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Technology's daily show (formerly the Technology Brothers Podcast). Streaming live on X and YouTube from 11 - 2 PM PST Monday - Friday. Available on X, Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.
You're watching TVPN.
Speaker 2:It is Friday, 06/27/2025. We are live from the TVPN Ultra Dome, the Temple Of Technology.
Speaker 3:The fortress of finance.
Speaker 2:The capital of capital. And we gotta ring the gong because the S and P 500 has hit a new high. Congratulations to everyone who works for an S and P 500 company, who runs an S and P 500 company. Who founded it.
Speaker 3:A product an S and P 500 company.
Speaker 2:Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. It's amazing.
Speaker 2:American consumers are feeling better than they did in May. Consumer confidence is up. Neuralink just dropped a massive one hour update. We're gonna have the co founder and president of the company on the show, DJ Cio. He's a fantastic leader and just he's just an amazing person.
Speaker 2:I can't wait to talk to him. Also, there's news about Tesla's Robotaxi launch and what it means for Waymo. We'll dig into that. Travis Kalanick might be getting back in the
Speaker 3:Where would you have priced game. So Waymo is getting priced at 45,000,000,000. Allegedly? Allegedly. I don't know.
Speaker 3:Rumor mill. How would you have priced Waymo?
Speaker 2:That's a good question. That feels like roughly correct. I mean, how big is the market for self driving cars? Pretty huge. The the kind of like base case expectation would be like something like a duopoly or like you're at least betting that like there's a 50% chance of a duopoly.
Speaker 2:So you mark so you kind of benchmark it at like 25% of the of the total market size and it feels like it's a $100,000,000,000 market based on, you know, the volume that Uber's doing and the market cap of Uber, which is kind of like, you know, Uber will be able to is obviously fighting to keep that, but that's kind of what's up at stake. And then also like, I believe Uber dramatically increased the volume of total rides. Like, it's the the Uber market is bigger than the taxi market, and you would expect that the self driving car market will be bigger than the Uber market. And so 45,000,000,000 doesn't seem that crazy to me. They've been at this for, what, almost two decades.
Speaker 2:It seems to be going pretty well. Anyway, we'll dig into it. Also, we have Kersten Green joining the the stream later. She just held a conference and is going to talk to us about consumer AI startups and the value of virality. I'm sure that we'll have a lot to dig into there.
Speaker 2:That'll be interesting. And then the the the great AI talent wars continue. We will be covering them. But of course, first, if you're getting in on the action of the S and P 500, you gotta do it at public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously.
Speaker 2:They got multi asset investing, industry leading yields. They're trusted by millions, folks.
Speaker 3:Millions, folks. And I wanna give a quick shout out to Jensen Huang on June 24, just a few days ago. Nvidia was sitting at a 10% chance of being the largest company at the June. And he has rocketed up to 97% chance Just an absolute hockey stick.
Speaker 2:Are you still on Polymarket?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I'm on Polymarket and he's absolutely cooking. So He is. A little hat tip to Jensen
Speaker 2:for And interestingly, if you if you scroll that to December 31, by the end of the year, Nvidia's still in the is the expected to be the largest company at the end of twenty twenty five with a 46% chance. Microsoft's at 34%. Apple's at 15. Tesla's at 3.6%. It's still a great horse race to follow.
Speaker 2:I love it. $3,870,000,000,000
Speaker 3:market cap right now.
Speaker 2:That's a big company. But everyone needs GPUs. You look at the rest of the mag seven and you're like, they they potentially all benefit from from Nvidia. And yes, they compete in some ways but really
Speaker 3:It's the highest ever market capitalization by a public company.
Speaker 2:Oh my god. I'd love to hear that. It's
Speaker 3:amazing. They achieved it once before apparently. Now, how does that work?
Speaker 2:Pop is in the timeline saying the S and P 500 has hit a new all time high and all the doomsday predictors can do nothing about it. And Geiger Capital says, Trump literally called the bottom apparently at the lowest point in the market. Donald Trump posted, guess on truth social. This is a great time to buy.
Speaker 3:He bottom ticked. He
Speaker 2:really did. He bottom ticked. It's actually crazy.
Speaker 3:Gotta give him some credit for the perfect bottom tick. You also gotta say, he's got a little bit of influence over over the markets, you know. He's pulling some strings. Yes. So it would make if anyone was gonna be able to bottom take it perfectly, I'm not surprised that it is DJT.
Speaker 2:Well, what else is going on in the market? Stocks have climbed in recent sessions after for the fragile ceasefire between Israel and Iran set oil prices lower and fueled optimism that The Middle East could avoid prolonged conflict. This was the end of World War three catalyst that we were talking about. Continued trade negotiations between The US and trading partners including China, Canada, and the European Union have also lifted investor spirits. It does feel like maybe things are moving forward in The Middle East.
Speaker 2:Things are moving forward in trade deals. Even the the NATO stuff that we covered yesterday, it feels like Trump was talking a really big game about, oh, we're gonna pull out of NATO. We're gonna be negative on NATO. And now NATO's stepping up and and obviously that that feels like it's cause for optimism. So on Friday, the S and P opened above its previous intraday high rising point 3% in early trading.
Speaker 2:The NASDAQ Composite also hit a new record. We love to hear it. And in just in just a few months, investors swung from exuberance about the deregulation and tax cuts they expected from president Trump to fear that his decision to launch a global trade war would cripple the economy. Then the mood shifted again after shrugging off initial damage to the markets. The president declared it was time to buy.
Speaker 2:He announced a ninety day pause on many of his planned tariffs, sending the S and P soaring 9.5% in its best day since the financial crisis of two thousand eight. And this was my take. I I have to take a victory lap here because I said like, this is a manufactured crisis that can be that can be reversed by the person who
Speaker 3:manufactured Well deserved victory, Bob.
Speaker 2:I need a Yeah. Need a pat on the back. I need a pat on the
Speaker 4:back for
Speaker 3:this. It's hard to I can't It's tough to reach you.
Speaker 2:I'll pat myself on
Speaker 3:the back. I'm there with you.
Speaker 5:But Yeah. Yes. Really It seemed like
Speaker 2:it was the end of the world.
Speaker 3:I I There was a couple days when I was looking around. I was just like, wow.
Speaker 2:This is bad. This is history.
Speaker 3:Yeah. We're living through history, right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. 100
Speaker 3:You never broke a sweat? Never. Never. Not even for a second.
Speaker 2:No. But it's funny because it's not it's not purely like a bull case because it's like it would be better to not have volatility. Like, I'm not like pro volatility here. Pro vol. But but I'm just
Speaker 3:saying No. It's it's it's it's max intraday volatility Yes. Overall stability. The S and P 500 is up 5% year
Speaker 2:to date.
Speaker 3:It would be, you know.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It was basically a
Speaker 3:good year by any measure, but max chaos.
Speaker 2:So Yes. Yes. Yes. The market sense that these tariffs aren't nearly going to be as onerous as what was presented on Liberation Day. Said Hank Smith, head of investment strategy at Haverford Trust, you've seen the recovery.
Speaker 2:Many investors remain worried that even watered down versions of the sweeping tariff plan, plans Trump unveiled early, could slow business spending. This is what a lot of people were saying back to me when I was saying this was like, now we are a we are technically like a high tariff country even if we stick around at 10%. Like, that is significant, and that would would potentially be a drag. But it feels like companies have been able to adjust. They prepared for the worst.
Speaker 2:They prepared for 90% tariffs, and so they they reallocated and planned ahead and and figure things out. And so they're more equipped to deal with 10% if that sticks around. But we'll see. So but so far, evidence of such damage has been sparse. The country's biggest corporations reported robust profit growth
Speaker 3:for the first We gotta have Ryan Peterson back on to get a proper update on Yeah. Kind of digging a level deeper and kind of understanding
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:What what's happening with his customers.
Speaker 2:For sure. We've seen that earnings are resilient, said Richard Saperstein, chief investment officer investment pertinent investment firm Treasury Partners. We've seen economic activity remaining buoyant. We've seen inflation not really moving higher. The American consumers undefeated and American consumers felt better in June than they did in May.
Speaker 2:And so, consumer sentiment has been climbing. It's risen to 60.7 in June according to University of Michigan. University of Michigan.
Speaker 3:We got Tyler looking Tyler
Speaker 2:Can we
Speaker 3:get a Tyler cam up? Tyler's we got we got
Speaker 2:Oh, he looks Wow. The lighting is really good. High so it's
Speaker 3:a white
Speaker 2:suit. Team. Everyone's in the white suits because the mic the market's up.
Speaker 3:We As we do.
Speaker 2:As we do.
Speaker 3:You're looking like colonel Sanders had a liquidity event.
Speaker 2:It's great. And so despite the increase, consumer sentiment remains 18% lower than it was in December of twenty twenty four. So we're still significantly down, but we're heading in the right direction. Consumers expect inflation.
Speaker 3:I think the consumers are
Speaker 2:booing you, John.
Speaker 3:Consumers consumers are feeling pretty good right now.
Speaker 2:They expect inflation to rise by 5% in the year ahead, a decrease from the 6.6% expectation in May. So people are expecting less inflation, which is certainly good to hear. The period the survey period covered May 27 to June 23, a politically tumultuous period that included protests against Donald Trump and the shooting of two Minnesota lawmakers, but overall, were still moving in the positive direction. And so the June reading remains low by historical standards. Before the pandemic, for example, the index hovered close to 100.
Speaker 2:Everyone was everyone was optimistic. Since COVID, though, a period in which American households have seen the cost of everything from food to houses soar, consumer sentiment has experienced a broader decline. Well, there's one place that's still where consumers are more bullish than ever, and that's the mansion section, of course. We gotta review some of these. Paris Hilton has purchased Mark Wahlberg's old house.
Speaker 2:So Paris Hilton, if you don't remember, she she is an entrepreneur, a hotel heiress, and an influencer, also a DJ.
Speaker 3:I'm looking up her perfume revenue because it's
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 3:In the
Speaker 2:It's a great product
Speaker 5:for her.
Speaker 3:Her perfume line has generated over $2,000,000,000 Wow.
Speaker 2:Well, it paid for this house, which was $60,000,000 $63,000,000 roughly. They lost their homes in the Malibu in Malibu to wildfires earlier this year. But they paid 63,000,000 for Mark Wahlberg's former Los Angeles estate, according to a person familiar with the situation. The estate is on six acres in the ultra exclusive Beverly Park gated community. It came on the market for 68, they negotiated them down to 63.
Speaker 2:The roughly 30,500 square foot home has 12 bedrooms and amenities worthy of a theme park. You'll love this, Jordy. A sports court, a skate park, a five hole golf course with a driving range.
Speaker 3:Only five? Okay. You got the range.
Speaker 2:You got the range.
Speaker 3:Okay.
Speaker 2:And, you know, you probably got I don't know. I don't think they're putting par fives on this thing, but that's for the next house when they upgrade. This
Speaker 5:is like
Speaker 2:a this is what they call a starter home. It's a starter home.
Speaker 3:Starter golf course. Is Wahlberg you know, I know this is about Paris and their new house, but isn't Wahlberg known for, like, setting up entire gyms Yes. Like, when he's
Speaker 2:Oh, okay. He didn't even mention the gym. We gotta get
Speaker 3:We gotta go to his gym. What what what kind of he probably has multiple gyms.
Speaker 2:Does he wake up at, 4AM? Yeah. He's the he's the pre Ashton Hall. Yeah. The Legacy Media Ashton Hall.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It was built in 2014. The main house has a wine and cigar cellar.
Speaker 5:Okay.
Speaker 3:A Now you're interested.
Speaker 2:Smoking lounge. The property also includes a guesthouse. And, yeah, the seller was represented by Ginger and Alexandra Glass of Compass. And Hilton was represented by her brother, Baron n Hilton of Hilton Hilton along with his wife and colleague, Tessa Hilton. They love the name Hilton.
Speaker 2:And so they've they've
Speaker 3:tripled a strong name.
Speaker 2:Yeah. They also, the founder of Fashion Nova has purchased a $32,000,000 house in another Los Angeles area spec home. This is cool.
Speaker 3:Did he sell? No. I forget. He still
Speaker 2:has I'll tell you the story of the one. So he is His name is Richard Shagian. I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly. He purchased The One, which was originally listed at $500,000,000, and it was developed by the once embattled builder, Nile Niami. Very interesting character who made his money in direct to video DVD sales back when that was like a banger market.
Speaker 2:He would get the he would get the rights to some video or movie that wasn't really that popular, print a bunch of DVDs, sell them in grocery stores, and just made a ton of money. Amazing. He started developing these luxury homes. I believe he built
Speaker 3:a home for the Wiggles Vos twins. Do vinyl podcast.
Speaker 2:Yes. Yes.
Speaker 3:To really tap into that market.
Speaker 2:But we're we're a little bit past that, unfortunately. The the the one, it was the largest home ever built, a 105,000 square feet in Los Angeles or the largest home in the developed world or something like that. I think there's technically one bigger Yeah.
Speaker 3:My home is about 6 figures.
Speaker 2:Have you seen the tour? Have you watched the tour?
Speaker 3:6 figures, like, it's under a million. They're like, no. Like, a 100,000 square feet.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The 100,000 square foot. It has like four pools. It has a full nightclub. I'm pretty sure the the garage holds 50 cars.
Speaker 2:It's it's like purely for like entertainment. He was thinking about hosting UFC there at one point. Like, his ideas were insane because he was kind of like, uh-oh, like, built something too big. Like, I don't know. And because it came on the market right as like the market was crashing and the and the interest rates were rising.
Speaker 2:And so all of a sudden, was like, okay. No one's gonna jump at this. And it was also like too big even if you have a $100,000,000,000. Like, do you really wanna live in a 100,000 square foot home? It's like, it's gonna take you ten minutes to get across the house if you're like, oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:I left my I left my my watch in the other room. Ten minutes there, ten minutes back. It has a full movie theater. Like, not like a private theater. Like, it's a full movie theater.
Speaker 3:Like, up to Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like, it could fit like, you know, 200 people or something in it. It's insane. But it was it was it was a really tough development. $500,000,000 asking price. At one point, I think got seized by the lender.
Speaker 2:It wind up it wind up selling to to Richard here, the founder of Fashion Nova, for a 126,000,000 at auction in 2022. Bought the dip on this one. I think it's worth more than that. Commissions and fees brought the total price to a $141,000,000. At the time of the purchase, Nayomi hadn't obtained a certificate of occupancy.
Speaker 2:This is gonna answer your question for the property. So the house couldn't be legally lived in. Shagian has been work working to bring the property up to code according to people familiar with the situation. I mean, this this developer was insane. He was like helicopter pad on the roof.
Speaker 2:I don't care about the permits. I'm gonna do it anyway. Like, they
Speaker 3:just way.
Speaker 2:Fighting for everything. It was it was crazy. Has a full track that you can just run like miles around the house. It's awesome. Anyway He's
Speaker 3:trying to broadcast there.
Speaker 2:So he's so he's trying to build build it. Yeah. We should do the deep dive on on the history of Fashion Nova and fast fashion with him. We'd love that. The Bel Air Estate.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So this is the Bel Air Estate that he just purchased that he or or this is this is the one that he, purchased that's smaller. You can see the image on that. That's the smaller house. That's only 30,000 feet square feet or something like that.
Speaker 2:Or 13 square 13. No. That's that's Paris Hilton's house.
Speaker 3:That's the Wahlberg.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's the wall that's the former Wahlberg house. The Bel Air estate is expected to be completed in approximately fourteen months and will serve as Richard's primary home.
Speaker 3:Because he can't occupy Yes. His $100,000,000 home.
Speaker 2:Yes. So he's so he's slumming it in the $32,000,000 home. The 13,000 square foot six bedroom home with a pool sauna and a putting green. That'll be fun.
Speaker 3:Damn.
Speaker 2:Anyway, let's move on to some
Speaker 3:other things. Homes with putting greens. There's homes
Speaker 2:with Full golf courses.
Speaker 3:Full golf courses. Yeah. It's always levels.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's the hedonic treadmill. Once you get the putting green, you're gonna want the five hole course, then you're gonna want 18, then you're gonna 36 because you don't wanna play the same course every
Speaker 3:single yesterday that the hedonic treadmill might be the best possible workout for your personal finances.
Speaker 2:I agree.
Speaker 3:Because once you get on, you pretty much can't get off.
Speaker 2:Do you know what the best is for your corporate finances, Jordy? Ramp. Time is money. Save both. Go to ramp.com.
Speaker 2:Easy use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Seamless. You like how I did that? Anyway, in other news, mister beast has rolled back the launch of his view stats AI thumbnail tool. He says, hey, thanks for all your feedback on the view stats AI thumbnail tool.
Speaker 2:We pulled it and added a funnel for creators to find real thumbnail artists to commission.
Speaker 3:And Okay. So clearly Yes. The thumbnail industrial complex Yes. Came for him hard. Yep.
Speaker 3:They're probably making, you know, death threats Yep. In the comments. It sounds like it was pretty intense. My thing here, you know, I I I have to agree with Lulu. This this is one of mister beast like many businesses.
Speaker 3:Right? So Yep. General like it's something he wants to create for creators Yep. And distribute widely.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 3:But the obvious reason that she he should have kept the AI thumbnail tool is you're by if you can roll out AI in this way, you can save millions of creators that create YouTube videos a lot of money because many of them are not gonna be able to afford to commission a hand designed thumbnail.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 3:And so the the right thing to do for the creators broadly is to makes a tool like this available, make it as cheap as possible so as many people as possible can use it.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 3:And not give in to the small number of people in the world that make thumbnails like that that's their sort of day to day. Those people that make thumbnails like there's a lot of things you could do. Could adjust, you could go and make edit videos. Right? AI video editors are not that good today.
Speaker 3:Yep. You could do that.
Speaker 2:It's very odd because the yes. It's like we're we're destroying the job of a of thumbnail artist or real real thumbnail artist, that's a job that was created like two years ago. Like, I I think I met the first like full I literally was at a YouTube conference just a few years ago and I met the first real thumbnail artist where that was his entire job full time. Yeah. And and mister beast hired a few of those folks.
