Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays from 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with full episodes posted to Spotify immediately after airing.
Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” TBPN has interviewed Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. Diet TBPN delivers the best moments from each episode in under 30 minutes.
You're watching TBPN.
Speaker 2:Today is Wednesday, 08/12/2026. We are live from the TBPN, Temple Of Technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. That's right. Tell you about ramp.com. Time is money.
Speaker 2:Save both. These use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot. They're all in one place. Some really interesting data out of ramp. We'll go through the the latest workings of our over at the RAMP economics lab soon.
Speaker 2:But first, we gotta talk about Josh Kushner. Bob Iger, they bought the LA Lakers. They're buying the LA He's done it again. They said he couldn't do it.
Speaker 1:They In the sauna this morning Yeah. I was thinking about the name Thrive Eternal. Mhmm. I think it's one of the best names for a fund ever. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like Eternal is such a powerful statement and it fits the strategy so well. Yep. And it does, you know, people have been talking about this this morning, but it feels like with all of the technology disruption happening Mhmm. It just feels like these sports franchises could be more durable than many of the biggest companies in the world today.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, we have Could be Rovell. Coming back on the show to discuss at 11:30. Let me take you through Yeah.
Speaker 1:And I figured out how to put on a suit.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Doesn't he look great? Look at this guy. It's incredible.
Speaker 1:I cleaned it up.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I cleaned it up. Super clean. Looking amazing.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Finally. Truth be told, we when we started the show, I went from we started hitting the gym. We did a little bulking season.
Speaker 2:It was bulking
Speaker 1:season. And I added I added some weight and I basically over You
Speaker 2:added 45 pounds of lean muscle. You don't need to undersell it, Jordi. And you lost 20 pounds of fat.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I added a little weight and I basically grew out of my suit slowly about two pounds a month Yeah. For eighteen months.
Speaker 2:It went exponential.
Speaker 1:And It was a fast take. It became extremely uncomfortable to sit here even though all these the the suits
Speaker 2:Suits are beautiful.
Speaker 1:That that we had gotten made.
Speaker 2:But they got a little tight.
Speaker 1:I'm gonna have to save them for when I'm an elderly man.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Maybe.
Speaker 1:Because at some point we'll shed we'll shed the muscle.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Cutting season's coming.
Speaker 1:We'll be lean, Max. Summer's only Cutting season is coming.
Speaker 2:Nine months away.
Speaker 1:In forty years. In forty years. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's good
Speaker 1:to be back. Yeah. It's good to be back.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Looks good. Let me take you through the story so everyone has the facts straight about this incredible deal for the Los Angeles Lakers. The headline is the Los Angeles Lakers are being sold to American businessmen Josh Kushner and Bob Iger for a record breaking price of $12,500,000,000. Multiple sources have told this to ESPN.
Speaker 2:So Kushner and Iger made the offer to Mark Walter who only last year purchased a controlling interest in the Lakers from the Bus family at a then record valuation of roughly $10,000,000,000. Walter, the CEO and chairman of holding company TWG Global officially became the Lakers majority owner last October after the NBA unanimously approved the deal. The new sale will likewise require approval from the NBA's board of governors, which is scheduled to meet next month in New York. But looking at that picture, it seems like they've had this conversation with the relevant people. They're not some random businessman coming in from out of town who And the
Speaker 1:sellers under federal investigation.
Speaker 2:Yes. Some very complicated deals where some private credit transactions were put into an insurance firm that they own. Those affiliated transactions, if you originate the deal and then you put it in your insurance company's whole on your insurance company's books, you need to you need to disclose this. Now, you can actually do this. Berkshire Hathaway, about 46% of their insurance assets are related party transactions.
Speaker 2:So there's a way to do it above board. The allegations are that he disclosed that only 3% of the insurance assets were related party affiliated transactions. But in fact, it was much higher when you considered some of the other assets Yeah. That had made their way through
Speaker 1:a Capital allocator. Bit of a bad of a bad boy.
Speaker 2:Even the bad boy thing. Yeah. Maybe. But, you know, innocent until proven guilty. Obviously, these are just allegations.
Speaker 2:He's just being investigated. A nice return. Yeah. And he's denied all wrongdoing. But it does it does give you a little bit more context on what might be motivating a sale so so soon after buying an asset that he was clearly optimistic about.
Speaker 2:So Kushner is the founder and CEO of venture firm Thrive Capital and cofounder and vice chairman of Oscar Health. He also is the brother of Jared Kushner, president Donald Trump's son-in-law. Kushner currently owns minority stake in the Miami Heat, which he will have to sell to complete the Lakers deal and was previously a minority owner of the Memphis grips grizzlies. Iger, meanwhile, stepped down as Disney CEO earlier this year and has already made a major investment in the loss in Los Angeles sports. He and his wife, Willow Bay, become controlling controlling owners of the National Women's Soccer Leagues, Angel City FC in 2024.
Speaker 2:The prospective new owners are already getting a warm reception from some of the biggest names associated with the franchise. Luca Doncic said, being a Laker means everything to me, and I'm excited to get back to the court and bring a championship to LA. I've gotten used to big changes over these last few years, but I know that no matter what, there's no limit to the potential of this iconic franchise. I look forward to meeting Josh and Bob so we can get to work building something special in LA together. You'll love to see it.
Speaker 2:Magic Johnson chimed in as well. He said, Lakers fans, couldn't have any you couldn't have two better owners, Johnson said. I've known Bob personally for over forty years. He has always loved the Lakers and basketball and he will bring championships back to LA. So Magic Johnson is optimistic about this deal.
Speaker 1:Weirdly, this is making me optimistic on LA overall. Yeah. I've had a generally bad outlook. Yeah. I have had extreme confidence that the weather is gonna be very nice
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:For a long time. Yeah. But that's really been the only thing I'm willing to really lean on. Yeah. But this is giving me a slightly more positive outlook.
Speaker 2:And and you've been pitching Thrive on your new incubation, the pothole company of Los Angeles. The pothole filling company of Los Angeles.
Speaker 1:Huge opportunity. Huge opportunity. Really Palantz here for potholes.
Speaker 2:Yes. Yes. Yeah. Hiring the best AI research.
Speaker 1:No. I want somebody I want somebody to do this. Figure out how to fix potholes
Speaker 2:Yeah. Quickly. I think it starts with its own satellite constellation. You have to put up 10,000 satellites in low Earth orbit with cameras pointed small
Speaker 1:small effectively missiles
Speaker 2:Oh, missiles.
Speaker 1:Fired at potholes Yes. And then a laser that sort of like melts the debris down to fill in the hole.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It just kind of sort of you bring the molten asphalt up to space. It comes down, warms up and as it travels through the atmosphere, lands directly in the pothole and smushes in, fills it in.
Speaker 1:Perfect. But but you know, people are always saying, why is like, you go to LA, every other car is a g wagon. Well, know why? Because the roads are absolutely terrible. You pretty much need something that's four wheel drive.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Otherwise, you're gonna have a bad time. I was talking to to a a Maybach to owner a couple nights ago and he had blown out multiple tires in the last year. I've I've blown out multiple tires last year. It's a it's a disaster.
Speaker 1:Do you
Speaker 2:have a
Speaker 1:mother's The Pothole Company of Los Angeles.
Speaker 2:It's a banger idea. Right? It's a banger
Speaker 1:I might become the Batman of potholes. Oh. Sneaking out late Yeah. It might Look, could go out in this suit.
Speaker 2:You could. You could. Yeah. Like that guy who was cleaning up the FDNY corner call box, like same thing.
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 2:Potholes in LA. They're really really bad. Every day I drive to work and I have to swerve into the other lane to avoid one on this one particular road that's been a disaster for the last six months. Anyway, the last quote related to this deal. As lifelong NBA fans, we are deeply honored for the opportunity to become the stewards of the Los Angeles Lakers, One of the most iconic sports franchises in the world, Kushner and Iger said in a statement.
Speaker 2:They said they have immense respect for Jerry and Jenny Buss and intend to build on the family's legacy. Don't know what you're laughing at. Compete at the highest level and serve this extraordinary team, its fans and the city of Los Angeles. If approved, the deal would give Lakers their third
Speaker 1:controlling ownership. Of potholes.
Speaker 2:I think he got
Speaker 1:says DT and Tyler says he's going to film the missions. This would just be absolutely riveting content. You're out on the 04:05 Yeah. 2AM. Just you and a nasty pothole
Speaker 2:Take look.
Speaker 1:And a little bit of traffic.
Speaker 2:And a little bit of asphalt slathering it in there. Right? Is that what you're doing?
Speaker 1:Well, my big issue is when they they when they fill in, they just do a really bad job. Oh. And so it basically creates a bunch of mini speed bumps.
Speaker 3:And you
Speaker 2:get a sinkhole. So then you just That's
Speaker 1:a whole other problem.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That was crazy. Oh, whatever happened with that in LA? Was really bad for a while. I guess they fixed it?
Speaker 1:I would like to Oh. Get somebody to throw on a tinfoil hat and figure out why a bunch of pipes started exploding everywhere around the city.
Speaker 2:Somebody's gotta ask the question. Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Wanna change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Just do it.
Speaker 2:There's a bunch of reactions hitting the timeline. Sag Harbor Capital says, while there are plenty of issues you can point out with sports investing, I think this actually makes a simple yet incredibly compelling case, longevity. Sports is a portfolio diversifier. Investment firms and wealthy individuals now view investing in sports properties as a hedge against higher risk investments. Very interesting.
Speaker 2:Everyone has always said sports investing is just it's a trophy asset. It's just because you like the team, but you're locking up a lot of capital. And when you're long AGI, the future, the most cutting edge technologies, also building a portfolio with some things that are gonna be around forever no matter how many robots there are makes a lot of sense. And so that that balancing effect seems to be a new thing that's driving demand in in sports investing. Do you agree with that?
Speaker 1:I do. It's a strategy.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Spore agrees. If you truly believe in AGI, buying a massive sports franchise is actually one of the best financial decisions you can make right now. And we've seen hints and rumors of this for a while. Anything else on the Lakers?
Speaker 2:We're gonna talk to Darren in just thirteen minutes about it. Get him to explain.
Speaker 1:He's gonna walk us through the whole rule set. Yeah. We're very excited about that. Anyway Apparently, there's a solar eclipse going on right now.
Speaker 2:Oh, is that going on right now? I saw a link to a whole bunch of different webcams that you can use to watch it. The last time, a couple years ago, there was a full solar eclipse, not a partial one. And everyone who went said it was one of the most insane experiences of their life. So I would highly recommend it.
Speaker 4:Tyler it's in Europe right now. Full solar eclipse.
Speaker 2:Full solar eclipse. Yep. Wow. Should've gone. I missed this one.
Speaker 2:When's the next one?
Speaker 1:What does it mean? What's the meaning, Tyler?
Speaker 2:What does it mean? It's a great omen for high beta AI stocks. That's what I choose to read into it. Lever up. That's what the that's what the Eclipse is trying to tell you.
Speaker 2:Anyway, let me tell you about Console. Console built AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. Grok 4.6 is roughly the same performance as Fable five max at an 85% discount, 80% cheaper for input tokens, and 88% cheaper for output tokens. Pareto dominance says Gavin Baker. Grok 4.7 will be significantly better as is a much larger model with the cursor and SpaceX data included in pre training.
Speaker 2:So the the the headline is SpaceX sort of jumped to the frontier, at least on these benchmarks. We'll see how this comes out, how people adopt it. Obviously, Cursor has huge huge usage all across the enterprise, across businesses. Grok is has been slower on adoption with a bunch of different pushback there. But the model seems to be catching up.
Speaker 2:The team seem to be gelling and things seem to be pretty good over there. We'll see how I mean, I'm sure on X, we'll see lots of people demoing examples of what they build with Grok 4.6. There's already some games that have hit the timeline. There'll be a whole whole bunch more benchmarks.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So so seems incredibly impressive. Yeah. Excited to get reactions and Yeah. And get people's lived experiences with the model.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Price wars have definitely begun. Yeah. You know, we saw this with Meta. We're seeing this with Grok now.
Speaker 1:And then third, I would say trust in benchmarks has to be at an all time low. Yeah. Right? There's been enough, you know, moments, releases so far where the benchmarks looked amazing, but then the actual lived experience is is, you know, less less significant. They also had a great launch yesterday.
Speaker 1:So they're building momentum. Sure. Grokkow.
