to see uh unemployment rise there.
20:55
Um but that's not driven by artificial intelligence.
21:00
that's driven by a correction in the markets that's just weaving through because it takes it takes a year or two for these big tech companies to actually change their hiring plans and roll things out.
21:09
So, um, so anyway, it's an interesting narrative, but it's not I I don't think it's quite telling the story that we think it is.
21:16
AI is part of the story, but timing is key.
21:18
The spike aligns with a flood of post-pandemic hiring corrections.
21:22
There's no evidence yet of a persistent downward trend in CS employment, but just to be safe, Tyler is going to become an art history expert today.
21:31
Just uh backup plan B backup plan plan B.
21:34
Um and uh yeah, I mean, if you're if you're working on an art history project, we should get every art historian on linear.
21:40
It's a purpose-built tool for planning and building products.
21:43
They should be building taking jobs from engineers.
21:47
They should they should they may as well start adopting the best tools that engineers and product leaders use like linear. Yeah.
21:53
I mean it's the system for modern software development but it could in the future in the near future be the system for modern art history development art history research.
22:01
It could streamline issues projects product road mapaps and more linear for agents.
22:08
You can you can orchestrate agents on linear now just like deep research but you can make it more custom.
22:12
So you could have, okay, with this art history project, we need to go tackle tackle all these issues one by one. Go read this book. Go to this library. That's right.
22:22
Blow off the dust off this ancient tome.
22:27
Anyway, we have too much fun.
22:27
Um, anyways, uh, Ben was wondering, uh, if you could try your headphones again. Do I have them? Okay. Um, I will try those.
22:38
Uh, we do have some sad news.
22:38
There's been a plane crash in uh Amad Ahmedabad.
22:45
I don't know how to pronounce that in India.
22:46
But it's the first fatal accident in a 787.
22:48
This is a new Dreamliner from Boeing.
22:51
Um and there's 242 people.
22:51
The footage of this is I'm sure many people have seen it already. It's very scary.
23:00
Actually, I guess talk about Sheil Monot's um hometown. Wow. Super tragic.
23:06
But we're going to ask Delian about this in 20 minutes. Yep.
23:08
I'm interested to get his point of view and and see if he has a read on um how and and why this could have happened.
23:16
But uh overall uh yeah, devastating for I guess there was one survivor on the entire plane out of hundreds of people.
23:25
Um so just absolutely tragic.
23:28
That is such an insane stat that just one one survived.
23:33
It looked like it looked like the plane from from the video it looked like the plane just didn't have the thrust to actually like it didn't have enough power or something.
23:42
So, something very bizarre happened.
23:43
But, uh I I I don't know.
23:47
It's it does feel like the the entire like every time that there's a there's a there's a plane crash like there was that one in DC, there was that one up in Canada, now there's this like whenever there's something that bad happens, people kind of retreat to like the base rates of the stats and say like yes, this is a freak accident, but it's still overall very safe to fly.
24:08
But now we've had like three and I feel like at a certain point like the stats actually do have to adjust.
24:13
And so I'm I'm wondering if there's something more systemic going on and we should be digging into this, but yeah, very rough.
24:20
Anyway, um we Yeah, I'm excited to talk to Del about it because he'll give us more context there.
24:27
Um back to back to business uh yesterday while we were at demo day.
24:30
Uh Stripe announced that they acquired Privy.
24:34
Uh Patrick Collison said in the announcement, "Money has to reside somewhere and Privy holds the best the world's best programmable vaults alongside our other stable coin work.
24:45
We're looking forward to enabling a new generation of global internet native financial services.
24:48
Uh so we're going to have uh Henry on from Privy today to talk about uh the business and the acquisition and what they're going to be doing at Stripe.
24:58
Um, somebody uh called Blor Works says, "First Stripe acquired Bridge, then Stripe acquired Privy.
25:05
Both for supposedly 10 figs at low eight figs arr.
25:12
Guess who invested in both? Seoia and Paradigm. Let's hear it for them. Let's hear it.
25:17
Let's Let's give it up for some generational allocation."
25:18
Yeah, they got to they they got to pay the bills over there.
25:22
Guess guests who invested in Stripe and have board seats. Sequoa and Matt. both at Paradigmass.
25:31
Um, yeah, I guess Privy uh the the actual acquisition price I don't believe was announced, but I think it was a great outcome and uh I'm very excited for the team and Stripe is certainly cooking on all things crypto. They are.
25:46
Yeah, excited to talk to them.
25:48
Um, what else is in the news?
25:48
Um, we're still investigating what's going on with Meta and the Scale AI acquisition.
25:53
Um big news with that 15 billion 14 billion acquisition of scale AI by Meta uh Sharon Gafar from 49%.
26:07
It's becoming a new trend.
26:07
Bill Gurley was talking about this on uh Patrick's invest like the best podcast.
26:11
He was saying that like there was this narrative that uh oh like the only reason that we can't do M&A is because of Lena Khan. Well, Lena Khan's gone. What's going on?
26:21
It's very odd that we talked to a few people about like where has the $80 million acquisition gone and and that's kind of fallen by the wayside.
26:30
Uh these creative uh these creative deals are are are certainly happening more and more.
26:35
I thought this was interesting that Meta hired top Google DeepMind researcher Jack W.
26:38
Ray and uh Johan Schulick, ML of popular voice assistant app Sesame.
26:45
Uh I feel like Sesame just got started.
26:48
Like that's a crazy poach so early, right? A trade deal.
26:52
Something must have happened. Who knows?
26:54
Um but they plan to hire up to 50 people including a chief scientist per sources.
26:59
Um Meta Platforms has poached top engineers and uh so I mean it's going to be fascinating to watch Zuck build that out.
27:05
There was someone else who had a great post in here saying that like every time you saw that one was like every time people think Zuck has his back against the wall, he comes back.
27:14
And uh and obviously like the the initial AI push was one of these or iOS uh was it iOS 14 the uh app tracking transparency thing that was supposed to like destroy uh you know the entire ads business because you wouldn't be able to track people on iPhones anymore.
27:32
Um that was not a that that was something that he definitely got through and even though Meta went down the stock went right back up absolute execution.
27:41
But it goes back even further like the very first uh mobile switch over for like when mobile started getting popular.
27:49
The I remember having an iPad and using a third-party app to interact with Facebook because they're they didn't have an app.
27:57
They just had a website and it wouldn't really work as well. Such a wild.
28:00
And then when they launched their app, they went all in on HTML 5 instead of native iOS like Objective C.
28:06
And so the so like their their their web-based app was not performing like people wanted it to.
28:12
Um and so uh uh he but but I mean he like got through it and like obviously has become like incredibly dominant in mobile and there truly was no uh there was no one who won like oh yeah we're like the social network for mobile and like we really like you know Facebook is just on desktop like mobile truly became like the sustaining innovation.
28:34
It was not disruptive to them. Yeah. And it was interesting.
28:37
Reddit went down the path of allowing third parties to build mobile applications based on Reddit and then um ultimately decided that that they they needed to basically eliminate that activity which which caused a lot of hub. But yeah.
28:50
Uh anyway, let me tell you about Vanta.
28:53
Automate compliance, manage risk, prove trust continuously.
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Vant's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation.
29:02
Whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program, Fanta makes automating compliance and security fun. We really have fun.
29:12
We really I we were talking to the Poly Market team yesterday about uh getting some YC markets on there.
29:18
I really want the uh when will the fourth YC company be added to the S&P 500 because now they have Coinbase, Airbnb, and Door Dash. Yeah. Like three out of 500.
29:30
like they're they're going to be approaching 1% of the S&P 500 soon.
29:34
Um and and there's a number of candidates that could do it.
29:39
I mean, Stripe, I think public obviously would be a candidate.
29:42
If Gary keeps doing and and the and the broader team keep doing what they're doing, it's inevitable that, you know, they're going to get double digits.
29:51
Maybe even triple digits, maybe even all of them.
29:53
It could be possible in a Mag 70 scenario. I love the mag 70. That was great. That's great. Um yeah. Yeah.
29:58
I mean the the the number of big tech companies is growing because it used to be fang which was five companies um and now it's seven although Netflix kind of fell out of that.
30:10
Maybe Netflix comes back gets added mag eight and then and then but Mary Mer is trying to trim it down.
30:16
She was saying magnificent six or whatever she's saying six I forget.
30:18
I mean I guess it does kind of make sense like Tesla's in a little bit of a different world.
30:23
They're not like as much of an online like hyperscaler in the same sense like they're they're kind of over in the car world but still trillion dollar company tech company very very relevant and you got to give you got to give him credit uh Elon for building that business.
30:38
Uh so privy to Stripe we talked about this um uh it it feels like the Elon Musk Donald Trump thing is truly winding down is that they're back to golden retriever.
30:50
They're back to golden retrievers.
30:51
They're like, "Hey, I'm sorry."
30:54
Yeah, we we went a little bit too far.
30:56
Yeah, they talked privately Monday night. Yep.
30:58
And uh yeah, sounds like sounds like they're in a good spot.
31:04
They're calling each other friends.
31:04
Uh they're back uh they're back to being buddies, which we'd love to see.
31:08
It's possible to have a huge blow up with somebody and get back to being friends and uh you know, put put things behind.
31:16
Do you think this is actually the end or do you think this is like just a roller coaster ride that will continue forever?
31:22
I think it's definitely full employment for Teddy Schluffer at the New York Times. Yeah. Yeah.
31:25
It's a bull market for Teddy. Yeah.
31:27
I ran into him at an event in Vegas and was asking him what he's doing.
31:31
He's like he's specifically on the on the Elon Musk beat like just on Elon Musk.
31:36
Like that's like what he had to write about.
31:38
That was like his not like tech, just Elon.
31:39
Like that's the whole thing. That's beginning.
31:41
Elon deserves a fulltime New York Times.
31:44
And he was like, "Yeah, like like like you know, like this is my Super Bowl."
31:47
Like, and he was like saying like, "I think there's gonna be a blowup and when it happens, like I'm gonna write the definitive article."
31:53
And like, yeah, he's kind of pulling it off, but Elon's not giving him too much to write about because he's back in the game.
31:59
He's like, "Oh, oh, the mainstream the mainstream media is happy with this." Yeah.
32:05
I don't want to give him nothing will bring Trump and Elon together than than the mainstream media taking victory laps.
32:12
They're like, "We couldn't possibly." Um, cool.
32:13
Uh, Lewis, Jeff Lewis has a post.
32:18
Jeff's been quiet lately.
32:19
Uh, he says, "Still this: everything you need to know about how we operate at Bedrock, especially when we're quiet.
32:26
Mission, we don't build bedrock for consensus.
32:29
We build it to hold in case of collapse.
32:32
This is not a firm created to chase the next wave.
32:36
It's an institution designed to hold through structural volatility and to back entrepreneurs building the systems that will define what comes next.
32:42
Our capital is not reactive, slow, precise, and architected to align with those who operate on signal, not noise.
32:50
We serve missions that compound meaning over time, structures that don't require explanation, and people who would rather build than perform.
32:59
We're not here to participate in the field.
33:02
We are here to reshape it quietly, permanently, and with those who already understand.
33:06
Um, incredible piece of writing.
33:09
Uh, I I almost have chills.
33:13
Um, I think the the M Dash police are going to are going to come to come are going to come here, but I want to say, Jeff, uh, we we uh ran into you briefly yesterday. It was good to see you.
33:24
Um, when you're ready to bring back temp check, when you're ready to come out of your your personal quiet period, we will be here.
33:31
uh we will provide the infrastructure to reboot Tempche and uh we cannot wait.
33:35
Yeah, Tempche was so underrated.
33:38
I love the uh the like even the branding just that like Miami Vice vibe to it.
33:44
Even it was even like the pre pre-Miami movement.
33:50
There was still this like uh this like wild like art style that doesn't it was so unique.
33:56
It was so like bedrockal and Yeah.
34:00
and and Vibe check had a different Jeff would be like at the beach in the water in Hawaii, you know, giving this sort of amazing uh lecture on on something and uh you know, he wouldn't even get dunked on for it because it was so authentic. Yeah.
34:15
A lot of people if a VC was was, you know, on a vacation, you know, talk, you know, lecturing, uh they would they would be a target.
34:23
But yeah, he pulls it off. No, he pulled it off.
34:25
Uh, I wanted to tell you about this uh this parking startup I talked to today. Uh, yeah.
34:30
So, uh, here's here's the basic thesis.
34:33
Um, there's a lot of people that park illegally in Los Angeles.
34:37
You know, just temporarily in like red red zones.
34:39
Uh, there aren't enough parking attendants to enforce all of that.
34:44
So, uh, what this company does is they they send out people who are uh, kind of dressed up in like, you know, parking attendant style uniforms. Oh.
34:53
and they go up to the people who are parked illegally and say like, "Oh, like you know, you're parked illegally, like I'm going to have to write you up."
35:00
Uh, and then, uh, you know, the person, oh, no, like, is there, you know, anything do?
35:04
Well, we, you know, we do take tap to pay and you could just pay here and, uh, and then so then they they charge the person for the parking infraction directly and then, uh, the government makes money off of like the the profit that the company makes. Oh, I like that. I like that.
35:20
They're kind of like acting as like an individual like an independent organization party almost like a third party DMV in some way. Yeah.
35:26
I I I imagine they could raise a lot of money from a VC that doesn't do any due diligence.
35:31
I thought you were going to say, you know, somebody, you know, basically they see somebody parking illegally, they walk up to them wearing a tux and just say, "Hey, would you like me to, you know, I can just sit here by your car and kind of sit against it." Yeah.
35:45
And uh it'll look like, you know, you're not you haven't left your car.
35:49
all, you know, so if an a real parking attendant comes by, they'll just assume this is just a guy pulled over. Yeah.
35:55
You know, uh needed to to write an email or something.
35:57
Um so yeah, there's there's potentially a lot of opportunity there, John.
36:01
I like how you're thinking.
36:03
Uh this could be the first TBPN request for startups. Uh breaking news.
36:09
Intel and OpenAI are teaming up their first AI powered toy.
36:16
Um, uh, arrive later this year.
36:16
A little rough for all the people that wanted to put Chat GPT in a toy.
36:20
Yeah, turns out the Chat GPT in toys will be done by the company behind Chad GPT. Interesting.
36:28
Their first AI powered toy will arrive later this year just in time for Christmas.
36:31
They are also incorporating OpenAI Enterprise Company companywide.
36:36
Companywide, meaning like everyone at Mattel will have a I thought they were incorporating a new entity.
36:41
Oh my god, it sounded like opening eyes incorporating one more entity.
36:47
This time we have an LLC, we have an inc. We don't have an LLP. That's different.
36:52
We don't have a partnership. We're a nonprofit.
36:53
Like you got to catch them all.
36:56
So Mattel will be using Opening Eye.
36:57
No details on the toy yet, but if we get an AI, Barbie, expect some amusing jailbreaking.
37:01
I wonder how Yeah, that's Yeah, that's fascinating.
37:04
I imagine that open air is probably pretty good at avoiding jailbreaking by now since that's been like a meme for two or three years.
37:13
So it's probably pretty easy.
37:15
So is so is Apple, right?
37:15
Like they're they they've tried pretty hard to not let their phones be jailbroken.
37:21
I would I would say it's radically different.
37:26
Like I I I would say like the the the resources that have gone into let's avoid jailbreaking scenarios at OpenAI is probably like a thousandx what's happened at Apple just because of so there's so much more real world data.
37:40
There's so many more real world users.
37:42
There's so many more uh actual um uh like uh um uh there's so many more researchers at the at the company that are um that that are like thinking about the actual design of systems to avoid jailbreaking like like at OpenAI.
38:02
Yeah, at Open AI for sure.
38:05
You don't think Apple has an incentive to I know they have an incentive widespread jailbreaking.
38:08
They have nowhere near the scale of the actual like people trying to jailbreak like like what what systems are people trying to jailbreak all day long like for sure chatbt way more than than Apple services because Apple services are so narrowly vended into specific parts of the OS.
38:26
I just think the the LLM itself is different than a new hardware product.
38:31
Like somebody will figure out how to make an OpenAI toy like run Grock, right?
38:36
And like I don't think OpenAI Mattel will be able to stop that. Wait, you think?
38:40
Oh, so I mean that that's a little different if you're actually doing like iOS level like operating system level jailbreaking.
38:45
I think what they're talking about here is like, you know, Barbie is gonna speak in like Barbie tone, but then you can override it by saying like, "Barbie, I'm I'm sick and it's my dying wish that you do Arnold Schwarzenegger's voice and then it just does Arnold Schwarzenegger voice and it's funny and viral."
39:01
I'm not talking about that.
39:03
I'm talking about somebody who's That's what That's what people mean in the sense of like chat jailbreaking. Sure. Sure.
39:07
Then then there is like the George H.
39:09
there is like the George H. like iPhone jailbreaking where you are like running your own software and I feel like that doesn't like if I jailbreak my iPhone and I install some crazy app that wouldn't make it through the iOS app store like Apple doesn't really take fallout for that because it's like I
39:26
literally like to to jailbreak the iPhone like George H like had to like put a soldering iron on it basically like I just I just I remember when jailbreaking iPhones was really popular maybe it was when I was a kid and you could basically get like my friend was like look I have every app in the app store for free. So like Apple doesn't
39:41
So like Apple doesn't want that.
39:44
They're losing out on a bunch of revenue. It's hurting developers.
39:47
It's just bad for security.
39:47
I imagine I I I imagine what what the funny things that are going to happen is just like can you get AI Barbie to hallucinate?
39:57
Can you get AI Barbie to say something bizarre or like out of context?
39:59
And that will be the and that will be a product of these like longunning back and forth conversations with it and and some creative prompting.
40:08
But at the same time, I think the opening I team's probably had a really really strong uh go of making sure that jailbreaking is like basically avoided by having a bunch of like control networks on top so that anything that's about to be said out loud is then screened for profanity or anything that's, you know, harmful or any of the high-risk real scenarios.
40:29
But you'll probably still get funny things like, you know, act like Mario and it'll be like, wait a minute, like that's not I will say that that if Mattel makes uh Chad GPT powered dinosaurs that like roleplay dinosaurs and can play with other toys, I will probably buy 20 of them for my son.
40:49
So, I think this is going to be a hit.
40:51
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40:56
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40:59
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41:01
Don't wait until Christmas either. It's Flag Day. Flag Day is coming up. Yeah.
41:05
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41:08
They might they're they probably will sell out Q4.
41:13
They're going to sell out of software. Yeah. Buy it now.
41:15
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41:16
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41:19
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41:21
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41:28
Um, did you see this this uh clip of uh friend of the show Mark Andre uh the thing that you want from your venture firm is power and uh Brad Gersonner was quote posting it another friend of the show saying 100% power to help you land
41:43
customers to find and land key team to raise from the best sources of capital to get on podcast and CNBC what about TVN and to navigate and be heard in Washington DC the power to deliver all things founders need to increase the odds of max success. That is our job. I That is our job.
41:57
I got to say A16Z, they've got they've got the power. They got the power.
42:03
They they single-handedly like at one point forced for my last company forced a Unicorn company to sign up and use the product. It was great. It was great.
42:12
They basically were like, "Yeah, you guys are using this now."
42:15
And and they became a customer almost immediately. Yeah.
42:19
Watching uh watching this rant about uh the value of power, it just made me really hungry, you know. Yeah. Yeah.
42:23
I think I think the idea of being power hungry has gotten kind of a bad rap. Totally.
42:28
But it's like you wouldn't criticize someone for being hungry for food.
42:31
So why are you criticizing me for being hungry for power? Yeah, you need it.
42:36
Yeah, you need We need to take back power hungry.
42:38
What's the quote like when you want power as badly as you want to breathe? Something like that.
42:42
That just sounds like a Jordy quote, but I'm sure somebody said it.
42:50
But yeah, uh we we we we need to normalize being power hungry. It's fine.
42:55
The idea the idea of power makes when you want to succeed as badly as you want to breathe then you'll be successful.
43:01
Then you'll be successful. That's great.
43:04
Um well we have Delian joining in two minutes.
43:07
Um let's tell you about Adio customer relationship magic.
43:09
Adio is the AI native CRM that builds, scales and grows your company to the next level.
43:16
People want to ask how do you how do you on you know how do you find and work with sponsors?
43:21
How do you book an average of of six guests a day on your podcast? We do it on Adio. That's how we do it. Yeah, it's fantastic. We have a Absolutely.
43:30
We've done hundreds of guests so far this year.
43:32
Takes a lot to Over 400 now. Yep.
43:35
Um takes a lot to I wonder what our what is our annual run rate of guests? Guest run rate.
43:41
That's really the metric that it must be. It's not a vanity. It's over a thousand.
43:45
It's over a thousand because it's four.
43:47
It's four a day and we do 250 shows a year. Wow. Yeah.
43:51
with over a thousand guests. It's great.
43:54
It's just a lot of good conversations.
43:55
A lot of people are like, "How do you do it?" It's an absolute joy.
43:58
There's plenty of jobs who have four conversations a day. It's not that crazy.
44:02
How do people say, "How do you do it?"
44:04
I say, "How how do we how could we not do it?" Yeah.
44:06
I thought this was an interesting post by Matthew Prince, uh founder and CEO of Cloudflare.
44:10
Uh small town newspapers are shutting down due to the lack of a succession plan, not financial in issues.
44:17
Uh small town newspapers are actually doing pretty well financially.
44:21
There's actually one uh company that's rolling up a lot of smalltown newspapers for polit for like political reasons.
44:27
Uh let's give it up for private equity back. You love it. You love it. Venture backs as well.
44:30
Uh not financial issues in nearly a dozen US states. A growing problem.
44:34
And so Matthew Prince says, "Actually, this is a recipe for a really rewarding life.
44:38
If you're a recent college grad, not sure what to do.
44:43
Find a small town you could love with a local newspaper whose owners are ready to retire.
44:48
Raise the capital to buy it.
44:50
That seems like the tricky part.
44:52
If you're a new grad and you might not know how to raise capital to buy out a small town, but you can do a a mostly seller note, you know, if they're graduating college, they probably have like $100,000 of art history major debt. Yeah.
45:05
Already, like just the fact that you said like raise a seller note, like that's not something that's just like in the cannon.
45:10
Like people have read Paul Graham talking about what a safe note is.
45:14
People understand like the basics of like maybe a preede round or handshake deal.
45:19
People do not like that's just not in the general discourse in college kids who are graduating.
45:25
I I think maybe it should be and maybe maybe there needs to be a firm that does marketing around this or or a whole bunch of different options.
45:33
But um uh he says run it with the community's interests at heart.
45:39
You'll not get rich, but you'll do well.
45:42
More importantly, you'll be a hero to the community and have influence even early in your career.
45:46
You'll meet the love of your life at some event you wouldn't otherwise get invited to.
45:51
Have kids who will be proud to call you their parent and make you uh make your corner of the world meaningfully better.
45:58
Anyone who wants to seriously follow this recipe and just lacks capital, happy to talk. So, there's the answer.
46:03
If you're thinking about doing this, going and buying a local newspaper, um, call Matthew on because he's working on some of the the microp payment infrastructure. Oh, really?
46:13
That we were talking about to try to fix the the business model of the internet. Very cool.
46:18
Well, we have Delhi and Aspuhof on the show for the second time in two days. There he is. I'm surprised.
46:26
Oh, he had to he had to go remote cuz he didn't want to get blasted with a confetti cannon again.
46:29
I legitimately my heart jumped when that happened.
46:32
And I was like, I'm dying. This is the end.
46:34
This is my final moments.
46:34
I I was saying to John after I I I didn't really mean to get you that bad, but I was imagining a scenario where you had like a concealed carry and you just like did a quick draw and like caught me twice and then that was just the end.
46:45
Like I'm a Florida man at heart. You know what I mean? He's a Florida man. He's a Florida man. It was wild.
46:51
Anyway, thank you so much for stopping by yesterday. It was great.
46:55
Um let's run through uh what's going on.
46:58
By by the way, nothing says SF and YC are back. Median at YC demo day.
47:06
Really, really symbolic, you know. Yeah, definitely.
47:08
I mean, doing a good job.
47:10
City was almost dead and AI saved it or AI plus Gary Tan, you know.
47:12
I think, you know, Mayor Daniel has a lot to owe to those two. Yeah. Yeah.
47:16
It's just all it's YC presidents all the way down.
47:19
It's Sam Alman and Gary Tan. It's true. It's Yeah.
47:22
It's just YC presidents and everybody will go, you know.
47:26
Who's Michael Cyel bringing for San Francisco?
47:27
Uh yeah, yeah, let's get Michael in the in the conversation.
47:29
He he can work on converting Alcatraz or something. I don't know.
47:33
By the way, I'm surprised you could even join this.
47:37
Apparently, Google is just down.
47:37
I mean, GCP is down, but uh I you know, all of our invites are based on uh Google calendar.
47:45
So, um glad you could join. Hopefully, it was cash.
47:47
Are are are they sure we're not just under uh political attack?
47:51
It's probably partially because they're trying to stop.
47:52
They probably said, "Hey, we're trying to take TVPN off the air.
