[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] Good morning, Chad. Good morning, Bobby. Good morning, Daniel. Good morning, Ragav. Good morning, Amola. Good morning, Gabe. Good morning, Misty. Good morning, John.
It's great to see you guys. Welcome to the show. Good morning, everyone. You're watching TVN.
Today is Thursday, October 30th, 2025.
We are live from the TVN Ultra Dome, the temple of technology, the The fortress of finance, the capital of capital.
Uh Meta missed earnings yesterday.
Due to a one-time tax hit.
Yes, not a not that big of a deal, honestly.
Uh Meta posted record revenue, but warns of expenses.
This is from the Wall Street Journal.
Uh Meta reported record revenue in the third quarter, but technology company warned of accelerating capital expenditures around artificial intelligence, sending its stock down 7% after-hours trading.
Uh if you're worried about expenses, you got to go to ramp. com.
Time is money, save both.
Easy-to-use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place, baby. Um It's now a $1. 7 trillion company. Not bad.
But we are in the age of three, four, five trillion-dollar companies now. Uh it's crazy times. There's a club above.
Uh standout for me, Reels at north of a $50 billion run rate. Crazy.
Which is more than all of TV combined, right? Something like that? It's close.
No, I think uh TV >> television advertising, like linear TV advertising, is is in that range.
Or it's like creeping up on it.
Uh in 2024, television advertising spending in the US was expected to amount to approximately $60 billion.
I mean, they're within striking distance.
Let's hear it for the Meta team. Uh remarkable.
Um so there was this one-time tax charge of 15.
9 billion that crushed net income.
Uh spending on AI researchers has also been crazy recently.
Uh and CapEx is growing a ton.
They're going to hit 72 billion this year.
I'm good for my 72 billion over at Meta. Not bad.
Um Uh the ad load, just anecdotally, is up tremendously.
They're now doing uh four ads where they used to do one. Yeah.
I thought they were almost five.
Like you can go in between stories and get five in a row or something.
Yeah, so in between two stories, you can get up to uh five individual ads. So >> Yeah.
got to pay for all that CapEx somehow.
Yeah, the core business rocks. We know this. Uh 51.
2 billion in revenue this quarter.
They were up 26% year over year.
Uh and there's just so many dials that the Meta team can get slightly more dialed every quarter.
Uh you can get more users, more time on the platform from those users, more ads, more targeted ads.
There's all these small tweaks that add up and wind up compounding.
So my bigger question today is what happens to the advertising cash machine once you're two decades in.
So Google went through this transit transition on October 2nd of 2015.
And at the time, I feel like most people thought it was crazy. They rebranded.
They went from uh Google to being called Alphabet.
And the idea was that they were going to have other business lines. >> BNZ. Yeah.
Yeah, we're going to have other we're going to have other things.
And you know, focus is usually pretty valuable.
And at the time, people were like, "Well, you can't even keep Google Reader online.
You can't even get a chat app up to date.
You can't You can't win in social networking.
You had to shut down Google Plus.
So what are you thinking you're going to go build a self-driving car, an AI team, or a new cloud platform? Like this is crazy.
Just put the 10 blue links in the bag."
Uh but looking back at it now, it feels like Alphabet totally deserves the broader name.
Uh the company is more than just Google search box, certainly more than 10 blue links.
Uh Google Cloud is material, DeepMind is material, Waymo is material.
Uh there's the business side um Google Apps for Business.
All of these are both key to the future value of Alphabet, but also key to just running the business today.
Uh the interplay between these divisions creates a ton of value, but more importantly, I don't think these businesses, at least most of them, would exist if they hadn't grown up in a cash-rich environment.
Like I don't I it's just so hard to predict in 2009 how much capital is it going to take us to build a self-driving car network that will be able to launch in San Francisco and barely be profitable and then we'll probably need another decade.
>> strange comp here is YC, I don't know, it's some years ago at this point, was trying to understand what what uh the factors that contributed to the breakout successes.
And one factor was founders having wealthy parents.
So the founders felt like they could just take these really massive, high-risk swings because they weren't they weren't going for a base hit.
The founders like, "If I make like a few million dollars If I make a few million dollars, it doesn't change my life, right?
Trust is is is well beyond that.
>> And so I got to go big, willing to like look silly for a long period of time, willing to uh you know, just stumble around as long as it takes to hit it really big.
Um and and certainly, you know, number of the things you just outlined like wouldn't have been able to be maybe would have died as traditional venture businesses.
Yeah, I mean this is what I was writing about with with 1X, the robotics company.
Extremely difficult to understand.
Are we 3 years away from that business really working financially?
Are we 10 years away from the business really working financially?
There's a lot going on, but Google was able to just hold on to Waymo from 2009 to today, 16 years, and uh they're probably still losing money on it.
I mean their their like unit economics are decent in one specific market.
It's going to be a long time.
I would say definitely losing money on it.
But they can actually do stuff.
Um but every time they announce something, you know, they stream it.
They got to get on Restream.
One live stream, 30 plus destinations, multistream, and reach your audience wherever they are.
You can sign in with Google since we're talking about Google.
Um so I wanted to look at some parallels between what's going on with with Google, who's been on a tear and now has this like all of a sudden pretty diversified business.
Uh there's this meme here of the Ninja Turtles where From the account Alphabet.
>> Yes, so the search giant the search the cash machine of the of the ads business is taking the other bets as their children.
And now as search becomes less relevant potentially in the age of AI, well, what does Alphabet have? They have Google Cloud. They have Waymo.
They have Maps, Gmail, Chrome, DeepMind, Google AI.
Like it's a stacked lineup.
And so yes, even if search does get older >> how YouTube is doesn't even isn't even deserving of its own Ninja Turtle.
And you'd think YouTube would be a huge one here.
Uh that one seems uh YouTube seems extremely resilient in the age of AI.
It seems like the place It's a social network.
It's going to It's going to stick around.
Um and and there We really haven't seen any I mean we've seen the Sora stuff, but uh no one's Ev- Everyone uses ChatGPT and says "Oh wow, yeah, this is definitely going to replace some of my Google searching, for sure.
It's kind of searching Google for me."
And then just giving me the results.
Uh No one's saying that about Sora.
No one's saying like, "Oh, I don't need to watch Doug DeMuro anymore."
or whatever Yeah, and I mean I I I think one of the you know, right now you're seeing more AI content on YouTube, but it's still created by independent channels. >> Yep.
There's a world in the you know, YouTube pays out a huge amount of its revenue today to the creators on the platform.
There's a world in the future where YouTube just generates the the the video, the content itself through, you know, its its various AI products.
It never actually has to pay out a creator. Yeah.
>> Because it's just And that's actually better for YouTube in many ways. Yeah.
So so content Content creators today are worried about being disrupted by other people using AI to make content.
They're not thinking about the platforms themselves that know exactly what Yeah.
uh the kind of content that people like and would be able to over time produce it themselves.
Yeah, but aggregating that demand Aggregating attention.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, the value is is aggregating this is the uh is not aggre- aggregating the supply side, it's the demand side.
This is the aggregation theory.
And so if you want to aggre- if you can aggregate a bunch of people that open apps and are in the market for video, you can serve them up a MrBeast video or Doug DeMuro video, or you can serve them up AI could generate content and you still make money because you have aggregated that that uh that demand, not supply.
Doug DeMuro would be a good guest. We are working on it. Great point, man. >> Okay, now 3 2 1.
Privy, wallet infrastructure for every bank.
Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rails, securely spin up white label wallets, sign transactions, and integrate on-chain infrastructure all through one simple API.
So the Google story is very interesting because really for the last decade since 2015 when they rebranded as Alphabet, I feel like they were not getting a lot of credit.
People were like, "Oh yeah, like Google, it's like the kind of the place where you sit on the you rest and vest, you sit on the rooftop, you're not really doing anything."
And then now everyone's waking up to this idea that it's like, "Whoa, they have like four monster businesses."
And yeah, there's a ton of gravestones in the graveyard from various note-taking apps and chat apps and Google Readers over there.
Uh but overall, they wound up building a very diverse, very valuable business where even if Waymo's not cash flowing a ton, is it worth a hundred billion dollars?
Does that add to their three trillion dollar market cap materially? Probably, right?
Uh Waymo also raised like a venture round not too long ago.
Yeah, I think it actually has like a public mark now, which is interesting.
Uh but my question is how do we take this and we and we bridge it to what's going on at Meta, formerly Facebook?
Uh in October, I guess October is the month where you rebrand a company.
Uh Facebook did it uh Google rebranded to uh Alphabet in October of 2015.
Facebook rebranded to Meta in October of 2021.
Uh and people I think overly were overly narrow about framing that transition about specifically VR, specifically specifically virtual reality, the metaverse, everything that Mark Zuckerberg was investing in after the Oculus acquisition and the Meta Horizon Worlds and VR.
Obviously, that was a It's interesting that I feel like the name Meta has aged pretty well. I agree.
Even though it was ultimately somewhat like kind of an embarrassing over-investment at the time. Totally.
So the name aged well even though the activities that were driving the name change did not.
Yes, and I think it was just it was just important for for Mark Zuckerberg to send the message that We're not any single app.
>> We're not Facebook, yeah.
Yeah, and we're not even just social networking.
Like we could wind up with a hyperscaler cloud platform.
If there was like, you know, yes, you have AWS, GCP, Azure, and then you also have like Meta Cloud Platform.
People would be like, "Yeah, that makes sense."
and that's a couple hundred billion dollar business.
And they figured it out, right?
Um and so that rebranding it did it did definitely set them up for a new uh a new era, but also just the ability to to place other bets like uh what Google did once they became Alphabet.
Um but uh so it's interesting to see like how will, you know, like what will those bets look like?
Because AI is obviously just a sustaining innovation for Meta.
It's a similar thing to YouTube, right?
And machine learning's been been generating value in ad targeting for over a decade.
Sustaining sustaining in many ways, but the the potentially disruptive uh component is that people are using LLMs in social ways.
And so as as people spend more and more time talking to LLMs, that is time that they are not in Meta platforms' products.
Yeah, maybe maybe on the like like the personal interaction side, like the really parasocial stuff. That's what I'm saying. That's what I'm saying.
But for the users like like, you know, there there are users out there that used to spend 5 hours a day using Meta products and now are spending any of those though.
I mean you look at the overall usage numbers.
Yes, you're getting 30 minutes of ChatGPT, but you're not seeing a blink on It's people are like they're they're doom scrolling Instagram and then they're also chatting with 4o. Right? They're doing both. >> Yeah, maybe.
But at the end of the day, I mean I I I I agree.
Like it could potentially be a headwind long term.
And that's And that's obviously why I'm just saying like Mark certainly like sees ramping attention and user minutes on OpenAI products. And it's a concern. It's a risk.
Not not quite as material Yep.
as for Google, but And so the yeah, the question is like can Meta, MSL, TBD Labs generate some sort of chatbot that's at that's at 4o level uh frontier level.
Doesn't need to be super intelligent necessarily immediately, but just something to sort of stem that bleeding in the way that uh Gemini and AI search mode, AI mode in Google Search and the AI search overviews sort of stemmed the bleeding from, "Okay, well, uh do I need to just stop using Google Search for knowledge retrieval?"
If you if if you're like, "Am I Do I need to stop?"
May- maybe you can pull some people there.
Um but I mean Meta does, even though there's like all this chaos around who they're hiring and and they're laying off their old team and they're building this new team, they're spending so much money.
Uh it's not like they're new to this.
Like Meta started using uh uh machine learning for ad targeting all the way back in 2013, two years before OpenAI was founded, four years before the Transformer paper.
Like this is not a new technology for Facebook.
They've been using this in their core infrastructure for uh over a decade.
Um but the there's this question of what is Mark Zuckerberg's track record when building or buying successfully in new markets.
That's where it gets really hard.
Obviously, Instagram, WhatsApp, great results.
Uh but certainly much harder in VR and also, you know, whatever the next next thing is, it's much less clear.
He has a track record of being amazing at at cloning Mhm.
incredible features and products and buying incredible features and products.
There's no obvious track record of zero to one innovation.
And some some of this stuff has just been blocked.
Like he I I I believe he wanted to buy Unity game engine and >> And effectively like get into the gaming world in in one way or another.
And of course, some of those games would be instantiated in VR or instantiated in meta properties.
But but I I believe that was blocked or that didn't get through FTC.
And so >> a you know, an environment that doesn't allow him to buy uh great companies is not a great It's his kryptonite. He's nerfed. He's definitely nerfed. >> By he's nerfed.
He's one of the M&A goats.
>> He is one of the M&A goats.
Uh His power level seems too high.
And it's way different than Google.
And it's interesting because on the face of it, Google and Facebook have similar backstories, similar cultures, you know, young founders who uh who built up these tech companies only 7 years, 8 years apart from each other when they started.
But Google had a very different culture, you know, it's a PhD research project, sort of an academic campus when you're walking around.
The the mission is organizing the world's information.
It's like very nerdy and that obviously translates to hey, how do we organize the world's information?
Let's create a mapping product, Google Maps.
Okay, what do we do when we have all the maps?
Let's try and drive around a car on it.
And then they get self-driving cars, right?
And it's like it's a little bit harder to jump from like our mission is to bring people together, so we're generating AI or VR, which feels like the opposite direction.
And so I don't know I it feels like there's always going to be a little bit more tension on the mission related to where the other bets go.
Whereas the organized all the information the organizing the world's information like you you might say how does a self-driving car fit into that?
But I can totally say here's exactly how it fits into it. I can't say that. What's meta's mission?
Monetize the world's attention? No.
Bringing people together.
And the thing is bringing people together to build the future of human connection and the technology that makes it possible. Yeah.
And so there's a lot of there's a lot of products that feel like they might be successful but they have a hard >> I would love for Mark to just go super villain mode again.
You know, he he he he's he's he like at some point it could make sense from a comm standpoint to lean, you know, in >> Totally. Of course. >> Yeah, yep, yep.
Right now, um that's not the strategy, but if he just said, "Our mission is to monetize the world's attention." That'd be great. >> go pretty hard.
I think the stock pops 20% that day. I I think so, too.
You want to build it back up.
Uh monetize the world's attention.
Stock's down 10% today, but if it came out with that updated update update on Halloween Ooh, spooky. Spooky. >> that. Spooky update.
>> that we're going into spooky earning season.
Uh before we move on, let me tell you about Cognition, the makers of Devin, the AI software engineer.
Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team.
Uh yeah, and so overall, uh you know, it's easy to look back with 20/20 hindsight on Google and be like, "Wow, it all made sense.
They they were these academics.
They wanted to organize the world's information.
They wound up building AI.
They wound up building Waymo.
They've they've been very successful there."
Uh who knows what's going to happen with Meta.
I I I do think that there is so there is an open question about how does Meta square the the grounding of the mission into whatever comes next?
Because if you're if if there is a big business to be built in anti-personal and truly like anti-social networking you kind of got to square that with the mission, right?
And so maybe you do need to maybe you need to shift away to some sort of newer mission, something different.
Or maybe you need to >> Apple Apple should probably update their mission to making phones that are performant but break easier.
Have you have you actually read Apple's mission ever?
Uh the the Apple mission >> We got to do we got to we got to do a a segment called ranking big tech's mission statements. >> We definitely do.
Apple's mission is to bring the best user experience to its customers through innovative hardware, software, and services.
Is that actually Uh That is like the that's like the the least inspiring mission statement.
>> They've they've gone uh so Apple strives to bring the best personal computing experience to student educators, creative professionals, and consumers around the world.
Um there was an older mission statement at some point like I think post-Jobs era there was one that like literally had like TM for like we make the iPad, which is the best like tablet computer.
And it was just like a list of products that they had.
It was like Apple's mission is to create technology that empowers people and enriches their lives. Hm, that's pretty good.
>> That's that's better than the than the AI overview of of of of uh Anyways, yeah, I I I think the mission statement's probably underutilized as a as a mechanism to increase your stock price.
Cuz authenticity authenticity is like powerful thing.
Yeah, I mean overall I I I I think um you know, the there's a lot of questions about like what is MSL building? What is TBD Labs?
What is Super Intelligence?
How does this all fit together?
I don't think anyone doubts that Meta can benefit from just improved machine learning systems, improved AI features all over all over the ecosystem, all over the family of apps, all over the core apps.
The question is like are any of the are any of the side projects going to become monsters because you're kind of in the side project era now that you're 20 years old? Yeah. That's a good point.
But yeah, get you know, another shout-out in in the second quarter of 2022, Reels was at a $1 billion run rate.
And uh by the third quarter of 2022 at $3 billion run rate, second quarter of '23, 10 billion, and the third quarter of 2025, 50 billion.
So the growth is absolutely incredible and and uh Yeah, credit credit to uh Meta's, you know, entire team for uh just ridiculous execution. Yeah.
Google really crushed it.
Google's parent says spending on AI development may reach 93 billion, they're higher than Meta's 72.
Uh Google parent companies Google's parent company reported a 16% surge in third quarter revenue with growth in its digital advertising and cloud computing units helping to finance robust artificial intelligence spending.
Sales reached a record 102. 3 billion.
Sundar is just like uh Is that good?
There was I mean he he almost posted like that.
Like the post is like, "Hey, we did our first hundred billion dollar quarter."
Not and it's completely insane that is. That's so so massive.
Uh shares rose 5% in after-hours trading.
I think it's up a little bit more now.
Net income was 35 billion, a 33% increase from the same period a year ago.
Like other large tech companies, Google is pouring tens of billions of dollars into AI development.
I mean, what a remarkable result.
You know, there was so much so much fud around >> Logan Kilpatrick, of course, works at Google, replies to Sundar and says Google is the most incredible business in the world. He just said that?
He's replied to Sundar and said that.
Uh I I uh I have to I have to agree.
Have to agree with Logan. >> Yes.
We are very proud to be sponsored with them by by partner with them, by the way.
Google AI Studio, you can create an AI app an AI-powered app faster than ever. You can get started.
Gemini understands the capabilities you need and automatically wires up the right models and APIs for you. You can get started ai. studio/build.
Talk about a domain name.
And uh uh this is uh I didn't ask Logan if this is cool, but if you run into any issues with with uh with Gemini, you can just DM Logan.
He'll be your personal tech support.
And if he doesn't respond quickly, DM me, then I'll DM him and say you need >> you're you're famously a uh you're famously a a dot com respector and a good domain respector.
Uh Google has gotten to the level where they're buying whole TLDs.
Are you familiar with this? Like docs.
new Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
>> I believe they own dot Google.
And so if you go to I think if you go to calm.
google it resolves or something like that.
I think they bought dot Google.
Maybe I maybe I don't get that right. www. I got to look this up.
But they they they've been on a tear. If you go to docs.
new, uh you just get a new Google Doc, which is cool.
Um Anyway, let's uh let's move on to some timeline.
Let's move on to some news.
Tyler, what's new in your world?
I mean, most of the big news, I guess, was the OpenAI um IPO. >> Yeah, $1 trillion.
And and that's from uh Reuters, correct? Uh yes.
Do we know like was that just leaked to them or was Can you just call them? Should we call Reuters?
Hey, uh TVPN, we think it might be worth a trillion.
Uh R E T Yeah, I don't know where this was originally reported, but OpenAI lays the groundwork for juggernaut IPO at up to a $1 trillion valuation, three people familiar with the matter said.
So, uh they got some reporting, they got a scoop.
The company has looked at raising 60 billion at the low end and likely more.
They cautioned that talks are early and plans, including figures and timing, could change depending on business growth and market conditions.
CFO Sarah Fryer, who's been on the show, has told some associates the company is aiming for a 2027 listing. Boo. Play the wet wild.
Let's get it happening earlier.
Some advisors predicted could come even sooner around late 2026.
I want this IPO to happen tomorrow.
I think it'll be the most entertaining news item ever.
To actually get to dig into an S-1, to actually look at the financials.
Like there's been so many leaks, so many so much speculation, to actually get >> our first 24-hour show. We should. We should.
I mean, realistically we should be there in New York City the day of talking to all these people, everyone involved as they go out.