Speaker 2:SpaceX is up almost 40% just in the last five days. That's a pretty
Speaker 1:I wish I wish you could figure out a way to parse out what what's driving that. Is it the semi analysis? Yeah. Thesis. Semi analysis.
Speaker 2:That's probably like Friday?
Speaker 1:Friday. Well, yeah. That was Friday at the close.
Speaker 2:It popped during the day though. Right?
Speaker 1:So But then up 10% today.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I don't know. Maybe it was leaking.
Speaker 1:CNBC says SpaceX short sellers are running out of bullets as stock rebounds more than 30% off.
Speaker 2:We're running out of ammo. I'm tired, boss. I can't keep buying at these prices. I can buy. You gotta buy more.
Speaker 2:Michael Truell at Cursor, founder and CEO. Excited to release Grock 4.6. With this release, Grock is becoming a more capable digital colleague. The age of work is upon us. Grock for work.
Speaker 2:It's happening. Say 4.6 is significantly better at difficult task and knowledge work. It combines Opus class intelligence and polish with very low cost and high speed, which people love. Even even just in the cursor workflow, the more iterative approach instead of having to come back a day later and see what goes on. There's a lot of value to that workflow in particular.
Speaker 2:Grock 4.6 is a very impressive test time curve on cursor bench in a league of its own. They did more mid slash pre pre training on the Grock 4.5 checkpoint and newer SFT stages with Grock 4.5 traces and model based filtering. Once again, shows how important a good SFT checkpoint is. Interesting. Getting some more details on what's going on with Grock.
Speaker 2:They also launched Grock bot. We recently hired a new teammate. Bots are AI teammates that do real work for you. They sign in to your tools, use them just like you do, and come back with finished work. So I guess I guess quirk isn't gonna happen.
Speaker 2:It's gonna be Grock bot, which actually it it it has a nice little rhythm to it. I like I like Grock bot. Also, very good results on the artificial intelligence index joining the frontier at 61. Strong agentic performance, lower cost obviously, and the model wars are are upon us. NVIDIA is also joining the model war wars selling selling weapons to both sides potentially.
Speaker 2:Nemotron 3.5 lightning, their open source model came out, but they also launched a model router, Nemo Switchyard, to deliver faster, smarter, more efficient agentic
Speaker 1:AI. Switchyard.
Speaker 2:Switchyard's a good name.
Speaker 1:It's a good name.
Speaker 2:I like that. Kind of
Speaker 1:railroad connotations which
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. Which maybe? Yeah. Maybe Ben Thompson stuff at some point. But interesting to see where this goes.
Speaker 2:I mean, it it does feel like if you're if you're a organization that has NVIDIA chips, you have your own data centers because you're a mid scale, maybe not a hyperscaler, but you're pretty big. You know, the being all in on the NVIDIA stack and then using their model router could make a lot of sense. Like, it's a logical place for it to live. And and then you're you know, it it has more it has more integration with the rest of your NVIDIA stack because you have a whole bunch of GPUs rack for the lowest possible cost. If you're cost optimizing, you'll probably eventually have your own racks and your own NVIDIA work, you know, data center, basically.
Speaker 2:Anyway, should we debate anthropics watermarking? Or or is our next guest here early? Should we bring in our next guest?
Speaker 1:Why don't you, yeah, dive into this? I don't I don't know that I have a strong take yet.
Speaker 2:Ben Thompson has a strong take on anthropics watermarking. So the basic news is that you might soon be able to know for sure if something came from a human being or from Claude. Anthropix said this week that text and files generated by its family of AI models will be watermarked to let consumers know. Now, they won't be watermarked. Like, you'll still have to take the text and then go to their watermarking tool and validate that it was that it was
Speaker 1:Bill Gurley was making the point that watermark a traditional watermark on an image is very visible. Yes. Just like immediately visible. Yes. And so it's not actually it's more like leaving basically, we're going to leave evidence that this Breadcrumbs.
Speaker 1:Is
Speaker 2:Yeah. Breadcrumbs. And so, in theory, a LinkedIn could or an or an X could integrate with an anthropic API to check the watermarks. But the interesting read on this is that this was actually this was actually implemented by the regulation in the European Union. So Anthropic in theory could watermark could only watermark text in Europe.
Speaker 2:But the EU has achieved their dream of regulating the world according to Ben Thompson. And so they actually instead I I think the idea is instead of instead of doing a last step at the end of the generation to add the watermark in, It's baked much deeper into the model level, which means it will be, watermarked whether you're in Europe or not. And so, Ben Thompson explains a little bit on how it works. Obviously, they're not explaining too much because then you can avoid it easier.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's so it's so interesting like how much of their revenue is coming from Europe Oh, yeah. Given how compute constrained they are. Yeah. Like, was there I wonder if they ever considered like, hey, let's just say if, hey, if you're gonna if you're gonna go forward with something like this Yes.
Speaker 1:We're just gonna exit the market entirely.
Speaker 2:But I don't think people care. I don't think Anthropic cares about watermarking. I think they're fine. I think it's nice. I think it's a good thing.
Speaker 2:And then also, I think business users don't care. Because they're like, yeah, I I want AI generated code all over my code base. I want it to be clean and and efficient and I want it to just do the job. And I'm I'm totally fine with it. I don't I I'm not I that that's not my business.
Speaker 2:And so I don't think people will be upset about this, at least in the enterprise. Ben Thompson points out that he is somewhat frustrated by this because even if you're using an LLM for proofreading and making individual changes in your text editor, like you just upload your blog post to Claude now and you say, oh, like what could be better about this? What's wrong with this? Did I make any grammatical errors? Did I make any spelling errors?
Speaker 2:If you go and implement those, there's a small risk. It seems like a very unlikely risk, but there's a small risk that even in just accepting those changes, you accidentally insert a little bit of the watermark in or potentially all of the watermark in. And then you don't get credit potentially because people will like, oh, this is AI, when really it was like the last step that was AI. We had a back and forth on this a little bit where I would write an essay by hand, we would throw it into Chekipity to to to proofread it and it would put in a bunch of em dashes. In the earlier model, it was really heavy on em dashes.
Speaker 2:And so people would just be like, oh, this is AI. And I was like, well, like the last step, but it's like but does that matter? It does matter to a lot of people. They do care about that. But it's it's odd.
Speaker 2:And Ben Thompson's point is saying what the EU is doing is stealing the last thing humans have, creation, and demanding it be bundled with substantiation, effectively giving the AI the credit. Even if you come up with a great idea, you write a great book. If you have AI, edit it. If it has a watermarking feature, it will be watermarked and people will be like, nah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It was all well, it was the prompt. And it's like, well, maybe there wasn't a prompt. Maybe there was a whole process that you went through to develop your idea and then you took it at the last step. And so that's the source of frustration. At the same time, it does feel like there's ways to work around this.
Speaker 2:If you become more collaborative with the AI system, you can avoid the watermark by only using it at one certain step and then doing an editing pass yourself. People have been going back and forth with these all all day long. He says, the human that gave AI the text to proofread or even the prompt to generate writing doesn't matter to the bureaucrats in Europe. Everyone is worried about being replaced by AI. The EU is mandating it.
Speaker 2:That's what he says. He's got some harsh words. What do you think, Tyler?
Speaker 4:Yeah. I mean, so I I don't think the actual, like, underlying the the way they watermark it is public. But presumably, it's like basically during the sampling process when you're generating tokens.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 4:Right? It generates some distribution over the tokens like which one is it gonna select and then it uses like a slightly different method than just choosing like the most likely one. Yep. And that way you can like see, oh, this is like less likely so it's it's probably
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 4:You know, written by AI. But like, if you basically have, you know, some essay that you wrote and you replace like one sentence, then like 99% of the tokens are still the same. Then like, it's like it's it's it shouldn't mark the whole thing as being like AI written. That doesn't make any sense. Like, only the sentence that you changed would be marked as AI written.
Speaker 4:Oh.
Speaker 2:Oh. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure.
Speaker 4:It it doesn't like say the whole document is AI. Yeah. It's like this sentence is AI.
Speaker 2:No. No. No.
Speaker 4:These tokens are like very
Speaker 2:People think of a watermark as it's a binary. It's it's either gonna say it's AI or not.
Speaker 1:In fact,
Speaker 2:it's worth
Speaker 1:something. People are gonna just look, you know, like the the peanut gallery online Mhmm. Is gonna be it'll be very binary for them. Sure. Like if somebody puts out even an Instagram caption Mhmm.
Speaker 1:They'll get dunked on Really? Even if it's one sentence. Right?
Speaker 4:Like like if you look at the Google synth ID, so Yeah. Gemini has done this for like a few years.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:If you look at their blog that like explains how it works, it will like highlight specific basically words in the in the blog or whatever Sure. Text. It's like, okay, this is probably AI written. Interesting. It's not saying the whole thing is is like, yeah, zero one.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4:I think I think this is kind of like blowing it out of proportion.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I don't I don't think that many people will have a problem with it.
Speaker 1:How long till someone ships the the Claude watermark remover app?
Speaker 2:I mean, somebody shipped a Pangram Fighter like yesterday. Something where you take the text, put it in this model and then it it reads a 100% human to Pangram because it rewrites it in a style that Pangram can't detect. And so now the Pangram team has to go figure out how to defeat that. It's all a game of cat and mouse, Yes. But let me tell you about Cisco.
Speaker 2:Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real time experiences and new value with Cisco. We've been keeping our next guest waiting for far too long today. Rovell, coming back on the show. How are you doing?
Speaker 5:Welcome back. Victor and well.
Speaker 2:Big day. Take us through, the story, how you're processing it, what this means. Set up the story of the Los Angeles Lakers changing hands again.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Just as just a surprise, obviously. Teams just don't change like this. You know, I don't think, hold on. I gotta get off my center stage.
Speaker 6:There we go. I don't want anything to follow me. Give me a second here.
Speaker 2:There we go.
Speaker 6:I'm a pro.
Speaker 2:That one's a
Speaker 7:There we go.
Speaker 2:I don't want to Okay.
Speaker 6:You know, Mark Mark Walter clearly did not say, oh, I could get in now and I could make $2,000,000,000 quick. Yeah. I mean, is amazing that in 2014, was saying, my god, Bomber bought this team for $2,000,000,000 and now that is the profit Yeah. That Mark Walter is making, just from getting out of here. I will tell you this because I know your show well.
Speaker 6:Yeah. I have never understood Guggenheim's insurance business. Yep. It's one of those things where I could never follow the buckets. It's buckets upon buckets upon buckets and this going to this and this going.
Speaker 6:I would say it's purposely obfuscatory.
Speaker 2:And
Speaker 6:so the fact that there are third party loans apparently where they can't they don't understand it and that the report that at least Bloomberg had that he had to, you know, get loans quickly to perhaps make them kosher. Yeah. Does make a lot of sense given my previous work with trying to investigate exactly how Guggenheim works.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So so a little bit of motivation for the early sale.
Speaker 6:Yeah. For sure. And the other motivation for the early sale, you would think, is the NBA in general. The NBA is a hell of a lot more progressive than Major League Baseball, not to suggest that he would have lost the Dodgers. But when you have the bomber situation, that investigation, that's in LA.
Speaker 6:You have I wrote on Twitter today kind of the this world where people are gonna become rich really quickly, but they also could become poor really quickly. We've seen that before, but I think that in the degenerate, you know, I think we wake up every morning and we're more in a casino than ever before.
Speaker 2:And
Speaker 6:that that means that you're gonna hear people buying teams for massive values and you're gonna see a higher percentage of those people be poor in two seconds. Oh. So while I don't while while while I don't think the assets of sports teams and the assets in general, obviously the macro economy is important, falling, I do see individual people falling and Sure. Replacement people have to come in more than ever before.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, we saw that just a few weeks ago, situational awareness, a fund a hedge fund that scaled from $250,000,000 to almost $50,000,000,000, round tripped very, very quickly in dramatic fashion. Fortunes are won and lost extremely quickly in the modern
Speaker 1:Yeah. Modern era. Very basic question. But but what are what are the kind of groups that can own an NBA team? Yes.
Speaker 1:I thought it had to be individuals. Obviously, you could they can bring in partners on it. There can be, you know, a bunch of, you know, co owners, but then I
Speaker 8:was They looking it up
Speaker 6:recently and like announced. Announced
Speaker 1:owns the Knicks like
Speaker 6:Any anyone now, I mean, you know, they've recently even allowed, you know, Blue Owl has a home court ventures fund
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 6:You know, which became when Blue when Blue Owl had their whole, you know, we're not giving any distributions and we're locking everything up, of course, people would say, well, you own 5% of a bunch of NBA teams, which wasn't convenient at the time. But, yep, I mean, pretty much anyone can own anything now, even the NFL now opening up, you know. But I listen, the Yankees and and their Apollo deal yesterday, I think sports leagues are willing to have pretty much anyone as owners Mhmm. As long as the value continues to go up.