47:55
We're trying to take Delian off the air. Let's just take India. They're they're afraid. I I'm afraid.
48:03
Let's keep it Let's keep it PG for anyway.
48:07
Uh yeah, I mean uh the it's is a ve very sad story about the 787 crash.
48:13
Uh this is the Dreamliner, right?
48:13
The first new or the most recent new major plane from Boeing.
48:19
It's not as big as the 747, but it's super efficient.
48:23
They're turning over the uh the the fleets.
48:26
It's supposed to be kind of the latest and greatest.
48:28
I remember the news around it launching.
48:29
I don't even know if I've ever flown on one, but uh it was not the it was not the 737 Max story that people were risk worried about.
48:38
It's a completely different platform.
48:39
Shouldn't have the same problems.
48:39
Um but at the same time, there's this terrible crash.
48:44
There's been a lot of crashes.
48:44
Is there something bigger going on here?
48:48
Can you just give us an overall state of the union on aircraft safety?
48:50
anything you know about this crash?
48:52
What even questions should be we be asking about this when something like this happens?
48:58
Yeah, I mean uh to like set the stage, you know, I am a you private pilot.
49:00
I've gone through some level of training.
49:03
Obviously, not to the level of like, you know, commercial pilots.
49:04
Not to the level of Nathan Fielder.
49:06
Not to the level of Nathan Fielder, but like you know, you you do get to train alongside a bunch of guys that turn into commercial pilots and you see what training they go through.
49:14
And while the investigations both for the DCA crash, so the Washington DC, you know, uh, helicopter plus plane crash, uh, and then this obviously India accident obviously only just happened, both those investigations are, you know, sort of ongoing.
49:26
ongoing. But I actually go back to like the Nathan Fielder, you know, sort of, you know, latest season where um if you look at, you know, sort of crashes, including, you know, sort of these two and a bunch over the course of the last 20, 30 years, a significant component
49:39
that fed into the crashes was [ __ ] you know, sort of uh was you pilot, you know, cockpit communication issues where um you know, a co-pilot identifies an issue um speaks up to the captain, the captain basically largely dismisses it and you continues down the prior track. So there's like the DCA investigation is
49:53
So there's like the DCA investigation is not yet, you know, sort of fully released, but there was early uh audio that was uh uh early, you know, sort of transcripts that were shown that I think it was something on the order of like 45 seconds before the crash.
50:02
The co-pilot literally said, "I don't think we have the plane in sight.
50:05
We should basically be going down into the left because I'm not sure that we're, you know, uh going to be, you know, uh dodging out of the like, you know, approach path."
50:12
And the captain, it seems like, literally just completely dismissed, you know, this piece of information.
50:16
And if they followed it, they would have flown in exactly the direction that they needed to fly in order to avoid the plane.
50:20
to fly in order to avoid the plane. And so that and then if you look at you know sort of today's you know sort of India's you know sort of 787 crash um super super early this is preliminary etc but from you know so the various you know sort of exac accounts and YouTubers that I follow the like you know sort of consensus theory right now there's
50:35
basically like two theories one you have a like dual engine failure right on takeoff which is like a 1 in 10 trillion outcome the idea that somehow both fail at the exact same time like even if it's like a flock of birds it have to be a massive flock of birds that somehow hits both but the thing that you know quickly is, you know, lining up is like a leading theory is that the flaps weren't down on takeoff. So with a plane like
50:54
So with a plane like this, in order to have an additional lift basically when you're first taking off, you need to have basically flaps down.
51:00
If you basically just have the, you know, sort of flaps up and wings typical, you just aren't going to be able to generate enough lift.
51:04
And if you look at the flight profile and how it's sucked down and that it was fully loaded with the passengers and with fuel, the flight profile basically ma matches that.
51:12
If you're going down the runway at takeoff speed with flaps up, there are alarms.
51:18
alarms. There are things that like are clearly alerting you that you have missed a step in a checklist which is like I guarantee whenever they pull that either cockpit audio there's maybe some chance that somehow all the alarm systems somehow you sort of failed but like to me what's very clear is like in the takeoff checklist they did not put
51:32
you know sort of flaps down and they clearly ignored that information um you know on the uh you know takeoff I would guarantee that there's going to be some you co-pilot pilot you know miscommunication you challenge that's going to be a huge contributor to the crash and so while the Nathan Fielder like season 2 was incredibly funny some of like the best TV that I've ever seen as a pilot. I actually genuinely think
51:49
I actually genuinely think he has like a really strong perspective here where when you're training about how to communicate with, you know, somebody else in the cockpit, all they show you is like a like, you know, basically like PowerPoint slide that says make sure to speak up.
52:01
The idea that like, you know, just being reading the words make sure to speak up somehow like trains you to actually speak up live in the moment.
52:10
That'd be the idea of and I think you know Kou and you and I have talked about this like I could read a presentation that says when you're on TV don't say you know you know you know which is like the verbal tech and I could read that and there's no [ __ ] way that I would actually be able to do that correctly.
52:22
I need to go on TVPN every practice. There's no practice.
52:26
And so the whole concept behind Nathan Fielder's you know season 2 is actually make the pilots practice.
52:32
Put them in these situations that are like simulations of crashes.
52:35
force them to communicate to one another and then force them to play out an alternative scenario where you actually push back against the captain and get into that an uncomfortable place where yes, this person's more senior, yes, this person's more experienced, but you have to be willing to actually push that.
52:48
And if you never practice that and that's one of the leading causes of crashes in the United States of the past 20 to 30 years, how is that something that the FAA is just like completely ignoring?
52:57
And so I have half a mind of, you know, when I'm in DC for like VA founders fund, Hillen Valley, I literally like I think next year for Hillen Valley, I want to put Nathan Fielder and the NTSB guy as one of the primary panels and be like this is a like extremely important topic coming from the technology industry.
53:12
Somebody needs to go influence this.
53:14
So anyways, Nathan Fielder is a [ __ ] goat and you know, somebody's got to, you know, make role playing a part of pilot training.
53:18
Is there is there a metaphor for the uh for what happens in venture?
53:23
happens in venture? maybe an associate who doesn't speak up when a GP is ripping a check into a you know a company that maybe doesn't have product market fit and is trading at 500x revenue role playing role playing in the partner meetings okay so let's just take a step
53:40
back let's let's stop talking this specific investment let's just let's role play a scenario where a diff we were investing in a different company at 500x you know ARR and and you know maybe a junior partner had some concerns about the invest Let's just play that out. Sidebar, five
53:54
Sidebar, five minutes, then we'll come back to this.
53:57
You know, do you think that ever happens in Silicon Valley?
53:58
I mean, look, you know, when uh a founder at an investment committee meeting is playing League of Legends and, you know, the numbers look a little too good. I don't know.
54:05
I think maybe like there should be a little role playing there and somebody should speak up and say, "Hey, like don't we want founders that are pretty focused on what they're doing or at least good at League of Legends?
54:15
At least good at League of Legends.
54:16
Should somebody investigate the fact that he's [ __ ] bronze and [ __ ] up?"
54:20
up?" like somebody should look at that and I think with a little bit of role playing I could imagine scenarios like that that could train somebody and so unfortunately what happens is no role playing happens and then the primary sponsor of the deal is uh you know she's shifted to somebody else and the
54:33
person's quietly exited and so our solution yes it does happen I'm just referencing a hypothetical by the way just hypothetical but it speaks to the importance of training yeah training is very important junior people need to speak up and say their opinion for sure uh what about the startup angle here. I
54:48
I uh there was some company that came to one of uh one of our off sites at FF.
54:54
Um and it was basically like autopilot for planes.
55:00
He was working with the AC130, the C130.
55:02
And the idea was that uh non-deterministic probabilistic software could not be integrated into the actual control stack of planes.
55:11
And so his workaround was put an iPad there that reads the data and makes recommendations.
55:18
And I was like, that maybe is bad, but also maybe I don't trust autopilot on the plane right now anyway.
55:24
So, um, this feels like, you know, whenever there's this moment, you'll probably see different companies jumping in to try and help for, you know, mercenary or missionary reasons.
55:34
Um, is there a world where the where the private sector can actually help with airplane safety or aircraft safety or is this purely in your mind like we need just changes to training like laws? Um there definitely is.
55:48
I think a lot of what you know sort of pilots do absolutely could be subtly automated you know by software over time.
55:53
I do think it's like um obviously a significantly harder problem than just like you know you know chat GPT reading the internet and then user spewing out words like it's just like the the training data is a lot harder to acquire the like outputs obviously like you can't have any hallucination and so um but like you know in 10 15 20 years could this be like fully fully automated 100%.
56:11
I think the challenge is much more cultural where it's just like the FAA other than like the DCA crash like you know basically had a spotless you know track record for like 15 plus years and so it's like really hard to justify.
56:22
it's like really hard to justify. I this is where it's I think like some of these like next generation like you know supersonic and hypersonic planes are going to really struggle where it's just like we're sort of stuck with this like you know you know sort of tube and wing you know sort of plane design even though there's like plenty of other net new plane designs make sense but they're
56:37
just so safe and so then you're stuck in this like you know catch you like the analogy I always give is like imagine today you came to society in a world where there was no cars and you said I'm going to give everybody this like two-tonon vehicle they're going to like move 60 miles per hour while there's like pedestrians close by and by the way we're just going to kill like 70,000 Americans every single year. Just every
56:54
Just every year we're going to [ __ ] murder 70,000 Americans.
56:57
But it offers all of us a little bit convenience.
56:59
We like get to places faster. Yeah.
57:00
In a world with no cars, no [ __ ] way. Would we ever pass that?
57:03
Like that would never happen, right?
57:05
And so there is a little bit of this like, you know, societal moral question of like what is the right number of deaths in order for progress?
57:12
And right now in the world of aviation, the answer is zero. Zero deaths is allowed. Yeah.
57:15
allowed. Yeah. Uh I is is there a tinfoil hat scenario where like aviation's been very very safe and then one crash happens like the first crash and and and it looks just like a blip and we return to kind of like the averages and we say okay well even including that it's still very safe but
57:31
now there's been the clash the crash in Canada the crash in India the crash in DC like at a certain point there's so many like you have to wonder if there's something bigger going on and and if it was this safety training thing we we haven't been doing this type of training ever So like is it possible that there's something else going on? I think when
57:47
I think when these complex systems deteriorate like they can deteriorate very rapidly and it's like hard to totally diagnose like you know an individual cause but like I do think that's what you're seeing a bit.
57:56
It's like Boeing culture and like their optimization for shareholder returns is like you know killing supply chain and consistency.
58:00
You're seeing some of the like you know sort of craziness of co where we retired a bunch of pilots and now we're hiring a bunch of super junior pilots.
58:06
of super junior pilots. the fact that ATC is super overworked and like you know they're trying to like still operate off of like 1970s you know sort of software even though the world's getting you know more complex and you know sort of higher volume in traffic and so I think what you're seeing is just like a fraying at the edge of this
58:19
system and yeah I do think there's a world where like all of a sudden you see us return to like you know 1990s level plane crashes on a super regular you know sort of basis and that may be the thing that finally makes it so that the like you know FAA and others need to start to adopt you know sort of next technologies where like they can no longer just totally rely on the safety track record. I think there's something
58:36
I think there's something you have to imagine this this uh this idea this thought running through a pilot's head in a scenario where one pilot is concerned about actions that the the crew is taking collectively and then they're just basically running the the the thought process of planes are just so safe.
58:53
I've done thousands of these. It's going to be fine.
58:55
We've, you know, I've been in situations that weren't great before and it always worked out and then be and then they're just like thinking about the actual statistics and realizing that no, you're not a statistic. You're in the cockpit.
59:09
You're a person in the cockpit responsible for hundreds of people's lives and I've been invested at 200x ARR and been able to spack before it can get out.
59:19
So, so how bad is this for for Boeing?
59:22
I mean 787 total failure.
59:27
I mean I mean I don't think it's anywhere near like the 737 you sort of max issues.
59:30
I mean yeah they'll have to like go through an investigation.
59:32
The like orders on this stuff are so you know sort of you know you know done so far in advance the likelihood that it like shifts revenue.
59:39
It's like unless something catastrophic comes out of the investigation in like a year.
59:42
I actually don't think that'll have that much effect especially when you like look at the footage where it looks like it's a pilot error. for reference on public. com. The stock is down 5%. Or something like that.
59:52
Um, should we go on to the next topic? Yeah. Uh, TS up for Shink. What's going on there? Shink.
59:55
Um, never thought I'd be, you know, sort of a fish investor, but I do love my fish.
1:00:01
Um, I've been a long time, you know, sort of lover of, uh, the Tokyo fish market, going there, eating quality fish.
1:00:07
I never appreciated that a part of what makes the Tokyo fish market quality, yes, is the fish that they go catch, but it is specifically also the way the fish is prepared and basically how it's killed.
1:00:15
Traditionally, fish in like the United States and most of the world, you basically catch a fish and then you either like freeze it to death or you like let it flop and basically like, you know, um, you know, effectively drown in air.
1:00:23
The problem with both of those techniques, fish knows that it's dying, gets super stressed out, releases all these like hormones, lactic acid, etc.
1:00:29
That significantly degrades the quality of the fish.
1:00:32
In Japan, what they do is they basically like stab out the brain and pull out the brain stem.
1:00:36
So, the fish basically never knows that it's ever dying, even though, you know, you obviously are killing it.
1:00:41
And so you have a very basic like relaxed fish meat and you bleed it out very quickly.
1:00:46
That's a lot of what leads like omocasi level quality.
1:00:48
That typically is like a super manual.
1:00:49
You need like an old Japanese chef on your boat in order to do that. Super expensive.
1:00:52
do that. Super expensive. basically met this guy save from Shink that you guys will be talking to that like one comes from like a fisherman's family which is like you know incredible like founder market fit and two basically built these robots that automatically basically kill the fish in the way that the Japanese chefs do but rather than like selling
1:01:07
the robots they actually just have like a consumer fish brand that is now carried in a bunch of like you know high-end Michelin star restaurants starting to get into you know sort of retail and I think it's like one of these things where it's like I just love you you you rarely meet just such an example of like this is the company that
1:01:22
this person was like born born to build you know what I mean like you know I like you know maybe stumbled into inspace manufacturing when I was like in seventh or eighth grade but I was not born for it safe was literally like born to build this company and I think there's like a perfect parallel of like if you look at like Cargill like a 100 years ago they started off with like
1:01:38
some simple you know equipment and then steadily basically grew into a massive like processor distributor wholesaler they're like you know the largest like pig and cow um you know sort of distributor um I think there's an opportunity here to do this in fish where like there hasn't really been a like next generation tech enabled equipment provider in the fishing industry. It's super longtail. There's It's super longtail.
1:01:54
There's no like one conglomerate.
1:01:56
no like one conglomerate. I actually think that this like initial angle into like high quality fish is something that like safe actually has the ambitions to go build into this like massive conglomerate that yes is serving fish but also is the wholesaler and the distributor and they have like automated fishing boats and they have like you
1:02:11
know they're like automatic killing and the processing and like the bleeding all of that nobody's taking a look at in basically like 100 years and I'm not too worried about like other people competing because I don't think like two Stanford grads want to go get their hands dirty and deal with a bunch of fish guts you know like really I've been I've Uh, I've spent time at the facility in the Gundo. It smells like fish. It smells like fish. Smells like fish.
1:02:31
You every day you go into work and for 8 hours you just smell fish every day.
1:02:35
And every day out, you know, we just believe, you know, competition is for losers.
1:02:39
What better way to smoke out the competition than just be like, you have to smell fish for 8 hours. Yeah.
1:02:43
It's a great It's a great market.
1:02:45
You know, the market opportunity is is is massive. Uh, low competition.
1:02:50
It's a great market to be in, but you got to love the stench of fish.
1:02:52
I felt bad last time last time I went and saw Safe in the team, he gave me some fresh fish and then classic LA, I had to like drive to a couple other meetings and then I realized that like I got home and like the fish had just been sitting in my hot car for like the entire day so I couldn't eat it. But I've had it. I've had it.
1:03:11
I mean they they're they're distributing to Nou and a bunch of amazing restaurants. Amazing.
1:03:14
Well, I'm excited to talk to him.
1:03:16
Thanks so much for Delian.
1:03:17
They were so mad that you were back on the show. They took down AWS too. US town, too. Google us.
1:03:23
Maybe not even we might not even be live.
1:03:27
We might not even be live anymore.
1:03:29
We're just the three of us talking.
1:03:30
But okay, we're live apparently. But this could be Iran. It could be Russia. It could be China. Could be anybody.
1:03:37
They don't want us to India.
1:03:39
I mean, Pakistan's getting in on the news. It is crazy times. Stay safe.
1:03:44
Enjoy the rest of your trip to San Francisco.
1:03:45
We'll see you next time you're in LA. Bye everybody. See you soon. Bye.
1:03:48
Uh and next up, we're going right into Shina. We got Safe who I met.
1:03:52
He's got some big news today.
1:03:52
And yeah, Safe YC company went through YC a few years ago at this point.
1:03:58
Did he raise on a safe hard tech company NYC? Yes.
1:04:00
He was named after the safe. Yes.
1:04:03
Good nominative determinism. Crazy. Crazy. Fantastic.
1:04:07
What if he just only raises on safes? Yeah. Welcome to the stream. How you doing? Hey gentlemen. How's it going my man? Fantastic. What's going on? Good. Hang up. Cool.
1:04:15
So yeah, Delian already said your whole life story, everything the business does. He leaked the news.
1:04:22
Now he leak a few of the few few bits here and there of the tech road maps. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
1:04:25
Um well, it's so exciting to finally have you on.
1:04:29
You've just been uh honestly, you know, I feel like fairly under the radar.
1:04:34
Uh and just real G's move in silence like lasagna. That's right.
1:04:39
Um, but uh I've been able to witness uh your journey dating back to uh probably it must be like two and a half years ago at this point.
1:04:47
But watching you go from solo founder uh you know you had come out of YC working on something that was that had uh I I was immediately a believer in you and and um uh you know invested but um you know going watching the transition from solo founder you had absolutely you know not saying this in a bad way absolutely zero hype around the business at all.
1:05:13
you were like, I'm trying to build fish killing robots.
1:05:16
And this was at a time, it sounds crazy now, that the idea sounds cool, but but there was absolutely no heat on the company, but you were able to get a few kind of core believers early on.
1:05:25
Um, and now uh you know, couple years later, you're announcing uh the kind of round that uh every every founder dreams of.
1:05:34
So, why don't you break it down?
1:05:36
Um, and then there's a bunch of other kind of things we can get into around the company.
1:05:41
Yeah, first I have to say it feels like two and a half, three years ago.
1:05:43
It was only a year and a half. Wow. Wow.
1:05:44
So, well, that's five years in in venture. So, back. Yeah.
1:05:53
We're really excited to announce our series A.
1:05:54
We've raised 22 million uh co-led by Delhi and Fund and uh Logos Capital and we um are reshoring American seafood. Amazing. Um, breakdown. Uh, here we go. Wait for that.
1:06:09
They They went to the wrong They went to the wrong screen.
1:06:13
Hit it again, John, for we're having uh Sorry, Safe.
1:06:16
We're having Yeah, we're we're having massive technical difficulties today due to the internet's under attack.
1:06:22
AWS, but your robots are probably running, you know, locally hopefully.
1:06:27
Um but uh but anyways, yeah, break down kind of the the your background, history of the company, how you got to this point, uh and all that and all that good stuff. For sure.
1:06:38
Well, Jordy, as you know, I like to say I come from a seaf fairing family.
1:06:42
Uh you know, I was born in Canada, but you know, raised in the Middle East.
1:06:46
Um so was fishing with my dad off the Red Sea.
1:06:48
Have matching sedator tattoos and my granddad, all like kind of peripheral.
1:06:51
Uh no one's formerly in seafood, but like you know, it's uh I have like very big library of just fish photos of my dad. Yeah, it's a classic.
1:07:00
And then uh yeah, you know, I moved to the US um you know, when I was 18.
1:07:05
Uh and then basically, you know, a few years into college. Yeah. Solo. Yeah. Solo immigrant.
1:07:10
Um and then um yeah, basically have uh you know, the the core of Shink really comes from from that portion.
1:07:17
You know, I kind of like left seafood alone for a while.
1:07:18
And then uh one of my early mornings in grad school, there was this essay in the newspaper about this vegan activist, which is kind of ironic.
1:07:25
which is kind of ironic. um uh called if fish could scream and it was all about how because fish don't have vocal cords we give them less empathy than we do to land mammals like cows and chickens and terrestrials you know um and that kind of got me thinking I first wanted to work on some more like skits art projects to do with that but I funnel
1:07:42
that energy towards um you know what we're now working on today right so the essay was really talking about you know what Delian said that you know when you walk into most mass market retailers most of the fish you're buying are basically brought onto the deck of a boat and left to suffocate And it'll take them anywhere from a few minutes to sometimes over an hour to lose consciousness, right? And so in that
1:08:00
And so in that time they're releasing stress hormones, lactic acid, all of these things that basically rapidly decay in meat quality and the shelf life of fish.
1:08:06
And so, you know, uh I was kind of like perusing around on the Reddit Reddit and YouTube rabbit holes and I found the techniques that were basically we started with scaling up, although we're working on other things now.
1:08:16
Um which is basically like a Japanese analog to uh kosher slaughter for cows if you're familiar.
1:08:23
Basically, like D said, you basically spike the fish in the brain.
1:08:24
You cut the gills off, cut the tail.
1:08:26
Achieve all the same things that basically rather than the fish flopping around.
1:08:29
You stop the experience of stress, you remove the blood, and so the meat can last up to three times as long.
1:08:33
You taste mission star quality, you know, the fish that you have to if you want to get fish like this, it's flown over from Japan.
1:08:37
Um, and so yeah, we're basically scaling those up, you know, and our first product is called Poseidon.
1:08:42
It basically uh produces Michelin great fish at commodity costs. Incredible.
1:08:46
uh break down kind of the early history because I know you went through YC and this was at a time when when uh there there there's a bunch of great YC hard tech companies.
1:08:56
I think they had a request for startups for fish, right?
1:08:58
They didn't have a request for startups for fish killing robots, but but uh but you made it in.
1:09:03
Um and and and I just remember that it was you you you had this very kind of um you know fast takeoff where where one day uh one day it was just like you and and a few Y you know YC safe and and maybe a handful of other investors and then you really started building out the team.
1:09:18
So maybe maybe talk about that that early day kind of those early days little a little bit of corporate history.
1:09:24
I took the company full-time in, you know, uh, early 2022.
1:09:25
Um, you know, we went through YC, presented at the summer down the day, and then, uh, you know, from there, uh, basically kept our heads down.
1:09:36
Um, I started building out the kind of philosophical point of view around the business.
1:09:39
Um, you know, both in the business model and the, uh, you know, the R&D and, uh, I had two junior engineers with me and we basically didn't do anything else for like two years.
1:09:50
I was like, you know, I started with like being in the cold domain.
1:09:53
So going from like the like desert Dubai to the winter of Maine was like an insane insane life experience.
1:09:59
Um you know probably the most extremes in my bloodline anyone's seen.
1:10:01
Um and then uh you know have basically you know we we we had this inflection point really around the time that you and I met you know which is you know a few people taking early bets on us.
1:10:12
people taking early bets on us. Um and that kind of catalyzed uh you know hiring you know the core of our founding team you know which is like you know early Andreal computer vision engineers you know my co-founders at SpaceX leading the avionics team on Starship um
1:10:26
commercial fisherman robotics PhDs and you know a lot of that the core DNA there is like really you know become you know what uh we're very prideful to say is like you know a top engineering culture you know and driven of that now as we start to scale out the sales you know, a top company culture as a whole. Um, you know, we've been able to
1:10:45
Um, you know, we've been able to accomplish in the past year and a half would like I think would take, you know, companies years and years to do.
1:10:49
We're already producing robots like as fast as like, you know, once every two weeks, you know, and we're uh we're taking a little bit slower than, you know, we need to, but like, you know, we have a robot that can uh the payback time is in weeks, you know, it's not months.
1:11:04
What's it like uh what's it like trying to recruit top talent when you have to uh when you have to convince them to be smell fish for 12 hours a day?
1:11:12
You know, it's funny, you know, um we we had uh you know, one of our founding engineers, Jen, um you know, told me this great story once and she doesn't know that use all the time.
1:11:23
Uh that, you know, we went to hackathon uh you know, she was like probably like one of the first like 20 perception engineers at Andreal really early on.
1:11:30
engineers at Andreal really early on. Um and so you know she went to hackathons and Androids really early and no one want you know the time no one wanted to um really spend you know any time really at all uh listening to you know defense
1:11:46
hardware and now as you guys know it is like you know the biggest thing you know when we talk about hardware and you know so when we went to hackathon about you know probably a year ago now um the sentiment was really similar you know
1:12:01
like people were like oh fish what you know oh meat you know um and we we got thrown off by you know intern like freshman and sophomores from like waterl by water interns yeah literally um it's so it's it's funny to say because now like you know we have like this you know
1:12:20
we can be like really selective where like we're now kind of the opposite scenario of like turning down all these top engineers uh really because we just you know we want to keep the bar really high and um you know our philosophy is like hiring smart nice people. And that
1:12:31
And that sounds really trivial, but the reality is our bar for smart and nice is extremely high.