Yeah, so it says they're going to they're planning to file in the back half of 2026. Yeah. So, it'll be a while.
There's still a lot to do, a lot to build.
build. I'm sure that they want visibility into what's the impact of Sora on the business, what's the impact >> Yeah, I saw I saw another post that that that was um I don't think it's in the in our stack, but it was something to the effect of like, you know, how depending on where Meta's market cap is at the time of the OpenAI
uh IPO will be like potentially like like it will be an interesting comp because you're going to be able to look at a business that's like they're you know, at scale, like profitable, still growing very quickly versus OpenAI, which we know will be losing, you know, tens of billions of dollars at the time of the IPO. Yep. Um Yep.
Um and of course will have an amazing growth story and a bunch of narrative and things like that, but um will still be um the comps are going to be absolutely wild if it if it's landing in that one to you know, one plus trillion dollar range. Yeah.
Uh let's go to some timelines.
Suspended caps says makes no sense what the F Meta is spending all this money on.
You've spent 70 billion on reality reality labs to make the Ray-Ban vision. Are you serious?
And people are critical of Apple and their hardware efforts. Give me a break.
And investor Nick says investors need to punish Zuck like they did in 2022.
Uh and suspended caps says he won't blink this time. This is too big. He's effed. Um I don't know.
He does have one of the biggest cash machines in the entire world in the entire history of business.
Uh there's a lot of cash and um the debate between Eric Schmidt and Peter Thiel where Peter Thiel sat down with Eric Schmidt, I believe at a Wired conference, maybe it was Forbes, and they debated what big tech companies should do with all the cash they're generating.
Before we continue, before I finish this thought, let me tell you about figma. com.
Think Figure build faster.
Figma helps design development teams build great products together. Get started for free.
And >> believe you interrupted your own thought.
>> And so and so I was listening to Sharp China with Bill Bishop last night and he and he his dog came in and he mentioned the farmer's dog, which is like the brand of dog food that he feeds the dog.
And he was like, this isn't like TV PR.
We are doing 25 ads in the middle of the show.
And I was like, you are doing ads.
Anyway, um yeah, the question was like Google has all this money.
Why are they are they have this growing cash pile?
Why can't they find something to do with it?
And it's interesting looking back on it now because Google did wind up giving a lot of cash back.
They they weren't able to find a place to they truly had too much cash to do they like they invested so much in Waymo and so much in DeepMind and so much in Google Cloud and and and a ton of other projects and at the same time they still had money left over.
And so they were still doing I think stock buybacks and dividends throughout that whole process.
Uh and so it was it like Thiel was kind of proven right that Google was sort of out of ideas or or the big tech companies or the technology industry broadly was was really out of ideas. Then of course AI comes.
Now we're sort of you know, vindicated.
Hey, there is this new thing we can invest.
Let's let's take draw down on the cash flow.
People are skeptical about it, but at least it's happening.
But the question is is what is Zuck thinking cuz he's definitely in the mode of like I got this cash machine.
Let me invest my cash flow in new data centers, in new AI training models.
>> are quite are right to to look at this and say like Meta Platforms is one of the greatest businesses of all time. >> Yeah.
And you have and and the CEO is a little crazy.
Like he's a bit of a wild card.
Like he has like obviously has an incredible >> of the big tech companies. No, I I I disagree.
I think if you look at I think if you look at Sundar.
I think if you look at Satya.
I think if you look at the the guys that are running >> What about Bezos?
I'm thinking Bezos because they had a cash machine with Amazon. What did he do?
He didn't return a dime of capital and had had gross net profits of like zero for a decade while he was building AWS. AWS.
And the last time that that Mark invested this heavily in something, it did not deliver ROI. Sure.
And so I think people are just a little bit scared.
That's why the stock's more volatile.
That's why it traded down today.
Google is up Google's up 10%. Uh Yeah.
>> Microsoft have traded down briefly after after earnings, but [Music] but ultimately I think you have to if you're if you're investing in this company, you have to be you have you have the the the the sort of protection knowing that this is fundamentally just a fantastic business and you can you can pause.
You know, they can sort of pause this like crazy spending at any point.
But again, they >> Meta can.
But Meta hit the hit they're they're doing a a bond offering that got announced this morning for 25 billion dollars.
And that's after they did another um they did another deal with Blue Owl for like something like 30 billion dollars a couple weeks ago.
And so Zuck is levering up. He's going all in.
And uh investors need to be tolerant of of uh that risk.
And there's plenty of people that are going to say, well, it's fine.
I'd rather own you know, Alphabet.
I'd rather own Microsoft. etc.
Bugo Capital bloke is also uh seems like he's on your side here.
He says excited to buy Meta in the 500s.
Uh the stock of course is trading in the 600s, so he's joking that it will fall back down. >> $666 a share.
That's a Is that a good thing? Is that a good omen?
Is that a Is that a good symbolism? It's a devilish omen. It's rough.
Uh and and Bugo Capital says own the only challenge will be having the courage to do it when it gets there.
And he shares a pretty good visualization from Gemini of what's happening right now.
Mark Zuckerberg is in some sort of convertible driving off a cliff wearing a VR headset with piles of cash >> in the back >> flying out the back of the car.
>> honest, I think this makes him look really sick. >> It does.
And this is exactly what I want out of a big tech CEO. I want risk. I want risk. And I I don't know.
I I feel like you're making a ton of good points that I agree with this year.
>> I'm not saying, to be clear, that I'm not riding with Zuck.
I will always ride with Zuck.
I'm just saying I understand why people are like, you know what?
I'm going to I'm not I can't really stomach, you know, a drawdown.
Some people are going to just rotate into the other hyperscalers.
>> I'm just trying you know, Tyler, what do you think?
Uh I mean, people were calling for Sundar to be basically fired for like a long time.
Like until like basically this year. >> Yeah.
So, I I feel like you're you're exaggerating how much like Google has been like this like winner the whole time. >> No, no.
No, no, I completely agree.
This was my point about when they when they rebranded to Alphabet.
Like everyone was like, you're not going to cure cancer and create self-driving cars and also build AGI and build a cloud platform.
>> are still saying Sundar like should not be CEO. >> years. For 10 years.
Yeah, people were saying like it's not really working.
And now finally people are like, okay, it actually worked.
You have a diversified business. Congratulations. >> Okay. Okay. Breaking news. Yes.
This is going to rock your world.
>> Taylor Sheridan and Peter Berg team on Paramount and Activision's Call of Duty movie. Let's go. Let's go.
Hit the hit the gong for that.
The creators that made Yellowstone, Hell or High Water, and Lone Survivor, and Sicario.
>> I'm so excited for the Call of Duty movie.
You know, they should also make a Vanta movie.
Automate compliance, manage risk, prove trust continuously.
Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation. Um That's incredible.
Wait, so what what we need to get someone on the show who understands media.
Because I like this all seems like it's happening very very quickly.
>> We understand neofactual media, new media, corporate media, legacy new legacy media.
No, I don't understand >> neotrad media.
The neo conglomerate is entirely new to me.
I don't understand what Allison's doing.
I don't understand what Taylor Sheridan is doing in reaction to it.
It seems like this is a reaction.
Basically Taylor Sheridan left Allison's new empire, left Paramount, and said, "Hey, I'm out and I'm going over to NBC Universal.
I'm riding with the Comcasters."
And and and now he's saying I'm making a Call of Duty movie.
Is this is this is this all tied to his him leaving him leaving Allison? Or is it something else? I I know.
>> this I'm sure this was in for a a Potentially. Was it? I don't know.
There have been like a flurry of Taylor Sheridan like little leaks and news items because it seems like he's in he's in a negotiation with with David Ellison over I mean he was until he left but he's still with he's still with Paramount at least for you know a couple more months maybe a couple more years.
He still has projects in flight.
You can't just like you know completely dip on your on your production company.
But we really should get someone on the show to figure that out.
Let's go to more haters more you know posters on the timeline from J. Bulltard.
This AI stuff is so dumb.
Zuck is repeating the 2022 sinking of a great money machine in meta with wasteful spend.
The metaverse sucked and AI is nearly as dumb with all this capex as investors tell him they're sick of it.
Yeah and in part of part of part of part of the the the I think part of the blowback here is that the first AI product that meta announced from their new team was meta vibes. Incredible moment.
And I know you're I know you've been putting in hours and hours a day on the meta vibes app but that didn't send a strong that does not inspire confidence right because it was they if they had launched Sora Yeah.
people would have been saying like wow. Yeah.
They're absolutely cooking.
And I think there's two audiences that the meta vibes app didn't hit with.
One was okay the extremely online technical teapot whatever you want to call them.
Those folks are like well this looks like white labeled midjourney because it kind of is and the app just doesn't feel like super polished or like crazy.
Oh wow I've never seen these like UI paradigms.
So there's that and then there's the you know the the teapot critique of like infinite jest and slop and all this stuff.
So like they weren't hitting with like the insiders.
But then simultaneously it's not like you walk down the street and you were like oh wow like this is actually breaking through with just like everyday random people in the way that threads has and so I don't know maybe in a year we'll be like oh wow they actually figured it out.
They funneled a ton of people to meta vibes and it's as successful as threads.
That would be impressive.
It seems like a tall order. It won't be. It won't be.
The uh but but the the thing about Sora that stood out and even though I'm not bullish on Sora as a media consumption platform Mhm.
it it had this innovative super viral feature that was fresh and new and so if I think I think if meta had launched that everyone would have been like 100%.
like you spend the money >> Yeah.
but when they launched >> the frontier of the slop.
Like you you you have the you have the purest slop.
Yeah and it and it you know Sora benefits Instagram weirdly because people are creating more content over there and it's driving engagement but it And also just the visual aspect of the actual app the idea of cameos and putting those things together and the
way it was like all the little details yeah it was like okay this is unique and then and like there's clearly a like this doesn't it doesn't feel Did you see Cameo's suing open AI like Cameo that the celebrity video That makes sense yeah. buy a celebrity video
buy a celebrity video platform suing open AI over the feature which I don't know like We got Beecher or just the name?
>> the naming the naming of the feature which feels like feels like a stretch to me. Yeah. I don't know.
The the the the the the the problem with brand names is if you create a name that is too descriptive of what you do you can't you can't trademark it.
So if if if we were to call this like the new show we couldn't we couldn't we couldn't have any intellectual property around that.
>> Did you see this this engineer said a couple days ago just submitted my resignation from meta some might say that one year at the company is not that long but I survived like three rounds of layoffs so I think it's fair play.
For what it's worth my team is great and it was an overall positive experience but there are other better places to build AGI which hopefully won't be used for stepmom chatbots and infinite slop machines. Wow. >> Scathing.
I wonder what the play is.
Do you think that's like grow your account so you can be a founder launch something uh the whole I don't know the slop it doesn't seem I don't know it's tricky. Yeah.
So Zuck is certainly not I don't think going to take his foot off the gas yet. No.
Like we'll have to get the vibes will have to get about 10 times >> There's new reality labs hardware shipping every year.
Like there was massive pushback in the in the stock like sold off by like 50%.
It was like really really rough for a while and >> Wasn't it wasn't didn't it trade down to something like like Yeah like $300 a share or something.
No I think it was I mean so Yeah look at the look at the five year chart in 20 at the bottom of 2022's it was $90 a share. That's what I'm saying. [Music] Rough.
uh and and it was up at 300 so it it it traded from from almost 400 to 90 which is down 70%.
Like that is an insane drawdown.
And then it just built right back up and it was bigger than ever. And so I don't know.
I feel like people might be filling out apology forms for him at some point even though it looks rough right now.
Just something's going to wind up clicking and also the core business is just going to keep ripping.
So you just get so many more shots on goal.
It is an endless an endless you know stream of shots on goal when you have a cash machine like the family of apps.
Yeah also the stock's up 20% in the last 6 months even even you know factoring in this 10% drawdown. I don't know.
I think I think uh investing in AI is not the craziest thing you can do in 2025 as a hyperscaler CEO.
uh Anyway Polymarket has some open AI IPO market up already.
So no IPO by December 31st 2026 is already at 55%.
Um we will certainly be tracking this but if they do get out the the market is pricing right now between one and 1.
25 trillion in market cap but 6% chance that it's up at 1.
5 trillion which would be crazy to go out at.
Not technically the biggest IPO of all time I believe that belongs to Saudi Aramco so oil is still dominant relative to uh AI but still would be one of the most insane tech IPOs in history obviously. Yep.
Quickly before we move on graphite.
dev code review for the age of AI.
Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster.
Um Did you want to watch this video? Toby yesterday No yeah.
uh responded >> Wait Lutke?
Yeah Toby we we covered his post where he said having some AI follow you into into your Zoom meetings or Google Meet for taking notes is the digital equivalent of showing up to a meeting with your fly down. Mhm.
I said I never let them in.
I just let them sit there in the waiting room. Oh I forgot. Sorry.
He responded and said I'm actually very pro meeting recording and AI summarization but I'm not okay with bots joining as fake humans to accomplish this.
It's a meeting between you and me not you and me and some startups viral growth strategy. Granola is great.
Gemini does this well in Google Meet.
Hypernote is great and fully local but use them with consent.
My tweet is about how ridiculous and self-important it looks when you show up to a meeting with random bots as entourage. Yeah.
I think um I I I do remember seeing there's a viral screenshot of somebody who showed up.
Is this the screenshot where somebody brought like five bots? It's just hilarious.
Entourage is actually kind of sick. Yeah wait.
Taylor this would be a good uh hack project.
Like uh viral entourage on your on your calendar that when you join a meeting it just joins with like 25 other people and it's just like it just takes your name and just automatically does like you're chief of staff you're head of security your PR person your secretary your driver your dietitian your uh and it just joins every meeting with 20 different bots and just makes you look super important online. Maybe that'll happen.
Uh we should move on to this video of Jensen Huang. Oh Jensen. Right?
Our I was going to go I was going to go for that the guy from from Snowflake. Oh okay yeah. Yeah.
I mean let's watch the Jensen video is only 7 seconds so look at this.
He's having beers with some absolute dogs.
He's hanging out with the CEO of Samsung the CEO of Hyundai hanging out in South Korea.
Just having some beers crushing some beers with the boys. This is how you do it.
People will call it a top signal.
I mean this is going to go so hard in a top signal vibe reel that we will definitely create Yeah. when the time is right.
But I mean there have been crazier top signals and when Nvidia was at like half the market cap it is at now Jensen was signing autographs.
People were like He's signing signing a woman's shoe >> that too. I don't know.
But it was a crazy moment and everyone was like this has got to be it.
So I think Jensen is just consistently putting out crazy clips that read as top signals to confuse the market keep you guessing. That's right. That's right.
He said doubt doubt me again.
He also says that Korea has the best fried chicken in the world taking shots at Colonel Sanders.
Rough out here for America.
>> know why Korea has the world's best fried chicken, but Korea has the world's best fried chicken. Let's go. Ooh.
>> best fried chicken in America is Korean. Huh. Whoa.
I have had Korean fried chicken. It is delicious.
Something about the sauce is really, really good. Mhm.
Um Also, uh Jensen Huang in uh South Korea says, "Are there any Nvidia investors here?"
Uh the audience cheers, and he says, "That's why Korea is rich, baby." Let's play this one. Play it loud. Did we get it?
>> Nvidia and Nvidia investors?
That's why Korea is so rich. He's got bets.
>> Do I have any message He's got bets.
>> He He's feeling good right now.
I mean, on on your 5 trillion day, I mean >> come on.
>> him let him have a little fun. >> going to do? Have some fun.
>> Let him have a little fun straight after GTC.
>> It's It's so wild that they hit 5 trillion uh yesterday, spec- particularly because they don't they don't report earnings for another like 2 weeks.
So, like basically every other big tech company is on like the October 28th, October 29th cycle.
So, as of tonight after Amazon and Apple report earnings, uh we should we we have like the book closed mostly on all the Mag 7 except for Nvidia.
But, Nvidia is still in the news, and so uh Alphabet got crammed to the business section.
Microsoft got crammed down to the business section.
Meta made it to the front page of the Journal because they sold off.
Uh But, Nvidia got the full chart of their progress.
They got the the Glazenator 3000, the A1 from the Wall Street Journal because they just hit 5 trillion, and they have this interesting chart of how many days it took Nvidia to create a trillion dollars in market cap.
Uh the first trillion took him 6,138 days.
The second trillion did it in 180 days.
The third trillion in 66 days.
Then, the fourth trillion was in 273 days.
And then, the fifth trillion in 78 days.
So, from 6,000 days took him 20 years to make that first trillion.
They say that the first trillion's the hardest.
>> They They do say that.
>> But, then the next one comes in just 66 days or 78 days, which is remarkable.
So, he is uh he's on a tear, and congratulations to Jensen Huang and all the folks over at Nvidia for uh powering this AI revolution and absolutely crushing.
>> pull up this video of the Snowflake CRO doing a little street interview. Mhm. Excuse me, sir.
How old were you when you became a millionaire? This guy. >> Yes, sir.
I've just been getting your Instagram feed.
>> How old were you when you became a millionaire? Oh, boy. 4 years ago. Okay, pause. Pause. Yeah, wait.
So, who is this guy again?
He's the He's the the CRO of of Snowflake.
Which like Snowflake's been like a hundred billion-dollar company for a while, right? Snowflake market cap.
I thought it went out like years ago.
I mean, maybe he wasn't liquid.
It's 91 billion-dollar market cap company. And it's down, too.
Like Like it was trading higher.
>> So, there's there This was the the line that people were most confused about because I don't I don't want to I don't want to like try to guess this guy's age to to uh you know, I I won't pretend to know exactly.
But, I I assume he's in his 40s, maybe his 50s. >> Yeah.
He was at VMware for 10 years as the vice president of uh US enterprise sales and then the senior vice president general manager of Americas. Yeah.
And so, uh and he was also the president of Broadcom for from November of 2023 till now.
>> Yeah, it seems like an absolute dog.
>> And became the CRO at Snowflake uh this year.
But, still uh everyone I think is shocked of like uh how how he didn't, you know, possibly pull together a million dollars million dollars by somewhere 25 years in enterprise technology. That's what it says. 25 years.
Like, what is he spending his money on?
He must be just like obsessed with buying depreciating cars. That could be it.
Maybe he gets a new Bentley Continental GT every year like clockwork.
Maybe he's the one that's buying all the Lamborghini Urus.
Maybe he's buying multiple.
Maybe he doesn't like to drive the same car twice. Yeah.
That must be >> Maybe he gets a fresh car >> be it.
I don't like to drive cars with more than 20 miles on the odometer. Yeah.
>> So, I'm just going to cycle it out. I'll take the lot.
>> Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Every 20 miles >> say once you drive it off the lot, you lose half the value.
Well, it's a it's the price I'm willing to pay. Yeah.
Cuz I got to keep my net worth under I got to keep it in six figs.
To inspire It's got Clearly it worked.
It clearly inspired him to grind harder.
He's the CRO at Snowflake. It's incredible.
Um No, this must be this must be some sort of he he misspoke.
Um because that uh Okay, let's let's play the play the rest of it.
This does not make sense.
G, what do you do in tech? Uh CRO for Snowflake.
>> Did you guys just go public?
Uh we went public 5 years ago during COVID.
Couldn't ring the bell, so this is our moment.
Do you recommend entrepreneurs take their company public because there's a risk there as well when you bring in all that capital, you bring in voting shares.
What do you think about going public as a position? >> question.
I was just going to say sorry.
I promise we got 17 million followers.
This is this is the best marketing he can do. I know.
All right, just keep it rolling.
Hey, we're keeping this rolling, man. Sir, real real quick.
Can Can I finish real quick with you real quick for 1 minute? >> We'll do 30 seconds. >> 30 seconds is cool.
All right, what do you think makes a good He does not do 30 seconds.
He definitely doesn't have like 5 minutes. Based on the edit.
Cash flow is everything until profitability comes.
Then you get S&P 500, and you get a whole different kind of return on >> What does that mean, too?
That I I don't know what that means.
Do I not understand that?
What did you guys do in revenue this last year?