Speaker 2:Does that we
Speaker 1:could see a hyperscaler just end up buying a sports team just as basically a part of their treasury? It seems like a relatively stable asset. They get some potentially some halo effect from it.
Speaker 6:I think I think I think leagues will still be very careful as to who they, let in just because they're worried about information as a whole. Right? They don't want things to come out especially as long as a lot of these teams are gonna still be asking for public financing for their stadiums.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 6:So so I do I do think they they I know I'm contradicting my contradicting myself, but I do think there are some caveats and if they open it up to many people who are say invested in a fund who then have to have access to those financials, I don't think major sports leagues think that's interesting. So that's the only only thing that I think is is probably like prohibitive to all of that.
Speaker 2:Got it. So when you say information, mean financial details about how that particular team operates? Because there's been
Speaker 1:Yeah. But can't you can't you you could certainly raise from a number of people and just have it be a condition that they don't get any information. Right? Right?
Speaker 2:Yes. Yeah. But that would be hard if it's like For
Speaker 1:example, I know a bunch of people that would happily co invest with Kushner and Iger
Speaker 4:Oh. On the you have to
Speaker 1:tell me anything ever. I just wanna be effectively be able say Yep. Yeah, I'm I I own part of the Lakers.
Speaker 9:Sure.
Speaker 6:And that's the thing, by the way, minority ownership, it's ridiculous. I mean, I I can't believe people say, hey, I'm gonna put a 100,000,000 in and and I'm going to own like an infinitesimal part of a team. I mean, it's like, yes, there is a trophy value, but there are seemingly better investments. I will say obviously, I have been wrong at every stage of since covering this for thirty years, I've been wrong. If you wanna pull all the videos, you can see me on CNBC saying in 2011,
Speaker 9:$450,000,000
Speaker 2:for the
Speaker 9:Warriors, that is crazy. And then and then
Speaker 6:and then the next year the the Bucks sell and and I even said in 2014, bomber for $2,000,000,000. It's 12 time it was 12 times expected gross revenues and this deal is now 20 probably 20 with LeBron leaving, it's probably 22 to 23 times gross revenues.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:12,500,000,000 for next year.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Wow. It's crazy. Someone some under the numbers in the chat said, most of the leagues allow up to 30% institutional ownership Yeah. In individual teams.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Thank you.
Speaker 6:Yeah. I think that's gonna I think that will change a little bit more. Again, I mean, there's not there's there's been relatively little we we haven't seen like majority Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth funds coming into American sports. I know that the monumental Washington capitals and wizards, you know, small piece in there, but and it's obviously infiltrated European soccer football Yeah.
Speaker 7:A lot
Speaker 6:more than it has here.
Speaker 1:Well, And and for all the existing owners, no one is probably sitting there owning one of these assets and thinking like, no, I don't want to unlock large institutional buyers for these Like, of course, there's a massive incentive to allow these, like, much much bigger buyers to come in.
Speaker 2:Do you think For sure. Do do do you think the trophy asset thesis is still driving the market? Or is there something else going on? Because, I mean, I guess the trophies can just keep getting bigger and bigger as the pool of capital and the larger buyers come in and people are wealthier, so they need a bigger trophy. But it feels like there are other things afoot in The US economy changes to like the big the big like macro thesis around sports is usually like we're all on our phones and that means we're craving Experiential.
Speaker 2:Experiential. Right? And so I'm wondering if there's if there's some other way that we should be thinking about a deal like this outside of the typical, it's a trophy asset.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Well, you have a lot of people who are interested in ownership because they're rich and no one knows who the hell they are.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:And that's obviously not the case with Kushner and and Iger. Yeah. You know, one of the things that's not a surprise is Kushner and Iger. I mean Yeah. Iger's been walking around forever and and and he obviously was at the helm of Disney, which owns ESPN, and he's had a first look at, you know, everything in sports over the years, and I just I just thought they were gonna get the Vegas team.
Speaker 6:I mean, were looking at Vegas a week ago.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:So, you know, that just shows you how quick this is, you know, and and Kushner and, you know, obviously what he's been doing, and always, know, hey, every day you gotta throw in a Trump connection somewhere.
Speaker 2:Sure. So
Speaker 6:so the what I'm interested in though, and I'm known
Speaker 1:But but you said you said so so I haven't been following the the Vegas team at all Mhmm. Or anything in the NBA.
Speaker 6:The opportunity that there'll be a Vegas team.
Speaker 1:No. But but but my question was like, is it is it possible that they always wanted the Lakers and they wanted and and these were this was going on in the background and and they just were using that the the Vegas Not
Speaker 6:not not what I was told. They they wanted a great team. They and and this happened over the last hundred hours.
Speaker 2:What is the shape of Las Vegas sports these days? I I I know, like, teams have relocated there, and there's f one and but is there like an indigenous fan base that's strong enough? Is the indigenous fan base
Speaker 6:They can't believe how big it is. Listen, was I was I was there Yeah. The day that they announced the Vegas Golden Knights. Yeah. Obviously, their first year going to the Stanley Cup helped.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 6:I mean, that crowd is probably in the top five best crowds in hockey. Wow. Everyone go you know, people go there for road trips
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Like they go when when teams play, you know, the Raiders. You know, the Raiders stadium, Allegiant Stadium is is amazing, is great. They've won. You know, Vegas is very hard to win at and people laugh at me when I say this, but, you know, eating has become the next act and it becomes eating versus Cirque du Soleil. It used to be eating and then show.
Speaker 6:Now eating is actually an activity. And so you're competing with eating over the last five years because of the chef the chef brands and everything else else that's out there. Yeah. And so, I think they think, know, the the a's are really gonna make a lot of sense and and and listen, if you look at the Knights and you look at, where the raiders are, I mean, ten years ago you were concerned about gambling. Now now, Kalshi has you, gambling on, what flights are late.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:You know? We've gone we've gone from from oh my god. I when I asked Gary Betman, that day when they said they were moving to Vegas, he said, oh, no. We're gonna have, the odds will be off the board of the two closest casinos to t mobile arena. We're concerned.
Speaker 2:Woah. And,
Speaker 6:you know, and and now you look today and you look at the prediction markets and Yeah. We're we're we're literally betting on toad races every two seconds.
Speaker 2:Alright. Is prediction are predicting Is toad
Speaker 1:racing is toad racing a thing?
Speaker 2:I mean, there's
Speaker 4:No. It will be though.
Speaker 2:I showed you that crazy Russian live streaming site where people play fake sports. Like, there'll be two guys sitting in a chair
Speaker 6:and they're You playing can bet on you can actually there you can bet on how many cars will go through a traffic light.
Speaker 2:I've seen those.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Until it turns red. I mean, listen, prediction markets are the the dopamine that is going on, whether it's gambling, whether it's opening packs, collectibles, obviously, I'm close to. Yeah. You know, my son who's 12 is on a free to play app and he's looking at whether, you know, Giannis is gonna sneeze during a game.
Speaker 6:And by the way, I I I don't say don't play that. I say, yeah, play that. Play that and make you use your fake money and when you lose 14 times in a row, that's a learning experience and if you had real money, you'd be screwed. Yeah. But but I don't know.
Speaker 6:I mean, it's the prediction markets are the craziest thing that I've ever had to watch in my entire, you know, reporting gambling life.
Speaker 2:Are prediction markets net good for sports? In terms of the businesses of like the Lakers, there's more points of entry and so you wind up buying tickets and going in person or does it not affect or does it pull people away because No.
Speaker 6:I I think until people run out of money. Yeah. You know, people people people run out of money. These are these are it's very very addictive. Yeah.
Speaker 6:And it's, you know, and it's and it's it's difficult to avoid because again, we need to be on dopamine. We are a degenerate nation and this is this is in a way the perfect and most horrible product.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. We talked to the head former head of the CFTC yesterday about it, about where the regulation might go, whether you're going to get some of those gambling addiction warnings applied to prediction And
Speaker 6:what what about what about Cauchy and Polymarket's market cap and, you know, what if you're Andrei and Harjot, sorry. How how are you predict, you know, if you're raising at a $50,000,000,000 valuation, but you know, at some point you have to believe that with the sports books and you get a complete proctology exam if you're related to the sports books and then if you're a cashier calling market, you get a free pass to do anything. You'd think that that would have to come to an end at some point, but and is that end when Trump is out of office?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Who knows?
Speaker 1:Breakdown, what's what's your updated view on whatnot?
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:We had Grant on the show. I believe it was on Friday. The business is growing like crazy. It seems like there's a lot of like traditional online commerce happening in this live format. You know, he gave an example of a guy selling fish, doing quite well selling fish.
Speaker 1:Yes, I
Speaker 6:love that example. That was crazy. Was live fish.
Speaker 1:And that's like, you know, the example that people always would give with China is like you can go on these Chinese live streaming apps and buy like mangoes and kiwis and fruit and all this stuff. And we hadn't haven't really seen that at scale in The US yet, but but if you were gonna put a number on it, what percentage of the activity on whatnot or what percentage of the volume on whatnot is like closer to gambling than commerce?
Speaker 6:90%. I mean I mean, I I you know, it is so much breaking, that I'm surprised that they don't have an insurance policy against breaking by selling, you know, normal memorabilia. Right? I mean that Mhmm. They're if if in a and this is it's not as close to prediction markets, but if a bunch of attorneys general, you know, decide that they're gonna go after breaking, you know, whatnot's gonna go all the way down.
Speaker 6:And breaking breaks
Speaker 3:breaks down breaking for us.
Speaker 6:It's like Breaking your It's
Speaker 1:like I buy you're sitting there with a pack of cards, you're about to open it, I can buy it for $10 and it's possible you pull a card that's worth a 100. Is that is that how it works? And then people just
Speaker 6:that by three. You put in you put in 300 to win 3,000 or you put in Mhmm. 700 and then potentially you could get nothing
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:Which is which then becomes a lottery rule issue. And whatnot has done a lot more recently to try to curtail it, but it's very hard to say that it's not gambling. Mhmm. And so I I think they should be doing a lot more regular traditional eBay type memorabilia sales. Yeah.
Speaker 6:I didn't believe in them in the beginning I confused the smallness of their transactions that the average transaction I think was like $15 Mhmm. That they wouldn't be able to get a critical mass.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:And to their credit, they certainly have gotten that. People enjoy watching the shows, know, they enjoy being a part of it, but again, as they get bigger, I'm surprised that they're not investing more in traditional commerce almost as an insurance policy.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Well figure out if they're gambling on fish. Maybe? Because it's like
Speaker 2:might have caviar inside, you don't know how much caviar is inside. This is a real thing with fish.
Speaker 6:By by the way by the way, if anyone wants to have a great time, you should go to Oklahoma Okay. Where you can fish for paddlefish, which is pretty much a fish when you pull it out of the water. It looks like it was on the Simpsons.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 6:And and you can fish all you want, but you must give Oklahoma the fish. They will then clean out the caviar and then hand you back the fish. Oh, interesting. American paddlefish.
Speaker 2:American paddlefish. Well, thank you so much for the tip and thanks for coming on
Speaker 1:the see you.
Speaker 2:We'll talk to you soon. Have a good rest of your day. Let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB.
Speaker 2:Don't just build AI. Own the data platform that powers it. Our next guest is Patrick Whitesell. He's the founder of WTSL, here with us with his first appearance joining in just a minute or two. There are some other posts in the timeline.
Speaker 2:But while we wait, let me tell everyone about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents. Whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows, Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish. And our next guest is with us here in the TBPN Ultra Run. Let's bring in Patrick.
Speaker 2:How are you doing? What's up, boys? What's going on? Thank you so much for taking the time.
Speaker 3:I'm good. I'm just in New York City. Can you see me okay? Hotel room here in New York.
Speaker 1:You look great. There's there's a a little bit of lag but I can Yeah. Hear you So Yeah. Make it work.
Speaker 3:Well, let me
Speaker 1:It's that hotel WiFi.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Know. Classic. It'll get
Speaker 1:you every time. Alright.
Speaker 3:Well, sorry about that, boys.
Speaker 2:No, you're good.
Speaker 1:No, you're good. We can hear you fine.
Speaker 2:Okay. Good. So, yeah, give us a little bit of an overview of your firm, the thesis, and then the recent deals.
