you're watching tvpn live from the Temple of Technology The Fortress of Finance the capital of capital today is Monday March 3D and this show starts now we got a great show for you guys today we're talking ramp fundraise we're talking strategic crypto Reserve we're talking about tsmc potentially investing a hundred billion dollar in America let's go also speaking of America we
landed on the moon again we're back America is back should have a flat earther call in probably not doing too well today in shambles sh absolute shambles uh also we're talking massive garages apparently it's a trend and the Wall Street Journal covered it and we just had to cover it and we had to cover it it's people are building 6,000 foot garages 3,00 like four times the size of you know average house in La uh
Minnesota built different we're also doing some Callins today we got uh Shi monach calling in at uh 1:30 hopefully and P cormick at 12 30 Pacific and so we'll kick it off take you through the stories and uh yeah break it all down break it down John break it down uh let's kick off with I gotta adjust my headphones too loud when I when I get loud it's it's a little bit too much um we're bringing the energy up let's go
because we got some big news today we do yeah uh ramp reached a new valuation $ 13 billion it's a lot of money it's a big number uh and so Eric posts today ramp reached a new value $ 13 billion we're not Steve Jobs or Wilbur Wright we don't invent the next iPhone or flying machine our job is more modest save you time and money so perhaps you can and there's levels to this they went
with the financial times for the writeups yeah at this point right this shows a sign of maturity you know skipping over the uh you know typical crunch Bas Tech crunch announcement uh very cool to see and I like that Eric is leading uh with uh by being a little humble here right he's saying we the platform in which you create the next iPhone not calling out that they're the next iPhone and I think that's that's
what you want out of uh a financial institution you don't want them uh you know thinking that they're Reinventing the wheel and making it all about them right you just want it to sort of run in the background yeah you can tell he's been uh listening to a lot of David C's podcast y uh Founders podcast because he says we got here by taking Charlie monger's quote to Heart Take a simple
idea and take it seriously and SRA has literally said that to me on a go before yeah about about podcasting so it's a simple idea but if you take it seriously it can grow and grow and grow uh our simple idea save every business time and money in less than six years we incorporated have saved businesses $2 billion in 20 million hours over half in the past 12 months alone efficiency
isn't flashy but it builds enduring businesses Sam Walton cut Walmart supply chain down from five components to three Henry Ford cut the time to complete a car from 12 hours to 93 minutes we cut the cost to buy anything from 30 minutes to 30 seconds ramp puts lessons of History's Greatest entrepreneurs on autopilot ask Poshmark who hit free cash flow goals 5 months early or andal who's
able to focus fully on their mission or notion and cursor who maintain momentum without sacrificing control most companies slow as they grow that's not happening at ramp we're determined it won't happen to you either as we enter the AI age finances going from steer assist to self-driving expenses that categorize themselves and money that reallocates itself for higher returns that's an interesting vision
yeah I love going back to the simple idea I think every founder uh usually Founders start with a simple idea and then it gets dramatically more complex and then it's a good sign if you can re simplify it down to just like this core core idea and saving every business time and money is a fantastically simple idea that uh they can build for decades off of that one simple idea right so um
amazing to see uh you know I think this this round from from what we know um got done last year and and ramp has just kept uh this ridiculous pace and uh I expect to see many more announcements like it this year yeah also interesting that uh this is not a new fund raise that goes under the balance sheet it's a secondary sale yep essentially and so the the structure here is uh the
5-year-old company hit a new valuation as part of a share sale in which investors including Singaporean Sovereign wealth fund GIC us private Equity Group Stripes inventor capitalist including Josh kushner's Thrive Coosa Ventures and general Catalyst bought $150 Million worth of Employee Stock Y and so for early employees they've been working for a long time they gets some liquidity and ramp gets to repic the
equity which allows them to hire more people show them that they're making yeah not notably this was above the uh 2022 Mark which is a milestone 7.65 billion in April of last year Y and uh yeah I mean ramp is is known for being I would say aggressive and high throughput on valuation and and marking the company uh that's something that is can often be very very difficult to do
for companies because uh it can sometimes mean you're going down and that's exactly what happened uh years ago during the the kind of the interest rate hike and the the failure of svb ramp was at 8.1 billion valuation in 2022 but drop to a 5.8 billion a year later is higher interest rates hit consumer spending factors that also h rival fintech companies such as stripe and Clara fintech obviously went through
volatility given the wild swing in rates and spending across businesses and consumers what I always thought was super interesting about this was that ramp ripped off the Band-Aid really quickly and there are a lot of companies that didn't repic their equity and there was always a question of is it a zombie corn which is something people were saying but coming out and saying hey
yeah look like the the market is down 50% we're down 30% we're still growing we're growing into our value valuation it's actually a very strong sign of strength and it means that for employees companies that fix a on a headline number yep and are trying to recruit employees based on that you know 20222 were worth a billion dollars really doesn't work well for anyone right it's only fall for it for so long
employees are intelligent they figure stuff out and uh they're not going to you know they're eventually going to say yeah I'm going to go somewhere else like My Equity is worth a fraction of of what it was initially priced at and you know I can go join another company that's priced fairly given their traction so Y and and and so they delivered on exactly that you know they repriced so sure the
employees that got in at 8.1 went down to 5.8 they they were like oh but at least they had transparency on what that was worth it wasn't zero obviously because there was a a round that happened at 5.8 and now it's up and they can kind of repic and say okay this is what this is this is where we're going and so congratulations to the ram team we're going to have a couple people call
in and talk about uh where that business is and where it's going yeah so while py join he's been an early investor in the company and and covered their Journey from you know early early days till now and then uh we're going to have shiil on at the end to talk specifically about just broadly the state of fintech because there was a very long you know roughly 700 days where it felt like
everybody said fintech is dead you know this was like a zerp trend you know these business models only worked when uh rates were zero and it's very clearly not the case so we're excited to have him on and get his perspective about kind of the future of the category and uh a lot more specifically the stripe addan stuff which he covered last week as well and we covered a bit y um but looking forward to getting his thoughts
there so let's get into the rest of the show cool well speaking of fintech if you're looking to invest you should go to public.com Investing For Those who take it seriously they have multi-asset investing industry-leading yields and they're trusted by millions uh and speaking of other Investments that you can make that the government might be making the with your tax dollars with your tax
you pay your taxes and then you know the government govern gambles with them in in in crypto uh I mean we might have to put on the steel hat for this one as well and there might be a silver lining here uh we need we need the steel helmet the tin foil we need all of the hats to come out today for uh the story and the story here the funny thing is like the the the real takeaway from this
is that when Trump plans anything crypto related something big is gonna happen so first time he obviously launched the trumpcoin got everybody together got the industry together and said all right now I have my own token and you guys are all sidelined because you're here in tuxedos instead of at your computers you know trading uh and this time launching the Strategic uh crypto Reserve or at least
formally announcing it yeah so the story from the W Journal is crypto prices jump after Trump announces five tokens for strategic reserve and so Bitcoin ether salana Ripple linked xrp and cardano will be in the in the stockpile and so uh crypto prices surged Sunday after president Trump said he would move forward on a US crypto strategic Reserve that would include Bitcoin and ether as
well as three smaller and riskier tokens lots of fun um and uh the U and the US would actually be buying these such an odd time to announce these things like most I mean I guess he he seems like he always announces things on like the weekend maybe I don't know because like obviously like a lot of companies they they announce their earnings after the market closes so people have maybe time to process it and
it doesn't create like chaos in the markets is that why they do that well it's fascinating to because there's obviously you know there's Bitcoin ETF now you have Micro strategy uh there's apps that let you trade those in off hours right but uh ultimately the sort of traditional financial markets are closed and he's releasing this you know very Market moving uh news on a Sunday
morning uh which is you know it's interesting to say the least also you have to look at the leadup to this right his uh you know his son Eric Trump has been uh on the timeline pumping World Liberty fi y uh pretty much daily telling people to hodle to buy you know uh so so they're basically you know they they they're they've learned the crypto game right totally yeah uh yeah I I there was an interesting take think pomp
obviously like you know super pro crypto but he was saying it was funny that like the crypto announcement happened when the market was closed and so like the traditional the trafi people couldn't participate which is like kind of true but also a lot of the trii people can yeah because they have assets they trade they're they're not completely separate um anyway a US crypto Reserve
will Elevate this critical industry after years of corrupt attacks by the Biden administ rtion said Trump in a Sunday post on his social media platform truth social I will make sure the US is the crypto capital of the world uh Trump said the crypto strategic Reserve will also include salana xrp and cardano unlike Bitcoin which is the largest and oldest cryptocurrency these tokens were
created more recently and often by smaller teams making them more susceptible to the wild price swings and other risks I heard uh I think it was nval was saying like if your crypto has a lobbyist it's not something like that which I think is a very good take let's go through some price action on Sunday afternoon Bitcoin Rose 9% the Counterpoint to that is that a a a decentralized uh organization
could decide collectively we should have a lobbying sailor is like Michael sailor is like PR for Bitcoin basically and it's not for any arguably some of the most important PR right PP is you know a catalyst for you know the X audience going on CNBC you know getting normies yeah it has nothing it's still decentralized but it also incentivizes people to do stuff uh and and that was a
big that was a big push on like the Trump pump and the idea of like you know eventually you know like there are so many gold bugs in in in Congress right now just because over the life of a senator they accumulate gold effectively and so and with stocks and Healthcare stocks and and Industrial stocks and tech stocks and eventually the assets work their way into our government organizations and so our our our
Representatives care about these things because they've acquired them and our next generation of legislators will have crypto assets yeah and one of the interesting things about this announcement is so it very clearly was priced in pretty effectively because if you went back five years ago and you told a Bitcoin Maxi the US government is going to be buying Bitcoin off their balance sheet they would have said oh
we're at a million dollars a coin right like it just sounded it sounded like a lot of people believe this would happen but they assumed that it would come with such a massive you know sort of increase in the price totally and now so yesterday it popped significantly popped around 10% yesterday but today it's actually down uh almost uh uh 7 and a half% so it's almost back8 it's back to
87,000 8 which is crazy because it's basically round the announcement is almost round tripped and it it I remember I remember thinking just a couple weeks ago like like what is the next Catalyst for Bitcoin moving up and it would have to be a massive us strategic National Bitcoin stockpile and I think it also has to be that cascading into every other every other country
saying we also need this yep and so just like there is gold at every Federal Reserve of every country essentially like they all stockpile gold I don't know if we have any left apparently you got to put on the tin foil hat put on the tin foil hat yeah yeah I'm a Believer I believe it's there but I don't know I want to see it yeah at the very least I hope hopefully they spray painted bricks you alluding to that
ridiculous uh so Bitcoin Rose 9% from from 24 hours earlier to about 93,000 than you mentioned it it round tripped uh what's eth at can you look on public.com yeah I'm pulling it up um I'm I'm sure up 11% 25 so Eric we got to get Eric Trump uh you know pumping eth a little bit harder clearly um not hilarious yeah so the dynamic here is absolutely wild like so much of the so much of the news around
World Liberty fi Eric Trump's project was that they were buying ethereum with size yeah presumably from the pre-sale but it also seemed like potentially proceeds from from trumpcoin we being sort of reallocated over there so um I'm pulling it up right now uh I'm expecting to see Eric saying Hodel yeah he he said so he said um on uh February 25th he said byy the dips by the
dips and then today he says uh somebody said Never Fade Eric Trump and today he says you're welcome my friend hopefully I made someone's life just a little bit better now my advice hold long term and ethereum is down uh yeah 12% today uh on on uh really really a devastating blow to the ethereum Community because you they've had a they've had a rough go at it um becoming a little bit of a punch
line and uh yeah this is this is right after their conference eth Denver which is one of the biggest you know events of the year for them so tough go um but uh you know so let's do some more context and then go into the timeline uh a one-time Bitcoin skeptic Trump embraced crypto last year and made a series of big Promises to the industry since returning to the White House he has created a working group on digital
assets and pardoned Ross the founder of Sil Silk Road an online drug Bazaar that used Bitcoin as its payment method investors and analysts said that one way to build the reserve is for Uncle Sam to hold on to its stash of Bitcoin seized from cyber criminals and dark net markets the US government holds more than 180,000 Bitcoin worth about 18 billion based on current market prices see that
would have been enough right we could have just had the US crypto Reserve be assets that were seized from criminals yeah and it's kind of funny to be like hey look like it will effectively be burned like any any Bitcoin that is ever seized going forward because we're probably going to be seing a lot more it's a way you know because because in the past there's been concern that the government has been sitting over the
sell button you know going to just market sell uh and so it it would have been a way to potentially find sort of a through line of saying you know we we we believe the government should have some exposure y to cryptocurrencies but uh we're not going to be using taxpayer dollars to do that yep um but uh uh alas uh not not what ended up happening it's great well let's go to some reactions uh
we got Nick Carter we uh wanted to have him on the show but he's tied up today he'll probably be coming on later this week uh if this is still in the news if not we'll get him the next time there's breaking news there'll be another headline I'm sure something will happen Trump this is Trump coin number two Let Me retweet this repost there we go um today feels like a good day to repost My
anti-s article that's the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve I stand by it especially in light of the inclusion of e Soul Ada and xrp uh it's not the job of the government to run an airsots crypto hedge fund it's not their job to pick winners and losers the dismay you're seeing at the inclusion of some coins confirms if the government gets interested in crypto it's not going to
be it's not necessarily going to be good for my bag most conservatives and Libertarians are suspicious of top- down government apportionment of resources in this manner preferring to let the private sector sorted out I wasn't a fan of Biden's massive infrastructure spending which I felt was extremely wasteful and for that reason I don't support further inclusion incursion into the private
sector by the government especially not via naked dollar issuance uh typically the US government doesn't really intervene in markets with its monetary tools Beyond setting rates its role is setting the rules of the road and keeping the system stable not aggressively deploying government funds into commodities for day trading and yeah it is fascinating this is something that like I feel like it's so Pro te
it's like it really should Mark the end of the story of the government being anti-tech anti- crypto and now the government's like So Pro crypto yeah but the response from at least our corner of X was this is not good yeah yeah well it seems like the government is generally Pro crypto because it makes a certain part of the voter base happy y the government doesn't seem to be Pro crypto
and the government acknowledges that it's a legitimate asset class now and we shouldn't as a country attack it yep because the technology has real potential and if you create a positive regulatory environment or a fair regulatory environment it could flourish right and we want that we want that industry to flourish here in the United States that being said it does seem to date that the biggest Pro
crypto moves have not been uh you know the push back is that there's so many ways that you could argue that that they're sort of conflicted moves right yeah um and uh yeah even even saaks was was facing a lot of blowback yesterday on X just because he said you know he came out and said I sold he sold his positions in salana and Bitcoin ethereum all these different things but uh you
can easily kind of look through and say you're a you know major investor that has positions in a bunch of individual crypto companies like bitwise is one and uh yeah he still has a ton of look through exposure yeah look through exposure basically and somebody was pointing out you know I think this is later uh in the timeline but somebody was pointing out that uh just just how convenient it is that uh bit wise's top
five position and the bitwise index are the exact assets that are in and and I'll push and the reason I don't think that's a conspiracy at all I don't yeah so so my my uh what what I would point out there is that they just picked the five biggest tokens by market cap yeah they're all the same right like the top five happen to be on the index built which happens to be the ones and that
makes perfect sense to me it's like you oh oh we're making a tech index and it was like Nvidia Fang you know mag s yeah mag seven and then and then all of a sudden some some Senator owns all all the mag seven and then Trump says the mag seven or what we're going to focus on for like chip you know incentives I'd be like yeah that makes sense like hyperscalers are hyperscalers so overall
I think the the push back against Sachs on specifically bitwise is a little bit misguided yeah agree but uh but overall it's it's hyper politicized right and the other thing is that they very clearly did this via the White House this wasn't something that went through Congress and was supposed to be something that had sort of uh broad Buy in uh from Washington also to be to be
fair uh did this isn't they haven't done anything they've just announced a plan to do something they were like like we need a pump we need a quick pump yeah no no like I don't even think there's a number yet like it could be we're buying a million dollars it could be we're buying a billion it could be we're buying a trillion like these are all wildly different things he's just saying
I'm excited about this it's a the number is going to be hyper hyper analyzed because people were also tracking how much do how much waste do is catching and so if Doge saves you know $500 billion and then we buy you know anything less than five 100 billion doesn't seem super serious right if they if the government went and bought hundred billion dollars worth the crypto it's like okay cool yeah uh but but uh
anyways that's going to be uh this is going to be you know continue to be hyper politicized uh as everything is today yeah and so uh I I like this analysis from Joe weisenthal over at Bloomberg kind of breaks down uh what it means to build a strategic stockpile he says conceptually it makes sense that uh conceptually it makes sense for the government to hold strategic
stockpiles of any asset that a it could presumably have a liability in at some point and B it can't instantly acquire with money so for example oil especially when we can't produce much here made sense military equipment is like this as well one could argue that in a war we have bullet denominated liabilities or tank denominated liabilities and you can't acquire bullets or tanks out of thin air with
money due to the time to ramp up production so um and then sa who we've had on the show before says uh strategic Bitcoin Reserve makes sense for the same reason a strategic gold Reserve makes sense it's a monetary hedge against US dollar hemony a prime export of the US other assets don't make much sense uh I.E the US does not have a random basket of precious metals so I think that's I
think that's the right take I think a lot of people uh Max Meyer had some good points along this route he's like um he wants the government to be focused on making sure the currency of the United States you know sort of maintains maintains its value not uh day trading but as we've seen some presidential day Traders you know uh the guy from El Salvador you know he pulls up Robin Hood or whatever on his phone
um if he's smart he's pulling up public um and uh you know he's just you know basically on a mobile device Market buying Market buying Bitcoin from what from what I can see so um I mean we were talking about this before with the Javier Malay stuff and it's like it's great that that that day trading Bitcoin is working for some people and the the crazy stuff is working for some of these smaller countries but like I I
I need to be convinced a little bit more that this is like that we are in the same situation as these other countries yeah um let's go to Joe lale yeah this was this was a good take so Joe says taxation is theft it should be kept to a minimum it's wrong to steal my money for grift on the left it's also wrong to tax me for Crypt bro schemes if efficient defense courts national parks which he
says should fund themselves prison Etc fine cut it out with these schemes guys I thought this was a best take you didn't see a lot of people that were you know overly Pro uh Trump in the sort of election cycle actually coming out and pushing back against this but this is the right take I think uh we we never discuss Politics on the show as as our audience knows but it's okay to vote for
somebody yet disagree with with you know and agree with some of the stuff they do and disagree with other stuff that they do and if you can't if you can't manage to do that then you're not sort of thinking independently right you're just sort of and vice versa like you should you should be able to say hey I don't support the guy generally but uh like this is one thing that I like and there
