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TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays from 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with full episodes posted to Spotify immediately after airing.
Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” TBPN has interviewed Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. Diet TBPN delivers the best moments from each episode in under 30 minutes.
First, we gotta talk about Josh Kushner. Bob Iger, they bought the LA Lakers. They're buying He's done it again. They said he couldn't do it. They In
Speaker 2:the sauna this morning Yeah. I was thinking about the name Thrive Eternal.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:I think it's one of the best names for a fund ever. Yeah. Like Eternal is such a powerful statement and it fits the strategy well. Yep. And it does, you know, people have been talking about this this morning, but it feels like with all of the technology disruption happening Mhmm.
Speaker 2:It just feels like these sports franchises could be more durable than many of the biggest companies in the world today. And I figured out how to put on a suit.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Doesn't he look great? Look at this guy. It's incredible.
Speaker 2:I cleaned it up. Yeah. I cleaned it up.
Speaker 1:Super clean. Looking amazing. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Finally. Truth be told, when we started the show, I went from we started hitting the gym.
Speaker 1:We did a little bulking season. It was bulking
Speaker 2:season. And I added I added some weight and I basically over
Speaker 1:You added 45 pounds of lean muscle. You don't need to undersell it, Jordy.
Speaker 2:And you lost 20 pounds
Speaker 1:of fat.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I added a little weight and I basically grew out of my suit slowly about two pounds a month Yeah. For eighteen months.
Speaker 1:It went exponential.
Speaker 2:And It was a fast take off. It became extremely uncomfortable to sit here even though all these the the suits Suits are beautiful. That that we had gotten made.
Speaker 1:But they got a little tight.
Speaker 2:I'm gonna have to save them for when I'm an elderly man.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Maybe.
Speaker 2:Because at some point we'll shed we'll shed the muscle. Cutting season's coming. We'll be lean, Max.
Speaker 1:Summer's only
Speaker 2:Cutting season is coming.
Speaker 1:Nine months away.
Speaker 2:In forty years. In forty years.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's good.
Speaker 2:But it's good to be back. Yeah. It's good to be back.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Looks good. Let me take you through the story so everyone has the facts straight about this incredible deal for the Los Angeles Lakers. The headline is the Los Angeles Lakers are being sold to American businessmen Josh Kushner and Bob Iger for a record breaking price of $12,500,000,000. Multiple sources have told this to ESPN.
Speaker 1:So Kushner and Iger made the offer to Mark Walter, who only last year purchased a controlling interest in the Lakers from the Bus family at a then record valuation of roughly $10,000,000,000. Walter, the CEO and chairman of holding company TWG Global officially became the Lakers majority owner last October after the NBA unanimously approved the deal. The new sale will likewise require approval from the NBA's board of governors, which is scheduled to meet next month in New York. But looking at that picture, it seems like they've had this conversation with the relevant people. They're not some random businessmen coming in from out of town
Speaker 2:who And the have sellers under federal investigation.
Speaker 1:Yes. Some very complicated deals where some private credit transactions were put into an insurance firm that they own. Those affiliated transactions, if you originate the deal and then you put it in your insurance company's whole on your insurance company's books, you need to you need to disclose this. Now, you can actually do this. Berkshire Hathaway, about 46% of their insurance assets are related party transactions.
Speaker 1:So there's a way to do it above board. The allegations are that he disclosed that only 3% of the insurance assets were related party affiliated transactions, but in fact, was much higher when you considered some of the other assets Yeah. That had made their way through a
Speaker 2:Capital allocator. Bit of a bad bit of a bad boy.
Speaker 1:Even the bad boy thing. Yeah. Maybe. But, know, innocent until proven guilty. Obviously, these are just allegations he's just being investigated.
Speaker 2:And a nice return.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And he's denied all wrongdoing. But it does it does give you a little bit more context on what might be motivating a sale so so soon after buying an asset that he was clearly optimistic about. So Kushner is the founder and CEO of venture firm Thrive Capital and cofounder and vice chairman of Oscar Health. He also is the brother of Jared Kushner, president Donald Trump's son-in-law.
Speaker 1:Kushner currently owns minority stake in the Miami Heat, which he will have to sell to complete the Lakers deal and was previously a minority owner of the Memphis grips grizzlies. Iger, meanwhile, stepped down as Disney CEO earlier this year and has already made a major investment in the loss in Los Angeles sports. He and his wife, Willow Bay, become controlling controlling owners of the National Women's Soccer Leagues, Angel City FC in 2024. The prospective new owners are already getting a warm reception from some of the biggest names associated with the franchise. Luca Doncic said, being a Laker means everything to me, and I'm excited to get back to the court and bring a championship to LA.