Speaker 3:So the idea was, you know, when we took Endeavor private, essentially what we what that effectively did was kind of we dismantled the company, and essentially sold everything but our ownership interest in WME, the talent agency,
Speaker 10:and
Speaker 3:our position in TKO, which is now around 61. But everything else that we ran and sat on, we sold, and so effectively kind of eliminated the job. And going forward and looking at the next chapter, I didn't really want to start, you know, a new company right away. And one of the things Egon Durbin and I talked about, we had a really great long relationship with Silver Lake, everything we kind of did at Endeavor was really fueled by them and with their partnership. And so out of that, I talked to Egon, goes, well why don't we just keep investing in the field that you're in?
Speaker 3:You know, kind of entertainment, sports, content, the things that I've kind of spent my, you know, thirty years in, but on a much smaller level, you know. So we just started with $250,000,000, and the idea was to make, you know, kind of 20 to $100,000,000 investments in different things that were in our sector, and help companies that I could, you know, have some influence on, help build. And so that's kind of what the whole thesis is around Whitesell, the investment company. And then the other part of it is when Egon bought Raiders, or invested into the Raiders, I should say, we had a WME at a football representation business, and per the league, you can't be a buyer and a seller. So Right.
Speaker 3:I took that entire group out and started Win Sports, which is predominantly a football agency. We're starting to do a little bit of golf too, but it's really focused on building a really great dynamic football agency. And we have also a handful of artists in there of clients of mine that I've worked with forever, of actors predominantly, and directors that just have been long time clients, so they're also a part of it. But the investment that we put into Alex Cooper's company came from Whitesell.
Speaker 1:Got it. Awesome.
Speaker 2:What are the key ingredients to a great investment, great media company in the modern era where it's individual led, influencer led, podcasting, live streaming, these types of things? What are you looking for?
Speaker 3:I think the reason why I was attracted to Alex is, I mean, again, going back, you know, thirty years, the one thing that's always the most important thing is having someone really talented
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And really special. And Alex to me, I mean, obviously her podcast, you guys know how big it is, how influential she is. She's a cultural powerhouse to you know, kind of Gen Z women, but she's also built out already at Unwell, a really diversified company that is not only in these other sectors, but doing very well. It's in live events, there are consumer products, of course they're in content, both kind of scripted and unscripted, and that's at you know, kind of the traditional media companies like a Hulu or Netflix, but it's also, she's kind of started her own network of channels on YouTube, and funding and producing content for YouTube, everything from micro dramas to just reality shows, and that's gone exceedingly well as, you know, on top of it. And then lastly, an advertising agency, account for digital solutions for people, creative agency, that, you know, Alex was saying yesterday that she thinks that by the end of twenty seven, that the revenues of that will exceed her podcast revenues, which is quite a feat.
Speaker 3:So what I thought was interesting is yes, she's a big force as a podcaster and talent, but she really has built a company that I think can only grow in every one of these sectors that we're in. So that's what kind of attracted me to her. I think also the part about, you know, what you're seeing with the in this kind of creator economy is they can they don't you know, for thirty years when we built our company, if you had someone who had an idea like Alex's, you had to go to one of the traditional media companies, convince them to pay for it, you know, and finance it, distribute it, market it.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Now, of course, people like Alex and others have done it themselves. You guys know that very well. Yeah. And didn't need to go to the traditional players. But in that, I think now you're seeing a bunch of capital coming to this space and are going to invest it.
Speaker 3:You see people raising funds for it. I think that what Alex has done is really, really hard, and so I don't think it's at the agency business, you do it at scale. I don't think this is a thing you can do at scale. I think there are going to be unique individuals and opportunities that can build multi billion dollar media companies. And so that's where I think kind of where I want to kind of spend my time, and I think I hopefully can help them think through the strategy, whether it's M and A, or just in kind of figuring how to grow their content business or live event business.
Speaker 3:Hopefully, my, you know, kind of three decades of doing this could be additive and and fun. Great.
Speaker 1:All makes a lot of sense. I I feel like so many different investors have been so excited about the creator economy for so long and have struck despite that excitement, they tried to invest in the best thing to do is invest in the actual platforms. Right? A decade ago, go invest in Spotify and and and, you know Do
Speaker 2:the YouTube seed round.
Speaker 1:Meta do the YouTube seed round. Things of that nature. But then all the other attempts, you look back at like 2019, 2020, people were like, well, what if we can invest in the in the sort of tools that these businesses are using? The problem there is that these businesses will just like they don't need a QuickBooks for creators. These are just media businesses.
Speaker 1:Right? They just use QuickBooks. You can use Bank of America. You don't need a a fintech just for your business. You don't need a creators don't need an Amex card.
Speaker 1:They can just use Amex or Yep. Or Ramp or or whatever it is. And so it's come it's becoming a lot more clear to me. And then even looking at investing in the early stage of creators, the best creators early on are scrappy. They figure out how to get an audience without a lot of capital.
Speaker 1:They can just turn on their phone and start recording. Maybe they hire an editor. And so they can ramp revenue pretty quickly. And I think what investing in this category is gonna look like is like people like you waiting to to see who these sort of power law creators are and then going in and investing real dollars once they've established like at least the beginnings of of a of a platform. Just because I've Looking at the early stage, I don't There's a lot of early stage content creators that I'm bullish on, but none of them, the smart ones would take money Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Because they're like, well, capital is not a constraint for my business. A constraint is like, how do I reach more people? How do I how do I grow my existing business? And these businesses, at least on the advertising side, just generate a lot of cash.
Speaker 3:I think perfectly said, and I think it's all the more reason why I think there will be a lot of people rushing to this space. And will, I think, make the wrong decisions. Because to what you just described, you have to get to this place, and where Alex came to us, it isn't like she needs the money. I mean, you know, it's well documented what her Spotify deal is alone, And you know, and and when we grow there, the oops. What was that?
Speaker 1:That was an air horn for the Spotify deal. Cha ching. And the Sirius deal.
Speaker 2:Yeah. She's she's put up some huge numbers.
Speaker 3:Yeah. But the point of it is, but she's like, listen, you know, I need help. Know, I want the smart people around us to help kind of grow it and think through exactly what you described. And what's interesting is the traditional media companies, they they are kind of saying, listen, we don't know how to get to this audience that you reach, and we don't really know how to do creator stuff. So she's kind of going to, I think, be able to, if we do this right, go back and forth, have her own ideas, her own kind of things that we will incubate and do on YouTube, but also for the traditional media companies.
Speaker 3:And that's a kind of a hard thing to do because I don't know many people who can do both, at least that have come along historically. So, you know, and also she's, you know, our audience follows her as she's becoming a new mother. Yeah. And I think that's going to open up a whole different, you know, categories, not only in consumer products, but other things that she can kind of get involved in. That her audience is going through those same things.
Speaker 3:And I think there's just an authenticity to her, and a connection that is real, and it always starts with that. You got to have like great talent to build these things, and she is very ambitious and, you know, and loves it. I mean, loves what she's doing every day. So it's going to be fun.
Speaker 2:How are you thinking about flowback from the creator economy to traditional media to Hollywood. Obviously, we've seen the Netflix, the Spotify deals. But the more interesting trend that emerged this summer was around obsession and backrooms and iron lung, these YouTube creators, these independent, you know, new new filmmakers who were able to put up really incredible numbers at the box office. If we were having this conversation in two years and you told me that there was an Alex Cooper directed rom com that put up 200,000,000 at the box office, I'd be like, yeah, that tracks. But is Hollywood set up to embrace a new modern creator now?
Speaker 2:Because it's because in the past, it's always been, well, take take take six months off your current podcast to come do a Hollywood project and maybe you'll make 6 figures. Maybe maybe a million dollars is in the mail and that's just not enough to take the whole podcast down for six months while you go do a project.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I think you're right. I I think where you're going to see it is and you referenced those two movies Yeah. Is what's what's happened with the tools, and this is not not brand new, but like, you when Chris Nolan was 15 years old, right, he either had to get his video camera out or go rent film equipment. If you actually wanted to shoot a short film, you'd actually go rent lights and cameras and all that.
Speaker 3:And so the kid today, and whether it's just on TikTok or YouTube, that 15 year old Chris Nolan
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Is doing that every day and getting really, really good at making content and coming with ideas, and very fast so with the technology. And that's where I think the next generation of filmmakers are going to come from. And you know, we would used to go to film schools, not that they won't still come from film schools, but I think what you're going to see is the writer, director, creator in the film business, and in television is going to come there. And the power of like both of those things, when you kind of like, you know, get the kind of virality of online, and you can incubate things there. So I think part of what I think will happen with Alex is she'll have an idea that will do there, just start as a micro drama or something for YouTube, and it'll catch on like this, and then you've got to socialize it.
Speaker 3:So by the time you go out, then you could go make it as a feature film, or as a show for Netflix or whatever, but you've also got this built in awareness. I mean, obviously you guys followed it, but Backrooms was, you know, massively well known by a target audience long before it went out, right? Totally. And so I think that's where I think it'll land. I think the idea of like leaving your podcast to do it, I think is still going be risky, but these other people are sitting here every day making really, really good stuff, really good content.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And so I think that's exciting. And you know, we'll see long term how Hollywood embraces that because ultimately, like, you know, where the role of the studios are in that, and how does the studios compete. You know, he made that movie for $700,000. It looked really good, you know, for for know, for that. And and those efficiencies are only gonna get better and better.
Speaker 1:Totally. Last last question I have before you leave. I'm curious how you think about generating returns from from an investment like like you're making it unwell. I'm I'm sure I'm sure you have a preference on it. You probably make back the original investment over the next few years.
Speaker 1:And on top of that, it's just you're you're you're in the money. But is this the kind of thing that you and and the team wanna just own and op you know, help operate for thirty years? Or do you think that there's gonna be in ten years from now, you know, a bigger set of buyers that would come in and and do, you know, majority buyout of of these type of platform creator businesses?
Speaker 3:You know, we it's funny to talk to Alex about that. I mean, because obviously, it's her company and how she decides to kind of grow it. And she's not really sure. I think she wants to keep doing this kind of forever, and I think one of the things that you know, when we went through it, you know, started our own company, several that came and invested, and over time as we bought other things, obviously our shares got diluted down, and we owed less and less of the company, but the company became worth, you know, obviously exponentially more, but we still had control of the company, and had the governance of that. And so I kind of look at it in a similar light here, as I think as long as Alex wants to do it, yes, I think there'll be room for other capital partners to come in if needed and if wanted.
Speaker 3:But I think my experience with Silver Lake is kind of like, you know, I got a bias to let's keep building something great as long as we can, and as long as we're enjoying it, and then I think the exits and all that will kind of take care of themselves. But you know, she started this company, it is her, So I I think, and she's got such a incredible work ethic. I just think she's going to be doing it for a long time, and you know, just going to grow it and own it. That's No. That's my Yeah.
Speaker 2:She's done a fantastic job. Love it. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us.
Speaker 1:Yeah, great to meet you. Congratulations.
Speaker 3:Likewise and congrats on everything you guys have done. It's Thank incredible. Yeah. Know, start this thing and you know, OpenAI deal, it's just awesome. Even down in LA, people are watching you guys, you know.
Speaker 3:Spend some more time. I saw the Bob Iger thing today. Yeah. That was incredible.
Speaker 1:Yeah. A lot
Speaker 2:of It'll be Los Angeles.
Speaker 1:That made me optimistic on LA in a long time. Yeah. Everyone's like, oh, California is falling apart. LA is a disaster. Bob and Josh are just like, we're dropping 12,500,000,000.
Speaker 1:We're setting a new record. We're going.
Speaker 3:It's incredible.
Speaker 1:It's going great.
Speaker 2:I love it. Thank you so much. Thanks
Speaker 3:a lot, man.
Speaker 2:Goodbye. Talk
Speaker 1:to you soon. Congrats.
Speaker 2:Bye. Let me tell you about public.com investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries and more with great customer service. Our next guest is from Code Rabbit. We have Harjot Gill, the CEO here with a big fundraise.
Speaker 2:We gotta warm up the gong. How you doing? Hey, folks. I'm pretty good. How are you?
Speaker 2:Welcome. Tell us the news. Welcome
Speaker 1:Well, he's been on the show before,
Speaker 2:haven't you?
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Yeah. Have you? But it's been it's been maybe a year and you didn't have an orange background.
Speaker 10:Can you up the volume, please? Sorry.