1:12:37
And you you generally have one or the other.
1:12:38
You have people who are like really really smart, but they know they're so smart that they're uh they have really high egos.
1:12:43
Um and then vice versa, you have people who are so kind as a kind of way to like make up for the fact they're not that smart.
1:12:48
And uh golden retriever mode.
1:12:49
This sounds like Pavle's uh hiring hiring criteria.
1:12:55
They have to have that dog in them and they have to be nice with it. Facts. Facts. Smart and nice.
1:12:58
Yeah, it's a little more sus.
1:13:01
Well, you can be nice with it and not be nice, right?
1:13:02
Like basically have motion.
1:13:05
That's called having motion.
1:13:06
You got to have the rhythm and the tism, right?
1:13:08
I saw I saw that on the Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah.
1:13:13
Uh talk to me about actually manufacturing robotics.
1:13:15
We've we've heard from a lot of folks that uh the supply chain is incredibly complicated.
1:13:20
Um I I mean you're not at like such an incredible scale that there's probably like geopolitical implications necessarily just yet, but uh what has that been like?
1:13:29
What who are your key suppliers?
1:13:30
Are you able to retrofit uh certain parts of machines?
1:13:33
Like how much are you building? How much are you buying?
1:13:37
What are the key suppliers in your in your world?
1:13:39
So we do some very light manufacturing in house.
1:13:42
A lot of it is uh you know using like local partners all of which are you know Elsagundo. Exactly. All put it together.
1:13:48
We do all the assembly in house.
1:13:48
You know, in terms of like tariff impact and, you know, geopolitical, you know, impacts from, you know, the current administration.
1:13:57
Um, honestly, it's been fairly net um helpful.
1:13:59
The, you know, yes, the price of steel and all that has just like gone up, but you know, for us, like, I'm not sure if you know, but um, you know, there's been a lot of like, um, deregulation and, you know, and like tariffs around seafood.
1:14:11
And so because of that, we're able to just like clean up the rest of like all the imported uh fish that are coming in from almost all countries. Interesting. Yeah.
1:14:19
Do you have an idea of what the tariff on international fish imports is roughly right now? Uh I don't.
1:14:26
Um it's like country by country, but I imagine it's like over 10% everywhere, right?
1:14:33
Close to 20 at this point.
1:14:33
It's obviously varies depending on skew and species and size, but we that amount is basically the entire margin for the importer.
1:14:41
So for them they're just kind of like and then there's also massive shipping costs I'm sure. Exactly.
1:14:45
Because it's cold chain and that's way more way more expensive than just like throw it on a, you know, a big shipping container.
1:14:51
Talk about the structure of the business today and maybe long term.
1:14:54
When when we met, you had uh incredible ambitions right away.
1:14:57
You wanted to build, you know, fleets and basically own the entire stack from, you know, catching the fish all the way through delivery to to the customer.
1:15:04
Um, it feels like, you know, your ambitions are still massive, but but you've really narrowed in on on focusing on some key areas.
1:15:13
What does the business look like today?
1:15:14
What does it look like, you know, a decade from now? Great question.
1:15:16
Um, I'm not going to go into too much detail on the former just because we're we kind of stay a little more quiet about that, but you know, we're structured as basically like a vertically integrated robotics company where we're basically like h halfway like between a robotics company and a CV wholesaler and processor.
1:15:33
processor. So the model that we have is you know Shink is a parent company basically you know uh manufactures all these machines um you know and for every Poseidon that we build um we give them to a fisherman for free and so I've actually worked as a commercial fisherman having after starting the
1:15:51
company and so the way that they actually make money is actually not for deployed fisherman yeah for deployed at the um and so the way that we make money is not actually as like like labor cost by the hour generally like it can depend But most of the time it's as a proportion of the catch. So it's a gross
1:16:06
So it's a gross profit dependent.
1:16:07
So every additional hand that you have actually ends up like taking away from the skipper's hands.
1:16:12
And so for us, you know, that's why we didn't want to add, you know, add load to the stuff.
1:16:16
We basically give them machines for free.
1:16:17
And then we actually pay them a premium uh over the commodity like dot price uh so that they're actually incentivized.
1:16:25
So there's no risk to them.
1:16:27
It's they sit on our balance sheet.
1:16:28
We basically own and maintain them. They just operate them.
1:16:29
And then we buy and sell that fish and sell it wholesale to other distributors.
1:16:33
Um, and we didn't even get into this, but I want to take a quick second.
1:16:36
This is basically a machine.
1:16:37
You put a fish in one side of it.
1:16:39
It it it pulls the fish through.
1:16:42
It uses computer vision to find the exact right point to target the fish's brain. Yep.
1:16:46
Takes it out and then it and then it moves on. That's correct, right? Yeah.
1:16:50
We also cut the the gills as well. Wow. Yeah. Which is just crazy.
1:16:54
and doing that on a ship that is at moving at sea.
1:16:57
It's not like there's one size of fish.
1:17:00
This isn't assembling iPhones.
1:17:02
Yeah, we can do multiple multiple sizes. 5 seconds of fish. It's pretty fast. Yeah, that's amazing. Um Yeah.
1:17:08
And I mean, you know, rejecting like multi-year shelf lives on the robots that, you know, again, we can like pay back in 12 weeks. So, pretty fun.
1:17:14
Multi-ear shelf life is also big because I imagine like salt water gets in these things.
1:17:18
There's like all sorts of corrosion and air and it's just like you're in the elements.
1:17:22
It's not some super clean room, right?
1:17:24
And and so that's where, you know, background on a lot of our team, you know, like when Reed is working on avionics, you know, like, you know, obviously like space and the marine are very different, but like the amount of like detail orientation you need towards like protecting it for extremely harsh environments.
1:17:38
Like a lot of that methodology carries over very quickly into seafood. Very cool.
1:17:42
Talk about uh where you guys are being distributed already, where the where the product is actually ending up.
1:17:48
I I don't know what what logos you can share, but Yeah. Yeah.
1:17:52
We're uh you name it, we're probably there in terms of metros.
1:17:55
So like New York, SF, LA, Chicago, Vegas, Miami, Austin, Denver, you know, a lot of those places.
1:18:03
We're basically in like the like highest and top top uh shelf fish for the segments.
1:18:07
We uh we sell wholesale to distributors like I mentioned for restaurants, but we also sell directly to retailers.
1:18:12
We have one retailer um uh in New York that we sell to um the only retailer that we have.
1:18:21
Um, but across all the restaurants, we have like over 40 Michelin stars.
1:18:23
Um, and we're probably moving about 40 Michelin stars. I'm hitting the size. Congratulations. That's a lot of hit. Oh yeah, there we go. This is the third gong. Love to hear it.
1:18:38
Resating through my bloodline. I remember that one. Yeah.
1:18:40
Thank you so much for coming on.
1:18:42
You have anything else, Jordy? We We do have uh Henry.
1:18:47
Yeah, I mean this is awesome. Come back on regularly.
1:18:48
Um, let's uh let's let's do a let's do Yeah, let's let's do a taste test on the stream soon. Sure. Great job, guys.
1:18:56
Uh, you guys are just getting started and it's been incredible to fall.
1:18:59
I just I love watching you win. Uh, I knew you would.
1:19:02
Uh, and I can't wait for uh, you know, it's I guess it's been a year and a half.
1:19:06
I can't wait for the next uh, decade. So, congrats to team. Congratulations. Cheers, Emman. Very kind. Appreciate it. Talk to you soon. Talk soon. Bye. Bye. Cheers.
1:19:13
Uh, we have our next guest already in the studio.
1:19:16
Really quickly, let me tell you about public. com.
1:19:17
Investing for those who take it seriously.
1:19:19
They got multiasset investing, industryleading yields, and they're trusted by millions, folks.
1:19:23
Uh, let's invite Henry into the studio from Privy.
1:19:27
We're talking about the Stripe. Congratulations. What's going on? Welcome to the show. How you doing? I'm good. How are you?
1:19:35
How How are your inboxes doing the last 24 hours?
1:19:40
A lot of lot of wealth managers. Hey, congratulations. Blowing you up. Congratulations.
1:19:44
We haven't talked in a while. I'd love to catch up. Yeah, congratulations.
1:19:48
Um, we would have wanted to have you on yesterday, but but we of course we're at demo day, but um but yeah, how how are you doing? I'm good.
1:19:56
You can see I'm dressing for the job I want. So, this is my audition. Thanks. I appreciate it. Thank you.
1:20:00
Now, uh terms of the deal were undisclosed.
1:20:05
We're not going to talk terms. Is that correct? That is correct. Okay.
1:20:06
But I'm still We're going to still hit the gong for you.
1:20:10
That's what That's what matters.
1:20:12
Even if the numbers are disclosed, we're still gone. Congratulations.
1:20:16
Uh but yeah, I mean take us through obviously we're not going to go through the deal, but I want to know more about the company and the future of uh of of of really just like the fintech stack as we move from fiaton companies to fiat plus crypto and the interaction between these two.
1:20:32
So maybe you could kick us off with a little bit of background on the company, what you built and then how that's going to integrate. Yeah, for sure.
1:20:38
So I mean to be very fair and I'll put the disclosure up front.
1:20:42
We're still in the closing period.
1:20:44
You know we we put all the asterises on the on our blog post and so on and so for the time being uh we're still very much two separate companies and and on that front I I I can't share all that much about you know any joint things but I can tell you about what we're seeing in the space and what we think is going to happen moving forward. Yeah.
1:20:59
Why don't you give a quick history of the company too because uh you're you're a couple years old. Is that correct? Is Yeah.
1:21:04
We started about three three years ago.
1:21:06
A little over three years ago. Wow. Got it. Got it.
1:21:07
and uh you immediately ran into the the one of the most meaningful crypto winners that you know maybe maybe it's not as bad as as some of the earlier ones but it felt significant at the time.
1:21:18
So yeah, quick history would be great and then and then we kind of get into the present.
1:21:21
Yeah, I think you know harsh winners temper uh hard companies.
1:21:26
So we we have been uh fighting for our lives for for a while which I think uh affects a lot of of our intensity.
1:21:32
But uh the TLDDR um I worked in crypto for a while.
1:21:36
So I guess starting with me was an applied cryptographer and ended up doing distributed systems research at a fairly low level and came out of it very excited about this sort of complimentary rail to the web.
1:21:46
The web is very good at fairing information across the world.
1:21:50
But uh the ability to move value, the ability to move assets and data uh without centralized intermediaries is super hard.
1:21:56
And so uh that was very exciting.
1:21:58
Flip side uh all of the products that I was seeing being built in crypto were broadly terrible.
1:22:02
And uh I would not use any of them.
1:22:06
And I think it had a super negative sort of cyclical effect where broadly you had two constituencies in crypto.
1:22:13
You had academics and you had scam artists.
1:22:14
And uh those were the two things that you could you could really cool research or you could try and fleece retail uh very quickly.
1:22:23
And and the thought that we had with with my co-founder Asta is if we can make it easier for anyone to build compelling products on these rails, we can kind of widen the aperture for what you can build with crypto.
1:22:34
And so we set out to build things around the sort of core crux of what ownership in crypto means, which is to say the wallet.
1:22:42
Historically, uh a wallet's a Chrome extension or, you know, a browser extension of any sort uh or a hardware device.
1:22:48
you plug it in and every time you want to take an action that is going to sort of send out a transaction to the blockchain.
1:22:54
So affect the state of uh you know the the chain as it were.
1:22:56
you know the the chain as it were. So usually this is financial or this could be uh data related asset related um when you want to buy an NFT when you want to send money um you have to make such a transaction every time you want to do that you basically get taken out of the
1:23:10
app you have a popup that's in your face it interrupts the app flow and it basically um is akin I think to like filling out all your credit card details when you get to an e-commerce site before you've filled in your cart before you've decided that you even want to engage with this. So I think our thought
1:23:23
So I think our thought was can we create a different kind of wallet that embeds directly into the product and that gives the developer building with crypto more power over their craft so they can build a really compelling experience and have the ability to communicate with the underlying rails be built in.
1:23:36
Uh and so you know that's what we do.
1:23:40
We build onboarding and embedded wallet systems.
1:23:42
We make it easy for any developer any business to leverage crypto as part of their apps.
1:23:46
We work with everything from uh neo banks who want to offer digital dollars to anyone across the world to payroll providers.
1:23:53
We have a customer toku for example that makes it very easy to pay anyone with stable coins.
1:23:56
So let's say privy has a Nigerian contractor.
1:24:00
If that Nigerian contractor wants to get paid in USDC rather than in Naira uh USDC's held its value against uh dollar obviously much better than Naira over the past few years.
1:24:09
um that contractor can receive the USDC, can hold the digital dollars um without having to have a US bank account just through privy basically creating a wallet that is backed by their email.
1:24:20
So we make it very easy for anyone to basically hold, earn, send uh digital assets in app.
1:24:26
And so this is uh I was saying neo banks, payment providers all the way to trading platforms.
1:24:31
We serve folks like Hyperlid.
1:24:33
Hyperlid is a trading platform that's done about a trillion dollars in volume over the past 18 months.
1:24:38
they do about 10 to 15 billion a day in trading volume.
1:24:41
Um Jupiter is another example and all these are platforms that are driving basically massive flows but who want to give their users uh an ability to have very sort of low-level secure powerful uh wallets that can be built into the product and we think this is going to become a much wider uh range of of the way people build when they want to build uh any product that touches value on the web.
1:25:04
Talk to me about the actual onboarding experience for uh the average user.
1:25:10
There's a lot of uh where we seem to be in a transition period where uh more and more people are interacting with crypto rails and not even really knowing that that's what they're doing.
1:25:20
It doesn't feel like oh command line bitcoin transactions anymore.
1:25:25
It feels much more like the web.
1:25:27
And so uh what is the what is the funnel that the average customer goes through?
1:25:33
When are they seeing your product and how are they interacting with it at various points in the customer journey? Yeah.
1:25:38
I mean so broadly you know you can think of us as a key orchestration provider.
1:25:42
We do key management under the hood.
1:25:44
A lot of our work is the security of basically these uh the these rails and this key management and a lot of it is around latency.
1:25:52
making sure that these wallets are so fast that as a user even though you're taking actions that require these transactions you don't notice it.
1:25:58
So our average signing time is call it somewhere between 20 and 100 milliseconds.
1:26:02
Uh because you know starting at 250 300 you start to notice it.
1:26:06
So that's a lot of what we focus on.
1:26:08
The question of how do you integrate that within your product is really up to our customers.
1:26:12
I think our core contention is uh products are not one sizefits-all and to that end the way in which you want to interact with these wallets is very different depending on where you are in your life cycle.
1:26:22
So you know you wouldn't interact with uh Candy Crush the way you would interact with your JP Morgan application likewise the wallet that we have for NeoANK that has Face ID.
1:26:33
Face ID. So you log in for example with an email or a pass key um from there while it's created under the hood you might not see it and every time you want to send money you might just need to face ID again to approve the transaction is going to be different from the interaction for example for uh somebody
1:26:49
who's doing digital asset management as part of their company where they want multiple signers and they want to look at transaction details looks a lot more to what people are used to in crypto or you know last example we serve games uh and these games obviously just don't want any pop-ups whatsoever. So the
1:27:02
So the onboarding journey is as simple as login with an email.
1:27:05
You don't need to record a pneummonic.
1:27:07
You can always export your key if you want to.
1:27:09
So you can sort of pop back out and get into the power user mode that traditional wallets give you.
1:27:15
But otherwise, whether your user is a layman or an expert, uh they can interact with these rails just the same.
1:27:21
Talk about the momentum that you guys have seen this year in particular.
1:27:22
It's been a wild year for for the industry broadly.
1:27:26
It's been great in a lot of ways.
1:27:29
Um and uh some of the companies you mentioned, Hyperliquid, Jupiter, things like that, you know, got uh have been around for a while.
1:27:36
What what kind of new momentum are you seeing across, you know, privy signups and and potentially categories that that uh that maybe wouldn't have been possible uh a few years ago? Yeah.
1:27:47
I mean, if you look at companies I I'll I'll question the premise for a second.
1:27:51
premise for a second. just if we get a graph going of like you know uh relative time to growth to volume I'm pretty sure hyperlid ranks pretty high up there in terms of companies that have gotten a trillion dollars moved in call it as a 2-year-old company likewise if you look
1:28:06
at pump or jupiter other customers of ours uh these are folks who are doing incredibly fast work in that regard but but to actually answer your question one obviously stable coins and the I would say broad foundational interest they're getting across incumbents. It used to be
1:28:21
It used to be I think like the crypto cope when AI was uh I mean it still is but like you know late 2022 crypto implodes.
1:28:28
AI is absolutely taking off.
1:28:31
Everybody is looking at their seat and being like oh man I made some terrible choices in my life.
1:28:35
And uh the cope I think was well crypto is the only part of tech that can enable new players to arise whereas AI benefits the incumbents because you need a data mode.
1:28:47
And I kind of think that stable coins changes that dynamic.
1:28:49
For the first time, there's a real advantage to adopting crypto for existing incumbents.
1:28:54
They have better capital efficiency for their treasuries.
1:28:56
They need to hold less fiat in various countries.
1:28:59
And so we're seeing that we're talking to, you know, you know, I've done this uh look in chat JBT.
1:29:03
What are the top uh 10 fints in the world?
1:29:07
And we're talking to call it seven or eight of them at this point who are looking at these things.
1:29:10
And so it's a question of we want to offer our customers the ability to buy and hold assets.
1:29:15
We want to offer uh the ability for folks to send assets cheaply and instantaneously across the world.
1:29:19
And broadly, we want to expand our operations globally.
1:29:23
So, it's companies like Airbnb, it's companies like Uber, it's all of these folks who are looking in that weren't before.
1:29:28
I would say that's broadly the big change over the last 6 months.
1:29:32
But then like the other side of this is trading.
1:29:34
Uh you see rotations and where capital forms in crypto, but there is just so much trading interest.
1:29:40
And the the thing I promise I'll shut up in a second, but the thing that uh that that we find really cool and interesting about the way we build is that by kind of serving the two extremes of the market, we think we we build a much better product.
1:29:51
Uh a weird example, but uh we have a very powerful sort of low-level policy engine.
1:29:57
You can say uh this wallet can trade up to $1,000 a day, but if these two people sign off on it, it can do a million dollars.
1:30:03
And these policies uh we built because we had uh these apps that were trying to do agentic trading.
1:30:10
They were trying to get AI agents to place trades on behalf of users.
1:30:12
And they were like, "Oh, [ __ ] If the LLM hallucinates, this is going to be very, very bad.
1:30:17
We need to limit on how much we let the LLM uh do."
1:30:19
And now that we're working with neo banks, these neo banks are saying, "We have risk policies.
1:30:24
We have, you know, ways in which we want to approve uh activity.
1:30:29
Can you give us a policy engine?"
1:30:29
And so this policy engine that was developed for one side of the market is very useful for the other.
1:30:33
And we're kind of seeing that across the board.
1:30:34
All of our customers are sort of pulling us upward.
1:30:38
in a way we're serving this really wide range actually I think creates a future proof product.
1:30:42
Um I know the the the transaction is is um still uh in the you know uh process of closing but can you talk at a high level about what drew you to wanting to work with uh the Stripe team? Yeah.
1:30:57
Yeah. Um I was in a telegram chat yesterday and somebody said uh I was just like creeping and somebody said uh there the you know there must have been that stripe charm or that Collison charm and I think it it plays I you know this
1:31:12
is a company the luck of the Irish luck of the Irish strikes again we we we we've we weren't intending to sell and I think the reality this is something an investor has said which is this is the most exciting time this industry has had in a long time. you've literally chewed
1:31:24
you've literally chewed through the worst environment uh for a startup over the past however many years. Why now?
1:31:31
And I think the reality is because we are seeing things move very quickly.
1:31:36
We want to accelerate that change and we were uh very drawn to I think that the care for craft and the huge lever that basically uh this partnership we think can bring to bear on the space.
1:31:49
Uh so that that was a lot of what was exciting to us is is broadly I think we share a lot of uh uh values for how to build great developer tooling and then I think the ability for us to accelerate our timelines and to accelerate the space more broadly in our own little way uh by just working that much harder with more resources for the teams that we serve was was the really exciting part. Very cool.
1:32:10
Well, congratulations and uh good luck with the rest of the process.
1:32:14
For you and the team and for Stripe and for what you guys can accomplish together and we'd love to have you back when when you know you can talk more about the future and and building.
1:32:25
I'm I'm really excited for this and I think it's something that everyone's thinking about is like what's the future of fintech as fiat and crypto mingle more together. Yeah. Uh it'll be fantastic. Incredibly bullish.
1:32:34
Anyway, thank you so much for hopping on. We'll talk. Congratulations. Good luck closing. Cheers.
1:32:39
We have our next guest in the studio already.
1:32:41
But first, I want to ask you, how did you sleep last night cuz I think I got you beat. I think I got you beat.
1:32:46
I think it's a clean sweep this week. I got a 91. 7 hours 39 minutes. 93% consistency. 90 tie.
1:32:55
This is the first time we've ever tied. Go to eight. com. Get a pod 5 ultra. Code TBPN. Code TBPN. 5ear warranty.
1:33:02
30 night risk free trial free on the eight podcast. That was amazing.
1:33:07
my last uh waking thought last night. It's good to be back. It's amazing.
1:33:10
Uh anyway, welcome to the stream, Chris. Uh guys, how you doing? What's going on?
1:33:14
Uh not too much, obviously. Uh yeah, right. Yeah, right. Not too much.
1:33:19
Everything's a flat circle. Yes.
1:33:24
I can't even bl I mean, it seems like since we started the stream, the whole internet went down.
1:33:30
So, I'm just happy to be here with you.
1:33:32
Oh, he's going to be affected particularly because every time Chris posts, he posts a link to a Google doc, Google's down.
1:33:37
You're cooked even though X is up.
1:33:39
This is this is the most content strategy insane thing about you is that you can you can break through the link ban somehow.
1:33:47
It's just the ideas are so powerful. I love it.
1:33:49
You know, nobody told me there was a link ban. Built different. Truly built different. Built different.
1:33:57
I had a post I had a post once that I was like uh like you know I I post links and they still do numbers google.
1:34:04
still do numbers google.com and it just bomb John and I thought it was hilarious going to go you got to be built different to post links you yeah you have been built different uh we've loved all the Google docs that you've dropped
1:34:14
maybe take us through the first one the end of software what was the thesis and then maybe we could reflect on some of that and how it's played out sure uh so admittedly kind of an incendiary title uh especially especially on Twitter uh to to this audience. But I uh the the
1:34:30
But I uh the the crux of the thesis was LLMs are were and are only getting better at producing code.
1:34:40
Uh and generating code has largely been uh a translation task assigned to humans.
1:34:48
And humans have been incredibly proficient but expensive translators in that regard.
1:34:54
And now that we have free translation from natural language to computer language, uh that should just completely change the economics and the production of software.
1:35:05
Uh I think I saw something where CS grads are having a harder have a hard having a harder time to find jobs in art majors.
1:35:18
Yeah, we have our CS intern today studying art history for the next two hours to try to get us to You can see.
1:35:25
Do you have do you have a do you have a fun fact for us? I got a fun fact. Okay. Um Okay.
1:35:28
So, did you know that uh Greek statues were they were originally painted? They originally painted.
1:35:34
They weren't just white marble. Interesting. Okay.
1:35:35
I think your your your job odds just went way up.
1:35:37
Anyways, back back to the interview with Chris.
1:35:41
Anyway, sorry to interrupt. Not at all.
1:35:45
Uh yeah, but uh interesting fact about that.
1:35:47
There's only 2,000 art history grads and there's a 100,000 CS grads.
1:35:49
So there is a little bit more sensitivity, but I think even though the the the the facts of that stat might be like a little bit early to say, like the trend is clear and we all see it coming.
1:36:01
And so we're interested in like the impact of that.
1:36:04
In some ways, it's like the the death of the software engineer job application.
1:36:08
Like the job application now is like produce software, like produce a piece of software.
1:36:12
produce a piece of software. the last the last engineer that we hired made us a piece of software that was good almost basically good enough for us to publish it immediately same day um same day and so like and at least the job application has been disrupted I mean I think it's this sort of uh inconvenient truth that a lot of us are incentivized not to want to accept because it really challenges
1:36:38
uh a world view that most of our existence is constructed on top of um but I think the people who like rush head first into it and try to understand okay well how does this change the future what's going to be different um
1:36:55
you know everybody else can be stuck clinging to uh the last vestigages of something that ultimately evaporates um I mean but what's really exciting is is uh I mean like imagine a world where where steel is free. Like what does the world look like if
1:37:14
Like what does the world look like if steel is free?
1:37:16
Probably a lot more steel.
1:37:19
It's like the the world looks completely different.
1:37:22
It looks completely different.
1:37:24
We can build so much more incredible things.
1:37:25
The frontier of innovation pushes out because we are pushing it out.
1:37:30
Uh but we're no longer limited by the cost of something the to produce traditionally. Be great.
