Technology's daily show (formerly the Technology Brothers Podcast). Streaming live on X and YouTube from 12 - 3 PM PST Monday - Friday. Available on X, Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.
You're watching TBPN. It is Friday, 03/14/2025. We are live from the Temple Of Technology, the Fortress Of Finance,
Speaker 2:the capital of capital.
Speaker 1:This show starts now. We got a great show for you guys, folks. Today, we have Logan Bartlett calling in. We have Keon from Nucleus calling in. He's announcing a new product, DNA sequencing.
Speaker 1:It's gonna be very interesting. We got Josh Steinman, the legend.
Speaker 3:The legend.
Speaker 1:The man, the myth, The man who's has every single morning, good morning, we are going to win. We're gonna find out if he's winning. And we have the great AI debate. We are putting two venture capitalists in a cage
Speaker 3:and Some people are calling this VC on VC violence, but we're gonna try to keep it civil.
Speaker 1:We'll we'll try and keep it civil.
Speaker 3:So Seth Rosenberg and Sam Lesson are gonna be calling in. They've been going back and forth, not only on the timeline, but on the one zero one. Oh. They've been billboarding at each other.
Speaker 1:Billboarding at each other. Okay.
Speaker 3:Sam Lesson and the slow team threw up a new billboard that say, got an AI startup idea? Shoot at Seth Rosenberg a message, not And this has just been on the on the one zero one as of yesterday.
Speaker 1:Lots of fun.
Speaker 3:Lots of fun. We're excited to have them on. And
Speaker 1:But that starts in half an hour. For the next half hour, we're going through the news, bringing you the top stories in technology and business and finance. Top story today, Intel has a new CEO. Pat Gelsinger, absolute dog, one of the greatest to ever do it. Was at Intel for a long time.
Speaker 1:Struggled, but absolute legend. And if you go back and listen to his Strathecari interviews, you'll understand that he is, someone to be absolutely respected. And, even though, obviously, there were lots of problems with Intel, the shift to mobile, the TSMC stuff, they're losing their their grip on the Foundry model, still a fantastic CEO and someone who I I just think should be respected in the technology industry forever. But today, we're teaching you about the new CEO. A former board member has stepped in.
Speaker 1:His name's Lip Bu Tan, and he's returning to overhaul the chipmaker. And so And
Speaker 3:to be clear, looking on public, the market likes this. They're up 18% in the past five days. Wow. After basically just kind of
Speaker 1:I mean, they obviously given like a crazy sell off too. Yeah. Mean, of it's potentially just the rebound from a pretty intense sell off.
Speaker 3:Yep. But this is
Speaker 1:And now a lot of people were saying, like, it was a mistake to not stick with Pat Gelsinger, but we'll see. Hopefully, this works out. Let's break it down. The selection as the new as the chipmaker's new chief executive officer was cheered by analysts, bankers, and shareholders. He brings two decades of semiconductor industry experience, relationships across the sector, a start up mindset.
Speaker 1:I wanna know more about that because he is 65 years old at this point and has been on the board and in these really large companies. We'll see if he can go founder mode now. And he has an obsession with AI and basketball. He also comes with tricky Chinese business relationships, so that could get more complicated, underscoring Silicon Valley's inability to sever itself from one of America's top adversaries. So even though people wanna go all in on America, there's still lots of flow back back back and forth between the two most important economies in the world.
Speaker 1:How Tan, age 65, will use his assets to resurrect Intel is on the minds of all industry watchers. Intel has gone from being one of Silicon Valley's biggest innovators to a relic struggling to compete with superstar NVIDIA and others in the age of AI. Its stock lost two thirds of its value in four short years as Intel sat out the AI boom. This is, of course, because Intel's known for making CPUs, not GPUs, very important for, you know, the normal apps that you use every single day, but not the next generation of video games, three rendering and AI training.
Speaker 3:One interesting point, Gelsinger was pushed out three months ago. Yep. There had been Took
Speaker 1:a while.
Speaker 3:Intermediary CEO.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 3:That's that's now
Speaker 1:But they think they're they think they got their guy now. So shares were up more than 14% at market close. Sounds like they're they've been up more since then. Yep. New CEO will soon have to answer the most burning question about Intel's future.
Speaker 1:Whether he will break apart Intel's design and foundry businesses. I think Ben Thompson has been advocating for this. A lot of people have been talking about this. Basically, manufacturing chips is an enormous expense that Intel can't currently sustain. This is what industry leaders and analysts say, and former board members have called for a split up.
Speaker 1:And so NVIDIA, of course, is a is a fabless semiconductor company in the sense that they work with TSMC. TSMC does not do design. They only do the manufacturing, the fab. And so when that when that separation happened Mhmm. It was very questionable because, you know, maybe you get some benefits to having everything being integrated all the way from, okay, you get an Intel Acceleron processor.
Speaker 1:It has a brand. You know, your average customer might not know, but certainly some gamer who's building their own PC wants the Intel brand, and that Intel brand late leads into design choices that they make to make the computer run faster and then they actually make it themselves. So that integration makes a lot of sense in many ways, but it kind of restrained them from having the flexibility to play in new areas as they came up.
Speaker 3:Totally. And Nvidia has shown that they can just focus on this one aspect of the stack and still put up ridiculous
Speaker 1:margins. And that's because they, even though they don't own the manufacturing, they have they have the software and the Yep. And and NVLink and CUDA and this ecosystem where if you're a very, you know, heavily funded large language model, foundation model company, The best engineers in the world, they want to do foundational research, frontier research, and they don't wanna learn a new language. They wanna just write CUDA. And CUDA is not perfect, but it's certainly the best in the ecosystem by most accounts.
Speaker 1:So but a deal to sell all or part of Intel to competitors seems to be off the table for the immediate future according to bankers. A variety of early stage discussions with Broadcom, Qualcomm, GlobalFoundries, and TSMC in recent months have failed to go everywhere anywhere and so far seem unlikely. And this was the story that we covered earlier about, the the the private jets of, I believe, Broadcom, Intel, and Elon were all at Mar A Lago at the same time, so there might have been some deal Which which
Speaker 3:I honestly think that was somebody trying to make a story out of everybody just being around Mar A Lago Yep. At that point in time because many of the most important people
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 3:All of the world and business I
Speaker 1:mean, they might have just been golfing. Yeah. They might have just said, hey. Like, this this get together, we're not talking business. Yeah.
Speaker 1:We're talking par threes, par fours.
Speaker 3:Let's be the first group to keep business off the course.
Speaker 5:Yes.
Speaker 1:Exactly. The company already hinted at a more likely outcome bringing in outside financial backers, including customers who want a stake in the man manufacturing business. Intel fortunes also rest in part with president Trump who has signaled that he wants to unwind the CHIPS Act, signature legislation from former president Joe Biden to invest more than 50,000,000,000 in semiconductors. Intel would receive up to about 8,000,000,000 through the legislation contingent on development of new factories, which have faced delays. And, of course, TSMC is now building fabs in The US, and there were early reports that it was going better than people expected.
Speaker 1:There was a big question about, okay. It's not just you get some ASML machines, you get some lithography machines, and then you turn them on and boom, you're just printing chips. You need really, really talented individuals, and most of those individuals live in Taiwan, and they might not wanna relocate very quickly or or or move over. But things have been looking good, but I'm sure we'll we'll need to dig into it more. Tan wants to wonder
Speaker 3:how bad it would have to get sort of geopolitically for Ben Thompson to leave Taiwan. Because you can imagine him just, you know, yelling into his newsletter, I'm not leaving.
Speaker 1:I'm not leaving. You're gonna have to drag me out of here.
Speaker 3:Then we'll have to do a strike mission, pull him out. Yes. Pull out one of the greatest writers
Speaker 1:of all He is one of the most valuable assets on that island. Yeah. Right below TSMC.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 1:Geopolitically, it's like we need we need TSMC and Ben Thompson. Ben. And then who knows what happens to the rest? I'm sure there's a lot of other important stuff over there. Tan has likely no more than a year to turn the company around, said people close to the company.
Speaker 1:His decades of investing in startups and running companies, He founded a multinational venture firm and was CEO of a chip design company called Cadence Design Systems. He served there for thirteen years. Good run. Provide indications of how Tan will tackle this task in the early days by cutting expenses, moving quickly, and trying to turn Intel back into an engineering first company. In areas where we are behind the competition, we need to take calculated risks to disrupt and leapfrog, Tan said in a note to Intel employees on Wednesday.
Speaker 1:And in areas where our progress has been slower than expected, we need to find new ways to pick up the pace. So this could be really interesting. I don't know if they're gonna go on acquisition spree, but, you know, there is an like, a question about what does the next chip look like after the GPU. You know, Google's built the TPU, but then you also have startups like Atch Facebook is rumored to be Facebook has one. Even rumored Yeah.
Speaker 1:Confirmed. Amazon has one. But there's also the question of, you know, these new transformer based AI inference focused chips like from Etched, and there's a few others. Cerabrus, there's Grok, there's a few others. I forget I forget the other startups.
Speaker 1:But a lot of people, they raised money very quickly. They got line time with TSMC. They became, like, great designers. But there was a question about could these companies really go the distance, or would they land with a company like Intel ultimately and just provide a a new product line that then Intel could push? Either could be fantastic outcomes for everyone involved.
Speaker 1:So many take this culture reset to also mean significant cuts at Intel, which has already shed about 15,000 jobs last year.
Speaker 3:Wow.
Speaker 1:That's like, what, like, a quarter DocuSign they lost? Yep. Something like that.
Speaker 3:Almost to a t.
Speaker 1:To a t. He is brave enough to adjust the workforce to the size needed for the business today, a former Intel board member who has known Tan since the nineties. Tan's first tour at Intel as a board member from 02/2022 to 02/2024 ended in frustration, people say close to people close to him say. Although he cited time demands as reason for departing, company insiders believe Tan was fed up with the bloated workforce and direction under then CEO Pat Gelsinger. Tan's return then signals an inevitable change in strategy.
Speaker 1:His capabilities aside, Intel remains far behind modern chip production, said Mark Rosenblatt, and Intel's balance sheet is not sufficient for the cost required to sustainably achieve it and scale the manufacturing needed to support it. Our team management Cadence was going through turmoil similar to Intel's when Tan took over in 02/2009. He was able to refocus the business, push its services to the cloud, and land new customers, including Apple. The company on the brink of delisting went on to return more than 3000% in share price during Tan's tenure. Let's go.
Speaker 1:Si's gone for that. There we go. Good stuff. Tan in public talks has described how he approached reshaping Cadence's culture to eliminate what he described as silos. I tried to change it into a one team culture.
Speaker 1:That approach harkens back to what he calls his first love, basketball. Born in Malaysia and raised in Singapore, Tan aspired to be a professional basketball player until his mother told him to get a real job. I love it. He said during a video interview during, January well, he, I'm sure his mother's very happy now. Hopefully, she's still alive.
Speaker 1:But
Speaker 3:Well, I'd I'd like to Because there's
Speaker 1:no more real job than CEO of Yeah.
Speaker 3:I'd like to see him go on a generational run at Intel and then buy the NBA. You know, don't just buy buy Don't just buy a team. Don't
Speaker 1:go bomber mode.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Buy the league.
Speaker 1:Yep. Buy the league.
Speaker 3:Say, I'm a professional deal you know, player now.
Speaker 1:Yep. That makes sense. Tan has has declared the arrival of generative AI as bigger than the invention of the web. He spent the past several years investing in AI startups across the globe. And let's go into the China connection, and then we'll move on to the next story.
Speaker 1:Before he rose in the semiconductor industry, Tan was known as one of the first Silicon Valley venture capitalists to invest in Asia. I'm sure he did very well. Tan is founder and chairman of Walden International, a prolific investor in Chinese tech companies. He was a big champion of China's semiconductor sector in an era when US China relations were considerably considerably rosier, including co investing with a China state owned asset manager.
Speaker 3:Party around.
Speaker 1:He was an early investor in SMIC, which is the semiconductor manufacturer international. I believe that's SMIC, and which the commerce department blacklisted for its alleged ties to the Chinese military in 2020. Walden sold his last stake in 2021. And in 2023, the House Select Committee on Chinese Communist Party sent a letter to him.
Speaker 3:We gotta get Steinmann's view on
Speaker 1:Oh, this
Speaker 3:will be good. Yeah. On this whole era.
Speaker 1:I'm sure he's gonna have a Nuance stake, folks.
Speaker 3:Yeah. You can expect Nuance.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You can definitely definitely expect some from mister Steinman. Oh, it's great. Intel as word of Tan's new role spread, one Chinese media outlet headlined the news, Intel hires the CEO with the best knowledge of China's chip industry. Interesting.
Speaker 3:Yeah. You missed the line here too. Subsequent report from the committee highlighted hundreds of millions of dollars of Walden investments that went to Chinese companies involved in military activities or human rights abuses.
Speaker 1:It's not good.
Speaker 3:Kind of a weird Pick. Market likes it. Yeah. Weird pick in the context of this being one of our great American technology companies. At the
Speaker 1:Keep your friends close. Keep your enemies close.
Speaker 3:Yeah. The the steel man here is that, you know, he's not a Chinese national.
Speaker 1:Exactly.
Speaker 3:And, you know, I would let's give him the benefit of the doubt that he is deeply loyal to The United States and we just, you Yeah.
Speaker 1:Mean, yeah, there is a world where you invest in a Chinese semiconductor company. You see how fast they're moving. You take the threat realistically. You don't want to be Jack Ma. You would much rather be Jensen Huang
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 1:And not get thrown in jail when you throw on a leather jacket and become a superstar. Right? And so you come to you know, you you take over Intel, and you make it amazing, and you become a legendary American turnaround CEO. And that's just that's just a fantastic outcome for everyone involved, well, except for the CCP, but I'm happy with that. So I don't know.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:We'll we'll be tracking it here. We'll get him to call in to the show.
Speaker 3:We will
Speaker 1:be Chop it off with us.
Speaker 3:Talking to a correspondent over at Truth Social, seeing what Trump has to say about about this, you know,
Speaker 1:appointment. I'd be interested. I don't know. I'm I'm I'm I I've always been very, very optimistic about Intel, very pro Intel. And I I used to have a riff about how, you know, I wish Elon had bought Intel instead of Twitter because maybe semiconductors are more important.
Speaker 1:Now you talk to, you know, all sorts of folks, and they'll tell you, well, like, the free speech thing is really important, and there are good good good reasons why it was important to to to for the X deal to go through. But why not both? Yep. Anyway Yeah.
Speaker 3:I mean, it does say a lot that Elon seemingly looked at the opportunity Maybe. Didn't go for it.
Speaker 1:I mean, it's a lot of work. He's got a lot of stuff going on.
Speaker 3:But it's very possible he just didn't see it's very possible that Intel is valuable, but Elon didn't see the sort of value for for the sort of Elon ecosystem.
Speaker 1:Totally. Well, if you're looking to go long Intel, go short Intel, whatever you're thinking, do it on public.com investing for those who take it seriously. They have multi asset investing industry leading yields, they're trusted by millions.
Speaker 3:Stocks.
Speaker 1:Go to public.com.
Speaker 3:Get started. Crypto. You can do
Speaker 1:it all. Do your own research and then make a bet. Anyway, let's move on to the economy. Everyone is worried about a recession and the Wall Street Journal is breaking down where you should be looking.
Speaker 3:Not reacting at all to me. Just
Speaker 1:I love the hats. I love the hats.
Speaker 3:I'm just gonna start not even making eye contact with you. Just fully focused on the mic
Speaker 1:On the mic.
Speaker 3:The public hat. That's great. So
Speaker 1:the the Wall Street Journal has an article here. Here's what to look for in terms of early signs of a recession. Tariffs, government layoffs, funding cuts, immigration restrictions, recession talks in the air. Any one of these things would at least temporarily exert some drag on the economy. Put them together, and they have an everything everywhere all at once dynamic that could hurt it badly.
Speaker 1:White House officials have cautioned that the economy might need, as treasury secretary Scott Bissant put it, a detox period. At the same time, some of president Trump's promised challenges, such as less regulation and a big tax cut, are pleasing to many businesses and could stir them to invest and hire more. Very true. Major economic data hasn't fully yet begun to capture Trump's time in office. The Wall Street Journal is looking at a host of other factors to figure out whether The US might skirt a recession or fall into one.
Speaker 1:Here are some areas to watch. There's the small business uncertainty index, which is at a high point and ticking upwards, but, a lot of that happened kinda before the, the the election. Mentions of soft landing in company conference calls are seems like it's very, very low, which means that people in business are maybe a little bit worried that there be a soft landing.
Speaker 3:This terminology started being used very clearly. You can see it in this chart that we're looking at in 2022 where everybody was like, okay, things seem to be correcting. Is a soft landing possible? And objectively, at least from a market standpoint, It happened. It happened.
Speaker 3:Yeah. But maybe we were
Speaker 1:still the maybe you stopped talking about it,
Speaker 3:maybe it's Maybe we just sort of leveled
Speaker 1:out, right?
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah. So I don't think that's necessarily the the right Yeah. Data point. But
Speaker 1:The US policy uncertainty index is at an all time high, and that makes sense. Everything feels very uncertain. But, hopefully, you know, certainty around policy can happen very quickly. Like Yeah. We can get certainty around these things.
Speaker 1:We saw that with the with the Bitcoin strategic reserve. Like, it was very uncertain on Tuesday. And then by Friday, it was pretty certain. And so, you know, that's not that much turmoil in the market. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Anyway, the policy uncertainty index was based on US news articles has soared. It recently hit its second highest level in data going back to 1985. The only time it was higher was in the early days of the COVID nineteen pandemic. Even for businesses that are enthusiastic about the White House's deregulatory agenda, the whiplash of uncertainty could be causing problems, not knowing, for example, what products might be subject to tariffs and at what rate. We talked to Avi Schiffman yesterday.
Speaker 1:He said, I didn't wanna make my product in China. I made it in Canada, and now I have a tariff on my product. And, so that that's a perfect example of uncertainty. You know? If you wanna set up a new manufacturing plant, you might be in the wait and see mode right now, and that hurts investment.
Speaker 1:That hurts the economy. That slows things down. Right? And so, consumer sentiment is dropping, and the probability of delinquency is also on the rise. But this is a trend that's been going on for a few years now.
Speaker 1:Tiny bottles of liquor are flying off The US store shelves. Whiskey and tequila makers said sales are up for miniature 50 milliliter bottles often called nips as well as for 375 milliliter bottles, which are half the size of a standard bottle. So do they make
Speaker 3:Is that historically a recession indicator?
Speaker 1:Of course. Because people stop going from, hey. We're we're throwing a party, and we're getting a large bottle of alcohol to I I need my alcohol, and I just need the cheapest thing possible because I'm living paycheck to paycheck. It's very sad. I would say stick to the 50 milliliter bottles of Dom Perignon if you can, you're struggling.
Speaker 1:But, yeah, it's a tough it's tough it's genuinely a tough recession indicator. And there's been a few others about what what products have been slowing down in convenience stores. We looked at that in the Wall Street Journal earlier. And and it seems like people are buying less because, of course, even though inflation we talked to Delien about this. Truflation.com is showing that inflation is coming down.
Speaker 1:But, again, inflation is a rate of change, and so we're not seeing deflation. So the prices are still high because once you go through a period of inflation, the prices are higher. Yeah. And they're not going back down. So the rate of inflation is declining, which is great, but that just means high prices forever, basically, unless they come down.