Speaker 3:But the whole point is the whole point is
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 3:That person can probably make much better thumbnails Yes. Than AI
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 3:Can right Still. And so
Speaker 2:For sure.
Speaker 3:Go up market
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 3:Work with creators that are willing to spend money Yes. And make a make a make an entry level tool that anybody can use
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 3:To generate an AI, you know, an AI generated thumbnail. Yeah. Like it it just.
Speaker 2:I mean, I have
Speaker 3:bunch of I'm surprised that
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:I mean, I'm surprised that he he rolled this back and gave in the but you know, it it's very possible that the thumbnail industrial complex Yeah. You know, has has a massive lobbying arm Yeah. You know, and and and said, you know, we're we're gonna work on getting, you know, your other businesses blacklisted, you know.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, it's interesting like like there's even a there's even a like a continuum of technology that exists within the pre AI thumbnail generation Yeah. Workflow. So at one point, I was making thumbnails the way people usually do compositing different images together. Pick a background, cut yourself out of a green screen image, put that over the face over the background.
Speaker 2:That's like the standard thing. Put some text over it. At one point, I actually experimented with Ben shooting practical thumbnails. So we would go and design, like instead of compositing a background, we would design a background image of wall and print out pictures, pin them on the wall and I would stand in front of the wall of images and they didn't really perform better. And so I think like using a design tool like figma.com, think bigger build faster.
Speaker 2:Figma helps design and development teams build great products together is great. They're just using software in general is completely justified and and no one really talked about like, well, if you're you if you're just compositing images Yeah. Then you're not filming them practically. All of a sudden you're putting set decorators out of out of business because it's not like I was hiring a set decorator. I was just saying like, hey, Ben, me and you are gonna practically set up this thumbnail Yeah.
Speaker 2:And then take the photo.
Speaker 3:So here's here's the real evidence as to why mister beast should have kindly told the thumbnail artist to
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 3:F off. Okay. I ran a quick query here basically to try to estimate how many people actually earn a living making thumbnails by looking at
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:You know, platforms like Upwork and Fiverr and all these different
Speaker 2:things and
Speaker 3:then doing some type of multiple. So generally, we're estimating two to 5,000 people make at least a thousand dollars a month designing thumbnails across Yes. All different types of platforms. Meanwhile, there are over 2,000,000 YouTube creators that are in the YouTube partner program. Yep.
Speaker 3:Meaning they're making ad revenue. Their YouTube is a business for them. Yep. And so do you wanna serve the 2,000,000 people by giving them great tools that they can use to run better, more profitable Yep. Content businesses?
Speaker 3:Or do you wanna build your product for the Yeah. Thumbnail industrial complex, which is just a few thousand people
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:That are probably not even doing it full time.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Right? They're just earning earning some type of living.
Speaker 5:So Yeah.
Speaker 2:I think it gets to, like, the importance of, like how how abstract should your title be? Because we were talking about this earlier. Like, if you if you if you did a job shadow on a lawyer in 1950, and then you did a job shadow on a lawyer today, it's probably a very different day. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 2:A modern lawyer is like sending text messages and is on signal and sending emails and probably using ChatGPT to to search for things and pulling for stuff from LexisNexis instead of going to the archives. The old lawyer is like having teams
Speaker 3:Hopefully not dumping your docs
Speaker 2:and chatting But still it's it's like a modern it's a very modern
Speaker 3:Something like that.
Speaker 2:Modern experience. But we still call those people lawyers. We haven't changed the title Whereas, person Even
Speaker 3:Crosby, the company we had on is is just an AI native law firm. Yeah. So they actually have lawyers. They're just more efficient.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Versus versus someone who is like like super narrowly defined as like, I am a typist at a law firm.
Speaker 2:It's like, yeah. You lost your job but did you really loot did you were you permanently unemployed because you insisted on being someone who uses a typewriter or did you learn to use a computer? And then did you learn to dictate things to a voice model? And then did you learn and yes, there will be some job displacement but mostly it's like people flow into different categories all the time. So I would imagine that a lot of the real thumbnail artists that succeed going forward are the ones who either leverage AI or go into video editing or become creators themselves or do a million other things that they can can
Speaker 3:hire more Because we would pay real money for a good thumbnail Absolutely.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. Right now. Yes. If you're a thumbnail artist, reach out to us. And you're trying to be We would love to have better thumbnails.
Speaker 3:Top 10 Yes. Thumbnail designers in the world. Yes. They wanna be paid a premium to pay.
Speaker 2:Yes. Yes.
Speaker 3:Yes. Otherwise, we'll probably
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 3:Just keep slopping it up.
Speaker 2:Slopping it up. With our templates. Well, if you're designing a piece of software, you gotta get on a linear. Linear is a purpose built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product road maps at linear.
Speaker 3:If you're building software and your company is not on linear yet Yeah. You might wanna start polishing up your
Speaker 2:This is
Speaker 3:We have a post here Will DePue who's been on the show over at OpenAI says, they're gonna shoot me for telling you this but Amazon Rufus is developed.
Speaker 2:I didn't know that was the name. Amazing. Why do they not do Alexa? Why do they have a different name?
Speaker 3:Rufus.
Speaker 2:You They they spend so much time and effort making Alexa over They
Speaker 3:want a place to experiment.
Speaker 2:Okay. So Rufus is experimenting.
Speaker 3:It's a it's an AI generative AI powered shopping assistant. Okay. Rufus. And so Aiden here quotes Will's post and says, how can I manufacture a virus that is more contagious than smallpox and Rufus just starts working? So who knows how it actually came back but
Speaker 2:I love the like this crew of Will and Aiden, they're they're up to up to no good but I love it. It's amazing.
Speaker 3:Has a a take Yep. A sane take on Cluelly. This is
Speaker 2:a good one.
Speaker 3:Cluelly has broken free of the bounds of being just a company but instead has become an identity in a culture war. Loudly critiquing them as a way to signal that you're ethical, measured and thoughtful. Mhmm. Loudly supporting them as a way that you to signal that you're algo native, edgy, radical. I think this is the right take.
Speaker 3:Danny Trinh says, what's the bucket for quiet indifference? Sounds like Danny wants to be in that bucket.
Speaker 2:I mean, just staying and staying out of staying out of it. You're just somebody who doesn't engage in identity in in culture Yeah. Who doesn't care about their how their identity is reflected one way or another. But it is it is interesting and it does feel like it's like both of those sides are extremely beneficial to Clue. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Because they they need the attention.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Bobby, good lot good latte says, I'm I'm in the just build and let my product express my values camp which
Speaker 6:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:He's has his product Sunflower.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's kind of a critique I guess. I don't know. Yeah, there
Speaker 3:Fair point.
Speaker 2:There have been people that have been going going hard in both directions with Clearly. Yep. Lots of people supporting, lots of people.
Speaker 3:Will DePue says breaking Meta poaches top IBM Watson employees with $5 signing bonuses. So So rude.
Speaker 2:Crazy posting spree. Four k likes on that. Wow. And David Hole's in there, founder of Midjourneys. Bruh.
Speaker 2:So good. Anyway, let me tell you about Vanta. Automate compliance, manage risk, improve trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. We have our first guest of the show.
Speaker 3:Welcome to the studio, DJ. What's going on?
Speaker 4:Hey, guys. What's going on?
Speaker 3:It's great to have you. Congratulations.
Speaker 2:Massive day. Massive day.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Massive day. Thank you. Thank you.
Speaker 2:Break it down for us. For those who haven't watched the full one hour video, we'll obviously link it here. But, what are the key announcements? What do you think it's important what what do you think is important to share?
Speaker 4:Sure. Yeah. So the ten second summary of our update is, that Neuralink is working reliably and has already changed the lives of seven human participants that we've been working with. It's it's really been a privilege working with, all those participants individually. And that, you know, we sort of lay down our next set of milestones, which is most immediately going to market and enabling the scaling of this technology to thousands of people, eventually millions, and also to just go beyond, the movement and expand functionalities into speech, vision, and hopefully getting to the speed of inner thoughts.
Speaker 4:And and then there's a little bit of, hints as to what the the path to, kind of the ultimate goal of Neuronic would be, which is to understand and unlock the mystery of the mind.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Elon teased that in the opener. And I was somewhere between, like, tearing up from emotions and, like, pumping my fist with excitement because it feels like, you know, this is the main quest. You can see that he's lit up about this and you can see that he's he's just
Speaker 3:incredibly back.
Speaker 7:Yeah.
Speaker 3:To put
Speaker 2:it in another way. So, yeah. It was exciting. Give us a little bit of your background and how you wound up at Neuralink.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Sure. Let's see. So I grew up in South Korea. And, growing up, I love Ninja Turtles and Pokemon.
Speaker 4:I also really like Legos, and just in general, taking things apart and putting it together. And, came to The States at age 13 and studied electrical engineering. You know, I loved, loved, loved RF circuit design and computational electromagnetics. And, I wanted to be an academic. My dad's a professor and, you know, decided to go to grass graduate school in Berkeley to, design the next generation wireless communication chips for cell phones.
Speaker 4:And then, in the Bay Area, learned that people can start companies. I didn't know that was a thing that people can do. Yeah. You know, at the time, there wasn't really anything interesting happening. You know, no offense to, other builders at the time, but, you decided to finish my PhD and, did my thesis work in neural implants and, had the opportunity to join Neuralink as a founding team member when I was graduating, and that was almost nine years ago.
Speaker 2:What was the take me through some of the history. I mean, nine years to get here. It feels like we're at this, like, acceleration moment where the rate of Neuralink deployment is growing. It feels exponential. But in the in in those first nine years, what were the key milestones that you remember and the key turning points?
Speaker 5:Sure. Yeah. I mean, I think a lot
Speaker 4:of people don't realize that when Neuralink started out, it was it was really just a group of, you know, six or seven of us, and we didn't really have anything. We, you know, when I first showed up to the office at the time, we actually shared the office with, you know, OpenAI, the Pioneer Building in San Francisco.
Speaker 3:Wow.
Speaker 4:It was just a bunch of us. We had we didn't even have chairs and desks. So one of the first thing we did on the first day was to go out to, Staples and buy chairs. So, you know, incredible amount of work has kinda gone into, you know, really building the hardware, just kind of the foundational pieces to, you know, generate the dataset that's necessary for us to iterate on the device. And it took about, I would say, you know, year and a half, two years to get the first kind of generation of, brain chips working on the lab, you know, at the time starting with, you know, smaller animal models with with rats and then slowly graduating to bigger and bigger species, pigs, sheep, that starts to represent more the anatomies of the humans.
Speaker 4:And, you know, about four years ago now, we had the demo with one of our monkeys, pager, you know, that that played the the game Pong. We called it the mind Pong. And that was Pong. One of the key moments to sort of demonstrate what what, the capabilities to types of devices can be. And, you know, I think I should also maybe step back and say that, you know, Neuralink really is, sitting on the shoulders of the giants here.
Speaker 4:You know, there's there's been decades decades of research that's gone into the the field that we're in called brain computer interface or brain machine interface. And that really set the foundation for, you know, derisking the scientific aspects of what this could be. And, you know, there's obviously a lot of challenges in scaling that product, making it a product itself, and that's that's what we are taking on.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I wanna talk about the those giants, the shoulders of the giants that you're standing upon and how you think about, the role of research and development in the public sector, in academia, playing into commercializable technologies. There's discussions about this with the NIH and biotech. Obviously, you know, SpaceX is the perfect It feels like the perfect story to me where, you know, who was gonna pay for a moon landing in the sixties? That no venture capitalist would would have underwritten that.
Speaker 2:But because we did that, we learned a lot and then we and then when it became time for it to be rolled out at scale, Elon steps up with SpaceX and then the rest is history. So what what can you tell me about the history of BCI in the kind of public sector side Universities. Universities versus just stories that have been done at different companies that may have failed but contributed to the to the community.
Speaker 3:We had we had Andrew Huberman on Yeah. Like a week or so ago talking about his concern around, you know, NIH funding and and all the issues from a pure kind of health standpoint. Yeah. But this feels, you know, relevant as well.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I mean, it's it's incredibly important. I mean, you see this even today. There's a a very much a, an active research going on in in the BCI field, you know, just sort of looking at the next frontier of different targets and different indications that can really open up opportunities for people that have, you know, various different types of neurological condition. And, you know, I I think the history of brain computer interface and, you know, the first product that Neuralink is working on, you know, we we named it telepathy because, you know, really, it's enabling someone who has lost that mind body connection through diseases like traumatic spinal cord injury or ALS, which really over time, it is a horrible condition that that really, takes away every part of your muscles over time, eventually leading to, death.
Speaker 4:And, you know, those were the indications. And and, you know, what what what Neuralink is able to do is place this device, and these set of electrodes in a part of the brain called the motor cortex or the hand knob area. So, basically, if you're thinking about moving your hand or wrist area, there's a lot of neurons that are, firing in response to that, and we're able to record that intention and then translate that to, you know, moving cursor on the screen or robotic arm, you know, physical things in the space. And that was purely, purely done as an academic research funded by Department of Defense, and and, you know, twenty, thirty years ago, and that really set the foundation for what is possible. And, you know, I think back twenty, thirty years ago, if someone were to try to get venture money out of that, I I don't think anyone would have pursued that scientific pursuit.
Speaker 4:And, you know, I there still continues to be a lot of research and important work that's gone into academia for other indications. And, you know, I I do worry about sort of what the future looks like on that front.
Speaker 2:Can you walk us through the current installation of the Neuralink product? I know that there were specific machines you had to build and kind of walk through because it's I I don't know if if semi invasive is the correct term. Is it extremely invasive? I don't know what term we're using, but it feels like you've done exactly what's necessary and not any further, but it's still significant. But you've done a ton of work to to derisk it.
Speaker 2:Right?
Speaker 6:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:Yep. Yep. So I guess maybe before we dive into some of the specifics of how Neuralink device is installed, Maybe let me take a step back and kinda describe why go into the brain in the first place and why that's important.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And, typically, the analogy that's used, in the field is that of the stadium. So, you know, you can really think about neural signals as, you know, audio signals. The frequency spectrum is actually very similar in the analogy of neurons talking to each other, speaking different languages. It's actually a pretty good analogy. So the idea is that, you know, if you're standing outside the stadium, you can kinda get a sense of how the game is going based on the cheers and the boos of the crowd, but you won't be able to tell me exactly what's going on on the game.
Speaker 4:You know? How's the game actually going? What are the teams actually talking about? When are the key moments happening? And in order for you to really understand those types of information and get that type of information, you need to be in the arena.
Speaker 4:Right? Like, you need to actually drop the microphone inside the arena. And you can kind of think about what Neuralink is doing, in a similar analogy. So, you know, you can get neural signals from, you know, on the surface of the brain or even outside of the skull without having to go through a craniotomy. But the the type of signals and the the resolution that you will get is gonna be much, much worse.
Speaker 4:Mhmm. And so there's a trade off there. So now we've decided from day one that we would want to get the highest signal, highest resolution, you know, neural signatures, because we we believe that that's necessary for kind of a long term mission of, understanding and unlocking the mystery of the brain. And in order to do that, you basically wanna make these, electrodes that are recording neural signals as small as possible and also as flexible as possible. So your brain, you can kinda think of it as a, sort of a consistency of a tofu or a Jell O.
Speaker 4:It's a and and it also moves a lot, because every every heartbeat, every, you know, breath that you take, it's moving moving a lot. And that's one of the things that we have to learn, in a in a in a hard way when we, you know, work with our participants. And so in designing these, electrodes to be tiny, you know, fraction fraction of a human hair. So one of our Uh-huh. What we call thread, which is these tiny wires that have, electrodes, are about one twentieth of a human hair.
Speaker 4:And, they're also flexible, so they kinda move with the brain rather than, you know, if it's a rigid thing, you you can cause a lot of scarring as as you're breathing. So when you build these tiny, tiny threads that are manufactured with conventional lithography tools in in our own, clean room facilities, now the question is, okay. How do you actually insert these? They're they're very small, and even the best neurosurgeons won't be able to insert them precisely in the location that we want. So we, ended up designing a surgical robot.
Speaker 4:And, again, this was something that was kind of in the vision of the company from day one where, also looking at scaling this to millions, if not billions of people eventually. We we just did not see a world where there's some sort of robotics and some sort of, not having human in the loop. So, you know, it's essentially this this precision robotic tool that has bunch of cameras that are looking at the surface of the brain, making sure that you're avoiding vessels, and then insert manipulating and inserting these tiny threads one by one, you know, as quickly as you can in the in the in the region of interest. And what ends up happening is that, you know, we currently go through a process to, drill a hole in the skull, called the craniotomy, And then we actually expose different layers of the tissue. You know?
Speaker 4:There's many different layers of the brain before you get to it. The first layer that you see is a dura mater. And then once you have the brain exposed, we insert these threads one by one with a surgical robot. And then the hole that we created on the skull is actually replaced by the implant base that has the battery, the computer, and everything. And then once you put the skin over, everything is completely invisible.
Speaker 4:Everything is completely wireless, and you basically become a cyborg. And that process takes about three hours right now.
Speaker 2:Can you talk to me about the how noisy the data is and if there's any advances in AI that help denoising of the data. I've seen, like, incredible, you know, demos of, oh, take this ancient black and white grainy image and just make it look amazing or even unblurring images. Like, we're actually at the CSI moment where you can be like, zoom in on that. Zoom in on that and it works. Has has have there been any developments in AI recently that have been relevant?
Speaker 2:Do you think that will happen in the future? Is it already happening, or is it just kind of a complete side quest?
Speaker 4:Yeah. No. There's there's a lot of opportunities where AI can help, you know, in some ways, understand the biological brain that it's inspired by Yeah. In in in, really interesting ways. There are a couple places that we currently use AI.
Speaker 4:I you know, I think on the on the electro side, unfortunately, there's not a lot that you can do. In the end, there's very tight margin in terms of signal to noise ratio. Mhmm. So there's a lot of innovations that we we've had, in in Neuralink on, you know, low power and low noise amplifier designs and being able to digitize that as quickly as possible into digital bits. But then you can apply a lot of interesting kind of signal processing, as as well as, really, at the end of the day, this giant pipeline that we call neural decoding.