1:37:38
Um talk to me about the the dynamic of as as code becomes cheaper and cheaper and eventually free to instantiate.
1:37:48
Uh there's there's two theories.
1:37:50
One is like we are in the age of the idea guy, the the person that can come up with an interesting thesis or contrarian insight uh can instantly go instantiate it without a team of engineers.
1:38:02
classic example of like the business guy who has the idea and just needs a team of software engineers to build it and can't do it.
1:38:08
build it and can't do it. The other side is something I saw Pavl Asperuv posting about which is that all those guys are going to be competing against the people with the software engineering mindset and yes the software engineers they won't be writing code anymore but they
1:38:23
might be the they might be the future idea guys they might be able to think in systems and and and come up with interesting ideas and even though they aren't doing the instantiation themselves they are able to have an even bigger impact because they are the beneficiaries of this leverage. So is
1:38:38
So is there one side of the argument that you fall on?
1:38:42
How are you thinking about that?
1:38:44
I mean I think creativity and agency are going to be the scarce resource.
1:38:49
Um because execution is just commoditized at this point.
1:38:53
Uh I think you know if if we're going back to like word cell and shape rotator debate um for better force I think word cells won right. Bold. It's possible. Very possible. Brutal truth.
1:39:11
Brutal truth for shape rotators.
1:39:13
But word cells just kind of came out on top because there's this Rosetta Stone that instantly translates words into shapes. Yes.
1:39:20
Um the prompt can be rotate the shape. Exactly. Good writing the prompt. You're good.
1:39:27
Just put put the fries in the bag. Yeah. I mean, no.
1:39:32
no. Well, the the the the wild I think moment for each of us is like we started going to chat GBT for tasks and you're just like count the number of objects like this in this image and it just writes like four minutes of like it it
1:39:45
works for four minutes writing code doing work that would take you know at least a few hours to do as like a as a well-trained software engineer just to do a task that that in many ways you could just look at you could just look at it and count it. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yes.
1:40:04
Well, so here's an interesting if you guys want to talk about something that please.
1:40:08
It's probably my next essay. Okay. There we go. So, hot off the press. Hot off the press.
1:40:12
Um, I think there's a frame that really clearly delineates what's going to be like eroded by AI and what will never be eroded by AI.
1:40:23
And uh, for example, like we're never going to watch robots play sports. Mhm. right?
1:40:29
Like that's just like never going to happen.
1:40:31
We don't watch we don't watch robots play chess and and robots have dominated in chess and yet chess.
1:40:37
com has done well as a business.
1:40:39
Magnus Carlson has done well as an individual chess player.
1:40:41
Hikaroo has a huge chess following online and you would think if you just wanted to watch the best chess possible we played you'd be watching Stockfish and no one does. We don't. We don't.
1:40:53
Not only that, but like the Olympics, we're so Okay, so so here's the frame.
1:40:58
Uh when it comes to utility, we are misanthropists.
1:41:02
We actually kind of hate other humans.
1:41:05
When you're in an Uber and they like start talking to you, uh you wish you were in a Whimo. You're like, "What? I don't need this."
1:41:13
When when somebody when you're at a coffee shop and they spin the iPad around asking for a tip, you're just like, I I'm just I want to buy this bottle of water.
1:41:23
I I want to walk away with my coffee. Why are you like this?
1:41:26
This is like a miniature ransom.
1:41:28
And and you're just you're you're frustrated because you know exactly what it is that we want to do and the human is preventing that from happening. Mhm.
1:41:37
And so, uh, I don't think any of us walk into an elevator and think to ourselves, man, I wish there was a person here operating it. Mhm. Right. That's gone. It's totally gone. We don't care.
1:41:48
We're actually like very happy with humans being removed from that loop.
1:41:53
And so, as as long as the thing is utilitarian and there's a drive towards efficiency, we actually kind of hate humans and we want them gone.
1:42:06
Now on the other side, if if we are if we're allocating a leisure hour, not a labor hour, if we're not trying to be productive, but we are trying to be consumptive, we are narcissists. We love other humans.
1:42:22
We love other humans so much that we would refuse to watch anything other than another human do that thing.
1:42:29
So, think about like um you know, fine dining, right?
1:42:31
know, fine dining, right? Omacaz you you go to a sushi restaurant you need that person there that's describing cutting you want to see how delicate the craft is part of the the craft and the and the social element to it is part of the product and it's part of a story it's a
1:42:52
story you're paying for that experience you want that human experience you want to understand that this is something that they've dedicated their lives to so on one hand finding you you need humans you you you need the story you want to understand where it came from. Like, and
1:43:04
Like, and then on the other hand, we order food and we tell the driver to leave it at the door so we don't have to interact with them. Mhm.
1:43:11
So, like we we we go through life with these two spheres.
1:43:14
Uh when we know we want to do something and we really hate other humans, like you know, when you call into a customer service line and somebody somebody like incompetent is on the other side, you just you're just reminded of the frustration of why you called in in the first place.
1:43:32
And then on the other hand, you know, let's look at uh modern art for example.
1:43:38
I think like the the trope in modern art is like it's not that hard to make.
1:43:40
Uh you know where the joke is like my kid could do that. Yeah.
1:43:46
Well, like your kid didn't and also no one cares. Yep.
1:43:48
Uh the the thing that we prize is the constraints, the creativity, the mythos of the of the artist that went into creating that.
1:44:01
the story if Daniel Arsham goes to a rock wall with an axe and like hits, you know, hits the wall and it chips a piece of rock off, like that rock would would have like, you know, an immediate 10,000x premium on it and like somebody would buy it because it exactly.
1:44:20
So, so I if if what you do Mhm.
1:44:23
basically is is gets in the way of people getting exactly what they want, your job's gone. Mhm. It's going to go away.
1:44:33
But if if what you do is part of storytelling or human existence or entertainment, uh it's it's moed. It's it's a huge mode.
1:44:45
I mean, one of the most interesting things in entertainment, I would say, over the last few decades, was the invention of reality television.
1:44:56
When we realized we would rather watch two people that we don't know fight than anything else, it's incredible.
1:45:07
It's it's often incredible content.
1:45:09
It is guilty pleasure for for many people.
1:45:11
On that note, I'm curious um on uh since we're streaming on X, are bots on X a feature or a bug?
1:45:24
Because they it see they're they're as far as I'm concerned, they've been designated a feature because they sort of went away for a little bit and now it seems like they're back and and and stronger than ever.
1:45:33
I think I think Twitter probably has the same stance towards bots that uh Louis Vuitton has towards counterfeits.
1:45:43
where it's like this exists because there's value in the product.
1:45:51
Replicating trying to imitate the authenticity of the engagement means that there's real value in the product.
1:45:58
The more that it exists and proliferates, the more it dilutes the core value of the thing.
1:46:01
But the fact that it exists in and of itself is a testament to just how valuable the product is.
1:46:08
Otherwise, people wouldn't try to imitate it.
1:46:13
That's a good framework on this concept of the future of jobs.
1:46:15
Uh Sam Alman put out a fantastic blog post and talked about how if you went back hundreds of years and showed uh people what we do all day.
1:46:29
They would say those are ridiculous fake jobs. You're that's not real.
1:46:33
That's not hunting or farming.
1:46:35
That's sitting in front of a computer just messing around talking to people.
1:46:39
um and yet we yet yet we get a lot of value out of them.
1:46:41
Uh when we think about the future of work and jobs, do you think that we are adaptable enough as a society to create full employment with that new paradigm?
1:46:51
Can we have 30 million omocas chefs and 30 million athletes and 30 million reality TV stars such that people by and large have meaningful work even at some sort of scale or or do you think this is some there's some other way that this plays out? I think yes.
1:47:14
Like we will we're such a selfish race or or or species that we want to and the way the economics will work is is uh the jobs will basically ex job availability will expand to fill the leisure bucket that it sits inside of.
1:47:34
So we have more leisure hours today than any any era ever in the history of time because we're actually the most productive, right?
1:47:42
Like if you if you want to go back to like the stone age, uh uh there's this really tight correlation actually between productivity boosts and the invention of leisure activities. Mhm.
1:47:54
So like tools get made all of a sudden we have free time.
1:48:00
We didn't have free time before because every hour was meant was spent like surviving.
1:48:04
What do we do with free time? We invent music. We invent bone flutes.
1:48:09
Actually the first board games were invented concurrent with irrigation.
1:48:16
So all of a sudden you have this huge productivity boost and then you have all this free time.
1:48:21
What do you do with the free time?
1:48:22
Well, we we invent things to fill it.
1:48:24
Modern sports were invented with the industrial revolution.
1:48:28
All of the oldest soccer teams, football teams were actually factory workers from the same factory competing against each other. M funny.
1:48:38
And so we have these like huge booness to productivity and then on the other side of it, we have uh job creation to fill that leisure expansion.
1:48:52
So yeah, we're going to have more athletes than ever.
1:48:55
This is hilarious because it's actually incredibly bullish for art history majors like because because I'm thinking about it like like so Ken Burns is about to drop a a new documentary about the American Revolution.
1:49:07
Uh, and I am so excited to watch it.
1:49:11
And I know I could go to ChatBT and say, "Build me a deep research report on the American Revolution."
1:49:19
But I want to hear it through the Ken Burns lens.
1:49:20
And I want to hear his voice narrated.
1:49:23
And I want to hear him express his unique viewpoint and the connections that he makes, even if they're not the best.
1:49:30
if they're not the best. even if I could get even if I could get more factualness or more truth or more more detailed insights from from Chachi PT I want the Ken Burns experience and so yeah I don't I don't know there's something interesting about that where like I mean
1:49:46
you know this is we have a friend David Senro who runs Founders Podcast and the way he he he reads biographies about great history's greatest entrepreneurs and retells the stories in a way that's as compelling as the original material and as compelling as the real life and you're getting it through the experience of David. And I just don't think that's
1:50:02
And I just don't think that's going anywhere.
1:50:04
Uh even though even though it is it is in some ways like the first thing that could be oneshot by AI with with with generative voice and and deep research products, but I think it'll be sticking around like you like you we're we're we're so narcissistic.
1:50:19
We love stories about each other. Yeah.
1:50:22
And we love storytellers and we love telling stories. Yeah.
1:50:24
Uh, and we hate inauthent inauthenticity when it comes to that.
1:50:31
Um, I mean like the the ESPN ate the oo like is is a joke, but it's like we have more sports than ever. Yeah.
1:50:42
Because we have more leisure time than ever. Yeah. We care so much.
1:50:43
You know, I I I I'll watch competitive darts.
1:50:47
We watch competitive darts a hundred.
1:50:50
We didn't have time to watch.
1:50:52
got really into bull riding recently and all the narratives there.
1:50:55
JB Many, the the greatest bull rider of all time.
1:50:57
I know the whole history. I love it. Yeah.
1:51:02
Getting into these obscure obscure sports is uh yeah, maybe that's the future.
1:51:06
I just get just get just spend all my time watching bull riding.
1:51:11
That's that's post scarcity for you.
1:51:13
Switching gears a little bit.
1:51:13
Uh, I mean I I wish we had a full hour to talk because there's so many different directions we could go, but um I wanted to see get your reaction to WWDC this year, Apple's news around how they're going to be working with developers.
1:51:28
I mean, there's there's a ton to dig into.
1:51:31
What what stood out to you? Sure.
1:51:31
Uh, I know that everybody has like lost their mind about Liquid Glass and the new UI.
1:51:40
Um, I think buried in a lot of the press around WWDC is actually Apple's stance towards LLMs and AI.
1:51:48
Uh, so there's a machine learning team inside of Apple.
1:51:54
Um and they are uh really they're starting with this library called MLX which is um uh allows uh inference on device for Apple iPhones and laptops for for M m silicon or or Apple silicon.
1:52:15
And what's what's really interesting about that is as a developer right now, uh when you when you think about creating an application that has enduser inference embedded inside of it, you also kind of have to do the mental math of how much it's going to cost you because it's all metered.
1:52:37
It's like, okay, well, yeah, I'm gonna, you know, drop this endpoint into OpenAI or anthropic.
1:52:40
You can make a viral app and then blow through your entire credit card limit. Yeah.
1:52:44
And that's like we've had bunch of founders on the on on the show that have like accidentally done that.
1:52:50
So, and you think about our early mobile days, like we're seeing an explosion of AI apps right now, but but that's been gated by developers thinking in their heads, well, if I make something amazing and free, I could actually just end up going into debt over it.
1:53:06
That that's not fun, right?
1:53:08
And and in the early venture capitalists will save us in those situations.
1:53:12
Thankfully, they will come back if you have plenty of VCA checks on a handshake.
1:53:18
No, but still there's just so many part dynamic dynamic.
1:53:23
Part of the beauty of of it being easier than ever to create software is there's a bunch of software that can and should exist that historically shouldn't have existed because it was expensive for development cost reasons.
1:53:33
Now we we've been through this era of expensive inference. Yeah. Yes.
1:53:38
And so it's it's it's that point highlights the entire dynamic or like you know imagine if game developers had to pay per pixel that was rendered by their the people who play their games.
1:53:52
It would be insane like like there would be no games made. Yeah.
1:53:54
And so what's so exciting is that it feels like we're starting to shift into better uh you know Apple's Apple's really in my mind uh in a perfect position to put the tools in the hands of developers and enable ondevice inference which really means free inference. Yeah.
1:54:15
So, we're so if we were in this era where game developers had to pay for for the pixels that were rendered on on end user devices, we're moving to like wow like people can render the graphics for free on their device and that just opens the floodgates for the things that can happen.
1:54:35
I think haters will say, well, like, you know, models are bad.
1:54:38
You know, you know, the the the battery life is terrible. Your iPhone heats up.
1:54:44
You know, the the models are small. Yeah. Today. Yeah.
1:54:49
But tomorrow, two, a year from now, two years from now, you know, all of a sudden, 80 90% of the queries that you would run through a cloud hosted model is just doable on your phone or on your laptop.
1:55:02
Y and for free and natively it can be offline whatever you want and private.
1:55:07
Uh and so that's a that's such an exciting future and from from my takeaway from WWC that was that was the most exciting one.
1:55:15
Um and I feel like yeah and you combine that with again they're not really getting any credit for partnering with Anthropic on Xcode which will enable some of this activity as well. Yeah. Yeah.
1:55:25
Yeah, I mean we need we need AI our AI Flappy Bird moment.
1:55:30
Like Flappy Bird, I remember was built by like a single developer and it's that perfect example of like leveraging all the hardware to just build something that went mega viral.
1:55:40
We've seen a few of these moments for images.
1:55:42
There was that uh magic avatar app that would make you look like Superman.
1:55:47
That kind of went viral, but of course it had high inference cost.
1:55:50
When you drop that inference cost to zero, you put on the edge.
1:55:52
I think we will have our our our our flappy bird moment for LLMbased interactions on the iPhone and I I'm really excited for that.
1:56:01
It's completely unpredictable what that will be, but I imagine it'll be very fun and everyone will be playing with it when it happens.
1:56:06
Uh I I I want to stay on the on the topic of Apple and and just this idea of taste.
1:56:10
A lot of people have been writing about taste and coming back to taste as something that's uh potentially a permanent differentiator in a post AI world.
1:56:19
Uh there's an idea of like agency plus taste uh being more valuable than skills.
1:56:26
We talked to Scott Bellski about that on Tuesday.
1:56:28
Uh how how do you think uh is taste a moat?
1:56:32
Is it something that can be learned? What is the value?
1:56:34
Is it still alive and well at at Apple?
1:56:36
There was a lot of criticism about liquid glass and yet when we looked at it looked pretty cool. I don't know.
1:56:43
I thought it looked nice.
1:56:44
Um I think tasted alive and well.
1:56:48
Maybe I'll describe Apple if you if you'll permit me to to to describe another one of my frameworks uh that we've developed here at Pace is is top down and bottom up companies.
1:57:00
So top down companies started by visionary charismatic founders um Apple, Tesla, SpaceX, Amazon, Epic Games.
1:57:10
And what's notable about these visionary founders is they're largely unattached to how they execute and what the products actually end up looking like.
1:57:20
And so what what what happens is top these top down companies uh ship multiple flagship products over their life cycle.
1:57:27
So you know uh we're we're all on you know Apple laptops and have Apple iPhones and AirPods.
1:57:34
Um you know Tesla's obviously created everything from cars to power walls and solar panels.
1:57:40
Uh SpaceX not only makes rockets but also satellite internet. Mhm.
1:57:44
Um, awesome, amazing, amazing constructs and and what's interesting is the market only sees the products and so they don't understand that the core innovation engine is the uh company itself because these top down companies hire innovators and and build up this core core ability to summit the next hill and launch the next product.
1:58:12
Uh bottomup companies conversely are started by tinkerer founders. They're hackers.
1:58:17
They try to uh pick locks basically and they they they combined with perfect timing capture lightning in a bottle.
1:58:27
And what's what's interesting about bottom companies is that they they only ever ship a single flagship product.
1:58:34
This is Google, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Airbnb.
1:58:37
uh most actually venture uh Twitter the where where we are um and and and they are actually fundamentally incapable of shipping a second flagship product.
1:58:50
It's because the the product market fit for that is so violent that every person that gets hired into that company is an optimizer.
1:59:04
It's it's so so imagine like a you're creating a jawbreaker around this core product market fit.
1:59:09
Every single person is hired as this optimizer. There are no innovators.
1:59:13
Why why would you stick your neck out to try something new when you can just make the core thing 1% better?
1:59:18
Y um and so they're actually fundamentally inc they you can't ship a second product as a bottomup company.
1:59:25
And a lot of bottom-up companies don't know that they're bottom-up companies.
1:59:30
Uh because success is a terrible teacher.
1:59:31
Um a lot of bottom-up companies expand through M&A because the businesses are so good. They're so good.
1:59:40
Uh you you and then if you can buy great products, you can optimize them really well and grow them and you look like you're you know you're look you can kind of mask the fact that you didn't actually make two of those sort of flagship products with scale going to meta.
1:59:53
It's like yeah 15 billion is a lot but what if it moves the market cap 1%. Yeah.
1:59:58
What if it optimizes their AI stack 1%.
2:00:01
It's like yeah itself Instagram. Yep.
2:00:05
you know, uh, uh, uh, bike dance buying musically. Sure.
2:00:10
These are in like maybe some of the best investments over the last couple decades, and they were M&A events.
2:00:16
Um, and so if you're a bottom-up company and you can apply that pattern match really well to identifying similar shaped assets, that's your core innovation lever because you you actually are incapable of shipping something internally.
2:00:30
Um, so going back to taste, do I think taste is alive and well at Apple?
2:00:34
Yes, because culturally that organization has been built out to hire this innovative DNA.
2:00:41
Uh it's not the same at every company.
2:00:45
Uh you know, I don't know I don't know if tastes famous last I don't know if taste exists at I don't know if true taste exists at bottomup companies. Mhm.
2:00:57
I I wonder actually if what we what we can see from bottomup companies is just ornamental window dressing that we misidentify as taste because it's yeah it's hiring a good design agency at the right time and and you're like oh this this companyy's so tasteful, but it's like well you had to spend 250 grand to be tasteful.
2:01:21
It's just the most legible thing.
2:01:24
But when when actually like Craigslist just works great.
2:01:26
I mean Craigslist is a perfect example of a bottomout company. No taste required. Interesting.
2:01:34
Um I I can I would be rattling off like 20 other examples that kind of fit this framework, but I would piss off too many people.
2:01:42
So we'll let we'll let the audience imagine uh for themselves.
2:01:46
But but I think it's powerful.
2:01:49
Yeah, this was fantastic.
2:01:49
We could go way deeper into all of these frameworks.
2:01:52
These are great like kickoff points for big discussions.
2:01:54
I have so many more questions.
2:01:55
So we'll have to have you on back soon because this was fantastic. Amazing.
2:01:58
Thanks so much for taking the time. Thanks for the time. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers.
2:02:01
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2:02:14
And our next guest is coming into the studio.
2:02:19
Joe from Infinite Machine.
2:02:19
I can't wait to launch our out of home campaign. John, I'm so excited.
2:02:22
The We were in the We're deep in the creative process.
2:02:26
We got to pitch Joe on doing an out of home campaign. Let's bring him in.
2:02:30
We'll hear his pitch and then we'll pitch him some billboard ads because I think this thing needs to be advertised. Break it down for us.
2:02:37
What are you building launch day? Congratulations. Show us. Give us a little tour.
2:02:41
What What are you building? Hey guys.
2:02:44
Uh so you are here at our New York City facility. Fantastic.
2:02:47
Uh, I'm calling from Infinite Machine and we make the best non-car vehicles on Earth. Okay.
2:02:53
And today we're launching our second product. It's called Alto.
2:02:56
It is a class 2 ebike, but it looks nothing like an ebike.
2:03:02
We rethought this thing from the ground up.
2:03:04
So, it goes 25 miles per hour in the bike lane.
2:03:06
It's got pedals that turn into foot rests. It fits two people.
2:03:10
It's made out of aluminum and steel. It's beautiful. It's useful. It's high-tech.
2:03:15
It's connected to the internet.
2:03:16
And we we just announced it today.
2:03:18
What's the damage for one of those? How much it cost? $34. 95.
2:03:24
You're giving them You're giving them away. Away. Double the price. We're giving them away. Uh yeah. Yeah.
2:03:27
I mean, it looks amazing.
2:03:31
Congratulations on the launch. How much?
2:03:32
So So So you basically reverse engineered this so that it didn't need a light.
2:03:37
So you basically that's riding.
2:03:40
get like hypothetically John and I and the team, we get a bunch of we get a fleet of these for the office and we want to rip over to our favorite lunch spot. Yep.
2:03:48
Uh we're we're riding, it looks like we're on little motorcycles.
2:03:53
Cops, you know, put the sirens on, they pull us over, we pull the pedals out, and we're good to go.
2:03:58
We're like, "Look, I'm sorry, officer. It's a bicycle.
2:03:59
I don't know what you're talking about." Yeah.
2:04:01
So basically, um, most ebikes take traditional bicycles and strap motors and batteries to them, but bicycles were never designed to be powered.
2:04:11
And so you're taxing these parts that were never intended for for motor power.
2:04:15
And instead, we said, okay, how can we think about this from the ground up?
2:04:19
We have to work within the legal envelope of what a bicycle is.
2:04:24
So, if you look in all 50 states in America, the definition of a bicycle is something that has pedals that are operable, meaning it has a chain.
2:04:31
It goes 20 miles hour as a class 2 ebike or 20 or or 25 miles per hour as a class 3 ebike.
2:04:40
Um, and it's narrower than 36 in.
2:04:45
That's the basic constraint.
2:04:45
And so, uh, you know, we took that brief and then we designed what we thought was the best version of that design.
2:04:52
What is the barrier to going more aggressive?
2:04:56
Building it wider, taking the pedals out, uh making it go 40 miles an hour.
2:05:01
Then are you regulated as a motorcycle and I need a motorcycle license?
2:05:02
Is that is that how it works? Yeah.
2:05:04
So if you're considered a an ebike, you don't need a license plate. Sure.
2:05:10
And therefore, it's not a motor vehicle.
2:05:12
It's not regulated by the state.
2:05:14
It's not regulated by the federal government. Got it.
2:05:16
And so yeah, like it's just a much lower friction experience.
2:05:20
You don't need to register the product.
2:05:22
There's no insurance requirements.
2:05:23
You don't need a license plate.
2:05:26
Um, and so we wanted to make a super low friction product that you can get on. It's super easy to use.
2:05:30
You don't have to deal with complex dealers.
2:05:34
You don't need to register the thing.
2:05:36
Um, and yeah, you can get on and go and it's and it's accessibly priced. Yeah. What's the go to market?
2:05:40
Is it important to demo these things in real stores?
2:05:42
Get them into traditional bike shops?
2:05:44
I've been in some bike shops where they have ebikes as well, or is this all DTOC and e-commerce?
2:05:50
So, can show you quickly.
2:05:50
We have a space here in New York.
2:05:53
We're getting set up for an event.
2:05:54
So, this is a 13,000 square foot space in New York.
2:05:59
Um, and it's going to be open to the public as a store.
2:06:01
Uh, people can come in and buy vehicles.
2:06:03
Um, and so we are going direct to consumer to start, but and through retail includes your own retail. Yeah. Yes.
2:06:12
To start our own facility here in New York.
2:06:14
We're also interested and open to selling them in channel retail. Sure.
2:06:18
Um, I guess Best Buy, for example, like it would be make a lot of sense for it to be there. Exactly.
2:06:25
Exactly. talk about the broader explosion of ebikes because I feel like adults nowadays the the number one way I feel like a boomer is when uh you know some like 12year-olds with ebikes are like you know ripping through traffics and and it feels like every time I I
2:06:40
drive in the city now at some point or another and and and in some ways like you know that the boomer in me is like oh that those kids are being you know dangerous and then and then part of me at the same time is like it's actually makes cities much smaller now where can just go out and explore. But I feel like
2:06:55
But I feel like it it feels like with with and and what you guys are doing broadly, we're kind of in the second era of the sort of um micromobility, right?