Speaker 2:Oh, sorry. Yeah. Well, give us the news. Tell us what happened. I wanna hit the gong for you and then we have a bunch of questions about the business.
Speaker 10:Yeah. So we're pretty excited to announce like CDC round of funding. So we just ended up raising $143,000,000 at a $6,000,000,000 valuation. So officially a unicorn now. Yeah.
Speaker 10:And in a in a short order, like, we started, two and a half years back. So it's been an amazing ride for Pretty the good.
Speaker 2:What's been the biggest
Speaker 1:only $500,000,000 of value a year.
Speaker 2:Not bad. Not bad. Yeah. What's been the biggest driver of growth? What do customers like about CodeRabbit more than anything else?
Speaker 2:What is what what's the real the real growth vector?
Speaker 10:Yeah. We're pretty much like riding the wave of AI code generation here. So the growth is it's a second order effect of growth of cloud code, codex. Or so as you know, like the biggest use case for generated AI has been code generation. Yeah.
Speaker 10:And that's what's leading to the bottleneck downstream with code reviews now being a massive, massive bottleneck on a choke point. Yeah. And that's where CodeRevit is right now the market leader, like providing automated validation and building trust in these AI outputs. And that's what is bringing all the growth to our doorsteps.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Unpack a little bit about I was just reading on Hacker News the death of the the the mid tier engineer. You either need a vibe coder who can just, you know, hammer prompts or you need a real experienced expert architect to make any headway. And the messy middle is getting much messier with endless code, huge PRs, huge code reviewing steps that are unmanageable without AI, what is the correct balancing act that a company should be pulling off to actually move quickly, not run up the budget, but still be able to understand their system and get a good result?
Speaker 10:Yeah. It's pure chaos right now. I mean, especially like the recent inflection point we have seen with these agents becoming more and more capable like in the last, I would say, three to six months have been amazing with some of these models like OPUS four five being so capable and being able to run for longer periods of time. And what that means is that the inner loop of coding is now fully automated. Like you can just go from idea to code without even going through like planning process of linear and Jira tickets anymore.
Speaker 10:Even linear, famously, did a blog post that issue systems are dead, which is a Like now your ideas are just being translated to code directly. Yeah. And it's not just the developers writing code, now you are seeing, as you said, like product managers, even designers who are non technical in terms of coding capabilities are now actually opening pull requests. Mhmm. And on top of that, we are now seeing every company wants to be a coding company.
Speaker 10:Like now we are seeing Spotify release a coding app.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 10:I mean, Linear is writing code, Notion is writing code. Yeah. Datadog wants to write code or Sentry, everyone's writing code. Right? Mhmm.
Speaker 10:So what that is leading to is like a massive like backlog of the code changes you now have to validate and understand those massive outputs and then ship to production. So the role of human has become more of a reviewer now. So you're every day you're waking up, you're deciding which AI task I take to completion, where I where do I add my taste. Mhmm. And it's a taste thing, it's a judgment thing now, which is scarce now.
Speaker 10:So that's what we're helping scale. So what CodeRabbit does is it, first of all, fights fire with fire, essentially like you're making cloud code fight with CodeRabbit in a loop. There's lot of loop engineering aspect of it. Making sure your changes are all meeting all the guardrails or the pre merge checks that you have. Yeah.
Speaker 10:Then after that, we are helping the reviewers also triage and prioritize the work. The nature of planning has now shifted downstream because that's a joke point. Mhmm. And thirdly, we are helping the reviewers also understand the changes. No one's looking at the code, which is the fun part.
Speaker 10:Like the this is like the biggest inflection I've seen. Like, even I'm not reading the code anymore. Expecting a reviewer to do that is is certainly impossible now. Mhmm. So that what CodeRabbit is also doing is like raising the abstraction of understanding these changes.
Speaker 10:Like where you're not looking at lines of code but understanding the blast radius and architectural impact of those changes. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:I have one last question, Jordi. Go for it. I'm interested in the opportunity internationally. You're expanding. How big is the opportunity in Europe, in Asia, abroad?
Speaker 2:How focused are you on it? Is there a unique opportunity because other companies are maybe less serious about international expansion and so you can be more trusted partner faster, accelerate there? Or is it just the logical next step for your company to to expand internationally because there's demand and pull everywhere?
Speaker 10:Right. For us, like, we have always had, like, pull from all segments of the market even globally. Like, when we started, like, initially, we went viral in Japan, was so funny. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 10:And even in this round, like we are partnering with a partner in like the one of the VCs who led that round, Atomico is a very large fund out of Europe. Yeah. BMW Ventures invested in that round. BMW has one of our early customers who believed in us. So massive opportunity.
Speaker 10:I think it's a global opportunity like the developers Yeah. Across the Yeah. Globe are like
Speaker 1:an m three, m two, m four
Speaker 2:I was thinking a wrapped I eight.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Ideally. Your
Speaker 1:orders do go up. Yeah. On the I eight. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Anyway Sorry to interrupt
Speaker 1:but what was what were people most skeptical about with in regard like during the financing process? Obviously, a bunch you know, it sounds like a bunch of customers invested. They don't they they have a good Yeah. Deal for the product. But, you know, space Cursor buys graphite.
Speaker 1:I'm sure that was an accelerant
Speaker 9:to Sure.
Speaker 1:Your business in some ways. But it also signals that like these companies that are generating code want to Do everything. Do everything.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And and so I think you can like I imagine a good argument is like, you know, it's helpful to have a non lab review your code, you know, like a third party be be in that flow. But how did you answer that question?
Speaker 10:No, that's a great question. Mean, this was one of the interesting fundraisers I've done. Like, this is my third startup, by the way. I've, like, seen all kind of fundraisers. Mhmm.
Speaker 10:This one, you can clearly see, like, there's a lot of, like, anxiety in the market when it comes to the SDLC space. Like, everyone's like just concentrating their capital on a few model labs. Everyone wants to be in Anthropic for instance. And the other dynamic itself is like what does the future of SDLC look like? I mean, is code review step even needed?
Speaker 10:Right? I mean, people are like completely on defense on what the future of I mean, you know, like gets on the stage and says that you don't need software engineers anymore. Right? So all those like anxiety had been there which we had to like talk to the investors who had to make them understand where this is all going to land, where the stable ground is and code reviews. In fact, like you bring up cursor, it's a great example.
Speaker 10:Like, what we have seen in the last few years, even the code editors are not future proof. Like, cursor started with tab completion and then they got blindsided by Cloud Code, which was almost like a Yahoo versus kind of a Google movement for them. Right? On the other hand, the code reviews, the guardrails, they never go away. Like you can never have a scenario where you're going to take AI code and ship it to real customers without having any sort of guardrails in place.
Speaker 10:So the GitHub is becoming like a choke point for a good reason. It's in a lot of distress as you know, but that is kind of a sign of things to come. Like that is the only place where you can actually take a look at the changes and then approve them. Yeah. And this is kind of like an example that I'll give you from a first start I was in the observability space.
Speaker 10:Had seen kind of the same thing happen where when micro services were taking off, cloud was taking off. There was a lot of chaos. So operators were kind of flying blind. And then Datadog comes in and defines this whole category of observability, right, and became a massively valuable business. Like while AWS, GCP, and they were all growing, Datadog also continued to become a standalone company.
Speaker 10:Mhmm. Same thing we're seeing with code reviews. Now there's a lot of chaos. Explainability has become a bottleneck. Sure.
Speaker 10:Just like observability, now you have an explainability problem. Yeah. So in a way like CodeRabbit is now kind of becoming the data dog of this new world. And very interestingly, Datadog is one of the investors in this round as well. Then there's That's awesome.
Speaker 10:This is analogy here as well. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I love it. Well, congratulations and thank you so much for coming on the show. Awesome progress. Have a great
Speaker 1:rest of rest the team on the milestone.
Speaker 2:We'll talk to you soon. Have a good day.
Speaker 3:Thanks, folks.
Speaker 2:Cheers. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches.
Speaker 2:Our next guest is Jeff Huber returning to the show. I think it's been over a year. He's the founder and CEO of Chroma. And we got some good news from Jeff Huber. Let's bring him in.
Speaker 2:I know we were keeping you waiting, Jeff. Sorry for that. Late today. How you doing? We're good.
Speaker 5:Doing good, guys. Good to see you again. Great.
Speaker 2:Good to
Speaker 1:see you too long.
Speaker 2:Give us the latest in your world. Take us through recent announcements, and then we can go all over the place, I'm sure.
Speaker 5:Let's do it. I think it's been a really interesting year in AI, and in particular, you know, seeing how companies are more deeply adopting AI agents. I think, like, as we sort of reflect on, like, the biggest gap in AI, it still feels like memory is the biggest gap.
Speaker 2:I mean,
Speaker 5:I'm sure you all try to use agents all the time, and they're constantly forgetting how to do things, and they're not the right context. And so Yeah. Yeah. We're we're announcing on the show kind of our solution to that.
Speaker 2:Yes. Take us through it. What is zeitgeist?
Speaker 5:Yeah. I think, like, in short form, there's probably a lot of sophisticated approaches to solving memory for AI, but in very simple form, if you can get AI agents just to be able to write things down and then later find those things. Yeah. You know, that's all you need. And in some ways, I think Wikipedia solved it twenty years ago.
Speaker 5:You can call it a revolutionary data model. It's just a wiki. And so I I think really inspired by like how Open Claw and Hermit Agent have been managing markdown files.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I was about to ask.
Speaker 5:Kind of thinking through
Speaker 2:Why not just a bunch of markdown files? Why not just take the Open Claw vibe coder Mac mini guy and scale it up to the organization of a thousand people in the enterprise?
Speaker 5:It's a great place to start. Okay. You know, as our team was adopting this technology over the last, like, three or four months, you know, we wanted, like, the shared memory layer for our whole team that knows everything about our whole company, really. And you've got to think about concurrency control and access control and versioning and lineage and just a bunch of infrastructure things that matter Yeah. As the dataset scales.
Speaker 2:So so as a concrete example, like, might be someone in human resources that's developed a skill to give people raises, but you don't necessarily want that skill proliferating across the entire organization. So I mean, otherwise, everyone's just giving themselves raises left and right. Is that is that a reasonable example?
Speaker 5:I think so. Yeah. Hopefully, the other access control systems would not allow anybody to give anybody a raise. Right? Sure.
Speaker 5:But, maybe more grounded, like, what we've seen amongst our own team is that, like, now our engineering team, the first place they go when they have a technical question is they ask Foundation, the product's called, they ask Foundation that question. And Foundation has seen all of our Notion docs, all of our Google Drive docs, all of our coding agent sessions, which actually have so much, like, high value tacit information in them Yeah. About how our team works, how they operate, what we care about.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:But now it spreads. The customer support's constantly asking questions. Sales, GTMs asking questions. It really become this, like, repository of everything we know.
Speaker 2:So Yeah. What take us through the the shape of the core business, the the launch of Chroma Cloud, how that business is going, just overall demand for for core products in and around the AI boom because everything is sort of booming and every system's, like, straining. What's your experience been?
Speaker 5:Yes. We launched current cloud in late twenty twenty five. We now have close to a thousand paying customers on the product and tens of thousands of other users who, you know, we'll bring on board soon. You know, I think, like, these lower level infrastructure primitives are cool. Right?
Speaker 5:A core core database, core search, core operations. They allow developers to pick it up and build useful applications. And we were looking at the market and seeing really what our customers were building. We realized there was an opportunity to meet them where they were. They were all asking us, hey.
Speaker 5:How do we build do we build Wikis? How do we solve access control? How do we solve versioning just time and time again? And so, you know, us just building those infrastructure for Biz for customers to use allows them to, you know, focus on what actually differentiates their business. Mhmm.
Speaker 5:So.
Speaker 2:Give me your not your AGI timelines, but your timeline to just good search. I feel like I go into my Gmail and I search for something and it's still bad. And I want an LLM to be involved, but I don't want it to be as slow as a current LLM. I know I can wire it up to codex or whatever and and have it read through everything. But I don't want to wait ten minutes, but I also don't want the current experience.
Speaker 2:And I feel like there will be a merging of these two, but do we need to bake it into an ASIC or something? Like, how complex is it going be until, like, you just show up to a website and the search function is magical and also as fast as you remember it?
Speaker 5:Yeah. I think there's a few different pieces of the puzzle. So number one is, like, having highly expressive, accurate, and fast search throughout the database layer. Right? And the second piece of that is, like, the agent itself for the model being really fast.