are plenty of examples of that like the moon yeah so so uh somebody and and he was quote tweeting mayor Suarez who says I turned Miami into the crypto capital of Florida now we're turning the us into the crypto capital of the world I generally agree that the US should be the crypto capital the world y like 100% but uh but if you actually look at the chart of Miami coin uh hopefully our
strategic Reserve doesn't fall the same path oh yeah also also like like making America business friendly to a like a company like coinbase that operates a very legitimate crypto exchange and having Bitcoin on the balance sheet of the FED are two completely separate things one is like stop sending Wells notices have more regulatory oversight be very clear with with coinbase on what can they list what
can't they list what's a security what's not a security what's a fair launch all these questions that everyone in the CTIC Community has where's the line drawn and the other is just like are we puming the Press Miami coin is the chart won't even show for Miami coin on because it's down so horrifically but um it's a good experiment the the Steelman on this is that a lot of times when
people when people say like oh the government shouldn't be spending on XY orz they always assume that it like the government spending is going to go to zero yeah but there is a world where the government buys a bunch of crypto and it 10xs and they sell it and they make money and that's actually what happened during the during the the housing bailout like everyone was like why are the bankers getting a bailout like
they're wasting my taxpayer money well those loans got repaid back with interest and so it's kind of like a narrative violation and like you might not like it because you didn't punish the people as much as possible because yeah some of the people that were involved in the banks they did get bailed out yeah but it didn't cost the taxpayer anything in fact it made the taxpayer money so you paid less taxes
it's the disappointing thing here is that if if somebody was already not a fan of trump yep nothing about the last 24 hours would have changed it all right like the dominant narrative on the left was that Trump is a grifter you know he's using his the office to just sort of accumulate personal wealth and all this stuff and uh now even people voted for him are like are saying like stop it
with the Crypto Crypt bro griffs so I I posted yesterday um uh a Nathan picture of Nathan For You fantastic show if you need some business advice yeah uh and I said the plan pay off the national debt by cutting government waste and investing the savings into highrisk cryptocurrency I can't even finish it cuz it's it's such a such a ridiculous plan yeah we're doing but uh well let's
go through uh Trump's crypto schemes according to how crazy they are in chronological order Nick went ahead and did the heavy lifting here he ranked uh uh Trump six uh crypto projects and uh so he starts off Trump nft three out of 10 low stakes was kind of cool at the time and started off uh Ryan cis's marago Arc which I think was kind of an important moment I have a hilarious
story about this so I know someone who bought this nft and they said that uh it was actually one of like the most valuable nft things you could possibly get because it got you dinner at Mar Lago and yeah and the thing was is that the people that bought it so like but it only gets you that one time right yeah one time but kind of a problem for this is the thing so so it it's sold to
everyone so a lot of the people that bought were just like fans of trump but they weren't like hardcore crypto people so they went and bought it but then in order to actually redeem the dinner and do the nft stuff you actually had to have like a wallet that you could transfer and it was like somewhat technical yeah and so you take the universe of like Trump supporters who are down to spend a bunch of money like
supporting him and like buying his nft and you narrow that down to like 1% of people that are both Trump supporters or like down with him but also like capable of running the wallet in the way that they need you to do to cash in the nft to go to the dinner and so uh I like the person I know that that that bought the nft went and like the dinner was like empty and so then he was basically able
to just pitch pitch Trump like his exact vision for crypto yeah and was like like this is exactly how I and then and then and then Trump was like wait the PE my my biggest crypto fans all believe X Y and Z yeah when like clearly that's not true yeah but he was able to just like swing it was so funny I'm surprised that more projects didn't realize that buy it because it sounds it sounds extremely
farfetched that you bought an nft for 500 bucks and you got a dinner with the president and you could talk to him about crypto policy but that was probably the best lobbying dollars you know you ever spend exactly and so like yeah like like the expectation was like you get you get a dinner you get to go into a massive ballroom and maybe Trump comes around and like shakes your hand instead it's like him and three people
yeah it's like the highest leverage lobbying you could possibly do if you but imagine the combination of things you have to be Pro Trump in crypto and also like enough of a Deen to think that buying an nft is a good idea so you can't be like the highbrow crypto person who's like actually like Bitcoin is just the only thing I'm a Bitcoin purist I would never buy an nft uh but but then
you also have to be willing like it's like all these weird things have to have one thing you have to give Trump's crypto team credit for is they always position these things as Collectibles like very clearly they were Trump cards yeah they were they were trading card nfts they weren't nfts right and with with Trump coin it was Trump memes you were just buying a meme you could buy a
million of them if you wanted you could buy we need a strategic meme reserve for sure that's that's obvious okay so continuing through this so we have World Liberty fi seven out of 10 we we got through one yeah uh seven out of 10 low uh kind of an insane thing to do ahead of the election uh which which you know this started in Nick was very against it he was like telling them like how can we
tell them not to do this started as vaporware now an extremely questionable slush fund thing that Justin's Sun owns a lot of bad vibes on this so they were basically doing a public sort of like Equity financing type thing that you just got tokens or something and now now they just have this you know basically uh hedge fund uh trumpcoin he says nine out of 10 completely unhinged just a
crazy move overall uh Ania coin he's he's actually pretty harsh here he says six out of 10 kind of sad at this point but it was the beginning of the end for meme coins and introduced us to kelsier which was behind the Malay project which was funny so they're are positive and then he said crypto Reserve featuring cardono and xrp 10 out of 10 I didn't even know what to say about this a
government bailout for your buddy who gets crypto news from Tik Tok still Silver Lining at least the Maxis are upset sad how long this list is so I think to be honest I think Nick had the best takes across the board over the last 24 hours uh we should get him on tomorrow if it's slow news so we got another post from Jack uh Reigns over at slow he says this is a great take and it's a post from David saxs in 2021 that
says uh who's now our crypto Zar uh he says the problem with government as a capital allocator is that the money goes to special interests who have the ability to lobby but not to innovate and it has to come from somewhere usually innovators haven't built up INF up influence yet uh so anyways uh and uh good good good one to surface Sam Lon another crypto um uh project guy and GP
over slow says LOL so anyways tough one uh Again David Sachs you have to imagine uh if if I had to if David Sachs could say what he actually thought I would say that maybe he thinks that there should be a Bitcoin Reserve in the same way that there's a gold Reserve I don't think that if he could have made this policy himself that he would have just made it the top five projects by market
cap yeah he does he is in a weird situation because like like we have no idea how much he's actually shaping policy yeah he is he is the crypto Zar yeah but what does that really mean well he's also the crypto and aiar yeah and arguably AI is probably a lot more important for him to be focused on but to date you know if anything goes wrong take the BL yeah so I remember Saturday night Trump coin gets launched and I'm
think thinking to myself it's very possible that saaks didn't didn't know this was happening right and now he's in a position where he has to defend yeah you know defend the actions and make up some you know he kind of has to say something about it I don't remember what he actually would have shared but uh he definitely Al for the ride right now he he yeah I mean clearly anytime someone
uh anytime the government does anything like iffy with crypto he's going to take like the brunt of the attack yeah effectively even if he was not in the room when it happened um but he has been pretty good but good on comms like his his his he very quickly anticipated people are going to think I'm pumping my own bags let me make it clear that I did sell all of my personal Holdings I might
have some look through exposure but that's a separate thing I'm not actively managing any any positions here and most importantly it's not like I went I'm not front running the I'm not like egregiously insider trading this and like the bar is so low that I think a lot of people look at it and they're like yeah okay like at least you at least you're not in trting aggressively
goate over at alongside uh who we've had on the show before uh takes a screen shot of Truth social uh Donald Trump had to uh add a clarification he say so basically he came out and initially just said the crypto Reserve featuring salana cardano and xrp and then he had to follow it up he had follow it up and say and obviously Bitcoin and ethereum as as other valuable cryptocurrencies will be
at the heart of the Reserve I also love Bitcoin and ethereum so the coming out and just saying the meme coin Network cardano and xrp are are I know I I I do I do genuinely I I I think the the the the team behind salana is fairly like legitimate I did a the whole thing I think they're building cool technology genuinely Bitcoin is digital gold salon is payment rails for the greatest Casino
in history yes and uh with the native sort of like poker chip right like it it makes sense and then card and then cardono and xrp chip is the is like the the immutable like uh instrument it's like the the fundamental unit of value on Sal is the poker chip but but cardano and xrp are you know people were joking like this is huge for Uber drivers like cuz it's you like the fake yeah anytime anytime somebody that's
outside of tech asks me like oh what do you think about crypto they're always like yeah I'm like oh like blah blah blah yeah like I have Bitcoin and cardano cardano and they're like and the funny thing is is cardano and xrp yeah like one of the reasons that it you could make the argument that you should put them in the Strategic Reserve is they sort of just like generally trade based on bitcoin too so like they're all
sort of like fluctuating at different rates but um uh overall fantastic and then hilarious yeah people were trying to put saaks in the truth Zone over Isaac Saul says that's a pretty weak Dodge uh David um you know calling out that um the conflict of interest here and they say first Sax's uh firm craft Ventures has been invested in a startup called bitwise since 2017 y David Sachs
was a lead investor uh right now bitwise is celebrating so the CEO of bitwise came out the top five Holdings of the bitwise 10 crypto Index Fund y uh because the main crypto coins going the best way to out yourself is not understanding crypto is to call them crypto coins that's hilarious not ironically um anyway so the main cryptocoins going in the crypto strategic Reserve just so happen to
match bit wise's top five crypto Holdings and the reason for this is that the tokens going in the crypto Reserve are just the largest project by market yeah except for binance coin which which didn't make it in because that's like the Chinese yeah right right right um which makes sense anyway so uh so we talked about this it's not C also there's a question about like you know
yes he uh so Sachs invested through craft I I don't know if Sachs is stepping back from direct control over craft over the Zar ship it he could be uh I don't obvious buted um like that doesn't mean that he also invested in the in the index fund and it's yeah there's just like there's like seven layers of like conflict here that where it doesn't seem like that bad but also it's not great but also it's
like how could you ever find someone credible at all in to advise the government on crypto who had never invested in crypto like that's basically impossible right well yeah and to be honest the way so sax is very good at the internet right he has one of the biggest podcasts in the world he's got a hyper engaged X following if he was running point on the Strategic Reserve
announcement it wouldn't have gone out like Hey we're we're putting cardano xrp in Sal in the reserve oh and also we're doing this it would have just been so clearly he's not actually running point on anything or has any impact on sort of the comms around this stuff right that that feels very obvious we have another post here from Joe he says even prior to today there are a lot of professional
people in crypto who have been denigrating coins like xrp and Ada for a long time and yet they're still here largely riding the same beta and Performing not much differently from salana and eth why is that um he says all the big defi stuff is on salana and eth most of the nfts you hear about on Salon you would intuitively think that salon and eth would have built up some gigantic market cap over others like Ada
and xrp and yet um and uh Laura shin has a take here yeah it's a good point read out uh it's because their total Supply is many billions 45 billion for Ada and 100 billion for xrp that gives them an inflated market cap even if you limit it to the circulating supply of 36 or 58 billion respectively it's still many many multiples of the circulating Supply yeah other side is of the coin is that
they benefit from small unit prices someone with a limited crypto allocation can feel like they're buying a lot of coins it's still still doesn't fully explain it um it's ridiculous but like these psychology things are real I mean like even like Warren Buffett has to split shares I mean at a certain point yeah I mean you you you can't buy Burkshire Hathaway class A because it's like 250k
a share well there was a while where you couldn't Buy fractionalized shares very easily too which is a big factor that never was a thing on crypto um we have a post from fat man he said the whale so so on Saturday night there was there was a bunch of hubub on X because some you know all this is happening on chain this this whale uh comes on and makes a does a 50x long on ethereum uh and maybe one
of the other positions uh using only $4 million in capital to create a $200 million position uh uh as the Strategic Reserve was announced on on Sunday they went up I think about 6 million y uh it says 5 million here uh coincidentally perfectly timing Trump's true social post confirming United States crypto Reserve so uh obviously some Insider action here who knows who it was but um
it's hard to say right uh because these uh assets haven't be been explicitly sort of designated as Securities y you know uh sort of a gray area but at the same time you know sort of Insider trading collusion uh is is broadly uh illegal and uh you would have to hope that this kind of thing got got cracked down on um because it's you know some serious size being thrown around bad
luck yeah very very bad luck yeah and for what it's worth uh that guy Nate Chastain went to prison he's in prison today for doing the same type of activity on on open se he was the product manager at open who was involved in the decision- making around what nfts got featured on the homepage and so he would just buy them they would pop he would sell them and he went to jail for that he went to jail he's sitting in
jail um I think it was at least uh for a few year yeah I mean the question of like of like is it a security or not blah blah blah it's like there's just something clearly immoral about having an edge on anything that has a financial asset wrapped around it and so I don't care if it's a monkey picture or a decentralized cryptocurrency or a stock like you CLI have an edge you're trading
on it you're stealing money from people like you so he's actually out of prison now he only had to go in for 3 months and then three years of supervised release uh so they they were trying to make an example out of him but overall I think this is enough of a precedent unreasonable that like enough of a precedent to say whoever was you know trading on Insider info ahead of the Strategic Reserve announcement probably
it's kind of crazy too that they got a 2X in in you know 24 hours they had to put it you're less than a 2X right um I mean the 50x long is pretty crazy I mean like but but the issue is speaks to the lack of volatility it's a very low volatility asset right like like I feel like for something as Monumental as like the government is going to be stockpiling this asset like yeah you
should not need to go so long just to double your money like I feel like a 50x long like just like an Nvidia earn a slight Nvidia earnings beat is enough to do this but ethereum is pretty sticky yeah and then uh there's a funny post here if he was really an Insider he would have longed anything other than Ethan BTC though let's be honest he of course everything else no this a good response he says uh I don't uh the
original poster says I don't know if it was an Insider or not but it's possible for an Insider to know the Tweet is coming but not know the exact contents of the Tweet which was again good I mean the rumor months ago the original way to index the crypto Market which just why crypto indexes didn't become super popular so you could just buy the few biggest coins by market cap Bally have
an index yeah it is interesting also when I see this I want to know like okay yes uh $4 million 50x long that seems like a lot but does this type of trade happen every single day because in that case maybe this isn't in trading maybe there's just one random person who's doing this every day and then something big happens and then you see it pop you know this was out of the ordinary it
also was funded by a wallet that was associated with fishings okay uh who knows what's going on there uh we can cap it off uh we have a post here from pachy who's joining in about an hour he says not to get all political but cardano crying emo uh and then another post from I actually don't I actually don't understand cardano that well because wasn't the guy like one of the co-founders of ethereum like is cardano
not a serious technical project or because it hasn't been like hacked or anything right like like it works I think it I think cardano and xrp are two two blockchains seriously but were super early and they were they were icos that um that never delivered on uh from a from a product perspective or adoption perspective adoption perspective the price is really the only it's one of
those things like salana came about they were like we're going to build a really fast blockchain we're going to you know build this amazing developer ecosystem on it and then they basically did exactly right and um and one of the things is is payment rails for the global Casino yeah the sound bite um and uh yeah o overall it makes sense that you know you know in 2022 every other
week you'd have a new uh L1 blockchain and then it was a new L2 blockchain and what what we're seeing now is that it seems like you know developer and investor activity have sort of focused in on salana and you know it it makes sense right there's there's no reason that um there should be you know a hundred different l1s um anyways last post for this one we have from Atlas uh at creatine cycle he
says American strategic scam and gambling Reserve with the uh with the bald eagle uh inspired by that you were inspired we got to we got to uh immediately ripped I'm gonna pull up John's post he says um you want to read it out say now that we have a strategic crypto gambling reserve the next obvious step is to introduce Universal basic parlay every Friday Uncle Sam should send $5 to every Citizen's draftking
account to give them a little thrill going into the weekend fantastic obviously I'm very an fantastic gambling we got to get that uh we got to get that into sax here you know that's next yeah I mean there is something to it just giving someone a little hey there's a chance you know it's like the government already runs casinos or like the lottery and they give you little stimulus the
stimulus is giving everyone the same amount of money right um and so this is a version of uh of that but uh instead of giving instead of giving everyone $1,000 for the co checks the Trump checks remember that yeah what was it a thousand bucks something like that something like that I don't know I don't think I qualifi I don't think I got it but uh I I think everyone got like a thousand bucks uh and then they
went and uh bought sneakers and Bitcoin and and uh GameStop stock yeah instead of that it cut out the middleman instead of giving won the $ th000 and then they go gamble it just give them a lottery ticket Y and so everyone gets and it's like hey we need we have a trillion dollars in stimulus we're going to make a thousand billionaires so so every American we know you're suffering there's a one in a
million chance that you become a billionaire incredible the American dream the American dream you know the American dream um okay we got we got Keith coming on in 15 minutes amazing uh we got py coming went on in in in thir uh in 45 minutes and we got sheal in an hour so let's keep moving on let's keep talking we got 15 minutes to run through you know what's something else that
people would take uh strategic stockpile of no what's yeah strategic what's what's another thing that the US government should be getting a strategic stockpile of watches trity and you know I want I would be more comfortable as a citizen if I knew that Uncle Sam had a 100,000 Day dates yes [Laughter] every yeah just Rolex is for everyone like I would like to know that the the US government yeah could at any point
decimate the watch Market by by flooding the market yeah and if you really so imagine let's let's say if if Trump really wanted to build Goodwill yeah he would buy up every single Watch yeah on the market and then at the end of his term market sell them all and drop drop the prices and then every American could buy a Daytona or or day everybody would be walking around uh you know in style I
mean you know uh you know Fort Knox is filled with gold let's take that gold turn it into cardier tanks turn it into presidentials turn it into turn it into uh you know uh I don't know uh what's another good gold watch a Santos yeah let's let let's take our gold ship it to cardier and just be yeah we'd like we'd like 1 million C wants to avoid tariffs use use for for
to make more watches and then give us a cut of the the the net revenue on on the final product we want some of your margin and of course the US government should order all of their watches on bezel you can shop 22,000 luxury watches fully authenticated in housee which would be authentication team is going to be busy yeah maybe we should send the bezel authentication team to Fort Knox
they're authenticating gold watches why not authenticate gold bars do the bars too the bars too yeah are these are these bricks that were spray painted with yellow yes chrome spray paint yeah if they can if they can tell is this watch uh just you know goldplated versus gold have you seen that Viral post that's like like uh oh like there's like these fake uh jewelry companies that sell on Tik Tok and no one can tell the
difference because they gold plate them instead of making them solid gold and Ryan Peterson was like didn't Archimedes figure this out 2,000 years ago like you literally just have to figure out the density so you just put it in the tub and look at the water displacement and then you weigh it on a scale which has existed for thousands of years and and everyone everyone on Tik Tok is like
it's impossible like that we can't figure out if it's goldplated or not without destroying it it's impossible it's so funny to me that that he just like he's just dunked with like the AR thing like we've actually been able to solve this problem for thousands of years uh but misinformation to be continues to be the problem anyway this information is back yeah well we have some real information