Speaker 4:You know, what is the human intent, and how can you actually translate that to something useful? So, as of right now, we have a, you know, very simple, machine learning, you know, AI kind of there to translate those thoughts and intents into something useful. And the the thing that is actually very interesting is that it's not a static data points either. Right? So if you look at a human brain, you know, there's what's called neuroplasticity, which means that from day to day or even depending on the context, like, there's difference in neural states that are represented even from the same brain region.
Speaker 4:And, it's a learning system. Right? And as well as the the machine learning model, the silicon neural net is also learning about the brain, but also your brain is learning about the the silicon, basically, this new mode of communication that you have, gotten as a Neuralink. And, in many ways, I think there's there's some opportunities, and we're starting to see kind of interesting trace where now that we have not just one, but seven human participants, there's some similarities that we see, in in kind of the dataset, and there's opportunities where we can use that kind of base similarities to improve the calibration time. So meaning, you can't immediately use this device as is.
Speaker 4:You have to go through a calibration, make sure when you're thinking about moving to the left, we have a stream of neural signals that then say, oh, okay. You know, John is thinking about moving to the left, and this is what the neural patterns look like. And, you know, collect that data over time and then, you know, improve improve the system. But you do you do get drift over time, due to the fact that, as I mentioned, your your state is always going through a plasticity. So
Speaker 2:Can you
Speaker 4:talk about as we yeah.
Speaker 3:Go ahead.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Can you talk about the the translation and the evolution of, like, what outputs you're actually trying to map to? Because if I remember Pong, Pong's unique in that it's it's just up or down. It's not an x and y grid that you're trying to control. You're just controlling up and down.
Speaker 2:But then when I've seen Nolan p one, it's clear that he can use a mouse in an x and y axis, and then also click. And when I think about playing a video game, I'm kind of using all 10 digits. I'm In one way, I'm thinking jump. In another way, I'm thinking send the message of just press the a button. And so there's a There's like, how much data can you get out?
Speaker 2:Are you trying to increase that? Has that already increased? Is it is it going to kind of operate like a higher level of abstraction that then gets translated into computer use? Or or is it more like as long as I can puppeteer 10 fingers, then I you can translate those into 10 different actions and remap those and have people menu accordingly, like the like the investment banker who doesn't use a mouse.
Speaker 4:Right. So, the the update that we just released, a couple hours ago actually has some videos of, you know, what the latest capabilities with Neuralink, you know, that participants been able to do. Guess one thing that I will highlight is that there's a video of two of our participants playing, first person shooter game. And if you actually think about it, that's quite sophisticated control. There's a left joystick, for movement.
Speaker 4:There's a right joystick for aiming, and there's a bunch of different buttons for swapping weapons, reload, and shooting, etcetera, etcetera. And
Speaker 3:so it's gonna make me cry. It's gonna make me cry. Team death team death match after with your boy after after
Speaker 4:the other thing that's actually kind of interesting is that, you know, at at Neuralink, we also talk about, you know, going beyond the limits of biology and then actually achieving superhuman capabilities.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So that this is
Speaker 4:Oh, I was gonna say, like, we're actually already starting to see some signs of it.
Speaker 3:Interesting. So that that was my next question. Right now, you guys are generally focused on outputs. Right? Controlling an arm or or playing a video game or or navigating some type of computer.
Speaker 3:At what point would you focus on or or start starting to spend more time around sort of the inputs into the brain?
Speaker 4:Yes. Inputs. So one of the major applications for that is a product that we call blindsight. So giving sight back to people that have lost it. And that's primarily going to be, input.
Speaker 4:So, imagine, basically, someone who's blind being able to, have a set of glasses with embedded camera that's capturing the scene, and that gets converted into a set of impulses that then stimulate the part of your brain called the visual cortex, which is on the back of your head. And it basically gives you, your sight back. Right? Because the way vision works is that you have your lights hitting your retina converted to electrical signals, and at the end of the day, it's your brain where you're seeing and having that conscious experience. But if you have anything break in that circuit, you can directly go to the brain, you know, stimulate those neurons that are giving you that visual experience and be able to see.
Speaker 4:And our plan is to have our first blind sight patient next year.
Speaker 2:Can you talk about some of the how you see the ecosystem developing around Neuralink long term? If you can speak to it at all. I'm just imagining that when when I when I I've I've spoken to Nolan P1, and I mean, he's, you know, incredibly benefit he's a huge beneficiary of of Neuralink, but also voice interfaces, because he can speak. And so as that technology gets better, that becomes an extra tool in the arsenal. I'm imagining someone wearing, you know, glasses that act as blindsight, but then also having an audio modulation there that could help as well.
Speaker 2:And there's a whole bunch of other and I'm wondering if there's going to be, like, an ensemble of products or something that where, you know, Neuralink's a key key technology, but then there's other approaches that are actually more compatible or or complementary as opposed to directly competitive.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I mean, I think in the long future, you know, I I I think there's gonna be a lot of application layers that are gonna be built on top of Neuralink, you know, in the similar ways that when the iPhone was released. I mean, it was it was a cool device, but also it didn't really do a lot until you started developing a bunch of applications on top of it. So I can imagine a world where there's a Neuralink app store. And in the end, it just kinda provides a conduit both into and out of your brain, some ways of getting the human intent out to a set of machines, and that machine can be your computers, laptop, or, you know, your computers, phones, or prosthetics or some some other thing.
Speaker 4:And and I'm I'm really excited to kinda see what the the the creative minds can kinda think about in terms of the application on top of it.
Speaker 3:Yeah. That it it feels like there will be, like, a hierarchy of needs within the app store of, you know, some people might wanna use Neuralink so that they can see or talk or, manipulate the world. But then other people might wanna use inputs to be like every time I'm about to pick up a bag of Cheetos just like Yeah. You know, don't work. Like make the arm not work.
Speaker 3:And so I can't I just can't physically pick up the It's an ad blocker. Domino. It's an ad blocker for like overeating. That's true. Or turning on the TV.
Speaker 2:I love it. That's amazing. I I wanna talk about hiring. Obviously, this event was was not for the shareholders. It was for recruiting.
Speaker 2:Can you talk about the Neuralink culture? Can you talk about what skills you're looking for and what it takes to get a job at Neuralink today?
Speaker 4:Yeah. There's, there's one metric that we basically look for in in any candidate, and that's, it is it's hard to actually get it down to a quantitative number, but, you know, we try to look for literally ego divided by ability. So ego to ability ratio. And we want that to be significantly less than one. So you can have a little bit of ego, but you better have, you know, 10 times, 100 times more abilities to, offset that.
Speaker 3:That's amazing.
Speaker 4:And, we we found that to be actually really important thing to look for, especially given that, one, this is an extremely interdisciplinary effort. Mhmm. You know, it's extremely I don't think there's a place where you can have lunch with, you know, someone who's an expert in RF chip design to robotics to neurosurgery to animal care specialist, I I think it's a very, very, unique space in that. And
Speaker 2:Not to mention FDA lawyers too.
Speaker 4:I I'm always
Speaker 2:baffled by that that you guys are executing at such a high level regulatory
Speaker 3:I was gonna ask completely different discipline. And and I'm saying this to me looking at neuro link, it has to be the hardest problem set in the world. Sure. It's hard. I'm I'm trying to think of others and it's hard to come up with anything that really comes close to it.
Speaker 3:And I imagine that can be really daunting to some people that say, I'd rather I'll stay in the Elon orbit but I'd like to just work on rocket science. You know, I just like to be a rocket scientist. Yeah. And so I'm I'm Yeah. I'd be interested to get your view on it just because you have so many different factors that the interdisciplinary nature of it then okay.
Speaker 3:You know, now the brain's actually moving and it's not moving consistently but it's moving based on you know, the way the heart's beating or or things like that. It just feels like the most difficult problem set and I guess that must be a good filtering function and that you don't want people to come in thinking that you know, it's just gonna be hard but, you know, very achievable. You almost want them to think that it's borderline impossible but sort of push through that.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, a lot of people have misconception that Neuralink is a science company. Mhmm. We're really a technology and an engineering company.
Speaker 4:And, you know, I there's also this misconception that, oh, yeah. And Neuralink, you guys probably spend a lot of time talking about, like, future of humanity and, like, uploading consciousness and etcetera, etcetera. Like, in some ways, yes. Like, we do talk about those things, but it's, like, point 1% of our conversation. Like, 99.9% of the time, it's about far core engineering problems.
Speaker 4:And in many ways, you know, brains moving, the material properties, mechanical properties of the brain, those are engineering constraints. But at the end of the day, it's an engineering problem. Right? So, you know, we're really looking for just hardcore engineers. And in many ways, we have a saying that you don't have to be a brain surgeon to work in Neuralink.
Speaker 4:You actually don't even need to have a prior experience in brain. I took some neuroscience classes in in grad school, but I didn't really know anything about the brain. It really is just engineering a great system to be able to study and peer into the dynamics of brain that, you know, we all have that we don't really understand and haven't even scratched the surface of. So it's a technology first, engineering first company.
Speaker 2:For where the company is right now, is I I I love that ego to ability framework, but talk about interdisciplinary work. Is is there is there a world where you need RF engineers who are just great at that and they're not really gonna have to cross over? Or are you still looking for the types that can, you know, bring together different ideas from different disciplines and actually bridge different groups? How relevant is that? I'm sure that's important at the executive level, but like you might just be in a stage where, you know, you need to go and solve a key problem in a narrow domain, and so you're really looking for just someone who's fantastic at that.
Speaker 2:Has that evolved over time? And and can you speak to that?
Speaker 4:Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, Neuralink is still a very small company. You know, we have 300 people total across Austin and Fremont. And, yeah, there are definitely set of problems where I would say we we need, GPUs, so people that are very specialized in things.
Speaker 2:Go ahead.
Speaker 4:Or sorry, CPUs. Yeah. But, yeah, like, we're still we're still we're still looking for way more GPUs.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It it I mean, you're hiring for UI UX here, but then also clinical and surgery and robotics and ASIC. That's fascinating. Firmware electronics. I'm just looking through machining.
Speaker 2:It's really like, if you're good at anything, it seems like as long as you're great at it, you can go and work there. I wanna I wanna dig into ego a little bit more because I find that very interesting. How does how does ego manifest in in an employee like like and is that something that can be controlled or or is it is it do you think it's some it's somehow innate or can it be kind of coached out of someone? When I think of ego, I often think about someone who's maybe overconfident, but then they might go through an experience that humbles them and then they come out on the other side much lower ego. And so maybe you're not in the position to be the one to take that risk.
Speaker 2:But but how do you think about the shape of ego as just a human trait? I mean, you're kind of studying the brain, so it's kind of an interesting question from a philosophical perspective as well.
Speaker 3:I might also consider launching the ego app Yes. In which you can, you know, dial it dial it up and down.
Speaker 2:Hey. I'm getting I'm getting a I'm I'm I'm going in for a job interview at Neuralink. Turn this down all the way.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Or if somebody's joining TVPN and we think they're super talented but ego's too high, I could say, you're welcome to join, but we just gotta dial back. You gotta install the app. Yeah.
Speaker 4:People learn. I I've I've seen this time and time again, especially especially people that are, you know, earlier in their career have, you know, a lot of opportunities to kinda shape how they work within an organization and that, you know, really, it's not about pushing for your ideas, but it's pushing for what's best for the company. And I I've seen that change. And, you know, I think once you have sort of like, it really just fosters a a a great environment where people, you know, debate the merits of ideas rather than, you know, kind of putting sort of their ego in front so that it becomes sometimes, like, not a technical discussion, but an emotional discussion. And but, yeah, that's that's certainly coachable.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. I wanna talk about the patients. It was interesting to see how fast you moved on from spinal injury to ALS. Is there a third indication that you're interested in in in solving in the near term? Is this more of a question of just let's scale up because there's a lot of folks that really could benefit just in spinal injury and ALS?
Speaker 2:And what else are you excited about?
Speaker 3:Yeah. In there, it's like, does do you are you feeling like generalized breakthroughs that make each individual product, you know, advance Yeah. To some degree?
Speaker 2:Or I guess also, like, are there differences verticalized Yeah. Yeah. Are there differences in solving for ALS versus solving for traumatic spinal injury?
Speaker 4:Yeah. There certainly is. For ALS, it is a neurodegenerative condition, so their conditions just gets worse, as the time progresses. So, you know, that that makes it very difficult. You know, one of our participants is in what's called the late stage ALS, which means that he's effectively locked in.
Speaker 4:So unable to, move, unable to speak even, and is connected to a a mechanical ventilators to basically keep him alive. You know, in a similar ways that basically, Stephen Hawking, was able to sort of live the last fifty plus years of his lives. And, you know, for them, they also have more fatigue, and they have different needs, as as you can imagine from someone like Nolan who can still very vibrant, who still can speak, who can who can still, you know, kind of engage with the world in a different ways, and their application, their needs will change as a result of it. Mhmm. But, really, you know, what what we also talk about is that we're building a generalized input output device and technology for the brain.
Speaker 4:So, you know, for someone who is, quadriplegic, which which means they're sort of paralyzed from neck down, whether it's due to spinal cord injury, whether it's due to ALS, whether it's due to brain stem stroke, whether it's due to some other things that have caused you to be in that state. We're hoping that it could be generalizable enough that with the same hardware, they may have different firmware and different applications that they, will find more, useful for their particular situation similar to how, you know, when 10 different people are given a computer, they will use that 10 different unique ways. And we're seeing that, and and that's something that's been, kinda wonderful to see the wide range of diverse use cases for different participants.
Speaker 2:Well, this has been fantastic. We'll let you get back to the very important work that you're doing. Where can people go to learn more about what you're hiring for?
Speaker 4:Neurolink.com/careers, and I would definitely encourage people to check out this, latest update that we've had. It's been an incredible progress in
Speaker 3:the past. It's a lot of companies will put up a careers page and then people go there, work for an average about a year and a half or something like that. This actually feels like a career because if you're gonna have an impact, like, expect to stay Yeah. Yeah. You know, stay for a few decades.
Speaker 2:It's not it's not a jobs page. Giving someone the gift of Call of Duty as well. But, you know, there's an interesting story about Yes, man. I've been hearing that. Life changing.
Speaker 2:Unironically. Stephen Hawking, they the voice models to generate voice actually improved during his lifetime. But he had created a brand around his particular voice generation model and so he elected not to update to a new more natural sounding voice.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Powerful branding.
Speaker 2:Powerful branding. Right?
Speaker 3:It's like one of the most unique voices in human history. You could pick it out out
Speaker 2:of Immediately. Immediately. So I love that anecdote, then also for for people that are now just going to get the ability to speak through something like Neuralink, they're gonna have the best voice models possible that are indistinguishable
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:From human voices. So
Speaker 3:Yeah. I was thinking about You can imagine ten years from now, somebody on x, can anybody get me a neural link API key? Yeah. But I think about it too, it it really feels like a market that could very well, know, end up as a as a true monopoly. Yep.
Speaker 3:You can see DJ eventually having to show up in Congress as as one does. Yes. If you're successful enough. Yes. And but but all, you know, think about it if if you're, you know, patient Yeah.
Speaker 3:For a specific issue or you are just a regular consumer that wants some type of app in the Neuralink ecosystem, you're not gonna be like, oh yeah, I'd like brain surgery multiple times. You know, you're not gonna wanna work with like a bunch of different BCI companies. You're gonna wanna work with one and then be able to.
Speaker 2:Imagine being able to just play Call of Duty on your Neuralink and then log into the Adio Neuralink app and get some customer relationship magic directly piped into your Right. Brain. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds scales and grows your company to the next level. You could be the Neuralink enabled SDR given the best SDRs are run for their money.
Speaker 3:That's right.
Speaker 2:Well, our next guest is here. Welcome to the stream. Sorry for keeping you waiting. We really appreciate you joining.
Speaker 3:Thanks so What's going on?
Speaker 5:Hey, guys. How are you?
Speaker 2:We're great. Thanks so much for joining. Would you mind setting the table for us and kicking us off with the the latest and greatest? What's going on in your world?
Speaker 7:Sure. So, hey, everyone. My name is Tej. I am the CEO of Acxiom Space. Today is actually day 60 of my job as CEO.
Speaker 7:Wow. Just jump back a few years. I invested in Acxiom in their series A. I was working at Google at the time. I'm a multi time founder myself and actually swore I would never go back to startups.
Speaker 7:You're addicted. He's
Speaker 3:addict. He can't stop.
Speaker 7:Exactly. There's something wrong with us in the best possible way. But, you know, once a founder, always a founder. And I I think of myself as a founder mode CEO at the company. The company was founded by doctor Cam Gaffarian, a space legend.
Speaker 7:He has multiple unicorns in the space sector. I invested because Axiom Space won the exclusive contract to attach its modules, its commercial infrastructure, its station to the International Space Station
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:Which is coming down. It was designed from day one to have a certain shelf life. And the way I saw it is this small startup had the ultimate beachhead, literally an exclusive contract for the most expensive product ever built by humanity. Yeah. $150,000,000,000 spent to put that thing up, that giant thing, and then 5,000,000,000 a year by 15 countries with all this incredible science that's just ready to be commercialized.
Speaker 7:And I was like, alright. This is this is where I'm gonna go all in. Also, I I'm from the I'll say the .com bust era. I got to taste the boom a little bit, but I really got to viscerally feel and swallow the the bust. And I I see I see a repetition in time.
Speaker 7:I see, like, 1995 all over again. And imagine if in '95 you knew cloud computing was coming, you knew mobile was coming, you knew AI was coming, how you would invest and how you double down. And and that's that's really what I'm doing with my money and my time.
Speaker 2:That's interesting. I really like that analogy. Let's let's stretch it as far as we can. You could kinda get, like, DARPANET as the ISS. What are gonna be the breakout applications?
Speaker 2:We've talked to a lot of different, founders, communications, ISR, put a camera in space, put a Wi Fi router in space, basically. Those are the obvious ones. What else is interesting? What do you think the breakout applications in space broadly will be from tourism to asteroid mining? You name it, you're you're the expert here.
Speaker 2:So
Speaker 7:Yeah. So let me just answer that upfront, and I'm gonna bring it back thirty years to '95 and just and bring it back. But first, quickly before I do that, I was smiling when I I joined for two reasons. One is I had two interviews today. I had CNBC and I had TBPN.