>> So, we're going to exit this year probably just over about 4 and 1/2 billion. >> Let's go. Disclosure. That's disclosure. Keep track of us. We snow. It's amazing.
You have some good equity in the company? Uh we're doing okay.
As somebody who's an executive at a billion-dollar company I watch you all the time.
Congratulations on all your success.
As an executive at a billion-dollar company, the best financial advice you can give to the younger generation, best money advice you can give to Dude, I think this guy this guy shouldn't be giving He's like, "Uh step one, You can save your way to being financially secure in the future.
You've got to build up wealth. Don't worry about W-2s. W-2 is not necessary.
Take me 30 years to build that Next question, what do you see in the future? Million dollars savings. This is crazy.
>> It's tough to predict, my friend.
In this world, it's This is actually hilarious.
12 to 18 months, that's all you got. Yeah, okay.
Can you give me the next 12 months?
What's the number one thing people need to be adopting in their business right now?
Uh they're going to be using AI.
>> He's He's still going.
He's like, "Hey, 30 seconds, 30 seconds." accelerate revenue.
It's all about moving fast.
>> Do you think if business owners aren't leveraging AI, they're going to be left behind? >> Absolutely. Why? It's like the internet.
If you're not on the internet, wave, you're dead.
>> It's going to replace Uber drivers with Potentially could. Self-driving.
It's going to change the world. It's so funny. Oh. Wild wild interview.
>> Yeah, so they had to file an emergency 8-K disavowing unauthorized statements.
Uh The projection exceeded the official guidance by a hundred million dollars.
So, uh they they they said that they were projecting 4. 4 billion. He rounded up to 4. 5. And uh that's a no-no.
So, he got himself in trouble. Stay safe out there.
>> don't understand how he has on his on his LinkedIn, he has president at Broadcom full-time since November of 2023.
He's not listed on the Broadcom website. I don't know.
Um but uh It is one of the funniest >> Maybe he's kind of like Sohum Parekh-style moonlighting over there. >> Yeah. Who knows?
Uh we have the founder of uh founder CEO of Whatnot coming in the studio today. Is that correct? >> In about 20 minutes.
>> About 20 minutes, we have Grant. We're very excited.
Uh people have been debating Whatnot because it sort of came out of nowhere as this uh decacorn e-commerce company.
Uh Chris Pike, former friend uh former guest on the show, uh is is taking shots on the timeline, putting the timeline in turmoil, calling it unregulated gambling.
Well, we're going to get to the bottom of it. Uh is it gambling? Is it not?
He says he feels like someone needs to write a deep dive on this, but uh we will dig in.
I'm not exactly sure, but we'll we'll we'll try and understand the business, how they make money, how it all works, and how they >> groceries gambling?
Sometimes you go buy a watermelon, you're like, "I don't know. It looks pretty good." >> crack it open.
>> But, if I once I cut it open Yeah.
once I get home and cut it open, it might not be the best watermelon. But, it looked good.
You're trying to knock on it, you know, you're trying to feel out the kind of the vibes of the watermelon.
You do that with pumpkins right now around Halloween. That's right. Halloween's coming up.
People are gambling on pumpkins.
Is it going to be rotten inside?
You got to play the game. Yeah.
Play the game on the field.
Um we uh Drew over on X Mhm. uh released a video.
I guess he says Amazon will sue me for leaking this. He says, "Worth it." Uh new new So funny.
Putting the tiny Amazon package in the missile launcher.
That just flies in And I love just demolishes the door.
It just completely destroys the door.
Like, the door just gets like broken into a million pieces.
And then, this is innovative because how everyone's experience is, right?
Even though Amazon gets it right to your front door, >> Yeah.
it could still be kind of mildly annoying >> Yeah.
to have to go out and carry boxes in. Yeah, yeah, yeah. First world problem. Yeah. But, this solves that. Totally.
Yes, you need to replace the door once a day, Yeah.
but So, people are taking shots at at DoorDash with the new DoorDash robot.
Will it get it to your door?
Well, here's your answer.
Maybe maybe it needs a missile launcher on it.
I also love that this video it it looks like it's it's in part a real video.
Like, those first frames with the human hand, that looks like they actually built the missile.
And then, they switch over to just a 3D render and so there's like maybe no AI here but still some CGI.
It's it's very very hilarious. Uh so funny.
Uh should we move into some of the more Neo Neo reactions? >> Of course, yeah.
But first let me tell you about Julius.
What analysis do you want to run?
Chat with your data to get expert level at level insights in seconds at julius. ai.
Um yes, me after loading the dishwasher instead of paying a robot $20,000 to do it for me and it's Trump holding a ton of cash. Uh very very funny.
Um Also, people are planning to drip them out with gold chains or silver chains and I think a fade on here too. This is very funny.
>> Uh Rob I mean underrated the idea that if you get the 1X robot, I wonder how much you'll actually be able to dress it because at a certain point you like you can't put a body kit a crazy crazy body kit on a Tesla because you'll just block the cameras and eventually you'll you won't have self-driving.
Um I'm putting Chrome Hearts all over my Neo.
>> Yeah, you're going to?
I think that I think it's going to trip and it's going to shut down. >> No, no, no. One t-shirt. One t-shirt? I don't know.
You get a baggy t-shirt there.
>> handle one one baggy tee. Yeah.
If it can't handle >> It's just you're going to have to pay for two Chrome Hearts t-shirts cuz you have to you have to send one to the teleoperator because the teleoperator doesn't feel the exact weight of the Chrome Hearts t-shirt.
>> immediately make an account dripped out Neos and it's just a daily feed of The vibes around this company are just great.
It's such a moonshot and it's like and it's it's so capital intensive.
It's so difficult but uh but I think everyone's having fun with it.
Uh I'm giving you actually dropped a whole video.
>> Rob we got to pull up this video of Rob Rob Freed.
He says 20K to simulate the experience of a roommate with a ketamine problem. It's ridiculous.
No, this is what we were saying that that that we were saying on the show yesterday.
It's like hey Neo you know, clean up all those wine glasses and it's just like Yeah, just smashing everything.
I mean it's going to be crazy.
>> get ready to be good at cleaning up glass. >> For sure.
That is that's really the final challenge for humanoids. Yeah.
Cleaning up glass one of the greatest challenges for humans. Yeah. Uh cleaning up glass. Oh yeah, it's a mess.
>> Like it's an adventure every time. It's a high-stakes game.
I mean the the uh like some of the anecdotes from this robot are going to be hilarious.
There's going to be wild stuff.
Um Well, if you're looking for a robot to generate some media for you, head over to fall the generative media platform for developers the the world's best generative image video and audio models all in one place.
Develop and fine-tune models with serverless GPUs and on-demand clusters.
Uh another post here with Neo with his got the Glock out.
Now tell me where the seed phrase is.
Got to make sure that the just another reason why they put the experts locally.
You definitely have to arm them. This is important.
Yeah, should should humanoids be able to open carry?
There's a whole Corridor Crew video about this that went super viral Boston Dynamics.
They made a whole series out of it.
All CGI but they took renders of real Boston Dynamics robots and put them in like shooting ranges in this whole environment.
They tell this whole story and it just goes viral constantly and people think it's real even though it's CGI.
Um What were you saying about MKBHD?
>> put out a video about Neo 1X and and he's he's beating the drum of like this is teleoperation.
It doesn't count and he's like he's going pretty hard on them.
He gives us some caveats and he says, you know, hey I wish I hope this does work out but some other people were kind of levying the critique uh on him that he's not in the arena not trying to build things.
But I mean at the same time we talked about this yesterday.
I think MKBHD really has seen a number of these consumer Yeah, and and He's been burned on on He's been burned on a couple things.
You know, multi-hundred-dollar devices that should be a lot easier to deliver a great customer experience and so I think it's fair for him to be concerned about a $20,000 product that will probably like I I I'm every day I'm more bullish on 1X. >> Yeah.
I think I think uh they're they have a great understanding of the internet. >> Yeah.
They're focused they've been focused on like a specific use case the home for a while.
They're focused on teleoperation which is the right thing to be focused on because even if it only is good at teleoperation forever Yeah.
that still could be valuable. Yeah.
Um I'm bullish as a futurist. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But well well yeah and I think that everybody should be going into this with the understanding that you are going to be participating in trying to pull the future uh I agree. forward. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It it seems like I don't I they I don't know if they're calling it a beta but it feels like you should go into it assuming it's a beta.
What are you laughing at? Didn't you have a joke?
Did you ever post your joke?
At least tell your joke on the on the stream if you didn't post it. >> I'll tell my joke. >> Tell your joke.
A woman shoots her 1X Neo then holds him underwater for 5 minutes. Next she hangs him.
Right after they enjoy a lovely dinner. How can this be?
The what was what was John posting about that before?
The woman John John Palmer This was inspired by John John Palmer's post last week of like the AI agent being like this is not my son.
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
A father and son create an AI agent company that gets to $20 million.
They go to San Francisco.
>> Yeah, with a father and a son a father and son build an AI agent.
The father tweets that they have 10 million AR and the son is rushed to San Francisco to pitch the seed round.
At the pitch the VC looks at the boy and says, I can't this I can't fund this boy. He is my son.
And so the answer of course to my riddle a woman shoots her 1X Neo then holds him underwater for 5 minutes.
Next she hangs him right after they enjoy a lovely dinner.
The answer to the riddle is of course Turbo puffer. Search every byte. No.
Serverless vector and full-text search built from first principles on object storage fast 10X cheaper extremely scalable. Major cliffhanger.
No, she killed the robot but is hanging out with the operator. Okay, okay.
At first it might read on it I mean my read on it was just like it's ridiculous and it's a play on that uh like riddle that confuses LLMs generally.
Uh I mean there's some very funny examples of those.
It's the strawberry thing all over the all over again.
It's just very easy to confuse these things.
Uh anyway PE PE Cooper over on X went incredibly viral 25,000 likes 25,000 >> a million views saying my Neo robot after I learned the third worlders piloting them is mad chill.
It's not going to be a third worlder, remember?
It's going to be an American >> American >> teleoperated robot.
W- W- What is this Will Manidis post?
He posted this Neo robot in this like uh in this image and I understand it's photoshopped in there but I don't understand why it went so viral. People really like it.
What is this a reference to?
It's some I mean if you scroll down Branden Jacoby's posting >> You think it's the they don't know?
But it's such a real image.
Have you seen the original image?
>> Yeah, is it like a frat frat guy >> What is the No, it's like a guy who's standing there and he like I don't know he just like I don't know how to describe it.
He's like looks all run down and everyone's like looking at him funny. Okay.
I I think the the it's kind of just like the Ghibli thing where it's like oh that's an image I recognize. >> Okay.
Yeah, for some reason I don't I I don't understand this image.
Uh I just don't look at that many photos of people drinking on uh porches I suppose.
Uh but you know, to each their own.
I guess isn't that Uh Dev had an absolute banger.
Uh wait till you find that MF 20K clanker in your kitchen acting too friendly. It's ridiculous.
And I guess you you followed him after this post and he says, damn after so long. Oh, that's funny.
I got caught following him but I did like this post and I was like I got to follow this person Dev. Uh I don't know.
Wait, after so long you you don't you're not that big of an account.
I feel like I'm not that behind. I don't know.
I'm glad I found your account though Dev.
You're very entertaining.
>> You guys found each other. It's very sweet.
>> Oh, Jordy already following.
Okay, it's me, you, David Holtz uh for the followers I know and Jaya Seed. Very funny.
And I like that Dev replied replied to the post banger.
This just giving yourself a pat on the back is fantastic.
Okay, Eric Katana has a less less not so PC post in here.
Is it gay to have sex with a female robot teleoperated by a man?
>> Elon Musk on there >> on there with the crying emoji crying emoji. I don't know.
We'll leave that to the philosophers I suppose.
We'll need a whole new branch of philosophy.
Eric Katana Eric Katana replied and said, Elon what what did you mean by this?
Which is Optimus's new hand upgrade includes 22 degrees of freedom. What does it mean?
Anyways, um Uh did this did this Tanae post get deleted?
I don't know where this one went. I'm I don't know.
Uh let's let's move over to some Bub talk.
We have a post here from USV with a clip from the legend Fred Wilson.
>> While we pull that up, let me tell you about Profound.
Get your brand mentioned in ChatGPT.
Reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands.
Um Let's play the clip from Fred Wilson.
>> the thing about bubbles is that there's just two things I think that people need to remember about bubbles.
First of all, bubbles provide the financing for new revolutions. that?
And Like that book you described, the power of revolutions.
And they provided at at inflated valuations, so people can I mean, look at what Open AI and Anthropic and others are doing.
They're raising money at astronomical valuations and then throwing all of that money building We got to get Fred Wilson on the show. What a legend.
We can say they're overdoing it, you know, this reminds us of the telecom overbuild of the late '90s, whatever, but the net result of it will be that it will be advances that would not have been possible without that investment mania.
So, that's one thing to remember about bubbles.
The second thing to remember about bubbles is after the crash, there's there's a renewal.
And so, if you can just ride out the crash and then stick with it, things will be even better afterwards.
So, well, so the thing about bubbles is that there's just two things I think that Basically, just survive. Survive.
Get in the winners, ride in the winners.
Invest in the companies that are durable, a generation, multi-generational. Yeah. Skip the others. Skill issue. Skill issue.
At all Just just just don't make mistakes.
Um >> Just don't make mistakes.
Uh use Google AI Studio, the fastest way from prompt to production with Gemini.
Create an AI-powered app faster than ever.
This is the second time I did that, I think, but Um sometimes we skip around.
Uh Dean Ball uh says, "My sense is that selling Blackwell chips to China would quite possibly be the most unpopular tech policy move of the Trump admin, especially on Capitol Hill.
It's plausible that the long-term, really even near-term result will be much more compute regulation."
>> I like this guy, Dean Ball. Tyler, do you know Ball?
I think you've already made this joke. Yeah.
But but have you have you gone down the Ball rabbit hole?
Uh not I've I've read some of his his longer posts, but He's coming on the show tomorrow.
Uh Pretty spooky day to come on the show. >> Yeah, it is.
>> That'll be an interesting It'll be very fun. interview.
>> Um Yeah, I I feel like the uh wait, didn't uh Trump went to China just yesterday, right?
Uh or or where did he actually meet Xi Jinping? He's not going to China.
>> No, no, no, but he but he met with Xi Jinping and immediately let up on the >> Oh, South Korea? Okay. Oh, Jensen's there, too. Uh that's fun.
Um I I have no idea anymore.
I I feel like if you were if you were if you were anti-selling GPUs to China on the basis of AI doom, you have to update towards it's actually kind of chill to sell them to China, right?
Like debate this with me.
Wait, if you're if you're a doomer, The reason one of the reasons people said, "Let's not sell GPUs to China."
was if they get GPUs, they will get super intelligence, they will steamroll us, they will be all powerful, and super intelligence will be communist, it will be state capitalist, it will be not love and free speech, it'll be all the things that are un-American and we don't like.
Then the last couple of years have happened and played out, and it feels like the fast takeoff scenario feels less likely.
And so, uh that should update you to be like a little bit less worried about it. No?
Um maybe I mean about selling to China, because it's not nuclear weapons.
It's not the Manhattan Project. It's It's nuclear slop. It's slop. It's erotica.
It's But it's also great knowledge retrieval, really cool image generation, really cool audio generation, summaries.
Like it is definitely a great productivity tool, but it's not going to be okay, they have it, they got the GPUs, they got you know, a GPT-5 level model, and now America just loses.
Like and and China's just dominant, right?
Yeah, I mean, I I think um you know, the the leap will take is that it's still like what I don't think in his scenario like the labs have even been nationalized yet.
And he's like I I don't like the capabilities right now merit the nationalization, but I think a lot of people still think that like it's like uh you know, two more years, then we'll be at a point where like it would make sense for uh there to be like major geopol- political conflict just over the AI question.
So, I I I don't think it's like the people who were super like bullish on that idea, I think are still uh I don't think they've been fully like disproven yet. Yeah. I don't know.
It seems like what what I mean, we'll have to talk to more people about like how that's shaping up, because there's also the weird dynamic of like even if we wanted to sell Blackwell to China, would they even buy it, because they seem very interested in their own supply chain?
I think I think they can do both, you know.
They can buy Blackwells today, and they can still I don't know.
I mean, the more you buy, the less incentive you have to build locally. Like that's just true.
Like we buy solar panels here, there are no good solar panel companies. I don't know. There aren't.
They're probably Like America has been like, "Yeah, we're buying them so cheaply, like how do you get a company off the ground in a market that's just getting destroyed?"
We ran this example with with GoPro.
Like America had a company there and got steamrolled.
And so, it's like you need to be over-investing like crazy, and America just doesn't have the appetite for that.
Yeah, and I'm I'm just saying China has to have a you know, entire industry you know, backstopped and you know, money-losing for a sustained period of time. Yeah.
Um Couple more posts before we bring in Grant.
Uh Zero Hash uh we talked about this briefly yesterday.
Mastercard is set to acquire crypto startup Zero Hash for nearly 2 billion.
Uh Imran Khan over at Alliance says Zero Hash powers most crypto-to-fiat on/off ramps holding money transmitter licenses uh and MSP licenses across the US.
Most on-ramps you use today likely run through Zero Hash.
This is a pretty big deal.
So, Mastercard uh getting into the game.
Uh In other news, Kimbal Musk says, "Please vote your Tesla stock.
There is no one remotely close to my brother, and no CEO CEO on Earth that would accept this package.
It is a massive win for you as a shareholder every way you look at it."
Uh Elon uh says, "Thanks, bro.
These are These are the original technology brothers."
>> What is it Oh, yeah, true.
Uh what does he mean by no CEO on Earth that would accept this package?
I can give some more context.
So, Gavin Baker says, "My firm, a Trellis Management, will be voting in favor of Elon's performance-based compensation package.
I would prefer that every company I invest in have a comparable plan. Sure.
I believe shareholders should generally support thoughtfully structured performance-based CEO compensation packages because they incentivize CEOs to create transformational growth and value.
The basic logic of these plans is the CEO gets 10% of the incremental value creation if they 10x the stock with a 2x hurdle.
So, shareholders get a 900% stock increase, and the CEO gets an incremental 10%.
The first Tesla plan incentivized Elon to 10x the value of Tesla.
He achieved all the milestones and may never be paid for this.
The Axon plan incentivized Rick Smith to greater than 5x the value of Axon, and he did.
And when milestones aren't met, such as Farfetch, then the CEOs don't receive the payouts.
The new Tesla Tesla plan is arguably better than the first, as it also includes financial and technological milestones in addition to market cap-based incentives.
Um and uh again, so Trellis is riding with uh the brothers.
Yes, but what do you what do you think Kimbal means by saying "No CEO on Earth would accept this package"?
Like >> I I understand that I I completely agree with the first part.
There is no one remotely close to Elon for Tesla.
Like I'm totally in on that.
I'm in on the idea of incentive packages.
I like that as a structure.
>> are so aggressive that most CEOs don't think they would achieve them, hence they wouldn't accept it.
Yeah, they'd be like, "No, pay me How about How about I do what I do for that?
How about I Yeah, how about I get Got it.
I just compounded 10% a year.
How about I do this for that?
Like if I go to the CEO of of Target or something and say like, "Okay, you won't make a dime unless you 10x the stock."
They're going to be like, "What are you talking about? No way."
Uh yeah, that makes sense. Thank you.
Well, uh Let me tell you about Linear.
Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products.
Meet the system for modern software development.
Streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps. You can start building. Um Let's go to Cheng Lu.
Uh have you heard this Scott Forstall stands?
There's a lot of Scott Forstall stands out there.
He was the senior vice president, iPhone software, 13 years ago.
He was apparently fired from Apple after the disastrous launch of Apple Maps.
What mapping app do you use on your phone? I am an Apple Maps guy. >> Me, too. I use Apple Maps.
>> have been, because I used to be I I switched to Apple Maps, but only like a year ago. >> Yeah.
But then I was on Google Maps.
>> I was on Waze, and Waze was incredible, because you'd find all these like secret behind-the-scenes Waze.