for you real information uh Trump and chipmaker tsmc expected to announce a hundred billion doll investment in the US it is the latest effort by Trump to persuade companies to make big investments in the US what do you got John uh it's exciting I mean the the whole tune and the whole the whole just I don't know Vibes around the chip band and how we are playing the the semiconductor strategy in the era of AI
has changed pretty radically like there was definitely a thought in post chat GPT post doomers having a serious say and being taken pretty seriously there was definitely a Vibe of like yeah like this is going to be a weapon this is going to be something that's very valuable we need to Corner this resource this is maybe like nuclear weapons we should maybe lock it down we should make
sure that it's not just you know being stolen left and right and and and also we should restrict the chips that allow these models to run at scale uh and then you know Flash Forward a few years we've done the chip band Nvidia was able to restrict the memory bandwidth on the on the the h80 instead of the A1 H a100 they they basically created the custom one that complied with the with the chip
bands uh China bought a bunch of those deep seek team you know optimizes winds up building a Frontier Model we've talked about this before we don't think that Nvidia has has gotten enough sort of flak for if sort of working around the chip band yep but at the same time so many major US institutions have so much uh such large positions in Nvidia yep uh you know there's actually a good
you know you brought this up earlier Ben Thompson has made a good argument for we actually should the the chip ban is probably bad we want China to be dependent on you know tsmc chips and uh not to build uh their own sort of alter to it so that they they sort of worry about you know invading Taiwan for that reason and Ben Thompson lives in Taiwan obviously doesn't you know wants to
continue living there I don't think he would be too welcome after a Chinese Invasion given his uh you know long history of critiquing um yeah and so China is rebuilding the tsmc supply chain right now they have uh smick and SME which are the tsmc and asml copycats but they are potentially a decade behind it's very hard to tell how close they are to the frontier I mean even Intel AMD are not near the frontier um uh and
and American companies have been struggling to catch up which is why uh we you know both every administration every Tech leader has been like let's get tsmc to come here can't we just you know give all those people green cards or gold cards we didn't really talk about the gold card thing but I think people would happily pay 5 million per person to bring over the tsmc uh experts
and uh manufact the challenge there though is you have Taiwanese people who love Taiwan and have they don't want to leave country because there's like slight tensions between two countries that aren't uh two countries that are just Rivals like we're not enemies with China we're just Rivals like we're not allies but we're in the World Trade Organization together we're in the UN together like we are not at War show
sure sure that's a bigger debate but we are geopolitical experts yeah we're we're we're we're in like an economic Tiff but that's about it and I don't know no one's King each other I mean ask the ask the fish off the coast of argentin yeah okay okay I no but but here you know what I what I like about this announcement hopefully it goes through is that the sort of America
First investment executive order uh this is the kind of thing that makes that EO real and so 100 billion ship manufacturing plants of the next four years in a short timeline too yeah it's not a xai speed but uh you know certainly pretty close and there was news that uh that tsmc was making good progress at their Arizona plant y I don't know if it's in this article but yeah that should give them confidence in
you know making a much larger investment yep uh to the US Advanced chip packaging is particularly critical for AI related chips as it enhances performance by integrating multiple semiconductor components reducing size improving power efficiency and ensuring faster data transfer key applications for uh key factors for AI applications the US has supported tsmc's growth through 2022 chips act which earmarked tens of
billions of dollars in Grants to domestic chip manufacturing and this is the other criticism that uh Ben Thompson has always uh lobbed against the chips Act is that it's grants it's hey we'll just give you money to just go try and build these instead of instead of being demand side it's supply side so um much better to say hey we want to C actually strategic Reserve like like the US is a
buyer of these chips at this price if you can domestically manufacture a chip that is competitive with a Nvidia h100 or h800 at uh at scale in America boom we'll buy we'll build the data center and then we'll be the leaser and then maybe we'll just sell it immediately but you know that the demand's there Y and that's and that's enough for the free market to go work and figure everything
else out as opposed to oh there's this grant that's going out and so the grant got parceled and now now all of a sudden you have to do it not you can't just do it in America you have to do it in Arizona because the Arizona guy gave you more of the Grant and like this and the taxes and this and like all of a sudden it becomes like the government is now managing the project fully instead of
just being like Hey we're we're just a buyer we're just a buyer yeah and so one of the so so going back to one of your earlier point so tsmc the world's largest contract chip maker set down roots in Arizona in 2020 when it said it would build a chip factory there for12 billion its Ambitions for the site have expanded rapidly since with two more fact factories on the same site in a
total investment of 65 billion the company's first factory began mass production late last year so uh we'd love to see them you know make a significant 122 billion investment and then and then commit to you know expanding that site as well as you know uh committing additional Capital uh hopefully this announcement isn't final yet but I have to imagine it'll be um sort of set in stone later this
week that's great um yeah love to see it and yeah I mean the the the the the tsmc stuff it is it is it is somewhat interesting how AI has made everything it's democratized learning in the sense that like you know like it just codes for you you can also learn pretty much anything any history you can just go and talk to it and it's your teacher uh except for making the chips that make AI
possible y all of that knowledge is just locked away in yeah you have to imagine are you know uh in these uh what are they call them like Mentor mentee uh you know Artisan like like uh like they they don't open source any of the papers so there's nothing to build on and so deep research like if you actually ask it how to run an asml machine and and get good yields uh it will come up very very
short yeah the uh interesting thing is it seems that the conversations around Intel and potentially Elon getting involved with Intel have gone uh silent I haven't heard much uh from that front yeah all all the all the airplanes were like circling and we'll see where it goes yeah but anyway um let's move on to the Moon let's talk about the moon what a shot the first lunar Sunrise captured
by a commercial lunar lander we tried our best to get a you know flat earther on the show today somebody a moon denier uh but we're squarely and the moon should be a state category here which is why we're happy to see that an American private company is landing on the moon NASA I really want to know the moon yeah the moonlanding denier like they have to deny this too and then they have to deny
the next one that's going to happen and then space next and then El it's just like well the mo the moon was a bit of a lost art for a while right it was it it was easy to be a denier when it was like ah that happened 30 years ago it's grny footage involved and now it's like okay we're gonna be up there all the time uh and so huge huge news we have the uh we have the breakdown here uh blue Ghost uh
which is a private us spacecraft landed on the moon uh after its successful lunar touchdown Firefly aerospace's Blue Ghost Mission could soon be joined on the Moon by two more commercial spacecraft and we have uh two minutes to rip through this before Keith I think will be hopping on um yeah we just have to call out that Firefly aerospace's comms are not not where they should be
right the fact the fact that uh nobody really knew this was kind of happening until they were basically on the moon yeah uh and Austin's calling out uh a private company just flew to the moon I didn't hear about it until now so yeah it is hilarious like anyone else who would do this would be like seven days until we land on the Moon five days until we buy merch here's a documentary
about it here's a video about it they just went and did it it's amazing I mean which is also cool it's cool yeah I mean they were clearly in uh what do they they call it monk mode monk mode something like that they just doing they were just focused on themselves after 45 after 45 days in space and a pulse pounding semi-autonomous hourlong descent to his Landing site at 300 a.m. eastern standard time the boxy car-sized
spacecrafts foot 4ot tipped legs crunched into the surface of May Chum a vast and ancient impact Basin filled with frozen lava on the moon's Northeastern uh Northeastern near side this marks the second time the US has soft landed on the moon since the crude Apollo 177 mission of 1972 the first occur occurred just more than a year ago when another robotic commercial Mission
the odys is landed from the company intuitive machines made moonfall lopsided but intact how do we not know about intuitive machines I remember either so space companies please reach out to Lulu yeah uh and get your act together that is so yeah that that is so TR stuff just going there yeah the the fact that uh who knows what what we were talking about when when intuitive machines went to the moon but
um yeah I I want to know more of this maybe it's because it's not launching on SpaceX it's just not getting enough attention but how did they I think they went uh it says it's a suite of 10 experiments provided by NASA as part of the space agency's commercial lunar payload Services clps Public private partnership so NASA's effort to save cost by enlisting more than a dozen us
firms to fery Cargo tied to the US space agency's ambitious Artemis program I I honestly don't know I honestly how an Elon critic might say that Elon is intentionally sort of resilience also also called hakuto R mission 2 launched to the Moon alongside blue ghost on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in mid January but unlike other Landers okay so I'm surprised that Elon wasn't pumping this harder but he's he's been a
busy he's been busy he he has been busy there's been a lot going on anyway um one of these inward looking instruments dub lisst is a drill capable of reaching a record setting 3 m Bel beneath the lunar surface to measure heat flowing up from within deep enough to give scientists a better idea of how exactly the moon cooled from a ball of Mo molten rock to the cold inert world we know
today another called the lunar mag magn magnetotelluric Sounder LMS will place electrodes across a roughly 700 squ met swath of terrain its measurements of subtle electric and magnetic currents coursing through the moon can probe more than 1,000 km into the interior 2/3 of the way to the lunar Center that's crazy wild we got Keith in the waiting room oh yeah that's perfect you have to imagine blue Ghost
was running on ramp to uh you know make it to the moon oh undoubtedly you can't you can't get to the moon if you're taking 45 days to close your books every month it's impossible what do you think Keith is it possible the future is on ramp so all the companies that want to create the future hopefully are saving time and money on ramp yes yes I love it uh can you give us the update uh what's going on with
ramp they seem to be on a tear valuations never been higher uh actually I would push back and say take a take a victory lab I know the the job's not done Eric has been very clear about that but uh I feel like you can take a little bit of a Victory lap uh and probably more more this year to come given the momentum well the amazing thing about ramp is the value proposition you know
has been clear from the beginning we're going to save you time we're going to save you money and now there's empirical evidence across any type of company we can show that you know 5% this 10% that so it's very obvious and the CFO world is one of the most archaic worlds parts of any business even the most Cutting Edge organizations typically have a very archaic call it uh analog uh CFO
function and ramp has the vision of we're going to digitalize and bring the CFO function and all the finance into the Modern Age and use the same tools same techniques same data same software same SAS tools that everybody else in your organization uses and that's why it's such an exciting Vision like the Valu the valuation you know is somewhat art not science but the reason why
investors all across the globe are static about you know investing in ramp at any point is because we have this vision of changing and transforming the CFO suite and every company has this broken engine has an old engine from the 1800s or 1900s and we're going to bring the engine of Finance into the 22nd century first 21st century uh AI will probably bring us into the 22nd century
with ramp two so that's why everybody's excited the other the thing that's special about the company though and the short term is usually at this level of scale companies slow down the product velocity slows down the quality of talents uh decreases um we have a reversion to the mean so to speak and ramp of anything is fire out all cylinders the product velocity is increasing the quality and insights of
the product um in the team are improving the intern classes for the last two years are by far the best intern classes anywhere in the globe so that's the future and so that's why this round is very exciting because it's a prediction for the future based upon a lot a a lot of Savvy people who get access to all the best companies that Ram still has the highest slope which is you know a
play on their metaphor H do you think uh that's because Eric and Kareem are second time Founders like like can you break them down as Founders and like what makes them able to stay on the like just insane Cadence going into year six going into year 10 like H how do they have so much energy great question I wish I wish I knew the answer because I would love to invested more if you can come up with a formula
or predict a formula that's great but having worked with them now for over five years I think there's a couple ingredients one subtle ingredient is Eric has amazing marketing instincts and you really can't train this the best CEOs or the chief marketing officer for the company and you know Eric entered originally a space that was quote unquote crowded there were large incumbents there were other funded
startups and we were able to cut through the Clutter immediately and he he deserves the credit for being able to clarify succinctly powerfully and communicate the value proposition of RAM and then reinvent that every year or two to make it broader more relevant more more impressive actually Korean you know is setting the engineering both Tempo and Quality Bar and has been from the
beginning and I think the combination is really interesting and you know maybe a global point is if you look at some of the other heroic companies and in people's portfolios let's say strike yeah you have two brothers um so you're getting two Executives for one I think you know ramp there's like you're getting two CEOs for one and so I think an other amazing company is that
incredible Synergy between two incredibly talented people where you're always on the same page and you really reinforce each other is very rare and so if I can find two other Founders that are that much in sync um that might be the reason to invest actually yeah well what are you seeing for like young gen Z Founders like what what like like there's this narrative like oh gen Z hasn't produced their Zuck
yet like what's what's your take on that and and and what would be some advice for you know the younger entrepreneurs who are coming in maybe deciding between like hey I build a chat GPT rapper make some money maybe it's not a vcable company but it gets me paid versus let me take a big shot at something massive like how do you counsel people these days I don't think there's a formula
that works for building an iconic company like as you put it out Zuckerberg is his first company yeah um Eric and cream did build a company to sell a company so I don't I don't think there's a one siiz fits-all formula I think it really comes down to do you have a vision of what the world needs and do you have a strategic advantage in your own traits your own personal superpowers that maps to that problem
set and if you have one when you're 19 years old or 20 years old or 21 years old it might be a really good idea to proceed if you don't have that combination of a vision and your own superpowers then learning building working with other talented people might be a really good um sort of formula for those of you who are sports fans you know there's this epic debate constant in football about you draft a rookie
quarterback in the first round do you start that quarterback and do they learn you know trial by fire or do you s of sit them on the bench for a year or two have them carry the clipboard around and occasionally you know enter a game that's you know over so to speak and I've studied this actually empirically and it's really interesting the people the there are Hall of Fame quarterbacks
of both uh of both sort of backgrounds career progressions the career progressions of those who start right away typically the first season the performance of the quarterback is miserable it's the worst year of their career almost without fail interception to interception touchdown ratio as a specific illustration the people who sit on the bench though for two or three years and
put aside the opportunity costs there when they start they don't have an upside down intercept touchdown ratio so they do learn things and so it depend upon the quality of the team anyway I think it's most useful most of the time for Founders to work in an outstanding Organization for a year or two before starting their own company you get a feel for Taste taste of what great is like what excellent really Excellence
really means Excellence quality excellence in driving an organization forward and I think there isn't there isn't a great substitute for that but if you're really ready to go there are people who learn better by being told you know I'm throwing you in the pool learn to swim I love it yeah question I have is you know you obviously noted earlier that ramp was a already a pretty
competitive category people thought that it was not you know a lot of people had made a bet and and were kind of ready to just watch the category play out do you see categories today that are like fintech in 2020 when you made the what I believe was your first time investing in ramp that are ripe for a team to come in and take this sort of new approach uh kind of potentially invert the value
prop in the way that ramp did uh have you identified anything there is there kind of categories that you would like to invest in well I was fortunate it was in 2019 I had a fair amount of expert use in the space and I've come to the conclusion that there's massive opportunity in replacing Amazon business card let alone this bigger vision of you know digitalizing the CFOs world but the people that were funding other
operations those Founders and teams were missing some key ingredients and we're kind of naive about some stuff underwriting specifically but there's other points so actually unusual for me I was proactively trying to find high quality Founders that were interested in this problem and then Deli unfortunately intercepted green playing a video game having listened to me probably annoyed by me
pontificating every day that we need to find like people to you know kind of compete with bra or ax and blah blah blah divy and all this stuff and then he's like he actually walked into my office I was in shock he said like I found I think I found two Founders I was like really like um but he turns out he he did um we had actually been like pitching other Founders and trying to
recruit people to do this so I don't usually do this but I have a lot of expertise in the area so I'm not usually proactive about trying to find investment opportunities and then similarly you know when I was working at Founders fund at the time was a very non-standard Founders fund investment in many many ways the most a cute one being if you have all these competitors that are doing well what's the Monopoly story
yeah you know like and there is a monopoly story I believe ramp will be a monopoly but you know imagine pitching the investment team at Founders fund um the Monopoly store in 2019 in a category that includes MX actually svb even had a product in the market bra andd well very well funded you know with quote unquote traction so um you know it took a little bit of massaging fortunately Brian
singerman also saw the potential at the time and really was alienated by some of the other Founders too so that that helped correct the antimonopoly you know kind Crusade it's great are there any uh categories that you're looking for right now hunting for found I mean obviously everybody talks about AI all the time and I think there are opportunities in AI that probably fit that characteristic
where people have assumed there's a winner or winners or you know whether an application layer or foundational model layer or somewhere else infrastructure layer but perhaps the right Founders it's now 5 to 10 years into that story and use sometimes it takes a lot of time to bake before you get the next generation of Founders who have insights into what could be reinvented you think
about this was kind of like what SpaceX did you know in some ways the Rockets was like the Rockets were really good but they were invented the 1960s in the United States and you know I waited about 20 years maybe 30 years uh to reinvent rockets and then rocket lab which has a very competitive offering at for certain kinds of uh payloads was another 20 years post SpaceX so sometimes you just have to let the wave
you know sort of go on for a while before you have a vision about how to reinvent it and then it's the right founder so I would love to invest in something that's the next generation replacement for llm not a better llm but something that will TR you know transforms pretty good dou chra but that's something that would be a you know complete it would make llms obsolete that would be a cool investment
yeah yeah how durable do you think the AI revenue is today you obviously were around for the era and companies going public you know with with little to no Revenue five million of Revenue going public right the the Counterpoint today is that we have you know great private companies with nine fig run rates you know that are growing tremendously fast but you know we've talked about this on
the show before this idea of like easy come easy go right so if you can create a bunch of traction really quickly how durable is that do you think that the companies that are you know adding 10 million of AR every month are you know sort of durable yet are they going to be leaders and five years what's your take there well there's a quality of Revenue and it's different like for example open
AI most of the revenue comes from chat TBT subscriptions that's pretty durable yeah um consumers are or people using it you know for business applications but on an individual basis tot there are revenues you can get that are more like Pilots yeah and you know those are completely non- durable and then they're somewhere between like if you sell to an Enterprise and they roll out to the
entire organization this AI based product the chance that they're going to swap you know in any short term is very very low yeah um so if you get through it you get through procurement you know you have a champion and you change business processes within a very large 14,000 organization that's pretty damn you know scalable durable revenue sustainably for probably five plus years
and so those kind of companies those AI companies are pretty damn good shape in my opinion but you do see people adopting something as kind of like a trial like you know my told me there's this AI wave I need to test out this this and this and have an answer to my board that revenue is is very precarious another set of revenues is around training and posttraining I think the advances in AI are so fast that the way