Speaker 5:You know, one thing that we made a bet on earlier this year was agentic search becoming, like, the default. That really all searches will go through a model. This is what it the bitter I think the bitter lesson means for search is that, you know, you'll spend more tokens, you'll use more inference. That's how you get better at search. And so we released a model in this spring called Context One.
Speaker 5:It's a fine tune of GPT OSS 20 d, and that model on three bursts today already runs at 3,000 tokens per second. And we were targeting, I think, yeah, Talos got Yeah. Bought last week. I think you guys covered that.
Speaker 1:It's Chad Jimmy. You know
Speaker 2:chadjimmy.ai. Best demo
Speaker 1:that names don't matter when the when the product
Speaker 2:When the product's really technical and good.
Speaker 1:The team has got cracked. You can name your product whatever you want. Chat jimmy.ai.
Speaker 2:We were
Speaker 5:a shared investor. You know, we were targeting context about running at like 15,000 or 20,000 per second on that chip. And I think like if you think about that's gonna come. Right? That's coming this year, and that's gonna change how we really rewire how people think about language models.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Is there still, like even though the the the the token speed is very quick in that example, is there a delay to sort of, like, fire up the chip, like, load load data into memory, build the context window, like do whatever you need to to actually get the once the inference is cooking, I can imagine it being very fast. But is there if you're dealing with something that's like a scaled email product and you have millions of users that that are gonna be searching things randomly, like, you can't store all of that in Yeah. Like, in memory all the time. So, like like, what Yeah.
Speaker 2:What what like, what is the process there? Is that a meaningful barrier or not?
Speaker 5:I think fast inference sort of what you're implying here, like fast inference does not solve just sort of for you, conduct engineering.
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Speaker 5:Like, you still have to make sure that you're bringing the model the right information, the right granularity of information, letting it forget information such that it can refocus. And I think it's been cool to see like Connus engineering to some degree get folded back into the model, but also as we've seen as of late, like, you know, really good harnesses, like the stuff from PrimeMintilex, like really good harnesses that are targeting tasks, you know, that is in some ways convex engineering and, like, they can outperform frontier models by a huge margin. And so I think there's still huge gains to to convex engineering.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Jordy, anything else? I got more questions but we're we're running behind. Yeah. Sorry.
Speaker 1:We Great to great to see you, Jeff. Let's not let it be so long
Speaker 2:Yeah. Let's do it again soon.
Speaker 1:Congrats on all the all the progress.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Thank you so much for coming on the show. We'll talk
Speaker 5:to Have you
Speaker 2:a good one. Bye. Let me tell you about Figma. Agents meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context.
Speaker 2:Go check it out. Up next, we're going back to back again. Shaun Maguire is doing deals left and right. He said, I want an entire Gundot. I want every
Speaker 1:Kushner of deep tech. Yeah. But
Speaker 2:we got Shaun Maguire and Soren Monroe-Anderson from Niros.
Speaker 1:Great
Speaker 2:to see How you guys doing?
Speaker 7:Have a
Speaker 9:lot of money.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's great. Job's finished.
Speaker 2:Take us through the deal. What happened?
Speaker 8:Yeah. I mean, overall this year has been super super strong. We've been growing like crazy, building the team, producing a lot more drones. We're up to about 1,200 a week in terms of production output. So things are going really really well there.
Speaker 8:And we've also started expanding into multiple product lines. So we just started talking publicly about Bandit, which is our interceptor drone. And really this round is, fuel on the fire to go expand to to new verticals and make bigger investments into the the core technology behind the platform. So, you know, core business doing extremely well, and now we're ready to take some some big swings.
Speaker 2:How much did you raise?
Speaker 8:We raised 250,000,000.
Speaker 1:Let's go. Alright.
Speaker 5:My most is This is the Yeah.
Speaker 9:Third round we've either led or co led in this company. Yeah.
Speaker 2:You were early.
Speaker 9:We've led the seed. There was a pre seed led by Ian Rountree from Cantos. Gotta give him a
Speaker 10:shout out. Nice. Yeah.
Speaker 9:He connected me with Soren back in the day. But then we also Sequoia co led the b and co led the c. Mhmm. And so that is I say that's max conviction, boys. That's that's up there.
Speaker 1:Really cool. Thing I'm most interested in for you, Soren, is like how is the American supply chain developing? How much are you guys having to take on yourself versus are there are there companies coming out of the woodwork hitting you up saying, hey, I can make this, I can make that, and you're and you're
Speaker 2:rumors of an American drone motor company because those were in really short supply. But walk us through what's going on on the supply chain side. Where are there green shoots? Where are there where where where are you issuing like a call for new startups?
Speaker 8:Yeah. It definitely depends on what part of the supply chain, and it's pretty varied across. So we have taken the overall strategy of designing our core components in house. We really specialize in the electronics design. So this is things like the radios and the flight computers.
Speaker 10:Mhmm.
Speaker 8:So when we're going and figuring out how to build these at scale, we're going directly to the chip companies, we're going to many different board houses. We get a lot of control down at the granular level of the subcomponents and the materials going into these parts. We do a similar thing with motors where like, we are sourcing neodymium, non Chinese neodymium, where we have a, place where we can get that processed outside of China, and then we're also working with multiple motor companies, including one of the American motor companies that has started up recently. So I think because drones are getting so much attention, there are some really capable companies, you know, like like West Mag is one of the the motor companies that's making fantastic progress. We benefit from that, but we also know that we need to control our own destiny in many of these areas.
Speaker 8:So we are going very vertical in our design and our manufacturing. And the intent is to be multiple, like, sourced have multiple sources for all of these critical things.
Speaker 1:Problem number one feels like you're on the path, which is as a country, we need to figure out a way to make a ton of these as fast as possible. Second is maybe, like, capability factor and how do you basically push the form factor forward. Sometime between when the last time you were on and now, I saw a video of a drone where effectively the whole body of the drone was spinning and it almost made it invisible, and it was very very scary looking. It feels like there's a lot that can be done on the form factor side. How important is that to the company right now versus just problem solving problem number one?
Speaker 8:Yeah. I mean, we're constantly iterating on form factor for Archer, basically figuring out ways that it can be a better product for the soldiers. These are really granular things. Like, for example, you know, every time they train with it, they find this one little like plastic part breaks and so then, no, you need to go and figure out how to change that plastic part. That's a really really specific example, but it's we get a lot of advantage by having now tens of thousands of drones deployed and constantly doing that iteration with the the end users.
Speaker 8:But in terms of overall form factor, the the biggest thing I would look at right now is Bandit, is our interceptor. So it is pretty much all of the same components from Archer, but in a new airframe with a different payload. It's designed for maximum speed versus, really, like, range with a with a heavy payload, and it's designed to go and chase down other drones. It's a great example of how we've built this ecosystem of these core components that we can produce at scale with a secure supply chain and now we're applying all of that to a new form factor and we're able to go and, you know, chase down shotheads with it, which is something that we cannot do with the the current product line today.
Speaker 2:Wow. Can you explain, like m five, sort of the the the buyer here and and how the how the drone procurement process will change over the next few years because drones don't you think like Air Force, they fly, but I'm sure the Navy needs drones. I'm sure the Army needs drones. Recently, Space Force was built up and that makes very that that makes a lot of sense for where space is. But you could see selling to the coast guard, selling to different branches of military even Are
Speaker 9:you saying we need drone force? We definitely maybe.
Speaker 2:Maybe that's the solution. But but I can imagine like the Navy SEALs needing something different than other Navy servicemen. And so how diverse will your customer base be within the armed forces, within the Department of War? How does it break down currently? Is there one buyer and then they do deployment and repurposing?
Speaker 2:Or are you actually interfacing with smaller segments of the armed forces?
Speaker 8:Yeah. It's a great question. So today, we sell to every service branch of the US military, but the army and the marine corps are the largest volume customers.
Speaker 9:Okay.
Speaker 8:Navy and Air Force have less of a, you know, a large quantity demand, at least for Archer Sure. Because Archer is really designed for maneuver forces, you know, striking targets within a 20 kilometer radius. And and that's really the the specialty of the Army and the Marine Corps. However, with with Bandit, you know, the counter UAS system, that is, I think, very applicable to the Air Force with protecting air bases as one example. But we design all of our products to be useful in many different domains, and the, you know, in our business development team, they are broken down by service, but not by product.
Speaker 8:And so we really want our the folks who are interfacing day to day with the customers. So this is our BD team and our mission success team. We want them to be really intimately familiar with the customer's needs and focusing on, you know, what does that specific service want so we can deliver them the best product.
Speaker 2:How are you thinking about lessons from
Speaker 9:the Let me, John. Let me just add Please. To that. Yeah. So, you know, you talked about a bunch of the American Department of War customers.
Speaker 9:Sure. This has also already started international sales. Yep. So so, like, obviously, these products are needed all over the world. Yeah.
Speaker 9:And then with this next product, Bandit, the interceptor product, you get into like, we need to defend pretty much all critical infrastructure. And with the Iran war, especially what happened in The Gulf Yeah. It's it's not just gonna be government customers. I think that if you're building a data center refinery.
Speaker 2:You're gonna
Speaker 9:have to buy interceptors, you know, like and you'll do it in cooperation with your government. But maybe the dollars will come from, you know, whoever owns the oil rig, Exxon, or anyone. And just this this problem is so big and it's gone it's, like, already going beyond the traditional just Department of War procurement cycle, and we're seeing it just extremely strongly at nears with their demand.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Lessons from the f 35 program, some really amazing technology, also tensions between different branches for different features that might have delayed, might have caused cost overruns. There's a bunch of different ways you can tell the story of the F-thirty five. But are you leaning more into modularity than another company might? Are you trying to are there benefits and trade offs of modularity at your current scale?
Speaker 2:Or is there something where you're thinking, okay, down the line, we'll need different products, So let's set things up now to be prepared for when that comes.
Speaker 8:Yeah. That's exactly right, actually. And we've started really trying to instill this in the engineering team which is breaking down our systems by, you know, the logical component and subcomponent level, and thinking about what is going to transfer to the next product
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 8:And being really smart about what every interface between components looks like. Niros, our theory of victory is building a component ecosystem, and making it so every new product is is utilizing that. And so we just build this flywheel. You know, a lot of companies have done this really well with software. Niras is trying to do this with with hardware as well.
Speaker 8:And that that is very clear as we're developing Bandit that we're able to reuse so much of the componentry. I will say that modularity is generally hard for mass manufacturing. Like, you can take parts of a design, but actually having individual components is is generally harder for making a really mass manufactured product. But it is something that our customers demand, especially with components like radios. We've just seen that you have to be able to switch out your comms quickly.
Speaker 8:And as we redesign this next generation of the drone, we're doing a a full ground up redesign from what you see today. Mhmm. And that is gonna be in service, partially in service of modularity, but also setting the requirement to be manufacturable at a million per year. So those things are somewhat at tension with each other, but we have to we have to figure out the right line in between.
Speaker 2:Shaun, it's How many? Oh. Oh. It's your third investment of this company. You have a ton of capital.
Speaker 2:Are you in terms of your defense tech investing arc, are you in growth investor mindset now? Are you going to be Do you expect to do fewer seed checks, really early stage companies, and focus on growth stage, board seats, figuring out the public markets, doing later stage deals? Or is there still an opportunity for early stage defense tech in your mind?
Speaker 9:Yeah. I mean, many people will disagree with me on this, but I am personally more in the growth mindset now. I think there are these moment in time, you know, these why nows that happen that an opportunity for the first movers to go and just, like, build companies that could not have existed prior, and the Ukraine war was that for a lot of defense tech. And so, like, the companies that were started immediately then or right before and are actually delivering value, you know, abroad in some of these active theaters, Like, they're just in a different level than the ones just getting started now. And I I personally think it's gonna be hard to catch up for a lot of these.
Speaker 9:I do think there are you know, like, let's say there are 10 very successful defense tech companies started in this decade or so. My guess is seven of them have already been started. We know the names.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 9:Maybe there's opportunity for, like, two or three more.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 9:So I I I am open minded and paying attention to the space, but, like, it's it's more active on the growth side. Yeah. And I gotta say on that, Niros is still today a deeply underappreciated company. Like, $2,500,000,000 valuation, that's cool and great. These guys, their revenue is growing at an insane clip, actually very efficiently from a financial perspective, which is very rare for a hardware company.
Speaker 9:They are actually, like, having profound impact in theater right now in multiple places.
Speaker 10:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:And it's just like that caliber of company is very, very rare. There's maybe another couple companies
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 9:In that, you know, group, but this company kicks ass.