And then I think a lot of local neighborhoods basically said like, "Hey, we we actually live on a on a nice quiet street.
We don't want Waze funneling a thousand cars through our neighborhood during rush hour.
So, can you route around us?"
And it kind of put everyone back on the normal routes.
And I just always liked that you could see the maps on your home screen without unlocking your phone. That was enough for me. I agree.
I I would stuck with it, even though sometimes it would take you on a little bit of a goose chase. Yeah. Goose chase.
Well, Waze >> Waze I was never a fan of the goose chase.
I'm like I don't I don't want to >> you're anti-goose chase?
Like in the Waze context.
Like >> love a Waze goose chase.
>> I don't want to go on a street race through a bunch of 25-mph >> best is when you're on Waze.
I agree No, I agree with you, but the best is when you're using Waze and it's like, "Hey, you're on the freeway, but why don't you get off and get back on the freeway seven times over the next 6 miles so you can save 45 seconds?"
It's like Waze, I don't want to do that.
At one point, Waze So >> They really should have a slight like an aggre- like an aggression slider. They basically do.
So if you go into the Waze settings, there's one where it's like, "Okay, avoid avoid toll roads."
It's like I understand that.
It's like I'm driving across the town and I don't want to pay five bucks.
Like I want to save money. Yeah, avoid toll roads.
Then one was like avoid freeways and I don't know.
I guess it's like maybe if you get motion sick or something you don't want to be on freeways. Whatever.
>> met I met someone recently that that doesn't drive They They didn't grow up in LA.
They moved here and they just avoid all freeways.
They only take uh street laws.
>> the self-driving cars often avoid avoid freeways because higher-speed accidents are are more risky.
But so for a while, I don't know if this is actually in Waze, but there was a moment where you could go in and check I want to avoid toll roads.
Two was I want to avoid freeways.
And three was I want to avoid dirt roads, which was hilarious because I can just imagine driving through Los Angeles and all of a sudden it's like, "Yeah, if you cut across this person's front lawn, you can save 30 seconds." Uh And so I don't know.
Hot take is that Scott Forstall like Apple Maps was this kind of disastrous launch where it it really didn't work as well anywhere near Google Maps, but eventually they turned it around and Apple Maps became a really great product for the iPhone.
And Cheng Lu says, "As someone with a bit of insider info, sorry for baiting, I can tell you that the current trajectory for Apple would likely have been better off if he ended up CEO.
Look up his background and interests.
I'll forever be a Forstall simp.
The guy can code and coded the right things.
And so uh it's very very interesting I wonder what he thinks about iOS 17.
Yeah, I mean, it Like you can you can run this counterfactual and and say, "Okay, if you put the software guy in charge, maybe the software is better."
But what does that mean for the hardware, the supply chain, the trade war?
Like Would Scott Forstall have been able to get through the crazy trade war?
I mean, Tim Cook could have been a goated COO right-hand to Scott. >> That's true. That's true.
But >> Maybe you wouldn't have Maybe iOS 17 wouldn't be such a dumpster fire.
I don't think it's that bad actually.
>> I I I I get multiple times a day a reminder of how how how bad it is.
>> I think it will I think you'll get used to it over the next like 6 months.
>> I've gotten used to it, but I still Yeah, yeah, yeah.
can appreciate how bad it is.
But we have Mark Mark Gurman's coming on the show next week. >> Yes.
Um and I'm excited to talk with him about it.
Well, we have our first in-person guest of the day.
While he hops on the show, let me tell you about numeralhq.
com, sales tax on autopilot.
Spend less than 5 minutes per month on sales tax compliance.
Thank you so much for hopping on the show. Great to meet you.
Likewise, good to meet >> Thank you.
Uh can you >> fellow LA technology brother. Yeah, not many of us. Yeah, many.
Uh here, I'm going to have you press There, that's good. Perfect.
Uh why don't you introduce yourself uh and and kind of describe the shape of the business today and then I'd love to go back and kind of hear the whole the whole entrepreneurial journey. >> Sure.
Uh so I'm Grant LaFontaine, co-founder CEO of platform called Whatnot.
Whatnot's a live stream shopping platform and online marketplace.
The way to best way to think about it is we sort of enable anyone to create like a digital brick and mortar store.
So as opposed to, you know, >> Interesting.
you know, any seller can come on, they can then sell through live video, which means you sort of like this.
You can stand up, you can be in your store, you can walk around your store, sell goods, sell anything.
And so we have people on the platform um selling comics to paintings to plants to women's fashion, everything in between.
Um and it just ends up being, you know, incredibly good way to build a business very similar to like a brick and mortar retail shop and online So interesting that that digital commerce has just doesn't look like Yes, there's items on the storefront that you can buy, but imagine if stores had no employees in them and you couldn't like in real time quickly ask Yeah.
ask a human like, "Hey, like, you know, what size do you recommend here? Or do you have this?
Do you have this in another you know, all these different things that ultimately drive like higher purchase volume in a retail setting that we just generally don't have online, but do exist on Whatnot. Yeah.
What was the uh take me back to the start of the company.
What were the What was the competitive landscape like at the time?
What was the uh Was this something that was like working internationally and you were like, "Okay, I think >> Of course. Of course.
That was the whole That was the whole thing.
It was like everyone was like looking at China and and you look at how some of China's retail giants got started.
It was like selling fruit and vegetables like >> in live and and something that Americans just don't understand at all.
You know, buying like bananas through like basically a farmer who's just like, "Yeah, check out these bananas I got."
>> I actually imagine you buying bananas through Whatnot. >> I would do that. >> In Malibu.
But anyways, but yeah, walk us through kind of like the early days of discovering kind of the opportunity. Yes.
So one of the funny things with us is so the live shopping market in Asia is like monstrous, you know, like nearly a trillion dollars in sales.
>> been big for a long time?
So I think it took off in like a little after 2015 or so and it's just like ramped to a crazy size. >> get started? What year?
So we started Whatnot in 2020. Okay.
Okay, so there was like some There were examples out there like this can work.
>> Although we had no idea. >> Yeah.
We literally had no idea.
So when we started Whatnot, it was me and my co-founder Logan and we were working at some bigger tech companies.
We'd both started businesses before.
We're like we like to build.
Like that's sort of the thing we enjoy to do. >> Yeah.
And we're like, "We don't like what we're doing now.
Let's go build something new." Yeah.
Um and we were both really into buying and reselling things online, collectibles.
So we you know, at one point we were selling sneakers and you know, in that whole world.
And I I My first business was when I was seven and I started selling Pokémon cards online. >> There we go. There we go. I love it.
I was selling DJ equipment.
He was selling skateboards.
>> YC batch, we we were asking every founder that we interviewed like how they started their first what what their first business was and a lot was like somewhat collectibles.
>> running Fortnite servers, collectibles.
Like there's just something about I don't know. I I have kids.
I don't know if you have kids.
I want to get my kids to like do business online ASAP.
>> Well, yeah, and and and people that don't people that are like, "I want to start a business, but I don't have an idea."
It's like business is just making something for one price or buying something for one price and selling it for a higher price.
Like that is just business.
So just sneakers or sneakers or collectibles, Pokémon cards, whatever. Just very simple.
>> So so I feel like a lot of the a lot of the media platforms, they'll start with just like the idea of like I want to share photos online Instagram or I want to have a place to host video online YouTube and then over time the commerce aspect comes in and becomes more feature-rich, whether it's, you know, tagged products with affiliate codes or sponsored content or an ad network.
Like how how mature was your thinking when you went to write like the first pitch deck or the first Did you go through YC? We went through YC.
Yeah, so the YC application like Did you apply with this idea or did you guys like take a little bit of a So I'd say we had like a quasi pivot, which was So early on, the thesis was there's something around collectibles and social commerce because a lot of why you collect is not necessarily for the object, but the sort of hang out and talk to people over about your interests.
And so our initial pitch was basically a social commerce like marketplace for Funko Pops, which are like little vinyl dolls. And that was it.
You can That's what's in the YC application.
And we didn't have any idea we were going to do video.
It sort of looked like a standard marketplace with a follow button and a cool handful of features.
So was it creator-led in the sense that I as the collector come and share pictures and inventory and details about particular products that I have in stock?
Yeah, it would basically be that.
So you like you'd have a profile, you could follow it, you could post your stuff.
There's DM, you could chat with people.
And how many investors obviously you managed to pull it around together, but how many investors passed because they were like, "Sorry, I'm not backing your like niche toy marketplace."
Yeah, I mean, it's it's funny now cuz the amount of money we've raised is like ungodly large.
You know, But not even not even relative relative to large numbers.
Not even rel- not relative to the valuation.
I mean, you've raised like just under a billion dollars.
You're sitting at 11 billion.
It seems like >> Also, the stakes right now for for raising an ungodly amount of money are like if you if if your business doesn't work, does everyone in the whole world lose their job?
And as long as you're not there, like have fun.
Or people are like, "I have two GitHub stars on my projects.
I'll take 2 billion dollars."
Uh but yeah, so so so when did this when did the video aspect come in?
What were the What were the thinking and like how did you how did you think about the first design and then start iterating again? >> Yeah.
So I'd say like I'm a purist when it comes to building product, which is like you you know, stay close to your customers, you talk to your customers and you figure out the problems they have.
And so as we were building our Funko Pop marketplace, we just knew everyone on the platform. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah.
knew all the sellers, we were friends with them. >> Sure.
And we could see them hacking sort of social media video in interesting ways, in particular trying to run like auctions in live video. Oh.
So, they'd be going live on Twitch or other platforms and then and then selling on Whatnot.
Yeah, so what we Well, well, the first the actual real initial example was we were uh following so I was following a seller on Instagram and I tapped into their Instagram live and they were trying to hold auctions in the comments.
And the latency on Instagram live video, at least at that time, was like 30-plus seconds.
So, they'd basically have like put up the item, run a clock, and then once the clock stopped, they'd start taking the bids in the comments.
And I invited my co-founder in and we got into a bidding war and it was just like really fun.
We're like, "Huh, why is no one built >> What's sort of broken?
Yeah, like what Why has no one built mobile video auctions?" It sort of felt obvious. Yeah.
And then People don't realize unless you've bid on an online auction, you have no idea how thrilling >> get thrilling it is.
So, I've I've I've I've bought cars on on Bring a Trailer and once you start bidding, it is just there's nothing more entertaining on the entire planet.
The more I get to know you, the more you're like, "Actually, gamification really works on me." >> It does work on me.
No, it's just it's it's it's incredibly it's incredibly fun and and that's even in the context of Bring a Trailer, which anybody that's used Bring a Trailer like maybe uses goes on the site all the time, but they're like, "This is so underdeveloped in comparison to every other application that I use."
And so, even just the dynamic of like bidding against someone else and looking at their bidding history and saying, "Okay, like this guy just bids a lot, he doesn't actually buy cars.
Okay, this guy's bought like six cars in the last 6 months.
Like, I've got a real real competition here."
So, >> Um but I still yeah, it's still the percentage of people that have actually like done like bought things online via auction, I think is relatively it must be relatively low still.
Yeah, and so so we Yeah, we basically >> did you ship the the your version of the live auction product after that? 4 weeks. Okay. Yeah. Correct.
They were good APIs around that time cuz I remember it wasn't Clubhouse doing live audio and they were partnered with some new company that was able to kind of do it like turnkey.
Yeah, it was this company Agora, I think that Clubhouse was using.
We actually didn't Again, we made a bunch of mistakes.
We didn't know anything about China.
Didn't know anything about the low latency live video APIs.
So, we actually stood up our own like low latency live video serving infrastructure.
If we had If we hadn't, we probably would have built it in a week. >> Yeah.
Um and it was not very good.
But like good enough to get >> Good enough and the product was so clearly had product market fit.
I'm not entertaining, as you guys can tell.
And I did the first live stream because we you know, we got to like make sure it works. Yeah.
And I sold $5,000 worth of Funko Pops in 2 hours. Wow.
And so you're like, "Unentertaining human being so I sells that much."
We basically dropped everything the next day and we're like, "We don't know what this is, but this is really fun. This is it.
Drop everything, we're all in." Yeah. Okay.
Yeah, and and and $5,000 doesn't sound like a huge amount of money, but when you look at that in the context of an individual seller that probably has decent margins on that $5,000 and then they start realizing, "I can do this every single day."
And this quickly just becomes like a real business out of like could be out of nothing.
>> So, from there, help me understand the growth mechanism.
Is it people screenshotting and sharing to other platforms? Are you running ads?
Is there a referral program? Is there SEO?
Like, what's the flywheel because Well, and part of it cuz I I imagine like the people that are obsessively buying like Funko Pops are like pretty like they know where they're being sold, right?
Like these people like it's not like like I imagine >> Like people know I'm going to go find that on Bring a Trailer.
Yeah, or there's a handful of other platforms.
Yeah, it's like people that are obsessive about a category are going to know all the surface area where selling is happening and just go to where the inventory is.
Is that roughly That Yeah, that's roughly correct.
For you know, for almost the first 3 or 4 years of the business, we basically just focused on collectibles and enthusiast categories.
Um which we sort of broadened out maybe like if you're into cars and things like that. >> Yeah.
And it was fundamentally because these categories people like to talk about what they're buying, where they're buying it.
And so, we lean for the first 4 years, we basically just grew through referrals and word of mouth.
Was it pretty smooth growth >> was it like with the investors once once the product was clearly working cuz I remember there was so many VC like think pieces on live shopping and how it broken out in China.
I imagine when they met you, they were like, "Lisa Algazi."
Like I finally I finally But there was also there was also like in the early days like I remember there were I I won't there there was like there was like Popshop was also very hot.
I think they raised around from like Benchmark around the same time as you guys.
So, it seemed like very competitive at the time.
>> Also, Amazon owns Twitch, they have selling infrastructure.
Like, there were lots of reasons why someone else might do this.
The classic like what if Google builds it? What if Twitch does it?
What if someone else does it?
Yes, I'd say probably at least for the even the first couple of years after we did live, we weren't like particularly hot. Yeah.
Um a lot of people like looked at the side that we started in, which was you know, all collectibles and then sort of compared it to Asia and they're like, "Is that really the same?" So, live sure.
You know, a lot of it was people holding you know, doing auctions and they're not showing their face on camera.
They just show like the Funko Pop. >> Okay.
And so, the and a lot of the other companies >> like they'll put the product out and wait till it sells and then put a new one up there.
>> Yeah, they're like talk to you and you're just like look at the product and you can you have chat >> in China, if people haven't seen these videos, it'll be like they'll they'll show like it's they'll just take a product, hold it up, move on.
Take a product, hold it move on, right?
>> Yeah, we we have those We have those people now.
It's crazy that that works at all.
Like that feels like such a worse experience than just an e-commerce app with like a bunch of drop-downs and filters. I don't know.
Something something about seeing a product in real life like makes it I I think it inspires like some element of like trust even than just seeing like a digital, you know, photo or render.
Yeah, I think what we see is that people start to build relationships and trust the seller.
So, as opposed to like in the previous e-commerce world is where is it coming from? Who you don't know. Yeah.
People come to Whatnot cuz they build a relationship with a seller.
It's sort of like, I don't know, a local shop where you go and meet someone, talk to them.
And so, it just builds a lot more trust in the system.
So, in that sort of like it it seems like there were a few years where like you weren't as hot as like maybe you should have been.
Was that driven by just not fully monetizing as well as you wanted or like choppy growth?
Were you cyclical at all?
Was it like the interest rate like crisis and SVB collapsing that like put a damper on the hype or was it all pretty smooth?
>> I cuz cuz my my memory of of the Whatnot hype cycle was like, "Okay, wow, this company has like a massive valuation, but I've never used it."
And I think that's what a lot of people like recognize.
Like people are like, "Something something can't possibly be real unless I'm using it."
It's zero unless I use it.
guys had this insane valuation and then every once in a while you're not you don't go on a lot of podcasts, at least I haven't I haven't heard you on one before, but like you just pop up with like a massive up round and then just pop up with another massive up round.
And so, I guess like what we're trying to get at, I think, is like has the growth been like relatively like consistent and smooth or has it been like unlocking new categories, unlocking new use cases that have just really continued to to drive the business?
In general, it's been pretty smooth.
We had one slow patch probably coming out of COVID where growth during COVID, if you were like a consumer Yeah.
entertainment company, it was just eat No one had anything to do.
And so, I think we were sort of lazy in our growth motion cuz it just basically didn't have to worry about growth.
It just sort of like It was happening to you.
And and then we had to get a little bit more deliberate, but I don't think we've ever grown under like, you know, top line sales.
I mean, revenue's probably never grown under 90% a year. Yeah.
In the entire history of the business. >> That's amazing.
And so, it's been pretty good.
And this When people like there's moments in time where people get excited.
So, for a long time we're like, "Oh, this is niche. It's collectibles."
And then we got fashion going and working.
And then people like, "Oh, that's exciting."
>> That's a big category.
>> fashion driven mostly by reselling existing inventory or are you partnered with specific brands or fast fashion companies?
So, the shape of the market.
>> mean, it's it's pretty diverse.
Um so, there's some brands selling now.
There's brick and mortar jewelry shops selling.
I would say the dominant sort of theme in in fashion is probably like old season inventory or overstock.
Um so, people The reason it's it's really great is it's great for whoever owns that inventory cuz they can collect higher margin by selling it on Whatnot.
And if you're a buyer >> brand.
Um a lot of times it's it's Um just businesses.
Think like TJ Maxx style stuff. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Um so, people getting access to TJ Maxx style inventory and it's multi-brand.
It'll be like Lululemon, but from last year and so, you're going to buy it at >> less or something.
>> less and the deals are incredibly good. Yeah.
So, people are kind of building their own business on Whatnot from from scratch, but then scaling to a point where they kind of have an operation relationship with different brands and they have a whole kind of strategy and probably pretty stable earnings as a creator.
What's the competitive landscape been like over the last couple years cuz I know it's been widely reported that TikTok's been willing to just burn billions of dollars trying to get shopping working on their platform.
You have There was another one I can't even remember the name that popped up with crazy incentives that was like I don't think it was live but what what's the one that Flip. Flip.
So Flip popped up and they were like free money. Mhm. As a service.
We're just going to get And that that was Like I remember people were like People would send me a text and it's like I just sent you $200 on Flip.
And so I'm like this can't go That's not going to last that long.
And so you've had a number of people kind of like you know trying to at least like enter this like overall kind of like entertainment meets commerce market but how how have you guys It sounds like it's just been continuing to execute against your road map?
Yeah, we're pretty like as you said we I sort of don't go on much podcasts and you know maybe we'll pop up every once in a while with a fundraise.
We just try and stay really heads down and just deliver.
Our thesis has always been it's going to be a competitive market and so how you're going to distinguish yourself is consistent delivery and then you know continue to add value to customers every day.
And you know our belief's always been there's room for a purpose-built platform here like say TikTok amazing product but people are going there to like watch videos not necessarily shop and I think that pattern's really hard.
So we've always believed there's opportunity for a player who's purpose-built to be world-class at shopping and sort of you know shopping meets entertainment.
And I think over the past 6 years we've sort of largely proven that out. Is there a Mr. Beast of Whatnot?
Um Is there a true power law creator that's just a whole order of magnitude above everyone else in terms of seriousness and operational excellence, size of team, like that type of thing?
There there are a few people who are like I think Whatnot's very similar to other entertainment platforms.
So I spent like 6 years at YouTube. >> Yep.
You know it is power law oriented and so the handful of people who are in the tippity top tier you know you're looking at operations with like 100 plus employees at this point. Um so pretty big.
That's pretty remarkable. Yeah.
Um why do people say Whatnot is gambling?
It feels like collecting things that just like I mean obviously there's a little bit of risk you buy a GT3RS and you find out that it is a broken you know Yeah and I think to be more specific people are saying like certain sellers on Whatnot are focused on >> Mystery boxes?
>> hard you know mystery boxes right?
Like like the power packs from GameStop and I've seen a lot of stuff.
also say that power packs and Do do you have like policies around it?
Do you have a personal stance?