we build models today with fine-tuning and different kinds of training may be also obsolete a year two years from now um so there may be models that are built that don't require any human training so revenues that are built on and companies that are built on that kind of Revenue may not be as durable as people think either yeah while we have you here what's your take on one of the hotter
categories in in deep Tech humanoid robots everybody's got to take uh because uh I think they rightfully should but uh I'm I'm guessing you have something spicy for us well spicy is that look Chinese are ahead of us and it's very dangerous politically geopolitically I think the administration is going to have to take some action there I think you have large companies like meta you know
publicly embracing this and their CTO responsible for this so it's a very top down initiative you have a lot of startups we funded several ATVs probably the hottest sector among VCS right now is robotic startup you know walks in it's like okay how much money do you want and the be hundreds of million dollars um so you know and then Tesla has had a lot of progress like actually
I think some of the private progress is better than the public stuff so it's very impressive so I think the sector will be successful for somebody I think as a VC right now it's really hard to invest in the sector given the proliferation of startups all with high potential the prices you have to invest that make money it's unclear that there will be monopolies yet some of these companies are being priced that way one
one of the concerns that I have is I think we need to learn from DJI we need to understand that they were able to flood the market with products that they were selling for less than it costs them to produce right if you just take apart some of these you know products and you understand the component cost it's actually uh more than what the retail price is and unit tree is doing the same
thing right now right there you can go on unit tree and and buy a humanoid and uh you imagine they're pretty happy with how the DGI roll out went and they want to do the same thing again no this is why I think geopolitically the Trump Administration is going to have to address this I think robotics have military applications too so you have this like imagine the data collection potential um but the military
applications of a robot that can run 17 miles an hour so I I I would be shocked if this Administration doesn't figure out a way to ban Chinese robots before it's too late yeah with DJI there's this idea that you're not too worried about the Drone in your closet because it's like zippered in you know the box that it came in and and there's the idea that like okay like in this doomsday scenario
the drones take off and you know become these sort of weaponized devices but a humanoid who's doing your laundry and then can turn around and you know get up any take you out is a is a totally different story so I think that you have a good point also training data I mean there's there's a lot of dangers and so I think this is a real political issue that needs to be top of mind like once
we get through Tik Tock which will happen you sooner rather or later I think Robotics and humanoid robots are particularly severe particularly severe threat and so that said we will need an American competitor one way or the other like the world is going to develop at some point yeah humanoid robots that are effective and' better if American competitors are great y but we really
need to slow down the Chinese progress especially if it involves subsidization by the CCP yeah yeah uh one thing that's been interesting is seeing how Uber's been positioning themselves in the context of autonomous driving right they're basically dar's positioned the company to be like a Booking.com for autonomous vehicles giving you opportunity to potentially uh talk your book a little bit does traba and I don't
know if you can speak to this but does traba have a position where you know today they're using sort of human capital to Across the sort of network of uh customers that they have is their world where you know I'd be curious if you could speak to sort of long potential of humanoids through tra well I think not immediately I think if you look at the tasks in light industrial
warehouses where tra specializes a lot of those tasks are not yet ready for robotic intervention however but 10 years from now if tra is succeeding in running an organiz in running you know the most sensitive part of a light industrial operation is the human labor and your action quality control reliability all of those things if you get the credibility of making a business more successful you may be a great
Pathway to introduce more and more technology sure so you may not obviate humans you may supplement humans you may make a com you may introduce a combination that does some humans and some robotics but it's some company from afar that doesn't understand how a warehouse works that doesn't understand real workers and what real workers you know needs are and tries to run a mixed system without
having any understanding of real people I don't think it's going to be very successful and I don't think we're ready to rip out in the longtail fragmented sense um light industrial that the investment required for robotics to R out all the humans yeah isn't going to be economically feasible Amazon may be able to justify you know the R&D plus the fixed cost but no and we we had uh
we had Ryan Peterson on the show last week talking about how the bar the the bar to clear if you want to replace humans is so high because we're actually we're pretty good at what we do right right we've got you know all this you know ability to to an agency um and uh it's you know very clearly going to be the same type of uh situation within within warehouses as in ports but over
20 years I could see tra introducing more and more technology to their current customer base like say you know look look we've already satisfied were delighting you trust us this is going to make you more efficient more competitive more scalable Etc and so that could be a long-term strategy that makes tons of sense for the company and for their customer base yeah how do you think about the roll out of humanoids uh
specifically around depreciation in the EV space we've seen massive depreciation on the consumer side right somebody buys a model y it's worth you know 30 grand less a few months later right this sort of extreme depreciation do you see that as as a potentially a headwind for the roll out of humanoids where you know Factory basically say hey look uh I think your Tech has potential but if I
just wait a year I can get a much better you know robot for uh you know the same price well I don't think anybody really knows on a Decay curve you know because what is wear and tear due to these robots like in what functions too it may be very different like if you ask robots to do this vers this vers this but like a year are they completely dysfunctional like imagine a simplified metaphor you
if you have a weight like a gym at home probably last for a decade easily like you're squat rocking your wa you throw them in a commercial gym those things are going to show wear terar in the first year espe and you bar you they got to change the treadmill out every day after you at Barry I'm sure lit literally like the wear so it does depend upon the use the use and I don't
think anybody knows really what that like curve looks like and then that affects the economics like how prudent just on a purely rational basis is using a robot to do X Y or Z because you don't you don't really understand that trade right now the only way to really do that is you have to throw some robots at some problems and then monitor what breaks why and how and how fast and how expensive or the replacement
parts yeah totally uh what about the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve do you have a take uh prepared for that yet yeah I'm probably not the biggest fan I mean I'm very supportive of the Trump Administration I think almost everything they've done has been really good and really strong and I've been very impressed I probably if I was going to do it would have done it Bitcoin only I don't think I don't think we need to do
it but if we were going to do it I don't think kind of stepped in the middle of a bunch of messaging Problems by like including a bunch of other cryptocurrencies but I'm not the biggest fan of like the government doing uh performing business functions period so I don't like the Sovereign wealth fund either um I mean I'm happy to manage it if they you know KB wants if they need
KB if they need professional managers we'll probably do it but that's great the the reality is I don't think mixing business function in politics is a good idea I think you at those and you know free enterprise works really well capitalism works extremely well and the government should do you know protect the American people defend defend the Border you know Etc um and I don't I
don't see any you know the only argument for the Bitcoin strategic Reserve is obviously we do have gold reserves yep you know and if you believe the metaphor that the future of shore value is like C you can talk yourself into it but I don't think it's the most appalling thing you know yeah there was a good point the administration like the Strategic Reserve could just be Bitcoin we seiz from criminals right and it just
goes into fun for that too yeah I mean obvious obviously the FBI and other people W uh you know treasury winds up getting their hands on a lot of valuable assets yep and you know that could be a good way to fund it without taking American tax dollars you know I think the burden and I think doge is showing this you know is really setting a great example here is the burden for taking a
dollar from an American family should be increased by an order of magnitude the justification should be go up not that there's never a justification but we need to raise that bar the dollar belongs with the people who earned it baring the most extraordinary justification for it you can't have these frivolous soft justifications or low R justifications it really belongs to the people who create the value
interesting well said yeah you're spending more time in DC do you think that there's a a like a potential for startups or specifically like defense Tech startups like to to move offices there earlier or like actually like build companies there I don't know I think for non-defense startups I wouldn't recommend starting an early stage company DC obviously the people
who are already successful are spending more time in DC which is you know valuable to me to some extent but I think if you're an early stage company that's not really targeting the government as your first customer Federal yeah you know in some way then I think it's probably a mistake right now that could change in five or 10 years and you know maybe there's a better ecosystem there yeah I don't know the
defense landscape and how fast the defense department is going to innovate um we'll see I mean there are people in the administration who believe that reform is going to be fast and furious in the defense department and that we need it from a budget perspective we have to the defense of Ary needs to do more with less yeah and so but until the proofs in the pudding I don't know how vast the opportunity is right
now we have time for maybe one more question I'm curious to get your take on uh on Sundar do you think he's still got a job in a year a year from now uh the roll out of of a across the Google uh ecosystem has been atrocious from my view and I think consumers feel this John always jokes he's like I I pay for Gemini I don't know where to find it but I it's cool when it pops up uh he seems
to be underp underperforming dramatically in the context of SAA you know what's your what's your take on on that whole situation well he he seems to be outperforming Tim Cook which you've read the latest at least they have TR that are good yeah for those that missed it Apple just said we're delay years two years something like that two years as other people pointed out two years in an AI world is an eternity
might as Welling something for 20 years orations at this point and so I think that's a serious problem and I'm an apple Fanboy for ever you know how forever so I think it's pretty devastating that they're so far behind I think suar made several miscalculations and I actually do think that Microsoft and you know sa got a lot of credit but I think they're seeing some of the sides
to some of their strategies now um like I think they are going to wind up not having quite as much of a strategic like lock on AI as they thought they were I think that said they maybe played the cards the best they could you know you can't always control everything uh but I think the world is changing really rapidly and the people who control the future of AI may not be at Microsoft
yeah that makes sense right well thanks for stopping by we love having you you're welcome anytime anytime there's breaking news I'm sure I'll give you a call this is fantastic uh we're going to hop on uh keep talking about ramp uh we're going to packing McCormack yet next so awesome thanks for stopping by keth talk to you soon great to chat have a great day that was great uh good questions Jordy I like I
like I like keeping the humanoid question going across all of these we got to ask py that too and then eventually we can put together a super cut here's every every important Capital allocator every Silicon Valley person uh talking about humanoids well while we are waiting two minutes to bring Pac in uh let's talk about wander find your happy place let's go I got a hat for this throw it on we got a hat throw it
on uh book a wander with inspiring views Hotel grade amenities dreamy beds top tier cleaning and 247 coner service it's a vacation home but better I've been looking at one uh up by yuse thinking about taking the kids up there uh yeah it's snowing and we wanted to go to the snow but we didn't want to do crazy hotel we didn't want to do some you know Airbnb thing wander was just
like the perfect Middle Ground perfect middle ground and they have this really nice UI feature where if it's snowing at the wander when you're going to be look booking at it it will drizzle snow over the web page while you're on it it's amazing amazing it's a really really nice while while we're you know Buy some time until py joins uh py did an entire deep dive on wander oh fantastic uh and
we got py in the waiting room bring bring him in let's bring him in I wish he was here in person he can do that he can do the wander oh got the ramp on there we go ramp day hell Brothers hello welcome to the show good to have you here oh my God it's great to be here long time long time first time first of many first of many first of many uh yeah break it down what happened
to day why why are you wearing a ramp hat take a Victory lap take a Victory lap no I I always wear a ramp hat uh I I've heard that tvpn is is just unbiased uh journalism and so I wanted to join you for an unbiased conversation unbias space yeah uh guests and hosts of this Podcast May May hold Securities by the presenting sponsor of the show um anyways it's great to have you on py uh
I wanted to go back to March 21st 2022 when you uh this was like probably your second time covering when when they announced their $8.1 billion valuation uh and was that the back to backr the double round or whatever I mean every single round for a minute there was you basically would you read a ramp fundraising announcement You' close the information and then they you you get a notification on your phone
that said scoop ramp is raising another round uh yeah it was wild yeah that was the8 that that actually might have been the third piece I think the first time I wrote about them was December 2020 I think they were we didn't talk about evaluation but I think they were valued at 300 million at the time so like something just path like C in series a at that point yeah that's like a a
personal kind of net worth type number um and then the next time I read about them was when they had raised backtack rounds I think it was like 1 billion and then 1.6 billion here and I spent a lot of the time in these pieces uh one just being like you know praising ramp obviously and then two kind of justifying that you know if you're growing this fast yeah like these valuations kind of end up catching up I
think there was a period in between they took a Down Round they took their medicine uh in 2023 but now they just kind of continue to grow fast and we're we're back way above that 8.1 billion dollar valuation yeah think about thinking about the the r ramp down round was directly tied to the market not business performance which is why they're back above that last you know financing just given that
um you know they were they were taking that down round while still putting up ridiculous you know numbers and also I mean down round is like I mean Facebook did a Down Round at one point um but down round can mean so many different things and like I saw some down rounds during that year that were brutal like pay to pay pay to play total cram down yeah it's $100 million on 50 pre so the
new investors are taking 2third of the company yep and then yeah there's a 10% option pool for the executive team or something like that that's like going to get rolled out and literally anyone who touched the company for the first half decade that they were running it is just gone wiped like didn't exist never thing you got paid W2 wages I hope you I hope you put some in Nvidia stock because you
got nothing now it was like that that happened all the time and it was like terrifying but you know it happens I yeah I was on I was on the other side of a few of those but I I I remember reading about the the ramp piece the ramp down round when it happened yeah and that's when I really knew like I think you know in 2020 20121 you know you can you can be impressed by a
company but a lot of people are growing fast a lot of Val valuations are going up yeah when you read a story about in you know this terrible Market a company doing a Down Round And it's like pretty much gushing and all of the commentary around it and Twitter and everything about them doing a down round was gushing commentary on how how smart it was for them to kind of just take the
hit and keep going that's when you know you got a company that's that's pretty special on your hands yeah so you talking about ramp safety yeah so this is John's uh so yeah so py like obviously like ramp's moving really quickly we're worried about a future where ramp is like closing the book so fast that like you go to ask ramp to close the books and it thinks like if we didn't have any humans we would never
need to close the book so it just kills everyone ramp yeah kind of like kind of like a ramp Doomer scenario like should we pause ramp I've seen some people throwing out open letters maybe trying to Lobby the government to slow down ramp what do you think what's your take it's I mean I think it's a real risk I I think pausing doesn't work though right then the Chinese are going to start you
know the faster so you can't do that the thing that I get worried about is that you run out of Adams in the universe at some point if you're an investor and you're thinking like can they continue to double every year like at some point run out of of Adams in the universe and so that to me is kind of one of the be cases I guess yeah I I think ramp generally is what they're doing is like
they're building a machine God that lives in your CFOs Chrome tab but ultimately it will be a beneficial benevolent machine God that lives in your CFOs Chrome tab focus on saving you time and money and it knows it's Lane right exactly exactly so in in a post ramp Society kind of like a post AGI post ramp Society I think I think humans will be doing fantastically I I think it'll be great at least the CFO sweet
will right they're gonna get all their time back strategically about the business about life so I I think uh that that's one of the things you know my my dad uh is is a CPA and so like I just think you know when I when I write about ramp I think about my father uh right and like how much how many basketball games you know he he could have been out of mine uh had ramp existed wow at the
time I mean the guy was you know he was a business consultant he was traveling you know all the time fly to Germany for the day and fly back and like imagine you know Rams AI just does that for him right and like we're hanging out he knows me better I know him better like and and God it just suddenly gets super dark back he's like my dad never made it to games in the first 15 days he
actually did pretty incredible that he would like fly back he would take the early flight back to make it into my stupid game uh so good on him I just mean he'd be like a lot less tired had ramp uh existed you know I'll give a personal anote I got to hang out with my kids this weekend because we're on ramp and you know it just the books close themselves uh uh pivoting a little bit
uh John and I were talking this morning there there's too many top signals to count right now uh everywhere you look you got trumpcoin you got uh cardano going in the reserve you got uh you know only fans competitors doing uh something you know we don't know uh and we got humanoid robot companies with one customer raising at 40 billion uh what is BMW's valuation by the way yeah
that's a good question oh my God if it's less than 40 billion you know for is less 53 billion eur3 billion euros okay so yeah so what's that in USD like $1250 we we're mogging the the Euro these days but um yeah it's probably 50 billion yeah so so yeah you there's definitely there's definitely a bull case to be made of why figur should be worth as much as their customer um uh their first customer but uh anyways how
do you think as an investor right now we're we're clearly living through one of the greatest times in history right we just had a private spacecraft land on the moon uh elon's launching Rockets every day there's there's you know austerity in the government which is you know potentially bearish for GDP shortterm but probably good for the dollar long term yep uh how do you think as an investor and even a writer and
somebody who's called a lot of Trends you know early you know what do you think the next you know talk to us about the next 5 to 10 years oh the next 5 to 10 years uh you know you know what's I found really fascinating is that a lot of the stuff that I'm not investing in has been super overvalued uh and then a lot of the stuff that I've been investing in has been undervalued and
underappreciated and I think it's going to be worth like a lot more in the next kind of year or two sure so that that's kind of my take I you know I'm not a a figure investor big fan of of their videos and actually my daughter loves figure videos and was like really s to see two of them uh two of them together I don't know I mean I think like there's a lot of probably overhype in AI there's
probably going to be like a couple of 10 trillion dollar AI companies that are going to pay for the whole thing humanoids scare the hell out of me as an investor because it's like this really impossibly hard thing to do with a lot of really really smart people working on it where like if you pull off this impossible thing then you're competing against these 10 other companies and
like who wins Big consumer surplus event but there's you know like human labor doing things there are some people I've heard who don't just kind of podcast and write right who like do you like you make cars or whatever physical labor yeah I think like you know human human salary and wages and all that it's like $45 trillion dollar it's like half of the world's GDP and so like if you underwrite robots as like some small
percentage I mean I think figure already got like 0.1% of that GDP got credit for 0.1% of that GDP which is pretty uh pretty amazing um but like there will be like massive massive massive companies built here and I think there's also going to be uh a lot of people who lose a lot of money we could talk about what's happening in in Venture I think it's like a really I think like the big
funds are actually super well positioned and all there's going to be a lot of these like emerging is funds who try to compete who I just think get kind of like wiped out I I don't know I think there's gonna be do you have a take on General Catalyst going public that's a good one I don't have a good take on that I mean it's like it's a really I would say like one one of the you know when I think back of some of
your one of my favorite pieces of yours over the year I'm not going to know the title but you you had a really great Deep dive on this idea that as our tools become better and more efficient you know a group that you know a company that would have taken a hundred people to build you know uh five years ago now only takes 20 right and I think we're really seeing that right now in AI where