2:07:06
Maybe the first era was was the kind of sharing economy, bird lime model.
2:07:10
And it's clear that that form of transportation is awesome. Yeah.
2:07:16
But the communityowned approach or or this sort of sharing economy model um ha had some like really you know big big issues and it does feel like you know actually having people own the end product care for the end product and not be just you know trashing devices that are part of a network.
2:07:32
So the way we look at it is you know the world as we know is urbanizing.
2:07:36
More and more people are living in cities and when you live in cities things get denser.
2:07:40
So instead of living in giant homes you live in apartments.
2:07:45
Instead of driving giant cars, you drive smaller vehicles.
2:07:46
And we believe that over time more and more vehicles in cities will not be cars.
2:07:54
They will be smaller, smarter, and we hope more beautiful vehicles.
2:07:56
Um, and our intention is to make the best of these things. Now, you're right.
2:08:00
The first gen one micromobility companies were all sharing oriented.
2:08:04
We think ultimately it's not a great business model.
2:08:09
There's a reason why those companies have not done super well, gone out of business, etc.
2:08:12
Uh but also we think that there's an opportunity to learn from what made cars so successful. People love their cars.
2:08:19
They love their vehicles.
2:08:21
They have an emotional connection to them.
2:08:22
And ultimately the car was built as a symbol of freedom.
2:08:27
And we think that there is an opportunity in urban environments to have a new symbol for freedom and a new tool for freedom.
2:08:33
So this thing you get on it, you can go anywhere in your city in 15 minutes. No hassle.
2:08:37
The wind's at your back and it's just great.
2:08:40
And compare that to the experience of sitting in the back of an Uber stuck in traffic. It's just night and day. Yeah.
2:08:49
Uh talk to me about what's going on in China because I feel like a lot of the phone companies have started going into cars and mobility and BYD makes all sorts of stuff and uh they have a very different model.
2:09:03
different model. uh you know with with so many tech companies it's like are you going to wind up being a bullet point at WWDC or or Google's IO uh it feels like it's unimaginable that we would see Apple launch a competitor to this but what's the actual dynamic why are
2:09:19
America's big tech companies not going into different areas if they have experience in hardware like why isn't Samsung getting in on the action why isn't Apple doing anything here uh can you comment on like the reaction to just like the a American companies are building technology today versus the China model. I actually think it's a bit of the
2:09:45
I actually think it's a bit of the opposite. So yeah, you're right.
2:09:46
If you go to China, you have these new hardware companies that are multicategory.
2:09:50
Uh so yeah, you go to a Xiai and they started at making phones and laptops and now they're making cars. Yeah.
2:09:56
When you look at the US, the model, take a company like Apple, we love Apple, but they're very very conservative.
2:10:01
they stick to their lane and the other American tech companies are actually not great at building hardware.
2:10:07
And so the way we see it is that there's an opportunity to build the the next great American hardware company.
2:10:13
We're starting with P1 and then alto and with vehicles at large, but we call the company infinite machine because we have big ambitions and we want to make incredible physical things in the world that move and are high-tech in new ways.
2:10:26
And so we will be multicategory at some point.
2:10:29
Um, and we're really building the competency to build high-end, moving, beautiful hardware with an integrated software layer.
2:10:38
Um, and do it in a way where we can move really quickly.
2:10:42
I mean, this company, uh, I've been full-time for less than a year and a half.
2:10:45
Uh, we have raised less than $10 million.
2:10:48
We've productionized two motor vehicles.
2:10:51
Uh, so we're kind of in a new age of what I call the ultra lean hardware company.
2:10:56
Um, and we're going to keep pushing and we're going to take that competency and double down, especially as we enter an age of embodied intelligence where the AI, you know, kind of escapes the screen and we're going to be all over that.
2:11:09
We're positioned to take advantage of that stuff and we're building the competency to make things uh that take advantage of it.
2:11:15
Is there any I'm just gonna I'm just going to speculate, but I can imagine you guys making a horse buggy without the horse that's fully autonomous and you just get to ride around the city, you know, windows down. Yeah.
2:11:28
You see the carriages in Central Park. Replace that as well. For sure.
2:11:33
Or a horse or a robotic horse. I'd love that. Yes. Yes. Yes.
2:11:38
Henry Ford said if you ask if you asked customers what they'd want, they'd say faster horse. I want a faster horse. I'd love a faster horse.
2:11:47
They're already self-driving.
2:11:47
They come out of the box self-driving.
2:11:49
Go home, horse, and it'll just take you there. Um, exactly.
2:11:52
Well, are areas has has your world been rocked by the tariff war? Are we in the clear now?
2:11:57
Is there any fear around scaling up the battery supply chain?
2:12:03
Uh, some companies have been fine on the battery side.
2:12:05
The more defense application companies like Skyo run into a lot more issues there. What's that been like?
2:12:13
I know that everyone's focused on re-industrialization in America, but it's a long journey.
2:12:17
Things have stabilized on the tariff front.
2:12:19
Um, you know, I it's not great.
2:12:22
Um, the world economy is highly entwined.
2:12:25
The supply chain for electric vehicles, even domestic manufactured electric vehicles is highly connected connected to China and beyond.
2:12:35
And so we are all, you know, we are fully supportive of re-industrializing America.
2:12:39
We want to be on the cutting edge of that.
2:12:41
We support, you know, smart policy to do that.
2:12:45
Both, you know, carrot and stick. So tariffs are a stick.
2:12:47
Um, you know, there's an opportunity for a new industrial policy that incentivizes domestic production.
2:12:53
We haven't seen that yet.
2:12:55
We've only see the seen a stick.
2:12:57
So, um, short story is, you know, it's stabilized, but honestly, I think we should be playing offense as America, and we're not yet.
2:13:04
We're we're we're using kind of protectionist measures. Yeah.
2:13:08
uh talk to me about making these uh vehicles safer using technology.
2:13:12
Um I I I remember like the hoverboard was a beneficiary of of uh you know better compute power and the ability to stabilize a device while you're riding on it uh very very cheaply.
2:13:27
And so those kind of went viral for one year in like 2014 and then kind of disappeared.
2:13:31
But I imagine that there's things that you can do now that you maybe couldn't have done if you were trying to build this company 20 30 years ago.
2:13:40
Um what what what what technology trends are you benefiting from?
2:13:44
You know on the safety front these are lower speed vehicles so you're not moving at you know highway speeds.
2:13:49
And so the name of the game is awareness uh people not just for the rider but also for people around you.
2:13:57
So that's emitting a sound, that's being highly visible, um, and that is alerting the rider when there are issues, and we do that stuff.
2:14:05
Um, you know, I think over time we'll start to use some of the ADAS software from automotive in these vehicles to do uh alerting and also to take over the vehicle when when that presents itself.
2:14:17
Um, but to start, you know, there are millions and millions of people riding ebikes right now.
2:14:22
If we can make them 10% 15% safer, um that's a big win and that's where we're starting.
2:14:31
Um talk to me about actually getting these in the hands of New Yorkers.
2:14:33
Um well, let's talk about getting them in let's getting in the hands of us.
2:14:39
I want to I'm going to sign I'm going to I'm going to configure uh one for each person on the team and then and then we're just going to be emailing you every day.
2:14:49
Hey, what what's what's the wait time? What's the weight time? Yeah, we got this.
2:14:53
We are offering what we call in internally the Burning Man shipping option, which is straight from the factory in August before Burning Man.
2:15:01
If you opt for non Burning Man shipping, that costs 4,500 bucks.
2:15:03
But if you opt for non- Burning Man shipping, uh that will arrive in late September, early October.
2:15:10
So, you know, they're shipping quickly.
2:15:12
We are about to start mass production.
2:15:14
Um and maybe for you guys, we'll expedite a few. That'd be amazing. That'd be amazing.
2:15:18
No, I mean I think that you will get the equivalent of millions of dollars in in marketing spend from just being at Burning Man because you can imagine, you know, if you can get a dense of the density of these on the Playa, the number of of Instagram stories, posts, etc.
2:15:32
, it's going to be absolutely wild. Yeah. Yeah. What about storage?
2:15:37
Like what are you recommending to people that buy these and are living in an apartment?
2:15:40
Is it something that you're designed to bring into your apartment or or do most buildings these days have like in like safe places to store ebikes or parking garages for these things? Yeah.
2:15:51
So, one of the cool things about Alto is it's designed to be left outside.
2:15:55
You park the vehicle outside. It's fully weatherproof.
2:15:58
It has an onboard security system.
2:16:00
It's virtually impossible to steal. Hardware and software.
2:16:02
When you park it, you don't have to take the whole bike to your apartment to charge.
2:16:08
You can take the battery out of the seat. Weighs 20 pounds.
2:16:10
It's a hot swappable battery.
2:16:12
Take it up to your apartment and then we have a dock that you drop it in and the dock plugs into a normal 110 volt outlet. So, super simple.
2:16:21
So, you charge it overnight and then just take it out with you every morning. Six hours to charge.
2:16:24
We also have a supercharger.
2:16:26
It takes three hours for a couple hundred bucks and yeah, very cool. Amazing. Anything else?
2:16:33
Uh, please uh make a video of yourself taking one of these things on a jump.
2:16:35
I just think it would be fun.
2:16:37
just think it would be fun. I I was going to ask when can we get these first thing the first thing the marketing strategy here you know I want to see I want to see the big jump you know monster truck rally let's push these to the limits really show people I think we should get one and put the full TBPN racing livery on it all the you know ramp on there all the different partners are we doing like Pikes Peak or are we
2:16:57
doing like halfpipe like what's going to go most viral here all of it all of it okay I'm super I'm super you know this this is one of the I I love businesses and products where you take something that um seems like, you know, seems like
2:17:12
it's competitive and then you you spend a hundred times, you know, you you you you be hundred times more intentional about creating it, designing it, distributing it, and um you create, you know, an entirely new also shipping before Christmas. I love a physical
2:17:24
I love a physical gift, a big box under the Christmas tree.
2:17:28
It's rarer Christmas trees.
2:17:28
It's rarer and rarer these days because everything's gone digital.
2:17:33
You used to give people books or CDs or DVDs and all of this is digital now.
2:17:38
So, it's very hard to find something to give to someone.
2:17:41
Uh although this is obviously like an a very nice gift, it is something that can really make a statement and be an absolutely joyful Christmas morning if you unwrap this thing.
2:17:51
We've been recommending that people give each other uh you know sales tax software or potentially corporate cards, but I think I think this is going to be added to our Christmas list this year.
2:18:01
I think this is a little bit more fun. Yeah.
2:18:02
And people can place if they want if folks want to make sure they get one for the holiday season, they can put a deposit down now. It's 100 bucks. Oh, cool.
2:18:10
And it's fully refundable. So, okay.
2:18:12
Well, save your configuration. Fantastic.
2:18:14
Well, thank you so much for stopping by.
2:18:15
Uh we'd love to give it a try. We'll talk to you soon.
2:18:17
Very excited for you guys. Bye.
2:18:18
Uh if you're if you're operating a wander, you got to get one of these for your guests to be able to tool around on. That would be fantastic.
2:18:27
Imagine this probably goes really hard in Malibu, ohigh, any any fun places, Sun Valley, any place where you're traveling.
2:18:34
Uh, and if you're looking to take a vacation, get on Wander. Find your happy place. Find your happy place.
2:18:41
Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel grade aes, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, 24/7 concier service.
2:18:47
It's wander allows you to go golden retriever mode because you just don't have to think about anything.
2:18:51
You just be chasing the ball, chasing the beach.
2:18:55
Uh, well, we have Zach again from Plaid.
2:18:57
uh third time on the show. Welcome to the stream. Great to see you. It's always a pleasure.
2:19:01
I'm I'm always blown away when you join because uh it's always so much fun talking to you.
2:19:05
So, thanks so much for joining. Uh great to have you.
2:19:08
What's What's the latest in your world?
2:19:10
Uh well, thank you so much for having me.
2:19:12
I'm I'm I'm honored to be here and uh it's always fun. So much fun.
2:19:15
Uh latest in our world is uh we did Plat Effects today.
2:19:17
This is our our annual customer conference where we announced a bunch of the stuff that we've been working on for the past year.
2:19:24
Um it's been uh super fun.
2:19:24
And the biggest announcement was a product called Protect, which is this uh amazing cutting edge anti-fraud product.
2:19:28
Looks at all the data across all the all all of the usage and the data flowing through the cloud network and uh builds a really great anti- fraud tool.
2:19:35
Yeah, that's that's the headline of the day.
2:19:38
H how how oneshottable is fraud these days?
2:19:42
Can you just pipe a ton of customer data into like a single context window and just ask and can the prompt just be like is this fraud now or or is it is it still like leveraging all the traditional fraud tools?
2:19:54
Yeah, I mean the the the hard part is twofold.
2:19:56
Okay, first is you have to put all of your historical data in it to say, hey, is this pattern anomalous?
2:20:02
Is something weird going on here?
2:20:03
So the question is like can you can you get all of your data into that?
2:20:07
And in plaid's case, can you take all the data that we see across all of the fintic apps and all the users and say, hey, what are the patterns that are occurring consistently?
2:20:14
So for example, um you know, if you sign up uh for for Coinbase today, that might be a totally normal signup.
2:20:21
you signed up for Lending Club today and you just signed up for six other lending products today.
2:20:26
Then that's obviously a potentially fraudulent loan that you're trying to take out.
2:20:29
And so like can you can can you get all this data all in one place?
2:20:32
That's that's problem number one.
2:20:32
And problem number two is can you analyze it and change the analysis that you're doing at the speed that you need to change it because fraud changes every day.
2:20:40
Um some of that is algorithmic.
2:20:40
So are the algorithms like chasing the fraudsters in the way that they need to? Some of that is manual.
2:20:45
So we built a tool that actually allows humans to go in and say, "Hey, I heard from, you know, I've seen this thing going on or I heard from some other some other fintech company that this fraud ring is occurring.
2:20:55
Can you search for it and tell me is is that actually occurring to me and then can I build some rules to to protect against it?"
2:21:00
So it is a constantly evolving game. Yeah.
2:21:02
How how important is this problem?
2:21:04
I feel like every American should just default assume that their information is like floating around the internet available to the highest bidder.
2:21:11
So like in in some ways like the only solution is just better tools to prevent this type of activity. Is that is that reality? Mhm. That is the reality.
2:21:22
Um financial fraud is going up around 25% a year right now.
2:21:26
Um some of that is or actually a lot of that is AIdriven.
2:21:27
So you know people using AI tools to send text messages to convince people to do certain things.
2:21:35
Um, I think, yeah, one answer is absolutely tools and we're trying to build the best-in-class tools and give it to all the fintech companies and frankly then we'll go well beyond fintech with these products.
2:21:42
Um, the other is just education like explaining to consumers how it works.
2:21:46
So, you know, my my parents and I we have a a word that we say to make sure that we know that it is the other person on the other other end of the line if we're sending money or frankly doing anything that requires authentication.
2:21:57
Those kinds of little tricks that you can build into your day-to-day processes are always helpful.
2:22:01
But it's a combination of tools and processes and and so forth. Yeah, makes sense.
2:22:07
Uh can you talk to us about impossible travel problems?
2:22:09
I found out about this yesterday.
2:22:11
Uh where where someone's logging in from Singapore 3 hours after they were in San Francisco and they couldn't possibly be there.
2:22:18
Is that something that uh that that you're already built a tool around?
2:22:22
Is that is that kind of uh like table stakes or or or are there are there like evolutions there? Yeah.
2:22:28
So, I mean, a lot of the the way that the the anti fraud product works, it's called Protect.
2:22:32
It's got a bunch of these different analysis analyses that we do.
2:22:35
So, there's there's I think just under 20 different analyses that are running now and we're adding more every day.
2:22:40
Um, one of them is location tracking.
2:22:42
So, we look at where was the last place that you logged into a fintech app and then if you're trying to do a new thing with a different fintech app on the same user's account in a different place. All right, great.
2:22:51
Well, that's that's actually, you know, it's an impossible travel question.
2:22:52
Um, and so that will immediately generate a flag.
2:22:57
Um there's a bunch of these other things like we look at stuff like how long has this bank account existed?
2:23:01
Turns out a brand new bank account is very likely to commit fraud and an old bank account is less likely to commit fraud.
2:23:06
Um we do stuff same thing for the phone number.
2:23:08
How long has this phone number existed?
2:23:09
And there's there's a zillion of these analyses that then run into a bunch of statistical work that we do on top of it.
2:23:14
Um but you know every time you look at a fraudster or or an instance of fraud, you can always explain it in retrospect.
2:23:20
So you can look back and say, "Oh yeah, obviously, you know, that person was in Singapore and then they were in California 2 hours later. That's impossible."
2:23:27
But when you're proactively trying to prevent it, like can you actually think through all the possible permutations of weird patterns that might exist?
2:23:34
And that's that's that's the complexity that we focus on.
2:23:37
So So uh I imagine at one point this was like very heruristic driven, very uh like a multivariable regression almost just saying like here are the different fraud factors.
2:23:47
Let's add up like a risk score.
2:23:48
uh have these products moved to a transformer architecture?
2:23:53
Are we using LLMs in them?
2:23:56
Are we using modern AI tools or or or are we just kind of continuing to scale up the the the existing uh uh the existing algorithms that have been working for the past few years?
2:24:05
Like I don't know how relevant the new models are.
2:24:09
People are kind of like throwing transformers and diffusion and everything right now and I don't know if that's appropriate here.
2:24:14
Yeah, I mean the answer is yes to all the above.
2:24:16
Um it is not heavily transformerdriven yet in terms of fighting fraud though increasingly um it is becoming that way. Sure.
2:24:27
We definitely use LLM for a bunch of things like autob building tools like doing some of the data cleansing so and so forth on the back.
2:24:32
Um but you know fraud is a fascinating industry because um if you talk to any company their goal is to make the fraud not happen on their platform, right?
2:24:41
They want the fraud to be more expensive for a fraudster to do on their platform than it is anywhere else. Sure.
2:24:46
Um and so everyone wants to be ahead. They want the new thing.
2:24:48
They want like the the new type of fraud solution.
2:24:52
Um but then eventually everything that's new becomes table stakes for everyone because uh you know you kind of have to have it.
2:24:57
And so you know we are iterating our way towards more and more complex architecture but uh it's still early days to actually solve.
2:25:06
To me this product feels like something that's just possible with like massive scale.
2:25:09
like you probably wanted to build something like this like you know five six seven years ago but but couldn't just because you didn't have like the the sort of broad exposure to all these different touch points. Is that right?
2:25:21
I mean this was the pitch that I was giving for plaid in like 2014.
2:25:25
Basically my pitch was when we get big enough we're going to have a lot of data and we're going to build these analytics that financial services doesn't have because uh you know no one can build them and no one has the tech sophistication to do it.
2:25:35
Um, it took us a decade to get to the point where we had enough data to actually build this stuff.
2:25:40
And then we acquired Cognto, an ID verification company in 2022, which is a big catalyst.
2:25:44
I mean, in part of the pitch to that team, I was saying, "Look, come use our data, put it together with your data, and then think of all the amazing anti-fraud tools you could build."
2:25:52
So, I mean, this stuff always happens slower than you wanted to, but we couldn't be more excited to get it out there.
2:25:56
Uh h how much of this like like fraud right now, financial fraud, is kind of acting as like a tax on fintech companies and should we be thinking about shifting that tax to the government by giving the government more tools to go after the fraudsters like at the source and just arrest the people that are even trying to do the fraud?
2:26:20
Well, I think one of the big the big challenges is in in crypto a lot of fraudulent activity is happening and and law enforcement is able to trace the activity to somebody in China.
2:26:28
And if you just go to if you go to some if you go to the Chinese government and you say like we know exactly who's doing this, they don't they're not going to act on it. So like it's Yeah.
2:26:38
I mean the answer is yes. Yes to all the above.
2:26:41
Like the government should be more active in this.
2:26:44
Um, again, much of the, as you said, much of the fraud doesn't stem from people that are inside the US.
2:26:48
So, it's not the US government doing it.
2:26:50
I'm sure you guys have been following or maybe you've read the articles about pig butchering.
2:26:54
Horrible name for a type of fraud.
2:26:56
Like they have these these these humans in fraud rings in like Malaysia with people, right? Yeah. Exactly.
2:27:03
And like they're they're often government sponsored or at least government like affiliated in some way.
2:27:09
Like there's there's knowledge in the government that that that happens.
2:27:12
And so I mean you know in if that is happening uh great yes we could we could give better data to the Malaysian government but also you got to build the tools. Yeah. Yeah.
2:27:19
What about um uh I I don't know how how much you can comment on this.
2:27:24
Um but you know there's been a lot of discussion recently and and frustration and at least after the the Coinbase um uh you know user data issues around like KYC's KYC laws and and effectively the government requiring people to retain all this data.
2:27:42
Do you think that there would ever be any movement uh in DC around really updating these laws to protect to help protect user data or is it just one of those things that that we have to to live with?
2:27:54
I mean you you would think they should.
2:27:57
Um, I mean, realistically, yeah, that the concept that um, if if if you're a bank and I sign up for your bank, you have to collect all of my most sensitive data and then you have to store it forever in your database.
2:28:07
On a scale of forever in, you know, many many databases, you have to assume that those databases will be hacked.
2:28:13
Thus, you have to assume that on a scale of forever, your data is all going to be public.
2:28:16
And so, it doesn't make sense that that that you would retain it.
2:28:19
you should in theory collect it, verify it, um like get say a token uh that it exists, like get some assurance that it exists and then delete it.
2:28:27
Um it seems like I I would hope that the regulations change.
2:28:30
I think it's it's it's you know regulations move as fast as regulations move.
2:28:34
Um and so I'm not sure that it's going to be uh imminent in that sense.
2:28:38
But on the flip side, like the industry is solving it.
2:28:41
The industry is building tools that are better and better.
2:28:43
You know, relying on a static social security number, sure, yeah, we'll do it.
2:28:46
That's fine if if we have to for regulatory reasons, but the reality is if if if social security number entry is your only uh fraud detection tool, your only fraud avoidance tool, like you're you're in a bad place as it is. Yeah, that makes sense.
2:28:58
The industry will solve it basically.
2:29:00
Can you talk uh uh this got kind of lost among other uh uh massive news cycles, but there were some updates to DoddFrank 1033 that a few weeks ago.
2:29:14
um you guys um talking offline were were kind of concerned about what that could mean just kind of broadly for consumers.
2:29:23
Any any kind of can you give us kind of an overview of what happened?
2:29:24
I know I think when we were in DC you were kind of covering a little bit of this stuff on the show as well. Totally.
2:29:30
Yeah, I think this is a a big issue that probably doesn't get as much coverage as it should.
2:29:35
So um in the DoddFrank law um the the the wrote a provision that basically says consumers have access to their financial data and they can assign that access to uh to third parties such as Plaid to act on their behalf.
2:29:48
Um and uh then there was never any rule written on that.
2:29:53
It was it was regulatory authority that was given to the CFPB.
2:29:55
Um no rule written for a long time under Trump first uh first administration.
2:29:59
Um Kathy Craninger, the head of the CFPB at the time, uh started writing the rule for this.
2:30:07
It then continued into the Rohood Chopra era of CFPB under Biden.
2:30:12
Um the rule that emerged from that was a very far-reaching huge overstep of a rule.
2:30:17
Um and in uh the second Trump administration, now there's a push to either pair back or get rid of the rule.
2:30:25
What actually happened is the day that the rule um was published by Ro Chopra um a group of the banks sued you know that same day meaning they had the lawsuit pre-prepared beforehand and just click submit um and so that that kind of is ongoing um the wrinkle that's come up recently is that the currency has
2:30:45
basically said um something effective yes we agree with the banks and we should get rid of the rule but also the way that they're structuring the language in that dismissal may foreclose on some of the regulator things that were set up and could actually put at risk um some of the the ways that open banking works in the United States today. Meaning um it could it could
2:31:01
Meaning um it could it could allow certain banks to put much more pressure on the ecosystem.
2:31:05
Um they could try to turn off data in certain areas.
2:31:10
They should try to limit data in certain areas.
2:31:11
They could more more likely um what's going to happen is they're going to try to limit certain industries.
2:31:14
So if you remember um you know a couple years ago uh there was this big uh debanking thing that went on where the banks were trying to push back and turn off crypto. Yeah.
2:31:25
This would give them the ability to turn off crypto.
2:31:27
This would give them the ability to turn off you know gaming or things like that or basically any any industry that they might feel is competitive with them.
2:31:35
And it wouldn't be all the banks doing it as a group.
2:31:38
It would be each individual bank kind of making their own determination of this.
2:31:41
And so we think that you know we don't mind getting rid of the rule.
2:31:45
We just don't want to foreclose on the fact that consumers really should have the ability to choose the financial products that they interact with. Yeah, that makes sense.
2:31:52
Uh, did you have a reaction to this the circle IPO?
2:31:54
I I I you know, obviously it performed very well, but and and and stable coins have been in the news.
2:31:59
Um, but I'm I'm interested to hear kind of like what the next most exciting uh instantiations of that technology might be.