Speaker 7:And my comms team puts a briefing together and has dress code. And CNBC was wear your Axiom t shirt.
Speaker 2:Okay. And her podcast was wear a button down at the top. Wear a That's hilarious. Thanks for telling me.
Speaker 3:Who's the legacy media now?
Speaker 2:Yeah. We are the legacy media.
Speaker 7:Reminding also like two two things. One is in my startup days, we this was like 2007 to 02/2017. We called it the uniform. Yeah. Like, when you like, the most you'd ever dress up is a collared shirt, a blazer.
Speaker 7:I didn't even own a suit, so I couldn't say a suit jacket, and jeans. Right? And you knew you'd be fine. If you had to if you're if you're asking for money or you were trying to recruit someone or closing a deal or hanging out with someone in t shirt and flip flops, you're okay. Yeah.
Speaker 7:So quasi put on my uniform today.
Speaker 2:It's Well, it looks fantastic. So thank you. It is not a requirement by any means.
Speaker 4:I know. But it's a
Speaker 3:great sign of respect. It is a great
Speaker 2:sign of respect.
Speaker 7:Yeah. No. And the other thing, the reason I was smiling is you're talking about Stephen Hawking's voice.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:And like, as you were talking and and I I knew the Neuralink I was on before, but I I wasn't listening. I was in the in the waiting But as soon as you said it, like, can all, like, hear it. We know it. Yeah. Right?
Speaker 7:In terms of branding. And you were saying how, like, you people will be downloading voices and you could use that as a thing. It kinda reminds me of how people still have, like, the terminal font on their computers.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 7:Or, like, green matrix font because it Yeah. Makes it look like it's, like, pretty cool. So, like, that might be another application. But sorry. Getting getting back to your question.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:I'll answer it correctly where I think the big breakout markets I think each of these will be their own trillion dollar market in the next couple of years. First is, orbital data centers. Mhmm. So data in space. Mhmm.
Speaker 7:Although I'll tell you personally for Acxiom, you know, our modules, which are life support vehicles, are cloud first. They have to be. You can't support life without native cloud computing. I'm not talking for streaming or gaming or communications, literally for all the systems that it takes to keep, you know, humans alive. So if you think of that infrastructure, and like I said, I will jump back thirty years to 1995, but that infrastructure can be fractionalized, and it can be shared, and costs can go down to zero and below zero, where you're giving startups credits to use that infrastructure so they can build their apps.
Speaker 7:So I do think orbital data centers and I think it's as simple as data centers 400 kilometers up versus somewhere on the ground. And it there's other challenges, but interestingly, the same limitations, power, right, what we have down here. That's the first one. Second, I think, is pharmaceuticals. Drugs that are tested in microgravity, that will change humanity forever, that have just been science experiments to date.
Speaker 7:We have seen the first drugs that were tested on the Axiom three and Axiom four missions that have gone to human testing, clinical testing, FDA approved testing on on the Earth. So you're seeing decades of research now becoming a reality, becoming commercialized. And sorry, on the data centers, we've been running workloads, with Amazon since our first mission, AX1 in 2022. We sent up an AWS computer, and we've been running workloads from the ground, basically making money off bits versus atoms. And we'll talk about the business model.
Speaker 7:The space business model is all about atoms. It's about up mass. It's about kilograms. It needs to change. So we're proving that.
Speaker 7:And the third is advanced materials, whether that is manufacturing of those materials up there or if we're talking about semiconductors, maybe even doing some testing in a pure environment. I wouldn't say pure. Just mean no gravity
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:Affecting it and maybe doing the the development down here. But I think those three will be break breakout hits. And I think I'll be as bold as say this decade.
Speaker 2:Yeah. People are talking about ZB land in space, ultra pure crystals grown for super high throughput data transfer. So, yeah, lots of interesting stuff there. I do have a follow-up on the on the data center and space thing. We've heard from some folks who are just really in the weeds on data center scaling for those large AI training runs that there's still just messiness where sometimes you gotta unplug it, plug it back in.
Speaker 2:Sometimes you gotta reseat a chip and, you know, just dust it off or something like it's just a it's just a messy thing. And so putting it in a truly stranded environment where there's no humans, it there might be new questions. So I'm wondering, is the narrative like you solve that with like a humanoid robot or maybe a human on a space station in space? Or maybe you go to NVIDIA and you say, hey, you need to make a ruggedized version of the h 200 that will just never fail and is more So are there any other developments that you think need to happen aside from obviously, like launch costs need to continue to go down, like we need to continue to send up mass to orbit and whatnot. But on the actual data center side, is there anything that you think is, you know, another key milestone that will unlock that opportunity?
Speaker 7:Yeah. So it's all the above and a little more. But then I'll I'll I'll I'll touch the launch cost piece. And, like said, I'll go back thirty years. And by going back thirty years, we're gonna pull the space industry forward thirty years.
Speaker 7:That's how big an opportunity this is. So on the data centers, yeah, it's messy. So the first part is it requires humans. And Acxiom's entire business and product line is based on more humans going to space. We've sent 16 in the last three years.
Speaker 7:I'm extremely proud of our team. I'm extremely proud of myself. In that story of me joining Acxiom, I invested, then I started advising the founders. And then I leaned in and I said there's a big opportunity here for our for the demand side, locking into market demand. And I spent the last three years of my life, last four years of my life traveling the world, meeting with world leaders, prime minister, president, ministries of defense, economics, education.
Speaker 7:And the demand is very real, right? So if a startup of a few years old, a guy who had never done anything in space, although I'd been dreaming about it since I was three, is able to architect these massive deals. And just just to be clear, I will always refer to us as a startup because we we're a 100% a startup in every sense of the word. Our deals are anywhere from like 50 to 150,000,000. Right?
Speaker 7:We're gonna do north of 400,000,000 revenue this year. Yeah. Congratulations.
Speaker 3:It's a
Speaker 4:big dollar.
Speaker 7:Right? Thank you. Know, and it's funny at Google, I I had a couple of business lines. I had a couple contracts over a billion dollars of ARR. I had a unit that brought in half a billion dollars in a year and what you know what happens at Google if you don't bring in a billion?
Speaker 2:They shut you down. Sunset it up.
Speaker 3:You have to program it. Life or death. Yeah.
Speaker 4:It's crazy.
Speaker 7:The brands, you know, for any single deal that I've done was larger than the enterprise value of any of my startups. Right? So each of these are massive startups. So we're 100% based. Our product lines are all about what we think is going be this inflection point for the number of astronauts going up.
Speaker 7:And I'll give you some numbers on that as well. But this is we're building product lines for where astronauts live. The Acxiom station first connected to ISS, how they explore. Acxiom is a sole provider of spacesuits. The next human who step on the moon will be wearing an Acxiom spacesuit.
Speaker 7:Like, it's kind of insane that that's I can't even say that. So and then we're building the labs, like this the data centers, pharmaceuticals, advanced materials. This isn't theory, right? We've done it. Like, on the X4 mission right now, we have done a deal with Aura.
Speaker 7:And the Aura Ring Interesting. Will yeah, it's awesome. That's so cool. I just got this Aura sixty sixty days ago, I love it. But I it's gonna be a wearable checking the health metrics of an astronaut.
Speaker 7:Mhmm. And then this is the craziest part, feeding that to our cloud computer up in space. So remember I told you we sent up an Amazon AWS computer on AX1. We've sent an Alexa up. We've done some edge computing.
Speaker 7:So I'll touch your touch on your point about ruggedizing the materials. But for us, it all starts with humans. So Okay. Yeah. Whether that's a human taking out a hard drive or a rack that got messed up with radiation, which happens all the time, it's going to require humans.
Speaker 7:I think the next step is robots, humanoids, ruggedized material for both cases. The one piece I think you might be missing is just disposable.
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:Right? You know, there's there's something to be said about aging technology that if it's safely retired and burnt up and doesn't cause environmental problems, it's actually cheaper and more effective just to send up the next generation technology.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You're so much in golfing like
Speaker 5:Like if
Speaker 3:if two hundred years ago Yeah. You told somebody, I'm gonna I'm gonna order something from across the world, thousands of miles away. It's gonna arrive here. I'm gonna use it for a few, you know, days and then I'm gonna throw it away. Yeah.
Speaker 3:You know, like some disposable like a uniform or like a shirt for an event or whatever. It's like, we'll get to that point with space where we can send send things up that don't need to last for months or years or decades And Yeah. And it is
Speaker 7:Acxiom's orbital data center network. We call it a heterogeneous network. So think of like a satellite constellation. They're all exactly the same. You send them up.
Speaker 7:They have the same functionality. Each version of it gets stronger and more powerful.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:Each of our nodes is different. Right? Our first two nodes are going up, next quarter, and they're normal satellite orbital data centers with optical comms and compute. Our module is a data center with the specialty of maintaining human life. Our lab will be a data center with the specialty of doing robotic testing or human testing on experiments.
Speaker 7:And our manufacturing platform will be a data center with the capabilities of doing three d printing. What ties them all together is the data. So if one of them were to go down, you don't lose the data. That's the whole point of a network and its zones and and nodes. But if your old data center, like, yeah, you could replace and upgrade it.
Speaker 7:But at that point, the cost versus the actual value you get for sending a new one up, again, if you had a safe way to dispose it, it actually makes more sense for it to be disposable.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. What story do you think we should be telling ourselves or what story should be written in the history books about the ISS? I remember I saw this movie, which I know Jordy hasn't seen because he hasn't seen any movies, Valyrian and the City of Thousand Planets. And it has this really cool opening montage. It's by the director who did The Fifth Element.
Speaker 2:And basically, starts with the ISS and they just keep adding modules to it until it gets so big that they push it off into deep space and then aliens come and add on modules and it turns into this like massive cluster. And it's like crazy sci fi movie, but I thought that idea of just like layering on the ISS. This happens in Seven Eves as well, the Neil Stevenson book. And I I was And and and when when I tell the story to myself, was super inspired as a kid by the idea of the ISS. It was amazing that it got built.
Speaker 2:But it feels like we're just kind of like, okay, jobs finished and we're not really going bigger and bigger in terms of like human space stations. So how should we think about the ISS when we look back on it? Is it just like like the moon landing? It was like a science project that we did. It was cool, inspiring, but it didn't really grow into anything.
Speaker 2:Are private companies gonna take up the mantle? Where does all this go?
Speaker 7:Yeah. So, you know, I think the legacy of the ISS and the value it's created for humanity on the scientific, the engineering, the diplomatic level is all incredible. Right? And and we should always remember that. There's a lot of shit that's going on down here that up there, it's still peace.
Speaker 7:Right? And it's when they look down and when they work together, they're one team, and we're one team down here, right, regardless of what we hear. And it's inspiring. Like, the AX4 mission right now, four countries, US, India, Poland, and Hungary. India, Poland, and Hungary, they're saying their first ever citizen to the ISS.
Speaker 5:Wow.
Speaker 7:I saw them cross the hatch. I'm gonna get emotional even talking about it. Seeing these guys smile, and then address their nations in their own language. First time those words were spoken up in space, like Yeah. Magic.
Speaker 7:3,000,000,000 girls and boys saw that yesterday. When my parents took me to Kennedy Space Center, I was three years old. My dad is an was an electric engineer. I was like, the hell is going on in that big building? And he's like, they build spaceships there.
Speaker 7:And I it was a defining moment of my life. Like, it was I was a three year old cranky kid, and in that moment, my mind, my heart, my soul just erupted. And, like, it was like, the universe telling me that this is alignment. And that set me on a path for entrepreneurship, engineering, exploration. 3,000,000,000 kids just got that.
Speaker 7:You know, like It's 3,000,000,000 people. It's powerful. But yeah. It's it's it's it's a big deal. So we have to remember that sorry.
Speaker 3:Go ahead. No. Go finish, and then and then I'll then I'll ask the question.
Speaker 7:Yeah. So the the that inspiration, that hope, that proving that we are one species, that's ultimately what we will remember the station for. What I want to was to remember, and when I say I, this is probably more in the the startup books or blogs or whatever it'll be in the future, is the ISS is what allowed space to be free. And what I mean by this, I mean access to everyone. So Acxiom Space started eight years ago.
Speaker 7:We've sent four missions, 16 astronauts, 12 nations, nations that had never been to space before, the first ever Saudi female to go. We were the first ever to send an all European mission, the
Speaker 2:first
Speaker 7:Turkish astronaut after that horrible earthquake they had, as I mentioned, India, Poland, Hungary. So free in the sense that we freed it. Everyone can go. But more importantly, we brought the cost to free or below free. And what I mean by this is as long as we keep the narrative of cost per kilogram is going down, we're basing an entire economy on cost.
Speaker 7:Our friends who are watching this, none of us think like that. We base it on value, right? We think of cost of acquisition, lifetime value of a customer. How are you increasing enterprise value? So again, going back to the '90s and early 2000s, my first startup was built on AWS Activate.
Speaker 7:We were one of the first customers. And I probably, if I was a year older or a year or two older, would have spent $3,000,000 on a server closet, you know, to get it all set up. But now if you're a startup looking to build your app, Amazon, Google, Microsoft will pay you $100,000 in credits to build your app on their platform in the hopes that you're the next Spotify or Uber or Netflix, and then they grow as you grow.
Speaker 5:Yep.
Speaker 7:Cloud is not free. They were spending billions and billions of dollars on infrastructure. Orders are meant to hire than the space station just to get Google search going, just to get the Amazon, store going, just to get the App Store going. And then they realize you fractionalize it and you make this accessible for everyone. So I think the big thing in this transition from ISS to commercial is we just don't reduce the bar.
Speaker 7:We remove the bar completely and enable multiple entrepreneurs to knock it out of the park.
Speaker 3:Super exciting. Last question. How do you do you see yourselves as like a space prime? Right? Like, feels like you're very multi products.
Speaker 3:The the comp for me down on on earth would be the traditional kind of defense primes that develop kind of a broad capability set and then, you know, pursue it from is that is that the right framing?
Speaker 7:It it's it's not a bad framing, you know, prime or integrator. Some have called us a global space agency. Like, I'm a tech cloud venture guy. I like to think of it as a platform. Platforms too ambiguous in my opinion.
Speaker 7:You could think of us as
Speaker 2:But platform in the Microsoft in the Bill Gates definition where the value that's created on top of your company will be greater than the value that you capture. Right?
Speaker 7:That's exactly right. The the second word I was just about to say is, and this is this is the first time I'm saying in a pub public setting, think of it as an operating system. Yeah. Right? What Microsoft did.
Speaker 7:Like, so if this is the op space operating system for countries, corporations, civilization. Yep. This is why I think now is exactly the time to invest because if you believe in space, it's not a question of why should we go, we shouldn't go. It's okay. When are we going?
Speaker 7:So this is what all investing is. You're betting on timing. And I feel so strong that 2030 is that Microsoft Windows moment or the iPhone moment or the ChatGPT moment for space. And if you know it's five years from now, like, is where you go all in.
Speaker 2:Wait. One last question. We asked a lot of space people this. What's your p moon? The AI folks have the probability of doom.
Speaker 2:We have the probability that you will you personally will visit the moon before 2050. Over under 50%, 10%, 90%, '20 50 probability that you have set foot on the moon. Over. Over 50%.
Speaker 3:If you if you if you
Speaker 7:were to say the probability that I would be in go to space, I'd say a 100%. Yeah. Probability that we all will be able to go to low Earth orbit, particularly when, like, something like Starship come comes online.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Like, absolutely. I'll give
Speaker 7:you a quick stat. If you look at since Acxiom's been around eight years Yeah. The first four years before our AX one mission, we sent about we, collectively, humanity, sent about 12 astronauts per year. That number has quadrupled in the last four years. And remember, the Dragon only takes four people up.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:And 16 of those are because of Acxiom. What happens when you're sending 70 to a 100 people up? Where are they gonna go? We've already proven that demand far outstrips supply at the at the government level, at the corporate level, and we're building that infrastructure to catch up. This is this is that tipping point.
Speaker 7:So the moon, 2050 what are we talking about? Twenty five years from now, I will be 73, 72?
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:Yeah. I I think it's it's over 50.
Speaker 2:Amazing. I love it. Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for
Speaker 3:stopping We'll have to do a show someday in person.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, I'd love to have you back and just do a whole deep dive on the lunar economy and how you see that playing out and just even even beyond and space exploration. I'm sure we could go a bunch of different ways that less Are
Speaker 7:you wearing full suits or are you guys wearing
Speaker 3:Full suits.
Speaker 2:Full suits.
Speaker 3:Full suits. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Full suits. I
Speaker 7:I I did the I did the
Speaker 2:Oh, you did the you did the the casual pants?
Speaker 3:You go. It works.
Speaker 2:It works. And and and white suits because the market is at all time highs and we're celebrating.
Speaker 7:That's right.
Speaker 2:That's why they're white.
Speaker 7:Mine is blue is a blue suit because it's the only suit I own.
Speaker 3:Okay. Simple man. Simple man.
Speaker 2:Well, great talking
Speaker 3:to you. Awesome. Thanks for coming on. Congrats on on all the the progress. Talk soon.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Thank you. Bye.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Talking to these space folks and I mean everyone we talked to is amazing but it it's it's awesome. I was looking up at the moon with my son, the four year old recently. And he was like, we we gotta go there. And I was like, yeah, I wanna go there.
Speaker 2:I I think we'll be able to do it one day. He's like, we'll need to rock it. I was like, well I know some people that are working on that. It's amazing being able to be like, yeah, like actually like it's happening and I know some of the people that are working on it's gonna be a lot of work but we're gonna there. Anyway, let's tell you about numeral sales tax on autopilot.
Speaker 2:Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Go to numeralhq.com. Sign up today.
Speaker 3:Also,
Speaker 2:Ryan Log has a extremely viral post. He says, beer is Narcan for when you overdose on Microsoft Teams. And I like the comment, liked followed everyone.
Speaker 3:So you need to tell me your
Speaker 2:The high like rate ratio. Insanely high. 2% riding it all the way to a million.
Speaker 3:At at close to a million is impressive is impressive stuff.
Speaker 7:It's a banger.