Like how how does that all work?
>> So because game gamification too is like that is something that sellers want.
They're like make it easier for me to provide an entertaining shopping experience. >> Yeah yeah yeah.
So first off there's no gambling allowed on Whatnot right? It's illegal on Whatnot.
Uh you know our trust and safety and customer experience team's probably our biggest team at the whole company so we do take this stuff like very seriously.
Let's hear it for no gambling. We love that.
Let's hear it for trust and safety.
Let's hear it for trust and safety team. They work really hard.
We know it's a serious expense. Very good.
But yeah so none of that's allowed.
I I think you know people open packs of cards it's fun.
I opened packs of cards when I was a kid.
I sold Pokémon cards when I was a kid.
And so we try and give sellers the flexibility to run their business in the right way while making sure it's safe for customers and we don't nothing illegal is allowed. Stop.
>> And so and so there are there there is an element of randomness if you're selling just like I I used to buy the booster packs of Magic the Gathering cards as a kid and like sometimes you get something that's a foil or something but that's very different than putting money into the Whatnot platform, participating in some sort of ecosystem and then pulling out dollars directly.
Like that's what gambling would be right? Yeah.
Yeah let me What what categories are you guys working towards that you're kind of most excited about?
You said you unlocked fashion.
So the one the future category I'm most excited about it's still early innings is food and drink. Okay.
Um so I'm like >> That feels like really hard to sell online.
Well so this it it would be in a static world but in a video-based world where you can like you know so like the We have a there's a farm outside of San Diego who sells organic citrus. The bananas. Back to the bananas.
Um and so like I'll order from them and like the next day at my doorstep will be like organic tangerines things like that.
And so I'm like I'm really into I'm a foodie and I I think everyone increasingly is more conscious around what they eat where they get their stuff from.
And so I think being able to eventually you know get fresh meat from a farmer, get fresh fish from a lobsterman from Maine.
There's a bunch of stuff we're going to figure out logistics-wise and and all sorts of But that's like Seafood is crazy.
But but wouldn't wouldn't you rather like see it get caught and then at your doorstep the next day?
>> Yeah with Starlink with Starlink the fisherman's going to be out there and be like all right I'm just pulling up a crate of crab. Who wants it? Who wants it? That's wild.
And then he pulls it up and and there you go.
Yeah that that's I can see that.
I can also see there's so many other categories of like collecting.
I don't know if these are popular yet but eventually I could imagine like a wine wine collectors going on there and wine is something that you want if you're buying it.
Like unless you're like a just an insane expert you probably want somebody like part of going to a wine shop is being able to talk to the you know associate there and they can talk through like the origins and the winery and what made what made you know a certain case of wine like special things like that.
So wine makes sense I think.
Other categories of like collectible alcohol like um you know whiskeys and and things like that. What about cars?
Cars would love dreaming of the day to do cars. Yeah.
>> I've wanted to do cars for a long time.
We'll eventually get to it.
The the truth is we're growing so fast and so we're having to like make sure the core user experience is really good before we get outside of our space.
>> rigid are you because Twitch just has you know like a just chatting or like IRL for like it's a catch-all.
If you're not playing Fortnite or Minecraft they have a catch-all and then people kind of go and innovate in that category.
Why is it just like I will get deplatformed if I try and sell my car on Whatnot?
Um Or is it just like you're not ready to say like it's actually a good experience but it is possible to do.
>> Cars are tough too because I mean think think of you know you can buy a new car it could be a lemon.
You can buy you know an existent you know a used car and you know even after you know on Bring a Trailer there's like you buy it and then you can get >> PPF.
You win the auction then you're getting the the the PPI done and then at that point you can back out.
You don't get your like I guess like fee back but at least there's like some protections there.
So when you up the when you up the price like you know 1000X it just gets So theoretically today if you adhere to our platform policies you'd be able to do it.
>> Theoretically it's it would be almost impossible cuz you'd have to be able to pay for it with your credit card.
You'd have to be able to you know like ship it in 2 days. Yeah.
It's like I will be driving this car across the country.
>> Cannonball across the country.
We have sold some cars on Whatnot.
Those have been more for collectible cars for specific events.
So like the creator of Spawn sold like the Spawnmobile and so we we just did some custom stuff there.
But it but in practice if we saw people starting to sell cars they'd likely butt up against some of the just general policies we have today and so we we'd have to go and make the platform suitable for it.
How's it like is the majority of the team in LA?
Uh so we're all over the place now.
So the A true COVID company?
Yeah we're a true COVID We even before like we started a handful months before COVID and our initial team there's a our designer was in Italy, two engineers in Brazil and me and Logan in LA.
And so we've always sort of been distributed. I'm an introvert.
>> Did you go to YC up in the Bay?
We did go to YC up in the Bay and then we couldn't raise money and so we moved to Phoenix. No way.
>> Yeah because we had like no money and we just ran it ran the company from our garage in Phoenix.
I would I would off air I would love to see who passed I mean even to to a lot of people's credit I mean I saw Sheel from BTV posted yesterday like if I got pitched Whatnot and they were selling like dolls I would have like almost certainly passed.
Yeah look at you would have the only way you would have ever invested in Whatnot in the early days was if you knew me or Logan deeply and had worked with us because that's the only thing that would have given you confidence.
We always had the confidence cuz we you know we thought we were capable of doing a lot per period of time but we're not I didn't know that many people.
I hate networking and you're coming here with like a Funko Pop thing.
Like so like I totally Do I harbor like a little bit of like you know Well you're getting the last laugh.
But but you know like I still think it's early so I don't even worry about it.
I just sort of like blinders on we got to deliver.
But yeah unless you knew us you would have sort of been a fool to invest.
>> How did the Logan Paul investment come around then?
Um I think we got introduced to him through Andreessen.
So Andreessen did our series A and then helped you know get us connected and he was really into Pokémon cards at that point in time.
And so it was sort of like a natural fit.
He's you know been on the platform a handful of times and and and so was a a good add-on investor.
Yeah I was reviewing his post talking about the investment and I was like that makes so much sense cuz he's been so immersed with even early stage like Vine was so primordial in terms of like what TikTok became.
He's been so early to all these platforms.
Makes sense that he could see the vision better than a lot of other people.
How how international is the business today?
I think we're in nine countries now.
Um, so I think we we got into international maybe about two and a half years ago.
It's it's it's a really big focus for us.
The international business is doing very well and I think you'll see us continue to expand this We're going on the offensive. Are we going to China?
We're taking the fight to them.
We're going to TikTok's front door.
You know, I think we're >> TikTok on notice.
We'll we'll go anywhere where we think we can add customer value.
>> Yeah, that makes sense.
Uh, how how crazy has the Labubu side of the business been? Um. We we covered it.
I think we So so we I think we literally by the time we did a deep dive on it, I think we like may have like top ticked that that trend. Yeah, I don't know.
May maybe they're still growing as fast as they were, but Uh, I mean it was pretty much came out of nowhere and then was doing hundreds of millions of dollars in sales on Whatnot. It still is, I think. Um. Annually?
Yeah, annual annual annual.
Like if you were to You're like no, daily.
No, it's it's it's it's pretty big.
Um, you know, I I I I think it just like fun.
You know, you sort of get a box and you see which one you get and it's kind of quirky and weird.
So it it had it like lends itself to making content and so it sort of takes off.
What's the relationship like with the company behind Labubu in that case?
Because I can imagine that they want to capture some of the value created by the gamification and they have the ability to sell directly and they they they might even have the ability to auction things off.
Like they want efficient pricing and so how how does the relationship work between you and like the originator of the collectible? I think it just depends.
Um, you know, there are some collectibles companies we work with directly.
Like I think we're working with Marvel and Um, we've done a bunch of stuff in the toys and comic space.
Uh, we haven't specifically worked with Labubu on it as well.
I think the Labubu stuff took off to such large degree even they're like I I again, I don't know.
But I imagine like fully, Uh, so no matter what they were going to sell a gazillion Labubus and so I think they were just trying to make sure manufacturing hits and the product is still doing so. That makes sense.
Uh, what uh before you jump off, what what is the next like couple years look like?
I think it's a lot of the same stuff.
One, just continue to make the buyer experience better, the seller experience better.
You're going to see us get into more categories, more countries and then make sure we build the products for more and more types of sellers.
So more investments in brands is is definitely in the cards very specifically. >> Yeah.
Where where does AI play a role?
Do you need like a traditional machine learning system for recommendation algorithms or is there a role for generative AI in this business?
Is it more just like you're using you know, tab completion models to write speed up the developer productivity of the company?
I think everyone's like there's there's the obvious spots where like yes, everyone uses cursor and you know, whether you're an engineer or not, you can prototype and build stuff faster.
Um, I think we're seeing obvious applications in CX and trust and safety.
Really good at like detecting context.
In core ranking systems, Um, I haven't seen anything yet that's like much better than the state of the art machine learning models.
So I'd say we're at least in um, core ranking systems.
Probably not a lot of LLMs.
We're starting to use it more for like content understanding. It's very good.
You can take a live stream and like tell me everything about this live stream to then feed into the ML models.
Um, so I think for us we're just trying to be world class at using LLMs to solve our customer problems.
So we're making deep investments, but it's you know, wherever we can solve a problem.
Yeah, where does the community stand on AI generally?
Are they like anti-AI because it needs to be like a you know, old fashioned collectible or do they see it as an opportunity there will be new IP that comes from some kid prompting a model and then create some collectible phenomenon?
Yeah, I mean I think I think people still want to interact with people at the core. Yeah.
So in some in some ways Whatnot sort of anti-AI in that it's like about the human experience. >> Yeah.
So I think anything that undermines the human experience will always have a little bit of a knee knee jerk negative reaction.
And so for us again, I think custom customers don't care if you're in fact they care if you're using AI, but you know, everyday customer who uses Whatnot doesn't care.
So it's more behind the scenes stuff where we can make their lives easier.
So you're a seller, can we tell you what are the the the five major things happening with your business or you know, generate tips for you or make it so you can list products really fast.
Can we get all the context from them?
I think that's sort of where we're applying it.
>> of folks that uh just I mean like there are obviously tons of people that just watch Doug DeMuro videos because they're interested in cars and they never buy a car on Cars and Bids or they never even buy a new car because they're just happy with their car, but they like him and they like him talking about cars.
And are there are there users on Whatnot who don't really buy stuff, but watch a lot and just see it as like some sort of meditative you know, content? >> Parasocial.
Maybe parasocial, but also maybe just like it's kind of like background TV and they're just like enjoying learning about different products and understanding the market. >> Yeah, absolutely.
So on like any given day, the vast majority of people who are watching do not purchase anything and the average person watches 80 minutes. 80 minutes? >> 80 minutes a day. 80 minutes a day? That's so much. >> gong.
[Laughter] [Music] That's crazy.
Uh, well, thank you so much for coming on. Thanks for having me. Really appreciate it.
Always always welcome when you have news.
Anytime you want to pop your head up and announce it. Yeah. All right, thanks.
Yeah, I'm glad that we're here. 80 minutes a day.
Wow, that is a lot of minutes.
We're going to need more minutes in in the day too.
>> Yeah, sorry Sam Altman.
Good luck with your 30 minutes a day of ChatGPT usage. Whatnot's got 80.
Uh, get those numbers up.
Time to get those numbers up.
If you're if you're building anything except Whatnot apparently.
Uh, Tyler, can you find out the day that we did our Pop Mart deep dive?
Yes, I need to know that.
>> Because Uh, I also need to tell you about Fin.
ai, the number one AI agent for customer service.
Number one in performance benchmarks.
Number one in competitive bake-offs.
Number one ranking on G2. Um.
Uh, oh, this there there was this funny funny thing.
So uh, there's Profound and like GEO is is is actually in the timeline.
And of course we are partnered with Profound and so you know, there there's the conflict of interest here and we you know, you got to get through it with a kid gloves, but the the the founder of Amplitude, a YC company, Spencer Skates, he posted too many VCs are funding AI companies that should be features.
12 plus startups have raised 72.
8 million in the last few months for AI visibility, basically SEO for LLMs, what Profound does.
We built it in three weeks with three people and shipped it for free.
Um, and he's going back and forth with David Burton who says, I personally demoed 12 SEO for LLM products and 11 out of 12 sucked. Did you see this?
First, don't don't we have to talk about James's reply? Oh, yes.
That was Almost almost ratioed Spencer.
James James replied, Uh, lack of focus kills and he just shared Amplitude's uh Uh, I I'm I'm not a fan of that.
I think it's not golden retriever coded.
It's not It was pretty hardcore.
>> It's a little it's a little too hardcore for me.
I think you got to you got to put on the kid gloves when you're dealing with somebody who's >> to me to me one one thing that stood out about Spencer's original post >> Yeah.
Um, Spencer's wife by the way did the series A of Whatnot. No way.
Yeah, so incredible investment. Ann Skates. Oh, cool. Friend. Very cool.
But they said 12 startups has raised 72 million in the last That just doesn't feel like that much for a category that could be drive like billions in built like >> Yeah.
Like Yeah, we've talked to a bunch of these different companies.
It feels like it feels like a lot for one sort of like thing all at once.
It is interesting because uh I mean it feels like a ton compared to like how many weapons companies were being funded when Anduril started.
How many of that is Profound?
Two thirds of the dollars, yeah, but not of the number of startups.
And so it is it is just interesting that it feels like a it feels like a niche.
Yeah, but but yeah, for for all of venture, if something's a good opportunity, expect like at least 10 funded >> I mean I would expect that there are at least 12 new uh, like CRM companies out there.
Of course we are part partnered with Attio, customer relationship magic, the AI native CRM that builds, scales and grows your company to the next level.
Um, and so but it was just funny because David Burton is like putting all of these AEO companies in the truth zone, but Ahmed Omar says, which one works? And he said, Profound.
Um, but I didn't buy because pricey and still too black box for me.
But he he was you know, very interested that he >> Yeah, and this is this is effectively why this is why I um Yeah.
I or one of the reasons I invested in Profound myself was Karim over at Ramp was just like this is what works for us.
That was that was enough of a of a cosign for me.
Tyler, did you find out when we covered Pop Mart?
Uh, yes, it was August 29th. Is that a top? >> Oh my god.
>> Wait, did we perfectly top ticket? August 29th. Really?
Not perfectly, but August it it actually peaked on August 26th.
>> And so this is a good learning.
If we ever start talking about Something cool.
toys >> It's not cool anymore.
Collectible toys, just know that we have probably talked top ticking it. >> Yeah.
If we're talking about some trend in technology, Or we're probably like Sure.
12 months 12 months at least before the top. For sure.
Uh We have our next guest in the restream waiting room.
Uh, first, how'd you sleep last night, Jordy?
How'd you sleep on your eight sleep?
>> just going but >> eightsleep. com and get a pod five. I did not do too well. Got six hours of sleep. I got a 79.
I think you might have beat me today.
See, the fact that you can get six hours and put up a 79 when I got seven hours and 10 minutes and put up an 81, it's like I'm going to have Matteo reset.
>> you I think it's a skill issue.
You're just not focusing on sleep.
Like so you're like waking up in the middle of the night and stuff. It's not good.
Uh, should we bring in our next guest? >> do it.
I'm excited to talk to Chris. >> Do it.
Uh, I'm going to let you take the intro.
>> Chris, welcome to the show. Hey guys. Thanks for having me. It's great to have you.
Uh, I will give some quick background.
Chris, you were the senior advisor to the US Department of State Office of the Special Envoy for Critical and Emerging Technology from 2023 to 2025.
You're a Foreign Affairs Officer for the US Department of State, the Bureau of Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance from 2015 to 2023.
Uh, and in 2024 you were the Deputy Senior Director for Technology and National Security on the National Security Council at the White House.
Uh and there's a bunch of other stuff that seems equally uh significant and important, uh, but uh I uh we can get into it.
Uh, it's great great to have you on the show.
I'm sure it's been a busy uh busy busy year for you, but why don't why don't you give a quick introduction on on your background and anything I may have missed.
Thanks a lot, guys, and and really appreciate you having me.
Uh, yeah, so I as a long-time civil servant uh in the government in the State Department, I was detailed to Biden White House from 2021 to 24.
Uh, from 22 to 24 I was I was on the National Security Council and I broadly had the China Technology portfolio um the the whole time uh and oversaw I think that kind of all of our the Biden administration's critical and emerging technology related work from the White House.
Um that I went back served the Trump administration um for a good chunk of time this year and and and recently left government.
So, um really appreciate you guys having me, especially on today where obviously we had a big uh a a a bunch of big developments kind of overnight uh with the the president meeting with Xi and and um the the kind of trade deal of which technology is obviously a very major portion.
Okay, so before we get into what's happened in the last 24 hours in the last week, like can you give kind of your view on this year and how a lot of these different um uh how you know how how the trade war has been kind of evolving uh in your view? Yeah, absolutely.
So, I mean I think the the the administration has very much kind of gone back and forth on on on where they are in China policy.
I think that you obviously have had enormous um you know, threats of of tariffs and and moves to to kind of really kind of separate the US and Chinese economies on pretty fundamental levels.
On the other hand, uh I think you you haven't actually seen a lot of implementation there.
There's a continued desire to talk with the Chinese.
And when it comes to some of the the the technology protection measures where I think the the Biden administration was more focused, um it's been a there's it's been a little bit more stop and go.
I I think that you know, generally since the first Trump administration, there has been a big pivot in Washington uh to move towards a you know, away from the the the policies of towards China of let's like deepen integration in order to to kind of get them to change uh and towards a more competitive stance.
I think Trump first Trump administration really kind of initiated that.
It was very much built on by the Biden administration, particularly in the semiconductors and AI spaces, uh where I think there was a a pretty very conscious decision.
I know there's a very conscious decision to um really separate those those supply chains and saying in those areas we have to we have to maintain as large a lead as possible.
It doesn't mean in every single one, but in the the especially critical ones like advanced chips and AI.
Um and then the Trump administration then I think took this and and initially escalated with enormous tariff threats on China across the entire economy.
Uh the Chinese I think have have very much taken to heart their the lessons from the first Trump administration that what you have to do is punch back and punch back hard.
Um and that has resulted I think in in a little bit more of a detente actually than we've seen over the previous few years where I think the United States has been able to kind of slowly ratchet things up.
The Trump administration has ratchet things up a lot, so did the Chinese, and I think both sides have now kind of pulled it down a little bit.
It does feel like the the renegotiation of US-China relationships starts in 2016 with the new Trump administration.
100-year marathon by Michael Pillsbury is an important point.
Um that book it seemed like it sort of went viral on Capitol Hill.
Um there's also the rejection of American tech companies.
But what what else do you think uh kind of led us what what was like the in event if there was one in uh this beginning to discuss a renegotiation in US-China policy.
Is it Xi Jinping becoming effectively a dictator for life?
That kind of changing the perception of like, okay, well they're not even going they're not even trying to go for democracy.
What what other kind of like moments in history do you uh think of as the defining moments in the renegotiation of US-China relations?
Yeah, I I think that's right.
I I think that China has has kind of fundame- well, China has fundamentally changed under Xi.
I think there's some some realization here that that some of the promises uh of of China political change in China and and market-based change are not going to happen.
Uh, there have been very much market-based changes in some senses, right?
They actually are are much more deeply integrated into the into the economy, but it hasn't changed the fundamental you know, integration with the Chinese state and their companies.
And from that flows kind of national security considerations.
And I think you know, Xi has obviously taken this in a in a in a in a much more authoritarian direction.
Uh and one can argue whether or not that was there all all along.
And actually, you know, maybe maybe it was something that people missed in the 2000s.
But but I think very much in in the mid-2015s like you said around 20 2015-2016, um people were starting to realize that we have to we have to change course.
And particularly I think in 2017-2018, and look the the the the initial Trump um campaign I think really did change the narrative on China.
Uh I I think that's that's you know, pretty indisputable.
On certain things I think that we we were starting to see a little bit of a changing narrative towards the end of the Obama administration.
Like the last week of the Obama administration, they put out a big report.