you have companies like cursor a big one you know with 20 people doing 100 million of ARR uh it's been amazing to see that play out how how you know how you know take basically one take a Victory lap there maybe double click in and share some more insight uh but I feel like that was really uh you basically called that uh and and did it in a very eloquent way but I think we're
I I expected it to be something like maybe like five years from now that would be the case but it feels like it's that way like today so there's there's a few different ways that goes and it's it's really like there's the Russ Russell conjugation where like you know the person who's doing something different than you doing it bad you're doing it right whatever and like I literally think about this a bunch when
I see all the charts of uh of these companies making like more money than ramp faster I'm like that's actually like way too fast and that's totally unsustainable Ram however is like actually growing perfectly but I like I that really actually goes through my head is doing it just right but they're they're not and I think I'm actually scare me yeah yeah yeah the bigger the bigger growth rates scare me it's okay
you're your growth rate is perfect growing faster is unsustainable right slower disaster you're growing the perfect right the Goldilocks effect the Goldilocks growth rate I mean you know that's Eric and Kareem just doing what they do I think just like really nailing that but I do think there is something about that that like really actually does uh does scare me that that fast
growth than just like how easy it's become so really the you can build more with fewer people I took to me kind of two different things like one it just made me scared this was like back in 2022 like really scared about software in in General uh because you can go out and build with five people a company that grows really really fast and two I think the other point of that that essay
was uh because we have better tools and because you can do more with fewer people startups should be able to just like actually start fresh and compete with these companies that you never thought that you'd be able to compete with I'm writing uh you know a followup on primer right now which is taking on K through 12 education taking on public schools like not a group or a group of
incumbents that like you thought you'd ever be to take on and I think they actually can you can like put education on a mors law like cost curve and get make education better for less and less money uh and so like that's pretty amazing obviously Ander roll you know is like starting to get starting to approach kind of primes valuation uh and so like that I think is like the really exciting part of it to me less that five
people can build things really really quickly and more that 100 people can build things to take on like these really old big companies yeah what's your AI stack you've been a little bit critical of a writing ability which I think is fair we also we we have cougan Benchmark which we do about once a week where we get the new latest model to try to tell us a joke and it and it's pretty
it's hilarious when you read it like you're a standup and it just bombs intentionally and it's funny to watch someone bomb intentionally so it's good in that regard but how have you been uh yeah what's your what's your AI stack and uh yeah what's actually useful uh I mean I still use Claude and Chachi and Gro to just kind of like if I don't understand something I'll throw it in or like to make sure that I like I
have explained something the right way or to get feedback go search basically four point what's that you're using it like a better Google search or like better better Google search and like just a little safety blanket on the like I don't have an editor so somebody to like tell me that this isn't like the the worst thing I've ever written um 4.5 is actually a little bit better
it stopped doing like the thing that killed me tweeted about a couple times recently is like the M Dash it's not just blank M Dash It's like a totally different blank and 4.5 has actually stopped doing that which is really good because I would see that in people's writing and it just like it really made me hurt but yeah what was the PG one uh delve delve but you know what's funny I
when I read older stuff that's like that totally predates I find delve in it all the time I think PG might have been wrong in that people Ed interesting yeah I I I thought there was some some some weird round tripping thing where like like the rhf team in Kenya that open AI was paying to do the rlf stuff had learned English in a very proper way and so Del was one of the words that was
like in the vocab like course that they all took and so they thought that it was like a much more popular phrase than Americans think and Americans use it but just not all the time so it's kind of weird but I I mean you'd see these aberration all the time where you'd be like write a tweet and would like use hashtags and it's like that's kind of what a tweet is but not really not today
it's not a banger like no one uses hashtags or if you do use a hashtag it's like in this funny like kind of meta ironic way it's not just like yeah anyway so yeah yeah give me some other hot takes on I mean it's I I literally just asked it uh today because I was trying to you know make my own joke uh for this podcast you know the joke that ended up becoming you know the fact that with this unbiased conversation about
ramp there's like that one phrase like no bias no something no conflict no interest no mercy no conflict no interest that's what I was looking for see this is this is so I said that I said uh no bias no dot do dot yeah and it was like very confidently no bias no bet like no bet what you're thinking of I was like no the phrase you're likely thinking of is no skin in the game no opinion oh my
God got two seconds uh I like still got it not a paperclip yet uh what what's going on on substack these days they've got some like social activity that's happening uh seems to be picking up you're still writing on substack correct I'm still writing on substack I've seen a lot of conversation about uh you know people going over to substack you can use links there it's a friendly
conversation I have not done that at all I think you know my my people are on X we're on X live right now right is our first live X episode it is first ever first ever you go retweet it right now don't get too distracted but yeah uh yeah um I don't know I don't know where you want to take that I me sub Tech like as a company seems to be doing very well like the last time I saw Chris
and and I would I got like some kind of I don't know if I should even say but like you know so so some reference on like oh I'm like hiring an accountant that work for them and they're like oh yeah it's actually pretty good business and so congrats to the team I I think they I think they've done really well from a company that was like kind of like maybe overhyped at one point it's
like oh it's like playing in the social nwork seems like they built a really solid bus broken through the cultural norm I see it on Instagram and my question to you is you pay them 10% of your gross revenue right no he does he unlike the all in podcast run ads this is why he's on the show there go you got to run ads I mean he is an ad respector ad respector we're both you know Ram sponsored obviously wander
portfolio company longtime friend of the newsletter just feel good getting to tell people about that if I were there you go if I were a subscriber business I wouldn't get to tell people about ramp I wouldn't there not nearly enough ads on the screen right now we need more so we got everyone has a sponsored hat right now there we go got bezel I got the wander you got the ramp we should have
look down so I can see the logo there we go that's good yeah so so so I mean he is kind of a bit of a failure mode for for sub I am well it's funny because people will ask me like you know you like what do you think about suback and like you've talked to the team obviously and like I actually have never talked to the co-founders I've talked to one person at substack once because I'm like
the worst possible business for those those guys I haven't paid a dollar to substack what do you think about this idea that like they should be doing the bundling and aggregation on their side where like you should go to substack somebody should pay $20 a month and they should get you know like you and pirate wires and you know Barry weisses Free Press like all instead of instead of those folks like leaving and you
monetizing elsewhere like do you think that make sense or is that just like a crazy idea no it's a good idea I mean it's like it's the idea that everybody I think has that they should do that that they should build an ad Network that like there's all these things that are like clearly good for good for business um that actually I think in practice like when you're when you're like
dealing with people who have kind of like Egos and think that their own thing is like the thing are really really really hard to pull off in in practice like I wouldn't want to be part of a bundle um and so I think that that ends up being a challenge same with uh you know like ramp is not going through an ad Network and buying like REM slots right they're partnering with you know just top shelf kind of shows and
specific people and so I think the ad Network stuff falls apart there I really like what suback is doing for the Simplicity like I in the beginning was definitely somebody who thought that I would move to a different platform I wanted more customization whatever like you'd have to P me a lot of money to move to a different platform now just because it works really really well the
core product that they they built yeah have you ever experimented with a like a paid off offshoot because I know you've done other offshoots like uh what was the Thursday white pill one we did the Friday yeah the weekly D optimism yeah yeah weekly dos of optimism which is kind of like a offshoot but but that's still free right it's all still all still free we could I don't want to write more if anything I want to write
less this year and so uh I think I don't want to Bangers only Li bangers only I don't want to limit what I send exactly uh and I actually don't know like at this point I'm in too deep and I don't know what the conversion rate would be and maybe it would be incredibly embarrassing and I'm just going to stick with stick with what I got there you go love it uh where you mentioned earlier
you've been finding uh companies you feel are undervalued you obviously have an insane top of funnel right you've you're broken through the the mainstream if I ask somebody that you know is on X they know who you are if I ask somebody that's kind of even LinkedIn mode like they usually know who you are right so the top must be the top of funnel must be crazy um but uh what like where where
are you excited to be investing right now um I'm sure you're flooded and and doing a bunch of AI but at the same time uh it feels like an interesting time right now where you maybe wouldn't want to invest in the next humanoid robotic you know company you probably don't want to be investing in more defense like net new defense tech companies that are just incorporating today what what's got you
you know space feels uh like in many ways there's more opportunity than ever because the cost to get up there is dropped but where where is exciting to you what's the weird stuff you're looking at yeah um really like the way that i' I've been think like my catchphrase on this is andal and SpaceX for everything so as opposed to like you see andal and SpaceX the mov is not like go do the second
best version of that it's go find that in the other industry so you know like a base power company or SOS internet doing TCO or primer doing education like find the thing that is going to go win that category is really what I'm looking for and those end up looking weird so I was kidding about the stuff that I'm investing in being under Val but uh I do think that because it doesn't like
really fit a thesis that a fund would have on defense or whatever um it is a little more affordable than a humanoid company or a foundation model company for sure yeah yeah I mean stuff in like power energy deeper in the supply chain way far away from the core hot AI consumer stuff there's going to be more reasonable prices there also are are you looking at bio stuff yet or bio adjacent
stuff we've been doing a lot of Bio stuff I imagine hot take would be cancer is probably gone in 10 years I think is is one of my favorite hot takes there's so many different attacks on it and cell therapies are doing well and it's a matter of kind of scaling scaling those out yeah I'm sure youtian malib the the power law uh I'm sure you've read Sebastian malabis the power law and before that he
wrote uh that book on uh more money than God about hedge funds and so his whole thing is like go and find the the group of people that are making trillions of dollars effectively are like really moving capitalist markets like the biggest power players and then write the definitive history and profile of them and so I went to a speaker series with him and afterwards you know somebody
comes up to him he's like what's the next book you're writing because that's where I want to be investing today right and he said bio he he was like I think that the next book I write will be about like the flagship pioneering like but also the biotech public companies and then the biotech funds and so it's something that I've I've certainly been meaning to get more up to speed on I
have a lot of friends and co-founders who have done like that bio is hard compared like of all the other things you know herb who I've been working with on the bio side who's who's you know stand for PhD in genomics and he like without him I wouldn't invest in BIO you see other generalist investors investing in BIO and he'll be like that is the dumbest [ __ ] deal I've ever seen in my life are we allowed to Cur on a
dumbest deal I've ever seen in my life you are allowed to curse on X but you what would your mother say and we will shame you for cursing generally because this is a uh this is a friend uh our kids watch the show kid friendly show our kids watch the show my goodness I'm I'm so sorry we don't curse personally but do whatever whatever's right for your brand yeah they're uh you know if
you want to have like a low a low tier like I I I know you're an Irish guy you're you're you're up in Boston getting drunk getting Hammer oh pck py P some bears throw some curse words out no I I all to say bio is incredibly exciting and bio is like a really funny one where I I think like people get really excited and we like oh my God like they told me that they're going to make people live till 250 years old they
definitely investing in that and people are going to lose their shirt but I mean at the same time it's like it's like every category is hard until some power law company comes along and makes it look easy like Ander Hardware was hard and now there's like now there's a new hardware company like every two days and then they like yeah they can't like beat anderol necessarily overnight but they
can like sell and get deals and then sell to Ander roll or like create value or like there can be good deals done in Hardware now even though like Hardware is hard totally I I mean more just like and may this might just be me calling myself out uh what do you have like millions of of people watching this right now calling myself out for being uh stupid but like just the vocabulary
of biology and like understanding how that whole thing fits together it's just like a totally different Beast even I think compared to hardware and other things yeah one of the one of the things I've been sort of realizing around everything deep Tech hard tech biotech fits this is uh within software we went through a 20-year period in Silicon Valley where software entrepreneur could
go out and make these sort of outlandish claims around the products that they would build but then just go and do it right because the software is hard but you can kind of make the pixels like you know work and whatever it's code right we we know how to do it and then in hardtech it's very different you know Elizabeth Holmes like I do believe she genuinely believed that she could build
the blood testing device that only needed one drop but then like physics got involved and was like I got to I got to tell you to pump the brakes there um so it's been interesting to see that play out where for you as somebody who's a a definite Optimist somebody that wants to believe in human potential and the ability to Great uh build great things you you probably have to dial it back at points and say like I want to
believe this is real but I'm not going to invest because I can't kind of reach that conviction threshold yeah I I have said and I think this is fair for for me not for people who are better at science but like I I do I'm I'm trying actually moving closer to the series a now and like not doing deep Tech because like I'm not the guy to underwrite the science and if I'm like the investor
that you're calling to to have something that has a much science risk in it like I shouldn't actually be it's more like the you know the the furthest out proven thing and putting a bunch of those together in do a company gentlemen I have to uh I have to leave you can we can I get a minute yeah you can get a minute okay as the Godfather of salana the guy who kicked off salana summer you
did you gota you gotta credit uh uh you got you deserve some credit for that uh give us your 30 second take on the strategic reserve it would have been unimaginable to think that the US government would be buying salana but uh you probably maybe I wouldn't be surprised if you alluded to it what's your 30 second take oh man my 30 second take is that it's all so dumb right now like I think salana is great I think
it's like fast tech and I think at like some point in five years a lot of Finance is going to run on salana on eth uh maybe on swe or you know like a lot of I think it's inevitable that that more and more finance will move over to crypto stable coins and having strip behind it is like a real thing any strategic Reserve that has cardano in it is just it's a joke right like it's like
there's a bunch of like and I'm guilty of this too there's a bunch of a bunch of dog that caught the car stuff going on anything in crypto right now it's like no regulation strategic Reserve we're like this actually kind of stupid like not this way like this is not what we've been bitcoin's down 8% today and basically round tripped back to where the announcement happened which is so
bearish like that's the US government is buying crypto and every bearish but I know you have an inperson meeting in like four minutes so sorry for making you late for that no this is great thanks for coming on have a good one see you later guys see you see you let's move on to garage mahals this is this is important stuff if you're building garage how big should it be couple hundred square feet no
couple thousand square feet no let's we're talking to people that are making 6,000 foot garages bigger than most people's houses out so I have spent time in Minnesota the CEO my co-founder at rora Brian lives in Minnesota and you can play everything's bigger in Minnesota right the houses are bigger the basements are bigger you can play basketball in his basement he's got
a half court uh and when it's below freezing for half the year you got to go big you got to build man caves and we're talking about man caves today so I'm EXC he a three car garage in the Minneapolis suburb already full he had a three car garage Brett Bailey talk about struggle I mean we need a moment of silence for this guy uh because he had to keep his racing portion a trailer outside through
brutal Minnesota winters then one March as he prepared for a race he discovered the wheels of the trailer had Frozen to the ground unacceptable but he didn't just take it lying down he figured out a solution for two weeks he was throwing salt out there but now he is part of a man cave meets Storage Wars Revolution spreading across the country I love it I'm a huge fan of man man caves and Storage Wars and so he
now keeps his two Porsches a Ferrari a custom Harley a dune buggy and a racing trailer in a nearly 2700 squ foot space outfitted like a Sleek European car dealership It Sports a tequila bar heated floors bathroom with a shower giant TV leather soap a stack of racing tires and a car lift so you can lift up the car work work on it wrench on it with a couple of cold ones on the
weekend it's great nothing like getting under your car after you've had a couple of beers just going to work on going to work on it it's a little dangerous sometimes you hit that Balmer Peak right working on your car call them car barns barn dominium toy sheds garage mahals or shes for Shop houses they're a big hit in the Land of 10,000 lakes all right so what's the controversy here John the
controversy is that uh they're too big and they make the town look stupid everyone hates how they look uh they called it what was it what they call it they call it the the the Tin Tin City or something like so I don't you you know this but Ben vice president producer of the show is actually from Minnesota yeah uh so we might have to send him out there to and and just have him zoom into
the show on the site because this is just such an important story it is it got to get original reporting we we don't like to do original reporting here we like to just you know spread misinformation from the timeline but uh we got to get Ben on the ground there because yeah there we go Ben Ben says he's got friends with garage mahals that's fantastic yeah in Cross Lake a forested vacation Mecca 2 and a half
hours north of the Twin Cities space is limited on Lakefront Lots making storage space elsewhere often in simple metal buildings highly valuable the city council has twice put a moratorium on new storage uh combating an image that has led some to dub this the community Tin City because there's so much tin uh going up as uh as as storage uh but if you look at some of these photos they
look fantastic it looks like a lot of fun if you're in one uh Nelson and others Tout The expansion of the tax base from the storage boom which includes his new 4200 foot building which is like that's a massive house and he's got a Taxidermy Kodiak bear in yes it's jammed with boats an RV sports cars motorcycles a Taxidermy Kodiak bear and his father's Model A one section designed with input
from his wife includes a full kitchen flat screen TV bathroom and stone fireplace the big biggest thing here John is I can't go in my backyard and throw up a uh I can't do one of these because California they don't they don't want you to build you can do adus every once I want 5,000 square ft of podcasting you know I got to run to the restur can you keep it going I'll keep it going um let's jump through to uh the
next post we're going to jump into the timeline we got a post from Reggie James uh somebody posted do you think that Steve Jobs did a market survey uh you know did uh a consumer survey to build the iPhone and Reggie jumps in here with a fantastic point he says they literally did they got all the phones on the market they saw it was all junk by Apple standards and they knew this for a while but had
to a few technical things in order first they had to get really good at miniaturization iPod helped them learn that then they had a cross-learning moment where the company they acquired for their touchcreen technology which was working on computer displays they took that and brought it over to project purple uh and that is how the multi-touch was born so now they have multi-touch and know how to make things
small and they are still looking at these junk phones on the market once they see what's wrong with them they ask themselves what's the phone we make for ourselves they vibed after they knew the market they had technical pieces in place and this is where all the software love that made the iPhone uh and uh the iPhone finally comes together pulling from springboard and all the Mac OSS
work that's what made the iPhone feel so good with directional multi manipulation of multi-touch the iPhone wasn't some isolated do what you want event it was built off of Decades of HCI learnings a key acquisition in the success in learning to the iPod uh learn the real stories and don't just take a cliche like users don't know what they want as an excuse to build nonsense so yeah aggressive but completely Fair
uh analysis the situ the guy who posted this though was like was like Hey I'm actually I actually don't know the history I'm just curious like can you just like educate me uh but Reggie's a good poster so he kind of amps it up and it's like let's let's go let's let's talk about this uh I want to have regie you know Reggie's had some amazing analysis of Apple over the years and