2:32:09
Uh I was talking to a payroll company CEO and uh he was kind of mentioning that uh yes it's lower fees and faster but interestingly stable coins might allow them to kind of recapture float and then earn yield on that in an interesting way that I wasn't expecting.
2:32:26
So like the the the potential economic benefit to some companies might be massive if they're able to kind of uh custody their own treasuries essentially through stable coins.
2:32:37
Um uh what have you been seeing in the stable coin world broadly?
2:32:41
What are the interesting knock-on effects?
2:32:42
Um how much excitement is there among stable coins from your partners?
2:32:47
Yeah, I mean there there there's a ton.
2:32:50
Yeah, there's a lot of amazing companies.
2:32:51
I think you talked to pretty Have you already talked to them? You're going to talk? Yeah. Yeah, just an hour ago. Just earlier. Great.
2:32:55
Yeah, I mean huge congrats to them.
2:32:56
Like amazing to see what they built and very excited for the ecosystem.
2:33:00
Um I think you know from our perspective what's happening in stable coins right now is not what will happen.
2:33:06
not what will happen. So what's happening right now a lot of people are using it as a currency hedge a lot of people are using it for crossber um payouts or or money transfers that otherwise would just be frictionful um and then you know a lot of people are using it uh just as a as a form of a s savings account that has higher yield
2:33:24
and while those are all big tams it's not that that interesting relative to the rest of what what what could go on in financial services um I think increasingly we're going to see more and more consumers having the ability to move money easily between say a bank account and a crypto wallet uh holding something in USDC or or or another uh another another stable coin. Um and
2:33:42
Um and yeah, you're right.
2:33:43
There there are big opportunities for people to hold uh elements of their treasury or elements of their float and earn meaningful interest off of it.
2:33:50
Um increasingly I think that that that float which was historically held on to by the platforms may well get shared more and more um with uh with the underlying companies.
2:34:00
So payroll uh companies if the float was all held at the bank now they're actually able to participate in a portion of the float.
2:34:05
So that's a huge new revenue stream for them while interest rates are what they are I will say.
2:34:09
So that'll create increasing volatility in their in their revenue streams because if interest rates go down then obviously the float goes down.
2:34:16
Um so I do think that that's that's a a big potential thing that a lot of uh a lot of companies might want to also offering more uh tender types allows a lot of the large platforms to keep dollars on their platform more.
2:34:26
Um, so you see some of the big payments processors, their goal obviously is to have more float on their platform because they get a slice of that float.
2:34:33
Um, offering more tender types, offering it not just to be held in dollars, but you could hold it in in in in crypto, you could hold it in a stable coin that keeps the dollars on their platform even more, which gives them both more leverage and and more open in the long term. Very cool.
2:34:46
What are you guys doing on the MCP side?
2:34:48
I I know you you had some announcements recently there.
2:34:50
Yeah, so those that was another big uh part of the announcements today.
2:34:54
I mean the short answer is like MTPs make it easier for developers to build.
2:34:58
Um I think the concept of uh a rest API was new when we started plaid because everything was on SOAP.
2:35:04
Now the concept of uh you know writing to a raw API without using cursor or winds surf or something like that is increasingly becoming uh rare and will become rare over time.
2:35:12
And so really for us it's just staying on the cutting edge building tools that help developers build faster on flat and then allowing them to get better analytics on their usage their uh their interactions with our system so on and so forth. So it's fun. It's really fun. That's awesome.
2:35:25
Do you have any type of broad thesis around how agent you know I think there's like a lot of narrative around okay agents will just default use crypto assets or or you know any anything around that.
2:35:37
Anytime there's sort of too it's coming. Yeah.
2:35:39
Anytime there's sort of an accepted narrative.
2:35:41
I I just you know want to kind of push deeper.
2:35:43
I'm curious if you have strong opinions.
2:35:45
I do not think they will default these crypto assets.
2:35:48
Um, I think crypto assets might be easier at first, but um, look, the the bank account is already effectively a digital first product or now is a digital first product.
2:35:58
Did not start that way certainly.
2:35:59
Um, cards oddly are not yet fully digital first, but are moving that direction.
2:36:04
Like still you have to know a 16-digit card number to actually like authenticate a card.
2:36:08
um whereas bank accounts have ooth already set up and then kind of the next phase of that is obviously crypto as crypto starts uh being digital native and so it becomes easier and easier to authenticate into things.
2:36:19
My take is that all three of those and many other tender types will become available to to to these uh to to to LLM uh and to agents but um it's going to take a little while for the industry to evolve but fast forward two three years and it'll be all the same. Very cool. Anything else Jordy? No, this is great. This is fantastic. Congrats.
2:36:37
I'm curious, did did Chesky tell you to to move to this kind of release cycle or or you've been doing it for a while?
2:36:43
Is it sort of the Chesky the Chesy play the Chesky method of entrepreneurship?
2:36:48
We've been doing it for a little while, but man, they have developed such an impressive track record of doing it and all the podcasts that he went on to talk about it, I think everybody else in the world decided to copy it.
2:36:58
So, maybe we were inspired by seeing what they did beforehand, but certainly we've learned a lot from from from from from listening to their playbook. Yeah.
2:37:05
the the the the jobs approach, you know, walked so the chesky method could run. Method. Exactly. Um, awesome.
2:37:12
Well, I'm excited to read through the the other announcements later and uh come back on anytime.
2:37:17
It's great to congratulations. Cheers.
2:37:20
Really quickly, let me tell you about Bezel. Go to getbzzle. com.
2:37:22
Your bezel concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. I love that.
2:37:27
There was one YC yesterday that had the the Daytona and the and the Texas Timex.
2:37:35
Yeah, the day date was the day on JLC reverso. Yeah.
2:37:38
Well, when we called the founders on it, they were like, I had a lot of embarrassing.
2:37:42
It's not super YC coded to have a to have a hitter on the wrist, but nothing throw 100K into a PC. You know, work 20%. That's the Cluey method. Absolutely. That is the Cle method.
2:37:56
No, build a generational company and then uh buy a nice piece on bezel for your for your father.
2:38:03
Father's Day is coming up.
2:38:04
Head over to bezel, get your dad a watch.
2:38:07
Um, let's check in with our intern, Tyler, who's pivoting from computer science to art history.
2:38:11
What do you got for us, Tyler?
2:38:13
Oh, he's at the Museum of Modern Art now. That's fantastic. Yeah.
2:38:16
So, um, earlier I I was thinking like I think before I should really start studying, I should kind of just like benchmark my stats. Okay.
2:38:22
So, I took two different tests.
2:38:24
Uh, the first one was the it was an AP art history practice exam. Okay.
2:38:28
Um, so, you know, it's like for high schoolers, average high schoolers like pretty dumb. Yep.
2:38:33
I thought I would do pretty well. I got 12 out of 29. So that's 41%.
2:38:35
So failing failing, you know, some some place to grow there.
2:38:41
And then I also took like, you know, maybe um that exam is just like weirdly, you know, it's like very specific knowledge or something. I took another exam.
2:38:47
Um this was the Bratannica art history quiz.
2:38:49
Um on that one, I got 24 out of uh 60. So that's uh 40%.
2:38:57
So uh you know, I have a lot of room to grow.
2:39:01
Well, there there's about an hour left in the show.
2:39:02
So, so were you using cursor for art history to to to answer those questions or were you Yeah, I was not.
2:39:09
But that was earlier in the show. I have been studying.
2:39:11
Um, so I think I'm going to take it, you know, 20 minutes before the show ends. Okay.
2:39:14
Uh, we'll see how I do them. Okay.
2:39:16
Um, but I was also kind of just looking um, you know, at what are the kind of careers that art history majors generally go into. Yes.
2:39:24
So it like if you kind of want to stay in the art world, there's basically uh you work in a museum or you work in kind of art dealership gallery. Yeah.
2:39:33
So first I looked at kind of be becoming like an a museum curator.
2:39:36
Um for that it's you basically need a PhD. Okay.
2:39:42
So I don't think I'll be able to get that before the show ends, but I was looking at art dealership.
2:39:45
Um and obviously like for that you kind of need some some funding to start with.
2:39:49
So I took uh producer Ben's ramp card. Okay. Okay.
2:39:54
Laid down some art pieces.
2:39:54
They're going to come in next couple weeks. Great. There you go.
2:39:57
So, yeah, I'm already starting this career.
2:39:58
I'm feeling pretty good about myself.
2:40:00
You flip you flip those pieces, bake it all back, pay off the ramp card, reward business.
2:40:05
Yeah, we will be checking in with his IRRa, seeing if he can beat the average venture fund. Yeah. Yeah. Just beat the market. Yeah, it's that easy. Um, amazing. Great work, Tyler. Yes. Yes.
2:40:16
Making lots of lots of promising uh uh promising uh progress. That's very good.
2:40:22
Um, uh, anthropic co-founder Ben Ma Ben Mann says that we'll know AI is transformative when it passes the economic touring test.
2:40:31
This is something I was talking about earlier.
2:40:33
Give an AI agent a job for a month.
2:40:35
Let the hiring manager choose human or machine when they pick the machine.
2:40:40
More often than not, we've crossed the threshold.
2:40:42
Uh, we've been talking about the economic touring test for a while.
2:40:46
I'm glad that he wrapped it in a bow.
2:40:47
Maybe it needs its own coinage.
2:40:50
Maybe we need to dig into anthropic uh more deeply, but we have the perfect guest for that.
2:40:55
We have Sharon from Bloomberg joining us right now.
2:40:59
Welcome to the stream, Sharon. How are you doing? Good. Thanks for having me.
2:41:03
Thanks so much for being here.
2:41:03
Uh I wanted to have you on because you've been on an absolute tear uh writing fantastic pieces.
2:41:09
Maybe it would be best to start with Anthropic, which I was just talking about.
2:41:12
Um what did you learn from uh the the piece that you wrote about anthropic and Daario?
2:41:17
We haven't had a chance to have him on the show. We talked to Schultto.
2:41:20
Uh they have an interesting culture, interesting history.
2:41:24
Um can you give us your kind of 50,000 foot foot view on the company, what they stand for today and maybe how that's changed?
2:41:34
Yeah, I think Anthropic is a company that probably the most right now is um facing pressure both to live up to its really strong kind of um ideological ethos which is around building AI safely as an and as an alternative to labs that they felt maybe weren't doing it as responsibly as they were and then also to deliver on the business value. Right?
2:41:55
So, I was kind of um I learned just how sort of savvy actually Anthropic has been with Dario at the helm.
2:42:00
Even though he has this very deep research science background, he's been able to cut some major deals, grow the enterprise business quite quickly.
2:42:09
Um double and now there's other reporting about tripling revenue.
2:42:13
So, you know, that's that's sort of where they're at.
2:42:15
But as you get more money, as you get more you get bigger and bigger funding rounds, you know, how does does that translate into pressure to move really fast?
2:42:22
Um, at the same time that you're trying to be responsible.
2:42:27
Did you get a sense that they have a they have a specific strategy around diversification in terms of hyperscaler partnerships because they've they've done a deal with Amazon.
2:42:37
I believe they were just mentioned at WWDC is plugging into Xcode.
2:42:39
it feels like they're trying to uh maybe go more of as an infrastructure provider.
2:42:45
Um they seem to be doing very well in in coding and with uh on the enterprise side.
2:42:52
Uh how much of that is deliberate or just like uh it got pulled out of them because of where their position in the market was?
2:42:58
I mean so am I reporting like it was very deliberate their strategy to first of all not lock in with any one hyperscaler right so they have both Google and Amazon as partners on that front.
2:43:08
on that front. um that kind of hedging I think was very calculated and also um they you know Dario in my interviews he's been pretty dismissive our reporting about Stargate um you know saying it's not clear exactly what it is and I I think his stance is that sort of
2:43:25
you can you can scale up and not need to make such a big deal about it at least that's what he sort of said publicly to me right um but but as as you said like I think the pressure is on right for them to to deliver and show that they can he invented scaling laws but can you build up the compute and pay for it to do that. Yeah. Can you talk a little bit Yeah.
2:43:41
Can you talk a little bit about the rhetoric around safety?
2:43:42
Um, I was very I I never really got caught up in the paper clipping and the AI doom narrative, but after seeing uh Deep Seek that's what every human says right before they get but but uh but after seeing Deep Seek uh drop and the anthropic paper about uh Manurion candidates or what was it secret hidden agents?
2:44:05
I forget the term that they use but essentially sleeper agents embedding uh something nefarious within the weights of the model that maybe only comes out when it interacts with a certain endpoint or a certain web page.
2:44:17
It it discovers that hey, I'm not just running, you know, in some random solo dev's cursor instance.
2:44:22
I'm actually inside the NSA.
2:44:25
I should go around and do something else.
2:44:26
Um and and that really flipped a bit in my mind to say, okay, safety research is actually maybe extremely important and maybe even extremely commercializable because people will want to do safety evaluations on the models that they use.
2:44:42
Uh how has the safety rhetoric evolved at uh at Anthropic over the last couple years in your in your in your reporting? Yeah.
2:44:50
So I think you know AI doomers or people worried about AI safety have been doing these sort of um hypothetical thought experiments like the paperclip experiment for a very long time like predating even Dario Emmed is right entry onto the scene.
2:45:00
Um however I think at Anthropic what I've seen evolve is they're starting to to outline and try they're trying to be as concrete as possible to explain like what the risks are what the different levels of risks are.
2:45:13
are. or they made a whole um responsible scaling uh kind of document framework to say okay it's it's kind of modeled after how um biological labs are that are very high risk and how for okay if if what you're working on is this level of biological risk then you have to have this corresponding level of actual physical lab safety so that's how they
2:45:32
viewed it anthropic and so you know when I was reporting this out they had recently had this kind of false alarm where they thought they were crossing into a level that was too dangerous for them to be able to handle And then they did extra tests and they're like, "Okay, no, we're all right for this release, but we better get up to par." What time period was that? Was
2:45:48
What time period was that?
2:45:48
Was that like an hour or like 10 days or a month?
2:45:53
So, you know, Daria told me they basically had to delay um not this release, but the the last bike one um by something like nearly a week because at the la sort of in the final days leading up to the release, um their safety team, you know, one of the red teaming uh group came to them and were like, listen, like we this model actually may be more capable than we thought, right?
2:46:16
Um so I do think that's that's a challenge, right?
2:46:18
is taking these really hypothetical, seemingly kind of sci-fi scenarios and translating it to like, well, when is that actually going to happen at our lab and what do you have to do to protect yourself?
2:46:27
And it's both physical security, like making sure no one can break into your lab or something like that, but it's also um you know, actually making sure that there are safeguards on the software side to stop someone from say and I think I think the most tangible threat that I heard them talk about was the bi biological one, right?
2:46:47
And that was a specific concern with that release I mentioned that could someone use this to come up with a novel boweapon. Sure.
2:46:52
There there's an there's an interesting dynamic with safety teams where if you're sitting there with a team of let's call it 20some people and you're costing the company tens of million you know I don't know$10 million a year.
2:47:07
It's not a you're not going to feel that like you're you're your job your job's that safe if you're if you're never sounding the alarm.
2:47:13
never sounding the alarm. there's kind of an oh this feels a little dangerous let's look into it you know there's also just so many other dynamics at play and I think people always dig into this like uh you know our models too powerful that's a great marketing line oh it's
2:47:30
too good like you know you could never give it to the the wild it's too powerful uh and then there's also um it's also maybe you just haven't put together all the inference capabilities and scaled up your data centers to really have a have a productive launch you need an extra two weeks in the oven. Oh, yeah. It's a safety issue. So, Oh, yeah. It's a safety issue.
2:47:46
So, there's a million different ways that the safety stuff can be kind of abused.
2:47:51
I'm not accusing them of abusing it, but it does feel like uh you know, we we noticed this with uh with with the Llama 4 launch.
2:47:58
uh they haven't been able to release Behemoth yet and they had some some issues with uh benchmarking but notably they didn't say it was a safety issue and that would have almost been an easy out and it's one that I think most foundation model companies would have taken a year ago but the the the community the developer community just doesn't seem to buy that line of reasoning as much anymore.
2:48:18
reasoning as much anymore. I don't know if you had any reactions to the to the long I I have you know in my own interviews with Daario I've asked him about this and um you know he has been upfront like we we reported on you know there were delays to um just this latest
2:48:31
big release right the the latest uh sonnet they're kind of or sorry is it opus whatever the biggest one is I'm forgetting all the specific names right now and um you know we we have report on on these delays we were we wrote you know um a big article about how um scaling laws at least with the
2:48:46
pre-training side of these models were starting to slow down and you know anthropic in my in my reporting with Dario he was pretty upfront that like that wasn't a safety like you know that big delay was not that big model being um later than some of their early projections that's because they were facing kind of the same technological
2:49:04
problems that I think many labs are facing right and ultimately they did release it so but I think people you know there it's absolutely reasonable to question any company's motivation when they say something slowed down I think I saw no evidence for that in that this specific case sure Sure. Yeah, that Yeah, that makes sense.
2:49:19
Um, uh, let's talk about the most recent deal.
2:49:22
Uh, Meta acquiring Scale AI.
2:49:25
Uh, 49% of the company is changing hands, I believe, at around 14 or 15 billion dollars.
2:49:30
Spiritually, the whole thing. Yes.
2:49:33
But technically, uh, what what what was what has been your reaction and what uh what have you learned from reporting on that?
2:49:39
Yeah, I think you just covered that that uh they they have a new CEO. So, so break. We just reported that. Yeah.
2:49:45
just reported that. Yeah. per um you know for our sources that they have picked uh the new CEO to be Jason Droi uh former VP he's currently uh you know at scale being promoted and and he was um formerly at Uber a VP and formerly also a partner uh in VC at benchmark so but you know that's just that's just the
2:50:03
latest right we we kind of we have really been breaking the news on this front we had a scoop this Saturday night um that we were the first ones to report that these uh talks were happening for Meta to make this multi-billion investment in scale I think it really caught you know a lot of people by surprise in the industry. Um this is a
2:50:17
Um this is a huge investment planned um on Meta Front, right?
2:50:22
probably their biggest ever um in a company and I think it's you know I think it's a sign that Zuckerberg is ready to go full on founder mode and try to catch up on AI and this last llama 4 release was you know widely considered a disappointment and so how do you how do you change course bring this big right big investment and this super intelligence lab and he's recruiting engineers we've reported on that they're making crazy high offers, right?
2:50:53
Um they they will open Mazak will open the the checkbook for the top talent. Yeah.
2:50:59
I think the interesting thing that stood out about some of you know people were just reporting the headline numbers of saying, "Oh, you could make, you know, 10 nine figures was the number." Yeah. Nine figures.
2:51:10
But you have to look if if you're trying to recruit somebody that joined OpenAI 2, three years ago, they're they're probably run rating at $10 million a year. Yeah.
2:51:19
already on on a on a full um fully loaded comp basis.
2:51:25
So I think it makes sense.
2:51:25
What have you learned about the future of the scale business, right?
2:51:29
Is Jason going to be, you know, pounding the pavement, trying to get, you know, more customers for the core business, continue to adapt the core business.
2:51:38
Yeah, there's a lot of scale competitors right now that are saying like, "Hey, we're going to take a lot of they're foaming at the mouth."
2:51:44
Yeah, we, you know, we're we're going to use this to our advantage when we go to the other hyperscalers and say, "Do you want to do business with a company that's owned by Facebook or Meta?" Yeah, absolutely.
2:51:53
I think um it's really unclear what's going to happen with the future of scales business.
2:51:58
future of scales business. um you know obviously the meta investment you know that's expected you could see partnerships happening there on that front but what will happen with the other customers I think we don't know um and and what will happen with um yeah other competitors in the space could
2:52:13
they start to right gain ground um as scale deepens the ties with Meta we'll see I think what we do know you know we we have reported that um Alex Wang plans to to join Meta um I think for Meta he is seen as someone who is just sort reinvigorating right their AI team and this renewed AI effort. Um he's a big Um he's a big name. He's incredibly savvy.
2:52:35
Um you know very well connected and uh built a real business with scale.
2:52:40
So you know I think that's where we're in the middle of you know of the deal.
2:52:45
We're waiting you know to see the all the official details sort of as this plays out.
2:52:49
Uh earlier this week, Bill Gurley was talking about the M&A markets and why we're still seeing these kind of odd zombie acquisitions happening.
2:52:59
Uh tech was laying the blame at the foot of Lena Khan for a long time.
2:53:05
Lena Khan's obviously out.
2:53:05
Why do you think the big tech companies are still using that?
2:53:09
She's still posting though.
2:53:11
She's still she's still reposting stuff about being anti- monopolistic.
2:53:15
So she's she's, you know, she's around.
2:53:18
Is it is this more just like this is just a more efficient acquisition vehicle generally even without even in a different administration and so it's just going to be continually used.
2:53:27
I don't think this is an asset that Meta would want to own just generally, right?
2:53:32
You wouldn't want to fully own because you're you're you're you're dealing with tens of thousands of offshore contractors, right?
2:53:40
Is that something that Meta wants?
2:53:42
But they already do that with those. Sure.
2:53:44
But but but they've had issu sure they but they've also had issues with it, right? It's a liability. Anyway, sorry.
2:53:48
So, of course, you know, um Lena was is known to be, you know, aggressive on going after, you know, monopolistic behavior and especially in the tech market.
2:53:58
Um doesn't necessarily mean that the current FTC is not going to scrutinize these kinds of deals, right?
2:54:05
I would say it's way too soon to have any definitive take on how this FTC will act around these kinds of deals.
2:54:12
I think you know companies never want to um raise too many eyebrows with regulators and um even if people are from different political parties we have seen Republican controlled FTC sometimes you know I mean that is part of their job right is to review these sorts of large transactions so um that may be why you know we're seeing we're continuing to still see you know companies not want to go too far on that front. Yeah. Yeah.
2:54:34
Uh c can we move over to Microsoft?
2:54:36
It feels like Sachi Nadella has carved out a ton of territory in the AI space and uh now the game is about holding on to it.
2:54:47
Uh it seems like they might be back to training their own language models.
2:54:52
At the same time at the last Microsoft build keynote he was distinctly highlighting how model agnostic Azure was and how they would be happy to route you to any OpenAI model, any DeepSeek model, any Llama model.
2:55:04
they they they want to be Switzerland, but at the same time uh they want to have a horse in the race.
2:55:10
So what's the latest thinking around Microsoft?
2:55:15
I mean I report on Microsoft more in the context of OpenAI.
2:55:16
Um so I'm not the Microsoft expert.
2:55:19
I will say that yeah obviously we've seen um we've seen more attention around the Microsoft OpenAI relationship lately and what that means.
2:55:28
I think OpenAI is also diversifying, right?
2:55:30
They're working with other um hyperscalers now for Stargate.
2:55:32
They have Oracle on board.
2:55:34
they have soft bank financing.
2:55:36
Um, so this is no longer just like an exclusive relationship between Microsoft and OpenAI and I think that goes both ways. Yeah.
2:55:43
What is the dynamic right now in the reporter uh in the reporter talent space?
2:55:50
It seems like the value of just being a pure play writer is maybe going down, but the value of being able to acquire, you know, new net new information and actually get scoops is is higher than ever.
2:56:04
What is the dynamic right now?
2:56:06
We've seen, I think, a lot of different shakeups and and layoffs at different companies, but I'm curious what you're seeing.
2:56:13
I mean, I I think that the value of reporting, like a real original reporting, and going, getting scoops, getting people to share with you information that isn't public, um, that takes a lot of human skill that at least in my job, I, you know, I don't think that's replaceable by AI uh, for now. Yeah. Yeah.
2:56:31
That that that that's what I was getting at.
2:56:33
Um, I do think at some point maybe you would have an army of agents that would just reach out to, you know, 200 employees at a startup at at, you know, a single given time.
2:56:41
Um, but, uh, but yeah, that that that tracks. Yeah.
2:56:45
I in in terms of the Stargate uh project, uh, were you able to go visit as part of the reporting?
2:56:50
Um, can you give us kind of the lay of the land on on on what uh who who the who the major players are and what the most interesting angles to dig into in the pro in the progress in Abene uh has been. Yeah, for sure.
2:57:03
Well, shout out to my colleague Brody Ford.
2:57:05
I don't know if he's listening, but I'll send this to him after.
2:57:08
He actually went out to Abalene for me because I was I was unavailable the one day that we could go or whatever. Um, and it's astounding.
2:57:14
I mean, I saw the pictures. I got the live feed. Um, it is expansive.
2:57:17
Like I think it's hard to understand just the vast scale of it until you really see pictures, video or go there.
2:57:25
Um and you know I think that uh there was a lot of like there was sort of a lot of people doubting if Stargate was even real and I think there's still a lot we don't know about the future of this project like exactly you know where the other sites will be.
2:57:41
They've said they plan 10 more at least in the US.
2:57:43
We don't know exactly like how the financing will work.
2:57:46
work. Um Stargate we talked to Masasan for this who's obviously you know Soft Bank's leading the financing they said it's project by project we'll go step by step um but I think what we learn can learn from abene is like at least that first site that abene site is very real like it is happening there it is being
2:58:01
built out we've seen the pace of it um so you know that could end up being kind of a template or a test case right for how how um how much target can can execute in the future on all of its promises that makes a ton of sense anything else makes a ton of sense No, thank you so much for hopping on. This This was fantastic.