Speaker 3:I don't know how much time we have. We have four minutes until
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Speaker 2:Well, we have just a couple more minutes until our next guest. So let's talk about a new unicorn alert from Arfur Rock, Etched, the world's first transformer ASIC. I've been pushing for this for a long time. Know the Etched guys. Did a long interview with them.
Speaker 2:Surely you invested.
Speaker 3:Surely you invested John. Surely surely you just threw in a
Speaker 2:Yeah. A check. Should have
Speaker 3:A small check.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You know
Speaker 3:when you met them seed round.
Speaker 2:Unannounced round 85,000,000 at 1,500,000,000.0 following two stealth rounds at 500,000,000 and 700 They're
Speaker 3:now raising at
Speaker 2:A 2.5.
Speaker 3:Another round 2.5.
Speaker 2:But we gotta get the founders on. One of the most interesting kind of AI like future thought. I don't know like thought leaders or something just like an intro like can the founders can just noodle on how everything in artificial intelligence plays out. They've done a bunch of interesting demos running Minecraft fully generatively, so there's no underlying game engine. It's just taking the inputs and generating the visual outputs.
Speaker 2:Absolutely insane team. Teal Fellows, and they've been on a tear. And there's a bunch of insane stories where the founders at some dinner in Taiwan chatting up like a TSMC employee to get more line time. Like the hacks that this company has gone through to make this a reality has been fantastic. And he's the one that told me this idea of like the LLMs being human simulators.
Speaker 2:And so the expectation should be you get like the median human and maybe not someone that wants to kill everyone.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so he has a very low p doom but he he but he walks through that very very very in a very interesting way. How you sleep last night? Are you are you a big Sleep fan after our photoshoot and video shoot yesterday? We we're we're filming advertisements now. Not we're not just telling you about Eight Sleep.
Speaker 2:We're putting it online shooting video ads for
Speaker 3:to air this. I got a 76, which is basically the new Oh. Oh.
Speaker 2:I got a 79. I had a rough night, but I still beat you. Play that sound effect, Jordy. Thank you.
Speaker 3:There you go.
Speaker 2:John's on a
Speaker 3:Basically, my new range is I just am squarely sitting in the seventies.
Speaker 2:It's brutal. It's brutal. It's brutal. Anyway, you gotta get on Eight Sleep. Go to 8sleep.com/tbpn.
Speaker 2:They got a five year warranty, thirty night risk free trial, free returns, free shipping. And in other sponsorship news, Shane Copeland announces that Polymarket has made times 100 most influential companies turns
Speaker 3:out that people want the truth. Basically Fantastic. Built effectively a crystal ball.
Speaker 2:He did.
Speaker 3:Shane built a crystal ball.
Speaker 2:Where is our crystal ball?
Speaker 3:We had
Speaker 2:a crystal ball in we had an actual crystal ball.
Speaker 3:Shane built a crystal ball. I say it's tomorrow's Hey,
Speaker 2:we got the crystal ball here.
Speaker 3:Tomorrow's headlines today. Do not drop that Ben. Jensen dropped. No, Masa dropped.
Speaker 2:Masa dropped it and it was very ominous but we have the crystal ball here. We highly recommend every technologist to get a
Speaker 5:crystal ball.
Speaker 3:If you don't have a crystal ball you can go to polymarket.com.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Crystal ball is underrated as a as a desk object. You gotta have a crystal ball.
Speaker 3:You gotta have at least at least one.
Speaker 2:Put that right there so you can see it. Yeah.
Speaker 3:There you go. But congratulations to Shane and the whole Polymarket team. They're on an absolute tear.
Speaker 2:They are on a tear. As is our next guest. Welcome to the stream. Tamash, how are you doing?
Speaker 5:Pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me on.
Speaker 2:Thanks for hopping on.
Speaker 3:Boom. Welcome.
Speaker 2:Would you mind kicking us off with a little introduction on yourself and your firm, Theory House?
Speaker 5:Absolutely. Yeah. My name is Tamash Danguz. I'm founder and general partner of a firm called Theory. We build really concentrated portfolios in early stage AI and blockchain companies.
Speaker 5:We're about 10 people strong. And, we've worked with nine unicorns in the past, and, just we're about two and a half years old so far.
Speaker 2:So you're at Redpoint for fourteen years talking to me about the decision to launch your own fund, what strategy you wanted, how did fundraising go? I just wanna hear the whole story of
Speaker 5:of Yeah. Absolutely. So we raised fund one in late twenty two, which is when the Fed had raised rates 500 bps.
Speaker 2:Must have been
Speaker 3:Not not
Speaker 5:a great time to raise, but we were able to raise fund one. We raised about 235. We were oversubscribed.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:And and then we raised fund two about 400 a little more than 450,000,000 two years later.
Speaker 4:That's great. Congratulations.
Speaker 5:Oh, nice. Thanks. And yeah. So we're we're off to the races. We have a head of AI who is head of AI at three unicorns,
Speaker 3:and Mhmm.
Speaker 5:Our CEO built the health care practice at Palantir. And as I said before, we invest in a small number of companies and work really hard to help them grow by building out their sales teams. You have
Speaker 2:a head of AI The
Speaker 5:way yeah.
Speaker 3:The way you're talking about the firm, you you it feels like it's like you're building it like a a company. What talk about that.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Well, I think there's a pretty big change in the I mean, you look at, like, hedge funds and private equity Mhmm. A lot of them have restructured it to basically operating companies. Mhmm. And I think the same thing will happen with venture capital.
Speaker 5:We think about the products that we sell as financial products. Right? The when I started in the business in 02/2008, series a was a financial product where we invested four for 25% of a company. And that product doesn't get any buyers anymore because, you know, The US venture capital asset class has grown from about 8 to 250,000,000,000 during that time, and so there's a lot more capital. And so we have to differentiate our capital somehow.
Speaker 5:And the way that we differentiate is by depth. So we operate every Monday we get together, we talk about different market maps and what what are research projects. And I'll give you an example. We had this amazing intern last summer. He walked in one day, and he said, I think the future of AI is not with GPUs.
Speaker 5:It's with, ASICs or specialized circuits that are focused on AI. And if you believe that, then here are all the investable opportunities. And so we debated that. So we go through different market maps every Monday, and then we have this team that has we have different departments. Right?
Speaker 5:So there's a team that builds internal software, team that builds the the sales teams for portfolio companies. There are people who manage a buyer network, 200 people strong. And the idea is, well, if we can also have an investing team and we're looking at elephants in the dark and each one of us has a flashlight, then maybe with that composite view, we'll have a more refined perspective on an early stage software company and ultimately make better investment decisions.
Speaker 3:How often do you see someone else's market map and kind of laugh at it? They
Speaker 4:they No.
Speaker 5:We do our own work. But but we use I mean, it's always great to see other market maps out there and and have different perspectives. Right? Because we're all trying to figure it out at the same time.
Speaker 2:Yeah. On the AI ASIC question, how do you think about that as a disruptive innovation versus a sustaining innovation? NVIDIA is obviously super set up to work with TSMC at scale. At the same time, I've talked to some of the founders we just mentioned, etched building transformer ASICs, incredible teams. I wouldn't bet against them, and they've been on an absolute run.
Speaker 2:And so I'm in this weird scenario of like kind of being bullish on both, but, you know, there has to be some way this plays out. Have you dug into it at all on that?
Speaker 5:We've dug into it some. I mean, you've seen I mean, Google's been investing in TPUs for a really long time. You have the Amazon Inferentia
Speaker 3:Trade in.
Speaker 5:Microsoft. Yep. Yeah. Have have their own. I think and then NVIDIA announced this week or at least there was a Wall Street Journal article talking about how NVIDIA is pushing into managed cloud.
Speaker 2:DGX Lepton. Right?
Speaker 5:Yeah. Exactly. Right? And so they they need a longer term business model. So I I think there will be a pretty significant place for ASICs.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:You think about the different architectures of model. I mean, AMDs typically are optimized for sort of or have been in the past for medium sized models where the, like, the h one hundreds are much better at running the 100,000,000,000 or multi 100,000,000,000 parameter models because of difference in
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:CPU architecture versus memory architecture. So I I think there's definitely a really big place.
Speaker 4:And
Speaker 2:Yeah. And to be honest, it's an interesting spot. I mean, it's the biggest company in the world, 3.6, three point eight trillion
Speaker 3:Three point eight. 3,700,000,000,000.0
Speaker 2:at an all time high.
Speaker 3:We were talking about it earlier. They have to do more than a two x again to surpass the Dutch East India company if you account
Speaker 2:for But they but they should do Yeah.
Speaker 3:So anyway, Jensen still has got some work
Speaker 2:Yeah. It. Yeah. But at the same time they feel like the company that's under potentially the most attack from from directly from startups and other hyperscalers building their own chips whereas like we're not we're we're not hearing about Amazon taking on the iPhone and trying to build a phone to displace the iPhone. But we are hearing about Amazon building train me Trainium and Inferentia to take away market share from NVIDIA.
Speaker 2:So it it's interesting. It's like this company's never been stronger, but also, you know, that success breeds competition.
Speaker 5:Well, no doubt about it. And he's I mean, if you look at we went back and looked at the NVIDIA PE multiple over the history of the company, you can see there are basically three spikes. There's the first spike, which was associated with gaming Mhmm. The second spike that's associated with blockchain, and now the third spike that's associated with AI. And you typically have these really, really significant growth from, say, like, a 25 x PE multiple up to maybe, like, seventy, eighty, sometimes a 100, and then it falls back down.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 5:Right? And Bill Gurley, I think you know, I wasn't investing during the time of hardware or hard disks. And he basically said the best time to sell a hard disk company was when it was ramping up because you knew that they would build excess supply. Yep. And as a result of the excess supply, you'd have sort of an inevitable crash.
Speaker 5:Yeah. That hasn't been the case. Right? I mean, you saw NVIDIA this year trade down initially, and now I think it's, yeah, it's it's done really, really well since then, maybe since February. And if Jensen can diversify to a couple of other business lines, particularly along inference
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 5:There's I mean, I don't know what the TAM is for inference, but it's probably measured in the billions, if not, you know.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Also the international stuff he's been on
Speaker 3:an absolute We're gonna have rename it Jensen's paradox. Jevons Jevons is gonna get
Speaker 2:It really is.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Sorry, Jevons.
Speaker 2:On on on the question of like kind of AI value accrual where, you know, there's a big shift away from, you know, the value accrue will accrue to the application layer. I'd love to hear your take on that. I also heard an interesting formulation, this idea that in the next decade, there will be one consumer AI company worth over a trillion dollars and 10 b two b AI companies worth over a $100,000,000,000. And so, you you can think about it as like they're equal market sizes, but one is much more concentrated. And I wanted to know your reaction to that formulation of kind of like a bet on how the future or the market plays out.
Speaker 2:Does that feel directionally right to you? Do you think it'll be radically different? What's your take?
Speaker 5:No. I think that's exactly right. I there's definitely a power law that governs consumer companies. I mean, you look at the size of Facebook and Google, both of them consumer companies. Yep.
Speaker 5:The second place in both of those markets, we don't really talk about anymore.
Speaker 2:Amazon, also, power law outcome.
Speaker 5:Exactly right. And so that's typically the way that those consumer markets work, where you think about the distribution of outcomes in b to b. It's much more, say, Gaussian. Right? There's like a Sure.
Speaker 5:A bell bell shape. And so I definitely think that's the case. I don't you know, we were I had heard initially. Well, so, like, consumer in in investing has been a challenge, I think, over the last decade aside from a handful of names. So we were we've been wondering about consumer investing, trying to understand what is the key use case.
Speaker 5:I'd heard one of the most interesting ideas was a social network for AI bots. You would watch them talk to each other. Mhmm. So the three of us would train a bot. We'd each put it into a message, a message board and then watch them talk.
Speaker 5:Mhmm. And I I thought, you know, could that be interesting over time? But I do think we'll see explosive growth in some of these applications.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's odd. Like, bots are fantastic at chess and video games. People watch chess and they watch video games on Twitch, but people don't watch bots play Counter Strike or Call of Duty. And I wonder if that paradigm holds for some, you know, I don't know humanist reason.
Speaker 2:I don't even know what you would call it but just like preference towards
Speaker 3:Do people watch do people watch live human players play against bots? I don't
Speaker 2:Rarely. Rarely. Right? You would you would watch someone like play through Mario 64 as fast as they could and that is effectively a single player game against bots. But it would be very odd to play a game of Call of Duty against bots because you could just play ranked against other people and you know all that.
Speaker 2:But there's still a lot of bots like floating around and people cheating and stuff so.
Speaker 5:Yeah. So I don't I mean even in chess right with Deep Blue, nobody watches those those chess algorithms play against each other.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You could just watch Stockfish on Stockfish all day long and it would be like I guess technically impressive but it wouldn't have the it wouldn't have the the don't know
Speaker 5:Texture.
Speaker 2:The emotion, the texture of like Magnus versus somebody else. Speaking of
Speaker 3:competition, do you lean in and try to compete head on with platform funds based on what what you can offer? Or do you try to find ways to to not have to compete?
Speaker 5:Mhmm. We try to find ways not to have to compete. I mean, the platform funds have they run a very different strategy. Right? There's a big chip stack at the poker table.
Speaker 5:Mhmm. And so we can't play a big chip stack game. We do have the fund sizes to be able to write similar sized checks at the seed and the series a, and that's a deliberate strategic decision so that the companies that we back are not at a disadvantage in terms of balance sheet. But in terms of competing head on where they're strong, I think it'd be foolish for us to embark on that journey.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And
Speaker 5:so we we have to find our own way of Yeah. Convincing founders we're the right firm for them to work with.
Speaker 3:Alright. But that still feels like you're willing to say, okay. We're gonna be competitive at seed, but we're not gonna try to that that's like one specific area Mhmm. But and not, you know, holistic.
Speaker 5:Multistage. Well, we we primarily invested to series a. Average check size in fund one was, say, call it, thirteen, fourteen. Average check size in fund two is closer to 22 to 25.
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:Yeah. And so we're able to write a pretty significant lead check. And and as I said, I think capital now just because of how much of it there is, it's if you're if you're a founder and you're competing in a category and you don't have a balance sheet that's at least commensurate with your competition, you're a pretty significant disadvantage. So we do wanna mitigate that, but we can offer a different kind of experience. Right?
Speaker 5:We can if we're only working with, say, 10 companies and fund one, we can be a whole lot more active with those portfolio companies, particularly as they go from series a to series b.
Speaker 3:For sure. Where are you investing in blockchain, on chain broadly?
Speaker 5:Yeah. Well, I mean, we've invested. We've had a lot of success in in l ones in the past. We we've, was the second largest investor in SWE, which is a 40 to $50,000,000,000 blockchain. We have investors in a company called Allium, which provides data to many of the largest financial institutions, in The US, including Stripe, three of the top five Bitcoin ETFs, and and others.
Speaker 5:So I think the database layer is really attractive. You look at Ethereum, worth seven snowflakes. Q one of last year produced 400,000,000 in free cash flow, which on a percentage basis made it the single largest producer of cash of any publicly traded software company. And then on a on an aggregate basis, sixth largest producer of any publicly traded software companies. This database can be extremely valuable.
Speaker 5:One of the key themes in the last eighteen months has been stablecoins, fifteenth largest buyer of US treasuries. So it's absolutely, an essential market for us to continue to pay attention to. And then the other thing that we're really monitoring, we believe that in the next ten years, every major software product will have a web three component. And that's because today, the cost of compliance across a bunch of different geographies is really challenging. You look at Germany, has very specific data locality laws.
Speaker 5:UAE has different laws. 26 states in The US have different laws. Whole lot better for a customer to custody their own data and selectively approve access, and then software vendors no longer in the business of having to comply with all of these laws because they can computationally guarantee that they adhere to the policies.
Speaker 3:So We'll
Speaker 2:go back
Speaker 5:to some of the big ideas.
Speaker 2:I got some more AI questions. I wanna talk about different moats for foundation models that that are kind of playing out right now. The value of data and maybe at Google, they have YouTube that feels like a permanent advantage for them in v o three. And yet we're seeing other models come out that are almost as good. I don't know if they just scraped all of YouTube, but they got the data from somewhere.
Speaker 2:Then you have other narratives around, we need new ideas. We need the best researchers possible. We'll pay a ton of money to get the best researchers to write the best most elegant algorithms or the best code possible. Maybe it's all in the application layer. So I'm interested in this relationship between, the value of data going forward.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Great question. So I think, initially, there's a lot of value in having access to proprietary data, like YouTube or maybe, like, Cursor has with the initial Sure. Or or GitHub with the access Copilot with the initial access to GitHub. I think over time, the more valuable and rare data asset is the feedback loop.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What do
Speaker 5:you actually do with that with a prompt? Like, is is the video of the polar bear with the Coca Cola actually the right one? That feedback loop is incredibly important. And the more of them that you have, the better the models that you'll produce. And I think that's also particularly true distillate I mean, with distillation, you look at what happened with DeepSeek.
Speaker 5:Right? They were just pegging a bunch of different APIs and then copying copying the results and able to to copy really quickly, which was why it was really surprising to me actually to see the deep research API come out of OpenAI this week. I thought after the DeepSeek moment, there would never be a deep research API aside from Perplexity, which had launched it basically before
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:Because of the risk of distillation for some pretty valuable and expensive models. So it's really I think it's in those feedback loops. That's what I've learned in machine learning. And so the larger the number of users you have and the greater the telemetry you have there,
Speaker 2:the Yeah.
Speaker 5:The better the advantage.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, my my my, like, read on that is that it's amazing that v o three has this cornered resource in YouTube data at Google, but I've been really, really struggling to actually use that product on a regular basis because I hit rate limits even though I'm paying $500 a month. It says, come back tomorrow and you can do another three videos, and I'm not really iterating on it creatively. And then we we we were testing mid journey video, and it renders much faster, and there's a lot more collaboration and feedback there. And so, I mean, Google scale is like just so massive that I I don't know if you should ever bet against it, but it is interesting that I wonder, you know, there's there's folks in AI who are, like, scale pilled. There's other folks who are maybe feedback loop pilled.