their different Trends it be it'd be great to have him on the show sometime soon we should have him on the show uh it's interesting I I remember this Old quora Post by Joe Lonsdale talking about the healan dialectic are you familiar with this no is this idea of like uh the dialectic is basically like there's a a thesis antithesis and then the synthesis and so you take like the
like an idea you think about the opposite of that idea the counter argument and then you synthesize something that takes into the best art the best pieces of both essentially um and it's a very popular like mental model and the example that he used in this qu post to explain the hegelian dialectic was literally Steve Jobs um both being like The Vibes guy but also the spreadsheet guy and it's so easy in
thought leadership and like posting for people to be like oh like Vibes are the only thing that matter like you should never think about the market map don't talk to customers don't exactly exactly people want axioms uh when in fact like like the best leaders are often like you know uh combinations best generalized advice do traditional market research just to as many customers as you can the thing
about consumer is consumer is a category where you can have no pre-existing business experience with the category and just build the product that you want I mean you can do this in B2B as well but I think it's more common yeah to just kind of ignore the market just build what you want in consumer yep um but even then it's it's cool to see the history of how the iPhone came together
and not just being oh here's a good idea we should just do this yeah anyway anything else on Apple I got a lot of hot takes on Apple uh you got to be more positive about Apple I think I just I've just been positive on Apple for 20 plus years of my life and it's fair to be negative in the short term but I'm positive in the long run it's more just like like I feel like at the end of your after you go massively viral
for talking trash uh there needs to be like hey like we can I gave Apple an out said just giving up on Innovation by an F1 team exactly then we'll we'll all shut up there's something about like I still love this company and I want it to be great and there is a sliver of greatness here let's just there's more than a sliver oh yeah there way more than a sliver totally but uh if tag Hoyer will
sponsor F1 why not why not Apple that would be very cool an Apple car and no other sponsors yeah like Red Bull like I mean Red Bull has a few others yeah they've got a bunch but they got a bunch imagine going around but I'm sure they can't do it because like some emissions thing or something like they they've made so many like they've pandered so to so many like special interest groups
essentially like they're like completely bought in at this point yeah I don't know uh it'd be very cool I'd like I'd like an F1 team do we want to talk about the GC yeah General Catalyst just go in public you'll be able to uh invest in a venture capital firm soon on public.com uh so get ready move your assets over to public.com uh but no this is a real story uh General catalyst is considering
an IPO Dan primac has the scoop we've been hearing rumors about this for uh a couple months um and as these asset managers get bigger and bigger it makes more sense to trade them publicly there's a few reasons uh behind that um the main reason in my I mean we can list out a few but uh when you're a public company you are uh subject to much more aggressive Audits and this is why people
don't want to go public because it's a hassle uh they will put they will put up with that Hassle and as a result they will have access to more Capital um and it will be a uh there will be potentially more of like a power law consolidation in the actual fundraising of these funds General Catalyst has uh you know billions and billions under management at this point tens of billions and uh if they want to go for
even bigger funds saying hey we are publicly traded all of our financials are are public you can go see them you know you don't have to rely on uh newcomer scooping some random things to uh to to count on it um but there was some debate over this Dan primac you know posts that General catalyst is considering an IPO Jason calak says what is going public exactly the returns or
the lp interest um and Dan Prim says what do you mean in this case it would be the management slh holding company like Carlile Blackstone Etc and a lot of people don't necessarily understand this I guess but um you know asset managers are themselves businesses that make money from fees and all sorts of pieces of that yeah GC I think didn't they roll out a private wealth divion yeah and and and they have private
Equity Investments they have they have growth stage Investments seed stage Investments and so every time they make a deal with someone else's money and so it it will be valued similarly to a bank although it's a very like high performing Bank in the sense but how do you how when you invest in a bank when you buy when you buy shares in city or chase JP Morgan or or I don't know Goldman Sachs
um what is happening well Goldman takes money from some people put my money in the bank and then they lend that money out and then they return it and over time they make money and it's just like any other business uh so I don't know why Jason isn't thinking about this Jeremy gon has a good bit on this which is you know basically that at the end of the day private Equity is the greatest
business model on Earth he always say like Merchant Banks the merchant Banks yeah he talks about Merchant Banks but specifically it makes sense that the the the people that invest in private in public in private markets um who study businesses all day long created a business model for themselves that's just absolutely fantastic sure yeah I mean they certainly have like an advantage playing in the the question is
is uh it will be very interesting to see a venture capital firm going out and doing you know a road show and putting together materials and saying look how much evida we're going to put up in this year and it's based entire you know presumably entire based on the fee accumulation uh from their various funds that are all kind of funneling into this one vehicle it'll also be very
interesting to see what comp looks like post IPO at these firms right because instead of carry points you're looking at stock options potentially there's a whole VAR that's what's unclear is is uh the the fund performance the carry where do those returns flow through because some of them will flow to the partners still but you would imagine that investors in GC and the public market
markets would want upside in the returns as well yeah so the partners have the partners own the general partnership right so then they would just have shares in the in the company exactly and So when you buy them you're buying a a slice of the general partner stake and if you buy enough it's like you're a general partner right but you just paid for that instead of worked on it um and yeah uh and and and this this type of
thing has happened before where um firms have sold GP stakes and said hey I'm cashing out of my fund itn't did this but I'm selling I I don't know if that's actually I haven't heard that but um but basically very I'm I'm selling part of my GP stake you will you will be the one to earn the returns from that upfront but uh yeah so this happened in 2023 January 24th 2023 Thrive Capital sells
minority stake to Bob Iger and other Mogul so this was kind of like a party round they sold 3.3% of the company uh including CEO Bob Iger um and uh yeah so they they were able to raise $175 million to the balance sheet of That's So fascinating too man comp and and because you think about 3% like that could be just like hiring another GP and giving them a a slice of the GP right yeah uh like you hire
another partner you say oh you're going to be the one who does the AI deals or the Deep Tech deals or the defense deals or whatever and you wind up giving them the effectively the same share but they didn't pay for it or unless they you know bought in for for some reason um or they and and and they don't get the same alignment like at this point it's kind of like iger's like a partner almost in
the sense like if he h he owns a stake in this one firm so if he has a deal that he wants to bring or partnership or he wants to do a deal with a portfolio company like he is linked to thrive in this like very important way that's more tangible and more economic than uh just like oh I'm an adviser to your fund it's like no like I actually invested in your fund I I not just as an LP but also on
the side which is fascinating anyway so she sums it up he says GC would be the first major usvc fund to IPO they own a health system a wealth business a fund of funds a debt business Etc they all started from a $73 million fund one that had 0.7 irr wow not good Legends but they kept it going I mean you just got to give them credit for that yeah it's amazing that's incredible their first
five funds wer that all changed with stripes when hamont LED stripes series B and of course ham tanaga is uh the CEO now and he refers to himself as CEO he has never he he he's never said I'm sure he said GP and but more recently he's been saying hey I'm the CEO of this firm I'm not just the I'm not just the GP or like the the named GP or the most important GP because all of that's kind
of like uh you know fake essentially yeah we should ask shei he's going to be on in 20 minutes we should ask him uh yeah for kind of a deeper analysis here and how he thinks uh all the fees and everything a huge percent of gc's returns 5.85 billion came from leango a chronic care company sold for 18.5 billion in 2020 written down two years later I wonder what it was written down to and I wonder um and I wonder
exactly what uh what happened with that like like why was that asset so mispriced but this happens all the time uh I mean plenty of times uh companies get uh get sold early and then wind up not doing the thing but then on the other side you have the Instagrams right yeah so tedoc was the acquirer they took a 13.7 billion loss in 2022 tied to the lavango lot that's a lot I wonder what
happened I wonder how they mispriced it so bad this is uh maybe on par with with square Square's acquisition of a firm or not a firm who did Square acquire uh wasn't it title or something well that was that was the uh wasn't that like the the music streaming thing didn't they wasn't Jack dorsy buy bought afterpay afterpay was that not a good deal I don't know I mean all that stuff blew up
when the interest rates they acquired afterpay for 29 billion and then like two years later they were worth like maybe 40 billion interesting public company okay well should we zoom in on much smaller deals a company making 30k in 24 hours selling through Google meet after one viral tweet interesting rhyme scheme here I wonder if that's intentional Eddie zo so just to clarify
in the last bit then we'll restart that so Square buys a firm yeah in uh the Zer era for 29 billion and two years later they're worth 26 billion right not not sorry after sorry yeah yeah so block Square buys after pay for 29 billion and less than two years later they're worth $25 billion collectively elves block is worth 25 collectively I mean they're worth $40 billion now so so build it all
back it's one it's just one um figure basically yeah yeah I mean they're just they're just one really good parlay away from yeah getting back to nine dig territory yeah we don't see public companies like ripping parlay what's 100 billion I don't even know I think that public companies should start ripping parlays Friday after the market closes what what is your job as a CEO not a
parlay it's like I want I want I want my CFO to work out I want this financing to go well I want that distribution deal to pop and I'm going to rip parlays it is a parlay well yeah and and even you would constructing the ultimate par CFO his job is automated Away by ramp and they have all this free time yeah they could be ripping parlays and it would be fun for the market to be able to sort of
anticipate all right how's the comp you know the company's putting up a100 million on DraftKings this weekend like how's it going to go no no no no no don't don't bet on Sports bet on yourself bet on yourself but but view your but view your organization as if it is a parlay yeah because we're GNA get this right and we're going to get this right then we're going to get this right you only to do that a few times exactly
one t Jensen Wong he's like I want China to not invade Taiwan I want I want TMC America to TC America to work I want I want Microsoft over 80 billion in capex I want suck to deild a$2 billion secures the 500 billion 500 billion and if he gets that boom1 trillion stock you got you got to post that 10 trillion stock he's like here's my 10 trillion doll par way for NVIDIA it's like it's like the Tesla
secer plan you know it's like here here if all these things go right my stock should be worth a 10 trillion and so you know great stuff this this is my plan just express it in a parlay I I think it's a viral format I think it's good I I like I like thinking about things in Carli even though I don't participate them in the sports betting realm because it's low class and vulgar anyway moving
on uh Eddie says he made $30,000 in 24 hours selling through Google meet after one viral tweet and I like the rhyme scheme there he says he was inspired by pmf or die yeah this is amazing so he made a post yes on Saturday and he said I built an algorithm that simulates how thousands of users react to your Tweet so you'll know if it will go viral before you post it's a really cool cont
concept everybody's experiences if you post it on X you think you've got something great you post it 300 Impressions later you got one like from from you know your absolute boy and you realize like all right this wasn't a good post sometimes the opposite happens and and something that you weren't super confident in um rips but um anyways uh very cool he ended up launching this uh
and starting to sell it kind of immediately and and did $30,000 in volume in a day which uh annualized his pretty good business he basically would have gotten out of the cage in an hour insane oh I didn't even annualize it yeah that's crazy yeah yeah you got to annualize everything don't talk about you know you had a good day say well annualized we a you know $200 million Revenue business it's great it's great
yeah I saw some big big people quote tweeting this it seemed really fun we should give it a try uh and congrats to Eddie I love that uh people have been inspired to go build stuff and and take a crack yeah I saw EMT Shear from yeah that's what it was tick tick tick yeah dramatic which basically alluding to if we're letting truly right now there's a lot of human input you know your brain's
basically an algorithm it sort of creates a concept releases it to the algo and then and then Humanity sort of reacts and then in a world where algorithms are dictating the sort of entry into the algorithm it's just an entirely new level yeah and so emiter says tick tick tick uh and essentially you know he says we're going to start he he he's going down like the wireheading
path path we're going to you know be optimizing for the algorithms too much that's going to lead to uh you know some some sort of AI Doom scenario essentially not not not full Doom I I don't want to like mischaracterize what he's saying but he's just saying like it's clearly just like things are getting weird which I agree with uh and so yakine chimes in and says would work better to replace this app with
something that just has a blank screen with the text Everyone likes you because you know the goal is to get lots of dopamine from the like button basically but that's not really what it is the goal of social media everyone thinks it's the goal to get like you know a pad on the back and oh people like me I'm popular no the goal is to make money the goal is to make money and and and and
that's what a proxy for you know getting a banger post is is that it will get you a job it will sell your product like this kid is making money and so um it's not about that Everyone likes you it's it's you know you cannot replace the app with with with shareholder value with C with actual Capital trans uh like changing so EMT says do you truly not see the oncoming train of consequences
for building optimizers that can predict the discourse generated from a post both volume and tenor do you truly not see the oncoming train of consequences for building optimizers that can predict the discourse generated from a post both volume and tenor and so I can't I me break it down I I gotta dig into it I mean I could imagine some consequences from that I don't know about all of the all of the consequences
on this oncoming train I I think that you know the reality is right now every active creator online is already hyper fixated on how to um what the algorithm want it's Tik Tok does this where they're like if you do this song we're going to surf you know surface it if you talk about positive about if you uh are against the Tik Tok ban we're going to surface it right so people know that
they start to lean into it so how is this an oncoming train I I I see this as like the train has been whizzing past us and continues to whiz past us and is is accelerating and you know I don't see this as some binary moment that EMT is is kind of I don't know we'll have to have him on and and and discuss this with him because uh I I think that's the main thing that I that I disagree with
the characterization here is like I Mr Beast literally built this for YouTube like two years ago yeah like it's like it predicts how well your thumbnails and titles are going to do and so like we're here like people people have these tools maybe maybe it's not good enough yet and when it gets better then it really becomes you know give the people what they want but I don't know I mean yeah
it becomes all AI generated it becomes all all very addictive and it becomes wireheading and no one ever goes outside and uh they get the juice reward and they get the the the nutrients directly delivered into them and and uh that's the end of humanity beautiful except for us because we'll be lifting speaking of humanity we got a post from Patrick uh Patty cison he says grock's voice mode remains active when
the app is closed this behavior is made very clear with a live activity it ends up being an awesome experience plop it beside you while reading a book and bat occasional questions its way without interrupting your flow uh I read this post and I read the first sentence grock voice modes remains active when the is closed and I just thought like oh this is going to be bad this is going to be
like it's spying on you you need to be aware of this like I thought because I didn't even see it was him uh and I love that it's just like this is exactly what I want actually this is great uh and I completely agree uh what was I it's funny cu cu Patrick has the perfect index on AI which is every AI company pays him you know 2.7% right of every dollar so he can be sort of Switzerland he's like the
Switzerland of a the true swizerland of AI uh you know everybody can can run on stripe uh but this was cool I mean it does seem like you know voice has been this sort of lingering Trend that everybody's been predicting but it hasn't quite played out right uh it it seems that voice has been predominantly used by people that aren't good at using their thumbs and it hasn't been the preferred sort of method of
communication communicating with your device uh that seems to be changing right Sesame uh Sesame came out last week and and had a pretty incredible response it's a wild experience to use and um and now grock is you know I I I Flagg this post from Patrick because I think we should try to um uh I think we should try to leave grock running for a show and just start interacting with it and saying you know
when we have a question that I would otherwise Google we can just ask grock yeah and it'll have the context from the conversation be able to sort of surface relevant data so that's um but we're having trouble with X servers today our live stream on X uh the the entire they M all the servers to grock yeah what happened clearly they're not they're not deploying AI they're not deploying the
servers to to the humans we're the second class citizens now yeah well said it's a disaster but um sweet well let's uh jump in we got a promoted post from adquick our favorite way to advertise out of the home out of home out of home advertising Made Easy and measurable say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising only quick combines technology out of home expertise and data to enable
efficient seamless ad buying across the globe love see and what I think is amazing in the same way that you know any any company in the world can go on meta and and just sort of sign up and start running ads alongside the biggest companies in the world same thing happens on adquick biggest companies in the world there's like a ton of the Fortune 500 that runs on adquick Wall
Street Journal Orbee Parker ramp Discount Tire instacart credit karma H&R Block lift all these massive companies use it but you as a startup can go and start testing out of home uh you know even on a smaller scale so you know another way to advertise out of home make a t-shirt like Jason Carman did there we go move on to the next post he says we made a movie about space for
free on X then we made some T-shirts all of the designs are love at story. Ina apparel go check it out we love to support Jason Carman here he has made some incredible and yeah he's building a whole media company right it now and it's fantastic uh and uh yeah I mean really cool designs like very very iconic I think these will age very well and uh yeah good to get it out in the world and I'm sure it'll start a lot a
lot of conversations about the content if you see somebody in Rocking adjacent Carman original like you know techno Optimist uh should we go to car pathy on 4.5 again let's do it uh so this is a a reply to someone uh zivy m saying uh gbt 4.5 reaction time go anything you want to make sure I don't miss or your own reactions and karpathy says my reaction is that there is an evaluation crisis I don't really know
what metrics to look at right now mlu was very good and useful for a few years but that's long over uh s bench verified real practical verified problems I really like and is great but itself too narrow chatbot Arena received too much Focus partly my fault uh that llm Labs have started to really overfit for it via combination of prompt mining uh private eval bombardment and worse
explicit use of rankings as training supervision I still think it's okay but there's lack of better it feels like on like it's on the decline in Signal there's been a number of private evals popping up an ensemble of which might be one promising path forward an in absence of great comprehensive evals I tried to turn to Vibe checks instead but now I feel they are misleading and there's too
much for confirmation bias too low sample size Etc it's just not great tldr my reaction is I don't really know how good these models are right now yeah you got to get the models to write uh to write little standup sets feed them to standup Comics they get bucket pulled it kill Tony or go on stand put them put them in the put them on the stand no it's got to be humans that step on
stage at The Comedy Store on an open mic don't get boot off and then you measure the booze to the laughs yeah booze to the laughs no I think I think the real the real bench like the the only thing that really matters right now if your foundation model company is being significant noticeably better not to benchmarks noticeably better than than chat GPT yeah for specific use cases
right so Claude is noticeably better at coding right and so people use Claude uh grock is not notably more entertaining for some specific use cases for consumers than chat GPT right so that that's like something that you know potentially but but you have the situation right now where 100 million plus consumers Love chat GPT they think it's awesome so if you're competing with them you don't just need to be 10%
better on some random math benchmark you need to be 50% better so that somebody will try you and switch to you for their day-to-day use I think that's what actually matters in terms of winning and you know you can see what in my view you can see what companies are actually consumer I companies are actually doing well by looking at the App Store rankings right it's not it's a snapshot
and S and it's obviously momentum driven yep but if you're a consumer AI company and you're not on the App Store chart while open AI has continued to have a pretty dominant position you're not in a good spot and that like the App Store chart is the final Benchmark the real Benchmark that matters I it's got to be so hard to try and be competing in llms right now because it's like you have people who are