Speaker 1:I've gotten used to big changes over these last few years, but I know that no matter what, there's no limit to the potential of this iconic franchise. I look forward to meeting Josh and Bob so we can get to work building something special in LA together. You'll love to see it. Magic Johnson chimed in as well. He said, Lakers fans couldn't have two better owners, Johnson said.
Speaker 1:I've known Bob personally for over forty years. He has always loved the Lakers and basketball, and he will bring championships back to LA. So Magic Johnson is optimistic about this deal.
Speaker 2:Weirdly, this is making me optimistic on LA overall. Yeah. I had a generally bad outlook. Yeah. I have had extreme confidence that the weather is gonna be very nice Yeah.
Speaker 2:For a long time. Yeah. But that's really been the only thing I'm willing to really lean on. Yeah. But this is giving me a slightly more positive outlook.
Speaker 1:And and you've been pitching Thrive on your new incubation, the pothole company of Los Angeles. The pothole filling company Angeles.
Speaker 2:Huge opportunity. It's really Palantir for potholes.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. Yeah. Hiring the best AI researchers.
Speaker 2:No. I want somebody I want somebody to do this. Figure out how to fix potholes
Speaker 1:Yeah. Quickly. I think it starts with its own satellite constellation. You have to put up 10,000 satellites in low Earth orbit with cameras pointed
Speaker 2:With that in small small effectively missiles Oh, missiles. Fired at potholes Yes. And then a laser that sort of like melts the debris down fill in the hole.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It just kind of sort of you bring the molten asphalt up to space, it comes down, warms up, and as it travels through the atmosphere, lands directly in the pothole and smushes in, fills it in.
Speaker 2:Perfect. But but, you know, people are always saying, oh, why is like, you go to LA, every other car is a g wagon. Well, know why? Because the roads are absolutely terrible. You pretty much need something that's four wheel drive.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Otherwise, you're gonna have a bad time. I was talking to to a a a Maybach owner a couple nights ago and he had blown out multiple tires in the last year. I had blown out multiple tires last year. It's a it's a disaster.
Speaker 2:The Pothole Company of Los Angeles.
Speaker 1:It's a banger idea.
Speaker 2:Right? It's a banger idea. I might become the Batman of potholes. Oh. Just sneaking out late Yeah.
Speaker 2:It it might look, I could go out in the suit.
Speaker 1:You could.
Speaker 2:You could. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like that guy who was cleaning up the FDNY corner call box, like, same thing.
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 1:Potholes in LA. They're really, really bad. Every day I drive to work and I have to swerve into the other lane to avoid one in on this one particular road that's just been a disaster for the last six months. Anyway, the last quote related to this deal. As lifelong NBA fans, we are deeply honored for the opportunity to become the stewards of the Los Angeles Lakers, one of the most iconic sports franchises in the world.
Speaker 1:Kushner and Iger said in a statement, they said they have immense respect for Jerry and Jenny Buss and intend to build on the family's legacy. I don't know what you're laughing at. Compete at the highest level and serve this extraordinary team, its fans, and the city of Los Angeles. If approved, the deal would give
Speaker 2:the Lakers their third Of controlling potholes.
Speaker 1:I think he got
Speaker 2:says DT and Tyler says he's gonna film the the missions. This would just be absolutely riveting content. You're out on the 04:05 Yeah. 2AM, just you and a nasty pothole Take and a little bit of traffic.
Speaker 1:And a little bit of asphalt slathering it in there. Right? Is that what you're doing?
Speaker 2:Well, my big issue is when they they when they fill in, they just do a really bad job. Oh. And so it basically creates a bunch of mini speed bumps.
Speaker 1:And you get a sinkhole. So then you just don't sinkhole company.
Speaker 2:That's whole other problem.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That was crazy. Oh, whatever happened with that in LA? It was really bad for a while. I guess they fixed it.
Speaker 2:I would like to Oh. Get somebody to throw on a tinfoil hat and figure out why a bunch of pipes started exploding everywhere around the city.
Speaker 1:Somebody's gotta ask the question. Saharbour Capital says, while there are plenty of issues you can point out with sports investing, I think this actually makes a simple yet incredibly compelling case, longevity. Sports is a portfolio diversifier. Investment firms and wealthy individuals now view investing in sports properties as a hedge against higher risk investments. Very interesting.