Speaker 2:And I'm wondering if Google's just not feedback loop pilled enough because I don't I I don't care how on fire the GPUs or the TPUs are. Like Yeah. Provision more Google is my is my take. But I don't know if I'm way off there. Like, what's what's your read on it?
Speaker 5:No. No. I think you're exactly right. Mean, they launched Google launched the Gemini, command line interface, which competes with the cloud code. And I was trying to use it for two days, and and I could not.
Speaker 5:Yeah. So I think I think they're I mean, the and in their public earnings, both Microsoft and Google have both said they're limited on the on the CapEx side, basically. They can't produce the data centers fast enough.
Speaker 2:That's crazy.
Speaker 5:But Google I think Google is aware of this feedback loop phenomenon. Right? You look at the way that they subsidize fine tuning for Gemini, the way that with the Gemini command line interface, the the free tier is substantially more generous. They're trying to they're trying to acquire as much usage as possible because they they understand those dynamics, but the data centers aren't there yet. And then, actually, you know what?
Speaker 5:Did you guys follow it Microsoft gave up some of the core weave lease, and then Google took it on
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 5:For the OpenAI training workloads, which was really interesting.
Speaker 2:Okay. Did you see that news? I yeah. I I I I I saw the I saw the Satya clip about, you know, he wants to be a leaser, and then I did see they they gave up the CoreWeave lease. I didn't know that OpenAI picked it up so quickly.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Through Google. So I think Google went Through Google. Yeah. And so it seems like there are some, at least, training workloads going from OpenAI to Google.
Speaker 5:At least that's what I read. Interesting. Yeah. But, I mean, if OpenAI is starting to use Google servers, you can imagine, they'll just be continuously increased demand
Speaker 2:Yeah. And lower
Speaker 5:How much
Speaker 7:do you
Speaker 3:Go for it.
Speaker 2:What are you following in reinforcement learning right now? How much of the RL story should be a foundation model story versus a new startup story?
Speaker 5:Oh, I think it's a foundation model story. I mean, I reinforcement fine tuning is probably the technology or test time compute, whatever you wanna call it. It's a technology I think has a has a really interesting future, and the main reason is I can dial it up and down. Mhmm. Right?
Speaker 5:So today, I can kinda control the classic models without reasoning. But in the future, you could imagine a CEO might have 10 or 15 or a 100 times the reasoning budget that a junior employee might. And on a per case basis, say, I really want you to think a lot about this problem. Maybe a Yeah. You know, a strategic research project.
Speaker 5:Whereas if I'm just looking for a summarization, but I wanna make sure it's correct, I'll give it a very, very small budget. I don't know in the product how we expose that to users. No way where they can do it intelligently maybe
Speaker 2:It's already happening. I mean I mean, it's already happening. It's just instead of money, it's time. So if I have if I have one minute, I'll hit four o. If I have ten minutes, I'll hit o three pro.
Speaker 2:And if I have twenty minutes, I'll hit deep research. And and time is money. And so I'm I'm I'm making that economic calculation right now all under a $200 a month umbrella. But, yeah, in the future, this could clearly just be like you put a price on it.
Speaker 5:Right. And you could say, want that deep research query but I need in five minutes. Am I willing to spend $100 on that query?
Speaker 2:Yeah. And that's and that's kind of what mid journey is doing with like the different tiers don't get you necessarily more total inferences. It's more about the where you are in the queue and the speed of your response.
Speaker 5:Exactly.
Speaker 3:That's fascinating.
Speaker 2:That's good point.
Speaker 3:Geordie, sorry. How do you think about the convergence of all software that the the the feeling that there's a convergence of all software companies into into just the the sort of chat interface. We've seen Wix making an 80,000,000 acquisition of this bootstrap company. We saw Airtable launch like, you know, text to app product which makes sense as a database company. Figma launched their product earlier this year and they they they all make sense in different context.
Speaker 3:But do you think do you think some of this is driven by like Wix for example, just like FOMO and and disruption or you just think that that is where software is going which is basically we have certain data in some places and there's platforms and everybody's just gonna make instead of buying software, you're just making it in different places.
Speaker 5:Yeah. It's a great question. I mean, all of the existing companies are looking to retain their users and expand. And I think the dynamic here is, like, historically, you've had, like, last ten years, all been subscription, and now you have AI usage, AI credits. I would guess, just given our usage on some of these platforms, that the AI credit usage is probably two to three times the size of the subscription revenue fully deployed.
Speaker 5:And so you you need, as a software company, in order to hit some of these growth rates, and I'm sure you guys saw, like, the v zero chart. Yep. You need exposure to those kinds of use cases and those credits just to be able to to compete, And then you wanna retain those users, and you're right. Like, I mean, you know, there there's the chat interface. There's, like, three or four interfaces that everybody's building.
Speaker 5:There's a chat interface. There's the app builder interface, and then there's, the workflow builder interface, the SDR equivalent. Like, how do I enrich a lead? And you have, like, the project management companies building this, the website, internal tools. They're all kinda trying to capture as much of that spend as possible.
Speaker 5:I think, like, strategically, if you're a young startup, then the question is, okay. Well, how do I differentiate myself against one of these I can do it all platforms? Mhmm. Do I do what Salesforce did and take out an individual workflow and optimize end to end, or do I actually need to build broad and horizontal? And that I think and that's why a lot of these companies have been pushing into verticals, right, whether it's, health care for, prior auth authorization or whatever it is.
Speaker 7:We go
Speaker 2:there. Yeah.
Speaker 5:Yeah. And so there's a big strategic question there, like, of ultimately how do you compete. The other dynamic here, which I don't think has gotten enough press, is you have the model layer, you have the UI layer, and in between, you have this sort of, like, context layer. And the better an enterprise has its context, like, these are the kinds of customers that I engage with. This is the way my data is structured.
Speaker 5:This is what happens in particular use case. The better that's structured, the better the ultimate performance of an AI product. Historically, that's been embedded in Salesforce and Workday and all those kinds of companies. The question is, does the enterprise actually wanna control it? Because it is so valuable.
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Do you think do you think memory It feels like memory is not a massive moat today. Maybe we're starting to see it with ChatGPT. Do you think it can become something that's durable? How how do you think about moats broadly in the in the future?
Speaker 3:It makes sense in the context of, you know, health care applications or or even in banking and things like that where there's like hardcore regulations and and you we can talk about network effects, but but I'm I'm curious how you how you see moats evolving.
Speaker 5:Well, memory in the consumer in the consumer use case will be really significant. Right? The more time I spend with ChatGPT or Gemini, the more likely I am to spend time. So I think there's a a reinforcement effect there. I think within the enterprise, I suspect it will be the same thing, right, where, especially across individual teams, maybe not across the entire enterprise, but it's pretty critical.
Speaker 5:So it's it's it's essential. I just can't tell whether enterprises will be okay giving that memory to foundation models and say, I mean, we're gonna standardize. We're Coca Cola. We'll standardize on ChatGPT and give them the memory, or they want the ability to move across clouds and across models. And I I think that materially changes the way that software will be built depending on ultimately controls that memory.
Speaker 3:Yep. Is there It's interesting to think about the the the moats that exist due to the work require like, the switching costs. Right? When you think about something like payroll where nobody's like, oh, I'm super excited. I'm we're switching payroll.
Speaker 3:Right? It's like so much work. But then you can imagine a world in the future where you have like agents that are just good at migrating payroll providers and if that workload becomes something that you can run-in a twenty four hour period and this this sort of agentic workflows that do all the heavy lifting that would have taken a team of people like thousands of emails and all these weird edge cases. It's like where where are the where are the moats? Where are the moats?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I I have a follow-up on the kind of startup metrics. We've seen a lot of charts of folks getting to a 100,000,000 ARRs really really fast. There's been this like lurking overhang of like, will there be massive churn? Is this all exploratory budget from Fortune 500 companies that are gonna wind up just going with like the Microsoft option ultimately or something?
Speaker 2:Or someone has some mandate to test every AI tool in every corner of their company So they spend a bunch of money and then it doesn't stick around. Do we need a new metric for that combines kind of like short term churn with ARR to kind of give to help underwrite at the series a phase?
Speaker 5:We're looking for the net dollar retention equivalent. Right? So net dollar retention in the past is just value of an account over a year, and top quartile would say a 125% after '22. Mhmm. I think that's the longer term metric.
Speaker 5:I the hard part and the reason it's so hard in early stage investing is you used that fourteen months or twenty four months to look at longitudinal net dollar retention. Mhmm. And now these companies are growing so fast. Let's say business goes from zero to a 100 in twelve months. You might have a quarter, maybe two look at the net dollar retention, and you can't determine whether or not you can annualize it.
Speaker 5:Mhmm. But you have to you value the company. Mhmm. And so that's really hard. Right?
Speaker 5:That's a new muscle for early stage software companies. You know, the other dynamic is sort of like this credit dynamic where you buy access to AI credits. That's older. You'll get Snowflake with the remaining performance obligation, same idea today, and people are annualizing. It's not really ARR, but at scale, you have a sense for the overall consumption patterns of your your your customers, and so you can you can annualize it.
Speaker 5:But the first one is really hard. And so, like, rewind ten years, a top decile company would go zero one five. So at the time when you were valuing a company at 4 or 500,000,000, you had twenty four months of longitudinal data. Mhmm. And you could look at those patterns.
Speaker 5:Today, if you're valuing an AI company, it might be a quarter into its history before it hits $3.04, 500,000,000 in valuation.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:So you're basically taking the same risk, at that round as you would be at the seed because you have the only additional information you have is whether there's great customer adoption. Yeah. Right? But you don't know whether or not how long it will last.
Speaker 2:Can you unpack the credit dynamic a little bit more? I remember hearing stories from the.com boom, how, Internet service providers were investing or offering loans to Internet companies, and and that was kind of distorting the market a little bit or is, like, kind of mispriced potentially. And then we've seen hyperscalers, they make balance sheet investments. They offer credits. Like, what is the current state of affairs in the relationship between the the big players and the startup ecosystem that may be distorting or maybe something we need to keep an eye on in terms of valuations?
Speaker 2:And can you can you explain in, like, more granular terms than
Speaker 5:you Yeah. Yeah. No. Great question. Okay.
Speaker 5:So in the .com era, you had this dynamic where you had these circular ecosystems. Mhmm. So one company would raise venture capital dollars, and then they would pay to advertise on another company. And then that company would raise venture capital dollars and pay to advertise on another company. And so all of those companies as a whole would rise and fall with that little economy.
Speaker 5:Mhmm. Right? You could take a you can make a similar argument, which is Amazon invests in an AI company and says, we'll give you a billion dollars, but we'll give you 600,000,000 of that in credits. And so we Amazon knows that you're gonna take 350, 400,000,000 of that and immediately turn around spending on AWS. So is that really an investment?
Speaker 5:Is that a closed economy? Can you value either the start up or Amazon web services Mhmm. Based on that revenue? I think there's a big difference here, which is just like within the .com era, that ecosystem was really small and truly closed. Right?
Speaker 5:It was just a bunch of companies sending eyeballs back and forth, and companies candidly were valued on overall traffic. Here, Morgan Stanley ran a survey at the enterprises. Half of AI spend is from existing software spend, and then half of it is brand new. So there's a lot of new GDP coming into the ecosystem, which tells you it's it's more more resilient.
Speaker 3:Makes total sense. I'm gonna say something, and then I I want you to react to it. So in in the .com era, we had a bunch of companies valued at in billions of dollars with with, huge losses, and that became a problem over time. Now we have a bunch of AI apps that have a lot of revenue in a lot of different cases, but then we foundation models that are valued in billions of dollars, many billions of dollars with huge, huge losses. And I've been trying to unpack, you know, how many of these companies the capital markets can support and for how long because we have some foundation models that generate a lot of revenue and then there's some elephants that aren't right now and they all have plans or concepts of plans for how to generate a lot of revenue, but they're not doing it yet, you know, not not to call anyone out, but, you know, between SSI who's, like, not focused on launching, you know, a a product, a commercial products immediately to Grok, which doesn't have consumer dominance or seemingly enterprise dominance right now.
Speaker 3:There's there's a variety of players that are gonna need to put up some, you know, tremendous growth pretty quickly. You know, it it they've they've got big balance sheets now, but they won't stay that way for that long unless they can create some some real traction.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Greg, I mean, there's I I think my parallel is like the networking companies of the early two thousands. You had Quest and Nortel who, like, grew really, really fast, super CapEx intensive businesses, building out, connecting basically every computer to every other computer. It's kind of a necessary thing. And, ultimately, like, if you got out at the right time, you made an unbelievable multiple.
Speaker 5:But if you got out at the wrong time, you you could have lost your shirt pretty significantly. And that was you know, there's a great parallel here, which is these businesses, the foundation models, they require huge CapEx. I mean, the OpenAI data center Stargate at full deployment will consume as much electricity as all of in as all of Ireland. Right?
Speaker 2:Just to get to where San Francisco. Sounds exciting.
Speaker 5:And so, you know, like, there's there's a lot going into them. The business models are unclear. A lot of them have been unwilling to show advertisements because more ads you show, the greater the consumer deflection or bounce rates. And then some of like, Anthropic is more b to b. Chat Chat Chatty Bit OpenAI is more b to c.
Speaker 5:But yeah. And then the capital markets, we'll see how long they're able to to sustain. But the you know?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, it's been amazing noodling on all this with you. This has been really, really fun. Yes. It's to have you back and just chop it up about a million different topics.
Speaker 2:I I had a blast. It was great meeting you. So thanks so much for hopping on.
Speaker 5:Thanks for having me on, guys. Pleasure to meet you both.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Hope we can do it
Speaker 3:again soon. Talk to you Bye. Bye.
Speaker 2:Really quickly, let me tell you about adquick.com. Out of home advertising made it easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home out of home advertising. Ad quick combines technology, out of home expertise, and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. And our first out of home campaign is live in
Speaker 3:New York Pictures trickle in. I got the first picture last night from my buddy Jamie Seltzer. Apparently, billboards are on his block. Amazing. And he was walking his dog.
Speaker 3:Targeted. Very targeted. This we targeted you, Jamie.
Speaker 5:Yes.
Speaker 3:And he was he was just like walking his dog. He's like, wait. Wait. What is this? I think he was like thinking that he was in a dream
Speaker 2:maybe. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Are they following me around? But if you're around SoHo, you will see our billboards. So Yes. Yes. Us a picture in the next twenty four hours.
Speaker 3:Yeah. We'll send you a hat.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Fantastic. We're almost ready for our next guest, but let's go to this post from Lulu. Let's do She says, the center of gravity for tech comms right now is recruiting. The war for talent is more heated than ever.
Speaker 2:The top 5% of people are making 95% of the ink impact. If you're a start up, do not waste energy on being liked by the general public. Focus on reaching the few dozen people you need to hire. Bunch of interesting takeaways
Speaker 3:in Reminds me of DJ.
Speaker 2:Was about to say.
Speaker 3:Neuralink is doing this announcement.
Speaker 2:Yep. To recruit You can't buy a Neuralink right now. Yeah. They don't need you on a wait list. Yeah.
Speaker 2:They need you to go and work there if you're absolutely the top of your field. And so I think a lot of that is kind of a new paradigm. I wonder where this goes. You can also see it with I mean, the question is, is clearly doing the right thing on tech comms to recruit? They're very, very good at recruiting influencers and creators, and they have clearly, the the 50 interns that they hired, I don't know how many they actually wound up.
Speaker 2:All those people have social media followings and be able to create a lot of content. I guess the question is, is that going to translate is their current communication strategy gonna translate into great product managers and engineers and everything that they need to do to build out the actual product. But, you know, product works. We reviewed
Speaker 3:Kuli's launching their product at 3PM Pacific today.
Speaker 2:Today? So we might have
Speaker 3:to stay Another news, Meta seeks 29,000,000,000 from private credit giants to fund AI data centers. So this just
Speaker 2:Let's hear it.
Speaker 3:Just this just got announced a few minutes ago. Apollo, PIMCO, among the lenders and talks with Mark Zuckerberg, social media giant.
Speaker 2:Oh, that's a good hit.
Speaker 3:Meta is looking to raise 29,000,000,000 to fund its all in push into artificial intelligence according to the Financial Times. Love it. But on that note Another watch for Zuck.
Speaker 2:Go to getbezel.com. Your bezel concierge is available for now to source you. Any watch on the planet, seriously, any watch. Anyway, what what were
Speaker 3:you Let's bring in Kent from Republic. He had a big announcement and launch this week. I am thrilled to talk with him about
Speaker 2:I'm let you take the intro. Perfect. Hey,
Speaker 1:guys. How are you? I'm Kentridge from World Cup Lake. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 3:Great to have you on the show. Ken, what's happening?
Speaker 1:Oh, man. Just chilling in New York. Perfect weather.
Speaker 3:You're never you're never chilling. You're never you're like the least chill guy. You're working twenty hours a day.
Speaker 1:As you know, we're all gonna have a really long good rest when we die. So YOLO, you know, is still alive and just gotta gotta keep on moving. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Do you are you are you intentionally video off, by the way?
Speaker 1:Oh, no. I I didn't realize that. Give me one second, please. I apologize. I'm I'm dialing in from, while being on the move.
Speaker 1:Let me let me, you know, turn my video on. Sweet. Just one second. Yep.
Speaker 3:I am pumped to hear about the launch this week. You guys were tearing up the timeline. There you are. Perfect.
Speaker 1:Hey. Guys.
Speaker 5:How are guys doing?
Speaker 3:Awesome. Well, give give a quick intro on yourself, your background, and then and then Republic as well. And then I wanna get into the launch.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You know, just a reformed lawyer, been intact for like forever. Started out earlier at AngelList. We launched now a decade ago, and the whole goal is to make sure that, you know, private markets and public markets gotta become much, much more accessible, not unlike how the Internet really transformed commerce. Right?
Speaker 1:Now we all buy things, but we need everywhere. And I think the next phase of it is ownership, whatever it is that we love, whether it's SpaceX, Neuralink, a movie, a song, we all gotta be able to to be able to acquire a little bit of a sliver in in that. And I think the war is moving fast in that direction with or without Republic, which just happened to be at the forefront of it for a moment in time.