2:58:19
Reach out when you got your next scoop.
2:58:21
Yeah, you can have you on same day to talk about it. Some more context. This is great. Absolutely. Thanks for having me. Take care. We'll talk to you soon.
2:58:28
We are surrounded by journalists. Hold your position.
2:58:30
Uh we have Cameron from Nominal coming on the show next.
2:58:32
Oh, he's already in the studio.
2:58:33
Jordy, I'll let you take the intro. I got to run. I'll be right back. Let's do it. Welcome in. [Music] There he is.
2:58:47
What's going on, Cameron? Welcome to the show. Good to see you. Thank you. Good to see you guys.
2:58:51
You've uh you've been busy since the last time.
2:58:54
I don't I don't actually know when that was.
2:58:55
Maybe it feels like maybe a month or or two ago, but time flies.
2:58:56
I think it was Yeah, I think it was about a month ago.
2:59:00
And the fun the fun fact with that is um that was like right in the middle of the 10day you know series B uh fundra sprint.
2:59:09
Um so I absolute chaos absolute chaos and um you know people will appreciate this Connor Connor Love from Lightseed uh Ventures posted uh or you know tweeted earlier today but I was actually taking that uh that prior TBN call from the Lightseed office here uh like in between that way.
2:59:28
So he was he was able to see, all right, how how does Cam handle himself, you know, in a in a in a in a a TV like setting, not that we're Exactly. It was a good tactic.
2:59:37
He was like, "Hey, do you want to be on this and just take it from, you know, take it from our office?"
2:59:42
And then, you know, so that's awesome.
2:59:43
Break down break down the new round um kind of how it came together, who are the different players, all that good stuff. Yeah, absolutely. So, I'm really excited.
2:59:52
Yeah, we're announcing a $75 million series B. Uh that is There we go. There we go.
2:59:59
led by led by Sequoia um in particularly Alfred Lynn um is going to be joining joining Nomal's board um and then as we mentioned um there's an additional investment from Lightseed Venture Partners combination of Guru Chahal
3:00:14
there and Connor Love um which we're really excited about and then existing investment from uh from our investors at general catalyst Lux and Founders Fund um so it's basically you're collecting you're collecting them all at this point yeah got that's amazing. Talk talk about um
3:00:29
Talk talk about um business progress since since the last call.
3:00:34
I'm sure things are moving really quickly.
3:00:36
Yeah, things are moving really quickly.
3:00:38
I mean we you know we we're raising this capital um to accelerate just to go faster.
3:00:42
Um you know really three big things we're going to do with this.
3:00:46
The first is kind of continue to expand into larger and larger enterprises.
3:00:49
enterprises. We're very proud to say uh you know many of the you know the startups and scaleups building in this new hardware wave are are nominal customers um and that is going to keep growing but you know recently we've been
3:01:02
taking our product to these Fortune 500 companies you know defense primes um and the traction has been really really positive uh we're also expanding internationally um so we're already serving a handful of customers in Europe and we're going to keep keep doing that. The second big thing is product
3:01:17
The second big thing is product development.
3:01:20
Uh and so we, you know, we have a big belief that to win really big in this software for hardware world, it's going to require multiple products.
3:01:30
We've started uh our original thrust is around testing.
3:01:33
around testing. But we're having customers pull us in listing linking testing to more quality acceptance testing production manufacturing and then later in the life cycle saying hey I use nominal to build all of the software you know build all the rules
3:01:48
and logic that governs how my my system works under test and I actually just want to you know uh version control that uh organize it and I want to deploy that on my asset when it's in the field and more of a a monitoring sort of fleet monitoring fleet maintenance use case. So, we're building products um and we're
3:02:02
So, we're building products um and we're going to be expanding.
3:02:04
So, that's that's the where the funding is going. Yeah.
3:02:07
How how big is the market for this or how how should I think about the market?
3:02:11
Um is this is this something where there's a lot of incumbents that that you can kind of go after and pull away from or live? Yeah.
3:02:16
you know these words or or or are we are we kind of like uh like disagregating test functions across all the companies and and and allowing teams to move faster and selling into existing organizations.
3:02:30
existing organizations. Yeah, it's really um you know the way I think about it is it's helpful to just give like a quick you know update a kind of the status quo world and so I think we see um pretty much everywhere we go that testing is too slow and really you have
3:02:47
uh scenario A where people are using 1990 software it's pre-cloud so it's it is like especially in the aerospace and more industrial world um software that was built before the the notion of like centralizing data even existed it's uh it's crazy and uh and people are really frustrated with it. So those are you
3:03:04
So those are you think of things like um you know Seammens or or Emerson or National Instruments which I had to kind of mention last time.
3:03:11
So that is an area where there's a direct swap for spend like people people spend a ton of money there.
3:03:16
Um those are billion dollar businesses that that we are excited to be be disrupting.
3:03:20
And I think the second area is where people are taking new software and new data technologies that are not designed for hardware uh at all in the least and trying to use those to sort of aggregate together and build this like tool chain um for testing and nominal is just a better way.
3:03:39
Um and so that's sort of you know showing showing these organizations what the future can look like um and delivering that value and and and they're willing to pay for it.
3:03:49
What what kind of metrics do you track outside of core kind of business metrics?
3:03:54
Are you thinking about like like trying to figure out like the if you're increasing the the development timelines for your customers in some ways like if you can allow people to just iterate test faster, you can actually just allow them to accelerate their businesses.
3:04:07
Like how how much how much do you try to track that kind of thing?
3:04:10
I know a lot of it it's probably hard to to fully capture.
3:04:12
Yeah, I'd say I'd say I had a a a phone conversation with um with Brian Shy um CEO of Anderl where you know he sort of was saying emphatically like the one of the metrics he looks at like the single most important thing is like how fast are my uh you know individual programs testing like it is such a direct correlation to just like the success of that product.
3:04:36
Um and that is what we see like you know everywhere.
3:04:38
So at the high level like the value that we're delivering is increasing that test cadence and that throughput um you know being able to to to have you know uh cases where at our customers you know test campaigns that were supposed to take 9 months taking 6.
3:04:54
5 months right that's that's something we deliver to a customer and when that's on a $200 million program where their end customer is the DoD like that's massive right um you know it's funny for a product like nominals we actually you know we obviously track user engagement and time in app and all these sort of functions.
3:05:11
But that's honestly like not the best correlation.
3:05:13
We sort of say it was really exciting as you see more and more time people spend in the app and a lot of our northstars actually like I kind of want a test engineer to be able to drop into the app for a little bit, get the insight that they need really quickly and then if they move on, you know, that's that's actually fine.
3:05:28
Um because they're that value that is compounding.
3:05:33
Um are you guys going to actually set up an international presence at all?
3:05:35
You said you have a bunch of international customers.
3:05:38
Are we going to see a nominal office in the UK? Australia. Australia. Got to go to Australia. It's a quick flight. Canada.
3:05:44
You're naming You're naming some good places.
3:05:46
I'll say um I am I'm doing sort of nominal's first uh big, you know, international business trip actually over the next two weeks.
3:05:54
So, going to be going to the Paris Air Show.
3:05:56
For international business.
3:05:56
I love international business.
3:05:58
We love an international businessman on the show. Yeah. It's an honor. It's an honor. Yeah. Yeah.
3:06:05
um going to be going to the yeah the Paris Air Show and then and then um uh you know stopping in in uh the UK as you kind of mentioned.
3:06:13
Um yeah, I mean we're really excited and I think we'll build a backlog of business before opening like a you know physical office there but I think it's absolutely you know in in future and we're excited for that.
3:06:25
Uh you mentioned Australia general aus world like we're we're really supportive of that and they they want and need all the same things that our US-based customers do.
3:06:33
Yeah, I I I I noticed you you offer the service on on premise still.
3:06:40
Obviously, a lot of companies are moving on cloud.
3:06:42
Uh how important can you give me some dynamics around like uh hyperscaler adoption within these within within these industries like AWS GovCloud ITAR compliance like I know Palanteer got some super high ITAR clearance.
3:06:56
There's obviously different tiers to this stuff.
3:07:00
Uh yeah, is there one hyperscaler that's kind of pulled away in this category?
3:07:06
Yeah, it's a really good uh it's a good question.
3:07:07
I you know from nominal's perspective, our goal is to be as uh sort of flexible and as versatile as we can.
3:07:14
So we we don't um really pick any one you know provider.
3:07:18
I'd say from our product perspective um we have two products in the market right now.
3:07:24
The nominal core product which is where we started which is cloud-based.
3:07:26
The whole value proposition there is you can get all of your telemetry, sensor data, logs, test, you know, uh data in one central place.
3:07:34
Run analytics and and automate.
3:07:36
Uh very quickly we we launched our second product uh which is nominal connect which is actually a desktop application which sounds crazy to say and and uh you know in but we're we're meeting our our customers and we need to market where it is.
3:07:49
It's run on uh it's built in rust.
3:07:51
It's run on a game engine, right?
3:07:53
So it's not your your your normal uh uh and so it you know super deterministic workflow sub 10 millisecond latency like this game engine are you using it's Unreal. Yeah. Unreal. No way.
3:08:04
That makes a ton of sense. That's cool. Um so it's really cool.
3:08:08
So being able to to have a you know where whereas it used to be um you know maybe a a National Instruments you know desktop app with like a little widget and you you can kind of envision the um the thing from 1990.
3:08:18
Uh you know we have this insane super fast rendering 3D visualization of our customers robotic systems or drones, right?
3:08:28
Like with telemetry coming in and the power is that can run completely airgapped, right?
3:08:32
If you're in Mojave or you're downrange like doing something, all that data is still going to your laptop and then as soon as you get connectivity, it syncs back up to the the kind of nominal mothership, all that data is sort of merged and dduplicated and it's super powerful for for our customers to be able to make sense of what happened.
3:08:49
Does Epic have a different business model for this kind of like industrial use case?
3:08:52
I know that like isn't Unreal Engine free unless you're generating like a million dollars in revenue like how do you pay uh Tim Sweeney? Yeah. Yeah.
3:09:01
It's a good uh you know it's a good it's a good question.
3:09:03
I I um I'll I won't you can answer it at a high level.
3:09:09
I'm sure you can details. Yeah.
3:09:12
No, I mean it's like we we're really excited about I think we're really excited about the technology and and kind of where it where it can scale.
3:09:17
Just I'll leave it I'll leave it at that. Okay. Cool. Yeah. Yeah.
3:09:18
Well, the market is speaking. I I I looked it up.
3:09:22
The company that owns uh National um Instruments uh is actually down a few percentage points over the last 6 months, most likely in reaction to extremely correlated.
3:09:34
They're just already pricing it in. So, of course. Of course.
3:09:38
Well, thank you so much for hopping on super.
3:09:40
Do we hit the gong properly? Let's hit the gong.
3:09:43
Alfred Lynn on the board.
3:09:45
That doesn't happen every day. Amazing. Amazing. Big gong. Um, yeah, super excited. Come back on anytime.
3:09:52
Cameron, congratulations. We'll talk to you soon. Thank you guys. Appreciate it. We'll see you.
3:09:57
Our next guest is uh Anneil from Meter hopping on in 5 minutes.
3:09:59
We'll go through some time.
3:10:01
By the way, Cameron's Cameron's resume is just absolutely insane.
3:10:05
Product and growth at Ander, advisor to applied intuition. Oh, let's go.
3:10:10
Head of defense at Sale Drone.
3:10:14
Investor operator at Lux Capital.
3:10:14
and then now started nominal.
3:10:17
So, uh it's almost like he was built for this or win tour.
3:10:23
Um I mean there's other news.
3:10:23
It's not really techreated, but it's related to our friends in the Wall Street and finance community.
3:10:29
Uh the race for Democratic nomination for New York City mayor is heating up.
3:10:35
Andrew Cuomo is dropping like a stone on Poly Market.
3:10:38
Uh Zoron Mdani is uh absolutely spiking.
3:10:44
He's at 42% versus Cuomo's 56% right now.
3:10:48
Uh, Signal has a breakdown.
3:10:48
He says, "This is a textbook example of narrative discipline.
3:10:52
Whether or not you agree with Zoron's platform, the coherence is surgical.
3:10:57
Every message hits the same emotional register.
3:10:59
Every post or speech is a variation of the same core chord, anti-machine, people first, morally upright.
3:11:06
His surge is pure mimetic lift. It's pure belief. And belief spreads fast.
3:11:11
This is the guy that just says freeze the rent. That's his platform. Yes.
3:11:15
And every time he post his new bit, his new bit is um is eliminating police presence in in areas that have high crime. Yes. Yes.
3:11:22
So, a lot of acceleration excited about this.
3:11:27
A lot of people that are are anti- New York are are supporting this because they think it will destroy New York.
3:11:31
Um but he is gaining ground and he might be the next mayor. Who knows?
3:11:36
Um uh every time he posts about freezing the rent, Nikita Beer chimes in and says, "Don't you think the rent the rent should just be free?"
3:11:44
You're not going far enough. Yeah. Housing.
3:11:46
You're not going far enough pig. Capitalist pig.
3:11:48
Also, new all-time high for Oracle.
3:11:51
Let's hear it for Oracle. Wow. Let's go. Ellison is cooking. We love it.
3:11:57
Congratulations to Larry Ellison.
3:11:59
Larry's listening to this.
3:12:01
I'm sure he follows TVPN.
3:12:04
It's just fantastic news.
3:12:04
Oracle's deeply underrated.
3:12:05
It's a fantastic company.
3:12:07
Been in founder mode for decades and continues to be on an absolutely they basically own Abene. They do. They do.
3:12:12
And they're getting Yeah.
3:12:14
The Stargate project would not be happening without them, I'm sure.
3:12:15
So, we have our next guest coming into the studio in the TBP and Ultra. Welcome to the stream. How you doing? What's going on? I love the background. Very cool. How you doing? Hardware. Our hardware.
3:12:28
It's almost like you're in the hardware business. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Break it down.
3:12:30
What's What's behind you? What do you do? Yeah.
3:12:32
Uh we are a networking company and our hardware behind us is our power, routing, switching, wireless, old school stuff that powers the internet. Incredible.
3:12:43
Uh break down the news today.
3:12:46
Uh and John, get the Okay. Okay, I'll get it ready. What happened? What happened? What?
3:12:51
Uh we we we raised a new round of financing to go build even better hardware and scale up operations and physical world stuff.
3:12:57
And how much did you raise?
3:12:59
We raised about 170 million. There we go. Hit it, John. Congratulations. Best part of the day. Congratulations.
3:13:08
Um, talk about give give some backstory on on the history of the company, kind of the different stages, what it took to get here. Sure.
3:13:17
So, so we got started actually quite a few years ago.
3:13:19
And what's interesting is networking is one of the largest parts of technology, but almost no new companies get started networking.
3:13:26
companies get started networking. um you know networking supports multiple hundred billion dollar market cap businesses but almost all of them got built through acquisition nobody sat down and said hey we'll build the entire stack together cohesive operating systems hardware APIs firmware so so we
3:13:45
got started a few years ago uh building out the entire stack um the COVID and supply chain years were tough because we couldn't get any hardware out of it but the last few years for us has just been really about delivering great products to customers just like scaling it up across throughput, bandwidth, products, integration. But at the end of the day,
3:14:02
But at the end of the day, I think, you know, nobody really thinks about networking unless you're working on it or a day like this, which causes errors and takes down, you know, something like 15% of the internet or something like that. What's going on?
3:14:14
What what we we've been live the entire time the issues have been happening.
3:14:16
Can you give Can you give us a quick update on on what you think is happening there?
3:14:21
The the production team is stressed right now.
3:14:22
They're sweating right now.
3:14:24
Sweating because you guys are up.
3:14:24
There are rumors that you guys took down the internet. Oh yeah. Everyone work together.
3:14:30
Just just watch TV today. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly.
3:14:32
Well, I think the really interesting part about networking is most of the issues actually happen because of like configuration errors.
3:14:39
And today that's one of the causes for it.
3:14:42
Um because it's you know disparit hardware systems, software systems that don't really work together and they're made by many different vendors etc.
3:14:50
today was one of the reasons for not the entire reason but one of the reasons for it was like network configuration errors.
3:14:56
Wild um you guys have a a it seems like you basically have every scale up on the planet as a customer already.
3:15:03
Uh is that close to true?
3:15:06
Uh are you working towards it?
3:15:08
What what's kind of the full range of your guys' customer base?
3:15:11
Because is the job finished or is the job not finished or it's just getting started? Just getting started.
3:15:14
Are you quoting Kobe John and saying the job's not finished? Yeah.
3:15:19
Um so so our customer base I think is actually quite interesting.
3:15:24
We we do have a lot of the tech companies and folks that are scaling up as customers but probably our most interesting ones are like the manufacturing facilities, warehouses, schools, u folks that go build like ISPs and data centers and um life sciences labs.
3:15:39
All of them sort of need connectivity and internet and networking to do whatever they're doing.
3:15:44
to do whatever they're doing. Um, and you know, probably my favorite part in the last five, six years is looking at all these different types of amazing businesses that have nothing to do with Silicon Valley, but sort of are the underpinning of our economy and how
3:15:58
things get built and all the interesting work they're doing from, you know, battery manufacturing to hydrogen cells to when one of us buys something online, how quickly does it get there because there's some great business out there actually doing it, but it's all automated and then they need networking. Um, so our customer base definitely is.
3:16:14
Um, so our customer base definitely is.
3:16:16
We have a big swath of some of the great tech companies, but it's really fanned out everywhere throughout the economy, too.
3:16:23
Walk me through some of the work you're doing around hardware innovation, software innovation, business model innovation, like what's most important?
3:16:33
What's been most acceleratory for you? Yeah.
3:16:35
Uh, and and kind of uh break those down in terms of priorities and and where you're investing and what you're most excited about.
3:16:44
So I actually think uh those things are all interconnected because it's what's incentives are what drive everything.
3:16:48
So if you look at legacy companies, what they're trying to do is build hardware for X dollars and then sell it to you for X plus whatever margin they're trying to hit.
3:16:59
And so there's two ways these legacy companies can make money.
3:17:03
Either by charging customers way more than the value they're getting or by making hardware with cheaper components and less quality components, etc. Mhm.
3:17:12
For us, we don't sell hardware to customers at all.
3:17:14
Uh we just sell the whole thing as a service, which is also very new.
3:17:19
I know rest of us that work in Silicon Valley, like that's sort of kind of given in how we buy things. Yeah.
3:17:23
But doing hardware and enterprise networking that way was fairly new and we we were the first people to sort of do it.
3:17:31
But that actually drives incentives on where you go invest because we are not trying to squeeze the last 10 cents out of a component.
3:17:40
We tend to go make very different choices in hardware on what sort of components that we use, how are they laid out, how is it built, what are we optimizing for?
3:17:48
Hey, something costs another $10. Let's go do it.
3:17:50
But what's the end customer thing like?
3:17:53
And then the better hardware that you have, you're enabled to go build better software.
3:17:58
And this loop sort of hits.
3:18:00
And so our business model is that not only do we build the hardware and software, we actually deployed and maintain it ourselves too.
3:18:07
We're fully vertically integrated.
3:18:09
Uh I know I know a lot of the tech companies don't want to touch the real world things, but you know the whole messiness of racks and cables and manufacturing.
3:18:17
We go do not just the pretty parts of it, but also the underbelly if you will of actually going and deploying all of it.
3:18:24
And we do this all without any capital cost to customers and only marginal cost on operating expenditure compared to how talk about that.
3:18:32
talk about that. talk about why a a CFO would want to have opex versus cap you know capex in this type of scenario and is that kind of a driver around decision- making it it is but it depends on the business right so if you have businesses that are
3:18:48
peown for example you actually want it to be capex and so our our contracts can hit the books as a lease so it doesn't hit their operating margins they get an e bit of boost that happens too but ultimately What customers actually care
3:19:03
about is do I have to take a bunch of capital and buy hardware that the moment I buy it it's a depreciating asset then I have to pay a bunch of money to go install it and then every four or five years I have to go buy new hardware cuz some new technology comes out etc or if
3:19:20
this hardware goes bad I have to go replace it myself that's the part CFOs care about that we remove entirely which is instead of having to go spend massive amounts of capital and operating expenditure to kind of fix all this stuff. We take all that on and sort of
3:19:33
We take all that on and sort of take on all the risk instead of the customers.
3:19:37
Then that contract can be actuated as opex or capex depending on what their business needs.
3:19:45
Talk about uh meters business.
3:19:45
You're doing a lot of things.
3:19:49
You're doing hardware software.
3:19:50
You have I'm assuming a network of you know team all over the country that are you know helping with installs.
3:19:57
talk about kind of the efficiency of the business and and uh I'm assuming you know this new $170 million round is is you know a testament to the the strength of the core business.
3:20:11
Yeah, it's a really interesting core business, right? Because you're right.
3:20:14
We get to go design hardware, make software, and then we build these racks like the one you're seeing behind us and then actually go deploy these by the hundreds for some customers everywhere.
3:20:24
And we're not just in United States, we're in Canada, we're in Europe, everywhere in the world hopefully by um next year.
3:20:32
And the operational parts of it are super challenging.
3:20:35
Um if you can imagine a data center in the middle of nowhere um or manufacturing facility, uh there's legacy hardware that's old hardware in there.
3:20:45
You have to go kind of sort of fix that and then you're integrating it, but then you're putting in this new entire rack.
3:20:49
So what what's sort of important for us is you know it's like a a duck swimming in a lake.
3:20:58
Um uh the customer doesn't see all the kicking that happens underneath to kind of deliver this to them.
3:21:02
And our work is always tying these things in together.
3:21:08
Why are we building the hardware?
3:21:08
How is the software getting built?
3:21:10
How are we deploying it and maintaining it?
3:21:12
And then any issues we see on one end should then be a loop back to how we build better hardware.
3:21:18
What choices are we making?
3:21:19
You know just this morning bunch of my colleagues were arguing literally what type of ports where should go so it's easy for install and and that loom is a new way of thinking in networking infrastructure even though after computing and CPUs and Intel networking is the oldest and largest uh part of all of technology.
3:21:41
So uh you you I mean you you you you design, develop, manufacture, make this network equipment, you're deploying it as a lease on a more rental basis.
3:21:51
Does that create a capex problem for you?
3:21:54
Like how are you thinking about your the way your balance sheet is growing and developing?
3:22:01
Uh is debt going to play a role earlier than it might at most other companies in your business because of the structure of what you're building?
3:22:10
Yeah, this is a really interesting question.
3:22:12
So, if you looked at historically how networking hardware got built, somebody built it for, let's say, $500 and bomb cost, but by the time it ends up in a customer's hands, it's like $5,000.
3:22:26
So, networking companies have enjoyed tremendous margins.
3:22:28
So, you should start there at any time.
3:22:30
Uh second, what we also try to do is a lot of our customers because we're dealing with physical spaces, whether it's in retail or manufacturing or data centers, anywhere, the buildout times are predictable, right?
3:22:45
Because there's a certain date you're trying to hit when a data center goes live or a manufacturing facility goes live or a school goes live.
3:22:50
So a lot of our manufacturing can be predictive towards that.
3:22:54
Unlike other hardware companies, we don't have to hold massive amounts of inventory without knowing where it's going.
3:23:00
We do have issues on like trying to figure out exact timing there.
3:23:04
We're not always perfect, but we can do that.
3:23:06
So, to answer your question, we actually use debt a lot more and plan to use a debt a lot more to scale up what we do on deploying with our real estate partners.
3:23:18
A big focus of what we also do is not only do we directly sell to customers, but we also go partner with real estate firms to just include meter in as a default.
3:23:27
Uh, and that's actually where the name meter comes from.
3:23:29
If you look at a building, there's electricity, there's water, there's cell phone lines, there's power meters, water meters.
3:23:35
This should be more like a utility.
3:23:37
Why is it that we're all struggling to kind of wrangle it uh to get it into working in any type of space?
3:23:44
So for us the debt and where that plays in is a little bit on hardware but a lot of it also on deployment and actually getting it out to the world and the pace of which we can do expecting a customer and some sort of discounted cash flow expectation of 12 18 24 months from now.
3:24:01
Talk to me about um the the the kind of like wheelhouse customer for you or the wheelhouse deployment.
3:24:10
Um, sounds like, you know, apartment building makes sense.
3:24:15
Scale up startup office makes sense.
3:24:18
It's probably overkill for the home office.
3:24:20
You might just want to get a an Amazon arrow uh mesh networking system.
3:24:25
Uh, at the same time, you know, you look at Google's campus, it's uh it's absolutely massive.
3:24:30
Uh, are you going one direction or the other?
3:24:32
Are you maxed out or are there specific oddities that you can kind of illuminate on what it'll take how you'll have to change the business or scale to satisfy a a client like Meta's Silicon Valley campus which is multiple buildings and probably one of the most complex networking infrastructures you know in America.
3:24:54
Um, is this something where you can just kind of copy paste your current solution so many times and it all fits together or will there be new uh technical innovations that you need to hit to actually service someone at that scale?