Speaker 1:Everyone has always said sports investing is just it's a trophy asset. It's just because you like the team, but you're locking up a lot of capital. And when you're long AGI, the future, the most cutting edge technologies, also building a portfolio with some things that are gonna be around forever no matter how many robots there are makes a lot of sense. And so that that balancing effect seems to be a new thing that's driving demand in in sports investing. Do you agree with that?
Speaker 2:I do. Fits the strategy.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Spor agrees. If you truly believe in AGI, buying a massive sports franchise is actually one of the best financial decisions you can make right now, and we've seen hints and rumors of this for a while. Anything else on the Lakers? We're gonna talk to Darren in just thirteen minutes about it.
Speaker 1:Get him to explain.
Speaker 2:He's gonna walk us through the whole rule set. Yeah. We're very excited about that. Anyway. Apparently, there's a solar eclipse going on right now.
Speaker 1:Oh, is that going on right now? I saw a link to a whole bunch of different webcams that you can use to watch it. The last time, a couple years ago, there was a full solar eclipse, not a partial one. And everyone who went said it was one of the most insane experiences of their life. So I would highly recommend it.
Speaker 1:Tyler
Speaker 3:it's Europe right now. Full solar eclipse. Full solar eclipse.
Speaker 1:Yep. Wow. Should've gone. I missed this one. When's the next one?
Speaker 2:What does it mean? What's the meaning, Tyler?
Speaker 1:What does it mean? It's a great omen for high beta AI stocks. That's what I choose to read into it. Lever up. That's what the that's what the Eclipse is trying to tell you.
Speaker 1:Grok 4.6 is roughly the same performance as Fable five max at an 85% discount, 80% cheaper for input tokens, and 88% cheaper for output tokens. Pareto dominance as Gavin Baker. Grok 4.7 will be significantly better as is a much larger model with the Cursor and SpaceX data included in pre training. So the headline is SpaceX sort of jumped to the frontier at least on these benchmarks. We'll see how this comes out, how people adopt it.
Speaker 1:Obviously, Cursor has huge huge usage all across the enterprise, across businesses. Grok is has been slower on adoption with a bunch of different pushback there, but the model seems to be catching up. The team seem to be gelling and things seem to be pretty good over there. We'll see how I mean, I'm sure on X, we'll see lots of people demoing examples of what they build with Grok 4.6. There's already some games that have hit the timeline.
Speaker 1:There'll be a whole whole bunch more on benchmarks.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So so seems incredibly impressive. Yeah. Excited to get reactions and Yeah. And get people's lived experiences with the model.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Price wars have definitely begun. Yeah. You know, we saw this with Meta. We're seeing this with Grock now.
Speaker 2:And then, third, I would say trust in benchmarks has to be at an all time low. Yeah. Right? There's been enough, you know, moments releases so far where the benchmarks looked amazing, but then the actual lived experience is is, you know, less less significant. They also had a great launch yesterday.
Speaker 2:So they're building momentum.
Speaker 1:Sure. SpaceX is up almost 40% just in the last five days. That's a pretty
Speaker 2:I I wish I wish you could figure out a way to parse out what what's driving that. Is it the semi analysis? Yeah. The thesis. Semi analysis.
Speaker 1:That felt like Friday.
Speaker 2:Friday. Well, yeah. That was Friday at the close.
Speaker 1:It popped during the day though. Right?
Speaker 2:So But then up 10% today.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I don't know. Maybe it was leaking out.
Speaker 2:CNBC says SpaceX short sellers are running out of bullets as stock rebounds more than 30% off low. We're running out of ammo. I'm tired, boss.
Speaker 1:I can't keep buying these prices. I'm like, I'm buying. You gotta buy more. Excited to release Grock 4.6. With each release, Grock is becoming a more capable digital colleague.
Speaker 1:The age of work is upon us. Grock for work. It's happening. Say 4.6 is significantly better at difficult tasks and knowledge work. It combines Opus class intelligence and polish with very low cost and high speed, which people love.
Speaker 1:Even even just in the cursor workflow, the more iterative approach instead of having to come back a day later and see what goes on. There's a lot of value to that workflow in particular. Grock 4.6 is a very impressive test time curve on cursor bench in a league of its own. They did more mid slash pre pre training on the Grock 4.5 checkpoint and newer SFT stages with Grock 4.5 traces and model based filtering. Once again, shows how important a good SFT checkpoint is.
Speaker 1:Interesting. Getting some more details on what's going on with Grock. They also launched Grock bot. We recently hired a new teammate. Bots are AI teammates that do real work for you.