Speaker 2:I love it. Great great
Speaker 1:way to sum it up. Last question I have. How meaningful is drone racing as a pipeline for talent? Mhmm. Like, are there people that that I'm sure I'm sure you you have plenty of attention from from that world given, you know, the meteoric rise of Niros.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Is like the what what the IMO medalists are to Scott Wood. Is that is that what drone racing is for Niros?
Speaker 8:A little bit. Yeah. Basically, our whole flight test team is, like, insanely good drone pilots, and we're we've actually started going to the biggest drone racing events, just to be there, have a presence, and, like, show people that there is something that they can come and work on that is actually a real career. Like drone racing is not much of a career, at least for for the majority of people who partake in it. And honestly, I just wish it was bigger because it is such a fantastic source of of talent.
Speaker 8:So my my theory is that over time as military FPV is really growing, it'll eventually mean that the the hobbyist FPV world will will come along with it, and we'll see more more very, very cool racing events happening.
Speaker 9:I just gotta add one more pipeline, which is, you know, now that these guys are doing very, very real deployments, they have a pipeline of former special forces operators joining the company. And I mean, for me, as, like, an American that used to work in in that world as a civilian, makes me very, very proud. So the drone racing, you know, is where Soren comes from, but it's really incredible to see these guys hiring a bunch of ex mill guys
Speaker 2:as well. Yeah. There was the story of Palantir. A lot of like used it and they're like, let me go work for this company. They did very well for them.
Speaker 8:We have had that happen multiple times. I'm sure. That is that is saying something good.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Are you the best drone racer at Niros currently employed? Or have you hired somebody better? What percentile are you if there's a company outing?
Speaker 8:Oh, man. I I I'm definitely not the best and I'm probably not even the second best. I have not flown very much in a That's
Speaker 9:long because he's old at 23 and his skills are exponentially Yeah.
Speaker 8:It's like Formula One. Yeah. I'm I'm I'm washed at this point. Unc. Unc mode.
Speaker 8:Levi Levi's our our lead flight test pilot. He runs the whole flight test team and he was a professional pilot before. He's like the Wow. Most naturally talented pilot I've ever seen. He's he's probably the best at the company.
Speaker 5:That's awesome.
Speaker 8:He also flies for a living, so it helps.
Speaker 2:Yeah. There you go. That does sound.
Speaker 9:And for those of you that don't know, Soren was the world champion, you know, drone racer in multi GP.
Speaker 2:I've I've I've watched him in person. Ben over there on our team came and filmed you in the park in El Segundo. And it was one of the craziest things I've ever seen. Because I I've I've seen a DJI drone sort of, like, take off and sort of, you know, like, float away. Maybe it goes a little quick and Soren puts on this headset and is just whipping around this tree going as fast as he can.
Speaker 2:Was a crazy video. It was a
Speaker 7:lot of fun.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for coming on the show.
Speaker 1:Great to see you guys.
Speaker 2:Great to see you.
Speaker 7:Amazing progress.
Speaker 2:We'll talk to soon. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all in one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web app servers databases and more while Railway automatically takes care of scale, monitoring and security.
Speaker 2:Our next guest is the real liver king, not the social media influencer, but the CEO of the world's largest human biological data center. Fascinating story. Andrei from Vivodyne. Welcome to the show. How are you doing?
Speaker 7:Doing well. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 2:Thanks so much for hopping on the show. Please introduce yourself and the company a little bit.
Speaker 7:Sure. So, VivaDyne grows human tissues at very massive scale. Okay. So we can test drugs, in humans without testing in people.
Speaker 10:Okay.
Speaker 7:And we do it at very massive scale. So many times the total amount of clinical trials run-in The US every year. And the reason for doing all this is the failure rate of drugs is huge. Yeah. So nineteen out of twenty drugs fail because all the animal experiments we've done just don't translate to people.
Speaker 7:So we can cure cancer and Alzheimer's and all these things in mice and then they fell in people.
Speaker 1:Maybe When did humans first grow human tissue in a lab? Yeah.
Speaker 7:This is this is the first time we're able to grow like large pieces of human tissue. So hundreds of thousands of cells in each individual piece. Mhmm. And we're growing, you know, tens, hundreds of thousands of these tissues at a time to test all sorts of different drugs and permutations. So it's
Speaker 1:a hundreds of thousands of cells. This is still microscopic or
Speaker 7:Oh, you can see them. Yeah. You can see the little blood vessels growing in them. It's like inch scale, centimeter scale.
Speaker 2:Interesting. What we have Have ever
Speaker 1:had a rogue tissue?
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 7:Yeah. I I am the first rogue tissue. I crawled out of this guy back
Speaker 2:here. Oh, no. You know, here I am. Well, yeah. What what what is the key unlock that allows this?
Speaker 2:Because I imagine that fifty years ago, there were scientists that were like, it sure would be nice to have a ton of human tissue to test drugs on. They couldn't do it then. Why is it possible now?
Speaker 7:So one of the things that made it possible is having the throughput to test all the different formulations for like the medias and the protocols that we use to grow them. Yeah. Which the robotics, know, by by kind of dog sitting around technology, we're also get better at.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 7:So it's you know, with with with biology, it's like climbing a big mountain with a with a little valley at the top. Right? It's the the the kind of skill is like getting the ball up and having it just kind of nest there. And that is when it kind of falls into what it would naturally do. Mhmm.
Speaker 7:So gains the function it would normally have. We can we can dose to these blood vessels that self assemble, and this tissue actually performs the function of its, you know, native organ counterpart.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Is are are humans like sourdough? Like, you need a little starter? You know? Like, how do you actually kick start your tissue?
Speaker 7:Yeah. So we use that's a very good analogy. So we use primary human cells. We get them from like donated blood or biopsies of things like tumors, and we get the primary cells out of there. We're not using, you know, like transformed stem cells or the old cell lines.
Speaker 7:They are primary human cells, and they are what kind of seed this process of the tissue cell.
Speaker 2:Yes. So someone has a tumor, they do a biopsy, and then instead of just saying, okay, you can test one drug on it because if you kill this, you're done. You can scale it up and and clone it effectively, and then you can say, let's test 50 drugs on this and see what actually works.
Speaker 7:Yeah. 50,000.
Speaker 2:50,000.
Speaker 7:The search space is just so big. Right? I mean, the the the the kind of real problem I think drug development is butting up against is, you know, over the past decades, we've tried to find like single target cures, right, for disease. So like maybe this receptor or maybe this compound in the blood by reducing it or by increasing it, we can we can fix some disease. But things like cancer and fibrosis and Alzheimer's and all of these just like keep getting away from us, right?
Speaker 7:So we might get a little bit close and then, oh, does nothing in people. And imagine like if the, you know, the check engine light comes on in your car, the solution is not gonna be you turn a single screw. It's like a little more complicated than that. And so the hard part about drugging multiple targets and interfacing with biology, like at the complexity that it has, is how how do you search that space? How do you know which things to bind and and and how it
Speaker 2:all
Speaker 7:works? And to to really address such a large shared space, you can no longer just be screening. It just runs away from me, right? It's like a cliff of like numerical climb.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:And so you have to do the inverse, so just understand biology and back solve the things that you should drug to make it do the things you want instead of trying to drug everything and seeing what happens. And so to understand biology at that level, especially human biology, we have to be able to test it.
Speaker 2:We read a story about the price of monkeys spiking based on demand from biotech companies to test drugs on monkeys. Where does this technology fit in the new drug development process? Because I it feels like we're very close to, like, the computers being really good at testing a bunch of ideas. But then, of course, you go what was it? Mouse or monkey or something at some point?
Speaker 7:Mouse or Right? Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And but this feels like an interim step that could be before mouse models, or would this be a full replacement for mouse models, or would this be after a mouse model? Like, where does this fit into the to the story arc of a new biotech company?
Speaker 7:So, you know, we we're we're we're currently working with, like, the very large majority of the top 10 pharma, and the majority of the projects that we're working on are things that do not translate from monkeys into people.
Speaker 2:Oh, okay.
Speaker 7:So even the primates are are not giving the same responses that humans are.
Speaker 2:Interesting.
Speaker 7:Or strange things are are being seen in the primates that were not seen in in in the mice and dogs, and you wonder like, which one is it? Right? Sure. And so the the instead of just jumping we have some cells in a dish here. We have some inorganic acid here.
Speaker 7:Now we're in mice and then woodchucks and a sort of we just need to test on human tissue from the get go and replace this whole outdated approach to maybe the mouse is going to tell us. Because all these drugs that are failing in clinic, right, these 19 out of 20, they are working in the animals. They're safe. They're pretty efficacious. So it's like, fuck, where are our cures?
Speaker 7:Instead of instead of all these cures, domestic abuse. And so we we we are working from discovery all the way through to, like, supporting clinical trials with these tissues, both to do things that you cannot search easily enough in people and also things that might be too unsafe to search in people.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Jordan, you have another? Or
Speaker 1:What were you doing before this? How'd you get into growing human tissue?
Speaker 2:Doing it for fun, Yeah. Hobbyist.
Speaker 7:Yeah. How'd you get into this? So my my my my background was in designing high throughput microfluidics.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 7:And then I met my co founder Dan as my PhD advisor, and he had invented this concept of the organic chip of of growing, you know, these functional units of human tissues. And we kinda came together and said we need to scale this up dramatically and also improve like the fidelity of these tissues and make them basically indistinguishable from what we'd get in a deep biopsy punch.
Speaker 1:Interesting. What what is like, what are the regulatory guardrails for creating, like like, I I I just imagine, like, you kind of, if your company continues to gain traction
Speaker 2:You're worried about accidentally creating like a Frankenstein type of
Speaker 1:Well, yeah. Like I feel like that's the natural path here. Yeah. And I'm just wondering like there's a lot of like moral and ethical dilemmas surrounding that. There will probably need to be regulations surrounding that at some point.
Speaker 1:And, yeah, it just feels like that's probably the end state is just vats of of people living in this. People. Anyways, I I've movie guy, but the it's it's the Matrix. Right? Where they're all
Speaker 2:You're real pretty far away from the Matrix
Speaker 1:doesn't feel that far.
Speaker 7:I see the Okay.
Speaker 1:I see the robotic arm in the background.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, real movie is The Island. Yeah. With Michael Bay's The Island, they they they clone a human
Speaker 7:That's and then
Speaker 2:the rich person can be like, oh, I need a kidney transplant. And they're like, well, we got a direct clone of you over there on that island. Let's go get that liver out of them. It's very very dystopian.
Speaker 1:But can I ask you to the We
Speaker 7:can do this hopefully without the the full person?
Speaker 2:Yes. Yes. Yes.
Speaker 7:The FDA, you know, like the the FDA is actually I I think among all of these cases where there's a new technology and you are, like, fighting with the regulator to to push something forward, the FDA has been you know, has has put up now, like, three modernization acts that drive the uptake of these animal alternatives. Right, like given the failure rate. And it really gets worse with biologics, right, like antibody based therapies and, you know, bispecific antibody drug conjugates and all these new modalities for drugs that are that are good because they're specific, but they're specific to human, you know, targets.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 7:And so it's even harder to test those. And so the FDA has been an extremely strong tailwind actually in in making these.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And then and then at some point, like, would, you know, would would you grow a specific individual's tissue and then test a wide range of drugs on that to figure out what was gonna be most effective? Like, that also feels like the next logical step is Yeah. Personalized medicine? Personalized medicine.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Sign, yeah. Take take That is what we're doing. Or something. Okay.
Speaker 7:Yeah. So so so so by definition, these cells have to come from someone, right? And so, you know, we we are usually kind of broad across the different demographics that we test on both, you know, age, sex, race, and so on. But ultimately too for various patient specific diseases. Cancer, right, is a great example.
Speaker 7:I mean, just imagine being able to if you have a solid tumor, I mean, Island is like the perfect movie. Right? You imagine like 50,000 clones of yourself and you say, alright, like, Survive.
Speaker 2:There's a lot of more You can explain it to the movie though. Gotta actually watch the movie, I think. You're gonna get into some hot water.
Speaker 7:Pick up the good parts. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, just the tissue in a in a tea Petri dish. I think most people get behind that.
Speaker 7:But No brain.
Speaker 2:As soon as it's Scarlett Johansson walking around with emotions and ideas and history, it gets a lot darker.
Speaker 1:Most fascinating company we've had on the show this year, I think.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Very interesting.
Speaker 7:Well, congrats I appreciate it, guys.
Speaker 2:Thank you.