Speaker 1:That's the nature of these things. So people are starting to feel that, and they're seeing hey. The economy and my salary is maybe not catching up with the higher prices. I'm gonna buy less, and then that slows down the economy. That's that's certainly the the
Speaker 3:Yeah. JD Vance did an interview yesterday, and he said, you know, a a part of It's possible for the underlying sort of economy to be fine, yet like the sort of fear and sentiment, you know, sort of takes over and people just start sort of anticipating a recession and then there ends up being like somewhat of a slowdown or like change in consumer behavior. Vance has taken a fairly hard line on this. He says yesterday, you can never predict the future but I think the economy and the fundamental the fundamentals of the economy are actually quite strong right now. Sort of sort of his job, he's got to defend like the policy coming out of the White House.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Mean, it's not that unreasonable to think about the fundamentals. Like if you think about previous recessions and depressions, they're built on, you know, massive bubbles popping, the .com boom, where so much money had poured into companies making no money, and then there had to be a retreat. Or you've built up this crazy house of cards on top of the real estate bubble, and all of a sudden, have six homes in the desert that are just sitting empty. And and right now, you could point to a lot of things that feel frothy, but it's hard to say, like, The US economy is built on a house of cards right now.
Speaker 1:At least no one's concocted a strong thesis around that. So Yeah. Although there are nervousness and weakness spots of weakness here and there, no one's really sounding alarm bells in the same way that Michael Burry did during the during the housing crash.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Except random and on accounts.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah. I mean, as you've said before, like, the most alpha you can possibly have is just tweeting top every single day. Yeah. Then eventually, they get it Yeah. And somebody so I I think Nikita tweeted top and it, like, very much near the top.
Speaker 1:Right? Yeah. Because, like, we're now we're now off the highs, he looks like a genius, I guess.
Speaker 3:I'm very excited to have Logan Bartlett on in just three minutes. Great. He's gonna be walking us through a Redpoint market update that they gave to their LPs
Speaker 1:This will be interesting.
Speaker 3:For March 2025.
Speaker 1:Have put these Has he been tested in any interesting, like, power law fintech companies?
Speaker 3:John, you know what? There's one that comes to mind.
Speaker 1:Oh, which one is that?
Speaker 3:I think the web it's ramp.com. Think
Speaker 1:it's the That's a good domain.
Speaker 3:Yeah. It's a good great domain.
Speaker 1:So is I think the company is pretty great too. Yeah. And what what do they do at that at that domain?
Speaker 3:They're an all in one finance platform that saves companies time and money.
Speaker 1:That's oh, I mean, that's great because time is money and you wanna save both. Right?
Speaker 3:That's exactly right, John.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Maybe maybe you could pull up some some Yeah. Some more info.
Speaker 1:I mean, I'll just I'll just pepper you with questions. They have corporate cards. Right? Yes. Are they easy to
Speaker 3:use? Absolutely.
Speaker 1:Okay. What about bill payments?
Speaker 3:They have that as well. Accounting? Yes.
Speaker 1:Do they have a whole lot more? They have a whole lot more. Wow. And you're telling me it's all in one place?
Speaker 3:It's all in one place, John.
Speaker 1:That's almost too good to be true. But
Speaker 3:it's not.
Speaker 1:It's not. It's not.
Speaker 3:Because you can sign up and you can use it now.
Speaker 1:And where where would I go to do that?
Speaker 3:Just go to ramp.com.
Speaker 1:Ramp Com.
Speaker 3:And tell them that the show formerly known as Technology Brothers
Speaker 1:Sent you.
Speaker 3:Sent you.
Speaker 1:Okay. I think I'm getting it now. Yeah. This is really cool. Yeah.
Speaker 1:We should check this out.
Speaker 3:But anyways, Logan actually invested in in ramp. I believe it was we'll have to ask him 2021, and he took a little victory wrap when Yeah. Lap when the new round got announced because they're back at a healthy multiple Fantastic. Where he invested at.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, in terms of, like, high status things in the valley, it's really just, are you a ramp investor? And then above that, it's like, are you advertising ramp?
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:That's the real, like maybe maybe we can convince him to run some ramp ads soon because that would really, like, broaden his appeal.
Speaker 3:Yeah. His podcast right now is presented by his fund Redpoint. Yeah. But maybe, you better
Speaker 1:if it was presented by ramp, I think.
Speaker 3:So That's right.
Speaker 1:Let's try and get him to do some ad reads. Maybe we'll get him to do an ad read on on this guest spot.
Speaker 3:That's great. We should we should have like a a bucket pull for the for the for the guests. It's like
Speaker 1:I mean, having the billboard guys come on to argue about AI. We gotta do an ad quick ad in between that. Yeah. Yeah. Pause.
Speaker 1:Hey.
Speaker 3:In most heated moment.
Speaker 1:If you're looking to get in a fight with another venture capitalist, go to adquick.com, throw up a billboard on the 101, and you might just find yourself debating another VC on the TBPN show live. Anyway, how are doing with Logan? Is he ready to come in? He is not ready to come in. Should we move on to some to some bucket pulls, some bangers, some random some random posts?
Speaker 1:Did you see, this, this AI written email? I hear you're in New York. You have to check out Central Park and catch a Broadway show. It's a blast. Ashley Meyer says, gee, I wonder if this vendor email was written by AI.
Speaker 1:It's pretty ridiculous. It is it is remarkable how how low the bar is for some of these. It's maybe just like these It's funny.
Speaker 3:New York is one of the I mean, yeah, I mean, to me AI should just focus on what actually matters and not focus on the sort of human connection piece. Because if you're sending, like the whole point of this is to try to send a super high volume of outbound that's sort of like superhuman level of outbound. Yep. And so for every, you know, if if one out of five messages that's like using this sort of personalization feature is just like making somebody like not respect you. Yep.
Speaker 3:Like, it's not it's not great.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's kind of an unlimited downside situation, which I think is why a lot of, you know, Apple has been slow to adopt it and a lot of large organizations have been slow to adopt it. Figuring out the right level of like human and living
Speaker 3:They've been that slow. Yeah. They
Speaker 1:I mean, those those
Speaker 3:They're happy to your experience. Message for you.
Speaker 1:I we I'd wanna talk to Bryce about that more. He did you see he he responded to my Apple intelligence thing? We got Logan Bartlett here.
Speaker 6:What's up, guys?
Speaker 1:What's up? How you doing? Good.
Speaker 3:There he is. Thanks for
Speaker 6:having me on.
Speaker 3:It's great to have you. It's great to have you. How's the how's the reception been to the market update? You getting any pushback or are, you know, VCs already sort of making threads or based around your content and and sort of making it their own?
Speaker 6:Yeah. Well, it's a you know, we we were done, like, a week or two ago with all the content. And then, obviously, the market went went crazy, and we had to, like, redo, I don't know, 50% of the slides or something. So I thankfully, it didn't end up being too stale. We we froze all the data on Monday.
Speaker 6:And Tuesday, Wednesday, it ended up actually being pretty tame, in terms of the market trading. So I think people can rip off all the slides for their annual meetings that are coming up here in the next couple weeks. We're happy to open source and take credit for it.
Speaker 1:Give me the give me the one liner. Is it so over? Are we so back? Are we poor? Are we rich?
Speaker 1:How are you feeling?
Speaker 6:Private or public?
Speaker 1:Let's start with public.
Speaker 5:I don't,
Speaker 6:I don't know is not a great answer, but, I would say it feels like we're in for a lot of bullshit, that is flowing through the system, and uncertainty just isn't a great thing for for any business. And while it's not gonna impact software companies or technology companies quite as much directly, like, the end customers for a lot of these different businesses are gonna be impacted in a meaningful way. And so until we get a little bit more clarity on to what end all of these things are being done and what sort of the end state is. I don't know how you price in anything, going forward. And so now that obviously changes by the by the minute here.
Speaker 6:So I it could be we're at some steady state here in the next couple days or hours or weeks or whatever it is, and and this ends up all sort of feeling kinda stale. But right now, I'm not, I'm not particularly optimistic about what's going on in the public markets. I heard some Morgan Stanley, equity research person said that coming out of their conference, which is a week ago, they said it was the most negative sentiment that he had heard, I think with the exception of the onset of COVID in the last ten years from people sort of, like, looking at the markets. And I assume that's just a factor of uncertainty.
Speaker 3:But
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Is there do you think there's some sort of, like, Doge efficiency meme that's working its way through the market right now? Like, I remember when Elon came into Twitter, X, you know, laid off a ton of people. There was this big question about, like, well, what other software companies could do something similar?
Speaker 1:But is that now that you're seeing it done at the federal level, are companies thinking, hey. Maybe we should pull back a little bit on the investing and scaling?
Speaker 6:I I I think we've sort of seen it over the last couple years or at least the last eighteen months or so. If you go look, one of the slides that we put up in our deck was sort of the trade off that's occurred between growth and free cash flow. And to some extent, that's the, you know, the macro environment. But, also, I think it's just the knobs being pulled a little bit between layoffs and hiring freezes and all that. And so I think people have made the conscious decision that they can do more with less, and I think AI is only gonna continue to pull that trend forward.
Speaker 6:Is it is it cutting to the bone like Doge maybe is doing or or Twitter did? Probably probably not. People aren't taking it to that extreme, but I do think people have really recognized that there's knobs that are a little bit more pullable than they would have appreciated otherwise. And I think I mean, if you look at the big software private equity folks, the business and the Tomah Bravos of the world, like, they've been doing this for the last it's ten, fifteen years. I I just think it wasn't something that people really tried to do in the public markets, now we're seeing that actually occur in a more meaningful way.
Speaker 3:For you as a multistage investor, what advice are you giving to the sort of average series A founder? In many ways, we could have massive sort of GDP could go negative, but if you're a high growth software company that's just sort of hitting your stride, you can still thrive. How are you kind of advising, you know, your portfolio companies around sort of downstream capital? Because as Redpoint, you guys are also, you know, a fund that can participate in some of these later stage rounds as well.
Speaker 6:Yeah. I would say that at least the last I mean, the last five years has sort of felt like so I've been doing this now for eleven or twelve years. In the last four or five, I've felt like, you know, twice as long as the first half of my career just in terms of all the changes that have occurred. That said, it does seem pretty uncorrelated what's going on at, like, a high level macro with the early stage funding environment. I think to some extent, what happened after February was the, like, sophisticated LPs really pulled out of the funds that they felt had gotten too bloated or too big, and that's happened this cycle as well.
Speaker 6:I think if you talk to smart endowments or pension plans or stuff, they they've definitely as fund sizes have gotten to $3.04, $56,000,000,000, like, those people have raised eyebrows and maybe voted with their feet to either scale down or walk away from those those funds. But there's a lot of other money that has willingly and excitedly run into those big fundraisers. And so I think you're seeing sovereign wealth in Middle East people come in to those funds and give them, you know, what what, $2.03, $4,500,000,000. And so it ends up kinda being a rounding error if a smart pension walks away or endowment walks away. So the way that impacts the start ups, I I think it's just at a very micro level, like, continue to execute and the funding will be there.
Speaker 6:At least that's the way it seemed over the last couple years, and I guess it's true until it isn't. But all this stuff sort of feels outside of the control of the individual founders, and so I would encourage people not to worry too too much about it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Related to that, I remember when the the market crashed kind of around I don't even know what we have the term for interest rate, like post ZERP era
Speaker 7:Yeah.
Speaker 1:SVB prices. Post ZERP. You were talking to maybe it was Emil Michael or someone, but about, this idea of, like, there's a lot of dry powder, and there was a lot optimism say from entrepreneurs being like, well, the VCs have the money. They're gonna have to give it to us anyway. And you were kind of explaining to folks, well, like, the dry powder isn't necessarily sitting in their bank account.
Speaker 1:Like, they have to make capital calls. The LPs might put pressure on them. Like, funds might get downsized. But it feels like maybe now the dry powder narrative was real. And now, like, all the VCs figured out how to start deploying again and and deployment rates are up.
Speaker 1:But how do you tell the story of the post ZERP era to where we are now in terms of just the pace of capital deployment?
Speaker 6:Yeah. It's a great question. It's I would say I've been surprised at how insistent people have been able to fundraise. And I think there was really a triaging or kind of a hollowing out of the middle that occurred or maybe the the tier b, if you will, tier two funds where you saw a handful of those folks blow up or really struggle with their fundraisers in some way. But the names that everyone thinks about or knows, I think there was a concentration and consolidation of capital Yeah.
Speaker 6:That came in, and then you couple that with some of our friends with with seemingly endless amounts of oil money coming into the the sector as well. And it just it just sort of feels like we're in this new normal state where there's a lot of capital going around, and I don't know exactly what's going to cause that to change. Yeah. It it it feels like there wasn't a ton of reckoning for sins that were made in 02/2020 and 02/2021. It feels like people were able to get a mulligan and say, hey.
Speaker 6:You know what? Like, yeah. We got a little crazy, but now we've we've really doubled down and focused on what it is that we do well. And people seem, at least on the LP side, seem to be largely forgiving. Or if they're not forgiving, there's someone waiting to take their place Exactly.
Speaker 6:In one of these name brand funds.
Speaker 1:I mean, feels like, yeah, there's gyrations and oscillations in the American early stage technology market. But where are gonna go if you don't invest in American technology?
Speaker 6:It's sort of like we all read the same books. So you look at the founders today, and, like, everyone's read Innovator's Dilemma Yep. Or everyone's read, like, read the case study of Blockbuster and Netflix. And so Yep. We're dealing with a far more sophisticated, like, entrepreneur that's executing or CEO that's executing on AI right now.
Speaker 6:And I think similarly, like, all the LPs studied what happened after 02/2000 or sorry. February, '2 thousand '1. Like, that was actually a great time to lean into the asset class. And so now we're at this prisoner's dilemma where it would be theoretically a great time for everyone to lean in if other people backed out because then prices would depress. But everyone's staying in, and so it's actually leading to prices staying elevated, which has been interesting.
Speaker 6:I mean, I think in the last couple weeks, it feels like I I've heard the the the meme or the the a refrain that it's, like, so 2021 or it's got 2021 vibes all over again. This was pre the last seven days, and so I'm not exactly sure how that's gonna play out. But that's definitely been the sentiment in the private markets from the VCs that I'm talking to. It's just sort of gosh, this feels like we're running this back and doing it all over again.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I was
Speaker 3:thinking of the I've had this feeling multiple times this year where a portfolio company is just raising, like, a, you know, big up round. And depending on the lead, I'm just thinking like, well, I really wish I could sell into this round. Like, even though I'm a believer in the company, it's just like, you know, getting so far over and and and the narrative is always there. Right? Like, I'm thinking of like one company in particular that will go unnamed like really really strong narrative, really strong traction is just like setting prices at a point that, you know, basically pricing in the next, you know, potentially decade
Speaker 1:Decade of growth.
Speaker 3:Of growth. And if that's the case as an investor, you ideally would want to get out and then just invest, you know, rotate into another illiquid because
Speaker 1:you're done.
Speaker 3:Asset. You got your growth.
Speaker 6:Do you Yeah. It's it's such a feature and a bug of the private markets that you're not, like, beholden to the mania, and you sort of get to play a long game in anything you're doing that when I talk to my private or my public market friends, like, they're envious that, you know, you can take a morning off and not have your entire world implode versus the public markets. Like, stuff can hit the fan, and you you your entire day could totally change at a moment's notice. The flip side of that is you're you're really in for a long period of time. And you don't get to say, well, I'll take a few chips off now because I think, probabilistically, there's a better opportunity that could come down, and it feels like this is a good risk adjusted return that doesn't really, that's not as accepted in the private markets.
Speaker 6:I think increasingly, though, we're finding some of the financial products for that, and I've seen more people or at least more opportunities to take a little liquidity. I'm not sure it's totally socially acceptable at least for the institutional funds to do it. I think it's far easier if you're an angel. People are a little bit more understanding of that, but it does feel like we're just
Speaker 3:coming into It comes down to volume. Right? If I if I put 25 k into a company and it and it does well that, you and I wanna sell the position, it's very different than, you know, you with like, you know, we have a $400,000,000 position here and we're rotating out. It's like, there's probably not the demand. What just one, don't know if you feel even free to speculate on this, but something I've been confused by was, you know, the figure round getting priced around $40,000,000,000 Like what do you, what in your mind do you think is the play there?
Speaker 3:The you know, Brett's last company SPAC'd, you could imagine, Figure, you know, I I think a pure play humanoid stock would do well, you know, at least a little bit a little while in the public markets. But what do you think is some of these later stage companies that are still a ways out from like true commercial adoption, but you know, you know, especially now with companies like CoreWeave, you know, the the CoreWeave IPO, it seems unclear now if they're gonna get out. But, like, what's your read? Are are are any of these companies gonna get out in the next year other than Yeah. Some of the bigger names like like Chime?
Speaker 6:I've I've heard so a few different things there. I guess I've heard I don't know if you if you guys have heard different things with CoreWeave in the last little bit, but it seems like there's there's a few people that are still kind of all systems go on IPO and are gonna plow ahead. And CoreWeek certainly doesn't ask my opinion, but if I were counseling them, it feels like just just get out there. And I think having some AI story with with probably a bunch of institutional managers that want exposure to some derivative direct trend of AI. I would say it's probably as good a time as any, especially when some of these bigger contracts are coming up in 2017, '20 '18.
Speaker 6:Like, get out when you have a little bit of, you know, certainty of those cash flows coming from the Nvidias and the Microsofts and the OpenAI's of the world. Like, I would encourage them to go. On the figure thing specifically so so I looked at Brett's business battery, which predates
Speaker 7:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 6:The last one. Hunter, actually, really enjoy I haven't talked to him in, I don't know, eight years or something, but I really enjoyed that interaction. Now that was, like, a job marketplace or something. So very different than now he's sort of become this, like, hard tech founder, which is interesting for from a job marketplace thing. The the thing that I don't totally understand about Figure and that round itself and this is a common phenomenon at the not the end, but at at the peak of a lot of cycles is you end up with a lot of these SPVs getting formed in a meaningful way, and you end up with managers trying to get write bigger checks for rounds than their funds can actually hold.
Speaker 6:And so it's hard to know exactly what the incentives at play for some of those names. So I I don't even I I wasn't familiar with the names that they're talking about in leading those rounds. Mhmm. But it certainly seems from a fund size standpoint that those people probably can't step up and write those checks themselves. And so then you wonder what are the incentives at play for the for the whoever is writing those checks.
Speaker 6:Like, what are they thinking about? And, like, what is the the executive team? Like, what is their incentive to raise at this price?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I looked looked at it as if you're gonna price it at 10 and say, is a pre IPO round. We are going to basically or we're planning to SPAC the company in the next year. We think it's gonna pop. That type of round makes sense.
Speaker 3:But if, you know, you're pricing it at four times that roughly, it just feels like how do you actually get out of this? Who's gonna get out of this position? Do the employees actually benefit? But that's just, you know, one one example.
Speaker 1:Skill issues, SPAC at 80. SPAC.
Speaker 6:Why not? Why not? I do think there's this retail demand for I mean, if I were OpenAI, I would try to get out sooner rather than later. Right? Because I think there's this demand both from institutional and retail to have exposure to some of these things.
Speaker 6:And if you look, I mean, Palantir's where they're trading, and, obviously, there's a bunch of different considerations around that business. But, like, I I think that if you went out and floated just a small percentage of your, you know, of your overall business, I think that there could be a lot of nice liquidity to fund a lot of the CapEx, and you would trade at a really healthy premium. So it'll be interesting to see who of, like, the big model companies actually tries to get out first.