Speaker 1:They sign into your tools, use them just like you do, and come back with finished work. So I guess work isn't gonna happen. It's gonna be Grock bot, which actually it it it has a nice little rhythm to it. I like I like Grok bot. Also, very good results on the artificial intelligence index.
Speaker 1:Joining the frontier at 61, strong agentic performance, lower cost, obviously, and the model wars are are upon us. NVIDIA is also joining the model war wars, selling selling weapons to both sides potentially. Nemotron 3.5 lightning, their open source model came out, but they also launched a model router, Nemo Switchyard to deliver faster, smarter, more efficient agentic
Speaker 2:AI. Switchyard.
Speaker 1:Switchyard's a good name.
Speaker 2:It's a good name.
Speaker 1:I like that.
Speaker 2:Kind of railroad connotations which
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Which maybe? Interesting. Yeah. Maybe.
Speaker 1:Ben Thompson stuff at some point. But interesting to see where this goes. I mean, it it does feel like if you're if you're a organization that has NVIDIA chips, you have your own data centers because you're a mid scale, maybe not a hyperscaler, but you're pretty big. You know, the being all in on the NVIDIA stack and then using their model router could make a lot of sense. Like, it's a logical place for it to live.
Speaker 1:And and then you're you know, it it has more it has more integration with the rest of your NVIDIA stack because you have a whole bunch of GPUs racked for the lowest possible cost. If you're cost optimizing, you'll probably eventually have your own racks and your own NVIDIA work, you know, data center, basically. Anyway, should we debate Anthropic watermarking?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Dive into this. I don't I don't know that I have a strong take yet.
Speaker 1:Ben Thompson has a strong take on Anthropic watermarking. So the basic news is that, you might soon be able to know for sure if something came from a human being or from Claude. Anthropic said this week that text and files generated by its family of AI models will be watermarked to let consumers know. Now they won't be watermarked. Like, you'll still have to take the text and then go to their watermarking tool and validate that it was that it was Yeah.
Speaker 2:Bill Bill Gurley was making the point that traditional watermark on an image is very visible. Yes. Just like immediately visible.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Yes. And so it's not actually it's more like basically, we're we're gonna leave evidence that this Breadcrumbs. Was
Speaker 1:Yeah. Breadcrumbs. And so, in theory, a LinkedIn could or an or an X could integrate with a Anthropic API to check the watermarks. But the interesting read on this is that this was actually implemented by the regulation in the European Union. So Anthropic, in theory, could watermark could only watermark text in Europe, but the EU has achieved their dream of regulating the world according to Ben Thompson.
Speaker 1:And so they actually instead I I think the idea is instead of instead of doing a last step at the end of the generation to add the watermark in, it's baked much deeper into the model level, which means it will be watermarked whether you're in Europe or not. And so Ben Thompson explains a little bit on how it works. Obviously, they're not explaining too much because then you can avoid it easier.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's so it's so interesting, like, how much of their revenue is coming from Europe Oh, yeah. Given how compute constrained they are. Yeah. Like, was there I wonder if they ever considered, like, hey, let's just say if, hey, if you're gonna if you're gonna go forward with something like this Yes.
Speaker 2:We're just gonna exit the market entirely.
Speaker 1:But I don't think people care. I don't think Anthropic cares about Watermarking. I think they're fine. I think it's nice. I think a it's good thing.
Speaker 1:And then also, I think business users don't care because they're like, yeah. I I want AI generated code all over my code base. I want it to be clean and and efficient, and I want it to just do the job. And I'm I'm totally fine with it. I don't I I'm not I that that's not my business.
Speaker 1:And so I don't think people will be upset about this, at least in the enterprise. Ben Thompson points out that he is somewhat frustrated by this because even if you're using an LLM for proofreading and making individual changes in your text editor. Like, you just upload your blog post to Claude now and you say, oh, like, what could be better about this? What's wrong with this? Did I make any grammatical errors?
Speaker 1:Did I make any spelling errors? If you go and implement those, there's a small risk. It seems like a very unlikely risk, but there's a small risk that even in just accepting those changes, you accidentally insert a little bit of the watermark in or potentially all of the watermark in. And then you don't get credit potentially because people will be like, oh, this is AI when really it was like the last step that was AI. We had a back and forth on this a little bit where I would write an essay by hand.
Speaker 1:We would throw it into to proofread it and it would put in a bunch of em dashes In the earlier model, it was really heavy on em dashes. And so people would just be like, oh, this is AI. And I was like, well, like the last step, but it's like but does that matter? It does matter to a lot of people. They do care about that.