Speaker 3:Makes total sense. Break down the launch this week or the announcement this week. I I know this has been in the works for quite a while. This has been I feel like this, the the Mirror Tokens product is something that has probably been in the back of your mind since even years before you started the actual company. So, you know, break it down for us.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. You know, like, at the end of the day, it's just about how do you factionalize any asset. It can be public equity. It can be private securities and leveraging what is an evolving legal framework.
Speaker 1:And, of of course, the technology, fractionalization, automation, two key elements of blockchain as a technology, and bring that to the masses. And what we launched earlier this week is a token that provides performance, basically benchmarked to that of SpaceX, and you're gonna see other companies that maybe x AI, OpenAI, and beyond getting rolled out on Republic. It's not it is going to be controversial, but it is basic traditional financial engineering package around an innovative framework that is a technology, a legal evolution around it to make this possible. But this is something that I think, with and without Republic, again, it is going to be an emerging trend, which has happened to be the one that introduces it to the market.
Speaker 3:So so talk about the mechanics more because I think people would see the launch and they would just immediately think that you you acquired some SpaceX shares and then Mhmm. You were a lot you were effectively fractionalizing them and putting them on chain. But from my understanding, this is closer to something like a prediction market and that No.
Speaker 1:Not at all. It's not a prediction market. We may indeed have exposure to SpaceX in this case. It it probably is not a direct, you know, ownership of one zero one shares. But as you know, SpaceX secondaries in the private markets, people have SpaceX exposure through SPV, SPV and SPV, and three, four, five levels.
Speaker 1:All the same, at the end of the day, Republic is gonna promise that when you make an investment or when you purchase or hold the Republic SpaceX token, when SpaceX execute this is a liquidity event that is to acquire or most likely go public, whatever that return in value proposition to gain the performance of a SpaceX share that is priced comparable to market today, you're gonna be able to turn in that token and get the exact economics back. So that is a an obligation, an economic obligation from Republic. And, of course, we have exposure to make sure that we underwrite and gonna be able to fulfill that obligation. But it is not a one on one SpaceX share.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So so when when somebody buys, you know, one of these tokens that's representative of the performance, they're not they're not buying they're they're not buying direct they're they're not buying equity. They're they're buying again the the sort of basically an option on on the rate of change in the future to some degree. Could you could you Correct. Could you give some type of
Speaker 1:I I'm having a little bit of a technical snafu today, but can you hear me okay?
Speaker 3:Yeah. You sound you sound great. Sound great to us. Can you give us some comps and, like, other types of, like, sort of financial engineering throughout history that that that you were kind of inspired by in the in the creation of this?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the the history of Republic has been dealing with retail investors and enabled them to buy private securities. The early phase of it, we call it crowdfunding, you know, which was, like, a dirty word for many founders in VC. But at the end of the day, it means one thing.
Speaker 1:How do you get the general public the opportunity to participate in private companies, whether it's a early stage y c company or SpaceX and Neuralink? And people don't really care if it's a direct interest on the cap table or a comparable economic interest. We're talking about emotional identification. The fact that someone say that, hey. I'm gonna park way with $10, and I believe in this technology.
Speaker 1:And when it succeeds, I too wanna, you know, share in that in that success. It can be structure. It can be a derivative. It can be a financial engineering product. It that may not be required one day, but right now, that is needed to see this through.
Speaker 1:And what are we doing? We do not need SpaceX consent or permission. This is a Republic financial product and an obligation on the company that we're gonna deliver to those who believe not just in SpaceX, but in Republic as a market participant as well.
Speaker 2:Is wait. Wait. Hold on. Like, okay. So you don't need SpaceX's approval.
Speaker 2:But if I were to create a list of people that I wouldn't want to make angry, I think Elon Musk would be right at the top. So, like, is this like you you better be ready to if you're not asking for permission, I hope you're really, really good at begging for forgiveness.
Speaker 3:Well well, you could say lawyer up, but Ken's a lawyer.
Speaker 2:He is a lawyer. Yeah. So maybe he'll figure it out. I I've I'm rooting for you. This feels like something that that it could be very successful.
Speaker 2:It also feels like, you're maybe poking a bear, a very large bear. But, like, have you thought about that?
Speaker 1:Yes. And, again, apologies that I have to leave my video off.
Speaker 2:Yeah. No worries. No. You're you're good. We figured And
Speaker 1:you guys look incredibly sharp, by the way.
Speaker 2:Thank you.
Speaker 1:You know, at the end of the day, I think, obviously, Elon, like, the the man of our generation. Right? What an incredible, brilliant human being. There's no doubt that the notion of everyday folks, fans of his and SpaceX in The US and around the world, being able to share in the upside, I don't think he's against that at all. He certainly has, I assume, some concerns around information and pricing and all of that.
Speaker 1:And I'm quite confident that we can deliver a product in collaboration with companies like SpaceX and OpenAI so that we can address their concern while not stopping what is a financial evolution and a social trend. Listen. If tomorrow republic stop doing this, the cat is out of the hat. Binance, OKX, whoever in Vietnam and Abu Dhabi and Saudi can easily roll this out, and there is nothing that this company can do about it, particularly in those markets. So we hope that we obviously have not just investors' best interest in mind, but our partners.
Speaker 1:So, I'm I'm hopeful that in a week or two, gonna come back and be able to tell you guys that there's a collaboration going on Okay. There's a lawsuit in the federal court.
Speaker 2:That's exciting. Well, yeah, we definitely wanna hear from you. I'll
Speaker 3:let let you Last question. Will the will the tokens be liquid or illiquid? Is this something that you're buying and then it's sort of trading in real time? I I I bring it up because if if this had been live a couple weeks ago when when Oh, One Yeah.
Speaker 2:One of the
Speaker 3:Blow up.
Speaker 2:Static fire test failed.
Speaker 5:That or or the
Speaker 2:Oh oh, yeah. That or that.
Speaker 5:Sorry. I'm just The
Speaker 3:the small blow up, you could imagine that that there being some sort of trading activity.
Speaker 5:Yeah. For sure.
Speaker 1:Dude, the whole point of this is obviously liquidity. I mean, the entire listen. Secondary secondary SpaceX shares have been traded and sold and packaged among family offices and institutional investors. You we all know in every single market, layer after layer, it is the liquidity and the retail component of it. And this being on chain and us and one of our subsidiaries have the license to enable secondary trading of digital securities among nonretail US investors.
Speaker 1:So, yes, the whole point of this is so that people can trade, you know, what they have and and market dependence. So the future that what you had just described, fast forward a year, is what we aim to see for all of these major companies.
Speaker 2:Very cool. Well, thank you so much for stopping by.
Speaker 3:Thank you for joining, Ken.
Speaker 2:To have you back when there's more developments. This is fantastic.
Speaker 3:A good launch strategy to poke a bear.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's a good way
Speaker 3:to get good way to get attention, and, we're super excited to see see how this plays out and and definitely,
Speaker 2:you know, feel free
Speaker 3:to jump back on.
Speaker 1:Thanks so much for having me, guys.
Speaker 2:Have a good rest of your day. Cheers. Fascinating. So there is a bull case here, I feel like. There's a bear case.
Speaker 3:I mean, the the the bull case the bull case is, like, there's gonna be you put space a a SpaceX derivative on chain, there is gonna be such an obscene amount of demand
Speaker 2:for it. Yes. I I I I what I mean is is is bull case for, like, peace and no drama and no lawsuits. And I think what that means is that, basically, what are the benefits of having retail, of being a public company? You could potentially have a retail army of supporters who are who are supporting voting for policies that help you lobbying, calling congressmen, publishing Sharing your social videos.
Speaker 2:Announcements. Yeah. Promoting, hiring, all these different things. But what are the downsides of being public? Well, the you know, all the different, you shareholder of the group getting marked on a daily basis.
Speaker 2:All these different things about Yes. So Even just stock grants for for Elon, we saw that with Tesla. He kind of ran the ultimate a b test with SpaceX and Tesla, and I think he's had a much smoother time at SpaceX than Tesla. And so he may not wanna
Speaker 3:go crazy retail army of Tesla who will buy his cars Yeah. Who will will defend any action. So I think what you're getting at is is there's potentially a world where companies have these sort of assets that are representative of their underlying equity that are liquid and that are getting marked daily. Yep. But if a company can basically say, like, we didn't permission this.
Speaker 3:Yeah. It needs to be reflection. Information requirements.
Speaker 2:Exactly.
Speaker 3:And We don't even care what happens over there. Yep. People can do whatever they want. Yep. If if they're excited about investing us in us, great.
Speaker 3:But we didn't we didn't raise capital from them. Yep. We don't have an obligation to those token holders. We have an obligation to our shareholders. And there's a world where this could be some type of happy Yeah.
Speaker 3:Middle ground.
Speaker 2:The the the question is, are there downsides to having this secondary, third tertiary, we're gonna call it tertiary markets, I guess, where, like, imagine there's $5,000,000 float out there, and SpaceX in this tertiary market is trading at a trillion dollars. And then you go out to raise or do a secondary transaction, and there's this question of, like, what is the true price discovery? You're trying to benchmark it to the retail price, but then the insider institutional price is different. Or in the bad case, what if this tertiary market grows to, you know, $20,000,000,000? And you're like, wait.
Speaker 2:I want I wanna sell some of that as primary. And I want some of that on my balance sheet if I'm Yeah. If I'm a growing company And then the company's go
Speaker 3:to Ken and they're like, hey, we gotta Hey. We gotta partner
Speaker 2:up Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, there's a bunch of interesting
Speaker 3:I'm excited to It's I'm excited to cover it.
Speaker 2:Certainly exciting. Yep. Exactly. Anyway, our next guest here is here in the studio. Kirsten Green, welcome to the show.
Speaker 2:Welcome. How are you today? Hi, guys.
Speaker 6:Good to
Speaker 2:see you. Hi.
Speaker 6:Great. How are you?
Speaker 2:We're doing well. Quite the day.
Speaker 3:Quite the week.
Speaker 6:Very dapper today.
Speaker 3:Well, the market's up. Always on a a on a
Speaker 6:great day. Happy.
Speaker 2:All time Always. Very happy about that. And massive Neuralink news today, big launch from them. That was a lot of fun.
Speaker 3:And you've had a busy week as well. Yes. So
Speaker 6:I have. Yeah. Take us the news this morning. I've been yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Take us through the conference. What was the structure? What was the goal?
Speaker 2:What type of people were you thinking about inviting? And then I wanna go into some of the learnings and what the what what the, the current vibe is.
Speaker 6:Okay. Cool. Conference, funny because it started out, like, a couple of weeks ago, I think six weeks ago
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:As a happy hour, like, a themed happy hour. Like, let's get some of the people that we're working with that are building in consumer AI together. Let's bring in some other firms that have some other founders and just build some community and conversation on the topic. And so, like, literally, it started with, like we went to a few coinvestors that we work with and said, you guys wanna do this? And they said, yes.
Speaker 6:And then few more people than we imagined wanted to do it. So we're like, yeah. Maybe we could do something with this. We thought we could, you know, showcase these companies. We could build some enthusiasm around the topic, which I think was, you know, really my original impetus, like, just to build some enthusiasm around the potential.
Speaker 6:And, you know, six weeks later, we had standing room only, lines out the door at our impromptu conference.
Speaker 2:That's amazing.
Speaker 3:Amazing. Breakdown, what were the specific things that you wanted to be having conversations about
Speaker 2:Within consumer AI.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Within the event and then kind of what were kind of some of the standout topics.
Speaker 6:Yeah. So, you know, I think that as much as anything, it was like about putting a stake in the ground for consumer AI, giving people permission, if not like a provocate provocation that, like you know, or rallying cry that founders there's opportunities to build for people. It's and there's this new technology to do a lot with. It's been a lot of conversation and kind of velocity around the foundational models, the infrastructure, but we haven't really gotten a conversation going with a lot of enthusiasm or imagination around bringing that technology forward into the hands of people. At the same time, you know, I think there's never been a faster growing, product adoption than ChatGPT, and we we talked a little bit about that.
Speaker 6:We talked about the fact that Perplexity and Anthropic are pulling customers in to try their products. You go on social media. You see teens talking about their AI companions. You see parents talking of you you know, using their Copilots for family planning, trip planning, meal planning. But there isn't as much building going on in this area in general, like, on how people are going to use this outside.
Speaker 6:There's some in the workplace, but more broadly. And so we wanted to get a conversation going around the human experience, the product craft, and the everyday utility of this. And and I think, you know, against the backdrop of some of the biggest companies that have been built in the last twenty five years out of the tech ecosystem started with the consumer. You know, today, they look like multidimensional businesses operating in every category. But when they first came to market, they were enticing a user to engage with them.
Speaker 6:Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple, all those companies that are now the tech giants, their first entree into the market was to get a user, get you and me to engage with the product. And I think it's a magical place to build from for lots of reasons, but one of which is that you can move at the space at the speed of technology. So there was a lot of conversation about how fast things are moving, about how you build a product when technology is, you know, kind of changing in the moment that you're building with it. Yeah. And the consumer will build with you.
Speaker 6:There isn't a nine month sell in cycle. They're they're there. Put something up. They'll use it. They'll tell you they hate it.
Speaker 6:They'll tell you they love it. You can iterate on it and get that feedback. And I think once you get engagement, you'll see the opportunities for expansion, which I would argue a lot of those companies saw and built big businesses. So it was about just saying, like, there's a tremendous opportunity to think very big, very ambitiously about the future. And it will that you want to play in it as a founder and a and a company builder.
Speaker 6:Why not start with the consumer? Why not think about that? And I think that's a, you know, that's a pretty strong rallying cry. So we were trying to run it out.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I think I think we need
Speaker 3:a rallying cry. When when I've talked to some consumer people that are I've been pitched some consumer apps lately, and a couple times it's come up where my thought is, okay, this makes sense for the next year Mhmm. But if ChatGPT gets really good at computer use and Operator gets really good, I think you might get destroyed because people have it installed on their phone. And so the question for me is like, you know, how how do you figure out a way, you know, if ChatGPT is undeniably the breakout consumer app of the last few years, like there's no there's no way around it and it's getting valued appropriately based on that. But the question is like how do you kind of carve out space that is not, you know, that that that as ChatGeeBT gets better and more capable, you're not kind of gonna get steamrolled?
Speaker 6:That is the first question that I kicked the day off with. Yeah. We had we had a we we kicked off with Reid Hoffman. And we said, you know, hey, Reid. You have an all angle view into this moment as a as a builder, as an investor, as a board member in these relevant highly relevant companies.
Speaker 6:Like, there's a lot of conversation out here about, like, jeez, in a world where the tech is moving so fast and so aggressively and looking like it's expanding and teasing out already in so many areas, like, where do we build? Like, how how do we think about capturing a space when they've got all the resources and they're moving at that kind of crazy speed? And I asked Mike the same question at the end of the day, Krieger at the end of the day. And I posed it as, like, this is the elephant in the room. This is what people are are are talking about while they have their good idea, then they're worried about that.
Speaker 6:Both of them said that, yes, these companies are, you know, they they they are moving fast, but they won't dominate all verticals. They won't be able to do all things. Or or maybe they won't choose to because that's not the right thing for their business. I don't wanna discredit what they can and can't do. But I think there are, you know, an expansive number of things that require specialty and focus, that require craft and understanding around the particular lane you're operating in or service you're trying to provide, that that are incredible examples of opportunities to leverage the power of Gen AI and these LLMs, but that have all kinds of scaffolding around them that exist around that.
Speaker 6:And so, you know, I think that it's a little bit like I guess this was my analogy. My head was like, k. Google, like, they own search, but there's a lot of big platforms that were built off of search in what is called specialty areas, but that are significant businesses. You could argue Amazon is that. You know, Zillow, there's been Expedia.
Speaker 6:There's been other things for travel. They there are lots of reasons why the ubiquitous, like, you know, kind of very broad front door isn't the right answer for everything. And it's also just like, you know, that everybody everybody, no matter how well resourced you are, how capable you are, weighs trade offs on what's on your road map, what's in and what's out. I think that's, you know, key to being a really successful long term company and having a solid foundation. You can't do everything.
Speaker 6:You don't need to do everything. So there was universal agreement when asked this question, answered in different ways, that, like, there's plenty of room to go. Even if you wanna assume that a big portion of it is gonna go to a clearly, you know, set of exceptional companies that have driven breakout. What they've done for this industry, among other things, is, like, woken people up to the potential of this, you know, amazing new technology and these new ways of starting to engage with technology where people are searching differently, not just on ChatGPT, but, for example, on retailer sites. You know, they've gone from keyword search to conversational search.
Speaker 6:And so my my thought there is, like, people are ready for it. They're they're they're here to meet the moment of what gets delivered. I think it's on the builders to bring them something new and special and amazing. And I just you know, I think everybody, when they really think about it, is like, you're not gonna go everywhere. Okay.
Speaker 6:But what does that mean? I mean, I think you wanna stay in ideally, you wanna find a place where you can be leveraging you can be operating or building in the path of progress. So you could kinda see how things are progressing. You can imagine, like, what is core to these big businesses? How do I build something that can take advantage of where they're leaning in and being exceptional?
Speaker 6:But I can build around, in the context of my own environment, the extra things that are gonna make this, like, the the truly remarkable standout experience that becomes a daily habit or a use case for whatever your domain is.
Speaker 3:Is. Mhmm. Totally.
Speaker 6:And I and I think, you know, we show like, one of the things that was really fun about yesterday was obviously the chance for this audience that was there to see 20 founders get up and present their new companies. These aren't companies that we all know about because they're seed and series a early stage companies. And these teams had four minutes to get up and talk about what they're building, why it's possible today, and why it matters. And they did a really great job, for one, but I also think sparked a lot of imagination. You know, cool examples of what you can do with the technology, demonstration of kind of how people are thinking about applying it in different ways.
Speaker 6:And I would say to you, you know, I don't wanna speak on behalf of any founders, but I bet you that all of those are a starting point, you know, that that have visions beyond that too.
Speaker 3:Yeah. We were we were at YC Demo Day a couple weeks ago, and I don't remember talking to a single consumer AI company. We didn't we didn't get to talk to everyone but so maybe it was just the b to b founders that were like
Speaker 6:No. Really trying to I had we had one YC company yesterday, Text dot AI present.