The President's Council on on uh a P-Cast, President's Council on on Science Technology, uh put out a big report on the importance of maintaining a domestic semiconductor industry, which was the first time they'd really talked about that.
And then obviously, you know, with the CHIPS Act in the coming years that became uh you know, the major focus.
But um I I I I I I I think you have to give the Trump the first Trump administration credit for for really changing the policy.
And and the the Biden administration very much continued that.
I think the approach was you know, maybe not to have a a massive confrontational policy across the economy, but to say in the areas that we care the most about, we are going to take pretty un you know, actions that you know, four or six years ago would have been unprecedented to um separate ourselves.
And uh that's that was that's we are in a very different place because of that.
Uh, I think we'll see kind of where we go going forward.
It's a little bit of a um the the last the last like couple weeks have introduced some some more complicating dynamics, I think.
Yeah, one of those was uh the rare earth elements debate.
Uh have has America been blindsided by the importance there?
Were we miscalibrated on exactly how much leverage they had?
Like how much that poker chip is worth on the poker table of this trade deal?
Yeah, there was a point where people are like, wow, they're already using that that that play, right?
>> Yeah, taking away the passports of the researchers and then also just banning exports, really crippling our ability to build with uh those rare earth elements.
Um but was that something that we've known about for the last 10 years?
Or or has this been a surprise?
Or is this like or or or is that just like one of the many chips that we expected to be played the whole time? Yeah.
people in Washington clearly knew that the Chinese had dominance of rare earths.
You'd have to kind of be under a rock to not know it.
But I think you're totally right that that no one really did anything about it.
Um and and part of that is that look, it's hard it's so hard to get things done in Washington. Yeah, it's about right.
Uh it's it's it's hard to get things done and it's hard to get things done that are like, you know, you need a lot of investment and a lot of coordination and like you know, massive resourcing and coordination is exactly the thing that's that's really difficult to get things done in Washington.
It took a Chamath to back to really make a move, right? AP Materials.
Oh, he did yeah, he did do that SPAC. That's crazy.
Yeah, I mean that's like that I think that's the big biggest success out of out of out of all them. Totally.
Yeah, and I think look, Washington is actually can be good at responding very quickly in a crisis. Mhm. Right?
Like Operation Warp Speed was very effective, for instance.
But obviously it took until there was a pandemic for for us to do something like that.
Um So, I I I I'm hopeful that now people will take this very seriously.
I I wouldn't be surprised if we start to see legislation on Capitol Hill that's actually resource this.
Cuz even though the administration, I think the administration is focused on it now and and takes it very seriously, they're also, you know, we really need to get money, right?
And exactly how where that, you know, how that money manifests, whether it's, you know, equity investments or loans or some kind of uh uh you know, other uh you know, Defense Production Act authorities or or or something else.
Like there's there's going to have to be some government dollars here, which certainly can be stretched a long way.
Uh but we're but we're going to have to do that.
I think just to your original question though, the thing that's surprising I think people were very surprised that they played this card as expansively as they played it right now. Yeah. Right. And Go ahead.
Yeah, no, continue and then and then I want to get into kind of the last 24 hours.
Yeah, the surprise on the playing the card early. Yeah.
I Look, the fact is this move was way disproportionate to anything that we had done.
Uh effectively, it was saying, you know, all the there was this affiliates rule that the United States put in place, which basically fixes a big loophole in export controls.
Like the way that the way that export controls work is every single company has to actually be listed on the control list to be to be controlled.
And if the subsidiary isn't listed, then you can export to them.
That's not the way that sanctions work.
The way that sanctions work is if the company is listed, then every company they own is sanctioned and you better not work with sanctioned companies because otherwise you're violating sanctions.
Uh for various arcane, you know, reasons that have to do with nothing. Exactly. Exactly.
So, we basically put in place a There was a regulation that said, "Hey, we're going to fix this really obvious loophole that is being blatantly exploited uh that also is just very logical."
And the Chinese response to that was to go way over the top and say, "We're going to cut you off from all the rare earths."
And, you know, threaten your entire economy.
Um They didn't think that was proportionate.
I think what they were trying to do was send a signal that we won't tolerate any additional export controls on you know, any entities in China.
And we won't any any, you know, additional restrictions on our access to technology, we're going to go over the top.
It was really risky for the Chinese because the US does have big leverage over the Chinese, too, right?
There's two things that they're extremely dependent on us for on for us that, you know, we could cut them off from.
The first is the US dollar, right?
Their financial, you know, system is is still very reliant on the dollar.
Obviously, they're trying to extricate that.
That would have enormous implications, but they're reliant.
>> that What would that What would that look like?
Sanctions on on banks or something like that.
Like I think it's something the Chinese fear quite a bit.
Now, to be clear, I'm not advocating for that and that would be a really significant move, but just it's something that that would be a it's a lever that we have.
The second is semiconductors, right?
Uh they they're not good at you know, they have limited 7 nanometer, can't do anything beyond that.
And they're they're very all their whole industry they're relying on on chips made with US tooling in Taiwan.
Okay, so I want to get way way more into chips, but to kind of ground the next part of the conversation, like catch us up to speed on the on what what you kind of what your takeaways were and what we know out of the meeting in South Korea.
Yeah, so I think basically the the deal was sort of a a freeze for freeze.
Uh they agreed to freeze implementation of their massive escalation, you know, earth rule.
We agreed to freeze escalate we we agreed to freeze our affiliates rule.
Uh so, I think you think of it as largely it locks in the status quo um for the duration of the deal.
There was various other things that it resolves that are recently created issues.
The Chinese agreed to buy soybeans, you know, we reserve resolve rare earths action as etc.
It did It did not, you know, we avoided some of the worst case outcomes.
Uh there was no agreement to send, you know, our votes to advance chips to China.
Uh there was no We didn't accept like a Trojan horse package to like, "Hey, we're going to build a bunch of you know, CATL and BYD factories in the United States," which would have been very bad for US battery and and um you know, auto industry in the longer term.
Uh but I think China really does feel emboldened right now because they kind of punched us in the face with the rare earths rule and our our, you know, what happened was we both de-escalated a little bit.
Uh we'll see what happens going forward, but um the status quo to a degree benefits China.
They're trying to buy time.
They're trying to circumvent our controls.
And if we're not willing to kind of continue to um engage in this in this kind of technology protection effort, then every day the Chinese get a little better at working around our controls. So.
What What can you say about uh or or what are you What's your read on the actual dynamic between Xi and Trump?
Like I feel like these two guys have been in the game for a long time.
I have to imagine my my part of me wants to believe that they enjoy the this like, you know, deadly dance that they play with each other.
But maybe that's Maybe they're just like deeply frustrated. bro-ing down. Who knows?
Well, what Yeah, what do you think?
I will say I it That was not the first time I've heard when I've heard, you know, leaders of countries speak to the desire to live to 150.
You hear some interesting things.
You work at the White House and I have heard that before.
Not from them, but [Music] Uh yeah, but um No, I mean, look, I think that that Chi- Trump's obviously coming at this from from, you know, this deal-making perspective. That's not surprising.
Um and obviously there is, you know, political dynamics here on top both because I think there's threats to, you know, the Chinese The Chinese kind of both pose threats to hollowing out industry, but also are are kind of doing acute things to cause pain to some of Trump's political base.
Like I think that the soybean purchases and things like that are doing that. Yeah, exactly.
Um On the other side, I think that, you know, Xi is very much seeing himself as managing the the relationship for the long term.
Um I mean, what hovers obviously over over all of this is is Taiwan as well.
Uh and the desire to kind of slowly move the United States away from Taiwan, which is ultimately his like long-term perspective and and goal.
So, I In some ways they're coming at this from a little bit opposite, you know, I think Xi is from the much, much longer term angle and Trump from a a shorter term angle.
Um but I don't think they necessarily have hugely different perceptions of the, you know, broader dynamics at play here.
Okay, so on the on the chip front, Okay, yeah, so so so so we got the rollback.
Yeah, let's move on to chips. Sorry.
>> So, I I don't even know, maybe it was two, three, four weeks ago at this point, but somewhere in the last like month or so, they were basically like, "We don't want any of your chips at all."
And and I didn't really know how much to read into that at the time.
People It seemed like the CCP team wants Nvidia chips, but >> Sure.
the CCP said, "You got to justify why you'd want Nvidia chips over Huawei chips. We're working hard.
Let's support America Yeah, so Xi wants to build up, you know, real national champions that can get to the cutting edge >> Yep. uh or leading edge.
Uh and at the same time the AI industry wants to be able to make as much progress as they possibly can. >> Of course.
And, you know, what was your read when that news broke?
And then uh how much do you think they're still kind of gunning for Blackwell-grade chips?
Yeah, so uh number one, I think they are, you know, they The Chinese will take all of the US chips that they can get in in a in a vacuum.
Um Like I I I I think that there's some negotiating ploys here.
Uh and I think I think they were holding the H20s kind of hostage because they wanted to to turn the tables on us and get us to give them Blackwells, which which obviously didn't happen.
There is a possibility that there's uh the information filtering up to Xi is saying, "Actually, we can do this ourselves.
You shouldn't take these."
And that would be like Huawei being like, "No, give us just just keep the money, you know, coming back to us so that, you know, we're close and we'll be a lot closer in a few years if we can, you know, take those dollars, reinvest them, etc." That's right.
But the problem is like there's just no way that China can meet their domestic demand with Chinese chips alone.
I mean, if we can have it all sorts of debates about Chinese production numbers and I'm happy to engage in those, but fundamentally, the United States cannot meet demand for our own AI ecosystem with with, you know, all of the semiconductor production in the world and all the best companies.
So, it's obviously impossible that China, who has a much more nascent ecosystem, is heavily restricted on tooling and I think all the estimates of their 7 nanometer production capacity, not to mention obviously they don't have any 5 4 3 2 production capacity, is is, you know, somewhere in the realm of 1/25 to 1/100 of the United States.
Like there's just no way that they can fill their domestic demand with Chinese chips.
So, any effort to say we're going to not take any US chips is going to inherently hobble their AI industry.
I mean, I guess at some point, if you're very close, the marginal value of that would be such that you're willing to take it, but I I think, you know, just given the dynamics we're broadly seeing with US AI companies, I'd be very surprised if they were they were actually, when the cards were down, were going to retract Nvidia chips.
Uh is Jensen being in South Korea at the same time just a coincidence?
Or did he Do you think you'd, know he he sort of planned around that?
Do you think anything with Jensen's a coincidence these days? No, I don't think so. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, it makes it makes sense.
I mean he's he's basically He's the CEO of the biggest company in the world.
Like he should be there regardless.
>> Yeah, yeah, he's running a he's basically Nvidia is basically a country.
I mean they're market cap is like you know bigger than uh Their market cap is equivalent to twice Canada's GDP. Something like that.
>> It's it's greater than Germany's GDP. Remarkable.
Not that you can really compare those.
It's kind of apples to oranges.
You wrote a piece that you published last night around why Chinese car investments are national security risk.
Would love for you to kind of like give us a preview on that front.
Yeah, I mean the point we were making there was a lot of rumors in advance of the summit that another thing that the Chinese were dangling which did not come to fruition was saying hey you appealing to the deal maker element of Trump and saying hey we'll give you a bunch of investment in the US in exchange for you know whatever I mean as part of the deal but that's kind of very obviously is is a Trojan horse.
We there's we we very much restrict Chinese investment in critical industries in the US via the CFIUS process right now and obviously particularly given the rare earth controls you would think that that would I think it has shown that we really can't be dependent on China for critical supply chains.
So if we were to have you know BYD factories like we're saying before like BYD factories or CATL factories in the US that's not that's that's just as bad as relying on on Chinese graphite for batteries, right?
So when you when you say Chinese investment in the US you mean them setting up local factories which is different from making equity Yeah, yeah, because China wants us to make as many equity investments in their companies as possible because that gives I mean think about DJI's a good example.
There was American venture capitalists that were in DJI.
They have huge returns just like sitting there.
They now have an incentive to say hey we shouldn't we shouldn't ban DJI.
Like it's not a problem that China can fly you know millions of drones over over all of our cities.
Uh just just worry about something else.
We saw this with I mean we saw this with we saw this with ByteDance too. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. No, that's right.
And there's a whole separate conversation on kind of outbound investment and what we should think about with with US investors investing in China.
And then with inbound investment the question is what are the risks that the Chinese and not passive investment that's very different but but active investments and particularly setting up you know large facilities in key supply chains what are the risk here?
And the trend we've seen over the course of multiple administrations has been to take those threats much more seriously.
So it's it's I think that's a positive thing.
I think that the other thing the administration is going to have to really think about is you know first of all what are the investments we need to make in those supply chains if we're not going to accept that and we're going to want to diversify not just from like Chinese batteries but also like all the way down the Chinese battery supply chain. What does that mean?
But also we have to think about kind of what are the sectors where this is where we got to the car is what happened with cars and we talked about in the piece.
What are the sectors where just having large scale deployment of kind of connected Chinese products in that area poses a risk and I think there was a recognition in the Biden administration that actually you know electric vehicles in general having you know 20% 30% of the cars on the road were were Chinese and could theoretically be like you know switched off by Beijing.
Yeah, I mean that they could our transportation infrastructure overnight, right?
That that that is something that wasn't a that was unacceptable.
So we've effectively banned Chinese cars but did it before there was big market penetration.
So I think we have to kind of think about what are the other like I think there needs to be some pretty hard conversations on robotics, right?
>> what do you think about Unitree just selling humanoids on walmart. com?
>> thinking about buying one here.
Because because I've I I've been very vocal over the last years long as we've been doing the show that you know I think it's super disappointing that we let you know like GoPro should have been the dominant American drone company and there's a longer list of companies that could have made great products in that space.
Maybe people would have to pay slightly more but we just let DJI flood and from from what we know DJI was just willing to lose money for a very very very very long period of of time in order to just take market share.
And so when I think about humanoids and you know I don't I'm not going to put a Unitree robot in my home but if they're the cheapest and you know if they're at kind of the leading edge right now there's a scenario where we just let them flood the United States with humanoid robots and maybe they're adding value in home or in factories and different settings but then just obviously like you just
watch any sci-fi movie and you can understand like the potential like national security risk of allowing robots that can be teleoperated to you know just proliferate all over the country and so it just feels like hopefully that comes up at some point in some of these discussions of just hey maybe we make the call to not allow this to happen like it did with drones. Yeah, I I I think we we just have to
Yeah, I I I think we we just have to have kind of class based regulations on these things.
It says anything that fits these parameters you know a robot in your home that's capable that has That can pick up a knife.
equipment and and audio yeah and can like has mapping technology and maybe has yeah has some kind of appendage.
I don't know you could you could figure out a way to do it.
Like just it just cannot be sold in the United States if it involved if it's from a Chinese company or Chinese Russian North Korean right like broader set of actors.
The only category of items that we've done that for as a class is vehicles.
But I think that needs to be you know we need to think about we have the tools to do it and we need to think about what are the areas where that pose kind of similar risks.
>> And you're worried that we'll wait until there's a robot uprising to to do to do something like this.
I mean you said earlier like the US is really good at reacting in a in a crisis and I just hope I like at some point like if I'm China and you're letting me sell humanoid robots into your country at scale and you're a political adversary like I'm laughing I'm I'm laughing at you.
Like it just seems like totally unserious.
Yeah, I I think it is easier to do these types of things before there are huge market impacts.
So part of the reason that the cars move was doable was because first of all like industry was very supportive, right?
We had Detroit banging down the door being like this is we're going to get killed by the Chinese.
But second in the same way they are with tariffs.
But but but second of all there the market penetration of all the Chinese car companies was very close to zero still.
Partly because we had such significant tariffs although those were going to become muted in effect.
So if you have an area where it's still pretty nascent it's doable.
And think about Humanoids are perfect.
Like the second once you have a million Americans that have spent 20 grand on a humanoid and they're like I'm not like I want to buy the next version. I like this one.
You know it's not like we've now seen the Chinese can build hit consumer products.
There was a long time where people didn't believe that was true but clearly with TikTok and DJI like it's no longer a debate.
And DJI is a great example because you know DJI it's a much more complicated to do this for UAVs right now because DJI is everywhere also all sorts of like state and local and municipal governments even the federal government still uses DJI drones.
They're just they have such dominance that like even if we did do it we would have to do some kind of mitigation steps even to implement it if we did it today which maybe we should but it's just it's massively complicated whereas if you do it nascently it's just if you could just kind of cut off the appendage.
Yeah, I I I anybody that disagrees about the national security risk here and the potential downsides like you can't believe that like if you believe that Israel was able to run like a decade long operation to get pagers like sold into the right group of people that they could then carry out this you know coordinated action and then you think it's safe to just let robots from an adversarial nation flood our country like I don't know what to do.
I think you're just you know >> uh blissfully >> And what they won't let us develop the domestic robot industry unless we do something like that too, right?
Like they will consistently undercut us and will never our companies will never get mature enough where they'll be able to benefit from the economies of scale where they can even remotely compete with the Chinese instead they're going to be 100% off.
We were having this debate before you not debate really but before you got on.
It's like I believe that China can simultaneously buy as many leading edge chips Blackwells whatever whatever we'll give them and simultaneously provide the the long-term capital to allow their own industry to catch up on whatever time scale it needs to catch up on.
Like what is the tolerance level for >> basically is is it possible for us to run the Chinese playbook against them?
We subsidize Blackwells, flood their markets with Blackwells and then they can't go down the learning curve with SMIC and SME and Huawei and then at the last second when they're super dependent we pull it back when we need to right before I guess ASI hits or something like that. That's the basic thesis. Debate.
I mean I think two things with that.
One is that history would show that's never something that the Chinese are going to accept, right?
They they they've never been okay being reliant on any Western technology of any significance.
They also we you know, we we've been very clear about our intention to keep this dominant now.
I think you can't put that toothpaste back in the tube.
Like they're going to go We we saw they were going all out in indigenization at you know, back in 2020.
It's even more the case now.
Their constraints are not desire or cash.
They they are actual access to equipment and tools and we're lucky that the the the SME and you know, not just lithography machines but also etching deposition machines like anything all all the kind of really advanced equipment is is among the most complicated technology in the world.
But we can assume that they're actively that they have you know, thousands or tens of thousands of people that are tasked globally with just collecting as much information as they possibly can to reproduce it locally.
Yeah, the only reason this works with chips is because this is the most complicated equipment with the most complicated supply chains on earth, right?
Like an EUV lithography machine is literally the most complicated machine ever made by man.
So therefore it's possible the Chinese can actually indigenize every single thing on earth except this.
Like that is a logically consistent outcome.
The other thing I would just say with respect to your your your thesis is if that was the play the more effective way to do that would be to cut them off from everything completely but then tell them you can have it via US cloud because then you can cut it off at any moment's notice.
You could debate if that's a good idea or not but like chips are going to be a lagging effect, right?
It's going to be two to three years until all the GPUs kind of go bust or exactly they'd appreciate the architecture. It's interesting.
What what what is the most current debate on the ground in Washington around like Blackwell's specifically?
So there is a question of whether or not we should ship them but actually the more pertinent question is is there's a piece of legislation called the GAIN AI Act that's moving on the hill that actually the Senate passed as part of the NDAA that must pass annual defense bill and
is being debated with the house right now and it's a sponsored by Senator Banks and basically it says he's a Republican from from Indiana and basically it says look we're not going to weigh in on the question of whether or not we should ship chips to China. That's a separate question but
That's a separate question but regardless of where you are on that American companies should get priority access before Chinese companies and it basically requires before shipping any chips to China that are controlled and authorized it requires American buyers to get right of first refusal.
Which I think is a from my perspective is a pretty logical approach whether or not you support or oppose AI chip exports to China.
It you know, saying that America should should have them first is is is logical.
The it also does one other thing the most recent text which exempts trusted US exports to trust from to trusted US persons to anywhere other than China from license requirements.
The reason this is important is actually there's a lot of pending deals in the Middle East right now from US data centers that are trying to make billions of dollars of deals in the Middle East.
Those are subject to license requirements.