Speaker 3:Speaking of going public, do you want your private market investor competitors to go public, the general catalyst? You're you're excited. You're you're like, yeah. I really I want you to go from, you know
Speaker 1:I wanna be able to see your fund returns.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4:You know disclosures are
Speaker 6:gonna be It's an interesting thing. So our structure is not one that we can or ever will try to have the ambitions of doing that. I I saw when when when people there's certainly funds that that act or either call themselves have leaders that that are are more akin to a CEO than they are, you know, investment partner or something like that. And so I think from a financial engineering standpoint and, like, institutionalization of the asset class, I'm excited to see people try these things. This cynical side of it, when I compare a venture firm to a private equity firm and think about the incentives at play so if you're a private equity firm, if you're Apollo or Blackstone or BlackRock or whoever it is, right, and you're this big entity, The people within your firm can't can't really leave and compete with you because there's so much institutional infrastructure around, one, the quantum of dollars that you actually need, but then, two, the relationships with the debt providers, the ability to process the deals, the ability to get access through the bankers.
Speaker 6:You can't just go hang a shingle or go join another competitor to compete with Blackstone or Apollo or whatever it is. Right? In venture, it's so beholden, I think, at least to individuals. And individuals can walk out the door, and they they can go raise a hundred, 200, 3 hundred, 4 hundred million dollars and, like, effectively compete with you in some way, shape, or form. And so I there was an information report, I don't know if it's true or not, talking about GC moving from more carry to bonuses.
Speaker 6:And I don't know if it's true. Information tends to do a pretty good job reporting, I And, like, that was reported alongside some people leaving the organization. And and you just wonder, like, as the incentive structure start to change and you start to be more institutional, how do you retain the quality of people? So, like, at an intellectual level, I'm very interesting interested to see how this plays out. And I respect anyone that's, like, innovating in some way on on a structure that has been stuck in some version for a long, long time.
Speaker 6:I I'm very curious about the practical implications of how it's gonna work with, like, retaining individual talent and all that stuff.
Speaker 3:Yeah. That's been that's been my big question. If if you're somebody that, you know, wants to get into venture and you believe in your picking ability and you think you can be one of the greats, wouldn't you want to get the maximum benefit of that by getting Carrie and being a part of a partnership versus, you know, oh, I got, you know, I invested in, you know, the next Slack and I got, you know, one time little bonus. Yeah. Who knows who knows how to work, But, you know, I can imagine.
Speaker 6:Especially since the next option, if you can't compete, then it's it's fine. You're kinda locked in. Like, Goldman bankers or Morgan Stanley bankers or Apollo MDs or whatever, it's it's hard for them to get the scale to go out and really compete. And sometimes they do and sometimes they don't. But, like, that RSU structure, bonus structure kind of works when you can't really walk out the door and and hang a shingle and compete.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Venture, you kinda can. And so I think it's if you're good, you know, you can go raise. We see a lot of these solo capitalists or whatever, like small $3.04, $500,000,000 funds out there. And so I think I don't know.
Speaker 6:Retaining talent is gonna be an interesting thing to see.
Speaker 3:Have you like, last question on this point. Have you seen solo, the sort of solo GPs overpaying to win deals? Because like, that's something like, you know, sometimes you see these sort of obvious power law companies like the Andoros of the world, Lod Gil sort of like, you know, leading rounds and that that makes that makes sense. I think there's sort of consensus now that that Andoroll is gonna be a really massive company. But when you see a solo GP come in and and write a a hundred million dollar plus check, Does that ever, you know, you know, what's your what's your read on that?
Speaker 3:Because in from my perspective, sometimes those marks don't even feel real when when you're you know, there's something to be said of like, okay, Redpoint like, underwrote this and like, you know, they're like an organization and a firm and it's not just like, you know, one or two, you know, major l you know, so so how do you how do you look at those rounds? And I'm sure oftentimes you're you're competing to win those rounds.
Speaker 6:Yeah. It's so I guess we've I've seen less of that phenomenon than probably 2021, and I would have to rack my brain a little bit to think about, like, the big institute or institutional institutional solo capitalists are I think those terms are directly at odds with one another. But the big solo capitalists that can write those checks, I mean, Elad Elad can obviously do that, and he's the the one that certainly comes to mind. I would say, honestly, there's there's been some firms that have continued to scale where I've probably seen that more than any individual kinda solo capitalists out there. And I think there was this thing where in 02/2021, it felt like we rotated to the brand where we lived in this world where everyone was was just a Zoom screen away.
Speaker 6:And so, you know, Marc Andreessen and Doug Leone and Keith Raboy and whoever was was could be in the room as quickly as I could be in the room because time and space weren't really constraints at all. And so in that world, I think there was a big gravitation to the big institutional funds because it was like, oh my gosh. I'm gonna get Marc Andreessen involved, and and that's amazing. Right? It feels like we've rotated a little bit more back to, like, who is my individual board member?
Speaker 6:Who is gonna be on the ground with me day to day? Like, I'm gonna solve for that person rather than the sole like, the just the past a certain point. Right? Like, obviously, you must be this call to ride the ride with some some things, and so you gotta have enough credible brand as an institution. But then it comes down to the individual a little bit more.
Speaker 6:And so I would say I've probably seen more than the solo capitalist thing. I've probably seen more of, hey. This fund has a bunch of money, and you might not be getting their number one person. It could be their, you know, whatever, their their reliever out of the bullpen that's coming in to do the round. And those are the ones that they're, like, really juicing the price a little bit on these things because they, you know, they want the asset in that way.
Speaker 6:So I I think that's that's something that I've seen more and more of of late.
Speaker 1:I I wanna go back to the innovator's dilemma, and I heard you on a podcast maybe two years ago right when the chattypie moment was happening debating is AI a sustaining innovation or disruptive innovation? How do you sit with it now? How are you seeing it, get adopted in the public markets, and what narratives are taking hold there?
Speaker 6:I still, I still feel like there there's an analogy that was made to me about Google, and it was it was talking about, the Americans in World War two that, like, we got every opportunity to ultimately do the right thing and come into the war and, like, help determine the outcome. And and I think that was the analogy I had heard about Google with AI that, like, they have all the things to their advantage, be it the distribution of Google SEO, be it YouTube content, be it what whatever it is, like, the talent, the team, the dollars, all of that stuff to, like, figure this out ultimately. Yeah. We'll see if that actually proves to be the case. But I do think that that is largely true of a lot of a lot of the incumbents in different sectors.
Speaker 6:And and so the analogy that I think I used back then, I think it's still true, is, like, if you go back and look at the Salesforce and mobile, that was still Salesforce. It was just like a mobile app of Salesforce.
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 6:And if if you go look and kinda go down the line, like, did Netflix or Facebook there wasn't, a a mobile Netflix. I mean, I guess you could say TikTok is mobile Netflix in some ways, but, like, there wasn't a pure play mobile Netflix, like a Quibi that came out and was actually disruptive in some ways. And there wasn't Facebook. There maybe Instagram was the one that, like, kind of cap hopped on being that. But still, it was like, it wasn't totally net new surface areas that ended up manifesting themselves around that stuff, or or at least it wasn't immediately in the fullness of time.
Speaker 6:Maybe it could have been if if Instagram had stayed independent or if or if or what TikTok's been able to do. I think that seems to be the case here today where we're going to see these things that are that are new and novel within AI. And I draw a akin to the Ubers or the WhatsApps apps or whatever it is where these businesses that couldn't have been possible without AI are gonna form a lot of independent equity value.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 6:But a lot of it's gonna be captured by incumbents in some ways. And I think in mobile, Apple and Google probably capture the lion's share of, like, equity value that was created by the mobile iPhone or, you know, whatever. Like, those were the ones that really through the App Store and the actual phones. They captured a lot of it. And and I think in large part, maybe with the exception of like, the vast majority of the equity value will probably end up accumulating to the Facebooks and the Microsofts and the, you know, the Googles and, I guess, OpenAI as well.
Speaker 6:But I still think we'll end up with hundreds of billions of dollars of equity value created for, you know, the derivative companies akin to the, yeah, to the Ubers and the WhatsApps and whoever else.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I had this take I was noodling on yesterday about it feels like Apple's missing the AI moment, but does it matter? Because they Microsoft missed mobile, they still made it work. How do you feel things are going with Apple Intelligence? Obviously, that John Gruber article kinda shook everyone to their core.
Speaker 1:Do you think they're in trouble, or is it overhyped? Or where where's the narrative sitting with you these days?
Speaker 6:So so the Grouper thing I mean, obviously, Grouper is like the goat of Apple coverage. And so I you gotta take everything he says almost like biblically in some ways. That's totally canonical gospel of of Apple, you know, takes. But I I have always hated Siri. Like, I I have always hated it.
Speaker 6:And then the Apple intelligence thing and the summarizations on the text, I mean, I love that. If only as a meme, like, I enjoy screenshotting it and sending it back to my friends.
Speaker 1:And, like,
Speaker 6:that's the best use case of Apple intelligence I've seen. And so, like
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 6:When making fun of your product is, like, the best instantiation of your product, it's probably not, you know, not on a child. Trajectory there. Culturally, it just seals and this is this is probably more, you know, John Gruber or Ben Thompson than what I profess to know about. But it just feels antithetical to Apple's culture to execute on AI in the way that I think you need to. They are very like, measure measure 35 times and cut once, and let's do this all secretively, and let's, like, try to control the ecosystem and keep everything, like, insular in some ways.
Speaker 6:And that is just so antithetical to AI. And AI is about, like, proliferation and getting it out there and getting the data and taking the feedback loops and moving fast and trying new things and iterating. And, like, I just think that's directly at odds with who they are. And so I don't know how you change that. And does I guess to your question, does it actually matter?
Speaker 6:I don't know. They have such lock in. Right? Is Apple what is Apple's market cap today? I mean, is it like trillion dollar business?
Speaker 6:Sorry. $3,000,000,000,000 business? Yeah. 3,200,000,000,000.0. It's like, I I think they're probably gonna mess this up, and I'm not sure it's gonna matter Yeah.
Speaker 6:For for them as a business. And I I think the sooner they realize that they they they won't be able to execute on it, the sooner we get these things in our product as a, you know, as a partnership rather
Speaker 1:than matching APIs and let the let the ecosystem flourish and, you know, let me change out the button for a different Siri.
Speaker 3:Well, other the
Speaker 1:other that nobody But it's fine. It it it is I still buy the I still buy the phones.
Speaker 3:The other thing that nobody really talks about anymore because it just hasn't been possible is M and A. Like, Apple has so much cash. If there are breakout, you know, consumer Yeah. Like products that make sense as part of the Apple ecosystem, there's a there's a world in which they could actually just buy those companies and
Speaker 1:sort of Everyone quotes the 60,000,000,000 on their balance sheet or something, but Apple has returned over a trillion dollars of cash over the last, like, fourteen years. Like, it is a cash generating machine at a scale. Don't think we
Speaker 6:ever their acquisitions, I think that's probably a better use of capital than what they bought to date. Yeah. Have been the best acquirers. You know, it's crazy, though. I mean, they they were Siri was acquired for them, like, I don't know, thirteen years ago or something, fourteen.
Speaker 6:Like, they were early on all of this stuff. And so, clearly, there's some, like, broken execution elements at least within, you know, how they've gone about it to date, which might not matter in the grand scheme of things.
Speaker 1:It's a it's a deterministic culture, not a probabilistic culture, and so it's misaligned with AI.
Speaker 6:I like that. That is that is very Ben Thompson or Ben
Speaker 1:Dick Evans of I'm trying to be more pithy.
Speaker 6:Yeah. I like it. I like it.
Speaker 3:We got really no time left, but I wanted to give you an opportunity to talk about RAMP. You when when they announced the new fundraise, you you kind of, like, were poking a little bit of fun at yourself because you you did you basically
Speaker 1:You got found the local top, but not the global top.
Speaker 3:Well, and I think you invested a couple times during
Speaker 6:the rest year. We invested a billion and then, like Oh,
Speaker 7:that's and a half
Speaker 6:and then 8 or whatever, $8.02 or something. Yeah. It was a it was a it was a long a long run from there. Funny enough that that round that we ended up investing in at whatever 8,000,000,000 or 8 and a half or whatever it was, what's a couple hundred million among friends. But Yeah.
Speaker 6:I that was, like, December 21 when we were talking about it, and then the round ultimately closed in January or February or something. And so it was really last boat off the island in terms of, like, internally, the the zero interest rate Yeah. Kind of mindset. And the thing that I've learned and this wasn't this has been the last five years for me, basically, since so I joined Redpoint in in December of nineteen, officially started in March of twenty. And what what what I've realized is, like, price very rarely within some zone has has mattered.
Speaker 6:And when I find myself iterating a little too much on on, like, oh, I'll do it at this price versus that price, it probably says something about what I think the ultimate outcome for the business can be. And when when it's been the investments that have worked the best are are the ones in which I'm like, I don't know exactly how this is gonna play out or where the ceiling is on how this company can execute, but I just need to be in business with these people, and let's let's just see where it goes from there. And, obviously, that's easier when you're talking hundreds of millions than it is low single digits, which is easier than high single digits, which is easier than double digit billion dollars. But, like, that mindset is one that I've I've internalized where it ultimately says something about the quality of the company if you really think too too hard about the difference between this price or that price. And so the funny thing about the ramp investment was the entire time for the last three years, I was, like, telling our team internally.
Speaker 6:So I don't know when this is gonna stop growing or what the ceiling for this can be. And at some point, we're gonna get to the other side of what that round was a couple years ago. And so that was the first, like, public validation that it really felt like we had crossed that chasm a little bit. I think probably nine months ago, a year ago, it sort of felt like an inevitability that we weren't gonna get stuck at, you know, some some maximum that was beyond that. But, yeah, I mean, the the team just continues to execute at a level that I've I've never really seen before, and I know you guys know them well.
Speaker 6:And so it's been a fun one for me to be a part of and kinda work alongside.
Speaker 3:Well, this conversation has been presented by Ramp, like, conversation.
Speaker 1:Go to ramp.com to sign up. Yeah. Can use corporate cards,
Speaker 6:bill it. My conversations quite literally are presented by Ramp. I've There we ability to do this job at this point is presented by Ramp in some So you guys have quite literally the ad play for it, but I Yes. They keep me in business as well.
Speaker 3:That's amazing. Thank you so much for coming on. When's your next are you gonna do is this report I feel like I see him twice a year, or is it Yeah.
Speaker 6:Early? Once a year ish is usually I mean, this this one, I think, took a lot out of our team internally. There was a lot of There was a lot of late nights and weekends on this one, so I think we're gonna give our folks a little bit of time, a little bit of rest before we run it back. But who knows? I mean, the market keeps up.
Speaker 6:We get more tariffs. We we get things a little crazy. Maybe we'll need to come out of the woodwork and, you know, when the theme music plays, you gotta emerge.
Speaker 3:For sure. Last last question for you. We have Sam Lesson and Seth Seth Rosenberg from Greylock coming on Slow. And slow coming on to debate AI in about an hour. Who's who's
Speaker 1:who's Who think's win? Is
Speaker 5:it
Speaker 3:just Let me
Speaker 6:give you guys a little bit of advice. As someone that has moderated Yes. Debate with Sam Lesson before Yes. Let me give you guys a little bit of Please. I would I would encourage if you if you have mute buttons on microphones, I would encourage you to jump in and try to steer the conversation.
Speaker 6:Don't be a passive participant.
Speaker 1:I remember this one.
Speaker 6:People tend to be really mean to you when you do that, and you let it let let the filibustering go on between him and, let's say, I don't know, Zach Weinberg theoretically. Yep. Yep. I would encourage you guys to be active participants in that conversation.
Speaker 3:We're excited. We got our we got our boxing gloves. We're gonna throw them on. We're gonna get in the mix.
Speaker 1:Hey, guys.
Speaker 6:Keep up the great work. I'm a huge fan of what you guys are doing. Appreciate it. Anytime you want me, I'm here.
Speaker 1:Thanks a lot.
Speaker 3:Always welcome.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Take of guys.
Speaker 3:See you. Bye. Yeah. Good fun. Did you Yeah.
Speaker 3:Gotta get the get the mute button ready.
Speaker 1:Have you seen that? What he's referring to? I With Zach Weinberg? They were debating crypto. It was Sam Lesson versus Zach Weinberg.
Speaker 1:And Sam was making the case that, like, every real assets should be on chain, and your mortgage should be on chain, and, like, this is the future. Everything will be crypto. And
Speaker 3:Zach is
Speaker 1:just Zach is just like, okay. Like, walk me through that at an extreme level of detail. Like, how does this work legally? How does this how do the taxes on the land work? Like, all these things.
Speaker 1:And they just went at it, and Sam was just going super, super hard talking, talking, talking. Hey. Okay. And then he kept being like, oh, I gotta go because it's kid bedtime. Like, I I I really I really gotta go.
Speaker 1:But then but then he wouldn't let Zach get the last word. So he'd be like he'd wanna, like, drop another filibuster on him. It was, like, really frustrating for everyone. And I guess people gave Logan some some negative feedback because he wasn't he wasn't aggressive on the moderation enough. But I thought it was a great I I I I found it very, very entertaining to watch.
Speaker 1:So I had a good time. Anyway, should we do some
Speaker 3:Good time.
Speaker 1:Some posts, some ads, all of the above over the next few minutes before Kean joins us from Nucleus? Yes. The shot the chaser from XOR swap. The shot Claude thinking and o one pro have replaced all university instructors for me. I can no longer watch any prerecorded videos.
Speaker 1:And then the chaser is I bombed my second linear algebra midterm. Ouch. Two days later. That's so funny.
Speaker 3:And word grammar, friend of the show says math is best learned from textbooks and practice problems, not from Claude, but also not from lectures. So Yeah. Just hit the books. Hit the books.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I remember I took train up to Silicon Valley from Pasadena. Took me like twelve hours. But I had a a textbook on natural language processing, like the precursor to LLMs. This is back in like 2012, '20 '13.
Speaker 1:I just sat there I know he. And just read this whole textbook and taught me a lot. I I really enjoyed it.
Speaker 3:Textbooks are underrated it comes to getting potentially coded when when
Speaker 1:When learning is the vibe.
Speaker 3:Is the vibe. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Textbooks are good.
Speaker 3:No. I think the good thing for Sean is that the models are gonna get better. The good thing about the real world is nobody really cares if you're using an LLM Yeah. For for specific answers as long as you can do a little bit of thinking yourself.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And you should be able to generate something. I mean, all the textbooks at this point have been scraped into these LLMs. Like you should be able to get the LLM to essentially just reproduce exactly the text that's in the that's in the textbook. Now maybe that's IP infringement, but you can certainly get the facts.
Speaker 1:The question is, were you just sitting there chatting and making it feel like you were learning? It seems like you didn't you didn't actually get all the information into your brain. Yeah. But good luck on your next midterm. Let's go to Paki McCormick.
Speaker 1:He says, today, much of the global GDP is not computer. Soon, everything is computer. This is the opportunity. Funny because there's it's true. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But I was thinking about the everything is computer, everything is computer thing. And I think it I like the phrase more as a possessive than a contraction. So the the actual quote is a contraction. He was saying everything is is a computer, basically. And then he dropped the a, and it was everything in everything's computer.
Speaker 1:Everything's a computer. But I I prefer the everything's computer as, like, what is the computer of everything? It's like this, like, you know, hive mind AI, like Right. Yes. What we're building is everything's computer.
Speaker 1:It belongs to everything. And and and that just tells you like this this very weird futuristic networked mega computer that controls everything. It sounds even more sci fi at that point. Let's stay with Paki.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean Yeah. Like, one more thing on this. I think this is the opportunity and why so many people that were traditionally software investors are excited about investing in Mhmm. Hard tech Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Or the real world as a category when you look at some of these some of the biggest recent outcomes, the sort of flock safeties Yeah. Andorolls are these companies that have are software is critical to the business, yet there's a major sort of real world component. Yeah. And, you know, I think that's just going to continue to be where some of the bigger outcomes are.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Teal had a good riff on this where he was like, I keep investing in companies that aren't the Internet and then they make money from the Internet. Like SpaceX. It's like a launch business, but Starlink is an Internet company. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And it's just like, I keep I I I keep going. It's like, you know, he's co founder of OpenAI, eventually invested in the business. It's like, it's a consumer internet company now. And like maybe that's where the value is. And so there's all these weird things where you just keep coming back to the internet is this ultra powerful force and the more you align yourself with it.