everyone there is like an OPI co-founder or adjacent to the president or a state actor it's like if you're not on the highest highest level like how are you how are you competing there it's going to be tough anyway we got she in the waiting room I'm excited to him let's talk fintech let's talk final technology ramp we're not going to call it fintech today we're going to call it fin technology
Finance Finance Finance Tech Finance technology uh let's go let's bring him in let's chat let's chop it up with she how we doing should we do one more related post will Brown says it's interesting that 1.5 billion parameters is all you need to crush math competitions but you need like 15 trillion to make the model funny maybe humor is the right measure of true intelligence and I agree I agree is very
difficult is can you see him in the waiting room yeah I just see his photo oh well 15 trillion parameters to be funny uh the whole be me thing is funny because uh it feels like it's going to really benefit from personalization like the people that are like oh it's so funny it's like well yeah Tyler cow and like you did laugh at it because like it's funny that the llm knows so much
about you but you give that to just some random person off the street and it's like be me like I don't know the llm doesn't know anything about you or you just have a normal job hey hey guys what's up oh looking good in the suit let's go he was prepared thank you I mean when you come on on this show you gota you gotta dress up you got to do the part so appreciate it I mean we had
we had uh quite the lineup today py nobody showed up in a suit but you did which is why I think you win the day you win the day hey let's go let's go let's go I love it uh super excited to have you here I mean we we've had on the show informally through dozens of times constantly surfacing uh the stories that matter but um I don't know we've had a big week I think why don't we start I
want to kind of start with uh maybe kind of extrapolating on your stripe adun point of view you you covered this last week let's start there and then I want to kind of broaden it and talk about fintech more broadly there's been some big news um but maybe we start there what um takeway yeah yeah what what's like the main takeaway from you know I I think you've tried to generally stay somewhat impartial right and just sort
of like put the the numbers out and let readers take away their their own opinion but um yeah what what's your what's your expansion there yeah so so the overall headline is the stripe stripe puts out an annual report now and addins a public companies so they do um they process a similar amount of volume stripe is slightly ahead growing slightly more it's like 1.4 trillion
processed by stripe uh and I think you know a lot of people look at that and say okay well these are equivalent companies so it's crazy that stripe trades at 91 and a half billion when addend a public company trades a 56 billion so a lot of people said okay that's a sign that the private markets are overvaluing stripe I don't think that's exactly true like although they have similar process volumes their
margin profile is different so like when you make a transaction on stripe stripe actually charges more than Aden does in part because of the types of businesses that stripe serves Aden has a lot of Enterprise businesses stripe has some smaller businesses so stripe most likely actually has greater net revenue than Aden does we don't know it because stripe hasn't posted that publicly but
overall I think both are amazing companies I think stripe you know people fault them for having more employees but I actually think it's interesting I think like stripe is in in more in R&D and they're growing faster and they have a lot more business lines so I think both are outstanding companies I actually have exposure to both which I'm quite happy about amazing you got to be
the best case scenario is you're conflicted but the even better scenario is you're double conflicted and they're both ripping so it's yeah they're both ripping uh uh I'm happy I'm happy to hear that um where do you think you know one stripe Stripes had this amazing ability to you know build a behemoth by betting on basically betting on these super early stage companies right many
of their biggest customers today were startups when they were all going through YC together and that's turned out to be a fantastic strategy is part of the reason that stripe could be worth significantly more than Aden uh right now is that the sort of General investor BL uh base believes that they'll be able to take customers away from Aden these sort of bigger Enterprise players because all the marketing you know
stripe has been able to take these two lines right they've got stripe at so they're going to get the next generation of companies but then simultaneously when you see their out of home ads today it's all oriented around hey we we signed Herz Ren a car right like clearly marketing and so do you see Stripes you know what what are Stripes biggest you know future opportunities um you know
Enterprise and and sort of Beyond yeah so you're absolutely right so stripe does a phenomenal job of getting all early stage startups or a huge percentage of early stage startups and actually like this business it start it started like almost 15 years ago now and at that time your CTO was not making the decision on who you chose for payment processing that was not a c's decision that decision was made by if you had a
CFO was a CFO or it was like the CEO they because it was it was a money decision and then what stripe did is they said it we're g to save you so much time and energy in getting a payment processor up and running that it's going to be the the C's decision and the C is a little less price sensitive and is going to go with the best option that saves them time and engineering resources so stripe charged a little bit
more money than you would pay if you went somewhere else but it was transparent and you knew what you were paying and um and then along the way a lot of those early companies that they signed ended up growing into massive behemoths doing many billions of Revenue um and so that was awesome for stripe but now stripee is also saying okay like we got those customers that started with
us when they were small and grew grew up but to your point the on the out of home and and like when they're at conferences and stuff they are trying to attract these other behemoths as well and so you know I think they have part of Amazon's business they have uh Shopify is large in the I think if you look at in aggregate Shopify one then Shopify is probably the largest uh single
opportunity for a stripe um but it's made up of you know thousands or many more than that of smaller uh individual retailers yeah that makes sense what other what you know they they've obviously they're making a push into stable coins um yeah what do you think there you know I think it was very smart to identify that hey what is the stablecoin developer tool that has the most traction that's that's really
working and just pay kind of any price to get that and then bolt that on right that's basic basally what happened what do you think um you know what's your thesis around stripe and stable coins they obviously wanted to own that sort of asset and have exposure to it but it's not like they're exactly rolling it across out across the entire portfolio today but what do you think that roll out actually looks
like so yeah one thing that's kind of interesting is like how this came to be so one kind of funny thing is I think the bridge stripe acquisition was announced I don't know three or four months ago yeah and literally in the next month I was getting five to 10 stable coin pitches per week it's amazing how how quickly that happens like as soon as some some large acquisition happens you're instantly VCS
are getting pitched all sorts of companies around that space and everybody thinks you know because stripe made this acquisition now the space is super hot um I think what actually happened here is pretty interesting I think like Bridge is a very a a great company um I I think what happened is they so SpaceX um had this problem with starlink so starlink you know is an international
ISP accepting payments in developing markets developing markets are really hard to accept payments in traditional banking infrastructure like totally sucks is slow it was like blocking transactions um like traditional infrastructure in some of these markets was blocking blocking transactions to strike or so SpaceX said okay we're looking for a solution I don't know if Shawn Maguire was involved at all but
like Shawn is is close with with SpaceX is close with with was an investor in Bridge and so Bridge you can imagine between you know raging you know fighting the culture war on X he was also doing the side deal to get the bridge Space X thing to happen I'm just saying there's a world anything else yeah the mar contains multitudes man of many talents for sure yeah do you want to finish and I
have a quickly I I think like I think SpaceX using stable coins was a big moment tot and I think a lot of other people said oh like we're having this issue too SpaceX is using stable coins with through bridge I think that was actually super instrumental for them even the scale AI example like really concretized it for me where it was like oh it's very clear that you're paying a
bunch of people internationally I I I paid video editors internationally uh using stable coins and just because like it's it's so much easier for them to get the money uh and so I think as soon as you have that it's very hard to be a skeptic about it because you're like okay I I actually used it it worked it was it was it was what everyone's been talking about for a very long time about
easier faster lower fees Etc but I wanted to flip it around for you and ask uh you know is you know you in consumer Tech you always have like oh Zach's going to kill you do you feel like you know you get these Bridge pitches post Bridge acquisition is there is there any fear like oh stripe is going to build that is that a vibe that you see among early stage fintech companies because
there's been a lot of successful fintech startups also stripe is a founder-led m decacorn that is very able to move quickly yeah I I do think I do think there's some of that but I think that there are other there are areas in which people have been able to build great businesses that stripe was competing actually you know kind of crazy maybe Blasphemous to talk about but one of
your sponsors here and friends of ours ramp um you know stripe ended up investing in ramp stripe as as you may recall had a competing product to ramp totally so so it's not like you can't beat stripe at anything they do there are a lot of businesses that are going after stripe also had a stable coin internal stable coin team that had been working for a while so so so while stripe you know those guys are super
sharp and as you said founder lead my brother works there I'm you know I'm I'm I'm All About stripe love it but I think there are plenty of opportunities to build businesses that that go after businesses that stripe is in and stripe has a core Focus area that they need to that they're doing phenomenally well at and they're doing a bunch of other stuff that I think they opportunities to
compete with them on just don't start a high-end Publishing Company because they will kill you is I would not touch it with a 10-ft pole that industry I think that's the one that they just have completely locked up monopol and they will actually break your legs if you the Irish Maia will come out strip does not launch a podcast because over yeah yeah yeah Brothers yeah yeah uh very true um what uh you
posted a day or two ago about the general Catalyst IPO and and sort of rumors around that how do you talk about you know I don't know if you U you know speak generally you don't need to give us any sort of inside uh baseball on it but how do you think the sort of um fee structures work when a venture fund goes public and and and do you think that's going to impact gc's abil you know is it
going to be good for gc's ability to recruit top investors is because there's more liquidity is it going to be bad in the sense that um you know people that really want to bet on themselves are like oh I could go work for BTV and get a bunch of carry and I and I trust my picking ability and I can make them a lot more you know getting actual carry um what how how does that unfold I think
on the latter part I think like these Mega funds we'll call them the like you know double digit billion AUM going out to raise five to 10 each time um they're already huge behemoths and like somebody who is considering working at them should not be considering working for us like we're we're we're playing a different game yeah um it's like you know you're you're uh CED or series a
startup and you interview somebody who's like and you're like who are they who are you considering and they're like well I'm considering meta stripe and you guys I I'm like get out of the room dude don't waste my time yeah yeah we just had this it makes so much sense so I think you know I think we play a different game like they're in the asset accumulation game and going public only
furthers that sure um where like they're going to make a lot of their money off of management fees from these billions of dollars they collect and you know returns like they've had some great returns along the way you know they LED Stripes series B at I think a $500 million valuation it's now worth 91 billion so obviously they've done phenomenally well there they have a few other bangers that they've had Through
The Years leango among amongst others um so I I think in the past they've had some pretty good returns I think in the future it becomes more of an asset accumulation game and if I think about how we as BTV uh like if we're if we're ing or we're we're trying to sell um a startup to take our money it's like look like we're returns motivated we're driven by you being successful they're
just and and like you're really meaningful to US versus if if it's a multi-stage firm it's like take their money later like they're not they're not as driven by they'll always be there yeah they'll always be there we we won't be yeah yeah exactly um but I I think it's interesting I think you're going to see more funds IPO frankly I don't think this is the last one I think um you know
it's certainly possible that Andre could IPO and and any of the mega funds could yeah now that makes sense especially they already set up right yeah exactly you have to be feeling pretty good uh lately given that fintech is is back I'm sure you had I'm sure you had a no I remember this in in in late uh early 2023 FTX had collapsed I was running a a fintech at the time that that had digital asset features and traditional
Fiat features and it just was like where where do we really go from here brex at the time was burning spending like 800 million a year to make you know uh like what what it was totally inverted right it was like 500 million in revenue on like 800 million of expenses I was like is this category like you know where do we go from here right it was it was sort of a dark time you guys rode through it
um you know uh crypto's really good at this right like crypto VCS like the Market's down they're like I'm going to get paid if I just hang on VCS typically are like you know probably had a lot of fair weather fintech investors that were like we're going to go and do other categories how uh where do you think the biggest opportunities are in fintech today um and um yeah I'd even be curious
you know without naming names out of the last few deals that you've done can you kind of kind of talk about the the investment areas yeah sure sure sure so I'd say like fintech overall look it's been it's been a crazy time we started this fund five and a half years ago it's been a roller coaster um you know and I've been investing in fintech full-time since 2016 nobody gave a [ __ ] about us
then then you know fast forward to 2021 we were the belt the ball everybody everybody wanted to invest in fintech um people were like begging us to give them advanced notice on deals we did and then investing like months after us at in some cases like 15 times the valuation it was absolutely Bonkers and stupid frankly good for fundraising I'm I'm sure yeah yeah you know good for
fundraising actually not actually not actually good for those companies that took too much money sure um and so and then what happened was an overcorrection in 2022 and 2023 and in part because those companies had so much money they didn't have to find pmf like yeah it w it wasn't pmf or die it was pmf or survive because you raise $100 million yeah yeah yeah off her Coast for five
years yeah exactly and so you know fortunately most of the companies in our portfolio like they had enough money to survive and then they didn't burn too much and they're now like now they're having killer years like a lot of our companies actually kind of struggled in 22 and 23 but then 24 was a banger year and like especially the second half I think it was just coming out of that Whiplash and and you saw it in the
public markets too like if you look at fintech companies 22 and 23 they were totally in the in the doldrums yeah I was just explaining I was just explaining to John that square bought afterpay for 29 billion and then was worth less than 20 20 like 25 billion combined like less than a year later I mean one of the one of the most one of the most devastating uh Acquisitions rough ever in recent memory um by the
way that's a fun topic so afterpay so the the cool thing about that one is um our friends at Matrix Dana over there when they invested in afterpay I believe it was a 80 million public company Matrix led the a um it was an Australian oh they raised money and raising money in Australia just meant you go public there's a lot of Canadian companies like that I see them all the time where it's
like oh it's a hundred million company and they just happen to be public because like that's how you get a deal done if you're raising $5 million like you have to go public because I want all of the oversight and I want all the accounting and want all the Audits and so you better just be public if you want me to underwrite this yeah so so what a banger of a deal like they invested any
of us could have invested in yeah and then like I don't know I don't know how many years later four or five years later sells for $30 billion I I think when all said and done what what happened was it got announced at 30 billion but by the time it closed Square stock had already dropped a lot so it was like half as much still quite a banger yeah yeah amazing um how that's why they brought in TJ to to find the
next one right yeah yeah yep um so uh there was a bunch of you know bunch of businesses started super low rate environment that that worked in that in that sort of setting and then sort of started to not work uh in in 2023 and Beyond how are you advising your Founders around just are are you telling them like plan on like this is the new normal uh you know it's been easy to
imagine a situation where Trump just lays on the pressure to to drop rates but um and then and this reminds me you have a portfolio company Mercury that that generates you know basically like really obscene levels of of iida but it's predicated on um you know this sort of um fed funds rate that they don't control right so they they've buil fantastic product but um so yeah how how are you advising your portfolio
companies around the sort of rate environment um given that that so much of the returns in fintech are driven by you know finding that perfect balance yeah it's true and and I would say overall lower rates are great for us we have mercury and one other portfolio company relay that are benefited by having higher interest rates uh it's because they're sitting on deposits so you know they they that's how they make
a lot of their money It's Tricky for both those companies like if you think about to your point they're printing money but um investors have to think about okay like what is the rate that we can make we can assume is going to be the case going forward it's really hard to predict these things I don't think it's going to be back to where it was in 2021 anytime soon if ever um so but at
the same time you could totally imagine like you know like a period in the next decade where we have effectively zero interest rates for like five years plus like post some sort of recession like inflation that was why when when the Mercury News came out and you know they were getting a $3 billion valuation and everybody's like oh this is great because it's whatever they got priced in
2021 I was looking at that and saying they're not really getting credit for that profit at all they may as well like there there's you know other companies that are losing $200 million a year much less making $200 million a year that are getting priced like that so fundamentally America just has a lot of debt anday keeping a high interest rate is not fun when you have a lot of totally I think you're GNA see a lot of
pressure from Trump I think there will at some point in the future of American History we will see low interest rates yeah the next the gri there's been one grift every two weeks but the next might be dropping dropping rates just long enough to refinance the whole Trump you know um no but anyway so your your general position is like assume they're going to be somewhere between here and
2% and you got to make your business model work kind of anywhere in that range sure yeah totally and and one thing that's interesting is like Mercury started before like Mercury was making a large portion of their revenue off of the rate and then in 2020 rates dropped they lost a huge portion of their revenue and then actually like built up a pretty substantial interchange Revenue
business and like kind of I don't remember the exact amount but like in March 2020 rates dropped Mercury lost a shitload of the revenue and I I believe that like two or three months later they were back up to where they were before that makes sense since it's the the top iic of the last 24 hours I would love I would love your take on the Strategic scam and gambling yeah strategic crypto Reserve yeah yeah
yeah yeah I I think I think it's total [ __ ] it's like a it's a classic big government idea that masquerades as some sort of like Forward Thinking policy you can say we're Innovative or whatever but it's actually quite the opposite we're literally handling handing public funds over to like you know private cronies and wealthy people like myself yeah you said you said your
single biggest position personal position is is Bitcoin so you're you're actually and and the craziest thing is you know we started the show today and we realized that that the Bitcoin price had almost round trip back to which is is the biggest be signal that we the government announces hey we're going to be investing in in crypto now it doesn't move the market materially or in any
permanent way this was really priced in fully it's ridiculous I think like my my point of view is on this a and a bunch of the other stuff that that has Trump has done in this Administration I feel like you know it seems like a short-term political win but longterm it's bad and in this case I think this crypto reserve undermines the Dollar's position which is like [ __ ] awesome the dollar is
the global Reserve currency and this sends some sort of confusing signal about our own confidence in USD yeah and like so other countries hold hold dollars because they're stable consistent and predictable yeah and you know I I think you could make the case for Bitcoin I wouldn't personally sure but you could make the case that Bitcoin is the new gold and it's some sort of
hedge against inflation or currency instability I don't think you can make the case for [ __ ] cardano you know xrp like what is this [ __ ] it's it's [ __ ] it's uh it's basically a taxpayer funded back stop now David saaks came out today against Joe Lonsdale and said it's not taxpayer funded I think that's [ __ ] let's say there's confiscating coins and holding them it's the same thing like if you like
previously When They confiscated they sold yep not selling it's the same thing like it makes no difference what about the argument of like you know during the uh Bank ba bailouts in 2008 obviously like it looked very bad because it's like taxpayer money is going into the the balance sheet of Bank of America Wells Fargo save those companies but if you look back historically now and you
read the Tim gner book it's like well the banks paid them back with interest in the in the and the taxpayer actually made money on that what about that argument yeah so so what's the but what's the argument for the crypto Reserve because the argument is that is that is that it could be net positive to the taxpayer like the taxpayer yes the taxpayer does does put money into this thing essentially but if it goes up then