There is a lot of negotiations on on whether or not those can go and they've been held up for a long time but this would say as long as the government certifies them as a trusted US person and they're subject to a couple you know, standard restrictions like you know, they keep 50% of their computing power in the US.
Then they can go without US government approval.
So really basically trying to prioritize US customers in any decisions vis-a-vis Chinese companies and also US companies vis-a-vis any decisions on the international AI build out.
Do you think uh Jensen will be happy with that?
I think Nvidia has been pretty public of their their opposition to the bill but look my response would be >> is that just they want they don't they just want the flexibility to do deals effectively?
Like cuz it's cuz it's it's not exactly a secret that Nvidia like they have a Shanghai office and R&D center.
Like they're trying to I've joked that Jensen is you know, the juggler just sort of like juggling a bunch of different you know, national interests always.
Um and I guess that's his duty to to the to the shareholders but what is their specific do you do you know what their specific opposition is?
I I think I mean any regulation is is generally opposed and I think there's they're they're concerned it would kind of hamstring their their operations or result in kind of bureaucratic complexities that actually would prohibit them from selling anything to China even if it kind of was prohibited.
I I I guess I I think that there is this is a good faith effort to to work to develop a system that would that would allow that if that's the administration's policy position to do so.
I think my response would generally be like if the question is really is there a supply shortage of GPUs or not? Right?
Cuz if there is I I think it's pretty clear with Blackwell that there's more demand than there is supply.
Then I I think that US companies probably it is not surprising to say that the US government for the US government to say that US companies should get priority over these over foreign companies for these chips.
If there's not then the bill in theory would have no impact on their on their ability to sell them to others.
Now certainly I think there's there's to the language and things that people would be you know, I know that Senator Banks and his staff are are you know, happy to work with industry on but that's the intent here.
I'd hope that we could come to a resolution there. Makes sense.
Really enjoyed this conversation. Come on again soon.
I'm we'll we'll reach out.
I'm sure there'll be much more to talk about in the near future. This is fantastic. Thank you so much Chris. Thanks guys.
Appreciate you having me.
Look forward to talking more in the future. Cheers. See you later. Bye.
Let me tell you about public.
com investing for those who take it seriously.
They got multi-asset investing.
They got industry leading yields.
They are trusted by millions folks and our next guest is already in the restream waiting room.
Let's bring in Max Ju Strand from Legora into the TBP ultra room. Boom. Max, how are you doing? Welcome to the show. >> I'm great. Good to see you. How are you?
Congratulations on all the progress.
Introduce yourself, the company and then give us the news.
Of course, I'm Max Ju Strand CEO co-founder of Legora.
We're an AI powered workspace for lawyers.
We just closed our series C.
Founded the business back in >> 2023. How much did you raise? How much did you raise? John's ready. John's ready.
150 million on a 150 And You can't even I got all of these pictures from I got all of these pictures back from the gym this morning from Stockholm.
They had bought a huge inflatable unicorn.
Maybe we can send you some pictures after.
>> It literally takes up half the office. Amazing.
I even added it to the team calendar so you can you can book it.
Are are you a YC company?
Yeah, we were in YC winter 2024. Winter 2024? Wow. Yeah, winter 2024. So it's 18 months.
>> This must be one of the fastest growing YC companies of all time. I think so. That's actually crazy.
months seed to series C from YC.
>> Wow, that's impressive.
So the VCs they'd said we need 10% Max and you're like best I can do is 8. 3.
Like how did that happen?
Yeah, this round they This one was easier to negotiate than the first one I did with Benchmark.
When I did the one with Benchmark we sat down we took an Excel sheet and put in some numbers and I went there's no way dude.
And he goes I've never done a deal where I didn't get 20% and then we started going down on the like point decimals and I think we landed on something like 18. 51%.
It was extremely You got him to back off just a little tiny bit. >> It was good.
It was he broke his rule for you.
for you. So Okay, so how how are you we we've talked to a bunch of uh Yeah, let me give some context here because uh good friend of mine is a lawyer and the firm he's at he's he's on their like tech kind of advisory I don't know whatever whatever you know, big law and
he's been evaluating products and about a year ago he like was not impressed at all and when I saw him I saw him last week and he was telling me that he now is seeing AI tools do he called it like a hundred thousand dollars worth of like diligence in like 10 minutes and he was like huge wake-up call. He was like thinking about
call. He was like thinking about like he didn't he didn't even think his firm would be able to evolve to that even though he even even though and this is a big you know, big firm but he he was like clients are going to realize like what's the game has changed like very quickly and not every law firm is
going to be is going to react quickly enough and so yeah, kind of want to get yeah, want want to get the update on like just how much has changed kind of over the last year because there's product innovation that's happening and then there's just like the models are getting better and they're both feeding into each other. Yeah, well I I kind of view it like
Yeah, well I I kind of view it like this.
Here's the model capabilities.
Here's the product capabilities and here's the people capabilities in terms of using those products and getting the most out of it.
So there's a huge sort of gap still to be filled in terms of what people are using the products for.
I mean back in 2024 when we were part of YC I mean Legora was a glorified GPT wrapper with sort of good rag, good citations, you know, solved compliance and data issues.
But now I I think your friend is right.
The products have moved from being a conversation conversational simple AI into something that solves much more sophisticated tasks.
And it looks very differently across transactional work or in litigation or in in-house work.
If you take due diligence as an example, I mean, it's effectively the exercise of looking through a large number of documents and understanding what is within those documents.
And I think LLMs were better at reading than writing initially, which is is important distinction.
So we came at this whole problem very much from the review angle.
I think some companies, I mean, look, we were not the only ones who realized that legal and LLM was going to be a nice marriage.
They came at it from the thing like research angle or drafting angle, which was much much harder to build a good company on in the early days. Yeah.
And I think now what's happening is I don't know how many apps you use on your phone. I use maybe five. Yeah.
And what's happening is um the lawyers don't want to learn 20 different point solutions.
We're bringing everything into one suite.
And then with things like MCP, we can actually also allow the really sophisticated law firm law firms to bring in corpus of their own bespoke tools and capabilities, which I think gives a much richer environment.
I I have a very painful lesson around diligence, which is why I care I mean, very excited about this technology.
There was I worked on a deal last year, you know, before we started the show and we were in diligence on this company and there was a single document that killed the deal.
And the lawyers had already racked up like like a hundred like a hundred thousand dollar bill before we before we before we found it.
Um and it ultimately meant that you know, all all the parties walked away.
But we were still sitting there with like this massive bill and it was just like unbelievably painful because it wasn't even complicated.
It was just the business was incredibly old and there was just this one deal that they had done like a decade ago that meant that that it was just like kind of dead in the water.
I mean I mean, what's what the tech allows is that you can also do a DD on the sell side before you even put the documents into the data room and you say, "Hey, let's go open it up to the other side, right?"
Like it's it's it's funny that it's called a data room, right?
Because it used to be a physical data room with a bunch of boxes.
You would go into that room. You would open it up.
You would start reading all the documents.
Then we got control F and you could start control F-ing for different change of control clauses.
And then came the early versions of the sort of AI systems where actually the seed for what became Legora was founded.
Back with the early BERT models, if you if you remember those.
And you had to fine-tune the system to find specific provisions.
And now what's cool is you basically just ask the query in natural language and the system understands it.
So you can even go in there and say, "On a scale of one to 10, how much of a smoking gun is this document?"
And the AI will just respond and provide its reasoning.
So I think in in the in the comment that you made, will some law firms disappear? Absolutely.
I think law firms will go through a huge wave of consolidation, frankly.
Because they've never had tech and sort of real scalability as a weapon.
I mean, you have the big four in auditing and tech has been very good for auditing.
It's very good with numbers.
It's very good in finance.
Tech has never been good at language until large language models.
And so now I think we'll see increasingly firms leverage these things to not only sort of out-deliver their competitors, but also to out-price them.
You know, Yeah, so so is the is the solution for law firms you think transitioning to kind of value-based pricing, flat flat, you know, more like project fees because uh you know, if you compare this to like the creative world, like the best logo designer in the world is not going to charge an hourly rate because they might be able to make that logo in like 30 minutes, right?
And so if they charge like you can't charge like a hundred thousand dollar hourly rate, but companies will pay a hundred thousand dollars for a great logo.
So is that is that >> correct.
Uh I I I think that's correct for a lot of work.
I don't think it's correct for all the work.
So I'll give you an example.
When we negotiated uh this term sheet, uh we were working with Goodwin and our friend and our partner Craig there.
And when I need his expertise to help me negotiate the term sheet, he's worth a lot more than his hourly rate, which is I mean, arguably already high, but it's worth a lot more than that in that specific case.
But when his team is reviewing simple documents, maybe that's not worth as much if AI can do that.
So I almost view it as if AI can do a specific piece of task, it will do it.
The only question is like, where does that get transacted?
And I think you will see value-based pricing in taking a portion of the deals like the best law firm in the world, arguably, is Wachtell and they don't do hourly rates at all.
They just say, "This is the price to win." And you pay them. Right?
And they get a portion of that.
Um but I'm also actually seeing another way where really big companies like the big tech companies are going to law firms and saying, "Hey, we're going to pay you 200 million dollars over the next two years and we want you to do all of this work. Can you do it?"
And the law firm is then forced to say, "Are we going to turn down 200 million dollars or are we going to figure out a way to do that?"
And of course then tech will be part of that answer.
So I I actually Yeah, it's about creating the right incentive to adopt the tech versus like currently some firms are going to resist it and being like, "I actually like doing diligence the old-fashioned way where we could get three people to spend you know, all these hours." Uh this was super fun.
I'm super excited for you guys.
I have a feeling we'll have you on a lot more in the future. >> remarkable progress.
>> Wish we Wish we had more Wish we had more time, but I love to see a YC company winning and I rarely see one winning this hard.
This is incredible progress.
>> this is especially I got to give a shout out.
Like we since we started in Europe, we just launched in the US back in March.
So since then we've killed the team to about 50 people and it's like the growth that's coming in the US is frankly why we're doing the round. Congratulations. Thank you so much, guys. Thank you so much. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one. Cheers. Bye.
Uh before we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about adquick. com.
Out-of-home advertising made easy and measurable.
Say goodbye to the headaches of out-of-home advertising as only adquick combines technology, out-of-home expertise, and data to enable efficient seamless ad buying across the globe.
Our next guest is Christina from Vanta.
She's been on the show multiple times. She's back. We're getting an update. How are you, Christina? Great to see you.
Thank you for supporting us for this entire year. It's been fantastic.
Uh you've been on a tear.
What's new in your world?
Well, um I got a hat in the mail from you all and it's great. Favorite company.
>> Well, you should have gotten a jack You should have gotten a jacket, too, but the team may have sniped it.
Somebody said, "Oh, we had a jacket never The jacket never showed up."
Jacket never showed up, but like really really into the hat, so thanks for that. I'm glad. I'm glad. Things are going well.
So little bit a lot of AI going on with everybody as probably talking about.
Getting excited for VantaCon, the security and compliance event of the season. >> Let's go.
And just did some surveying of security folks about how they're feeling about AI.
Yeah, we were talking to the CEO of CrowdStrike yesterday.
Very interesting nuance some There's basically like AI-generated viruses now where the actual code that hacks the system is generated on the fly by a generative AI model. >> And can do reasoning. Yeah.
>> So your malware can >> sure. can think like a human.
>> I'm in danger is what I feel like.
But but but how are people feeling?
What are you learning from the customer base, from the folks that you're talking to on the ground?
Yeah, so we talked to folks on the ground and then we also surveyed thousands of security leaders around the world. >> Sure.
And the results actually super super encouraging on the AI front.
And I actually even guessed.
So we found like four in five security leaders are using or plan to use AI agents to prevent against those sort of attacks. Sure.
So the solution to the attack to the AI agent attacks is is good guy >> get more AI. Yeah, of course. Yeah. Long tokens. Yeah. So there's that piece.
Um and then we found like kind of similar percentage, but 70% of folks are letting those agents give input on security strategy. Yeah.
Um and it's like giving it to a person who's considering it except but like >> we're in we're in like default let the agent talk to your folks and influence them Yeah.
versus like default skepticism.
And again, this is among security folks, so I was like pretty impressed with this.
How How Do you have a sense of like how token intensive some of these processes are?
Because I imagine that like one of the things you could do is just the benefit of AI is that it doesn't mind working 24/7 for months on end.
So you could just say, "Actually go through every single line of my code base one by one and then just, you know, see does this does this seem like it there could be a vulnerability here?"
And just generate tons and tons of you know, ideas and then we'll have a human filter through what it thinks could be vulnerabilities.
Yeah, so okay, I saw your interview with Alex and Parker yesterday. Yesterday.
And I think we're like seeing something similar where it's just like paralyzing. Sure.
And we're like, "Okay, go off. Run. Take all the tokens.
Like see what you come back with." >> Yep.
And maybe it's something and then I just did two things at once.
And maybe it's nothing and then I'm like I kind of just did the one thing and I have to move to the next task.
But like I'm in the I'm in the spot I am.
And so we are seeing like a ton of paralysis at work here. Yes. Yeah.
Um what uh yeah, what what what what else is is empowering people on the on the AI side in in security compliance?
I can imagine that like you know, when we're talking about the technology, we talk about oh, the future of agents will just be able to do it, but then when we talk to people on the ground, they're like, uh, I'm just using ChatGPT to do my homework, or I'm using it to get educated.
And I feel like there's a whole world where we go and rebuild the compliance training processes in an AI-native way. Uh, In a not awful way.
Also, Yeah, yeah, it's a lot of times it's pretty awful.
I've been through a few of those where you're clicking a button and watching a video and you need to move the mouse.
Uh, is there progress there?
How fast is that rolling out?
What what is the future of uh, compliance training look like, you think?
>> Yeah, okay, well, compliance training in particular, I think a ton.
And to your point, like adaptive and compelling and not the like, um, watch a video that feels, you know, at best stuck in the '90s.
There's probably worse things you could say about it, right?
It's just like, where does this work?
Um, yeah, we see folks doing like the fishing email was like always the classic thing, but now it is just they're they're really good cuz it's also like, oh, let me scan your email inbox and be like, what do you actually reply to? Oh.
I'll send you the, I don't know, TVPN newsletter and like try to or fake that and try to get you to click on it.
Like it's it's super personalized and there's some cool there.
Um, to your other question, my model of this, kind of an overall, but I definitely see it in security and compliance, to steal from Tyler Cowen, is like centaurs.
And so it's like AI plus person and we're at that stage. >> Yeah. Right?
And we'll be at that stage.
And maybe, you know, AI will take it all the way, like the way it did with chess. >> Yeah.
But even with chess, there was like a multi-decade, you know, AI plus person stage and I we're seeing a lot of that with our customers. Yeah, that's fantastic.
Uh, what uh, we were asking uh, the CrowdStrike uh, founder about like, like uh, basically was he surprised that we haven't seen like a gen AI induced like high-profile security incident yet?
I don't know if Like a solar winds I'm sure what yeah, when when you like, yeah, what's your, you know, it's like how how concerned are you about about that sort of like Yeah. Like even outage.
That was not a generative AI driven problem.
It was just DNS configuration on a database.
Okay, so actually like building off of that, I think I don't know.
Probably pretty soon, but I don't think it'll be some like crazy complicated attack.
Like that kind of, you know, it'll be like, oh, you left your database that's unlocked.
It's like the classic Equifax thing, you know, and it's like, maybe AI spotted that.
But like you kind of did the equivalent of like, well, you left your front door unlocked. >> Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, so just another another lesson just like go back to the basics, drill the basics, uh, human in the loop.
There's definitely uh, the centaur era is going to be here for a long time, I believe.
I agree completely agree with you.
>> Last question, uh, wish we wish we had more time today.
Like, how how are you uh, how are you and your team thinking about headcount planning over the next over the next 2 years?
>> Oh, yeah, that's a great question.
It's like all I'm doing right now.
Um, in like an AI sense in a business sense.
>> Yeah, well, just not even in an AI sense, but just like it's a new it's a new world. It's a new world.
We see we see public company CEOs doing layoffs and saying, we're doing these layoffs because of AI and maybe some of it's because of AI, but, you know, others is just it's a really good time.
Like Carta told us he's not going to really grow headcount.
He thinks he can massively grow revenue without actually scaling up the the the the talent pool that much.
Government contracts are amazing.
Um, so we were thinking about it >> Yeah.
is um, uh, like someone or like AI won't take your job, but someone using AI might.
Like back to the centaur thing. Yeah.
And so have a bunch of stuff and that's that's like our framing inside of Vanta.
Folks work at Vanta, whatever.
And we have a bunch of stuff both to like encourage and teach and be like, this and then this will be a core expectation of your job.
Um, and so like that kind of model going forward and filtering on it and hiring and, you know, So you're telling the team like you should have three three at least three bots join every hangout that you do that are all summarizing all summarizing the meeting notes in in in competing to summarize the meeting notes the best. I thought this too.
I yeah, I'm I don't know.
I would I'm a note-taker and like notes make me pay attention, so I like can't use those meeting recorders cuz then I stop paying attention and I'm just like, I know this.
Um, not everybody is like this, but yeah. >> Yeah. No.
Yeah, a lot of it depends on like the actual use case.
If you're in some sort of meeting where you need a full transcript, that's probably different, but, you know, certain types of meetings it's going to make more sense.
>> Vanta should make like a really menacing agent that joins and is like, watch watch out or Make sure there's no funny business going on in here. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Say some words, it'll like pop up at you. Yeah. >> Yeah.
Well, thank you so much for taking the time to join uh, the show today.
We will talk to you soon.
Have a great rest of your day. Bye. Talk soon. See you.
Um, before our next guest hops on, let me tell you about Bezel.
Your Bezel concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch.
>> Okay, quick fire drill for the team.
Is Alon from Navan in the in the in the waiting room yet, Ben?
Uh, we have >> Cuz I know we have a couple more, but I know the Restream waiting room right now.
Okay, but team, think about ordering here because uh, Alon >> a special we have a special situation because Navan is going public today.
>> And the IPO's timing might be Yeah, I just want to be cognizant of his timing, so. >> Okay.
So we will have the production team working on that. >> in Lynn.
>> in Lynn from Fireworks AI into the TV panel room.
Welcome to the show, Lynn. How are you doing?
Hi, thanks for having me.
Uh, thanks so much for taking the time. Big day.
Uh, would love to get your introduction to the company, how you're framing your business relative to everything else that's going on in AI.
It's such an exciting time.
Um, and then um, we'd love to go into the news. Yeah, definitely.
So Fireworks, we are a AI inference platform. Yeah.
Uh, with application-specific inference. Okay.
So here's how we think about inference differently. Yeah.
That we do not think about inference as we buy in compliances at home.
For example, we buy a refrigerator, use that for 10 years, and then upgrade to the next one. >> Yeah.
Um, we believe model should be continuously becoming smarter and smarter and learning and adapt into the application.
So every single application developer, they should have their own model.
They shouldn't use off-the-shelf, um, you know, any model other people use and become a model API wrapper.
Instead, the model should be part of their product design. Yeah.
And the model is like we raised child, it will continuously learn and be smarter and be more specialized in solving particular problem really, really well.
So that's kind of inference platform we provide with um, smarter model, faster model, and a much more cost-efficient model for every single application.
So I mean, you're competing with am I crazy or you're competing with like AWS, Azure?
Like these are the biggest hyperscalers.
They are somewhat model agnostic, but serve up inferences APIs.
Like Lynn's competing with everyone.
He's coming for everybody.
>> I mean, what take me a a click deeper on the actual strategy.
Is it just that there's so much demand that you can go in go and satisfy the the extra demand, or do you think you're building something that will just be completely differentiated from the hyperscalers forever? Right.
So, um, we currently we are running very high traffic.
We are processing more than 180 requests per second.
That is an order of magnitude of uh, it's same in the ballpark of Google search traffic volume.
We process more than 10 trillion tokens per day. Um, >> Okay.
That's similar to their [Music] Um, that is um, that is actually the same as uh, their um, token processed uh, from Gemini.
So we process a large volume of data.