Speaker 1:So capitalism in the economy just kind of naturally pulls every company towards that. You know, Flock Safety is like, yeah. We're we're a camera manufacturer, but without the Internet, our company would be worth way less.
Speaker 3:We originally wanted to be a newspaper and Exactly. Everybody said, hey. Technology Hey.
Speaker 1:Why don't you put this on the Internet? Yeah. That's really the way to get ahead.
Speaker 3:Should we
Speaker 1:stay on Packy?
Speaker 3:To his Let's stay on Packy.
Speaker 1:His breakdown.
Speaker 3:This was a
Speaker 1:What week for the optimists.
Speaker 3:Devastating week for the pessimists.
Speaker 1:Devastating. He breaks it down in his fantastic newsletter. He says solar and wind pass coal in The United States. That's a big milestone. The United States continue continues to mog all in liquid natural gas exports.
Speaker 1:NASA launches a mission to study the sun. I like that. That's interesting. I don't know what they're trying to get out of that. I wanna know more about what the goal of studying the sun is.
Speaker 1:They're like they come back and they're just like,
Speaker 3:it's bright. Basically, you know how people started
Speaker 1:Going well over there. Sun. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Huberman.
Speaker 3:Austin, the whole Austin crowd.
Speaker 1:Sure. Sure.
Speaker 3:I don't think Huberman has a record
Speaker 1:Yeah. It was like the meme was like, wake up, get some sunlight. It's like, get outside, get some sunlight. People like Wake up. Circadian rhythm stuff.
Speaker 3:The the the sort of startup community in Austin sort of staring at the sun directly. Sort of maybe getting some benefit from that. NASA's basically saying, you know, we see some opportunity here. Yep. They haven't gone blind quite yet.
Speaker 3:We should maybe check it out ourselves.
Speaker 1:We should check it out ourselves. Gavin Newsom launched a podcast and Paki says, hear us out.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so this was cool. Lulu's analysis of this was fantastic. Which
Speaker 1:is the
Speaker 3:Gavin Newsom, the Gavin my my read on Gavin Newsom is he'd maybe start a podcast and he would just have people that agreed with him on. Yep. He's taking the opposite
Speaker 1:of where he's
Speaker 3:inviting basically his political enemies on the Yep. And it's very humanizing. Know, he's he's got He's always been a much better public speaker than he has been operator, I would say. He's good with his words. And I think the strategy is really smart.
Speaker 3:And I think, you know, you're you were you know, when we started this show, you you probably said multiple times on the show, like the person that does the most hours podcasting will win the election.
Speaker 1:It's all about attention. Attention is all you need.
Speaker 3:Gavin heard you say that. Probably. He got the memo.
Speaker 1:The podcast election. No.
Speaker 3:But I think it's always smart. You know, the the joke is like the world doesn't need more podcasts, but there still is white space and ways to come in and Yeah. And get an edge.
Speaker 1:And no one was doing this, which is an actual, like, original talking across the aisle to Yeah. Some of the characters who have been labeled extreme. I mean, Steve Bannon is a very controversial issue very controversial figure, not normally platformed by even Yeah. Centrist media, mainstream media. But he I think Bannon did a did a interview with The New York Times.
Speaker 1:The New York Times also had Marc Andreessen, who they've written very negatively about in the past, and they they also had on courtesy Arvin, who in the past has been extremely controversial and and someone that was not platformed by the mainstream media, but something is certainly changing.
Speaker 3:Well, John, do you know what happened around five years ago? What? California governor Gavin Newsom was photographed wearing a Rolex Kermit. Wow. Which you can get on
Speaker 1:On Bezel. Bezel. Shop over 23,500 luxury watches fully authenticated in house by Bezel's team of experts. Go to getbezel.com, shop around, and find your next hitter.
Speaker 3:Apparently, Newsom is is a Panerai guy.
Speaker 1:Oh,
Speaker 3:really? But every now and then, he'll step out. I think he's he's got a lot of attention. Right? People kind of judge a lot of his fashion decisions.
Speaker 3:He he had these it's very sad time but he had this sort of like custom all this custom gear for the fire where he'd like pop up and be on Yeah. On camera. Yeah. Was like really like you you got that like like specifically stitched to kind of like LARP as like a firefighter.
Speaker 1:Sometimes it works. Sometimes he's taking risks, you know. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 1:Anyway, we got Kian from Nucleus coming on the show soon. Let's check-in with producer Ben and see if he's on. I think we got a couple more minutes. Let's move on to another post. Project Europe is a joke, says Arnie Ramesh.
Speaker 1:It's not the Thiel fellowship for Europe if they take 6.6% equity for 200 k. Surprised, so many European founders are on board, maybe for visibility. $10,000,000 fund size, LOL, an average US seed round. Make it nondilutive, then I'm all for And Kari Sarinen
Speaker 3:It's very European mindset to just be like, just give away money. Yeah. Just give away money.
Speaker 1:Make it non dilutive. I mean, Thiel fellowship is non dilutive because it's a non profit, but at the same
Speaker 3:time Sure. But it's Yeah. But they're trying to they're just
Speaker 1:asking for a handout.
Speaker 3:Yeah. They're trying to stimulate for profit, you know, the founding of for profit companies. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's fine to just do it as a seed fund. It's fine. I don't know. I I haven't dug into it too much, but let's read this critique from Carrie Sarinen. This is founder of Linear.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:I set up a Linear account for us to do some project management stuff yet but we'll see if we get you on there. Okay. But I'll read through it. So Carrie or Carrie says, I think your critique is overly harsh and frankly reflects the kind of attitude that holds Europe back. Initiatives tend to get criticized unless they meet some impossible standard or align with absolute ideals set by someone.
Speaker 3:Is this the best deal globally? No. But by European standards, it's probably average. I see seed rounds at 20% for one to one and a half million led by reputable VCs. Personally, I'd rather raise less with simpler terms than go through these seed rounds, but everyone is their own economic actor and can decide which deals to take or pass on.
Speaker 3:Someone has to provide the capital and there isn't the the the deals to provide the capital in Europe. You're also overlooking history in a lot of context. You're comparing something just starting now to YC, which began twenty years ago. YC's original deal was 6% for 20 k and it stayed that way for a long time. None of the perks you mentioned even existed back then.
Speaker 3:What you got was PG's chili once a week and some advice, priceless chili. When I went through YC in 2012, the deal was 7% for a hundred and 25 k. The whole premise of YC and whether the economics made sense was simply about whether it could make your company at least 7% more successful. If Project Europe can do the same then it's worth considering. Very interesting.
Speaker 3:I'm in favor of Project Europe. Okay. We've also been working on our own Project Europe
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 3:Internally at the show which is going to Europe
Speaker 1:Going to Europe 3 Months.
Speaker 3:South Of France Wine Tour. Doing doing the podcast. Spending lots
Speaker 1:of time on boats.
Speaker 3:Doing the podcast from the continent. Yeah. Making Europe greater grand one show at a time.
Speaker 1:Seven spend six per 6.6% of your time in Europe. That's the real project, Europe. Anyway, we got Kean in the waiting room. Let's bring him in. You doing?
Speaker 1:To the temple of technology.
Speaker 3:What
Speaker 1:up? What's up, man?
Speaker 5:The goofy hooligans, the mods of pods. I'm ready, John. I'm ready for you right now.
Speaker 1:Let's go. Let's go. It's great to talk to you. Great to see you. I don't think I've seen you in person since Miami.
Speaker 1:But give me the breakdown. Tell the tell the fans who you are and what what Nucleus is and then what you announced today.
Speaker 5:Yeah. So my name is Keon, founder and CEO of a company called Nucleus Genomics. We're the world's most advanced DNA health tests, single swabs, single tests. We can screen for over a thousand conditions. And today, oh my god.
Speaker 5:It's chaos in the headquarters in the best way. Okay. We have launched genetic matchmaking. Okay? So now you can family plan far more effectively.
Speaker 5:You can make sure every single couple in this country has healthy children.
Speaker 1:That's fantastic.
Speaker 5:It is absolutely amazing. It's already blowing up on Twitter. John, have you seen the video?
Speaker 1:I have not seen the
Speaker 5:video. Can you pull the video up right now? Can you pull the video up right now?
Speaker 1:I will I will share it then and hopefully, we can we can pull it up and watch
Speaker 3:it. Have you been are are you in a relationship? Have you been testing this yourself? Have you been getting on the
Speaker 1:dogfooding this?
Speaker 3:Are you dogfooding this?
Speaker 5:I am dogfooding this real time.
Speaker 1:Let's go.
Speaker 5:It's funny because we we were thinking about like, we block same sex couples or not, you know, because we figured that in the future, should be able to, independent of sex, you know, be able to have, you know, children. For now, it is sex blocked, so it has to be male to female. Sorry about a lot of tech pros out there. I know that might be hard for some of you guys. But when you find the one, when you find a special someone, you can do Nucleus and it is going to be amazing.
Speaker 1:What is the actual flow for nucleus? Is it a cheek swab, I mail it in? Break it out.
Speaker 5:Cheek swab. Yep. You get you get a DNA kit that looks like this. You open it up. Inside, there's a cheek swab.
Speaker 5:You take the cheek swab. You go, stick it in a tube, noninvasive. You can do it at home. No doctor's office involved. Goes to a laboratory.
Speaker 5:Laboratory processes the DNA. Outcomes a raw DNA file, which then we run through all our analysis, which is honestly like a like, this is people do not appreciate how much of a feat of science and engineering this is. A couple people I have to thank here. First and foremost, Gregor Mendel, late nineteenth century. Let's go.
Speaker 5:You for playing with those peas. Yes. Did not know.
Speaker 3:For the day.
Speaker 5:He played with those peas, you know, you know, he he had, like, extraordinary statistical intuition. You know, he had no idea what DNA was. He was completely abstracted.
Speaker 1:There was
Speaker 5:no molecular basis. Just playing with the piece, went all the way to the Hershey, you know, Hershey Chase experiment, shot to that experiment. Watson Crick identifying the structure of DNA. Of course, the Human Genome Project, right, a massive government project, billions of dollars in investment, thousands of scientists. This product is now live in '90 It's
Speaker 1:a short line from Gregor Mendel in 1866 to, Nucleus being promoted at the Jake Paul fight. So
Speaker 5:It is very short see
Speaker 1:it now, we'd be great.
Speaker 3:Ben, you're live streaming right now. Let's see if this video works.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Got the video here.
Speaker 8:This is a day I've been looking forward to for four and a half years. But really, today's product announcement is the culmination of decades of scientific, medical, and genomic progress, spanning thousands of scientists and billions of dollars in investment. Hence today, I'm so excited to show you the next chapter of preventative health, Family Planning Through Genetic Matching. Imagine knowing every possible outcome for you and your partner's future children, starting with their hereditary risks. Through Nucleus, you have the power to end preventable disease in your future family long before you even decide to have children.
Speaker 8:To show you how easy this is, I'm gonna sync my results with my good friend Molly O'Shea.
Speaker 1:Let's go. Hi, Molly.
Speaker 8:Hey, Molly. What's up?
Speaker 6:Perfect timing. I just opened up my Nucleus to see my results. I've gotta say the UI looks really good.
Speaker 5:Oh, that's so nice.
Speaker 8:You know, we really spend as much time as possible to build beautiful products. And by the way, aren't you one of the first people who did Nucleus? I mean, do you think maybe we're gonna be a genetic match? Definitely. Let's find out.
Speaker 8:Seeing if you're a genetic match is almost as easy as seeing if you're a match on a dating app. I'm gonna show you exactly how. Are my Nucleus family results, which just came out. Synced with Molly yet, so you can actually see my kids may be at risk for cystic fibrosis. But the only way to find if Molly and I are actually gonna pass down this risk to our kids is by syncing our results.
Speaker 8:Let me show you how this works. Just click add partner and confirm that your partner's done Nucleus. Molly has, of course, so I click yes. We're about to find out if we're a match. Molly, are you ready?
Speaker 6:Yep. Let's see.
Speaker 8:Oh my god. We're a match. This is amazing. Yeah. Molly, are you still there?
Speaker 1:Shocking. I'm gonna
Speaker 6:have to break up.
Speaker 8:Okay. Well, we'll come back to Molly later, but let's see about what just happened. On the back end, Nucleus scanned our combined genomes for nearly a thousand conditions that we could have unknowingly passed down to our children. From here, Molly and I can dive deeper into the specifics of our results. In reality, nine out of ten parents have a genetic risk that they could pass down to their children.
Speaker 8:And one in twenty five people have a genetic marker for cystic fibrosis. So what would happen if Molly had a genetic marker for cystic fibrosis? We have good news. We've been hard at work for something that we think will fundamentally change family planning forever. We can't share too much yet, but imagine if you could learn not just about the diseases you could pass down to your children, but also whether they gonna look and act more like mom or dad.
Speaker 8:More on that soon. Nucleus, we believe that anyone, anywhere should have the choice to access genetic insights to make more informed decisions about their health.
Speaker 3:Very cool. So the big question do we have him back?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You there? Oh, I think we gotta unmute him.
Speaker 1:Let's see. We're juggling things. Can we hear you, Kian?
Speaker 5:Hey. I can hear you. Can you hear me?
Speaker 3:Yep. Fantastic. The big big question
Speaker 5:First thing, how how was that video? It goes hard. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. It goes hard. Very clear. Very clear. I I really liked how efficiently the everything's communicated.
Speaker 1:The transition are cool, but it's not all style. There's substance there. Very well executed. Good job.
Speaker 3:When the big question John and I are both married Yep. But if somebody if one of our listeners is dating, you know, somebody when's the right
Speaker 1:time to to say, alright.
Speaker 3:Pull out. Like, let me see your cheek. We gotta do a quick swab.
Speaker 1:We gotta do a swab.
Speaker 5:Look. Look. Look. Look. There's there's many ways in doing this.
Speaker 5:Right? If you're someone already, it's okay. You know, you do nucleus, you see if you have a genetic risk or not. If you're if you both have a genetic risk, you're the same thing. You can do IVF.
Speaker 5:There's other reproductive options. You're gonna be good. You know the risk exists, so you can prevent the risk. The whole point of genetics. Right?
Speaker 5:But also there's a world where listen. Maybe you're a tech rep, they listen to this podcast, you don't have the special someone yet. No worries. You sit down, you say, you know, you know, what what college you go to, you know, they tell you, whatever. You say, okay.
Speaker 5:Nice. You know, what do you do? You know? And then you say, have you done a nucleus test?
Speaker 3:There you go.
Speaker 5:There you go.
Speaker 3:There you
Speaker 5:I mean, you gotta break it to them. You gotta say, listen, you gotta make sure the genes are alive. Because why would you get into this business in the first place? Are you trying to get deeper into it if the genetics are not matched? Right?
Speaker 5:I mean, you don't wanna be carrying the same Do
Speaker 3:you see people throwing up their nucleus results, like, on dating apps? Like, just look just look at these genes. What do you think? I
Speaker 5:mean, I think I think we we believe in kind of individual liberty. I think genetics should be integrated with dating apps, and if someone, you know, opts in and should say, hey. I don't wanna be matched with someone that's also a carrier for a rare genetic marker. It's actually done in different communities. The Ashkenazi Jewish community, they do this all the time.
Speaker 5:Actually don't match people who are the same rare genetic marker. So 100%, I think you should integrate dating apps, do mass preconception testing. DNA is becoming, as you guys know, cheaper and cheaper and cheaper, one of the greatest decrease in costs ever. Combining that with AI, there's gonna be magic. Mass integration with different dating apps, I think you're able to save a lot of babies' lives.
Speaker 1:What about flipping it around? Obviously, the genetic markers for diseases are very you know, you wanna avoid those, but, you know, I already have kids, but I could imagine that my son, when he goes to have his own child, my future grandchildren, might wanna optimize for a grandchild who's, you know, gonna be a future bodybuilder, let's say. And and we wanna make sure that, they're just matched up so they can go to the Arnold The most proud grandpa ever. And absolutely look diced, you know, massive, put on 300 of pure muscle. And he wants to make sure that his his wife is, is setting their kids up for success.
Speaker 1:Will Nucleus help with that?
Speaker 5:Great question. So first thing first I'll say is, John, he has a good father because you're, like, seven foot taller, actually.
Speaker 8:The genes are good. The genes
Speaker 5:are good. He already has already, inherently, he's good.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes.
Speaker 5:But, you know, it's funny you actually asked this because at the end of the video there, I, you know, I left a little teaser in there about something that's coming out. Okay. I mean, let let's just say, you know, there there's something about, you know, maybe, you know, you don't wanna just simulate people's disease risk, but also maybe you wanna simulate what your baby's gonna look in to act like. And Oh, cool. You know, when you start thinking about whole genome sequencing, you can start maybe thinking about, can you actually simulate procreation?
Speaker 5:Oh, wink, wink, nudge, nudge. Let's just say, you know, John, we're shipping. We're shipping like crazy. It's like Yeah. It's like hysteria in the in the nucleus headquarters.
Speaker 1:I love it.
Speaker 5:We're building at the frontier genetics. You know, I hear like sirens going up, gongs being hit. It's complete chaos in here.
Speaker 3:So so It's so long. So so it it feels like, you know, the the I think that the consensus now is that 23 and me walk, you guys could take us to the moon. Like, what it like, how far can you how far can you take this? Right? Because like the first step is like giving people the data and then you're then you're trying to like influence influence outcomes.
Speaker 3:Like, how how much does this sort of Nucleus platform expand? Is the like $10,000,000,000,000 vision for the business? Because I know you're that ambitious.
Speaker 5:Yeah. So, you know, it's like blockbuster versus Netflix. It's like, you know, Blackberry iPhone. That's the moment that's happening in genomics right now. And the beauty of the genome, what everyone's starting to appreciate is that the basically, moral of engineering and science that it is.
Speaker 5:Because if you think about it, when you actually read someone's entire genome, it's not just disease risk assessments that you can actually think about. It starts to become about family planning, about procreation simulation, about what drugs actually work best for you, what supplements work best for you, and even about the long tail of different traits that you can analyze from from IQ all the way to muscle strength. And you start realizing that the integration of the genome simply has not happened yet in society. Right? If take a poll of, you know, 300,000,000 Americans and look at how many have been sequenced, right, basically none of them have.
Speaker 5:And you talk about one of the greatest innovations ever, which is the decreasing cause of sequencing the genome, by far the single highest density, highest consequential piece of health information that exists, because it's literally your DNA. It's the entire thing, and it's not integrated in medicine, in lifestyle, or in dating. I mean, the opportunity is massive. And this test today cost $400. I'll make a prediction right here on Technology Brothers.
Speaker 5:Within five years, this test, couple dollars. Couple dollars, I said.
Speaker 1:Amazing. Congratulations.
Speaker 3:Wait. Where can people
Speaker 1:get it?
Speaker 3:So so last question. Is are we gonna have a way to test if somebody's nice with it or got that dog in them or is cracked? Because you seem like you're you're definitely nice with it. You definitely have that dog in you and you
Speaker 5:see the So we we have found consistently, okay, that founders who do nucleus tend to be very high in their schizophrenic disposition. Oh, okay. So personally, I'm in the ninety ninth percentile. I'm rocking it, baby. I'm seeing shit.