Speaker 7:Hey, if you wanna grow copies of yourself.
Speaker 2:No. When we hired Tyler, I made sure I was a perfect match on blood type and everything. Yeah. So I'm I'm pretty much good to go. But this sounds good for for those who don't have a title.
Speaker 1:Where are you based by the way?
Speaker 7:San Francisco. We're we're right in the Bay Area.
Speaker 2:Cool. Fantastic. Well, have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 7:Thank you so much for
Speaker 2:having me. Have a good rest of your day. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces and now with AI agents.
Speaker 1:Let's head over to the timeline. Alfred Wallforce
Speaker 2:What he said?
Speaker 1:Over at Listen Labs. Oh. He's been on the show before. Mhmm. Coming in with one of the hottest takes.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Got some pushback.
Speaker 1:He said founders, only send investor updates.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Give me the boathorn. When you're winning, system has sent three in its history off on race announcements. Nobody reads a bad update in house. They just want you as dying.
Speaker 2:I think your crazy voice sounds crazier than mine. Let me check. Let me check. Oh, it sounds about the same. It sounds about the same.
Speaker 2:But
Speaker 1:Yeah. This is just I think this is terrible advice. Really? Except if you're winning.
Speaker 2:Thanks. I
Speaker 1:think it should be founders. If you're winning, only send investor updates.
Speaker 2:Yes. I I I No. It's just like
Speaker 1:it's it's it's just such bad advice because I've had so many I mean, I've had instances like kind of surprise and delight moments where I haven't been getting an update from a company in a year and I just assume the company is like dead and dying and then they pop up with an update. I I had this happen where a company that I thought was fully dead, I didn't even wanna I I almost bad asking. It was a small angel check. I thought they were dead until I got an update that I needed to sign something because they were selling for like, you know Wow.
Speaker 2:There you go.
Speaker 1:250,000,000. Sick. So any anyways, like Yeah. I I just think like investors If you have Mhmm. 10 investors and you send a bad update, a lot of people aren't gonna be able to help.
Speaker 1:But if there's a chance that one helps Yeah. Then then that's great. And and even if you're not winning, you can show momentum which is going to like, updates are how you build trust. It's how people Yeah. Start to process like how is this team and this founder performing?
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Even if they're not winning yet, are they making progress? Are they iterating quickly? It's how and if if you're not sending any updates and then suddenly you need to raise more money Mhmm. Like you need a bridge round or something like that, the likelihood of getting that round done is much lower because you just don't have the you don't have the People can't get a good read on like, okay.
Speaker 1:Do I believe do I have more conviction in this team today than when I invested even though they haven't figured it out yet?
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:Right?
Speaker 2:So I'm taking the other side of this with some reasonableness maybe. I don't know. You can debate me on this. So do you think it's important to send investor updates when you're a pre seed company? Like, purely in the idea, May, is very early stage.
Speaker 2:They're the revenue is zero every month. You're just sort of like, you know, out figuring out the first product.
Speaker 1:I mean, at that at that stage, it it depends. Hopefully, you only have like one or two investors. Yeah. And but but it's still important to see like a it's it's valuable to see a a snapshot. It doesn't have to be the the if at that stage, if I get an investor update that's paragraphs and paragraphs and paragraphs, I'm like super super bare.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Totally. But it's still better to just have like even quick bullet points. Hey, here's what we're working on. Yep. We'll come we'll we'll we'll have another update in a month.
Speaker 2:Okay. Because Listen Labs is only a three year old company and they raised their series a in April 2025. So and he and there's a there's a rumored series c going on right now. And so if he sent three investor updates, that might be April 2025, January 2026, and August 2026, which is like every six months, which doesn't feel like that crazy of a cadence. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's like, yeah, it's not quarterly. It's not monthly. But it's a pretty regular pace because they're raising So money if it's very different if it's like, okay, this is like a more, like, less, like, hot time in the market. You're not going to be fundraising every three months. You're going to be raising money every 18 months, realistically, every 24.
Speaker 2:It's a harder industry. And so I, as an investor with a series a check, I want to know, okay, how much runway is actually left. Yeah. Because but but that's not the equation here. So a little bit of a of a unique this post reveals a little bit more about the level of fundraising activity that you can only send investor updates Yeah.
Speaker 2:And still be emailing all your investors every six months. Yep. So there's a little
Speaker 1:bit of Yeah. And and a lot of this comes down to Alfred. Listen, Labs has been crushing. Yeah. I remember when they first came on the Yeah.
Speaker 1:It seemed like the company made a lot of sense. Yep. They they quickly raised follow on rounds from great investors. Sure they're still doing well. You wouldn't post this if you if you weren't winning.
Speaker 1:Still still sure they're doing well but like just really really bad just really really bad advice
Speaker 2:not one size fits all advice. I completely agree. The other thing Yeah.
Speaker 1:And the other the other thing I would say is like how do you know a company that's building in public is struggling? They stopped building in public.
Speaker 2:No. Right?
Speaker 1:They haven't like I've I've seen this like at least 10 times Yep. Right now. Yep. You see the company that that's got all this momentum. Yep.
Speaker 1:Founders like, I'm sharing our here's our I'm sharing our best
Speaker 2:because they're just proud
Speaker 1:of it. And they usually will string together like six months of that Yep. And then they go dark. It's like, oh, what what
Speaker 2:What
Speaker 1:happened? You don't want to build in public when Yeah. You're not growing anymore Yeah. Yeah. I know.
Speaker 1:And revenue is declining or or you were you were a thin wrapper, whatever it is.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. The other side of this is this nobody reads a bad update and helps they just mark you as dying. I think that maybe that's not a 100% accurate, but The thing is like
Speaker 1:you're dying unless you're winning.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I I I think there is something where in investor updates, a good investor update can be a pitch for the company a little bit and it can be an opportunity for the founder to sort of rehearse their next round's pitch with their current investors and say, okay, let me restate the vision, the mission, the progress, what we're doing. And instead of instead of framing things as like I need all these different things, it's more just like I'm I'm going. I'm working. And and then also there's the dynamic of sometimes companies stop sending investor updates because there's a tier one, like, partner on the board who's, like, shepherding the company and all of the activity really happens at the board meeting.
Speaker 2:And maybe one of those early angels has a bigger stake in a competitor and so you don't actually want to share the update broadly, but the board meeting is still happening. There's still, like, oversight and infrastructure around the business. And so, in fact, you're getting something that's bigger and more important than an investor update, which is a board deck and a board meeting. It's just not being shared to all the investors.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The other thing about updates is they just keep companies top of mind. Like, I have
Speaker 2:a friend
Speaker 1:I have a friend. He has a bootstrap company. He effectively sends a monthly update Yeah. And it gets him so many customers because it's just at the top of the inbox. He's like, hey, I'm trying to connect to this company
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:And people just loop them in all the time. Yeah. It's amazing way to just stay top of mind.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's happened a few times like companies that I'm not even invested in. I get on the investor update list.
Speaker 1:I'll just be if you're not updating somebody like I I had one of the 70 odd
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Angel investments that I've made. Like hadn't heard from them in a year. Mhmm. And then they they they texted and said, hey, like, are you free to catch up? And the ask was basically, like, will you will you, like, do a bridge round?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And it's like, yeah, if I if I can ask all the questions to try to understand what has happened between now and when the investment was made. Mhmm. But it's so much different to be getting like those updates in real time, seeing how they're dealing with adversity, sealing seeing how
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:How they're building moment momentum as a company. And Yeah. So anyways, don't do this. Don't do it. Don't do it in every case.
Speaker 1:Don't listen to Alfred, the founder I'm
Speaker 2:sure it applies
Speaker 1:companies. I'm to fully I I I can fully get behind not sharing up if you have a ton of if have you
Speaker 2:have sending ton of fundraising announcements. Does that count?
Speaker 1:If you have a ton of if you have like a really kind of crazy cap table, I think it can be I think it can be fair to and you're in a competitive category. Think it can be fair to say like, we're
Speaker 2:We're keeping these numbers closely held.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We're gonna Specific numbers Yep. Or or even just say like, hey, we're basically sending updates to people that have invested like more than a million dollars. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Threshold. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But Makes sense. Anyways, very very funny very funny post.
Speaker 2:Put the timeline in turmoil.
Speaker 1:Love it. Definitely got the people going. And we should have Alfred back on the show to get an update.
Speaker 2:An update. On the company.
Speaker 1:They must be crushing. This is the only thing you post when you're just on fire. Yeah. Must be ready to send another churn.
Speaker 2:What's churn? Go ahead and walk us through the funnel. Pull up the slides. I want to see them. Anyway, we got one last news story.
Speaker 2:It's good news for the gamers in the audience. If you're a gamer, the US government wants you to consider becoming an air traffic controller. You've had the practice. Now, it's time to go into the real world and become an air traffic controller. Transportation secretary Shaun Duffy says a federal campaign specifically targeting gamers has helped the FAA hire more than 2,000 people to train as controllers, putting the agency at 94% of its hiring goal with another 200 or another 2,000 plus candidates moving through the pipeline.
Speaker 2:Duffy launched the effort in April arguing that the government needed to look beyond its traditional recruiting pool and that gamers already practice some of the skills controllers need including rapidly processing information, maintaining focus and keeping track of multiple things at once. You don't necessarily need a four degree four year degree either. The FAA accepts candidates with qualifying work experience, education, or a combination of the two, ideally a steam account as well. It's also a potentially lucrative career. The median air traffic controller earned a $144,580 in 2024 according to the BLS.
Speaker 2:While the top 10% of air traffic controllers earned more than $210,000. Getting the job, however, is another matter. Applicants generally have to be US citizens under under 31 years old, pass medical and security screenings and take the FAA's three and a half hour air traffic skills assessment which is designed to predict whether they have the cognitive aptitude for the work. Those who make it through then undergo extensive training at the FAA Academy in Oklahoma City before continuing their training at an air traffic facility. The recruiting push comes as the FAA tries to dig itself out of a longstanding staffing shortage.
Speaker 2:A government accounting, accountability office report published in December found that the controller workforce had shrunk 6% over the past decade even as air traffic increased 10%. So the number of air traffic controllers relative to the amount of flights was decreasing really, really in a bad way. At the end of fiscal twenty twenty five, the FAA employed 13,000 controllers and shortages at critical facilities were are were already contributing to delays and cancellations. We've all seen the reports of those. What the problem Jack
Speaker 1:in the chat says being an air traffic controller must be like being a lifeguard for planes. Just MF's doing laps all day. Just shoot me instead.
Speaker 7:Say you're
Speaker 1:not a Speak for yourself. Some people like controlling air traffic.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's the same thing as playing SimCity. I don't know. You think you could make it
Speaker 1:Not for everyone. Not for everyone. No? But the few, the proud, the air traffic controllers.
Speaker 2:Do
Speaker 4:you think there's specific games that they recruited from?
Speaker 2:I mean, you have to imagine Starcraft. RTS is better. Starcraft. Would deal with a Starcraft player over a FPS player.
Speaker 1:All day.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I don't know.
Speaker 1:Alright. Final post of the day.
Speaker 2:Hit me.
Speaker 1:Tyler, I want you to read it.
Speaker 2:What does he say?
Speaker 1:Got a post here from Hemot over at Lightspeed.
Speaker 2:Wait. Oh, really?
Speaker 1:Okay. Let's see if your if your new app works, Tyler. Font over
Speaker 2:at light speed. The curse of Discipline is that every day looks the same. The curse of indiscipline is that every you does. That's some wisdom. The curse of discipline is that every day looks the same.
Speaker 2:The curse of indiscipline
Speaker 1:This one every year crazy numbers.
Speaker 2:Woah. I did
Speaker 1:not realize Not every day you see a VC other than the putting up numbers like this.
Speaker 2:True. True. Very very
Speaker 1:mainstream? Yeah. Very good mainstream.
Speaker 2:You're going mainstream. You're going mainstream with some advice for everyone in the boys group. If you're if you have a boys group chat, take the picture of Adam Silver, Josh Kushner, and Bob Iger, and send it to your boys chat and just say us. It's going it's going to three k for sure.
Speaker 1:It's going.
Speaker 2:It's going. It's going. It's ripping. Well, thank you for tuning in to TBPN. We'll be back tomorrow at 11AM Pacific.
Speaker 1:Can't wait. Five stars
Speaker 2:on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at tbpn.com.
Speaker 1:It's been an honor and a privilege.
Speaker 2:And have the best Wednesday ever.
Speaker 1:Please do. Goodbye. We love you.