Speaker 1:But it's it's odd. And Ben Thompson's point is saying, what the EU is doing is stealing the last thing humans have, creation, and demanding it be bundled with substantiation, effectively giving the AI AI the credit. Even if you come up with a great idea, you write a great book. If you have AI, edit it. If it has a watermarking feature, it will be watermarked and people will be like, nah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It was all well, it was the prompt. And it's like, well, maybe there wasn't a prompt. Maybe there was a whole process that you went through to develop your idea, and then you took it at the last step. And so that's the source of frustration.
Speaker 1:At the same time, it does feel like, there's ways to work around this. If you become more collaborative with the AI system, you can avoid the watermark by only using it at one certain step and then doing a an editing pass yourself. People have been going back and forth with these all all day long. He says, the human that gave AI the text to proofread or even the prompt to generate writing doesn't matter to the bureaucrats in Europe. Everyone is worried about being replaced by AI.
Speaker 1:The EU is mandating it. That's what he says. He's got some harsh words. What do think, Tyler?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, so I I don't think the actual, like, underlying the the the way they watermark it is, like, public. But presumably, it's, like, basically during the sampling process when you're, like, generating tokens.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 3:Right? It generates some distribution over the tokens, one is it gonna select? And then it uses, like, a slightly different method than just choosing, like, the most likely one. Yep. And that way, you can, like, see, oh, this is like less likely so it's it's probably, you know, written by AI.
Speaker 3:But like, if you basically have, you know, some essay that you wrote and you replace like one sentence, then like 99% of the tokens are still the same. Then like it's like it's it's it shouldn't mark the whole thing as being like AI written. That doesn't make any sense. Like, only the sentence that you changed would be marked as AI written.
Speaker 1:Oh, oh, sure. Sure. Or whatever. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. It it doesn't like say the whole document is AI. Yeah. It's like this sentence Yeah.
Speaker 3:AI.
Speaker 1:No. No. No.
Speaker 3:These tokens are very
Speaker 1:People think of a watermark as it's a binary. It's it's either gonna say it's AI or not.
Speaker 2:In fact, it's People are gonna just look it's, you know, like the the peanut gallery online Mhmm. Is gonna be it'll be very binary for them. Sure. Like if somebody puts out even an Instagram caption, they'll get dunked on Really? Even if it's one sentence.
Speaker 2:Right?
Speaker 3:Like like if you look at the Google synth ID, so Yeah. Gemini has done this for like a few
Speaker 2:years. Yeah.
Speaker 3:If you look at their blog that like explains how it works, it will like highlight specific, basically words in the in the blog or whatever Sure. Sure. It's like, okay, this is probably
Speaker 1:AI written. Interesting.
Speaker 3:It's not saying the whole thing is is like, yeah, zero one.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:So Yeah. Yeah. I this is kind of blowing it out proportion.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I don't I don't think that many people will have a problem with it.
Speaker 2:How long till someone ships the the Claude Watermark Remover app?
Speaker 1:I mean, somebody shipped a Pangram Fighter, like, yesterday. Something where you take the text, you put it in this model, and then it it reads a 100% human to Pangram because it rewrites it in a style that Pangram can't detect. And so now the Pangram team has to go figure out how to defeat that. It's all a game of cat and mouse.
Speaker 2:Let's head over to the timeline. Alfred Wall Force
Speaker 1:What'd say?
Speaker 2:Over at Listen Labs. Oh. He's been on the show before. Mhmm. Coming in with one of the hottest takes.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I some pushback. He
Speaker 2:said founders only send investor updates.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Give me the boat horn.
Speaker 4:When they're winning, Justin has sent the weed in its history all fundraise announcements. Nobody reads a bad update in house. They just want you as dying.
Speaker 1:I think your crazy voice sounds crazier than mine.
Speaker 4:Let me check. Let me check. Oh, it sounds about the same. It sounds about the same. But
Speaker 2:Yeah. This is just I think this is terrible advice. Really? Except if you're winning. That's
Speaker 1:great. I
Speaker 2:think it should be founders. If you're winning, only send investor updates.
Speaker 1:Yes. I I I I I do
Speaker 2:think It's it's it's just such bad advice because I've had so many I mean, I've had instances like kind of surprise and delight moments where I haven't been getting an update from a company in a year. And I just assume the company is like dead and dying and then they pop up with an update. I I had this happen where a company that I thought was fully dead, I didn't even wanna I I almost bad asking. It was a small angel check. I thought they were dead until I got an update that I needed to sign something because they were selling for like, you
Speaker 1:know Wow.