Speaker 5:I'm telling you right now.
Speaker 6:Schizo, Chad.
Speaker 5:I'm in 99 percentile. That's how it is. I swear. Look at Alexis. Shots by my man.
Speaker 5:Alexis, one of our lead investors, super high schizophrenic. Lot of other founders I know, super high schizophrenic. And that's public, by the That's public, by the way. I'm not just exposed to Alexis. Alexis' results are public.
Speaker 5:I would never just expose Alexis. It's very public.
Speaker 1:I'll look
Speaker 5:at all his results. Shout out to Alexis there. And so if you want, you gotta look and see who's schizophrenic. In fact, one interesting study showed that they ran these different models across every single phenotype, and they compared it across different careers. By far, the highest predictive one was actually schizophrenia, but it was for artists, which is very similar to entrepreneurs though.
Speaker 5:So, you know, that's what they do. If you're low ADHD, super low ADHD associated with doctors and lawyers. So, you know, there's something there, you know. You got that dog in you, maybe it's in your DNA.
Speaker 1:I love it. I love it. Well, where can people go get it? Where can people order a test?
Speaker 5:Mynucleus.com mynucleus Com / family. If you're a couple, you wanna have healthy children, that's where you should go. Fantastic. Tion's negative five. Follow me on Twitter.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Twitter's a good part today.
Speaker 3:You're amazing. You're amazing. I this this was fun. I I've I've actually never we've never talked. No.
Speaker 3:And, I'd love to have you back on whenever there's whenever there's genome news just
Speaker 1:Bio correspondent coming in.
Speaker 3:Join this exact link. Like, don't even you know?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Tell us. Just join
Speaker 5:the link.
Speaker 1:Hey. There's news. You tell us.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Amazing, man. Amazing. Congratulations on the launch. We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 3:Talk
Speaker 1:soon. Have a great day.
Speaker 4:Thanks, guys. Bye.
Speaker 1:Have a good weekend too. Amazing. I I think genetics might explain why a single inorganic blueberry would kill you on the spot, and yet I could eat a credit card with a fork and knife and just be honest back then. Be then. So I think we got Josh Diamond coming
Speaker 3:Speaking of microplastic haters. Yo.
Speaker 1:Yo. How you doing?
Speaker 2:Good. Good.
Speaker 1:Welcome to the show. We got Josh Steinman in the building, in the temple of technology. Give us an update. Is it a good morning, and are we going to win?
Speaker 2:All signs point to yes.
Speaker 1:Oh, fantastic. Fantastic. How how's it going?
Speaker 2:It's good. It's good. How are you guys?
Speaker 3:We're we're good. Want little show lore? I I I definitely, like, put one of your initial good morning, we're going to win posts into the into the stack in the early days. And then I put another one in about a week later, and John was like, wait, you put this back in? I'm like, yeah.
Speaker 1:We're we're still winning.
Speaker 6:It's still a good learning. It's important
Speaker 3:to remember.
Speaker 1:And so we've done those tweets like three times
Speaker 3:already. And I've and I've talked about it on the show before. I think there's this, you know, founders will say something once and and feel like they've said it and you're not realizing that, you know, a lot of the long the the return is in the sort of long tail of just drilling this idea and I I really feel like it's become a movement.
Speaker 1:It's David Senra thing. You're not advertising to a a standing army. You're advertising to a marching parade.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting because, you know, part of it is self talk. Right? And this goes into, like, the deep, like, how do we program ourselves?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like, human as computer. Scott Adams talks about this, the moist robot hypothesis. Hypothesis, but other people as well. And, like, his his school of persuasion is the same school that Bill Clinton and Tony Robbins come from. Like, Norman Vincent Peale, like, there's a lineage here.
Speaker 2:So it's like, how do we talk to ourselves as people? How do we talk to ourselves as as agents, free agents, like, in the world? So part of it is just like, I'm telling myself every day. Like, you have to wake up and you have to, like, want it every day. And then the other part is just like, obviously, you know, with the with with the public persona that I have, you know, having come from, you know, both the military, but then also politics.
Speaker 2:Like, man, it was dark for a while. You know? Like, super dark. And I just wanted something where I just could say to myself every day, like, look. Things can turn around.
Speaker 2:And I actually think they're going to, and certainly they have. But, like, every day, just wake up and be willing to just, like, offer yourself up to the universe. Like, yeah, it's gonna happen. Like, we're gonna win. Like, you're never more than one one day away from like catastrophic success.
Speaker 1:Going back to Catastrophic success. I like
Speaker 3:that term. Going back to your your dark days, do you feel like you got a lot of like were were people turning down meetings with your company early on just because of your sort of political leanings? Could you
Speaker 1:do some backstory on the company? Can you break
Speaker 3:down Yeah. Maybe
Speaker 1:we should start. Building, who you are, little career highlights.
Speaker 3:Who you are.
Speaker 1:I mean, yeah. I'm sure a lot of people know, but give give us the basics.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I started off my career in, like, this weird corner of operational counterterrorism in the US military. That sort of branched into high technology and high technology strategy. Again, when I was still in uniform and got a lot of exposure to just how much, you know, the world is a very interconnected place, and there are things that we can do in the digital world that absolutely affect the physical world. People talk about Stuxnet.
Speaker 2:They talk about, you know, these these attacks that have happened against, oil facilities. So, I get out of the military. I go to Silicon Valley. And then two years later, just like a strange series of coincidences, I get asked to come back to Washington and essentially be, like, the most senior cybersecurity person in the US government. Not like, I'm gonna reset your password, but, like, I'm gonna remake our entire practice of running cyber operations for, like, the DOD and the intelligence community and homeland security and all that stuff.
Speaker 2:So I did that job for four years. And then afterwards, pulled together two buddies of mine, including Brandon Park, who helped stand up Amazon's global, what we call operational technology OT cybersecurity program at Amazon, and then Felix Plushinski who I'd recruited to come join me in the admin who was a hedge fund trader. And we started looking at this problem. It's a huge problem. You know, we've digitized the industrial world, and yet there's it has created these huge vulnerabilities that have been exploited, and some of that stuff makes its way out into the public.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, we just wanted to start a company to to solve that.
Speaker 3:What percentage actually gets public versus is sort of known among the industry, but not necessarily in headlines.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Are there foreign agents operating on American soil? Because I I I hear some people say the number is zero, but I think you had a different point on that.
Speaker 2:Right. It's a different meme of mine. Yeah. No. There's absolutely foreign foreign sabotage teams operating on US soil.
Speaker 2:A %. My actual number is somewhere around a hundred teams. My guess question is, like, you could break that down into, you know, what types. Anyway, yeah, most of it doesn't get public. And, you know, sitting in that chair for four years, I had to get the classified reports every day of, like, oh, this thing happened, that thing happened.
Speaker 2:And it just didn't drive me nuts, but it was like, man, it makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up.
Speaker 1:Are there any cybersecurity stories in history that are public now that you like to point to as, like, that could have been prevented. That's the one we're learning from, and here's how my company would prevent that essentially, or here's how I would have stopped that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Too easy. So, I think two, three years ago, someone, I don't
Speaker 1:know who
Speaker 2:I don't know who, literally destroyed the Iranian steel industry in like one day. Really? There's video out yeah. There's video out there. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Like they literally took over, you know, the refineries and just started pouring liquid metal all over the floor on a bunch of these bunch of these facilities. Yeah. There's a bunch of incidents like that that have happened.
Speaker 1:So walk me through how you would prevent that. I mean, I I imagine what you're describing is, like, remote takeover of a machine that is connected to the Internet or maybe air gapped, and they didn't have the right security there. How do you actually step in and prevent that for for our steel industry?
Speaker 2:Air gapping, I mean, a lot of people will say that stuff because they've heard it on, like, TV or whatever.
Speaker 1:That's me.
Speaker 2:Or yeah. Exactly. But these operations take days, weeks, months, sometimes years
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:To sort of, like, get into a network and then find your way to the systems that you wanna take over. And the whole point is, like, every step of the way of those types of operations leaves breadcrumbs. Mhmm. And so currently, the way in which people try and protect these networks is by looking at only one area of technology inside the four walls of the facility, and that's, like, the networking equipment. So what we do is we look at everything.
Speaker 2:And so by looking at everything, you just have a a bigger picture, and you can assemble a narrative. You can try and understand when malicious things are happening at that super high level because you're seeing what's going on with the engineering workstations. You're seeing we are seeing what happens with the network. We're seeing what's being done on the applications. We're seeing what's happening, you know, with the firewalls.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So we just take it all in and, you know, it's not it's not, it's not new to, like, oh, do something with a much bigger data set. That's really what we're doing here.
Speaker 1:Can you break down, some of the difference between espionage projects and sabotage projects? Are there any differences? Are there any risks, you know, state actors that are prioritizing one over the other right now?
Speaker 2:Yeah. This is, the thing that most people don't understand. They'll say, like, oh, you know, things that are happening right now, it's just espionage. The thing is, like, in the course of an operation, like, you do the espionage first. It allows you to map the network, map the systems, and then sometimes people will, like, just leave a little leave a little something there.
Speaker 1:In case they wanna do sabotage later.
Speaker 2:They want.
Speaker 1:Yep. Pop it. Okay.
Speaker 2:So, like, yeah, there's, like, lots of espionage happening
Speaker 3:Sure.
Speaker 2:On critical networks. Like, gee, what's that preparation for?
Speaker 3:Sure. That makes sense. What what's been your read on our response to DeepSeek broadly? Do you think that US companies have been taking it seriously enough? There's this, you know, general lens from some some some of the tech community that says it's, you know, it's open source.
Speaker 3:You know, it's not sort of the the same type of risk as TikTok. What's your read on it?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Look, a major frustration that I have is that we get a bunch of these cutting edge companies. And then, you know, almost certainly you have foreign foreign actors, not just the Chinese, like many other foreign actors
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:That come in. I mean, you can read the papers that came out of, like, the Twitter
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Buyout, you know, transition to x. And they basically are like, yeah. We had foreign we had foreign intel service, foreign governments, like, operating inside, you know, x formerly known as Twitter. I think that's happening at a bunch of our companies. I think it's a huge problem huge counterintelligence problem.
Speaker 2:Because the question is, like, what are they manipulating? Like, are they putting back doors in there? Are they changing content? Are they changing you don't know. And a lot of the companies, many of which my friends have worked at, they don't even have a way to think about this.
Speaker 2:And also, obviously, like, it's not politically correct to talk about it. Like, hey, maybe we shouldn't hire that foreign national that went to the, you know, military college of their respective nation and whose uncle is, like, the deputy chief of their intel service. Yeah.
Speaker 3:So speaking, the the new CEO of Intel that got announced today, you know, we covered this earlier on the show. You may not have seen it. Has invested over the last, you know, twenty years, hundreds of millions of dollars into, you know, Chinese tech companies. Do you foresee any sort of, like, pushback and to bring somebody like that on to run? You know, he's not a Chinese national, but
Speaker 1:Born in Malaysia, grew up in Singapore, but invested in the Chinese semiconductor company, exited the position in 2022, I believe, and now running Intel.
Speaker 2:Look. I, you know, I don't know the situation specifically. Obviously, Chinese companies are legally required to be dual use. Mhmm. Like, they architected their entire economy to serve the Chinese Communist Party.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:It just means that I'm super wary whenever you see folks that have been allowed to make profit out of that system. I don't know his scenario specifically running Intel. I certainly hope that, you know, I certainly hope that everything's on the up and up. I have no reason to think that it's not. But whenever I look at, you know, those types of interactions between, you know, what I think the The United States and and Western allies would call, like, the free market and the Chinese Communist Party, I'm just super wary as a whole.
Speaker 3:Staying on the topic of China, do you think we've learned at all from the sort of DGI just sort of blitzing and taking the entire US drone market? Do you think there's a real risk that they're able to run that same playbook back with unitary in the sort of human aid space? Or are we gonna be smart enough to not let them put a robot in every American's home?
Speaker 2:They are absolutely taking that they're absolutely taking that playbook and trying to replicate it as broadly as possible. For years, I've been telling, screaming anyone that'll listen on x or wherever else, like, we we should ban DJI from doing business in The United States. Full stop. Full stop. Everyone's like, oh, all the alternatives are, like, more expensive or this, that, and the other.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, supply and demand will allow the market to correct over time, but it's a huge problem. Like, they exactly know. By the way, like, if you don't think that senior CCP Intel officials have the ability to just walk into DJI headquarters and be like, give me everything you know about the topography of The United States. Mhmm. Like, you're smoking crack.
Speaker 2:They probably have access to it right now. So every time these things fly, anything that get transmitted into the cloud, whose cloud is it, where is that cloud located, you know, what access do, you know, the Chinese Intel services have to it, military have to it? Like, yeah, all that stuff's, like, in the wild.
Speaker 1:What about personal cybersecurity? What what do you recommend to the average listener just to kind of beef up your own, ops sec?
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's tough. So for normal folks, I just say use the big cloud use the big providers. That's like the the Googles, the Microsofts, etcetera. Enable two factor authentication.
Speaker 2:I think probably the biggest thing that I don't hear a lot is whenever you get a message, like an email saying, like, hey. Like, your bank says this or that. Delete the email and then go straight to log in to the service.
Speaker 1:Sure. Sure. Sure. Right?
Speaker 2:And and that's like the mind space that you wanna be in because, like, these guys are social engineers. They know the language to get you to click the link, and that's what they're trying to do.
Speaker 1:Yep. Because they're gonna put
Speaker 2:malicious software onto your laptop, onto your phone, whatever.
Speaker 1:Tons of phishing attacks at x right now. And then those are getting more and more convincing. You've seen some people leak it out usually just for meme coins launches, basically. But
Speaker 3:you can imagine being much Famed investor Kleiner purchased launched a meme coin. I wanna, there's a couple topics I wanna get through. One, you know, I'm sure you can only make sort of general predictions here but do you think this whole TikTok thing gets resolved in the next month? You know, there's sort of there there was an initial date for early April that it was supposed to, you know, sort of change hands but you just we haven't been seeing that much new news about it.
Speaker 1:At this point, there's plenty of people that wanna buy it. You know, Oracle, Microsoft, Alexis Ohanian. Like, there's so many different capital groups, like, chomping at the bit to, you know, be the be the buy side on this deal. It's just a question of can you twist their arm enough to get the sale done, I think. But what what do you think, Josh?
Speaker 2:Yeah. They absolutely wanna retain control of the algorithm because that's like the prize. It's the ability to, like, inject ideas into the youth of The United States or elsewhere in the world. And so I think that's gonna be I hope that's a major sticking point with the way in which it resolves out. At the same time, you have to remember that this deal has the attention of the president of The United States who is at the same time negotiating with his counterparty, Xi Jinping, over a trade relationship that, you know, there are 12 trillions of dollars in the offing around it.
Speaker 2:And so I learned this over four years of working for him, like, you just have to trust the boss. He's playing a game that, like, very few humans have ever been able to play, which is, like, the most high risk, the most, you know, impactful game of, like, one nation in the world. And so, look, I hope he's able to negotiate it in a way in which, you know, preserves cognitive, sovereignty. There's a lot going on and
Speaker 3:That's great question.
Speaker 2:Sort of take my foot off the gas on it.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's not
Speaker 3:a focus. Let's let's kind of pivot to a topic that's, you know, definitely I'm sure top of mind for you guys. Re industrialization, the vibes are good, the work is you know maybe starting. Ongoing. Feels like it's starting, it's ongoing, job's not finished.
Speaker 3:Are we doing enough? It seems like there's a, you know, sort of top there obviously is a top down directive to invest in America, but, you know, there's been, you know, on the topic of China, China will give, you know, companies, you know, very, very low or zero interest rate loans to do development. We're not quite there yet.
Speaker 1:I think DeepSeek's taken one of those.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:DeepSeek turned down all their venture capital interest and said, yeah, we're just gonna take a 0% loan from the Bank of China. I love it.
Speaker 3:So, yeah. What what like, it it doesn't it it it's almost like it's not an impossible task, but it's a very difficult one. Are we doing enough? Do we need to do more? What's your take?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So in my four years at the White House, I ended up taking over this port not or not even taking over, but owning this portfolio of, technology supply chains. And it's it it's hard. You know? The Chinese are literal just like you guys have said, they're out there giving these 0% loans to these companies to try and build what they call national champions.
Speaker 2:And so and so how do we compete? I think the answer is just the market. You know? And I don't mean that in a sort of, like, lame kinda way. Like, oh, the free market will take care of it.
Speaker 2:But, like, there is an incredible amount of dynamism in the American system and in the American markets. So, like, the Chinese can certainly go out and try and drive attention or monopoly towards their chosen, you know, national champions, but we've got a bunch of people that wanna make a ton of money here in The United States. A bunch of people from around the world that come here because they wanna make a ton of money here in The United States. I think that presents us with different advantages. And so I think that, you know, when it comes to financing, there are lots of tools in the toolbox.
Speaker 2:There's the defense production act. There's, you know, DOD procurement. There's a whole bunch of things. I do know that the team right now is thinking about all of them. Again, having sat in the seat, you know, I'm not gonna take shots at anyone.
Speaker 2:Not that I have any shots to take. Just that, like, I'm confident that they're thinking about it. I'm confident that they know, you know, what's available, and I think we're seeing great stuff already.
Speaker 1:What do you think about the debate between supply side and demand side stimulus in these projects? Like, the CHIPS Act, obviously, $50,000,000,000. I think 8,000,000,000 was gonna go to Intel, provided some milestones. But Ben Thompson has been, advocating for flipping that around and instead just saying, hey. Let's have the US government say, we're buying chips that are made in America.
Speaker 1:Yeah. If you show up with chips that are made in America, we are the buyer, and then maybe someone else will buy them. Maybe Google will buy them. Maybe Apple will buy them. But we but you can guarantee that there's demand, but we don't care about what's happening on the supply side as long as it's happening in America.
Speaker 1:Do you like that change? Do you like that v two thinking?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I love it. I love it. I think, you know, right now, I've heard a lot of strange things about how Chips Act has played out. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:I haven't followed it as closely as if I was, you know, some analyst covering this stuff for the banks.
Speaker 3:But Yep.
Speaker 2:I mean, it it was one of the approaches that we pushed. Was this like, look, you just have to have it made in America. That's it. Show again, show up and we'll buy. Yep.
Speaker 1:That's one
Speaker 2:the things on the table and I hope they do it.
Speaker 3:That's cool. What's just pivoting back. I don't know if you're in California right now or up at the Northern office, but how do we solve the wildfire crisis California, right? It's this sort of very complicated issue. You've worked in government, you're very in tune with what's happening in hard tech.
Speaker 3:It feels like Yeah. There's a public role, you know, to play. There's a private markets role to play. There's obviously the whole insurance side, but you're sticking it out here in in California, I hope. So what what do you what what's your position on, you know, what we need to do as a state?
Speaker 2:I mean, we gotta let the forestry guys, like, actually operate. You know, it's insane to hear them talk about, like, what was going on in Altadena where, like, years it took them to file these crazy applications with, like, 15 different state boards letting them do controlled burns and brush clearing and they get said no to. Like, we just gotta let these guys do their job. Like forestry management is a solved problem. Right?
Speaker 2:Let these guys get out there. The Europeans laugh at us. The president talks about this all the time, but it is literally true. They don't have these types of catastrophic forest fires because they have good forestry management. There's an amazing account, Mann, m a n n, made films on Twitter.
Speaker 2:You've seen this guy? He did he did a film. He took a red camera and he became one of these, what are the what are the fires, the, smokejumpers.
Speaker 1:Oh, wow.