they wind up paying less taxes down the road oh when when the government wants to fund something because hey we don't need to tax you as much because we went 10x long on X Y or Z yeah it's it's just a question of do you trust the government to allocate our dollars or do we trust individuals and so I I think it's like a personal freedoms issue so it it's kind of strange to have it come
from the Republican Party frankly yeah totally it is odd anyway um what uh talk to us about you've got an accelerator which vertical specific accelerator makes a ton of sense it you know if you're you know YC is an amazing product and platform and why aren't you locking them in cages though yeah yeah yeah no that's the real question why aren't you locking them and putting a live stream
on it um no I don't think that I I think people are are sick at this point of the pmf r die approach applied to financial products you know uh we we very clearly did not want that cu been some bad uh bad things that happened when you just Tred it but uh what kind of companies are you looking for I imagine that it would be insane if somebody had the opportunity to go through the your
guys's accelerator and they're building in fintech to to choose YC not because YC is not great but just because you guys can connect them to this hyper hyper specific Network and yeah yeah I totally agree YC is great um look I I ran an accelerator 2016 to 2018 YC I think Gary said that they had four and a half% of their companies became unicorns actually um in mine 7% became unicorns so we we good
congratulations um so we have a good success rate I think the idea is like look if you're building in an area that we have expertise yes ring the gong um we have expertise we could be helpful yeah um now you you asked what areas I'm interested in I I'd say look we are we're sort of founder driven first and foremost but there are some areas we've invested in a lot one is this you know very unsurprisingly
we're investing in AI companies um we we've done a bunch recently in the services as software space cool um including one actually we did with a previous guest on here Keith um we have a company called basis uh that's a AI for accounting company that is able to do a lot of the work that a low-level account does we led the SE last year Keith led the a recently um we've done a
bunch others space we did um one in the SMB loan underwriting space called caj we did one in the mortgage space did one in insurance and all these companies basically are using AI but embedding themselves deeply into workflow and solving a problem for somebody who probably could not build it themselves which is exciting I I think you know my worry with a lot of these AI companies
you've seen all the charts 0 to 100 million Revenue I think a lot of them that aren't as deeply embedding into a workflow I think it are in danger of going from zero to 100 Down Easy Come Easy Go yeah so so we're trying to invest in companies that we think have some durable lasting value some data distribution um an embedded workflow uh value those kind of things are easy to find in ftech yeah have you touched any
of um these broader sort of more PE style rollups you know there's some opportunities in in payments obviously for that have have you gone into that space at all yet and and what's your general point of view there um we haven't we haven't done a whole lot of these PE rollup style things we've done a couple things that that are similar we did one in the um in the healthc care space uh that's doing that's Works in
private practices called maroka um I I think honestly jury's out on those kind of businesses and and raising Venture dollars to do so um probably works better for the asset accumul Harvester model where you know you can deploy a lot of capital with with no you know lower risk unless you're saying you know we're going to replace every employee with AI you know it's easier to say
we're going to buy a bunch of companies at fair prices and and get some efficiency but that's basically just private equity which is not the business that you're in not the business that we're in that's exactly right and so I I completely agree I was going to bring up like General catalyst is buying a hospital system in akan Ohio that's they're in a different business than we're in um and I can see why it makes
sense for them really quickly you say is buying can you break down like I heard about that deal like last year why is it taking so long like what's going on with that what is is this like a regulatory approval type of situation yeah I'd imagine I don't know I don't know any first information but um I'd imagine when you're buying a health system there's a ton of [ __ ] that you have to
do there's like there's push back from the community I noticed like immediately like sure we heard about it I also saw articles like hey this is [ __ ] up like a venture capital firm is buying something that should be for the public good yeah there's been a lot of push back on like oh private Equity bought this uh you know local clinic and like made it worse or like reduced the
quality of care to like maximize profits so it's always been controversial it'll be very interesting to see how General Catalyst position themselves in the IPO I mean Citadel was thinking about going IPO back like I don't know 10 years ago and they they like hedge funds were seen as like villains of the the crash so they bought an investment Bank to try and make themselves look better which is
hilarious to me because it's like like oh yeah we're we're not the bad hedge fund guys we're the good investment bankers like both of those are like kind of villainized already uh it's bad if you go Banker to make yourself look better that's bad exactly that's great and so they yeah I think they paid mckeny like a fortune to like you know advise them on how to position their brand going into the IPO and then they
just kept it private then they created Citadel Securities and printed it was great yeah um problem you're probably uh got to jump because I I know we had 30 minutes is there any IPOs that you're you're pretty convicted are happening in 2025 in fintech specifically I mean there have been rumors around chime and CLA and you know um uh chime and cl are the biggest I think where chime prices
is going to be you know very important to the fintech world I think like I think in the private markets it's currently trading 10 but people think uh you know people think it's going to go out stronger it's gonna have a huge impact on on me and our portfolio actually we have we have some other companies that are in a similar space so I'm I'm really looking forward to that one Clara I think um you
know I actually don't know where it's going to price CL has something interesting you know they raised at a crazy valuation and then did a massive down round which is not necessarily a bad thing especially for them Clara actually does not have liquidation preferences is crazy enough so it just like they also replaced 100% of their employees with AI right supposedly I don't know it's just the
CEO and and Claude 3 Sonic cursor actually now somebody should go buy a pelaton and then see if see if a human Bang's on their door or it's just it's just a chat B being like hey please pay this back no it's fun what but but chime what was their La what was their 2021 or 2022 um valuation it must wasn't it or like you know forx yeah 25 billion in 202 nice I remember it trading privately
at like 30 yeah yeah cool very cool well we will have to definitely have you back on those this was super fun guys enjoy you're welcome any week and uh thanks for jumping on appreciate it cheers bye cheers see you later bye uh fantastic should we close out with we're going so long the lights turning off because we're running out of battery in them we're really pushing it to the Limit
today it's great uh should we close out with some timeline what do you want to do little bit of time 2m. we got we got to drive around in a Ferrari later you know it's a hard life out here more to come there soon also not kidding uh uh did you see the the the Mr Beast backlash I thought this was kind of interesting I didn't I didn't so uh Mr Beast did a podcast on Diary of a CEO
have you ever listened to this podcast Diary of a CEO no but it's like the biggest it's the biggest business podcast and no one in Silicon Valley listens to it it's very odd uh I mean it's like it's popular but it's popular just with like a very different crowd I guess um I think it has a lot to do with the fact that it's not an American show the guy's British and so even though he has he has great guests like I mean
Brian chess also has like a web 3 startup do yeah yeah oh I had no idea the the host really yeah wow he should have stuck to supplements I guess but anyway um I'm going to let you read through this I'm the restroom yeah sure so uh Mr be Beast goes on Diary of a CEO and then Kotaku writes an article about Mr Beast going on the show and says Mr Beast life is quote so much easier when
you're broke and of course this is very controversial people get very upset there's a viral post saying Fu uh it gets like a 100 million likes everyone sees it as very you know negative and flippant that this rich guy would come on and say ah it's so life's so much easier when you're broke but that's not actually what he said uh and it's very interesting so Jack applebe breaks it down he says this might be an alltime PR
team screw-up Mr Beast went on Diary of a CEO podcast the podcast PR team pitched Jack applebe and other writers to cover it which is something most uh most podcast most people don't know about podcasts but when you go on a podcast there's a PR team for you know trying to amplify the attention that this guest gets it's all very uh very planned out very Insider plant uh industry plant and so when Kat Kotaku
wrote about it they used a pretty harsh quote uh he said i' I'd have done the same except it's not a real quote the podcast publicity team somehow confused Mr Beast saying bro as broke so maybe they use like AI dictation or something but in a moment where he's just saying life is harder when you travel they misquote him and made him sound like a jerk when it's not the case at all and
it's all not naturally gone viral with the misin information side of it uh all because the publicity team tried to get coverage and they screwed up so now Mr Beast is taking heat Kotaku is taking heat when neither of them deserve it and so the the real quote was this is killing me to be honest it was like so much easier when you're broke if you don't travel constantly and that's not
what he was saying he was saying it's so much easier when bro like you're not traveling and it's fascinating uh and of course uh his original point is correct but the but but but the Strauss reading of all this is of course that life is so much easier when you're broke and that and that with wealth comes responsibility yeah and that and that what he's what he's getting canceled for he should have said the
quiet part loud and that everyone else is wrong yeah it's true he's also built up a brand where he's sort of almost promised his audience that he's reinvesting like 101% of whatever he makes like he's gone out at all but uh I mean Elon has said that uh and not back down from it where he said like look I have all this money I'm the world's richest man I'm miserable you don't want to be me like I'm not
having fun like I'm I'm like like I'm having I'm doing there's Forward Motion there's energy but I wouldn't call what I'm doing fun and that's fine that's good that's also a choice he could retire he could retire by the biggest yacht and not ever talk to the med again exactly yeah he could totally have to buy and plenty of people have the the Google Founders did for a long time Bill
G you could say has kind of been on that tip for a long time uh even Ellison is kind of chilling from time to time like there are people that choose to be much less aggressive um yeah Jason calacanis was the first investor in Uber one of the first and now he's deciding to be in this you know go to war with a defense Tech founder you know he does not need to do that you know he could he could
pass on that and yet he doesn't he keeps he keeps kicking the Beast and everyone involved in that seems to love fighting love fighting it's very annoying to me I'm I'm totally over it anyway over it uh should we stay on the topic of VC Liz wessell ramp investor congratulations to Liz she was an angel uh she says has anyone written about the trend over the last 6 to 12 months of Founders 18 to 26 years old
raising VC to buy old school businesses and inject AI into them I've seen so many pitches in every vertical on this in 2024 and it looks like still in 2025 I'm curious to learn how VCS who have done these seed and a rounds of and price pretty high are thinking about this approach blog post or podcast Rex appreciated well let's just do a podcast about it right now let's do it here we
go let's do it so Liz we got the answer for you uh we're gonna go to Jordy an expert in this exact topic Jordy break it down for us uh would you invest in a 18-year-old founder buying a uh old school business injecting AI into it and uh the seed round is at uh you know you're going to get you at ai9 PR in instructions no so there's two things that there's two things that happened
the the the concept of the search fund exploded because the idea of these sort of old school IRL real world businesses it wasn't a Sil Valley thing HBS an HBS thing saying hey you could have gone to Goldman instead you're going to take 5 million bucks and try to turn it into $15 million uh in you know five years something like that um so that became popular and then the the AI sort of
enabled rollup you know started blowing up and and Liz is right there's just tons and tons and tons of these companies my concern you know generally I think we're going to see we're going to see returns in the category it's not going to be one where you know every everything that gets basically zeroed out um but that being said you're going into you're you're taking Venture dollars and you're going into this sort
of private Equity World which is like one of the most efficient markets in the world right private Equity has spent decades honing the ability to buy assets make them better and then sell them for a higher price Y and so by going in there and saying uh it's a huge bet to say we're going to we're going to be able to replace 80 to 90% of the employees with AI right when when the
models are good but you know they're not agentic yet right for the most part and so um my my concern is that you're going to have that it seems like the most likely outcome is like some of the big Winners end up being the big Winners still end up not being Venture winners right and that they they they get a nice 3 to 5x and on invested Capital but it's not enough to to to sort of return any any type of fund yeah
I I think that's a good point I'm I'm trying to think of like the private Equity deals that I've seen like kind of up close and personal and I'm going back to like Bane Capital when I was there they the the the the historical like Banger for them was Staples yeah you know Staple stores and that was not a digital transformation story y like that was very much a nuts and bolts like what
should the capital structure be how do we lever this thing up properly how do we close underperforming stores ramp up over performing stores it was not it was not hey the internet's here I mean this what this happened in like the 90s like this is the Bane Capital story so they I mean they they think they owned I think they owned Staples from like the 80s 90s two early 2000s like the internet was a
thing they there there is a world where you could be like buy staples and turn it into amazon.com but I'm sure they launched an e-commerce site at that point but it didn't like materially change the business uh same thing they bought uh who they buy Toys R Us and that one I think they got out but eventually it went bankrupt and it was not a digital transformation story and so yeah the private Equity thing it's
like the the the even though there's been a trend of like the internet for a long time there like that hasn't been the story of private equity in my yeah in my in everything I've read over the past like few decades it hasn't been oh let's like let's go and buy the hospital Network and we're going to improve the user experience flows of the payments plan or whatever like it hasn't been
like the chall the challenge is when you're buying a legacy sort of SMB yeah typically the founder is retiring yeah and the reason that that company you know Outsiders will look at the business and say oh they run on pen and paper yeah they're not factoring in the fact that that founder was a staple of their local community would work 12 hours a day for decades and put their Blood
Sweat and Tears into the business and so you get this effect of you're ripping out the sort of owner operator who's who's made their life's work this company and then you're slapping some AI on it and I don't know I think you almost are better off with the owner operator right and so the value and so these business when you're buying businesses that are being valued on cash flows you need to make them grow faster
and you need to increase earnings otherwise the value is less yes and so it's it's you can rip out cost to increase earnings but the the sort of replacement the sort of what you're ripping out is human capital and injecting you know artificial intelligence it's unclear what that trade is going to look like in the short term the other thing and where the value capture lies because so so so hold on to
that second point but the the interesting thing is like like oh they're doing stuff on on pen and paper well if they're paying somebody you know $10 an hour and they're only spending one hour a month on it well that's bucks a month docu sign's going to hit you up for 100 bucks a month you're going to 10x your bill by going not paper right and so there there's a question of like
how efficiently priced are the digital tools because if they're really efficiently priced they're going to take their pound to flash some of small small businesses are like you have the the niece and nephew of the founder who like kind of work for like below minimum wage and they're getting ripped out too right they're not sticking around yeah yeah grandchildren coming in on the weekend
and like you know racking servers I've got I've got a buddy in Malibu who's like has a multi million doll like healthare software focused PE fund and he uh he has like people don't realize like how um how precise these um managers are and that he does not care to try to get a 10x he's like I just want to get you know 2x uh I want a 2X uh and that's really all that I care but I'm never going to miss and I'm just
like only and so you're coming in and you're competing with an operator where you're going to have to pay you know people that are selling their businesses usually they have some type of long-term incentive to make sure that the the the acquisition is successful do they want to sell to the guy that's a proven operator that's like gu like literally like I'm going to go out of business if
this doesn't you know my fund is going to be uh uh damaged if this doesn't work or do you want the 22-year-old that's like you know I'm roll rolling up you know pools like I saw like a like a pool roll up that was like and I think it's awesome like it's a cool like it's a cool shot the pool but you know uh I I I'm it's unclear if public pools no no like residential pools so like if you
can no so you can go on bis by cell or some of these other sites right now and you can buy a pool route and it'll be like basically the client the clients and so these things trade over time where you can go and say yeah I'm gonna buy you know thousands of pool clients in outside of Austin right and roll this up the challenge is like the the the competitive pressure on a pool route is
so intense that anybody with you know $100 worth of equipment can clean pools right and so it's not it's certainly not a monopoly type environment tot yeah yeah I mean I can see a lot of VCS getting burnt here um mostly because like yeah like even if you wind up shifting from look we have one 100x in our in our fund to everything's a 3X and the math and you work out the math and the irr should be the same that's not
the entire purpose of a single fund because there's plenty of there's plenty of situations where yeah you want to get a seed you want to get a seed into some company and then you want to pile it into pile into it with your growth fund yeah and and if you're just getting a 2X you're not going to pile into it and scale it so it's kind of just this this hope that AI will transform private
equity and maybe it will but we don't know we haven't seen it yeah and the risk for Venture funds is that you're running a traditional Venture model and then you say oh we're going to put 20% of our fund into a bunch of you know rollups and then you get a banger and it's a 4X and you're like great like we still like are under going to underperform right so anyways I think um
yeah Venture people need to understand that uh you know we like to go into other Industries and and you know sort of say like oh like you guys have been doing this all wrong diary or boond doggles I mean they're basically boond doggles you know maybe hopefully it works out I I hope they figure it out uh let's go to mly OA this is a fun one I think I think we should take this into account um we've been
we've been podcasting pretty hard I think we should announce that we're taking a break we're g to take maybe 18 hours off yeah so you won't hear from us for a while yeah we're gonna end this stream eventually and it's going to be about 18 hours before we start up again yeah so we're going to spend time with our family yeah yeah really recharge the batteries y deep breaths and stuff but
then we'll be right back at it uh but let's let's close out with this uh post from M she says after further analysis I've come to the difficult decision to go into hermit mode I will be refraining from any generalized social interaction or networking like events travel conferences and coffee chats for the foreseeable future if you want to hang out sign up link in my bio my team will
get back to you Brave Molly Brave you're brave I wonder who inspired that I wonder who inspired I wonder who inspired that uh um no no we love Molly on this show and uh yeah she's our default answer when we get invited to events now is uh come happy to yeah happy to cover it on the show if you invite us to Event Event we're gonna say no but if you tweet about it we'll cover it on the show want to call in you can
call in too everybody wins but uh you're probably not gonna get us out of this chair because it's so much fun it's just too much fun it's too much fun you never want to turn off the stream are there any other bangers you want what was your sleep score last night cuz I I I had I had a good one I got a ton of sleep it takes me having the worst night of the last 30 days for you to for you to do
better uh uh I got a 72 I got a 94 I slept eight hours and seven minutes let's go you put up you consistently do 8 Hour this is great the CL you got the laugh that's great yeah put up huge numbers built like a bear sleep like a bear just hibernate every once in a while uh I have I've been a bit into the weather so I had to go to bed early still got up at 6 got in pump I had a
funny so so I didn't set an alarm yeah I used the eight sleep alarm SLE alarm said it yesterday yeah you shouldn't have told me about that because if you're competing with me now I got an edge yeah you got to keep these features to I got some other secret features that I'll share with the audience but you're I'll have to do cover my ears no but I I didn't turn on the the warming feature
at the end of the night and so it was like impossible to get out of bed yesterday even though I was sleeping in like two hours past like whenever we normally get up so anyways go to uh.com I forgot my transition my original transition was when we go to the Moon with firefly we'll we'll sleep on an e sleep on the moon or something but somehow I missed that I don't know what uh we interested in competing with the
audience so uh go to 8sleep.com tvpn yep you get a discount on eights sleep and then DM us we'll get in a group and we'll all sort of motivate uh each other to put up crazy numbers yeah um anyways we got some more timeline I think I I think let's do more timeline tomorrow I think we're I think we're good at this point it's getting late good um we we got a promotion to film uh
yeah we are uh gonna go drive a Ferrari around which you'll hear more about soon fantastic uh thanks for watching leave us five stars on Apple podcast and Spotify leave ad in your review we got to do a review of the reviews tomorrow yeah we should do a review of the reviews we'll get them up on the show and uh thanks for watching we appreciate you thank you Brothers we'll see you tomorrow thank you see you tomorrow