Um, and that means that just means open model has a future.
And there are so many startups and enterprise they are reinvent the new user experience and they want to have full control of of the model as their IP um, and have the model codevelop, code evolve, coadapt into their product.
And we see that as a future and that's how we differentiate from product focus point of view and we do not provide this inference one-size-fits-all.
We provide inference one-size-fits-one, specific tailored towards application.
Are you GPU rich or you GPU poor?
Is this uh, part of the uh, part of your strategy to uh, have GPUs available when your companies need them?
Is that a differentiator?
Yeah, I would I would like to say we design our products for GPU poor because um, interestingly, uh, we are at the beginning of S curve of huge uh, AI native product explosion.
But product market fit today doesn't mean a viable business Mhm.
in the sense that uh, many of the uh, we talk we work with so many companies, they just couldn't scale to millions of developers or billions of consumers.
They're going to scale into bankruptcy.
Fundamental AI infrastructure is so expensive.
Even if they build a best product has so much value, they just couldn't make a viable business.
Yeah, scaling to bankruptcy is an iconic line. It's a great line, Lynn.
I I'm not going to name There's one company that really comes to mind. I won't name them. Um, give us the news.
Give us the news from today. >> fundraising side.
>> Yeah, and get that gong ready again >> Yes, what what happened?
We congratulations >> our Series C.
What uh, yes, give us some more details. Who who came in? How much? What is the valuation?
What else are you sharing about the round?
Yeah, we raised 250 million co-led by Lightspeed and Index. Boom. Love it. With Fantastic.
participation from EQT Ventures and Sequoia. Fantastic. >> Amazing.
You can just call it a quarter billion now.
You're getting into the big number the really big number range.
So >> Well Right, it brought us about our valuation to $4 billion. $4 billion, wow.
>> really excited for all the customers, founders, and investors.
And and quickly, how old is the company? We're 3 years old. Wow, that is impressive. Congratulations.
Uh well, thank you for everything you're doing to power the AI revolution.
>> Helping people avoid scaling into bankruptcy.
That is that should be the company motto.
It's honestly one of the greatest lines.
>> uh we're going to be we're going to be using that line quite a lot.
So thank thank you for that.
And uh it's great to meet you.
Congrats to the whole team. Congratulations. >> milestone. Thank you so much. >> Have a good day. >> Cheers.
Uh before our next guest hops on, let me tell you about Wander. Find your happy place.
Book a Wander with inspiring views, hotel grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, and 24/7 concierge service.
It's a vacation home but better.
Our next guest is from Navan.
We have Ilan Twig, the CTO and co-founder of Navan. >> is. Welcome to the show. >> Get that gong ready. >> Congratulations.
Let's ring the gong preemptively. Preemptive hit. Now we can I love you.
Now we can have a conversation. I love my champagne. Cheers. Cheers.
Uh we have we have Happy Dad.
Nobody's joined Nobody's joined drinking champagne ever on this show despite >> uh drinking champagne.
I'm going to have a Happy Dad from the Nelk Boys. >> do that. From uh our friend John.
I had a really long a really long day, so that's my last thing before the big party starts.
So >> Well well well, congratulations. >> Amazing.
And you're live uh live from the Nasdaq.
How's how's the day how's the day been?
Uh and yeah, may maybe kind of back up a little bit and actually introduce yourself.
I think people can probably tell what you're up to, but Yeah, sure.
And so my name is Ilan Twig.
I clearly like champagnes.
I'm the CTO and co-founder co-founder of Navan.
Uh Navan is a travel and expense management company.
We started it more than a decade ago. Wow. Today we IPO'd. Super pumped. Congratulations.
>> It was a beautiful day. Uh yes, exactly. It's amazing.
>> family, by the way, I think I I broke the record of the number of family members that joined me to the ceremony. No way. That's amazing. Yes.
It's so funny because the last time we were at Nasdaq here.
Yeah, well, the last time we were at an IPO um it was for Klarna.
Sebastian, who's a friend of the show, and he for him it was it was just like another day.
He was like, "Oh yeah, I didn't even bring my family.
I just kind of stopped by, IPO'd the company, come back."
But so every founder, every every executive like processes these things differently.
It's always interesting to hear how people treat it. How many roughly? Like 30 30?
No, it was just from my family it was 17. 17. 17.
I think there's the gong.
17 family members at the IPO. Yeah, congratulations.
Really amazing milestone.
>> if I may say one last thing about the guests, so my parents were here, both of them. Sure.
My dad turns 90 in 2 weeks. Wow.
>> was here with me on the yeah, on the stage. He was like happy. That's amazing.
>> Yeah, I think most of my excitement was watching them Totally.
being so excited, not understanding anything because they don't really speak English, but they kind of got the gist of what's happening, and it was super exciting. Yeah. That's incredible.
What uh take us back through I mean, I'm sure when you when you looking back into like the depths of COVID, which probably it feels a long time ago, but >> Well, it was traveling.
>> you were in a business that was I mean, I just imagine you you aged more rapidly than you maybe Brian Johnson would like during that period.
Walk us through kind of some of the key moments getting getting to this point.
>> Maybe I should first tell you that before COVID I had black hair. So go back. Oh, wow.
Uh looks it looks good on you. It looks good on you.
You look more like a serious, you know, executive now.
Yeah, yeah, I can fool people around you that I'm serious. Um yes. No, let's see.
You know, you run a company that's the business model is you we make money when people use the platform.
There was no monthly fees.
There was no way you don't pay yeah, yeah.
>> lock-in, no enterprise contract. No enterprise contract. So And why?
Because both my co-founder Ariel Cohen and I, we we had this philosophy that if the company uh generates money on usage, then the company will always be focused on making sure that people would want to use the product because it's a it's a great experience.
And it worked well for us for the first 5 years.
And then when COVID hit, no one was traveling and no one was using our platform not because it was an inferior product, it was because there was a virus and no one could travel.
And so we found ourselves with the the best product out there with zero usage and zero zero revenue.
And it took 6 weeks from like I don't remember the number, maybe 100 million to zero, 6 weeks. So then what?
Uh yeah, it was it was a very interesting point in time, but I can tell you that you know, 5 years later here I am with a glass of champagne. My parents were here.
We were celebrating the IPO with a company that has way more products, a much more resilient business model, and trust me, this time it's pandemic proof.
So we are not going to go to zero.
We'll go down, but not to zero if it happens again.
So we learn, you know, that's why we have gray hair. Um Battle scars.
And yeah, it's it's it was definitely a challenging time, but but I think that, you know, judging by results, I think that it was managed well.
Obviously, the entire company entire management team, the board, we were all united around the decisions, and here we are. You're happy.
How how are you We were We were talking to Brian Chesky at Airbnb last week, and uh he was sort of mapping out his vision for the future of travel.
This idea that as as we become more online, we also maybe want to become more offline as well, and maybe we're we're traveling more as well as spending more time just online.
Uh how do you how do you and how do you internally in the company think about the future of just business travel, pleasure travel, just like the overall travel market? Right.
So first I should tell you, you know, I'm the CTO and I love technology.
I I I'm I'm this is my thing.
I really really love technology.
When ChatGPT came out, I the first thing that I did, I bought like a $30,000 worth of a GPU. That's what I did. And and I I built a PC.
My co-founder thought that he should fire me.
It's like, "You have a PC under your desk." I said, "Yeah." I and I paid for it.
You don't you don't worry about it. I paid for it.
And and then I started deploying LLMs on top of it, unsensored LLMs.
I dove deep into that, and I really wanted to know the nature of these creatures, how they behave, because if I were to deploy anything to production based on these creatures, I call them, I need to know who they are, how they behave.
Will they lie, for example?
Do they know what a lie is? No, they lie.
Yeah, but forget the translation.
They will also lie for other reasons, intentionally intentionally, like they would not want to lose, for example.
And they would lie in order not to lose.
Uh lots of discoveries, but ultimately it led us to once we really understand the technology, how to deploy this thing to production, and let it run completely unsupervised and do stuff for us.
And and I think the important thing is completely unsupervised.
The first thing that we've done is we deployed the Ava.
Ava is our virtual travel agent.
And she communicates with travelers as things happen, when they need to book something, or when there's disruptions, and they need to push their travel by 1 day, cancel this leg, argue about the refund, etc. etc.
And she would do all all of these things for them.
And it is all based on an internal framework that we built.
We call it Navan Cognition.
Uh I really like the name Cognition. I didn't invent it.
It was a professor from Columbia that we worked with. And why Cognition?
Because it turns LLMs into a highly functioning cognitive system.
So Ava today is completely unsupervised.
She manages thousands of chats every day with a very very high customer satisfaction that matches the humans' level.
And she offsets more than 50% of the incoming chats. Mm. She does not deflect. She solves.
So I think our our approach to travel is we we look for ways to leverage technology to make travel easier so that people can focus on being there rather than getting there.
Getting there is is is just a noise that you have to it's you know, it's a penalty that you have to pay.
But the focus for corporate travel is to be there and to be fully there.
And there's people outside trying to make me laugh from outside Nasdaq.
So and I am a little bit uh Well, I'll try I I I just have one one sugges- one suggestion.
I think if you make an agent one of your you know, your your baby creature and call it Twiggy, please.
Oh, that's a good nickname. Microsoft has Clippy. Navan needs Twiggy.
You already went through one You went through a rebrand. You were TripActions. Now you're Navan.
And I want you to rename Ava to Twiggy. Yeah. I love it.
Let's let's let's I'll do my best.
Here's I'm going to drink for that. Really. >> Cheers. >> Cheers.
>> Thank you so much for coming on the show on such a big day.
Congratulations on the IPO.
>> such a monumental moment.
Uh and and please extend our congratulations to the entire family, all 17.
All 17 and the whole team.
Uh It's a beautiful moment.
>> And just uh I hope you have a great rest of the day, >> I hope you have a great rest of the day, great rest of your week.
>> I'm going to >> party tonight. Thank you so much. Thank you. It's there. You guys, bye-bye. Love your podcast. Love you.
Oh, what a what a legend. What a legend. >> What a legend.
That that's the way to do it. Yeah, for sure.
>> uh tough to tough to follow. >> Yeah.
You have Taranjeet coming in next. >> From Memo.
Uh I think that's how I pronounce it, Mem Zero.
Uh he's in the Restream waiting room. Uh how are you doing? Great to see you.
Uh really really tough one to follow, honestly.
>> last guest that IPO'd he had champagne he was drinking.
Raised the billy, uh but uh I'm I'm excited for this.
>> But thank you so much for hopping on the show.
We're very excited to talk to you.
Yeah, like thank you for having me. Great to be here. >> Of course.
Um uh talk to me about the business.
Uh introduce yourself in the business and then I want to go really deep into how uh memory will actually transfer and and what the equilibrium of the market will be, but we can go into all the technical or or like market structure stuff after we kind of get the general news, where the business is, the shape of what you're building. Yeah, thank you. So, I'm Taranjeet.
I'm the co-founder and CEO of Mem Zero.
Mem Zero is building memory for AI agents. >> Yeah.
Right now everybody is trying to create an AI app or AI agent, but there is a fundamental issue.
All the apps are done because they are stateless. Yeah.
They don't evolve with you as humans evolve.
We are trying to fix that.
Uh We are the uh so far we are the most dominant player in the market with like 41,000 GitHub stars, 14 million downloads, and we recently announced our 24 million funding All right.
uh led by Basis Peak Ventures with Kindred, Precursor Ventures, and GitHub.
Uh Overall agent domination. Okay.
So, I mean I I I got to just jump straight into uh the actual market dynamic because I I have to imagine that uh right now OpenAI is saying where you're going to log in with OpenAI and we're going to store the memory because we want you locked to us as much as possible and for everything else uh that if we we want to build it within the app, we want to you know do we want one-click checkout in the app.
And if and if we're going to send you out, you're going to OAuth with ChatGPT.
And so, are you the Android to ChatGPT's iPhone or is there a way that you can play together?
Is there a data privacy thing where I can go to Sam Altman and say, "Hey, look, I know I'm daily driving the ChatGPT app, but you got to let me take my data with me, my personalization data with me cuz I want to go out into the open open LLM ecosystem and interact with things all over the place."
Yeah, I think that's a really good question and there are two ways to look at it.
First, it's good that big labs are adding memory in their consumer offering.
They are actually educating the market that memory is needed and they have also realized that as models commoditize, memory is the next mode.
And it's a matter of time that memory becomes available as an API.
But you know, developers who are building all sorts of cool AI apps are using multiple LLMs. Mhm.
So, in that scenario, because memory is not just read-only, it's also write, you would want to decouple it from LLMs out there.
So, that's like take one.
Now, the fundamental thing for why, you know, this is happening is, you know, we are going through a technological shift.
So far we have been interacting with click, swipe, and scroll, but for the first time we are we and everyone on this planet is getting the ability to talk to software.
You can chat with it, you can say a few words, it will say it back to you.
So, you as human, I as human, we are accumulating rich personal context.
Now, right now it's a handful of AI agents that we use on a day-to-day basis and we use like ChatGPT, Claude, and you know, other apps out there, but 5 years down the line it's going to be a lot of apps in our life.
And imagine if I as a user or you as a user have to explain every app who you are, that's going to be frustrating for you.
So, in that scenario, we we strongly envision and we strongly will make uh this Plaid for AI kind of uh you know, functionality out there where then you as a user are empowered to carry to own and carry your AI memories across any app or device that you interact with.
Okay, so if you're the Plaid for memory and in the future I am using I mean this is real story like I use Gemini all the time for VO3.
I also if I'm interacting with a YouTube video, I'll always go to Gemini for that.
Gemini's faster in a bunch of different places, but I use the voice mode on ChatGPT.
I also use Claude every once in a while.
Like I have little memories all over the place Yeah.
and if I'm in the Plaid analogy, that's similar to having a Chase account over here, a Morgan Stanley account over here, an E*TRADE account over there, a BofA account, a credit card, all these things.
And I want to bring those together.
Is is that something that you imagine I'll be able to do when someone comes out with a completely new product that they want to customize?
I could go over we were talking to Adobe or something and then I could say, "Yeah, I'm going to OAuth with Memo and and then I'm going to allow you to access my memories or my my yeah, my memory in all of the other apps and and and port all of that in.
Is that something that they would let you do?"
See, that's uh that's the future that we feel is highly possible.
They won't I mean like big labs won't let you do because for them memory is one of the modes, right? >> Yeah.
But if you consider from other side of users then like, you know, the world is not going to be just one app.
The world is going to be multiple apps out there.
It's like OpenAI will be there, Gemini is there, Claude is there, right?
In that scenario, once So, right now it's like a technological shift so you and I can relate, but not everyone on the planet, right?
But soon they will relate.
And because of this new interface of voice, like I will feel like why do I have to tell this software again and again?
Why is this software so dumb?
In that scenario, I think like user should be empowered to own and carry their memories.
So far it has not been the case because it's just been like clicks data, you know, your session history.
But now you are sharing a lot of personal rich context. You should own it.
You should be saying that, "Okay, I give my health care memories to this app.
I give my financial memory to this this app and they are in sync."
I think that's a future that benefits everyone.
Uh at least everyone on the planet. Yeah.
Is cold email underrated?
I I actually changed my life it's the most valuable asset for everyone out there.
You should be writing more cold emails.
Everyone should be writing more cold emails. I love it.
Uh handwritten or AI-generated? What's the take?
No, I I still write like everything personally.
I just take AI help to uh fix, you know, some grammar or some structural issues, but should be personally >> The Yeah, the AI cold email.
"Hey, saw you're in New York.
Hope you like I bet you like Central Park."
>> Yeah, do do you like Starbucks?
Uh anyways, uh congratulations on the fundraise.
Uh it's great great to meet you and uh hopefully uh get to use uh Mem Zero out there in the wild very soon.
Yeah, thank you for having me. Fantastic. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one.
Um I have uh the perfect post to end the show on. >> Hit me.
That is that um Tyler's Tyler's app is broken.
Oh, taking shots at Tyler. He's doing his best.
Do you want to do the virality equals taste one?
No, I wanted to do uh Metob says, "I keep getting ads for cocaine on Facebook. Oh, yes.
They're just using Linktree as a cloaking page.
Kind of surprised this works."
And to that I would say, "How do you think who's going to pay for the CapEx, right? You got to Oh, okay. I see.
You're bringing it back to where we started in the show. It's Meta earnings.
Uh if you see this, you got to you got to assume uh you know, the the the you know, whoever's running that ad advertising cocaine, they got to pay a pretty penny.
They got to pay in their Facebook Ads Manager." This is so funny.
There's a there's a reply here from this guy Zach.
"What data does Meta have on you?"
And uh Metob says, "I was in LA for a day, I guess."
This was a thing um this was a thing on on Facebook of people advertising drugs and it is a game of whack-a-mole back and forth trying to catch people cuz the the lingo will change and the the way people are kind of dog-whistling to each other that they have something illegal that they're selling.
Uh it's a it's a huge game of cat and mouse that the Meta team is is kind of constantly working on.
Uh and you see the same kind of like breathless panicked news articles about like is Facebook like a hotbed for I guess cocaine in this case or or you know, something else and you know, a variety of different adult content or whatever.
And uh it's always this like dance of like how much do they how much are they going to invest in trust and safety?
How many people are going to be in the loop?
How much AI are they going to throw at it?
How are they going to have false positives?
Cuz what if you're just posting a meme about Tony's uh not Tony Soprano >> Tony Montana. Tony Montana.
Yeah, our favorite song that we used in our in our launch video.
If we post that, there's obviously a reference to illicit substances in there.
Do you want that to be flagged? No, obviously not.
Uh and so um it's a it's a constant dance, but uh very funny that someone actually sn- slipped this through the Facebook's ad ad review team.
Uh I have a funny story about the Facebook ad review team.
Uh there was a time when you could straight up like there there were companies there were companies that would basically go and find the individual ad manager who would approve who would have admin access to the the Facebook side of the ad manager.
And the company would go and put up an ad and try and get it approved and it would get shut down.
And the ad would be like, "Harvard scientists created this limitless pill that's used by Johnny Depp."
It was always Johnny Depp and it was always Harvard scientists.
And it would be a picture of Johnny Depp looking great and then Harvard scientists.
And it would link you to some scammy website that would sell you basically some fake uh fake nootropic or fake supplement.
Uh and these ads were against terms of service.
Like it's straight up snake oil.
Like it it's not even like there's no thesis of like, "Oh, it's actually good for you."
It's just completely fake.
But, they realized that it would convert and it would be very high margin.
And so, what they would do is they would go to uh the Facebook ad manager people and they would try and bribe them and say, "Hey, if you go in and you approve my ad, I'll put $100 million of ad spend behind it and generate $200 million in revenue.
And if I can get that ad approved if if you as just the individual ad manager can go and tweak the back end."
And so, uh there's like a constant war even inside the organization to make sure that nothing illicit is out.
>> something interesting uh that uh there's a a a a health influencer and people make AI videos of them just promoting random supplements on YouTube.
So, they make an AI video, they post a video, and in the in the in the um description they'll put links out to products. >> Okay.
And YouTube does not it will not systematically identify the the content themselves.
It's just they say they we support AI video. >> Sure.
And so, uh this influencer is paying an another AI service to consistently monitor all these videos and then report them automatically.
But, they have to spend $10,000 a month. >> grand a month?
>> On the service because it's super it's super intensive from a And And this influencer like needs to >> Yep.
Uh so, you can imagine somebody Yep.
you know, I know exactly what you're talking about.
Yeah, there's uh yeah, it's a it's a constant war. It's a constant war.
>> to bad AI is good good good AI agents with guns, I guess.
Give your neo robot a Glock. Uh it needs to happen.
Anyway, thank you so much for tuning in today.
Thank you for listening to the show.
We will see you tomorrow. It's Halloween.
We have a special show for you. Please tune in.
Uh leave us five stars on Spotify and Apple podcasts.
>> Tomorrow's going to be spooky. It'll be spooky. It could be silly.
Have a great Have a good one. >> And I can't wait. Goodbye. >> Have a great evening.