Speaker 2:He was a smokejumper. And he he did this amazing film. Follow him on x. But he talks about it. It's like, look, yeah, these places are prone to fire, but if you let the forestry management folks do their job, like, you know, you can manage it.
Speaker 2:And the same thing with the water stuffs. Like, the solutions are known. Like, there's weird blockages in the way in which water comes into California, and the president's trying to deal with some of that stuff stuff. Like, the state of California, like, people know what the answer is. They're just not being allowed to do it because crazy weird bureaucracies.
Speaker 1:That's right. The movie was called Hotshot. I remember seeing a trailer for this and being blown away by the visuals. I need to watch this movie. This looks fantastic.
Speaker 1:Available on Amazon Prime, Apple, Google Play. Go check it out, folks. Anything else?
Speaker 3:I think that's all I got.
Speaker 1:Thanks for stopping by.
Speaker 3:I'd love to you know, we'd love to have you on when, you know, there's there's a bunch of these topics.
Speaker 1:Cybersecurity correspondent.
Speaker 3:You're you're our new cyber cybersecurity correspondent or brother depending depending on
Speaker 1:Or just a morning pump up speech. Yeah. Hop on. Just tell us good morning. We're gonna Then you can hop off, get get to the rest of your day.
Speaker 3:We're starting the show with just by singing a little bit. So if you ever wanna, like, you know, create like an anthem or anything,
Speaker 1:we just sing it. Good mantras. We need good mantras.
Speaker 3:We have
Speaker 1:a few. Temple of Technology, Fortress of Finance, Capital of Capital. But good morning, we're gonna win works too.
Speaker 2:See you guys.
Speaker 3:Thanks for coming on.
Speaker 1:Thanks for
Speaker 4:coming on.
Speaker 1:Great. Cool. We have five minutes until
Speaker 3:we get to date. Let's hit a couple posts.
Speaker 1:Let's hit a couple posts. What do we have in the queue? We were Oh, so this is
Speaker 3:a crazy story from this account, Rob
Speaker 1:Rob Wiblin. So
Speaker 3:he says, this is a tiny niche story but it may actually be the most catastrophic thing to happen globally yesterday. Bold start. Bold start. I'm not going to go out on that. We will
Speaker 1:the judge
Speaker 3:of that. We will desperately need politicians. Okay, so the headline here is that this media company, New Scientist, has used the freedom of information laws to obtain the chat GBT records of Peter Kyle, the UK's technology secretary and what is believed to be a first world first use of such legislation. Interesting. So Rob here says, we will desperately need politicians to be able to use AI advisors to keep up with the intense pace of events that recursively self improving AI agents will bring.
Speaker 3:AI advice will improve in scale proportionately to the social impact AI is having given giving governments some shot at keeping up. But if any conversation with AI can be extracted using, freedom of information laws while advice from humans given verbally cannot, politicians and civil servants will be hugely biased towards worse and slower human advice and analysis. They'll fear looking stupid for asking clarifying question or outrage if the AI advises some un PC course of action. Just as we need humans and government to be able to have some private conversations, we need humans to be able to get AI advice without journalists being able to publish the transcript. These conversations must
Speaker 1:urgently be carved
Speaker 3:out of FOI legislation. So anyways, point. Yeah. You know, you want politicians have a lot of pressure, they have hard jobs. You want them to be able to like, you know, have their little friend companion.
Speaker 3:Yep. Like, maybe they're using Avi's. It's like, sometimes it might just say, you got this. Yeah. You know, but other times they might ask, you know, hey Hey,
Speaker 1:you need to brush up on your linear Yeah.
Speaker 3:Like, what what is when what's this maximum speed limit
Speaker 1:in this? It's like, he didn't know. He didn't know the mass he should have known that. Yeah. But interesting.
Speaker 1:I wonder I mean, there are ways to use LLMs in more secure and less FOIA able ways. I mean, certainly, you can run your own llama or deep sea instance Yeah. On a computer. George Hotts has a project, Tinybox. But, I mean, even if you just have a, you know, a new generation Mac Yeah.
Speaker 1:It it's now big enough that you can run and powerful enough, and the models have been condensed enough that you can run them locally. That obviously makes it harder for them to be seized without your permission. Also, you could see a an LLM or an AI service, you know, basically built on top of something like Signal, where there's end to end encryption, where if you're using an unencrypted network, the government can go and ask the tech company to, they have the keys so they can unlock the servers and Yep. And pass over the records. But that does that's not the way it works on Signal and other end to end encrypted communication apps.
Speaker 1:So you could imagine a world that where someone is vending an LLM through a an end to end encrypted service, not saving the records and and offering a different service. Feels like a niche but potentially important use case, but it'll be interesting to see where it goes. I mean, is actually maybe the bull case for Apple because Apple's whole thing has been end to end encryption everywhere, including the the Messages app. If I'm talking to you on on iMessage, Apple cannot see those. And even if the FBI shows up and says, we have a warrant.
Speaker 1:Unlock Jordy John and Jordy's latest memes. We wanna read them. They've been posting Memes. Bangers back and forth. Yep.
Speaker 1:We wanna access them. Apple doesn't have the keys. Yeah. And Apple, if they're running the LLM locally on your device, it's locked
Speaker 5:behind your
Speaker 3:for if a if a government employee has a government phone, shouldn't If the government be able to, like, see that itself? Yep.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if you have if you have the passcode to get into the phone, you have full access. So it needs to be on a on a personal device that can't be monitored in order to truly get guess then, of course, the flip side is that then, you know, bad actors can use the encrypted Yeah. And this has been the the privacy debate forever.
Speaker 3:Yep. Yeah. And and OpenAI has historically just been very careful around anything anything political. Totally. They don't want to be positioned as, you know, OpenAI influences election or things like that.
Speaker 3:But these are some of the big problems that they're gonna have to
Speaker 1:look Let's go to Blake Robbins. He has some random thoughts. We love these posts from Blake. He says there might be an entirely new generation that now thinks of Nokia as a Drake song. That's funny.
Speaker 1:Two, sort of insane how much mobile games like Candy Crush leverage haptics. So as you're using the game, it's vibrating, kind of an underrated way to increase engagement and, I guess, decrease regretted user seconds or just keep people addicted. And then number three, whoever runs stakes clipping strategy slash network is on a different level playing four d chess. I'm sure you've seen those stake ads all
Speaker 3:over Yeah. So viral. Thing that that that's been relevant to X is they've taken over or they're partnering with these accounts that post these these
Speaker 1:Like viral videos.
Speaker 3:Viral videos and or just posts, images, things like that. News, sloppy thing. And if you look at the bottom, it'll say like this post is presented by stakes. So it's like very
Speaker 1:kind Just a tiny logo.
Speaker 3:This It's
Speaker 1:full ad.
Speaker 3:It's just stakes. Logo.
Speaker 1:And and and every time one of those goes viral, there's a community note. This is against the terms of service. You can't promote this. This is undisclosed ad, but this still goes viral. Still gets a ton of impressions.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I had a fourth random Well,
Speaker 3:so he's bringing up Steak. Steak has like this massive partnership with Drake.
Speaker 1:Oh, They do. They keep doing like stunts
Speaker 6:for Steak
Speaker 3:and Drake.
Speaker 1:Steak and Drake. It's a lot.
Speaker 3:Steak and Drake. No. But I mean, the the the very the funny thing is in this one post you have him calling out that a whole new generation doesn't realize Nokia as a Drake song which implies that and Drake partnering with Steak means that Drake is just marketing, you know, basically gambling products to the youth. Very odd. And he should Clean it up.
Speaker 3:Should look in the mirror.
Speaker 1:Clean it up. Well, I have a fourth random thought here. You should get an Eight Sleep. Nights that fuel your best days turn any bed into the ultimate sleeping experience. Go to 8Sleep.com/TBPN and
Speaker 3:Get $350 off the pod. I slept very well last night, which I'm glad I got a 98 because this debate is about to be tense. Gonna be difficult.
Speaker 1:It all could come crashing down. I got a 94. You beat me. Night. Good
Speaker 3:Good night for you.
Speaker 1:Nine nine hours twenty one minutes. How is that even possible? That's a long time. I mean, you I put up some crazy numbers.
Speaker 3:You put up some crazy numbers and
Speaker 1:and it was But you gotta be well rested for these debates. They're hot. They're aggressive. Yeah.
Speaker 3:I wouldn't be surprised if so Lesson is not in the waiting room yet. Okay. Guess Seth is, but I wouldn't be surprised if Sam was just taking a power nap on his
Speaker 1:seat. Surprised. Yeah.
Speaker 3:You know, to to just sort of get really into that sort of
Speaker 1:bring in Seth,
Speaker 3:do some pregame Yeah. Let's
Speaker 1:I wanna hear his strategy. I wanna hear how he's thinking about going toe to toe. Let's bring him in into the Temple Of Technology, the Fortress Of Finance. Very good to see you. Welcome to the stream.
Speaker 1:How are doing? Oh, you got the custom background with the billboard there.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I'm I'm starting with a little psychological warfare.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 4:That's that's my strategy. Just get them get them a little uncomfortable.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What does it say? It says lesson south shoot lesson a message, not Seth Greenberg. Yeah. Okay.
Speaker 1:It's very AI generated.
Speaker 4:It says it says got a weird meme coin, shoot lesson a message not
Speaker 3:so it's cut
Speaker 1:off. Okay. It's cut off over here. But yeah. Give us a breakdown.
Speaker 1:How how did we wind up here?
Speaker 7:So
Speaker 4:about a year ago, or maybe six months ago, Les and I had a public debate about, you know, is the AI opportunity for startups or incumbents?
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 4:And it got heated. And so, yeah, we've kinda just been going back and forth. And then and then he actually took out a physical billboard on the 101. Like, with all like, amongst all of these, like, advertisements for AI companies that says AI is not your moat, like, love slow kind of thing. Yep.
Speaker 4:And then I just kinda tweeted back at him saying, I'm gonna, take out a billboard on the other side.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 4:And then
Speaker 3:But then he actually
Speaker 4:they updated it. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So then he he lessoned, threw up a new ad yesterday that says, got an AI startup idea, shoot Seth Rosenberg a message, not slow. So this is basically the Drake and Kendrick of of allocators. Yep. And
Speaker 1:The Tupac biggie of this era,
Speaker 3:really. Exactly. No. But it's great it's great to have you on. Sam's Sam's a fierce debater.
Speaker 3:We were talking with Logan Bartlett earlier He's moderated a debate before. Debates. So we're gonna try to keep it we're we're gonna try to keep it very, very
Speaker 1:Keep it tight. Keep it tight. He's known to filibuster a little bit when you get him down.
Speaker 4:That's right.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So you gotta
Speaker 4:You guys gotta help me and just cut Sam off.
Speaker 3:Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, mean, he might not even show up and then you win by default.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 1:That's good.
Speaker 6:It's a forfeit.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 3:What yeah. Why don't why don't like since we have some time
Speaker 1:Give some background on yourselves.
Speaker 3:Introduce yourselves. Yeah. Some background for the for the listeners.
Speaker 4:Sure. Well, so Sam actually hired me at Facebook in 02/2013. So we've gone way back.
Speaker 3:Crazy, though. Wow.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Exactly. So I was like this young analyst at Goldman Sachs, like spending a hundred hours a week in spreadsheets. And then Sam invited me to this backroom dinner in New York talking about the future of the world. And this is back when Facebook had a little less baggage.
Speaker 4:It was still like a startup energy, like future of the world, giving individuals a voice, like Arab Spring, all of that. And Yeah. I was just super inspired by it. And so it was like a four hour dinner conversation. I'm like, Sam, like I def like, that was the first time I met him, but, you know, he's quirky and futuristic.
Speaker 4:And so I'm like, I need to do this. So I spent, like, any spare time I had, like, learning how to code and just, like, getting up to speed on tech world, and then I've just been in in that world ever since.
Speaker 1:How long were you at Facebook?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I was there for
Speaker 4:about four years. I I led the separation of Messenger into its own app, and then David Marcus came on to lead it, and Stan came on and built kind of an empire around it. And then I was running
Speaker 1:post project Titan? Because it wasn't Titan like the the whole project to like put everything together and then you kinda
Speaker 4:That was after I left. That was after I left. Okay. This was this was the opposite of that.
Speaker 1:The opposite of the separation.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Yeah. This was back when it was like Facebook chat.
Speaker 1:That's the game at a hyperscaler. You just break it apart, put it back together For best for PMs in the Valley.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Exactly. So I was there for phase one.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:And then you went straight to Greylock or what was your next move?
Speaker 4:No, no. So I was running the product for the developer platform at Facebook, which was like AI bots, messenger bots. It's like the hottest thing in Silicon Valley for like four months before everyone realized it didn't work because we were seven years away from LLMs actually, you know, being released.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Remember those bots. Lots of business logic, lots of if then statements.
Speaker 4:Exactly.
Speaker 1:Dressed up with a nice UI every once in a while.
Speaker 3:We got your former your former boss or at least the guy that hired you is in the waiting room now.
Speaker 1:So we can bring him bring him in. Bring him into the temple of technology. Fortress of finance. The capital of capital. And if they if they get out of hand, I'm gonna be ringing this gong, telling you, hurry it up, finish what you're saying.
Speaker 1:No filibustering on this debate. Wait. Wait. You know?
Speaker 4:Sam, you almost forfeited by being late.
Speaker 7:Was in the waiting room. I'm sitting there. I wore my team Canada, Canadian team Canada like arch tariffs for you, Seth.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Thank you. I appreciate that. I support state. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Hey. I'm American now. I kinda support it too, honestly.
Speaker 7:That's great. You go.
Speaker 1:That's great. Well, welcome to the stream. Welcome to the debate. Should we do some some opening arguments? What what lay down the the the general, the what is the actual point that we're debating here?
Speaker 1:Sustaining versus disruptive innovation for artificial intelligence? Is that kind of where you guys are differing the most?
Speaker 7:I think the debate is that Sam
Speaker 4:has too much disposable income to waste on billboards.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay. Yeah. So Sam, what's the ROI been so Are you I don't know.
Speaker 7:Seth, how many how many AI pitches have you gotten from my billboard?
Speaker 4:Actually, honestly, like the the inbox is full.
Speaker 7:There you go.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. You're welcome.
Speaker 7:You're welcome. I see no debate here. I'm very happy to send Seth all the AI pitches and life is good.
Speaker 3:And, yeah. Be clear, this this debate is presented by Adquick, the number one way to buy billboards on the one zero
Speaker 1:one. Yes. If you're trying to duke it out with a rival, get on Adquick, get a billboard.
Speaker 3:It's underrated to take debates from the timeline to the one zero one. Yes. Air it all air it all out. But yeah. So so Sam, we had we had lesson on the show, I think last Friday, broadly talking about opportunities in AI and the whole kind of full spectrum.
Speaker 3:Maybe yeah. I mean, I I don't even know necessarily where to start. You guys were the ones that are
Speaker 7:Well, okay. Here's what I'll I'll bet. Seth and I have been debating this for years. Let me let me try to tee it up. Which is, I for several years, so I try to be self consistent, have been very pro that AI is going to make the big big big platforms a shit ton of money.
Speaker 7:And it's gonna be really good for small businesses. But it is a terrible place to hunt for startups. Right? It's a great way to lose a lot of money on startups. Now I my refinement of that, which I would I will give as a refinement from my like do really believe in what I'll call AI cherry on top businesses, which is businesses that are good that there's a sweetener because of the efficiency of AI.
Speaker 7:But broadly speaking, when people come in and pitch AI, my answer is pass. Please go call Seth. Seth's answer I think is please call me.
Speaker 1:Okay. Seth, what did So
Speaker 4:I think that tees it up well. So I'll I'll give you two examples of where I think massive new businesses can be built that are, let's say, AI native. I think one is like networks and marketplaces based on new democratization of being able to create new types of content. So like the analogy on the phone you now have a camera in everyone's pocket. The first wave of apps was like camera filter apps and then Instagram No, the first wave of
Speaker 5:apps
Speaker 7:were fart apps.
Speaker 4:Fart apps and like drinking a beer app.
Speaker 1:The beer drinking.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Fair. But like the first camera apps were like you know, just like little fun tools you could do with the camera. But then the real mobile first business were things like Instagram and Snap, right? Which basically created networks around democratization of creation of new content.
Speaker 4:And I think if you think about AI, like what new types of content can now be created by everyone, there's a few examples. One are games, like what's the next Roblox? Two is music, you know, is Suno gonna have like a consumption experience? So gonna be a new type of network there. Three is software.
Speaker 4:Right? Just generally. I don't know if if there's enough out there to build like a, you know, web app store around productivity or vertical SaaS or whatever, but there's basically democratization of new content type. And I think you could create a marketplace around that. I think you could build a big business.
Speaker 7:So I mean go ahead.
Speaker 3:I guess to like maybe push you a bit further there like specifically around Suno, and I don't have no insight into what they're actually doing. But if I create a great song on Suno, don't I wanna share that with like the most amount of of people? So just like take that to YouTube or or x and wouldn't that be an argument that you know, that that like the the value just kind of continues to just like anchor around the sort of distribution platform?
Speaker 4:Yeah. I think that would be, you know, a base case or kind of like smaller outcome for Suno if it just kinda gets relegated into the creative tool. Mhmm. But I think if like, the number and quality of things that are actually created on the Suno platform starts to exceed or at least, like, take a meaningful but separate piece of the market, then they they could just create a more closed ecosystem where the only way to way to get that content is on Suno.
Speaker 7:I know that's extremely unlikely. I mean, the the thing that I think is like that I would say I buy is I'd say that there is in general, the medium is the message. Right? And so you have in a lot of places. And so when you have a new tech
Speaker 4:By way, Sam Sam made me read that book as onboarding for I
Speaker 7:did. I used to control I used to have the distinction of controlling the reading list which I invented for all onboarded PMs. And I hired Seth and then made him read Marshall was it? Was it was You could. Snow crash.
Speaker 7:Snow crash. Okay. Snow crash was well well before Oculus on the required reading list. Best of But look, I mean, I think here's what I was gonna say is I do if you think about like a lot of what the Internet is, people like to think about it as a technology. Right?
Speaker 7:Or a lot what it really is is like an information economy or a content economy. And like I think if you start thinking of things on economic terms of like producers, consumers, like what's the what's the holistic picture of that, you do get some really interesting frameworks for talking about AI. So I'll give an example. What is Facebook? Or what is social media?
Speaker 7:It really is a content pump. Right? There are rules, there's an economy established with it. That economy then produces a certain type of content pumping out of humans that otherwise wouldn't have been pumped out and then recirculates in the share and creates an economy around it. If you said, hey, AI creates some new affordances that makes it cheaper to pump information.
Speaker 7:Like all of a sudden we can frack humans, right, in a new way. And by fracking them, there is some sort of like new content type that comes out that is super compelling and super different. Sure, like maybe that there's something there. But I think that the most likely outcome by a mile when you think about products is it just turns out that like most products and the platforms already exist. It's all about getting laid or getting paid.
Speaker 7:These AI is one of the greatest extensions of existing platforms you could imagine. It just makes everything better. And just like fracking, you kind of get new content or cheaper content from people because AI makes it easier. But it all flows through the same fucking pipelines, right? And the money is not in the fracking because the fracking itself is commodity.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I definitely agree that the fracking is commodity meaning the creation. The question is can you frac something new that then creates a new network? And I just think
Speaker 7:it's extremely unlikely because the pipelines exist. Right? Like there's no, like, what is the new, like, don't Yeah. It's just oil. Yeah.