Speaker 2:There you go. 250,000,000. So Updates are how you build trust. It's how people
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Start to process like how is this team and this founder performing
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Even if they're not winning yet. Are they making progress? Are they iterating quickly? It's how and if if you're not sending any updates and then suddenly you need to raise more money Mhmm. Like you need a bridge round or something like that, the likelihood of getting that round done is much lower because you just don't have the you don't have the trust.
Speaker 2:The people can't get a good read on like, okay. Do I have more conviction in this team today than when I invested even though they haven't figured it out yet?
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Right?
Speaker 1:So I'm taking the other side of this with some reasonableness, maybe. I don't know. You can debate me on this. So do you think it's important to send investor updates when you're a pre seed company? Like, pure pure purely in the idea, May, is very early stage.
Speaker 1:They're the revenue is zero every month. You're just sort of, like, you know, out figuring out the first product.
Speaker 2:I mean, at that at that stage, it it depends. Hopefully, you only have, one or two investors. Yeah. And but but it's still important to it's still important to see, like, a it's it's valuable to see a a snapshot. It doesn't have to be the the if at that stage, if I get an investor update that's paragraphs and paragraphs and paragraphs, I'm like super super bare.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Totally. But it's still better to just have like even quick bullet points. Hey, here's what we're working on.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:We'll come we'll we'll we'll have another update in a month.
Speaker 1:Okay. So because Listen Labs is only a three year old company, and they raised their series a in April 2025. So and he and there's a there's a rumored series c going on right now. And so if he sent three investor updates, that might be April 2025, January 2026, and August 2026, which is like every six months, which doesn't feel like that crazy of a cadence. It's like, yeah, it's not quarterly.
Speaker 1:It's not monthly, but it's a pretty regular pace because they're raising money regularly. So if it's very different if it's like, okay. This is, like, a more, like, less, like, hot time in the market. You're not gonna be fundraising every three months. You're gonna be raising money every eighteen months, realistically, twenty four months.
Speaker 1:It's a harder industry. And so I as an investor with a series a check, I want to know, okay, how much runway is actually left
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Because but but that's not the equation here. So little bit of a of a unique this post reveals a little bit more about the level of fundraising activity that you can only send investor updates Yeah. And still be emailing all of your investors every six months. Yeah. So there's a little bit
Speaker 3:of that.
Speaker 2:And and a lot of this comes down to Alfred. Listen, Labs has been crushing. Yeah. I remember when they first came on the It seemed like the company made a lot of sense. Yep.
Speaker 2:They they quickly raised follow on rounds from great investors. Sure they're still doing well. You wouldn't post this if you if you weren't winning. Sure they're doing well. But like, just really really bad just really really bad advice
Speaker 1:not one size fits all advice. I completely agree.
Speaker 3:The other thing Yeah.
Speaker 2:And the other the other thing I would say is like, how do you know a company that's building in public is struggling? They stopped building in public. No. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 2:That's true. They haven't like I've I've seen this like at least 10 times Yep. Right now. Yep. You see the company that that's got all this momentum Yep.
Speaker 2:Founders like, I'm sharing our here's our I'm proud
Speaker 1:of it.
Speaker 2:And they usually will string together like six months of that Yep. And then they go dark. It's like, oh, what what What happened? Or you don't wanna build in public when Yeah. You're not growing anymore Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I know. Revenue is declining or or you were you were a thin wrapper, whatever it is. Yeah. If you're not updating somebody like I I had one of the 70 odd Mhmm. Angel investments that I've made.
Speaker 2:Hadn't heard from them in a year. Mhmm. And then they they they texted and said, hey, like, are you free to catch up? And the ask was basically like, will you will you like do a bridge round?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And it's like, yeah. If I if I can ask all the questions to try to understand what has happened between now and when the investment was made. Mhmm. But it's so much different to be getting like those updates in real time, seeing how they're dealing with adversity, sealing seeing how
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:How they're building moment momentum as a company. And Yeah. So anyways, don't do this. Just don't do it.
Speaker 1:Don't do it in every
Speaker 2:case. Don't listen to Alfred, the founder I'm
Speaker 1:sure it applies companies. I'm sure it applies to some companies.
Speaker 2:It's been an honor and a privilege.
Speaker 1:And have the best Wednesday ever. Please do. Goodbye.
Speaker 2:Thank Bye.