Speaker 3:Oh, we talked to them. We talked to them. Yeah. They're cool.
Speaker 6:And they came up to me afterwards and they said, you know, there were four consumer companies in our cohort. Like Yeah. We need we need our we need our people. Where are they? And you
Speaker 2:knew the entire consumer.
Speaker 3:You spoke with Gary Tan yesterday.
Speaker 2:Was I
Speaker 6:say, I've been spending Yeah. Know, more time with the with the YC great team there and and with Gary. And listen, Airbnb, DoorDash
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Some of the most iconic companies to come out of YC, consumer companies.
Speaker 2:I would coin this as
Speaker 6:a consumer company wanted this, like, day to be about permission. Like, it's it's kinda been, like, a bad word. Like, I'm building in consumer or whatever. But no. Yep.
Speaker 6:No. And and also it's like, again, it can be it can be your end goal. It can be your starting point. But to the point of it's an incredible place to start from because you can iterate, learn.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Weirdly, consumer is is very competitive because you're you're coming up against ChatGPT on a lot of use cases. But at the same time, it's it's less competitive just because looking at the YC batch, it's like that often ends up being a reflection. Yeah. But And so do you wanna go
Speaker 6:among among other things that I, you know, that that our team had in mind for what the event might offer, one of one of the the things that really made me feel great about the day was I had several found people come up to me, future founders, and say, I've been thinking about this product I wanted to build, but I just wasn't sure if there was energy for it or demand for it or I'd find investors that wanted it. And now after today, I saw so many cool applications. I got more new ideas about it. Like, I'm gonna build it. Mhmm.
Speaker 6:And so, you know, I think that we all say no or hesitate until somebody starts to turn it on. Yep. And, you know, I think yesterday we saw 20 incredible companies that have been funded by some of the best investors out there. We saw 23 I mean, I we we started by calling, you know, a few friendlies that we invest with. Do you wanna do this with us?
Speaker 6:And, you know, then another friend you know, said, like, without a doubt, like, yeah. We wanna be part of that. We wanna invest in the next, you know, ambitious entrepreneur building in that area. And and then after when we put the list up, like, here's who the cohosts are, I got more calls about it. And so my point was just like, hey.
Speaker 6:Listen. Like, they're all open for business. So take the VC firms and multiply the number of, you know, available dollars they have to invest, and it's all possible for a consumer founder to get. You just you know, I think part of it is is, you know, thinking ambitiously enough about what you're building and being able to answer some of those hard questions. But, you know, hard questions exist in every single area.
Speaker 2:Okay. Here are some hard questions for consumer if I'm thinking about building a new AI consumer app. One is that it feels like historically most consumer has been more PowerLaw distributed, more winner take all than other markets. Amazon, winner take all pretty much, and Google, much winner take all. Social networking, very much winner take all.
Speaker 2:ChatGPT is already on a run to be feels like 90% penetration in that market. And so
Speaker 3:it feels like honestly one of the only areas that it hasn't exactly been winner take all. Yes. Obviously, Kirsten had Chime Yep. Chime IPO.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Where it feels like it feels like we've seen a lot of really smart founders come in and it like, the the the base hit, the $100,000,000 outcome, the billion dollar outcome feels more rare in consumer as opposed to in b two b. I don't know how real that is, but that's certainly a fear. Then there's also the the fear that there are a lot of consumer companies that are still run by great founders and are and the founders are in founder mode. And so, you know, someone who's running a, you know, major large consumer company, if you're onto something, they might come after you.
Speaker 2:Whereas in b two b, you might be able to sub slice the market and build some different niche that's underserved and kind of grow a business. Are either of those serious concerns, or do you think there's good counterarguments that founders should have top of mind if if they get hit with those questions?
Speaker 6:Okay. So on the second one, I'll just start there because it's on my mind with the second one. Like, no. I don't think so. I mean, yes and no.
Speaker 6:Right? There's always competition. I think if you get into business, you should just be getting into competition. Like, and you know what? If you're going after something worth it, if you're going after something worth the price, there's going to be competition.
Speaker 6:It's going to come at you from pure startups. It's going to come at you two years from now from another startup that's starting with some out some of the baggage that you have. And it's gonna come from some incumbents. But I I think that, you know, there there is a lot to be said for for an a unique insight, for a particular point of view on how it gets executed, for for a particular culture you build at your team and at your company and how you go after it. And, like, that is not that different than in any other space.
Speaker 6:There are for every kind of b to b company, like, in the space, I mean, it is it's open season. There's not five competitors. There's 50 competitors. So get your game on for competition. Yeah.
Speaker 6:For the other question, which was the the power law question.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And, yeah, does that also under affect underwriting in the sense that, like, you have to you have to underwrite to with I mean, if you're talking about, like, I don't know, most consumer AI companies or most consumer companies, I feel like it's either, like, a 0 or a trillion dollars. But I don't know if that's the right narrative, but that that that feels like it would change underwriting maybe as a investor.
Speaker 6:I mean so I I think that as as venture investors, we're all in it for the trillion dollar idea.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Right? So, you know, I think that we are thinking, like, what's the big ambition here? What's the big possibility? If you're an early stage investor, you then better be thinking about, like, what's the, you know, first act that gets gonna give you the right to get to the second act?
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:But I think we're not playing for, like, how do we do an M and A exit in a couple years? Like, that's not that's not what this is about. I I I so I don't think that's how we underwrite things ever anyways. Mhmm. I think when you're in the zone of doing those other things, it's because dynamics have changed.
Speaker 6:Or, you know, usually it's because dynamics have changed. And I, you know, I think that we have sold companies in M and A situations, and I think that exists in all areas of business. So may maybe it's not as prolific in consumer businesses than it is. I I don't know. I haven't really done that analysis because I'm here to hopefully build big companies with founders.
Speaker 6:Yep. But, you know, on the on the power law question, there is definitely like, I do think I'm particularly interested in and and venture investors are particularly interested in businesses that have network effects that do have products and experiences that get better with scale, that get better with more activity and more engagement. And that, you know, sort of beg that sort of leads you into these businesses that have the self, have the the power law dynamics. But the companies that you mentioned are, like, the category leaders.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:That doesn't like, there are still big businesses that are adjacent to those categories that are public companies, are big stand alone companies, are successful successful stories for both founders and teammates and investors.
Speaker 3:So, you know Yeah. Power laws all the way down. So there's like the the the category leader power law, and then there's like You market power you know, a a $20,000,000,000 company that's a power law within its subcategory.
Speaker 6:There are. Right. So but you know what? Worth mentioning, and this is why I started to feel urgency on this topic and igniting the conversation yesterday, there's a lot to be said for being first. And ChatGPT proves it, for instance.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 6:You know? And I don't know if Google actually was the first search. I don't think they were, but they were pretty close after. Like, it like, it is game on right now. There's gonna be opportunities for the next ten years just like there were in the last cycle and the cycle for the next twenty.
Speaker 6:But, like, right now is a unique moment in time where, like, the the the deck is getting shuffled and newness is being created. Yeah. And we still are in the zone. One of the things we were, hoping to tease out yesterday in conversation and just in general is just like, okay, if you were starting a company today, like, challenge yourself to think about the problem or the opportunity you're going after and the technology that you have to play with and build with and work with. And what would you what do you bring to life in 2025 with that?
Speaker 6:Like, instead of thinking about, like, this is the way we've always done things, and now we have this technology and our chatbot can be better or something. So, like, get out of the zone and think about, like, a new way to present. And I'm the investor, not the founder, so don't ask me what the idea is, but I know somebody out there has a bunch of them.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. Google was the first Definitely
Speaker 3:not.
Speaker 2:They weren't the first search engine, they were the first one to implement PageRank, so that particular algorithm. ChatGPT was not the first chatbot. There were, you know, Siri and different, you know, WhatsApp bots that you could kind of, you know, write some business logic around. But they were the first transformer based chatbot that had been scaled up to a large run. And so they they broke through in that way.
Speaker 2:I wanna talk about distribution for consumer apps. We're seeing a bunch of interesting things. There's a couple case studies that might be interesting to weave through. One is Lenza, this magic avatar app where you could upload a few images and it would make you a superhero, or it would do kind of a a generation of your face on an AI avatar. It was massively popular.
Speaker 2:They made a ton of money and then it kind of fell off. And they've and they've kind of changed the business and re and revisited that.
Speaker 3:I think they changed to something that then got kind of smoked by ChatGPT Exactly.
Speaker 2:Again. Yeah. So there's that story. And then and then on the other side, you see But I
Speaker 3:also don't think they raised very much money.
Speaker 2:No. No. I think they probably made a bunch of money. But And then and then I'm We've been tracking a lot of what's happening with Cluely, this viral company that I I It's kind of hard to tell if they're consumer The
Speaker 3:c word.
Speaker 2:Or or they're b to b. The the the Roy Lee, the founder seems to be exploring both sides. But it's undeniable that he's been great at getting attention and breaking through the very noisy, you know, startup AI ecosystem, in in the sense that he will take over the timeline in the way I mean, thinking machines raised $2,000,000,000 and more people were talking about Cluelly that day. Like, that is crazy to me. But I
Speaker 6:mean, that that is crazy. And honestly, like, I I think that's smart. Yeah. Right? So, I mean, one of the hardest the the hardest thing to do is to build an amazing product that people use on a regular basis and are committed and loyal to it.
Speaker 6:That's the hardest thing to do. The second hardest thing to do is get in the conversation. Right? So, you know, I mean, we work with a lot of, you know, companies that are consumer facing, and and one of the first questions when we work with a new founder is is, like, how do I market this? You know, you got a company that did this and did this.
Speaker 6:Like, what's the secret? And I always say the same thing is like, hey. Listen. I got good news and bad news for you. Like, the the bad news is there's well, well, the good news is is, like good news and the bad news, guess, is you have to do everything.
Speaker 6:Like, there's a lot of ways to do that, and there's, like, not one way to do it. That's the good and the bad news. Like, you have to figure out, like, how to be showing up in all these different places. And when something hits, then you need to lean into it. I and and so I think, like, if you if you have the creativity to do that and you can create relevance in the conversation, that's good.
Speaker 6:Now, it's all worthless if you don't have a great product. So you 100% have to be able to back anything you do in that way up for a great product because the business is built on the product. Marketing. Mhmm. It's not.
Speaker 6:And I think that, you know, that is that is long always been true. But today, you know, consumers are savvy. I've I've said this for the thirty years I've invested. Consumers are savvy. And you can maybe sometimes pull them in onto something, sexy marketing story or whatever, but, like, you can't really build you can't build a business unless you've got, like, something really worthy.
Speaker 6:Yeah. But you know, so it's not a business to be a good marketer, but it's an advantage to be a good marketer.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Consumers do seem extremely savvy right now. I'm thinking and and the nature
Speaker 3:of this ask ChadGPT, should I use this product?
Speaker 2:With ChadGPT, the the the the the consumption pattern of the consumer seems to have completely changed in the sense that you have people that are paying $200 a month. Maybe they're using that at work. Maybe they're using it personally, but it's a very different product shape than what we've seen on the Internet before paying 200 or $500 a month for something that maybe you're expensing it, maybe you're using it for work, maybe you're using it as a consumer. And I'm wondering if we almost need a new word we need to bring over prosumer.
Speaker 6:Well, actually, I love what you're talking about while you're saying that. Like, I think that the lines are being blurred
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Like, as we speak, and they have been for a while
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 6:On, like, consumer and business.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Because people have been doing it in their lives. How many people have two cell phones anymore? One for work and one for life? No. You just put it in.
Speaker 6:You just it's what you're doing, you know? And people are working, you know, different hours, and they're doing side jobs on the side, and they're so and we're using Notion for personal lists, we're using it at work to communicate with our colleagues. These sort of things are happening, like, increasingly, and they're just gonna continue that way. And so that really begs, like, any product builder to have a user mindset. Maybe we can get out of saying consumer and really talk about users or people.
Speaker 6:We're building products for people. Whether it's you in the office or whether you at home, you don't completely change your expectations of what a great experience looks like when you're on home mode versus work mode. So, you know, I think that that, like, that, like, line is, like, it's really blurred, and I think that it's getting increasingly blurred in business. And it's also getting blurred in, like, what people are willing to pay for and how they're using it. Right?
Speaker 2:And you might actually put, like, cursor in the prosumer category in the sense that it's more of a go to market motion. It's like it's bottoms up adoption, and it's selling to the individual, to the user, to your point, as opposed to a top down mandate, like, the CFO or the CTO decided that we're using this database. And
Speaker 3:so Yeah. It's an
Speaker 2:we're using it whether or not you want it. It's like Prosumer
Speaker 5:prosumer products. Prosumer led growth.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Because you can use that whole, like, we iterate in real time real fast with the consumer, see what they're building
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 6:Learn about our product, you know, charge something for our product. And then if we're, like, really relevant and we're delivering on this value proposition, it's efficiency, it's it's time ROI, we can get a company to come in and pay for it. Like, you know, then you've kind of straddled both of those. And I think that's that's pretty great place to play.
Speaker 3:It is. Totally.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you so much.
Speaker 3:Congrats on the event. Congratulations. Congrats on the happy hour. Yeah. You should probably you should probably do
Speaker 6:it. Happy hour sunshine yesterday too. So that was good.
Speaker 3:You should probably do it quarterly because there's no time to waste. Know? Wait.
Speaker 5:We wait.
Speaker 3:I mean,
Speaker 6:last night we had a drink after after dinner, our team. We went out to dinner and I I, you know, gave a cheers and I said like, you know, thanks everybody for indulging the crazy and that we got this done in six weeks. It was fun.
Speaker 2:It's fantastic.
Speaker 6:You know, it was fun.
Speaker 3:Be Just gotta put it out there and commit to it. Yeah. It happen. Awesome. Well, thank you for joining.
Speaker 3:This was super fun.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I hope
Speaker 6:to have
Speaker 2:you on
Speaker 5:a Yeah.
Speaker 2:We'll talk soon.
Speaker 5:Have a nice day.
Speaker 2:Bye. Let's go back to the timeline. Talk about Tane, former guest on the show is talking about the Xero acquisition of Mello Payments. It's, they're paying 2 and a half billion dollars. This is 13 times its $190,000,000 in run rate revenue, but Mello raised around at 4,000,000,000 in September of twenty twenty one.
Speaker 4:Was the multiple? What was the multiple, John?
Speaker 2:It was a 400 x multiple.
Speaker 1:Let's go.
Speaker 3:Let's give it up for 400 x multiples.
Speaker 2:You know you know, yeah. Of course. It's like it's a down round acquisition, but I think everyone still did quite well.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And and Right? All the any any investor that invested 4,000,000,000
Speaker 2:Gets a one x.
Speaker 3:Their one x back, they can redeploy it and get another, you know, get a get a couple 10 x's in a row, few 10 x's in a row, turn it into, you know
Speaker 2:A trillion.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Trillions.
Speaker 2:Turn that into a quadrillion. Yeah. And despite growing almost 20 x in three years at a very healthy healthy exit multiple, it sold for lower than the 2021 valuation. And, yeah, acquisition, I think, makes sense here because we were talking to Ev Randall, and he was saying, if you do a screen on on pure play SaaS companies in the enterprise, at, you know, I think he was even over a over 500,000,000 in revenue. There are, like, multiple players in almost every subcategory at this point, so you can get public markets exposure.
Speaker 2:So this type of company, even though a $190,000,000, amazing, gong worthy, fantastic performance from the team, it's just maybe not enough to be enticing to the public markets. So exiting to zero makes a ton of sense. Anyway, speaking of big numbers, big numbers, the app is out. Budget on everything, says Stephen Zhang. Preston asked for this.
Speaker 2:He said, I want a finance app with three numbers. What I spent today, what I spent this week, what I spent this month. I saw someone vibe coded this. I'm not sure if Steven's the one that vibe coded the the first example, but he has a launch video out, and we love to see ideas to products in just a few months. April 8 was the tweet that inspired this.
Speaker 2:Now there's a launch video for it. So congrats to Steven for launching Big Numbers. I like that name.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I think it's good name. Super excited for, Steven. Yep. He's a man.
Speaker 2:Looks like he was filmed in a cinematic location. Love the name.
Speaker 3:I love the name too because it's it's, easy to understand what it does. Yep. It's also aspirational.
Speaker 2:It is. It is. Wanna put some big numbers
Speaker 3:in that app.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The video looks like it was filmed in a cinematic location. If you're looking to hang out in a cinematic location, you gotta find your
Speaker 3:Your happy place. Place. Find your
Speaker 2:happy place. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel grade amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, and twenty four seven concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better folks. Also is
Speaker 3:a good way to
Speaker 2:place a Ali, Deebo. We gotta cover this. Roy Lee, apparently interned for Kian of Nucleus fame.
Speaker 3:The two most controversial Gen Z technology brothers.
Speaker 2:Both been on the show multiple same team. OGZ fellow Kian got a cold email from then Columbia student Roy. Roy wanted to intern for Kia Kian. He hustled and got it. Within a year, Roy left Columbia and built Cluelly.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. And became a Z Fellow. And so the new PayPal mafia is the Z Fellow CU, the cinematic universe. I really like that Ali's breaking this whole this whole thing down with the red string. It's great.
Speaker 2:And is there anything else you wanna cover today? Or are we good to I
Speaker 3:realized we we did a team. Is it a half it was a half Murph this morning.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. We did.
Speaker 3:We wanna be efficient
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 3:With our time. Yep. But I have not had a sip of water at all
Speaker 2:the drinks?
Speaker 3:I've only had, Mattina and I was, as much as I love Mattina, I'm starting to get a little bit of a
Speaker 2:Okay. Of a headache.
Speaker 3:Lack water? Accidentally not having water
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 3:As a water
Speaker 2:enthusiast. Entrepreneur. Entrepreneur. Founder.
Speaker 3:You're a waterfrontcom. But, anyways, this is a great place to end.
Speaker 2:Anyway, leave us five stars on Apple Podcast and Spotify. Thanks for listening. Have a great weekend, and we Have the best
Speaker 3:have the best weekend of your life. Yes. Just do it. No excuses. No excuses.
Speaker 3:If you if you don't, it's a skill issue. Goodbye. Cheers.