Speaker 7:Making the
Speaker 4:argument that like Facebook Does that make it
Speaker 3:a good VC bet? If even if it's even if there's like a, you know, 5% chance, but the new network is, you
Speaker 1:know I mean, that's what happened with TikTok. Right? Like, it was first just those lip syncing app, and you would repost that content elsewhere, and then they bootstrapped a network on top of it and became a very good outcome for, I guess, the CCP. But, you know, in in Well,
Speaker 2:but I I could imagine that when they're kid
Speaker 7:content type. That was the new content.
Speaker 1:Like, snap Doesn't Harry Potter or Balenciaga videos, couldn't that be the the the lip syncing video of this
Speaker 6:era?
Speaker 4:I feel I feel like I'm a democrat with CNN on my side here. You got the votes on my side.
Speaker 3:But No. We're we're just guiding the conversation.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I
Speaker 3:think you're both think you're both wrong. No.
Speaker 7:I'm kidding. The problem the problem with AI in general and I think the entire AI discussion is I always like to point out, it's like the the average of infinity and zero is infinity. Right? And so VCs aren't very good at math but they can do that one. And so the problem is you say, okay, this is so disruptive that even though the likely outcome is zero, because there's like no math you can do on this and market big, then you're like, well, I'll pay anything because maybe it's a thing.
Speaker 7:Right? And like, I think that's actually what's going on in the industry a lot. I think it's quite bad because it leads to this like complete lack of like thoughtfulness and discipline. It's just like the most rudimentary math on what happens. I look a lot.
Speaker 7:There are actually projects I'll give you an example of something I actually believe is like new content that can exist because of AI that not only I've I've invested and I helped start, right, which is we're working on this thing called Merit First with Joe Lonsdale and his team. We have some good announcements that'll
Speaker 4:happen about Yeah. Like this, Sam.
Speaker 7:Here's the thing about it. Here's the basic here's the basic set up for it. And it is it is an interesting AI oriented business because you say, look, the way you hire people to date in most worlds is credential based. You're like, ah, you went to Harvard, you studied this thing, you got this check box, now you're in my pipeline. Hell, I hired Seth because we used to go to New York and say we wanna talk to smartest from Bain, McKinsey, Goldman, BCG, and Morgan.
Speaker 7:That was it. That was like the entire thing. Like we don't know how to look at everyone, we're just gonna like go call those people and we'll like pick some of them, right? That was how we did hiring. At least in the alternative PM hiring we were doing.
Speaker 7:What is way better is to do it based on what you can actually do, based on tests, based on, you know, forget credentials. I don't care how you got to go to something. Like what like show me what you can do. Here's the problem. Is if you go to most hiring managers say, hey, hire based on tests.
Speaker 7:You have three problems. One is you're like, well I don't know how to design a good test. Right? Like what is a good test for this role? It's actually pretty hard to figure that out and make it meaningful.
Speaker 7:Two, how do I know you're not cheating? And three, the biggest most non obvious, once you have like 10,000 applications for something, you're screwed. Because you can't possibly actually grade all those tests. Right? Unless it's like a multiple choice which is like not sophisticated.
Speaker 7:So does AI have leverage on that? Absolutely. Does that mean that there's like a new way to think about a human interaction like how do you hire people because AI exists? Absolutely. Like that is a type of thing but it's not you're not investing in the AI.
Speaker 7:You're investing in like a new way or a new approach to hiring which happens to leverage AI, right? And I think there is an important distinction there.
Speaker 4:Well, yeah. I'm glad I already got hired so I don't have to compete with
Speaker 7:Yeah, don't have to do it fast. Yeah,
Speaker 4:don't have to compete with 20,000 other people. But that's actually kind of the second big bucket, Sam, of AI opportunities that to me are very obvious, which is just AI opening up new markets that were historically owned by labor, right? And right now you're talking about recruiting, massive industry, it's mostly human led. There's a long list of others, right, where technology is now taking labor spend, whether it's legal, whether it's accounting, compliance. We have a company in our portfolio called Greenlight that's growing super fast and it's just, you know, these large banks and fintechs have like thousands of compliance analysts that just go through check boxes and write reports.
Speaker 4:And so you're competing with BPOs in these cases. Well, kind of. But I think
Speaker 7:this is something you have to be really careful about. Because this goes back to the whole, what are you actually investing in and is this an AI company? Like, one of the big memes right now in venture capital is, oh, we should, buy accounting firms and make them robots.
Speaker 4:Yeah. And by the way, I'm not doing I'm not doing the roll up.
Speaker 7:And it's like, I mean we've actually done a bunch of roll ups that we think do make sense. But like this is one in particular I think is really stupid because people don't understand the point of accountants. Right? The point of an accountant is not like you could have a robot. You could have a you know some fancy AI that has a 1% error rate or even a point 1% error rate on your taxes.
Speaker 7:Your accountant might be running a 3% error rate. Who do you hire? You hire the human. You know why? Because you know you're really hiring with an accountant?
Speaker 7:You're hiring someone so when the IRS is like, you fucked up your taxes, you're like, I don't know. Talk to Steve. Right? And like But
Speaker 4:you could still do that. You can still sell software to big accounts. Like, there's no robot. Million accountants right
Speaker 7:Send them
Speaker 3:the chat gbt dot com Yeah.
Speaker 7:So the basic point is like there's a lot of jobs that people want to like, oh, machine can automate. And you're like, you don't understand like this is a liability shifting thing. Like most a lot of human jobs are not actually about doing the thing, they're about shifting liability and responsibility. Right? That's Yeah.
Speaker 7:Agree that the job will
Speaker 4:change to its essence, which is like trust and sales. Right? But that just means that that individual guy, Steve, who everyone trusts to put a rubber stamp can do 10 times the amount of business with
Speaker 7:But the basic but the but every the problem is the AI itself is commodity and everyone will have it. And like that's not where the leverage is. So you're not really investing in the AI business. Right? You're still investing in the accounting business, Steve's business.
Speaker 7:Right? And everyone has the same level that it's it's a classic war of attrition where like you you and I just don't think this is a place where like unlike a true where you're gonna like make money on the arms dealing because the arms dealing is all commodity. Well, the question is does Steve
Speaker 4:like is the software that Steve's using to leverage himself? Is that OpenAI and ChatGPT? It doesn't Is that Tulsian Reuters or is that as It
Speaker 7:just doesn't matter. It's all commodity.
Speaker 1:Okay. How how do you map this to the mobile wave? Because we were just talking to Logan Bartlett about this. It's the kind of the classic innovator's dilemma, sustaining innovation versus disruptive innovation. And with mobile, it's like it was it did feel like a sustaining innovation in that the mobile Salesforce was just Salesforce, and yet a lot of VCs made a lot of money betting on mobile companies if they got the WhatsApp.
Speaker 1:You don't think so?
Speaker 7:Didn't make that much money on it. I mean, I think Silicon Valley has a story that venture capitalists like to tell LPs
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:Which is every x years, the whole thing gets reshuffled, and there's all this money being made. It's bullshit. Right? Like going from shrink-wrap software to internet, that was a big deal. Right?
Speaker 7:That was a paradigm shifting, broke the machine thing. You know, I would actually argue that the shift to mobile was not disruptive at all. Right? Like you have all the same winners, they're just bigger. Right?
Speaker 7:I would argue that the shift to cloud was barely disruptive. Right? And it just turns out that like there's a very big difference between things that are so important in paradigm shifting they break the incumbents and there's huge opportunities for win. Like that's why crypto is really interesting. Think what you will of it.
Speaker 7:It's crypto is extremely hostile to incumbents, right, as like a concept. We can talk about how it's being now co opted by incumbents. But like in general like it fundamentally is. Whereas I could not think of a more classically extending innovation than AI. Right?
Speaker 7:It just makes the rich richer.
Speaker 1:When's the Sam Lesson mag seven ETF coming then? If you're so bullish on the
Speaker 4:No. Gotta buy jelly jelly.
Speaker 7:Well, first of all, I'd say the mag seven like, would actually argue. I I was because I like to lick the cookie on these things.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:Is like, I I was like, I think, you know, if you go back two years, like, pitching the, like, these are the five companies that are gonna win in AI and it's all the same ones that already exist. I mean,
Speaker 3:it was,
Speaker 7:you
Speaker 7:know
Speaker 3:so
Speaker 7:I'm into the mags setting thing. I also would say, like, when people ask me like my AI investing strategy, I'm gonna say like, thank God I held on to some Facebook stock. Sure. Right? Like that's the answer.
Speaker 7:It's like best AI bet.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What about the idea that like Apple's slipping or Google's not shipping fast enough? Like This does create opportunities for entrepreneurs at least to build a company that gets acquired or something.
Speaker 8:They're not
Speaker 7:gonna get acquired. Just gonna
Speaker 4:get copied. Here's what I'd say. I think here's maybe some common ground with Sam and I. I don't think AI is gonna kill incumbents in favor of startups, but I do think it opens up new markets. And yes, they're outliers, but that's kind of what we're in the business of doing and funding.
Speaker 4:And like for mobile, yes, like it didn't kill Facebook, it didn't kill Airbnb, but it created Uber, It created DoorDash. It created Instacart. It created TikTok. It created Snap. It created Instagram.
Speaker 4:It created WhatsApp. And so these are tens of billions, hundreds of billions of value that were kind of mobile first. And it's a similar thing, which is like, what are the new capabilities, GPS, camera, video? Can you create can you use that as a hook to then create a sustainable business, whether it's a network? I agree with you, Sam, that like AI by like doing an API called OpenAI is obviously not defensible, but can you use it as a hook to then build a real business?
Speaker 7:And I just think the answer is in almost all places, no. Right? Like I think it's a thing it's just like everyone uses it, everything gets leveled up. You know, like to your thing about incumbents and Apple, look, Apple is comical. We talked about this last week.
Speaker 7:Like Yeah. The Apple stuff is like pretty funny. Right? Because it's so bad. Right?
Speaker 7:But it's not gonna make me buy an Android phone. Right? Like and so you're like so they have a hell of a lot of time to figure out something. Like it's we are a long way away from that being a real issue for them even if it's pretty funny.
Speaker 1:About the more sclerotic industries? I mean, you're thinking about, you know, like, management consultants seem to be printing money on AI, just strapping on AI pitches onto legacy businesses. As I see like, oh, I go to IBM or something with oh, I wanna replatform my app and I just need a bunch of programmers to do that. It feels like an AI native company there could potentially scale up and get really I
Speaker 7:don't know. I mean, like, look, Accenture is gonna make a lot of money short term on trans on this stuff.
Speaker 1:Right?
Speaker 7:Short term. The problem is Accenture is mostly in the business of BPO outsourcing. Yeah. And they're gonna kinda eat themselves in doing that. Right?
Speaker 7:So it's very it's gonna be a very different world for them in terms of how they navigate this. Good good any but like anyone who sells business consulting is gonna do pretty well in a period where like IT transformation. For a little bit. It's just like these are not VC backed businesses. Like these are consulting firms that will make money for a little bit.
Speaker 1:Right? I mean, seems like you're just super bearish on VC as an asset class. Like, should founders just go and build we'll do. Just just go and build a, you know, lifestyle business or something or or pick some different capital structure? So
Speaker 7:go for it, Seth.
Speaker 4:Yeah. No. I mean, AI is also great. I think AI is just an accelerant for everything. It makes large companies more profitable.
Speaker 4:It opens up new markets for startups, whether it's services businesses or new networks. And it's it's also great for lifestyle businesses. You can there's a long tail of random problems that you can now solve really specifically with a very small team.
Speaker 7:So the way I would phrase it is related but a little differently, which is in life, the middle usually drops out. Right? And I think AI is a great example of dropping out the middle. Like, no one want being a there's no such thing as being a $10,000,000,000 public company anymore. It's just like a dumb place to be.
Speaker 7:No one cares. Right? Either want to be a hyperscaler, right, which is a great I mean, it's a great place. Like most of the market says AI interesting. Where put money for AI?
Speaker 7:Right? And like that's like the seek. And that's why you've seen like the Mag seven in particular things like Facebook just crushing it. Because you're like, no liability, tons of upside, like easy bet. Like why is everyone buying NVIDIA?
Speaker 7:They're like, we don't know how to invest in this. NVIDIA seems fine. Or like, we don't know how to invest in this. Let's just buy power. Right?
Speaker 7:Like, because we're not sure how this plays out. So like the big will keep getting bigger and there'll be like a massive and then on the very small, until you're like, thinking about lifestyle, look, I the reason we have a creator fund, right, the reason that we do a bunch of stuff at the low end is I I totally buy the thesis that you're gonna see individuals that have a lot of trust and brand and community and deeply understand a niche do things you haven't seen before. Like I I buy the one person billion dollar company thing. Like I think that's real with like with the leverage you have. I think the key is you just have to have the right capital for the mission you're on.
Speaker 7:And having the wrong capital is a really bad place. And by the way, the worst capital you can have, I personally think, is being a subscale company competing with hyperscalers using venture capital. Right? That's like a recipe for total disaster because the hyperscalers have orders of magnitude more money and time. Right?
Speaker 7:And you're just like, you're kind of truly bringing a knife to a gunfight.
Speaker 1:Isn't it possible that we wind up looking back on this in a few years and think like, oh, we just hadn't thought of what the Uber for AI is? How do you think about the Uber story with mobile to, you know, today? Like Uber was hard to predict when the iPhone dropped.
Speaker 4:I mean, we were already seeing Uber for AI. It's like
Speaker 7:What's the Uber for AI?
Speaker 4:Cursor? Like the next Roblox? No.
Speaker 7:Those like they're fine. They're fine. I I think that like it's interesting. Why do you think Cursor is interesting? Like, it's Cursor is I like it.
Speaker 7:I use it as a product. I don't see it as a good business.
Speaker 4:I just think like, it's the classic like startups need to get distribution before incumbents innovate. And now because these tools are so powerful, you're actually able to get distribution as a new company very quickly. So if you're first to market with the best product, then you can start leaning into all of the other things that kind of give you defensibility.
Speaker 7:I don't know. I think that's true. The thing is people are applying network thinking to what's fundamentally just a technology. Right? It's not a net there's no network.
Speaker 7:There's no lock in.
Speaker 4:So there's lot of soft spots that become very
Speaker 3:sticky. I think so. I think the
Speaker 7:whole point of AI is the switching cost for almost all this stuff goes to zero. Right? And because switching cost is zero, there's just no I mean, like, people like, have I use Chorus. Have you guys played with Chorus? No.
Speaker 7:It's awesome.
Speaker 4:I can't use it.
Speaker 7:It's great. Basically just like a desktop app and you plug all the LLMs into it.
Speaker 6:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:Right? Like, you have keys for all of them. And, like, I don't care. Like, use the best one marginally. When a new one comes out, you know, the only defensible thing it is, is there are so many fucking LLM models at this point.
Speaker 7:I'm happy to give someone the job of actually researching them all and deciding which one to send a specific query to. Like, there's some sort of aggregation value there for a little bit for now. But I don't know,
Speaker 3:man. Jordy? One fun thought exercise on the social side is that, you know, we went through this generation, you know, social media was great initially because people were like, oh, it's actually more interesting to see what my friends are kind of talking about and doing versus just like traditional media which is like random people. And then it was like the Kim Kardashian era of, you know, it's more interesting to like follow a famous person's life. And it's it's possible to imagine a world where just being in a version of Instagram where everyone's a bot and they all like, you know, are either polarizing or exactly aligned with your views and there's just like this kind of constant stream and you get everybody gets a thousand likes on their posts Yeah.
Speaker 3:And they post This
Speaker 7:is and get. Yeah. So like My my line on this has been that the the the for for twenty years, the way you start a social network is you say, who do you wanna follow? And the way to start a social network today is say, who do you wanna follow you? Right?
Speaker 7:It's like the the inversion that you could see. Like, I'd actually argue Twitter is already doing this. Like Twitter, I think, is intention my I'm not I have no inside information. My sense is it is intentionally full of bots. Right?
Speaker 7:Because people are lonely. People want responses. It's clearly full of They
Speaker 4:want the Yeah. We talked about this, Sam, as like a new social network.
Speaker 7:Yeah. So you're like, look, it doesn't you clearly there just aren't mathematically enough humans to fulfill people's need for like validation. So like, sure. Throw a bunch of machines in the mix so that people have more validation floating
Speaker 3:around.
Speaker 4:This is why I debate Sam. I just want more billboards.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I think I think one one example that is way too easy to like or or way too early to make a call is you have so Seth, you guys are in Tome which started out as like the ability to like generate slides which like people spend a ton of time all day long making slide decks. Like there's probably billions of dollars spent just producing slide decks in The US for various use cases. They recently sort of pivoted into a space around, you know, automating sales research and outbound. You can imagine, like, you know, like a real test will be can Tome compete with Salesforce when Salesforce has this sort of this this, you know, army of people like jamming comparable products, you know.
Speaker 3:And actually for it, you know, there were some news in the information I think yesterday that Salesforce is basically saying if you don't pay for agent force, we're like raising your your your regular, you know, rates on the CRM side like three x?
Speaker 7:I can already give you the answer this. Let's say I finished with his company, but I love Keith. I really respect He's a great guy. He used to work with me too, same team. Is no way can Tom compete on this.
Speaker 7:But I'll go even a step further, which is this entire industry of outbound goes away. This is where we talk about the real displacement of what's going on. So first, I mean I have several portfolio companies that are calling and saying, you know, we have this thing. We tried this thing in in AI, but now all the platforms are just bundling it and giving it away and we and we can't compete because even if we're better. So like that's happening all over the place and you're like, duh, of course that's gonna happen.
Speaker 7:This is an easy tack on. But then the the step two which is where the really interesting social displacement comes is everyone's excited about, oh I can use AI to like customize outbound sales or something. You're like your inbox is now worthless because once all the sales are customized you can't tell what's real and what's fake, that entire economy collapses, right? So I'd actually go the more likely outcome is a, no Tome can't beat Salesforce. But two, even if they could, that entire emotion goes away because of AI.
Speaker 4:Yeah, look, I don't think you need to beat Salesforce to be very successful and to find a segment of the market that wants a more modern product that understands your business, has everything in one place, and can actually make your sales team a lot more effective with a more modern architecture. So I think Tome is gonna be successful. Because again, you can think about this hypothetically, or you can talk to customers, especially in different segments, and just see where the pain is. But one thing I'll agree with Sam on is I think we're in an outlier business. You have to be very selective.
Speaker 4:I think people who are overpaying for things that are not durable at crazy prices, that's not a game that we're playing and not a game that I believe in either. I think backing amazing product builders and technologists, going after either existing markets that need to be totally re architected using AI or totally new markets that open up, whether it's like a gaming network or replacing services in, you know, a very long tail of really large markets, I I still think there's like a massive amount of value to be made.
Speaker 7:I just think that it's such a different like, I'll give you an example. Like, I think it's a you don't wanna back generic Facebook PMs anymore who know AI and product. Right? Because they don't know anything. Right?
Speaker 7:And like it's just commod if anything the irony is it's all getting all those things are getting hyper commoditized in terms of, an AI only commoditizes it faster. So how do you build and what is a product? This stuff doesn't like if you told me, and we look at some of this too, you have a truly unique market insight. You understand a market that no one else gets because you've been a specialist for twenty years in it or whatever. By the way, the tools of building and the paradise have changed so quickly, there's an opportunity to build something new.
Speaker 7:Yeah. There's interesting stuff there. We do businesses that are AI quote unquote enabled all the time that fit that pattern. But those people are generally not building quote unquote AI tools. They're just like it's kinda like saying like they're not building cloud companies or internet companies.
Speaker 7:They're just building great companies that happen to leverage technology.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I agree. Like there was like an AI conference last week. I'm like this concept of an AI conference is gonna last like six months because eventually, you know, it's just It's like building
Speaker 1:an internet business.
Speaker 7:Everything's a computer.