3:25:07
I think the answer is both.
3:25:07
But we already doing customers at that scale and more uh for example bridgewater who's the largest in the world runs on meter um uh as an example.
3:25:17
Uh but I think we will go to continue even more technical advancements to hopefully bring new things that legacy folks just can't do or won't do or can't think of and uh sort of implement.
3:25:29
But I I think overall what's really interesting about networking is that nobody gets to do custom networking if you will because it has to go work with the rest of the world.
3:25:40
Generally when you look at enterprise companies they end up building some sort of Frankenstein thing of what they started off with that becomes a custom thing for each enterprise customer.
3:25:49
For us any enterprise customer has to then go work with the rest of the internet.
3:25:55
So they don't get to do their own protocols their own things.
3:25:58
So largely there are things on the margin but largely whether you're a Google or Meta or Bridgewater or a school customer or large universities that we do all of them use the same internet if you will.
3:26:10
Uh and this is also the same in like data centers too.
3:26:15
Um what you would find in majority of nonGPU data centers is not that different what you would find in a large campus because it all has to flow together.
3:26:25
The packets must flow end to end.
3:26:27
Wait, what's the difference between nonGPU data centers and GPU data centers in this context? Yeah.
3:26:32
So, so yeah, in GPU stuff, there's actually a lot that happens between two GPUs and between clustered GPUs. Got it.
3:26:38
That's a different type of networking.
3:26:41
There's a lot of work that's happening.
3:26:42
Obviously, Nvidia with their Melanox four years ago and what's happening now with ultra Ethernet, but just everything else is actually relatively same.
3:26:50
What was the what was the key word you just said? Ultra. Ultra Ethernet.
3:26:53
Ultra Ethernet is a new thing that's happening.
3:26:55
Is this I remember Cat 5, Cat 6, I've heard about Cat 7. Is this like cat 8?
3:27:00
What are we talking here?
3:27:02
This is like a whole different ballgame.
3:27:04
So uh if you if you look at you know uh the joke in the networking world is uh you know uh Ethernet is dead, long live Ethernet.
3:27:13
Uh you know every sort of 15 20 years uh Ethernet is predicted that it will be the end of it.
3:27:20
uh but you know somebody comes up with innovations on how it can scale up on speed on throughput on bandwidth on security.
3:27:26
So ultra ethernet is this new version that's coming out for you know next phase of all the data center buildout that's happening because you know roughly the US has more data centers than the rest of the world combined.
3:27:38
Wow roughly let's go here for America that's a white pill right there.
3:27:45
Everyone says we're falling behind but not today.
3:27:48
But the rest of the world is trying to catch up to get to that and the US is trying to 3x where we are.
3:27:52
So there's a lot we're undefeated.
3:27:59
We support meters international strategy. So it's kind of nuanced.
3:28:01
We're pro but also anti as long as we're benefiting.
3:28:08
Anyway, yeah, there's a lot that goes into it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense.
3:28:11
I mean, we we've experienced it here.
3:28:12
there's uh like new generations of just streaming cameras that do power and video over Ethernet and and you and you know we're thinking about kind of the V2 of the studio and there's a ton of insane things that you can do do over Ethernet.
3:28:25
It's no longer just LAN cable and so must be fun to be at the heart of that.
3:28:30
Uh Jordy, any more questions or should we let them get back to building?
3:28:33
Congratulations on the the funding milestone.
3:28:34
Congratulations and uh yeah, check in next time.
3:28:38
We'll we'll check back anytime. Thank you both. See you soon. Bye. Cheers.
3:28:41
Uh our next guest will be joining in just a few minutes.
3:28:45
Uh in the meantime, it is an absolute banger day. Lots of fun. I know.
3:28:48
But I was just going to say it's actually insane.
3:28:50
We've been able to keep the show up with every the entire It is crazy.
3:28:52
We Yeah, we got lucky today.
3:28:54
Uh did did have we ever has the stream ever actually gone fully down?
3:28:58
We had Zoom go down one day and we were kind of kind of kind of wrecked by that.
3:29:03
Um well uh let's bring in our next guest.
3:29:07
Ian in the chat says uh Mix Panel, Shopify, and GCP are still down for him.
3:29:12
All the services that he's in.
3:29:14
Honestly, if you're worried about the show going down, do not worry.
3:29:17
Just send us your mailing address.
3:29:19
We will print the show onto vinyl and we'll send you a record of the show so you can listen to it. Same day shipping. Exactly.
3:29:27
So that you can get the show almost live, you know, a couple hours. Couple hours later. Yeah.
3:29:34
But um yeah, we'll also do a lot of innovation on the vinyl pressing because I think that takes a while too.
3:29:39
Anyway, our next guest is here. Welcome to the stream. How you doing, Trish? What's going on? Good to see you. How are you doing? Good to see you guys. Thanks for having me on. It's great to have you. It's great to have you. Uh big day.
3:29:49
You guys announced a series A, new website, and you took down the whole internet.
3:29:57
You took down the whole internet.
3:29:59
I can't confirm or deny it was part of the launch strategy, but good timing was. Uh, give us the stats. How much you raised?
3:30:05
Yeah, raised $20 million. There we go. Congratulations.
3:30:11
Who did you raise it from?
3:30:13
Yeah, sound led the round participation. Hit it again for sound. Hit it again. Congratulations. Um, amazing. Sorry. Continue. We got a little excited. That was a good gong. Yeah.
3:30:27
participation from Buckley, Nabal, Arj Vowsi, founder of Dropbox, Arvin from Perplexity, bunch of other awesome angels. Yeah. Very cool. Very cool.
3:30:35
Uh, break down the pitch.
3:30:38
Uh, like like how are you positioning the company right now because I know you've been doing a lot of different stuff.
3:30:43
They pivoted from pizza to something.
3:30:44
I know them as the pizza delivery company.
3:30:47
Uh, there there was that Zoom company that was doing pizza on demand.
3:30:51
They that didn't go so well.
3:30:52
So, obviously a huge white space.
3:30:54
Well, they just did pizza for a day.
3:30:55
they sold out and then they moved on to the next thing.
3:30:57
So give us an update on on the platform.
3:30:59
I know how how are you positioning it? For sure.
3:31:00
how are you positioning it? For sure. So I think for us always the mission of anti-metal has been how do we simplify infrastructure but current moment what's really different is you know software engineering the bottleneck used to always be programming like if you could build a software you could ship it you could distribute to everyone suddenly
3:31:17
your product is live now you have all this AI assisted stuff like really awesome products like you know cursor lovable vote v0ero and increasingly like the latter half of that equation which is deploying that code maintaining it making sure it scales like going from one user to 1 million is increasingly the bottleneck on like how companies, you know, are actually going to grow and sustain. Um, like you know, the short of
3:31:36
Um, like you know, the short of it is like writing code is no longer the hard part, right?
3:31:39
It's all this operations and and maintenance.
3:31:40
And so what we're really indexing on is building this product that helps you better manage, you know, and automate infrastructure.
3:31:48
So, a lot of that is, you know, the nuance of infrastructure versus code is a lot of it is knowledge that is baked into, you know, people's heads.
3:31:56
Like you have that one senior engineer who just knows how everything works.
3:31:59
that's your go-to guy when something breaks or you need to spin up something.
3:32:02
Uh, but that's not super sustainable, right?
3:32:03
And this like notion that comprehension can just scale linearly as you hire more hire more people isn't super tenable anymore.
3:32:10
We're like emitting a bunch of data.
3:32:10
All that data is super fragmented.
3:32:13
Everyone's super specialized.
3:32:13
Everyone's super specialized. And so for us what we're trying to do is you know start going into companies plugging into their entire infra surface area whether it's like source code their cloud their ticketing system whatever it might be really understand why things are failing um and basically pull in data and give
3:32:31
them these golden pathways as to what's going on why is it happening what prescriptive action should I take that is going to help me fix this and along the way sort of learning what are the ingrained practices your organization uh that part is super important in the sense that we don't want to build like an opinionated platform from says like this is good or this is bad, right? That's pretty subjective to each
3:32:46
That's pretty subjective to each company.
3:32:47
So, it's a little more about learning, okay, given this tenant, what's going to be good for them?
3:32:51
How do they prefer to operate?
3:32:52
You know, what's going to make their systems perform the best? Makes a ton of sense.
3:32:56
How much how much are you spending time thinking about from a product standpoint?
3:33:00
trying to solve things that are sort of human nature to some degree versus like it feels like that the nature of software development is changing so quickly.
3:33:08
But if you can kind of focus in on on what will always be true and and you know many people would say that's human nature, you can create something like durable and valuable out of that. Yeah.
3:33:21
I think a big thing for us is, you know, some companies try to position this like, hey, we're a full-time employee and we're going to like automate this functional way for you.
3:33:27
I think for us it's a little more of how do we take all this knowledge that exists in a bunch of people's heads, institutionalize it into a system, encode it into a system such that it's reusable.
3:33:35
Like the dream for us as companies go from asking this question of like yo, can we keep this running to what can we build next and really taking away this time for maintenance uh that a lot of people are spending their time on.
3:33:46
So you know I think human nature like inevitably all info problems are kind of human problems like you know someone messed up a config or someone didn't really understand what's going on.
3:33:54
Uh, and in that sense, you know, working with our users to understand like what's their preferred behavior, why do they want their stack set up this way, why have they chosen the tools they did, um, and not trying to like force an opinion down their throat. That makes sense.
3:34:05
Uh c can you talk to us about um some of the newest problems that companies are facing with LLM inference costs just faults that come from this new paradigm of running agents and running tons of inference and and just taking advantage of all the tools.
3:34:27
Uh we saw Sacha Nadella at Microsoft Build talk about model routing being something that he was really pushing at Azure. GCP has a similar tool.
3:34:37
Um, are you hearing from customers?
3:34:39
customers? Like right now we're in this era where uh every new model release and price drop basically goes viral on X and so unless you're under a rock like it's pretty easy to move over to the latest and greatest thing, not leave a bunch of
3:34:53
money on the table, but are there new problems that you foresee as things become a little more commoditized or a little bit more calcified that companies aren't using best practices or they're running into new problems from the kind of AI age generally? Yeah, I mean I
3:35:05
Yeah, I mean I think the first one is like what you struck on the head which is all of this AI stuff is super nent.
3:35:10
That means there's not a ton of like super robust tooling out there how to monitor evaluate these things.
3:35:15
You know people are building their own frameworks on the fly.
3:35:18
I think like most companies that are really succeeding are not using something off the shelf.
3:35:21
They're building it in house right so there's a lot of nuance that goes into these things.
3:35:24
The other thing is you know models are another potentially single point of failure.
3:35:27
Like if cloud goes down like what happens to your product?
3:35:30
Are you ready to do model routing or are you going to do something else?
3:35:31
you going to do something else? uh but I think like you know putting them into like a broader system perspective they're not like new problems in the sense of these are things systems engineers or you know data architects have had to think about for a long time but obviously more and more companies
3:35:44
are doing these things and they're really complex systems I I think the second part of that is actually just like you know we don't index on this super highly but something we're seeing is more companies are just pushing more software like highly verticalized niche
3:35:55
to their internals like you know why go put something on a retool dashboard when I can like build it and bolt and probably get a more nuance tailored experience So I think that coupling of like hey we're working on a pretty nent space that there isn't a ton of structure around and we're trying to figure out at
3:36:09
the same time combined with we just have more infra and more services running period is creating this like really chaotic environment where people are you know stuck in the trenches of like debugging things figuring out how do we scale them uh paying down tech dev sort of thing. Is there anyone on the
3:36:22
Is there anyone on the hyperscaler side that you think is like really underrated right now? Yeah.
3:36:25
Um, honestly, OCI, I think, uh, Oracle Cloud, they're never part of the conversation.
3:36:32
I think all these other clouds have really great offerings, really great services.
3:36:35
I think the thing about Oracle is, you know, they don't sell a bunch of services on top.
3:36:38
They have a really good foundation.
3:36:40
Like, these guys have been in the computing business for quite a while.
3:36:42
I don't think it's the sexiest option out there, but like from a price perspective, security perspective, I think they're pushing a lot internally on what that's going to look like over the next couple of years.
3:36:51
Um, but yeah, I think underrated. That's amazing.
3:36:53
the uh uh stock hit the all-time high today.
3:36:56
Let's hear it out for alltime highs and generational run. Fantastic.
3:37:01
What's your guys I'm just curious since you guys are so deep in the weeds on this.
3:37:04
Uh what's your what's your personal uh AI, you know, codegen stack right now?
3:37:09
What are what are you and the team loving?
3:37:11
Uh right now we have cursor for the entire team.
3:37:15
Uh some people preferred claude code depends you know different strokes for different folks.
3:37:20
Um, but yeah, I mean like people are using chat GBT, claude, cursor.
3:37:24
Cursor is probably by and far the biggest one.
3:37:26
We're finding a lot of success with some of the agentic stuff like cloud code, but I think the median for us is people are loving cursor.
3:37:32
That's probably been the best coding experience. Very cool. mostly tennis.
3:37:35
Uh what about just go to market um top of funnel like you're it's an interesting super interesting company because you've been able to go like massively viral with what is an enterprise like software company like it would be different if you were selling like an energy drink.
3:37:52
I would kind of expect like a stunt and oh yeah everyone's talking about it but uh you've been able to break through in a really interesting way in in in the ex community in the venture capital community.
3:38:02
Um, what are you seeing that's working on the top of funnel side?
3:38:06
What viral loops are you taking advantage of?
3:38:08
Flywheels, just break down the marketing side.
3:38:10
Yeah, I mean like you know growth is a big part of our DNA.
3:38:14
I think largely from you know my co-founder Mattly I like a beast at growth and marketing.
3:38:19
Um, you know for us uh a lot of it at least in the early stage right now is you want to grab people's attention obviously attention economy.
3:38:26
I think the the really nice thing for us is this is a problem like every engineer we talk to has faced or seen to some degree.
3:38:32
Uh even people on the operational side when they're like running a business, they're like, "Holy crap, like we couldn't push this feature out because we were stuck like fixing the service or paying down tech debt instead of launching the new thing."
3:38:41
Um but yeah, I mean we're doing all sorts of things.
3:38:45
I think candidly you're going to see a bunch of it over the coming months.
3:38:47
Um we're going to have a you know bigger splash later this year, but yeah, more to come. Can't wait. Cool. Amazing.
3:38:53
Well, you'll have to hop back on when that bigger splash happens. 100%.
3:38:57
Uh, great talking to you.
3:38:57
We'll uh congratulate Great to Great to get the full update.
3:39:01
I think we're both on the on the cap. Yeah, we'll talk soon. Love it. Awesome, dude. Thanks, guys. Talk soon. Have a good one.
3:39:08
Uh, let's close out by telling you about Figma. Figma. com.
3:39:12
Think bigger, build faster.
3:39:14
Figma helps design and development teams build great products together.
3:39:16
You can get started for free.
3:39:18
I have a challenge for the audience.
3:39:20
your uh your personal website is probably bad.
3:39:23
Go on Figma, make a new one, and just ship a website.
3:39:27
Do it in in like five minutes. Fantastic.
3:39:29
Uh speaking of design, Signal's been on an absolute tear breaking down all the WWDC updates.
3:39:33
Um uh he says, "Two quick observation observations after using iOS 26 and iPad OS 26 for a few days. iOS 26 feels great. The system is fluid. Buttons are larger.
3:39:48
Everything responds with intention.
3:39:49
It's super enjoyable and fresh.
3:39:51
iPad OS 26 is a breakthrough.
3:39:54
Productivity finally feels native.
3:39:54
File handling, window management, multitasking are intuitive and fast.
3:39:58
The most fluid and powerful computing experience on the planet for most tasks.
3:40:03
He says he does everything except code on an iPad.
3:40:06
And so I've I've every time there's a new update, I'm always like, "Oh, maybe I should pick up an iPad. Maybe I should." I'm tempted.
3:40:13
This might be the one that does it for me.
3:40:15
It's a bad point in the release cycle to buy an iPad Pro because it's over 400 days since they launched the last one.
3:40:21
So, they'll probably refresh it at the next iPhone event.
3:40:23
But, uh I'm I'm I'm definitely thinking about getting it uh on here.
3:40:28
I think it could work really well for running the show.
3:40:29
Got a couple iPads around the house that just kind of collect dust.
3:40:33
Collect a lot of dust, but maybe I'll upgrade and maybe you can get back in.
3:40:37
I think you got to commit to that being How is uh your your uh iOS 26 experience so far?
3:40:43
Have you run into any more problems?
3:40:45
Uh, it's pretty good so far.
3:40:47
I mean, it's still, you know, my phone is like 6 years old, so it's a little bit slow, but overall it's been totally fine. I like it a lot. Yeah.
3:40:56
Getting a six sixy old iPhone.
3:40:56
I was asking him I was I was asking him like, "Show me it."
3:41:00
And he starts swiping through his apps and one and on one screen he just has like 25 copies of What app was that? Uh, Chick-fil-A. Chick-fil-A.
3:41:09
He He somehow got the Chick-fil-A. the one app.
3:41:12
You're only supposed to be able to install the app once.
3:41:14
Somehow he got 26 copies of it installed. You got to have 26.
3:41:17
If you're serious about If you're serious about Chick-fil-A, you should have at least 26.
3:41:23
26 copies just in case 24 of them break, I guess.
3:41:26
Uh give us the update on the art history project. How's it going? Are you an expert yet?
3:41:30
Uh, by the way, my wife texted me and said that uh it's it's extremely embarrassing that we didn't know that Greek statues were painted because apparently that's common knowledge, but also she has a she's an art history. Okay.
3:41:40
The art history major is common knowledge if you're if you're if you're a renowned expert. Yeah. Yeah.
3:41:47
Anyway, g give us the latest art history fact. How are you doing? Yeah.
3:41:49
So, so I I took another quiz, another like assessment. Um, this time I got 50%. Oh, very good.
3:41:55
So, that's 10% in only I think like an hour and a half.
3:41:57
compound that you'll be at 50% more than 25% improvement.
3:42:02
Honestly, give yourself some credit. Yeah. 25% improvement. Yeah. Yeah.
3:42:05
But, you know, if I get 10% every hour and a half, that's, you know, math checks out. Extrapolate a bit.
3:42:08
I think it's like 7 and 1/2 hours. I should be at 100%. Fantastic.
3:42:11
So, I should have do it again. You could be at 200%. 200%, 300%.
3:42:15
You could be the world expert.
3:42:17
Uh, did you learn anything else interesting about art history?
3:42:19
Do you have any more facts to share with us or are you tapped out?
3:42:22
I've been reading a lot about this guy, um, Giorgio Vasari. Okay.
3:42:26
So he's kind of he's 16th century.
3:42:29
He's kind of a polymath um author, historian, painter, sculptor.
3:42:32
He's kind of like the uh the Plutarch of of art, right?
3:42:37
So Plutarch writes uh noble lives of uh or parallel lives of noble Greeks and Romans, right?
3:42:41
Um and then Visari kind of writes the same thing for uh kind of Renaissance art.
3:42:46
Um but kind of this controversial guy.
3:42:49
He he writes about, you know, he he looks at art from the perspective of the artist.
3:42:52
the perspective of the artist. um which is you know controversial in the sense that like later on this guy um Winkkelman I think okay he he criticizes Visari he says no you should you know separate the art from the artist you should look at art kind of in and of itself by itself um but yeah a lot
3:43:11
that's where it came from I've heard the term separate the art Chris from Pace would just say absolutely not we're not going to separate it no we're going to look at it the artist is if we were to issue you a termination letter today would you feel more confident now that you've at least studied art. Well, I I
3:43:22
Well, I I actually your job prospects. I mean, yeah.
3:43:27
So, so so I I also looked at those other stats about just general employment and you know, so I'm actually a physics major. I'm not CS. Sure.
3:43:32
Um and physics is actually the second most unemployed.
3:43:37
So So they're at uh physics majors are at I think 7. 8%. CS was at 6. 1.
3:43:43
So um I think I think I probably would go into art history.
3:43:47
I mean I I don't got much else. So amazing. Underrated. underrated.
3:43:52
I think we just discovered some massive alpha.
3:43:54
It wouldn't really take that much to double the number of art history majors.
3:43:57
You know, there's only 2,000 of them, right? Or something like that. Yeah. Well, 2001 now. 2001. 2001. Um, amazing.
3:44:03
Let's rip through some timeline. Great work, Tyler. Yep.
3:44:08
We have some we have some news.
3:44:10
Uh, congratulations to Crusoe.
3:44:10
Uh, Chase Lock Miller been on the show.
3:44:14
Uh they are partnering with Brookfield on a $750 million debt facility to build the intelligent infrastructure of the future.
3:44:23
Do we have to ring the gong? I think hit it, John. Hit it.
3:44:24
That's a lot of That's a lot of pesos. That's a lot of pennies.
3:44:30
Uh congratulations to the whole team over there. Fantastic.
3:44:32
We love big data centers.
3:44:34
We love uh scaling laws, putting big training runs on the data center. Fantastic.
3:44:40
We got another post from Z.
3:44:41
What are some good baby names for someone just getting into nominative determinism?
3:44:46
I got to say it came to me immediately.
3:44:49
Oh, I guess it's here as a comment, too, but I was going to say if it's a boy, Chad.
3:44:52
Uh, it's just so obvious.
3:44:54
Um, Chad, I think, is going to come back in a big way.
3:44:57
I think it it sort of waned in popularity when it was more of a slur, but now now it's just massive alpha there.
3:45:04
It can kind of be an inside joke for you and the other dads.
3:45:08
20 years from now, your son, you know, little baby Chad turns into a man. Oh. Oh, he's a Chad. Huge surprise.
3:45:13
You know, it was, you know, uh Johnny IV was in the news because he went to OpenAI.
3:45:22
Uh but he's technically Sir Johnny IV because he's been kned by by the uh by the the British royalty, right?
3:45:28
And I was thinking we need an American version of sir of knighting.
3:45:33
And I think what we should do is we should take all the Chads and the ones who are really really impactful, the ones who have driven, you know, massive capital investment like Chad Buyers, they should be knited in an American way and they should earn the title Giga.
3:45:50
And so and so for his contributions, the president should take a sword and tap him on both shoulders and knight him. Giga Chad Buyers. Giga Chad Buers.
3:45:58
I think I I I think that would really really it would be the American version of the nighting. Yeah.
3:46:04
You know, and it's based purely on how much capital formation 100%.
3:46:08
There's no other criteria.
3:46:11
That's that's the way it needs to go.
3:46:13
I mean, so step one, name your son, Chad.
3:46:15
Step two, get him into capital allocation on the private side ideally, but public markets will work too. You're still eligible.
3:46:21
There's some more good comments in here.
3:46:23
Grit Capital says King or Don. Donald. Yeah, Don. Don. Donald.
3:46:29
I never never thought about the dawn.
3:46:31
Yeah, that's where dawn comes from. Yeah, I think so.
3:46:33
Uh, in other news, Anan Swal says, "My first and only angel investment went to zero today." Well, founder of stake.
3:46:41
Yeah, should have made 50.
3:46:44
I'm sure one of them would have worked out.
3:46:46
Made it all back in one trade.
3:46:47
fascinating because he's the founder of CB Insights, which you would think he would be addicted to angel investing with all that data and stuff, but he knew his life's work was to build that company and that's what he focused on and he only invested in one company. Fascinating.
3:47:00
Very, very dealership guy responds, "Congrats." Very funny. Uh anyway. Yeah. Yeah.
3:47:05
I mean, he said he learned, "I don't really enjoy."
3:47:07
And if you don't enjoy it, you're not going to be good at it, so stay out of the game.
3:47:12
Uh Paula says, "Diet Cokes or fridge cigarettes?" So true. Silly. So true.
3:47:17
Just drink them all day long.
3:47:17
All right, this is a good place to end.
3:47:19
I like how Zuck has been back against the wall like 37 times since 2007 and every times resoundingly wins, but each times he he has a crisis.
3:47:30
People are like, "Oh man, Zuck is cooked." Yep. So true. Yeah.
3:47:33
Do not count the AI talent crisis is is merely a bump in the road for for old Zuck. He's he's cooking.
3:47:41
We've all We've all been there.
3:47:44
We've all, you know, we've all tried. Yeah.
3:47:45
We've all been running a trillion dollar company, a personal behemoth, you know. Yes. Yes.
3:47:50
We all have something you need to wrangle and get out. Gotta power.
3:47:53
Whether it's a 4 hour stream or or a or a two trillion parameter model, you know, you got to get it out.
3:47:58
Well, this was a great show.
3:48:00
I got to give it up to the to the incredible production team while everything goes down internet.
3:48:05
We learned everything there is to know about art. We're experts, too. He's an expert. Yeah.
3:48:12
Um, now we got to worry about poaching because I imagine a lot of the galleries are going to be watching this and they're going to be, "Oh, new art history just dropped. We got a picture." Understands physics. Yep.
3:48:21
Live streaming and computer science.
3:48:24
Knows everything there is to know about. He knows everything. The history of art.
3:48:27
Anyway, thank you for watching.
3:48:29
Leave us five stars on Apple Podcast and Spotify.