Speaker 1:Everything's a computer
Speaker 7:for sure. Everything's computer.
Speaker 1:We're at thirty minutes. We gotta ring the gong. We gotta
Speaker 7:wrap it up. Because who won the debate, guys?
Speaker 1:Closing arguments. We'll let the we'll let the fans decide.
Speaker 7:Damn. Let the let the
Speaker 1:Internet decide. We'll let the box decide. And
Speaker 7:so Put the
Speaker 1:bots decide. Whichever it's an economic battle. Okay. Here's the war, capital fight. Whoever deploys more bots to vote wins.
Speaker 1:So No. No.
Speaker 3:Here's the real way we're gonna do it. I will put a a calendar invite for like five years from now.
Speaker 1:Okay. I love that.
Speaker 3:Yes. And we'll just come back. We'll watch the debate and we'll just pause and and people can take little victory laps. They can talk about
Speaker 7:companies I love that.
Speaker 3:That's great. I love that. So five years from today, mark your calendars.
Speaker 1:Mark your calendars.
Speaker 3:I look forward to it. Thank you guys for jumping on. Have fun on the one zero one. Enjoy. Have a great weekend.
Speaker 1:Talk to
Speaker 4:you soon. See you, Sam. Bye.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We should host the follow-up to that debate at a wander. Go to wander.com. Book a wander today. They're also doing a giveaway.
Speaker 1:Sign up and
Speaker 3:Wander.com/tbpn. Yes. You can also use tbp n to get $300 off your first stay. One thing about Wander is the properties are so amazing. They do get booked out.
Speaker 3:Oh, yeah. Pretty far in advance at times.
Speaker 1:But not five years in advance. So we could definitely get something.
Speaker 3:We can get something in the book. Castle. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Own sweet castle.
Speaker 3:And that's what I'm
Speaker 1:looking for. Check out hotel great amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, and twenty four seven concierge service. It's a vacation home but better, folks. Check it out. Let's go back to the timeline.
Speaker 7:Wrap up.
Speaker 3:Let's do it.
Speaker 1:We got And
Speaker 3:that was and and just just to summarize that that was fun.
Speaker 1:Who do you think won?
Speaker 3:I mean, I I do tend to side with Sam.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:I think Seth has good points. I think Seth Seth's an optimist. He's in the outlier business, you know, the entire model of running a fund like Greylock is Yep. If we can back, you know, one one or two, you know, really impactful companies per fund, they have more AUM, they can, you know, make bigger investments.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 3:And I think they're they're in the the sort of optimism business. Sure. Sam is much more of a pessimist. Sure. But he has some he has some real points.
Speaker 3:Right? You know, the the Tome company specifically, I brought it up. They they started, they were very hyped sort of AI slides company didn't find a market for what they were doing.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Now they are competing with Salesforce and I can imagine, I mean, anybody in sales is competing with Salesforce. They're an AI assistant for sales. Sure. Yeah. And it's and it's
Speaker 1:I mean, it is good to kind of like break down like what it means to be bullish on AI generally because you could just say, yeah. The AI thing is real, and the way I'm expressing that is in a mag seven ETF and going along hyperscalers. Or it could be I'm building a lifestyle business as a solo developer, vibe coding, pumping it out on x with videos and making money that way. And so there's always a bull market somewhere, but I think Sam is narrowing it down to, hey. Maybe $20,000,000 series a's are are particularly fraught right now.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And I don't know. It's possible. It just it just depends on if you get in the right business. I still think it's early enough that we could get our WhatsApp, we could get our Uber, and you might see some funds dump $20,000,000 at $200,000,000 post Yeah.
Speaker 1:The big the big
Speaker 3:thing is
Speaker 1:still get a hundred extra turn.
Speaker 3:The big thing is is it seems like what we now define as AGI is an extending innovation, but it's this sort of looming ASI Extending. Oh, that's the the disruptor. The the the real disruptor is ASI, not AGI Exactly. As we've we're sort of currently defining that.
Speaker 1:So My joke with that is that eventually when ASI comes, you say, set up a website or buy me something, and it rebuilds Stripe from first prince like, all the way. It just writes all the code that's ever existed on the Internet in in five seconds and builds you everything.
Speaker 4:Yep.
Speaker 1:And and that would be very disruptive. But I think we're a long way away from there, especially on how much it costs to inference these models and how how rough the the vibe coding thing has been amazing. But then we've heard a lot of accounts of people saying, yeah. It'll get you 80% of the way there, 90% of the way there, but there's still a lot of humans in the loop. And maybe we are seeing not acceleration, but deceleration in in the the efficacy of these models.
Speaker 1:But they're still really fun. They're cool. And I wanna check out some of those ones that he recommended. I actually did play with Suno last night for the first time.
Speaker 3:Bedtime song?
Speaker 1:No. I was trying to make a theme song for TBPN. I was thinking we need our own, you know, NFL.
Speaker 3:No. So what we should do is get a symphony Yes. And we stand in the symphony
Speaker 1:I think we and
Speaker 3:they play it, and we and we just, you know
Speaker 1:My takeaway was that, yeah, I would love to get a human to do this because
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:The first version that came back, was like, you know, ESPN style football song intro, and I didn't have lyrics turned off. And so it generated all these funny lyrics, like football games starting now. It's like all these really ridiculous things. But lots of promise there. And I mean, just the mid journey of music seems fun.
Speaker 1:I don't know if it'll replace everything, but certainly like a tool in the tool chest for the artist.
Speaker 3:Overall, I think having a debate, letting people share their opinion and then circling back to it Yep. Is really the best solution because Yep. You can't win a debate like that Yep. In the moment. It's just vibes right now.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes, definitely. And I think keeping it tight and short is key. Yeah. Anyway, let's move on to the opposite of tight and short.
Speaker 1:Larry Ellison's longevity, which is unreal. He's been in the game for decades. Putting up these numbers. Look at this chart. Percentage.
Speaker 1:Oracle Corporation is up 210000% all time dating back to the eighties. Putting up these numbers for life for the lifetime of modern tech industry while also being the true Brian Johnson. If you are not familiar with how young Larry Ellison looks, he's looking fantastic. When he was born, for context, we were still in World War two. Wow.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Insane. Yeah. Oracle, not mentioned as much as the other magnificent seven companies, the hyperscalers, but clearly doing something right. The stock is up and to the right.
Speaker 1:Yes. And so we love Oracle here on the show. Big news. This really shook the tech industry to the core. Jawan over at Ramp got a raise.
Speaker 3:There we go.
Speaker 1:He said turns out Hit the side gun for Jawan. Jawan. Congratulations. Day one of asking Ramp for a raise, that happened November thirteenth of last year. Now it's March 13, and he got it done.
Speaker 1:Based on your accomplishments and results in 2024, we're pleased to provide you with an update to your compensation package. Congrats to Jawan.
Speaker 3:Move on to I mean, nobody every everybody said It was impossible. This is never gonna impossible. But he did it. He was consistent. He, you know, survived and thrived Yeah.
Speaker 3:Through controversy and he got the raise.
Speaker 1:This this would have a great debate to have on. We could've had Eric and Kareem come on, debate it. With Juwan. With Juwan.
Speaker 3:He's gotta make a presentation.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. He's live on the show. This is how raises will be done at Ramp in a few years. Anyway, let's move on to Luke Metro.
Speaker 1:He's quote tweeting Michael Dempsey. YC used to feel like a window into understanding the areas progressing from what the smartest people know, what the smartest people are doing on weekends to VC backed startups. Today, it feels like the best window into the current consensus thing. And Luke Metro says lots of tech feels like this now. Here's my theory.
Speaker 1:Pre 2020, there were still novel insights in lots of small offline subgroups. VC scout programs existed to capitalize on this, but post COVID, Silicon Valley moved entirely online. Now the time from out group to consensus is minuscule. What's your take?
Speaker 3:I think this is totally right. It it feels like YC now is a reflection of what the Internet is interested in. Yeah. Right? What the sort of community is interested in and I think that that's fine.
Speaker 3:It's it's if if ideas are important, we should have a bunch of people attacking them. Mhmm. That's the beauty of the free market. Yep. But I think this is totally on point.
Speaker 3:The other thing is that you the companies that are truly not like that don't feel relevant at YC or that feel weird are the ones that don't get the hype Yep. Because they're just tinkering on some weird thing and then six, flock safety is a good example. Sure the flock safety batch was just
Speaker 1:a bunch of So,
Speaker 3:and Luke also had another good post from today We did. That that I'm just got pulled up here. He says the real project Europe is VC spending three months in the South Of France this summer.
Speaker 1:We Were you gonna say that? You have the same idea. I had we had a similar We
Speaker 3:love it. Similar idea.
Speaker 1:I love it. Well, yeah. Go enjoy Europe. Book now. Book on Wander.
Speaker 1:Book your trip to Europe. Get out there and spend some time recuperating while the while you can feel the AGI. You can feel the Let the let the innovation, the acceleration wash over you under the Tuscan sun. Yep. Albedo has some news.
Speaker 1:They are launching. I was texting with the founder. We're gonna hopefully gonna have them on early next week. Clarity one will launch as the first commercial satellite to operate in very low Earth orbit, beginning with 10 centimeter resolution imagery, previously only possible with aircraft or billion dollar government satellites. Albedo is redefining what's possible from space.
Speaker 1:And so we'll have to have them on. I saw a picture of the fuselage of the of the Falcon nine that they're riding on. Nice. And, good luck to them. There's been a few delays as there always are with these with these launches, but it's looking good.
Speaker 1:And so you can tune into that launch tonight. SpaceX is going back to LEO.
Speaker 3:What time is it?
Speaker 1:I think he said, like, midnight Pacific time or something. I he he was also like, you guys are live. Right? Saturday at midnight? Yeah.
Speaker 1:I was like, not yet, but stay tuned. We're getting there.
Speaker 3:We're working on it.
Speaker 1:Let's move on. Types fast. Ryan Peterson, founder of Flexport, friend of the show, been on. He is quoting Leonard Bernstein who says, two things are needed to achieve great things, a plan and not quite enough time. Civilization five when building the Big Ben Wonder.
Speaker 3:He's been pulling quotes out of Civilization five. I love it. It's awesome. Bunch of bangers in there. We had Captain Price
Speaker 1:last I I've never actually gotten into Civ. I've wanted to, but it's a big investment because I think the time to actually play a full game is more than, like, a few hours. And so I Yeah. I haven't been able to find the time. But he's spent a lot of time on planes.
Speaker 1:He's got Starlink locked in. Actually, I think you can play Civ offline. It's not even a multiplayer game necessarily. So good way to spend a few hours in the belly of a seven forty seven, ferrying packages around the globe for flex port. Anyway, should we move on to Augustus Durico?
Speaker 3:Augustus himself, he says, every twenty to thirty year old man I know who is great or that's aspiring for greatness seems to get mentally and spiritually obliterated daily. They're not without joy, wisdom, or purpose, but constantly raw. And Cernovich says, adult men are not supposed to feel happy. It's abnormal. You should question what you're doing.
Speaker 3:You should feel the tinge of fear. It means you're pushing yourself. The alternative is sitting around waiting to die like some Muppet. And yeah, think I put this in the stack just because I think it's important to realize that, you know, optimizing for feeling good all the time will be your downfall. And Yeah.
Speaker 3:Part of, you know, having a great life is Yep. Not just not optimize, you know
Speaker 1:It's not optimizing happiness specifically. Talked about with our, with the Lone Ranger. The goal of a startup is not to be a happy startup. It's to be a successful startup. The goal of a marriage is not to be a happy marriage necessarily, it's to be a successful marriage.
Speaker 1:And Yeah. And that's a different vector. And happiness is derived from that and and adjacent to that, but not not the end all be all goal because as soon as you start optimizing purely for happiness
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 1:You put a lot of the the the grind to the side and Totally. Rest on your laurels. Should we go to Nikita? Yep. He was talking about vibe coding and where some of these apps are going.
Speaker 1:If you've tried following vibe coding games over the last month and have tried making one yourself, it should be abundantly obvious that we are very close to someone building a creation ecosystem or app store where anyone can be a game developer. And success of the creators within this feature ecosystem will be determined by pure merit of their concepts, not technical execution. The only gap that needs to be closed for this ecosystem to exist is abstracting away the remaining pieces that are too complicated for the layman, authentication, server networking, and deployment. Once that's achieved, the only thing left for creators to do is to dream up their concept and click publish. And suddenly, we will have millions of people making three d online games with graphics comparable to n 64.
Speaker 1:I love that.
Speaker 3:We talked to a YC founder who's basically working on this exact problem. One of my
Speaker 1:friends, Kyle Russell, built something like this, I wanna say, like, five years ago. He was working on it right in 2020. I met him through Andreessen Horowitz. He was, like, the associate on on the deal. And, great guy.
Speaker 1:He built this company called PlayByte, and it would let you it gave you a bunch of primitives. And on your phone, in a browser, you could build, like, a top down two d game. And he was just, like, maybe a little bit too early with that concept to really get escape velocity because it wasn't it was easier than Roblox, but didn't really have the same, like, viral breakout moment. But you can certainly imagine, like, what the vision of what he was laying down makes a lot of sense in terms of App Store. Of course, Nikita got a lot of pushback here.
Speaker 1:Everyone said, he said, stop saying Roblox. I'm talking about something much more customizable. The thing is that I've seen some Roblox games that are incredibly customizable. I've seen people say, like, we rebuilt Call of Duty in Roblox, and it looks like Call of Duty almost. I don't know if it's fake, but
Speaker 3:Well
Speaker 1:it'll be interesting.
Speaker 3:Somebody rebuild the TBPN set in Roblox. Oh, good. Record a No.
Speaker 1:Oh, they
Speaker 3:should. We'll record a show there.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That'd be great in the metaverse. Should we go to Bo Nickel? We got some breaking news.
Speaker 3:We got some breaking news from Bo. Bo has a new fight. It's gonna be on May 3. I'm gonna pull up a supporting article here.
Speaker 1:It's a middleweight bout.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So Bo is a middleweight. Has
Speaker 1:been
Speaker 3:I
Speaker 1:assume that has something to do with the size of the guys. Is that how
Speaker 3:it works? Yeah. Yeah. This is the joke. John is obsessed with Bodybuilding.
Speaker 3:Professional bodybuilding. I follow UFC closely. Yeah. But anyways, so Bo, friend of the show and listener, he's also an entrepreneur, has his own business. You can check out.
Speaker 3:He started in Dana White's Contender Series. We got a couple wins in there Then he's gone on a tear. He's seven and o. He's 29 for those that don't know, which is like kind of the prime years. Right?
Speaker 3:He's got a bunch of wins under his belt and now it's time to make a run at the title.
Speaker 1:They're allowed to punch and kick
Speaker 5:in the sleeve?
Speaker 1:Is that how it works?
Speaker 3:The last the last time we covered Bo on the show, Bo texted me and he was like, I'm always amazed with how little John knows. So his John's knowledge is actually even like going backwards. Isn't square. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 3:It's almost like has more sides.
Speaker 1:It has eight sides.
Speaker 4:Yeah. It's an
Speaker 1:eight sided. Yeah. Okay. Know that. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Good. Learning this stuff.
Speaker 3:And so anyways, Bo is one of the top prospects in MMA right now and he's his next fight is against this guy, DeRidder, who was at one championship. He's been a two two weight class champion over there.
Speaker 6:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:So this will be a huge test for Bo, but we are very excited for it. He's been training hard and Good luck
Speaker 1:to him.
Speaker 3:Good luck to him. We'll be watching hopefully live. Yep. But we'll we'll see.
Speaker 1:Good luck to him. I hope he can go all 25 rounds. That how many rounds there are? Hope he makes it.
Speaker 3:Honestly, hope he
Speaker 1:gets a gold medal, honestly. I hope I really hope he gets a gold medal.
Speaker 3:I'm I think I think he's gonna make short work
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:After Ritter, but Good luck to him. Good luck. Good luck, though.
Speaker 1:Let's go to another friend of the show, David Senra. He shares some sage advice from Peter Thiel. Superior sales and distribution by itself can create a monopoly even with no product differentiation. The converse is not true. I love that.
Speaker 1:And it's funny because it's like MBA advice almost, but it's contrarian in the VC context because for so long there were these naturally growing Facebook. They didn't need to run billboard ads for Facebook because it was the social network and it just grew. But they really did have better distribution because of the network effect in the model.
Speaker 3:And then an example of this, right?
Speaker 1:So we
Speaker 3:we were just talking about Salesforce versus some of these up start sales assistant companies. Yep. Part of Salesforce's monopoly is they have thousands of people that sell Salesforce. Yep. And they're going to new to customers current and new and saying, if you don't buy our AI assistant for sales, we're gonna increase the price of the product that you actually want.
Speaker 3:And for many companies, like, it's just the default CRM. And so that by itself is, they have the distribution. They have, you know, the the labor force and, yeah, it's gonna be very tough for for a lot of those players to to get anywhere close to threatening Salesforce's market cap.
Speaker 1:Should we close out with a fantastic private equity story? Boiler Room is apparently private equity back now. Levels. Shares the financial story of Boiler Room is interesting. Boiler Room started in 2010 by Blaze Belleville with weekly live broadcast on YouTube.
Speaker 1:If you're not familiar, they're DJ sets essentially. Over the years, he raised $12,600,000 in VC funding in total. Then in 2021, while Boiler Room was heavily struggling financially, he sold it to Dice FM, an event ticketing startup. Dice had raised more than 200,000,000 in VC funding. Then Dice sold Boiler Room a few months to Superstruct, a festival organizer that owns festivals like Mystery Land, DEFCONs, a bunch of others.
Speaker 1:Then last year, Providence Equity, a $35,000,000,000 private equity fund, sold Superstruct to KKR, which is a hundred billion dollar private equity fund. So a $100,000,000,000 private equity fund now owns Boiler Room. Many articles state Boiler Room's founder, Blaise Belleville, exited around 2021, but he's still involved in the company. So more likely, he received more stock while working at it. So he's I mean,
Speaker 3:this is just this is just a beautiful story. Yes. And, you know, a celebration of I mean, I hope that they do private equity night at the boiler room. Yes. We don't go to events like this.
Speaker 1:No. We're
Speaker 3:just not big into that world. But boiler room celebrate celebrate the shareholders.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 3:You know, put do a do a big party for KKR.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 3:You know, wanna see the champagne bottles popping and the big KKR sign walking Exactly. When you spend $10,000 on this bottle of of cheap champagne, just know that you're just sort of like supporting big private equity.
Speaker 1:You're driving EBITDA multiples.
Speaker 3:There's other there's other you know, we've said on the show before, there's other fantastic companies owned by private equity TechCrunch
Speaker 1:Veil.
Speaker 3:Vail. You know,
Speaker 1:some of great This could be the next Vail. You never know.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, we made the argument earlier this week that TechCrunch should merge with Vail. Yeah. And just become
Speaker 1:Pivot system.
Speaker 3:Ski lifestyle magazine. Magazine. That's the real way. Anyways, it's been a fantastic show. Thanks for watching.
Speaker 1:Thanks for
Speaker 3:tuning in. Go leave us a five star review, put an ad in it. It helps with discovery and See
Speaker 1:you on Monday.
Speaker 3:We hope you have a good weekend. If you if you're working over the weekend and you're missing TBPN, you can go back. We have some
Speaker 1:The back catalog's full folks.
Speaker 3:We've got many, many, many episodes of this show. And if any of you have listened to every single hour, I would be very impressed.
Speaker 1:Very But
Speaker 3:there's probably an hour in there somewhere that you haven't listened to. So It's okay. And anyways, we will see you on Monday. See you on Monday. Cheers.
Speaker 3:Bye.